Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: “truly the most oppressed minority."

David Corn reminds us that Donald Trump badly mishandled the COVID pandemic while he was President. Well, he also talks to memory experts to explain how Americans might actually have forgotten that (long story short: the pandemic sucked, why would you want to remember it?), but the better public service is reminding good Americans that a President less interested in creating drama at every turn and more interested in leading us through and out of the pandemic might have saved many more lives. And putting this guy in charge again would just mean more drama, more hysteria, and more assholes threatening to kill people who actually know how to do things, which is all pretty much the opposite of the future I signed up for.

Ho hum, right-wing "journalist" discovers that libel is actually a thing and not just a weapon to brandish at anyone you don't like. Specifically, a Scranton Times reporter reminded everyone that said "patriot reporter," who makes a living claiming that "certain high-ranking elected and public officials are satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles sexually abusing children and drinking their blood to ingest the life-extending chemical adrenochrome," has, in his own past, a Corruption of Minors conviction. The "patriot reporter"'s libel lawsuit, predictably, failed. Nice to know Scranton, PA still has a local daily, though will they still have one after a few more frivolous libel suits?

Portage County, OH Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski advises his Facebook followers that, if Kamala Harris wins the Presidency in November, they should "write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards! Sooo...when the Illegal human 'Locust' (which she supports!) Need places to live...We'll already have the addresses of the their New families...who supported their arrival!" (Odd capitalization and use of ellipses in the original.) When he feels like responding to press inquiries, he'll no doubt say that of course he didn't mean to intimidate anyone, but was just "trying to make a point," but I'm pretty sure most folks just read "write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards" and reacted accordingly, and that's almost certainly just as he intended. In case you were wondering, I think folks so obsessed with "illegal immigration" that they'd upend law and order are racists.

With the news that the Florida ACLU has sued a state health care agency for using taxpayer money to spread lies about the abortion-related ballot initiative up before Florida voters in November, we will gain some insight into what right-wingers plan to do if they lose this fall. They'll do what they did with their book banning and masking-related attacks in 2021 – attack where liberals are strong, and with clear majorities supporting the liberal position on abortion, they'll dig in with their "abortion always hurts women's health" rubbish and their LIBRULZ AREZ TEH REALZ FEARMONGERURZ!!!!! rubbish. In the meantime, someone should go to jail for misuse of taxpayer funds. And whoever ordered police to interrogate petition-signers at their homes maybe should go to Hell – in addition to jail or in place of it, whichever.

I'm old enough to remember when saying you "create stories," as Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance did on CNN when confronted with the fact that he repeated lies about Haitian immigrants eating cats, would finish your campaign, but in the Donald Trump era, you can get away with saying pretty much anything anymore – if you're a Republican, anyway. Those who would respond "well, fiction writers create stories to get you to pay attention to other people suffering" should note that Vice Presidential candidates are not fiction writers. We should expect political candidates to tell the truth; if we don't hold them to that, we're not "superior" because we're more cynical, we're just not doing our job as citizens. (At the risk of piling on, Mr. Vance sure is one to claim that "the left needs to tone down the rhetoric," since his running mate is the one who says 99% of all the obnoxious shit we hear.)

New Hampshire Libertarian Party opines on X/Twitter that anyone who would "murder()" Kamala Harris would be "an American hero" – and then deletes the tweet, saying they only did so because the tweet violated X/Twitter's terms of service, laments that "(i)t's a shame that even on a 'free speech' website that libertarians cannot speak freely," and further adds – and you may want to sit down for this – that "Libertarians are truly the most oppressed minority." Yeah, I remember when our government enslaved Libertarians and marched them off to detention centers and gas chambers and threw them out of helicopters! I kid, of course. I fucking hate whiners.

Finally, an internal Department of Homeland Security report reveals that under former President Trump, DHS tried its damnedest to link Portland, OR protestors to an "imaginary terrorist plot." Just as anyone who had even one working brain cell could have predicted when Tha Bush Mobb created the Department of Homeland Security after 9.11! The good news? Some DHS rank-and-file pushed back, because no one could prove the antifa "terrorist organization" even existed. But don't worry, folks! If we put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office this November, he'll make damn sure this time that nobody who ever stood between him and his evil fantasies will ever work for our government again! I wish I were kidding, but Project 2025 has essentially said the same thing.

Action: concerning health care, law and order, and homelessness.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act, outlaw judge-shopping, and enact housing policy that actually helps homeless folks. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act, which would make it easier for states to start their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems. Canada’s Medicare-for-All-style system started in Saskatchewan, after all, and the enterprising American Governor would relish the possibility at attracting big corporate headquarters to their state, since even CEOs prefer cost certainty to insane premium hikes. Of course, it’d also be better because folks wouldn’t have to stay in a bad job or marriage just so they don’t die, and because banksters wouldn’t make money from hurting you like they do now.

Demand Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing judge-shopping. You should get the judge in the area where you were allegedly harmed, not in some district in Texas headed up by right-wing judges who love certain kinds of frivolous lawsuits! It ain’t that deep! Now you may have heard Trumpholes lamenting the “unfairness” of their Personal Lord and Savior having to go before a jury of (gasp!) New Yorkers. Psst: that’s where he committed the crimes. They have nothing to say about his classified documents case being heard in Florida since the alleged crime happened there. So let us have wisdom, not Trumphole hysteria, guide us.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that really addresses homelessness, instead of pretending that jail time and massive fines are the solution. Who thinks some kind of punishment is the answer to every problem? Someone who needs to be ejected from your life, that’s who. And who fines someone who doesn’t have any money? Someone who wants to bring back debt slavery, that’s who. I’m not exaggerating about that. But Congress could invest more in housing assistance and end discrimination against renters, which would speak much better of us as a civilization than putting spikes on public benches.

Around the table: today, with upwards of 29% good news!

The PRO Act may not be very close to passage nationally, but the PRO Act has passed in Vermont, and will not only outlaw those forced propaganda meetings corporations like to make folks attend like they don’t have enough work to do, but will let domestic workers organize and let public workers form a union via card-check. There’s a lesson here for all Americans – don’t strap yourself too closely to Democrats, and fight for what you actually want, and you might more easily get Democrats to go along with you. I mean, they can put their finger to the wind just like anyone else. Come to think of it, didn’t New Deal legislation pass pretty much because the politicians were following the people’s lead? Why, yes!

Study published in The Lancet predicts that worldwide life expectancy will increase by almost five years by the year 2050, from around 73 now to around 78. Why? Because we have more non-communicable disease these days than communicable. Say, remember that time we all had to wear a mask all the time so we didn’t accidentally kill each other? Turns out that’s a habit that helps people live longer! And think how much better we’d do if we adopted better ventilation practices in public buildings! But it’s also going up because, well, a lot of nations have a lot of room to grow their life expectancy. What will be a drag on life expectancy? The fact that a lot of us are too fat because we eat too much crap.

Team Trump sends a cease-and-desist letter to the makers of the movie The Apprentice. Can you say “diaper-loaded brat,” boys and girls? How about frivolous lawsuit? And why don’t Republicans defend the free speech rights of the filmmakers? Because the only lawsuits they find “frivolous” are lawsuits that make corporations pay for the harm they do to good Americans, that’s why. In a peripherally-related note, GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.

Tim Cushing at TechDirt tells the story of what happened to a couple of cops who literally tortured a Fontana, CA man into confessing to a murder that never occurred. The “suspect” actually called the cops for help because he thought his father had disappeared; turns out his father had taken public trans to visit a relative and a female friend, but the cops decided he was dead and decided the son was the killer, pretty much without thinking very hard about it, or at all. You’ll really love the part where they threaten to euthanize his dog if he doesn’t confess, and then bring the dog into the interrogation room. Sadly, these cops didn’t lose their jobs but the city paid almost a million bucks in damages to the tortured citizen (four years later!), which of course came out of his and everyone else’s taxes. Who bellows I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!! after hearing that story? Someone you should straight-up eject from your life, that’s who.

Donald Trump endorses primary challenger to Rep. Bob Good (E-VA), which is probably the death-knell for the otherwise noxious right-wing incumbent. And also an opportunity for Democrats, if they have the sense to recognize it: Virginia’s 5th Congressional district usually votes Republican in federal and state elections, but not by absurd margins, plus the 2020 election saw 400,000 out of 580,000 potential voters actually vote. So a lot of these 180,000 folks might be persuaded to turn out against the Republican – by an actual populist Democrat who won’t let the party’s consultant class dominate their messaging. I’m not sure I see that individual among the Democratic primary candidates, but I’d be happy to be wrong.

Despite all the bad PR they’ve received for their, ah, unique educational “reforms,” Florida’s government continues to leave a trail of slime wherever they go, now putting together training materials that lump “cancel culture” “victims” in with Josef Stalin murdering three-quarters of a million political dissenters. When they lecture us about “the dangers and evils of Communism,” and then equate the quite deserved shame of garden-variety racists with the imprisonment or murder of actual political dissenters, they’re telling you that shame is only for right-wingers to use against you, never for you to use against them. What has two thumbs and won’t eat Florida blueberries until they stop being fascist? This guy!

Finally, Louisiana passes law reclassifying abortion drugs mifepristol and misopropol as “controlled dangerous substances.” People have been using these drugs safely for decades, and the fact that some asshole somewhere may have misused it – if the bill’s sponsor’s “personal story” isn’t some made-up sack of dung – doesn’t change that. Let it be known that having a Democratic Governor for two terms hasn’t changed Louisiana politics one little bit, so be wary of supporting weak “centrists” (or “the only people who can win”) in red states. The only liberal who can really win in a red state – which is to say, win an election and be of some utility to the people of that state – is a populist.

Action: concerning voting rights, actual frivolous lawsuits, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act, pass anti-SLAPP legislation, and repeal the Comstock Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act and thus end felony disenfranchisement in America. Some 4.6 million Americans can’t vote because of a felony conviction, and voting shouldn’t be conditional in America, because, you know, rights shouldn’t be conditional. And yes, that means even child molesters should have the right to vote! They just shouldn’t have the “right” to molest children. A certain “law-and-order” mindset says we should just heap punishments on people if we’re frustrated, but that’s not just uncivilized, it’s un-American.

Greenpeace helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass anti-SLAPP legislation. SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” a.k.a. when rich, thin-skinned pricks sue their critics just to shut them up. But why should good Americans get sued into poverty merely for criticizing some Donald Trump-wannabe? And why haven’t tort “reform” adherents embraced anti-SLAPP laws? Possibly because they think class action lawsuits against polluters are “frivolous” lawsuits, while the lawsuits rich folks file to silence their critics are good lawsuits. Or, maybe, they’re just evil. No matter: our duty is our duty.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, a 150-plus-year-old law that forbids our Postal Service from mailing anything abortion-related, a law right-wingers want to will back into enforcement so nobody can get mifepristone and misoprostol through the mail. Now, as you may remember, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held back in 1936 that the Comstock Act couldn’t prevent our Postal Service from shipping such medicines if a doctor ordered it. Our Supreme Court will almost certainly ignore that precedent, so we’ve got to speak out to our Congressfolk.

Action: concerning drug prices, affordable internet, and gun lawsuits.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to oppose anti-Medicare drug price negotiation bills, extend the Affordable Connectivity Program, and repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Courtesy Helen Santoro at The Lever, we learn that several big pharma-aligned House Democrats have proposed limiting Medicare drug price negotiation. It’s like they’re saying if 90% of us support something, then we should all just go fuck ourselves! So let’s call our Congressfolk and tell them to oppose the ORPHAN Cures Act, the MINI Act, and the EPIC Act, and let’s also tell them to stop pretending we must either have price-gouging or no cures at all! That is, of course, a rhetorical hostage situation. And any politician who believes we should pay more for life-saving drugs deserves defeat. That certainly includes Donald Trump!

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act, which would extend the Affordable Connectivity Program Congress created during the pandemic, so that more working families can afford internet. You remember how all our kids had to go to school online for a year or so? Well, we would be cruel to make it harder for some people to afford the internet connectivity they might one day need just to go to school again. I mean, we’ve already got cable corporations to be cruel to working families by charging whatever they like! Certainly our government doesn’t need to heap more cruelty on top of cruelty.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevents gun corporations from being sued not just for their role in enabling daily mass murders, but also for the gun safety issues they cause. Why do big gun corporations need this kind of protection from the marketplace? If we extended that to, say, cars or cribs, people would recognize that as an offense to civilization right away. But guns? Too many people want to hold guns more sacred than people, and that’s also an offense to civilization. And, look, truly frivolous lawsuits lose, but gun corporations don’t deserve the privilege of not having to deal with lawsuits.

Around the table: mostly good news from antitrust enforcement to health care in Rwanda.

Big news: Lee Hepner at Big observes Thanksgiving dinner prices falling by almost 5%, and sees the hand of the Biden Administration antitrust efforts behind it – specifically, our Justice Department has broken (of all things) a turkey monopoly, our government has thwarted one proposed airline merger and forced another to be put on hold, and a federal jury found two big egg-producing corporations guilty of price-fixing, meaning those high prices that were all over the news last year had little to do with avian flu. It’d be nice if the Biden campaign would actually, you know, run on these efforts – but it’d also be nice if our “liberal” media covered these efforts the way they hysterically covered sky-high egg prices in the first place.

Have some more good news! Portugal lately relied entirely on renewable electricity for six consecutive days at the end of October and beginning of November. Plus Portugal made so much electricity they were able to export it to Spain for most of that stretch! Six days in a row is a big deal; the more it happens, the less we’ll have to hear about the “war on coal” and other manufactured outrages. And we should at least make it harder for Our Glorious Elites to manufacture outrages.

In a related note, the Guardian tells us that legendarily-frigid Norway has done a great job relying on heat pumps to heat their homes, largely through federal subsidies and – this is important – the absence of federal subsidies for fossil fuels. So when nay-sayers whine that heat pumps don’t work when it’s too cold, they actually mean it only returns about twice the heat for the electricity you use to run it when it’s far below freezing, which is another way of saying we want you to use the perfect to murder the good. Way too many folks still prefer chaos to progress.

In another related note, I am more than a little surprised to hear that electric scooters and e-bikes have displaced four times more demand for oil than electric cars have done, though, admittedly, much of that increase has come from China, where good Chinese were already riding mopeds a lot. I’ll admit I’ve always kinda side-eyed this option, figuring that e-bikes, especially, are for people who don’t want to exercise, but a) that may not even be true, since most folks split their exercise off from their transportation and b) it sounds like it’s actually helping save the planet. Also c) I moved to an area that’s really, really hilly and I see the attraction of an e-bike a little better now.

Ho hum, Iowa Republican official’s wife gets convicted of 52 counts of voter fraud, as she apparently filled out election forms for Vietnamese immigrants who, imagine that, didn’t really understand what she was doing. Strange how we only seem to catch right-wingers for actual voter fraud, despite all the whining they do about it. Ms. Taylor faces a max of five years of prison per charge; not that I think she’ll really get that (or that I think she should get that), but it’ll be interesting to hear right-wingers suddenly find Jesus about long prison sentences.

Ari Paul at FAIR reminds us that Elon Musk’s "thermonuclear" defamation lawsuit against Media Matters is “About Destroying Free Speech.” He must hope us “little people” don’t get it in our heads to tabulate which big corporate ads turn up right next to all that disgusting anti-Semitic/pro-Nazi content he allows on Twitter! I’d say I hope Mr. Musk loses this frivolous lawsuit in the most humiliating manner possible, but I actually doubt he’s physically capable of humiliation. Which is yet another reason a civilized society shouldn’t let billionaires grow this big!

Finally, Rwanda has seen a significant drop in malaria cases, to the point where its national Biomedical Center says it’s on track to achieve zero malaria. Scientists point to increased use of mosquito netting and indoor insecticides as major factors in the drop, and that, I’m sad to say, will be good practice for when too many folks refuse the malaria vaccine the World Health Organization has just approved. But Rwanda’s success reminds us that good people doing good works are everywhere on Earth, even in nations we call “developing” – or worse.

Action: concerning immigration, media, and health care.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to expand health care for DACA recipients, tell internet service-providing corporations to drop Fox News, and tell Merck’s CEO to drop his lawsuit against Medicare drug-price negotiation . Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

United We Dream helps you tell the Biden Administration to expand Medicaid and Affordable Care Act eligibility to DACA recipients, i.e., “dreamers.” You could say it comes down to if they’re here, don’t be so damn cruel to them, but it’s even simpler than that: DACA recipients left their home countries as small children because their parents immigrated to America, and we’d be cruel bastards to deny them access to health care simply because of a decision made long ago that they had literally no part in. No use squealing about terrorism, etc., at least not if you’re a proud member of the greatest nation on Earth. So many self-styled “patriots” have so little mercy; I wonder why.

Inequality Media helps you tell your internet service-providing corporation to get the Fox News (sic) Channel off their platforms. Fox News just paid out over three-quarters of a billion dollars to settle a defamation lawsuit, and quickly responded by gutting its hard news division, such as it had one, so even if you knew absolutely nothing about the trail of slime it’s left across the country we love over the last few decades, you would wonder why any cable company would carry a “news” channel that had suffered such a reversal (and responded by resolving to get even worse at news-gathering!). Our First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, but not an audience or a pile of money for that speech, so let’s keep up the pressure until they fold.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell Merck’s CEO to “drop your greedy lawsuit” aiming to end Medicare drug price negotiation before it even starts. Of course it’s even worse than a greedy lawsuit – it’s the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit, one that clogs up the courts and delays justice for all. And it’s filed by a rich corporation! There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. Anyway, don’t brook any cynicism from anyone about how Merck is just trying to protect its profits. Our Declaration of Independence speaks of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and none of that includes a “right” to price-gouge good Americans by overcharging them for the medicines they need to live.

Readings for February 26, 2023.

Lee Fang at The Intercept describes how “Years Before East Palestine Disaster, Congressional Allies of the Rail Industry Intervened to Block Safety Regulations,” and boy you will not be pleased with anything he reports. Sen. Thune’s successful efforts to block ECP braking systems are so odious they make Sen. Manchin look good in opposition, and then former President Trump – who made sure his visit to East Palestine last week was all about him like he does with all human suffering – scuttled the rule mandating them. You’ll be even happier to learn that the railroad industry liked ECP, until the North Dakota fracking boom made it more expensive, though I’d bet President Obama’s embrace of the system also soured them on it, since Mr. Obama was The Hated One. Then came the frivolous corporate lawsuits, and now, years later, the accident that will threaten the health of good Ohioans for many years.

However: David Sirota at The Lever reminds us that it wasn’t just Donald Trump who helped caused this train wreck, but Barack Obama. While the Obama Administration did create the ECP braking rule that the Trump Administration repealed, the Obama Administration also narrowed the definition of a “high-hazard flammable train,” so that the Norfolk train that derailed would have been exempt from the braking rule anyway! That’s even though that train had five cars full of flammable carcinogens that will pollute the air and water of good Ohioans for years to come. Hey, maybe this is how Republicans have been winning Ohio lately – by taking advantage of weak Democrats who cave to corporate power (in this case, the chemical industry)? And our current President was the Vice President during the Obama Administration, so don’t expect change unless we make that his only option. Which we will be working on shortly!

From the “Articles That Completely Waste Our Time” file: The Hill reports that Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show generated a little over 100 FCC complaints, though of course that wasn’t the headline – the headline was that it generated more complaints than Sam Smith’s presumably ersatz Satanic mass during the Grammys. But you have to wait until paragraph 13 to learn that it didn’t get that many more complaints (102-87) than Mr. Smith did, and you have to wait until paragraph 11 to learn that these numbers pale next to the 540,000 complaints Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl halftime show got. You also have to wait until paragraph 18 to learn that Rihanna’s show had almost 10 times the audience the Grammys did! So, there’s no story here, except that some Americans love yelling about crotch-grabbing and devil worship, and the article sure gives those complaints a lot of space! This kind of “reporting” cripples our ability to think, and I don’t care that it’s “just celebrity reporting,” because it’s bad celebrity reporting, and all of bad celebrity reporting’s nefarious methods have surely infected hard news.

Around the table: the corruption, it burns!

Hard to believe, Harry, but gas drilling billionaire Kelcy Warren, suing Beto O’Rourke for defamation, has given money to judges who could hear and rule in his case. No use arguing that a billionaire can’t be expected to keep track of every single campaign donation he makes, because that’s a very good reason not to have billionaires in the first place! And what’s the “defamation” here? Mr. O’Rourke excoriated Mr. Warren for donating $1 million to his opponent, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, weeks after signing legislation that helped Mr. Warren’s corporation. That’s “c’mon, I’m not a schmuck” territory.

In a peripherally-related note, our Supreme Court failed to disclose its financial relationship with the “expert” they brought in to review that probe they supposedly conducted to find the person who leaked the ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. Said “expert,” former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, helps provide various security assessment for the Justices, but more pertinently: why does anyone look to Michael Chertoff as an “authority”? He’s a Bush Mobber, dammit, and a civilized society would ignore him unto death.

Central Bucks School District backs down from its effort to scrub Elie Wiesel quotations from school library posters. And just days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, to boot! In case you thought they were coming to their senses after a year of doing far right-wingers’ bidding, they’ve contracted with a PR firm for $15,000 a month “in an attempt to repair strained public relations and improve the school district’s image,” and I bet the good folks of Bucks County just love seeing their tax dollars thrown away like that. Want a better image? Don’t appease evil.

When I hear that first-term Rep. Andy Ogles (E-TN) has completely ignored federal laws requiring him to make his personal finances public, I wonder if House Republicans would apply the Santos standard, i.e., they’d toss him from our House if they found he’d broken the law. Ah, I kid – they’ll find a reason not to, and that reason will probably have something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop or pronouns or M&Ms or litter boxes or whatever tantrum right-wingers are throwing that day.

Finally, Snopes.com informs us that that obnoxious twittering about gas prices and egg prices and such shooting up just because Donald Trump isn’t President anymore is utter horsedoodle. “Vince Langman” thinks he’s clever understating the actual figures for gas prices ($2.54/gallon, not $2), mortgage rates (3.7%, not 3%), and inflation (2.5%, not 1%) as of January 2020, and no doubt he’s right now composing an eight-paragraph rant about nitpicking. Maybe he could ask a bank what’s the difference between 3% and 3.7% interest over 30 years.

Action: concerning corruption, police brutality, and abortion.

Long story short: tell our Department of Justice to prosecute the Trump campaign for wire fraud, demand justice for Jayland Walker, and tell President Biden to open abortion clinics on federal land. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell our Justice Department to prosecute the Trump campaign for wire fraud. So how do they merit this particular charge? They told supporters they were raising money for an “Official Election Defense Fund,” ostensibly to fund all the frivolous lawsuits they filed over Mr. Trump’s seven-million-vote defeat in 2020, and then spent around 95% of the $250 million they raised on wholly unrelated matters, like raising more money and funding more rallies. The man gives off the stench of corruption with every breath he takes, so our laws have to land a punch somewhere. But only if our DOJ swings!

MoveOn helps you tell the city of Akron, OH and our Department of Justice to get justice for Jayland Walker, a Black man shot 90 times by police officers over a, get this, “traffic and equipment violation,” which sure sounds like a made-up category. “They won’t be convinced by ‘traffic,’ so let’s add ‘equipment.’ More words is better!” When I hear that police shot a man once, I get suspicious; what am I supposed to think when they shoot a man 90 times? The petition makes a lot of other demands of Akron, like an end to police violence against protestors and “investment in real, community-led public safety solutions.” The city should give in to all of them, because it's the right thing to do.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to open abortion clinics on federal land. If “abortion clinics on federal land” sounds a little absurd to you, put it next to our Supreme Court outlawed abortion because it’s not a “deeply-rooted” right even though it’s been legal everywhere for nearly half a century and was also legal for over half a century at our country’s founding and even Ben Franklin had an abortion cocktail! Not so absurd now, is it? And ain’t nothing states can do about what happens on federal land, try though they might. President Biden doesn’t seem like the kind of fellow who’d do this. But that’s why we stay on him.

Around the table: featuring weak executives, hypocritical corporations, and other losers.

Ever the optimist and I say that as a compliment, Matt Stoller sees a chance at undoing the T-Mobile/Sprint merger through suits by private plaintiffs, including all those independent franchises T-Mobile promptly shut down after it went through. Still, we live in a transitional moment (at best!) in re mergers and monopolies, which is why even folks like Mr. Stoller still write sentences like “(a)fter AT&T was blocked from buying T-Mobile, and prices dropped, executives across the industry became increasingly agitated about competition in the market.” Aren't executives always saying they like competition? Sadly, they do not really like competition. That's because they’re weak.

You knew this was coming: most of the corporations making the biggest deal about paying for their employees’ abortions just so happen to have made big donations to the Republican Attorneys General Association (or RAGA), which “by its own admission, played a central role” in getting Roe v. Wade overturned. And besides, only around 5% of all corporations have even pledged to pay for employee abortions, plus they’re leaving out contractors and students, and besides, what if you don’t have a job? But yeah, all that great PR JP Morgan Chase hoped to get from its pledge should dissipate now that we know they gave $25,000 to RAGA just this past March. The putatively pro-abortion corporation that's lately cut off welfare payments to RAGA? Yelp, if you can believe it. GoPuff has been a major offender, and I bet you can more easily believe that.

Yahoo! News/YouGov poll finds an eye-popping 68% of Fox News viewers actually think the perps of the January 6 attempted coup were liberals trying to make Donald Trump look bad – which, like, Tucker Carlson was saying that that damn night, using a source that even the Washington Examiner soon repudiated – but the poll contains even more interesting results. A third of CNN viewers and a quarter of MSNBC viewers agreed, and more than a third of non-cable viewers (that’d be my category!) also agree, and that’s too damn many. Also, only 11% of Americans blamed the Trump votaries at the Capitol first and foremost. And that would have been my choice! Donald Trump incited a riot, but good Americans are supposed to take good enough care of themselves that they don’t get incited. Seriously! You're supposed to understand that being full of rage all the time is bad for you in at least two ways.

Michigan Republicans want to pass a bill that would allow parents to file frivolous lawsuits against public schools for exposing children to drag queen shows, though no one can cite a single example of this ever happening. I mean, how many of today’s teachers have even seen The Kids in the Hall? It’s not enough to say “well, the lawsuit will fail without evidence,” because the state government will have to pay to defend the suit, and, well, they’ll be using taxpayer money to do that. Bunch of damn drama hounds, right-wingers are, alleging horrors where they don’t exist and thinking it means nothing they can’t defend their position. Can Michigan Democrats run against this stupid crap, maybe? Because I think they'd win, even in the more gerrymandered areas of the state.

Mitch McConnell actually threatens that Republicans will tank a bipartisan semiconductor bill if Democrats take up any version of Build Back Better in the next month or so. And here’s how the fuck you’d deal with that: take the semiconductor bill, add it to the Build Back Better-ish bill, and pass it through budget reconciliation – which means Republicans would get no credit for reviving the American semiconductor industry. Oh, wait, is that uncivil? We’ll never get civility back in American politics until we stop playing pattycake with assholes. Too often Democrats act like they've never heard of boundaries. And seriously, what's Mitch McConnell's problem with lower drug prices? We need to ask that every time he makes a threat like this.

Finally, Bush Mobb Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says our Justice Department could well prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 coup but before we begin a bunch of sentences with “Even Alberto Gonzales,” remember that Alberto Gonzales comes from an entirely successful fascist regime, and what most likely bugs him about the Trump regime is how stupidly they went about it. I do wonder if “there’s a lot there” is a sly wink to the major complaint about George W. Bush before he became President, which, as you may recall, was “there’s no there there.” Of course, “there’s no there there” is exactly what competent fascists try to make you think.

Around the table: special "Pennsylvania primary drama" edition!

So Donald Trump endorsed state Sen./January 6 attendee Doug Mastriano for Pennsylvania's Republican nomination for Governor mere days before the Tuesday primary, and one feels compelled to ask: what took him so long? Mr. Trump sure does like to get behind a winner, and Mr. Mastriano has had a pretty hefty lead in most polls for a few weeks now; that probably explains it. State Republicans say he can't win, but surely they understand things better than that! Republican wave or no, Mr. Mastriano has a decent shot against state Attorney General/presumptive Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro, particularly if Mr. Shapiro does the Democrat thing and act like he's got it in the bag.

Meanwhile, does the Trump camp seriously expect us to believe, in re Kathy Barnette's late surge in the PA Republican Senate nomination race, that "no one saw this coming"? I saw this coming, and I get paid by the hour! Of course, I mistakenly thought Jeff Bartos would benefit from "not being one of the two rich out-of-state guys in the race," but apparently his role in this drama has only been to take front-runners out, first Sean Parnell (he leaked the news of Mr. Parnell's divorce proceedings, you may recall), and then Messrs. Oz and McCormick (if I saw the ad he ran on that topic once I saw it a hundred times). Still, anyone could have seen this coming, particularly students of Deb Fischer's 2012 Senate campaign in Nebraska.

Much has been said about Ms. Barnette's loose tongue on Twitter since she's become a thing, but I take particular exception to her claim that "homosexuals LEAD with their sexual preference" (shouty caps in original). No, Ms. Barnette, you "lead with their sexual preference" by only talking about gays in terms of sex, which is but one aspect of anyone's life. I don't know how many more ways I can put this. Fun fact: Ms. Barnette lost in Pennsylvania's 4th House district in 2020 by 19 points -- and not only wouldn't concede defeat, but launched at least one frivolous lawsuit to stop it from happening!

And yet Republican efforts to stop Ms. Barnette's candidacy reek of desperation, as would any last-minute effort to stop a candidate whose surge you didn't see until it was far too late. I can't get away from that "Crazy Kathy Barnette" ad on TV (and if she were a man, think they'd call her "crazy"?). The ad not only takes alleged "praise" for Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter way, way out of context, but repeats phrases like "white racism" and "structural racism" with a sneer, as if that alone makes them "crazy" things to say! I could never vote for Ms. Barnette in the general election, but I hope she beats her opponents' asses beet-red in the primary, because the "Crazy" ad is exactly the kind of thing that should bring shame and shunning upon anyone who creates it.

Finally, the New York Times wonders why Rep. Conor Lamb, despite "Ha(ving) All the Makings of a Front-Runner," is not actually the front-runner in the race for the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nomination. I wouldn't blame you if you shot out because liberals are sick of this shit, that's why, but at least the Times did cite that (not in those precise words) as one of the two reasons, the other being the Lamb campaign's own "missteps." What were these "missteps"? Taking front-running status for granted, trying to appear "above the fray," calling yourself the "most electable" candidate -- in short, all of the things Democratic consultants always tell their candidates to do! If folks like John Fetterman and Lucas Kunce and Gary Chambers and Charles Booker can win their Senate elections this year, maybe folks will stop listening to the defeatist pablum of Democratic consultants. Why, folks might even realize that they're the reason Democrats went from (in Paul Begala's words) "the party of the factory floor to the party of the faculty lounge."

Action: concerning immigration, junk fees, grizzly bears, antibiotic abuse, wage slavery, and the notorious OAN.

Long story short: tell President Biden to end the notorious Title 42 program, tell our CFPB to end bankster "junk fees," tell our Interior Department to protect grizzly bears, tell our FDA to root out antibiotic abuse from factory farms, tell Wendy's to do better by the farmworkers in its supply chain, and tell AT&T to sever all ties with the notorious OAN. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Moms Rising helps you tell President Biden to end the Title 42 program that Donald Trump put in place so he could turn more refugees away. I know they said their Title 42 program was a health care thing, designed to keep COVID out of the United States, but what a crock of shit that was! How much COVID came from Mexico, or Honduras, or anywhere else a "caravan" supposedly came from? Now how much COVID came from a quarter of Americans refusing to get vaccinated in an elephantine hissy fit over Their Guy losing the 2020 election? Yeah, sure was a good thing we kept Mexicans out for "health care" reasons. Title 42 only allows our government to send refugees back without even the hearings our laws guarantee them. As civilized people, we demand better from their leaders as well as ourselves. So let's get to the demanding.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to stop the "junk fees" bank love to impose on working families. You can name overdraft fees as a "junk fee" -- do you really put a bank out that much when you make a math error? -- but our CFPB also wants to hear from you about "fees for things people believed were covered by the baseline price of a product or service," "unexpected fees for a product or service," "fees that seemed too high for the purported service," and "fees where it was unclear why they were charged." Banksters do come up with creative ways to steal your money! And of course they do it the most to working families and seniors. Our CFPB will fight for us -- but only if we demand it.

Change.org helps you tell our Department of the Interior to reject any plans it might have to remove Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears. We've been working to help improve grizzly bear numbers for almost 50 years -- yes, good works do occasionally take a very long time. But grizzly bears still only number around 1,200 in the United States (a far cry from 200 years ago, when their numbers were more like 50,000, not that we'd be trying to get back there, necessarily), and when the Governors of Montana and Wyoming talk about revoking protections for grizzlies, they don't foreground "tyrannical federal mandates" or "protecting other animals" or "we got wells to dig!" -- they foreground trophy hunting. It's like they're trying to be soulless! And soulless people shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to eliminate antibiotic abuse on factory farms. We've been telling them for a long time, and it's not like they've done nothing, but the need remains. Two out of every three antibiotics in America go not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, partly to make them "meatier" and partly to help them better endure the squalid conditions at factory farms. And what does antibiotic overuse help create? Superbugs, which took over a million lives worldwide in 2019, which was less than 2% of the 58 million folks total who died that year, but we could see 10 million annually by 2050, per a U.K. government study from 2014. And if a superbug gets you, the number that'll really matter will be 100% of you.

Daily Kos helps you tell fast-food corporation Wendy's to join the Fair Food program, which roots out the wage slavery and unsafe work conditions on farms supplying food to fast-food corporations. Every other big fast-food corporation has joined the Fair Food program, so Wendy's needs to step up its game, lest farmworkers march on Wendy's board chair Nelson Peltz's huge Palm Beach, CA mansion in the next few weeks and brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR against him. Imagine him having a gathering there; and then imagine him and his fellow travelers all laughing at the "little people" who think they can make a difference against his awesome power. Then imagine us winning, because his power is less like a machine gun and more like an anvil around his ankle.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut off all ties with the notorious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN). DirecTV dropped OAN from its lineup staring next month, and AT&T owns most of DirecTV, but OAN wouldn't exist without AT&T money to begin with, so starving the OAN beast of a platform isn't quite enough if you're still feeding it. OAN has, of course, filed a hilarious lawsuit against AT&T just for doing what it did, even suggesting that if they don't get an audience fed hand-to-mouth they have no free speech, though dozens of 2000s bloggers got big audiences without big corporate sugar daddy money. To think OAN says that with a straight face and still calls itself "conservative." C'mon, OAN, bootstrap up! Prove you don't need the corporate welfare!

Around the table: of refugees, bioweapons, and "terrorists."

Everyone wants to help out Ukrainian refugees, but Julie Hollar at FAIR reminds us that "civilians in other conflicts" are "much less newsworthy" -- "particularly when they’re victims of the US." Hence Ukrainian civilians get on TV a lot, but Iraqi civilians didn't get much screen time back in the mid-2000s, nor did Serbian civilians a mere half-decade earlier, nor do Syrian civilians today; you just have to wonder if there's a connection, despite TV journalists intoning that "the pain of war is borderless." And when you read about how our "liberal" media tripped all over themselves back in the day avoiding saying that American forces were attacking Iraq, you'll be reminded of how they trip all over themselves today avoiding saying that American police officers shoot people.

When I hear that Russian biologists have informed us that Russian/QAnon claims that America is sponsoring bioweapons labs in Ukraine are utter bunkum, I'm reminded of when former U.N. inspector Scott Ritter said Iraq had no WMD in 2002, when he had at least three very good reasons to say the opposite. These Russian biologists are all very likely to find themselves dead or in jail soon, so let's not squander their good works by forgetting them, or by, say, giving more oxygen to the amateur epidemiologists who told us COVID wasn't real or masks choked you or vaccines killed 50,000 people.

Michigan's biggest energy providing corporation makes big bucks while shutting off electricity to many, many more homes than any other similar corporation in the state -- and also charges the highest prices in Michigan, and though it wouldn't be fair to say the state of Michigan rubber-stamps their rate hikes (generally, DTE gets about half of what it asks for!), I sure do wonder how the state allowed any energy-providing corporation to get so big, let alone fail to take into account whether good Michiganders can even afford these rate hikes. I mean, capping bills as a percentage of income will help, but how about some good old-fashioned trust-busting?

Senate Republicans apparently plan to attack President Biden's Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, for her work defending "terrorists" at Guantánamo Bay. Perhaps conscious that most Americans now think Guantánamo Bay was a total fraud, they're working on shortening their argument to "she kept defending terrorists," which should be enough for folks who already fight anything touched by Biden-nature. But as you're mindful of how many innocent people got sent to Guantánamo over the years, and how often our government held them for decades without even charging them, then really, Guantánamo was horseshit is the only response you need deliver.

When I hear that One America News Network has sued AT&T for breach of contract after AT&T simply didn't renew their contract, I'm tempted to yell frivolous lawsuit! from the mountaintops. OAN's argument has (at least!) four prongs, which is already a bad sign. First, it alleges a conspiracy between AT&T's (Black, Democratic) Board Chair and plaintiff-against-OAN Dominion Voting Systems, and good luck finding the smoking gun emails for that one! Second, it suggests that AT&T should have continued their relationship past 2022 because OAN had had an "exclusive advertising agreement" with AT&T through 2024; you've heard of the Commutative Property of Contracts, of course? Why, no, you haven't. Third, it alleges that AT&T didn't enforce a non-disparagement clause by preventing some of its other properties' celebrities from criticizing OAN; calling that a "reach" would insult actual reaches. Fourth, it alleges that AT&T is "imped(ing) the right of American television viewers to watch the news media channels and programs of their choice," a charge that should make every early-2000s blogger laugh hysterically. Gosh, these big corporations will say just anything to avoid the obvious truth: that good Americans succeeded in agitating for AT&T to dump OAN. Why would they want to occlude that truth, I wonder?

Finally, Ohio Republican Senatorial aspirants Mike Gibbons and Josh Mandel got into it in a debate hosted by FreedomWorks last Friday night, after Mr. Mandel accused Mr. Gibbons of outsourcing Ohio jobs at roughly the same time Mr. Mandel was fighting in Iraq. The timeline Mr. Mandel presents is more than a little tenuous, but Mr. Gibbons really stepped in it with his response -- think "I personally didn't buy the stock" will resonate with anyone? Will "I wish I'd made millions off of Chinese Petra"? And that was before the big confrontation, when Mr. Gibbons told Mr. Mandel he had no experience in the private sector and Mr. Mandel responded "I've done two tours in Iraq! Don't tell me I haven't worked!" Bad behavior in public is never good, but I think all this will help Mr. Mandel on primary day -- he orchestrated it all pretty well, though not perfectly (Mr. Gibbons didn't actually say Mr. Mandel has "never worked," but, as they say, if you're explaining, you're losing), and getting in other people's faces isn't exactly something that repels Trump votaries, is it? I guess we now know why Donald Trump is hedging his bets in this race. Josh Mandel's no great prize, of course -- he's already lost a Senate race, to Sherrod Brown in 2012 -- so all Tim Ryan or Morgan Harper has to do is, like Mr. Brown, offer Ohio voters something of value.

Around the table: of despots, oligarchs, and unwanted comebacks.

Remember how we were saying Vlad the Bad's oligarchs don't mess with his political dealings because he leaves them alone in their financial dealings? Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, goes deeper into that story, revealing how the billionaires picked Mr. Putin in the first place back in the 1990s. Incredibly, the Russian oligarchs actually went looking for a "Russian Pinochet" (this, while the actual Pinochet faced murder charges related to his nefarious rule!) to replace Boris Yeltsin, not just with Mr. Yeltsin's acquiescence, but with the actual help of Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, last seen telling America to fight inflation not by fighting monopolies (as the Biden Administration would do) but by pressing down even harder on the throats of working families.

Homeless folks and their advocates have begun an Occupy-style protest in none other than Boise, ID. Since the Ninth Circuit rules that Boise couldn't just criminalize homelessness, particularly if they weren't going to give homeless folks a place to stay, Boise police appear to be shaking down the homeless, often under the guise of "welfare checks" (which don't require warrants), hence the occupation of the state Capitol Mall. I wish them luck in persuading a state (and a nation) that they do matter and that our treatment of them matters, if we want to call ourselves civilized. Hell, Utah's as right-wing as Idaho is, and they do much better by their homeless.

Richard C. Gross at Counterpunch summarizes the right-wing stratagem in America about as succinctly as I've seen it done: "suppressing voting rights, restricting abortions, curbing teaching about race and identity, banning books in schools and libraries and picking on one of the most vulnerable in society – LGBTQ youths." After all, as he suggests, right-wingers not only can't win elections with superior ideas, they can't win arguments on the merits. Democrats would do well to use a similar summary in political ads -- in conjunction with their own accomplishments, which I expect to be more apparent by mid-summer -- though I doubt they have the guts. The Jesse Jackson epigraph -- "In politics, an organized minority is a political majority" -- is as stark as it is instructive.

Ho hum, Wisconsin Elections Commission won't do anything to the 10 Republicans who tried to pass themselves off as Presidential electors in 2020. I shudder to think the real reason they laid off was that one of the 10 was also one of the Commissioners, but you know what would be worse? If they actually believed the 10 fake electors' claim that they were just "keeping their options open" in case Mr. Trump won any of the 60-odd frivolous lawsuits he lost. And the Commission says Wisconsin state law doesn't prevent "alternative" electors from "meeting"; does it prevent them from pretending they're the real electors in a race their man obviously lost? Law and order!

When I hear that the Alaska legislature is contemplating a bill that would outlaw state IDs that comply with the national REAL ID system, all I can say is at last, the vaunted Alaska libertarian streak returns! The bill, HB 389, would give good Alaskans the option of using a driver's license photo that can't be read by facial recognition software, plus it would force Alaskan state government (namely the DMV; we'll get to them) to destroy all of its current drivers' license photos and prohibit "bulk sharing" of any of said photos -- a big deal since the Alaska DMV decided all by itself and in defiance of state law to upload all of its REAL-ID-compatible photos to the national database in 2017. I don't know if I've said this here, but folks who obsess over other people's papers are pretty much telling the world they don't know how to do anything about anything important.

Finally, recently-disgraced Andrew Cuomo says he not only might run for a fourth term as Governor of New York, but might create his own political party to do so. To which I must ask: why does he think people love him so much that he could create his own party? That man has always needed Democrats more than they have ever needed him. And boy do I wish he'd STFU about "cancel culture" already. He didn't "say" stuff so much as he did stuff, the First Amendment doesn't protect you from your employer, and we've accepted sexual harassment in the workplace is wrong for over three decades now. Hate to pile on, but I'm tired of hearing that "we have to reduce the anger in politics" from the people who stoke the anger with their wrongdoing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: once more into the breach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning abortion, voting rights, discrimination, and "bipartisanship."

Long story short: tell the Texas state legislature to reject an anti-abortion, anti-law and order bill; tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act; and tell your Congressfolk that you want results, not "bipartisanship." Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

First things first. The Texas state legislature, not satisfied with suppressing voting rights and injuring trans children, continues its reign of terror with HB 1515, the so-called Texas Heartbeat Act, which is not only one of those bills that would make abortions illegal after a fetal heartbeat can be detected -- i.e., before most women even know they're pregnant! -- but would also allow anyone in Texas to sue any abortion provider for violating any of HB 1515's provisions. The bill's authors sell that as a way of keeping state law enforcement out of, well, enforcing this particular law like that's some kind of "compromise" or something, but we have a thing called "standing" in lawsuits for a reason -- to prevent precisely this kind of chaos where anyone who "feels" aggrieved by anything, ever, can sue anyone they like over anything they feel aggrieves them. Standing typically requires a) evidence of direct injury and b) some degree of certainty that a court can actually redress it. But once again, the party that constantly whines about "frivolous lawsuits" seems determined to create more of them with this anti-law and order bill. Progress American helps you oppose it.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Mob Boss Mitch McConnell (E-KY) says "100% of my focus is on stopping this new administration" -- again, apparently zero percent of his focus is on serving the good people of Kentucky! -- so let's contemplate what that "100% focus" would mean with regard to his plans to stonewall the For the People Act: it would mean state legislatures could keep drawing Rorschach-looking legislative districts that exclude individual houses on individual streets just so undeserving incumbents can be easily re-elected; it would mean states could continue to use bogus "databases" to pretend that citizens with common first and last names are voting in several states at once; it would mean state legislatures could continue to restrict early voting, mail-in voting, and automatic and same-day voting registration at their own whim; and it would mean no campaign finance disclosure of big donors even though virtually everyone in America wants that and such disclosure doesn't actually violate big donors' rights. So let's end the Age of McConnell by telling our Senators what they should really do.

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. What would the continuing Age of McConnell mean for this bill? It would mean our Justice Department could do next-to-nothing about states that continue to suppress votes. It's no accident that, after our Supreme Court's Shelby County v. Holder decision -- which eviscerated this power granted to our Justice Department by the Voting Rights Act -- that those very same Southern states our Court felt the Voting Rights Act now "unfairly" targeted made a slew of changes to their voting rights laws! These changes just so happened to cement Republicans' unearned advantage in those states. So if Mitch McConnell gets his way here, Republicans will eventually make it so that no non-white person anywhere can vote, not that they'd ever put it like that, of course.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. What will Mob Boss Mitch's "100% focus" on stopping this new Administration" mean here? It will mean that landlords can continue to refuse to rent to gay and transgender folks merely because they're gay or transgender, that banks can continue to refuse to serve gay and transgender folks merely because they're gay or transgender, and that states and localities can continue to keep transgender folks out of public restrooms merely because they find them icky. That may not mean much to you if you're not gay or transgender, but it would mean a lot to those who are, because they would continue to get pushed around by the law instead of be protected by it, as we all deserve. Ignore all that crap about boys playing girls' sports. I've gone into why it's crap a bunch of times already, and I won't go into it anymore. At some point, bad ideas have to die if they've lost the argument. And the folks who keep repeating them should be treated as whiners.

Finally, because they need to be told at least a million times before they get it, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that you do not want bipartisanship if it means good legislation can't pass or only bad legislation can pass. Seems commonsensical, until you listen to Joe Manchin say the same stupid crap over and over again like he has no idea which political party just tried to overturn the election on January 6. Was he even in the building? Anyway, when did we hear about "the importance of bipartisanship" in 2017, when Republicans controlled every branch of government? Approximately never. We only hear about it when Democrats control every branch of government! Because Democrats might actually do something good for people! I'm sick and tired of living in the Age of McConnell, where "bipartisanship" means "Democrats and Republicans coming together to do whatever Republicans want." The American people matter, too. And we need to step up and remind them of that, every damn day for the rest of our lives if necessary.

Action: concerning COVID relief, the minimum wage, the right to organize, and social media.

Happy Monday, good Americans! Today's as good a day as any to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass a vigorous COVID relief package. You may want to inform them, if they're of the Republican persuasion, that a recent The Hill/Harris X poll finds a sizable majority of Republicans support the notion of Democrats passing a bill through budget reconciliation without Republican votes. So when national Republicans whine about being "left out" of the deliberation process -- which is to laugh, of course, given how often Republicans do that to Democrats, the Trump tax "reform" being only the most recent obvious example -- remind them that most of their own right-leaning constituents don't agree with them. And when Republicans whine about the deficit -- which is also to laugh, since they clearly don't care about it when they're in power -- remind them that their constituents don't care about that, either. Funny how easily you can find actual bipartisanship among the people but only the fake kind among politicians.

And if you're from West Virginia or Arizona, you may also want to mention to Sens. Manchin (D?-WV) and Sinema (D?-AZ) that you support the $15/hour minimum wage. Already I've heard liberals saying that we have to cut these two some slack because they come from conservative states, but that gives them veto power over all legislation! Do you remember voting for the Manchin/Sinema ticket in 2020? No, you do not. These two won't lose their jobs in 2024 for "being too liberal," but they will lose their jobs for doing too little, and the sooner they learn that, the better for them and for us. At least Sen. Manchin says he'd support an $11/hour minimum wage; Sen. Sinema says we shouldn't raise the wage through budget reconciliation at all. But we just almost lost our damn government to violent assholes and we are thus, ah, not particularly obsessed with "the sanctity of Senate procedure" at this point in time. Besides, she's just going to vote against the hike if we do it the "right" way. Unless we flood her phone lines, of course.

Meanwhile, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act (which has no bill number at this writing) would, as its title suggests, better protect workers when they try to organize for better wages and working conditions. Bosses herding their workers into anti-union meetings, or firing organizers, or sending them endless text messages, or flat-out bullying them on the floor? All that could become a thing of the past if the PRO Act passes, since the bill would not only strengthen penalties corporations face and empower our National Labor Relations Board to force corporations to bargain with employees when they commit these transgressions, but it'd also empower workers to file civil lawsuits against them, too. Does your Tea Party uncle want to call all that "frivolous lawsuits"? But who files the most frivolous lawsuits again? Corporations and Donald Trump, by the evidence. So the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Reps and Senators to protect American workers by passing the PRO Act.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk and our President to enact legislation that would hold big tech corporations accountable for their misdeeds. And by "misdeeds" I mainly mean "allowing lies and extremist content to spread across our internet with no attempt to moderate the flow." Social media CEOs twiddled their thumbs for years, responding to any attempt to get them to do better by shrieking TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!!, but Facebook and Twitter aren't public utilities, they're private corporations -- best characterized as publishing houses even if our laws won't do that. Hence People for the American Way helps you call for these sites to actively moderate content. And I doubt "using algorithms" qualifies as "active moderation" -- I would call it passive moderation, in fact, and would it be piling on to note that the algorithms these best-and-brightest tech honchos develop too often spew out racist content? And that's just another reason why people, not algorithms, need to do our most important work.

Around the table: evil and its incessant drama, part 399.

Impending bill would let big tech corporations essentially create local governments in Nevada -- and the idea has the support of Nevada's Governor, nominal Democrat Steve Sisolak. All because the local government supposedly is "inadequate alone to provide the flexibility and resources conducive to making the State a leader in attracting and retaining new forms and types of businesses and fostering" blah blah blah. Seriously, what a terrible idea: corporations only account to shareholders; governments account to people. When it doesn't work as well as it should, we must hold them accountable -- and holding a private corporation accountable is a lot harder when you're not a shareholder.

Rachel Kraus at Mashable gives us "9 Scary Revelations From 40 years of Facial Recognition Research." Didn't know it'd been going on that long, did you? Well, it has, and it was a Department of Defense idea, of course, and facial recognition works a lot better in studies than it does in the real world -- a truism you'll grasp more easily once you learn that facial recognition researchers started by having (mostly white) people sit for portraits. That's three of the nine revelations; the other six probably won't surprise you, but the article contains a lot of good data and argument in one place.

As you may know, Parler's former CEO got fired last month, and now he's taking to the airwaves to talk about how "betrayed" he feels by Parler investor Rebekah Mercer: "I thought I knew her. She invited my family on trips with them and everything. I thought that she was, generally speaking, I thought she was being real. And then she just abruptly has her people fire me and doesn't even talk to me about it." So how on Earth did he not know what he was getting into? Oh, because "I don't judge anybody by the press that I see," to which Carl Sagan might have responded have an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out. Again, this is why we shouldn't worship CEOs -- too many of them are either awfully stupid or just pretending to be.

Donald Trump's impeachment lawyers call his upcoming Senate trial "political theater." Well, they would know! I mean, the defendant acts out this big drama all the damn time. As an aside, NPR's summary of the incident leaves more than a few things out, things that would make you more likely to want Mr. Trump convicted. I would never have thought that an op-ed coming from Barbara Comstock and Charles Boustany would enlighten on this matter better than an NPR news report, but here we are.

Upon hearing that the Biden Administration plans to "punish" Congressional Republicans who vote against his American Rescue Plan with (among other things) "midterm attack ads and "a giant outreach effort," all I can say is: we can only hope! A man does get tired of Democrat weakness, after all. As nice as it would be for Democrats to do works that are obviously good, like Medicare-for-All or a massive renewable energy infrastructure build, Democrats' complete unwillingness to run on the Affordable Care Act in 2010 was cowardly. It couldn't have been that hard, if all those Democrats running on it in 2018 took our House back from Republicans.

Finally, the New York Times wrings its hands that all these defamation lawsuits that seem to be stemming the tide of right-wing noise in the news have "raised uneasy questions about how to police a news media that counts on First Amendment protections," but I find that an easy knot to split: if a media organ tells lies that hurt people, people can hurt them back. That's why defamation lawsuits exist. And if you're worried about rich people suing or countersuing the aggrieved into silence, you pass an anti-SLAPP law. C'mon, I'm an hourly-paid schmuck and I know this stuff.

Action: concerning government spying and gerrymandering.

Assholes-with-guns took over our Capitol last week, aiming to nullify the will of the voters -- and you know what that means: it means more government spying legislation! After all, when has "anti-terror" legislation ever gone wrong? Besides always, I mean. Has the USA PATRIOT Act made us safer? Has the FISA Amendments Act made us safer? How about NSA data-vacuuming? And, more to the point, did any of those things prevent a bunch of Nazi wannabes from plotting a coup on social media in broad daylight? No, of course not -- our government is more preoccupied with abusing its powers against Black Lives Matter protestors. Never does a catastrophe happen without our government demanding more power to spy on innocent Americans. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any broad new government spying authority. The Capitol coup is not a clarion call for more spying powers and more of our tax dollars.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state legislature is actually trying to gerrymander judicial seats! HB 38 aims to create "districts" that particular state judges (including state Supreme Court judges) would "represent." Why? Simple: because five of seven judges on our state Supreme Court are Democrats, who've made a lot of trouble for Republicans by un-gerrymandering U.S. House districts and slapping down frivolous election lawsuits, to name just two good works, so our legislators want to retaliate by creating more Rorschach-blot districts that'll reliably pump out Republican judges. HB 38's pretty damn convoluted (it'd ultimately put a Constitutional amendment before the voters), but the machinations aren't as important as the simple fact that this is a sore loser bill. Maybe Republicans should try winning some elections, amirite? Hence Common Cause helps you write a letter-to-the-editor of your local paper opposing HB 38. And remember: in your letter, make sure you call it a "sore loser" bill.

Action: concerning voting rights and accountability.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, is back, and you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers so you can call them and tell them to pass it. The For the People Act would (among many other things!) institute same-day and automatic voter registration nationally, prohibit states from using returned and non-forwardable mailings (or failure to vote in previous elections) to deregister voters, curtail (though not end) the practice of using felony convictions to disenfranchise good Americans, require states to use voter-verifiable paper ballots, require 15 days of early voting for all federal elections, let voters file affidavits in lieu of voter ID, make states use independent commissions to redraw their legislative districts, and require disclosure of campaign contributions over $10,000. So let's patiently review Republican objections to this bill -- nah, just kidding; their objections will be TEH SOSHULIZM!!!! and TEH POWER GRABZ!!!!!, just like they were last time. Republicans might try doing good works on behalf of their constituents if they're so afraid the For the People Act will take their power away.

Also, the House will vote on impeaching our soon-to-be-ex-President today, so while you have your Reps on the phone about H.R. 1, you might want to remind them to impeach him. Our President incited those morons who tried to take over our country last week, and he did it because he lost an election by seven million votes and because almost every single one of his 60-plus frivolous lawsuits died in court, many of these before right-wing judges. Inciting a riot is a crime, and inciting a riot to overturn an election you lost is about as precise a definition of "high crime" as I can imagine. Now, Republicans have been talking a lot about unity lately -- these are the same clowns who constantly hurt us and then constantly point to those other people as the reason we're hurt! They say we shouldn't impeach this President because we have to hold the country together. One more time: we do not "unify" with evil. Here's how "unity" works: sane people realize we have more in common with each other than we thought, and then we unify to keep stupid batshit whiners from destroying our civilization with another well-armed tantrum. And getting rid of the ringleader of the stupid batshit whiners is where we start.

Around the table: Nothing Ever Ends, part 322.

British farmer Martin Crawford describes (in a short NatGeo video running less than three and a half minutes) how agroforestry could help save the world from starvation and drought brought on by climate change. "What we think of as normal in terms of food production is actually not normal at all," he says, and he ain't lying -- the way big ag corporations do it (one crop on one slab of land, lots of pesticides) suits them more than it suits human beings. Mr. Crawford's also written a book, Creating a Forest Garden: Working With Nature to Grow Edible Crops, though you'll have to hunt around for it a bit.

Former Health and Human Services advisor, if you can call him that, advocated creating "herd immunity" by infecting "Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc.," adding "(w)e want them infected," in case you missed it the first time. Admit it -- you thought this was A Modest Proposal for a minute, didn't you? Except I don't think Mr. Swift would have used the word "fastly" even as a wink to his audience. This Administration was quick to say this fellow's ramblings had no sway over their policies, although our soon-to-be-ex-President wouldn't STFU about "herd immunity" all freaking year.

Nathan Bernard at Mainer describes "How Sara Gideon Lost to (Susan) Collins the Day After She Entered the Race," but I bet you could replace Sara Gideon's name (and Susan Collins's name!) with their counterparts in Iowa, Kentucky, and North Carolina and have more or less the same article. Spoiler alert: Ms. Gideon lost by taking big Democrat money and taking big Democrat advice, resulting in a campaign that was "ugly, uninspiring, obscenely expensive, and out of touch with local concerns." And note well that Jared Golden got re-elected easily in a right-of-center House district "despite" supporting Medicare-for-All while Ms. Gideon lost by seven percentage points statewide after her six-figure consultant advisors all told her not to support it. (But read the whole thing, not least for the damning, and laugh-out-loud, testimony of one Alex Steed.)

What's the worst thing about Republicans' entirely manufactured outrage that Joe Biden's campaign manager referred to them all as "fuckers" in an interview? No, it's not that Republicans have spent four years excusing or pretending not to hear all of our soon-to-be-ex-President's cuss words, but that our "liberal" media will tell us this is the reason Mitch McConnell blocks everything Joe Biden tries to do, which would disregard 14 years of evidence telling us Mitch McConnell blocks everything any Democratic President (or House!) tries to do just because he can. Hey, they called us fuckers! I call them evil; I think that's worse.

Finally, when confronted with the news that our soon-to-be-ex-President's future neighbors in Florida don't want him there and would cite the terms of his own 1993 post-bankruptcy legal maneuvering to keep him out, I couldn't blame you for being quite amused at watching him get some of his own -- after all, hasn't he been clogging up the courts with far more frivolous lawsuits the last few weeks? Sadly, I bet this story ends with him getting some crony in the state legislature to help him out -- with a law aimed at "letting people live where they want" regardless of the legal agreements they've made, perhaps? If so, that sure would be conservative of them.

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.

Action: concerning our election.

So, we're almost two weeks after Election Day, and our current and soon-to-be-ex-President is still trying to stop our federal courts to stop states from certifying their election results over horseshit voter fraud claims and horseshit claims of electioneering impropriety. Pardon my French, but I've no patience for his drama, nor that of his Republican enablers. Sen. McConnell told us the day after Election Day 2016 to "accept the results," but this time he sure was quick to assert our soon-to-be-ex-President's right to file all the frivolous lawsuits he wants after losing by five and a half million votes. And while we'd all love to think he can't just sue his way to victory here -- after all, he's sued plenty of small businesses he's stiffed into just throwing up their hands, but suing Wisconsin into flipping 20,000-plus votes, for example, is a rather bigger lift -- winning lawsuits and flipping votes may not be his goal: his goal, as many keen observers have said, may well be to stall the states from certifying their vote totals so that state legislators will have to take over and select the electors he wants. Everyone's on a deadline, after all, particularly the December 14 deadline when the Electoral College meets. And you know what'll help persuade those legislators to buck the obvious will of the American people? All these rallies where right-wingers demand that our President be re-elected because it's what they want, the rest of us be damned. With rage-filled right-wingers, of course, there'll likely be violence sooner or later, and violence tends to influence legislators far more than we should ever allow.

So here's where things stand now: as the link above reminds us, Republicans control the state legislatures of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, five states Mr. Biden won this election -- and a lot of these politicians were, like our President, telling a bunch of stories about people they know who heard things about dead people voting and the like. Things may be changing: a few days ago, state legislative leaders from four of these states (all save Georgia) said they wouldn't "intervene" in elector selection, although at least one (Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers) has left open the possibility that "some type of fraud -- which I haven't heard of" could change their minds. Suffice it to say that a "box from Alice" full of votes for our soon-to-be-ex-President won't turn up in Arizona -- but the right-wing fever dreams of machines switching millions of votes will continue, and as we approach the Electoral College deadline, the likelihood of Confederate flag-waving caravans of pickup trucks rolling through peaceful neighborhoods and demanding action-or-else will grow.

So our task today is to remind the leaders of these state legislatures of the promises they've made, promises we expect them to keep even when violence hits us. After all, they're getting a lot of phone calls from right-wing crybabies, so we've got to make sure we're heard, too. Here are their phone numbers:

Arizona House Speaker Russell "Rusty" Bowers: 602.926.3128.

Arizona Senate Majority Leader Rick Gray: 602.926.5413.

Georgia House Speaker David Ralston: 404.656.5020.

Georgia Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan: 404.463.2478.

Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield: 517.373.2629.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey: 517.373.5932.

Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler: 717.783.6424.

Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman: 717.787.1377.

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos: 608.266.9171.

Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald: 608.266.5660.

Your message can go something like this: "I call today to urge you to do your part to ensure that our Electoral College expresses the will of the people in this election, as your own state laws require. I am encouraged to hear less loose talk of so-called fraud and so-called impropriety during this election, but I am also aware that many right-wingers fantasize about doing violence, and may in fact do violence, in support of their preferred candidate, and when that time comes, I urge you to remember to do the job your laws command you to do, regardless of what pressure partisans may exert from the outside."

There is one other thing we must consider when talking to these folks: they all saw what we saw -- our soon-to-be-ex-President outperformed the polling, and did seem to drag a lot of House and Senate candidates upward to victory, against the pundits' expectations. At least in the short term, Republicans may come to different conclusions about that data -- some will say it "proves" that our current President "deserves" re-election regardless of the vote tally saying he doesn't, while others will say it proves that the "movement," such as it is, that our current President has galvanized will endure and requires "respect." I say that people who are wrong about everything and feel nothing but rage deserve no respect regardless of how much they whine in public, but a lot of folks will make different calculations than I will, and we have to prepare ourselves for that, not just today, but every day.

So good luck, and God bless.

UPDATE. Got some full phone mailboxes, so I'm going to add some email addresses here:

Georgia House Speaker David Ralston: [email protected].

Georgia Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan: [email protected].

Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield: [email protected].

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey: [email protected].

Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald: [email protected].

I was able to leave a voicemail with everyone else (very few legislative staffers are answering the phone these days due to COVID). Also, the 888 number for Speaker Vos apparently doesn't work outside of his district, so I removed it.

Action: concerning further pandemic relief legislation.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Today's action alert is all about the next pandemic relief bill -- what it should have, what it shouldn't have. I think you can make this one a phone call to your Reps and Senators, but I've also included as many email/petition links as I have, if you're pressed for time. The next coronavirus pandemic relief bill should include the Paycheck Guarantee Act, emergency funding for our U.S. Postal Service, adequate health care for prisoners, and stronger worker safety protections at food processing plants. But the next relief bill should not have more funding for our President's vanity border wall or other welfare handouts for defense contractor corporations, payroll tax cuts, or lawsuit liability protections. (I don't have action alert links for those last two -- yet! -- but they're important.) I'll describe why all this is important, as briefly as possible, in the paragraphs below.

The Paycheck Guarantee Act (Congress.gov doesn't have a bill number, text, or summary at this writing) would cover 100% of paychecks for all workers making less than $100,000 who lose their jobs for the next three months, and would keep those workers enrolled in employer-sponsored benefits like health insurance. So, if we have 30 million unemployed, and pay them $5,000 a month for three months (which would be above the median salary for American workers), plus $3,000 for health insurance during that time (which would be above the average per capita spending on health insurance), we would spend $540 billion. We've already spent more than that on "small business" payroll protection, and most of that went to big corporations! And if your Tea Party uncle starts to ask where the money's coming from, just remind him that billionaires have made over $400 billion just in the last month and a half. You may also remind him that such concern about deficits and debts made more sense when Congress mostly threw away our money in the last pandemic relief bill. Really, it wouldn't be uncivil to do that.

We continue to demand better funding for our Post Office despite Presidential intransigence on the matter. He finally spelled out a condition under which he would accept such a thing happening -- and it involved quadrupling the prices our Post Office charges to good Americans like you and I! Think of that -- quadrupling the price on meds for our veterans via the VA! Quadrupling the price of mailing your stimulus check! Quadrupling the price of sending lab samples and reports all over America! And our Post Office might well be delivering our votes for President this November, and if it runs out of money before then, you think FedEx or UPS will deliver your votes? They will charge you a lot more -- a lot more than quadruple a postage stamp, too! -- and neither one of those corporations has ever handled anywhere near the volume of mail our Post Office handles routinely. Hate to pile on, but Congress put our Post Office in a position where a pandemic could have killed it by mandating that it pre-pay health insurance and pensions decades in advance, a condition Congress has imposed on literally no other entity. Why, you might think they were trying to kill our Post Office! But they still have to reckon with us.

Now, as far as making sure folks in prison get the medical care they need, I know a bunch of Americans will respond: why? Let me begin by appealing to their self-interest: prisoners do not get to practice "social distancing" -- why, many of them can't even pee in privacy! -- which means they're basically a massive Petri dish for COVID-19. And guess what? Prisoners are not the only folks who spend a lot of time in prisons! A prison full of COVID-19 sufferers will spread the disease to guards and administrators (who can't just do their jobs on Zoom, amirite?) and then they'll spread the disease to their families and communities, and then all the hard work the rest of us have done to stay safe could be for naught. And now, for those who do not listen to arguments involving self-interest: a great nation doesn't treat its prisoners like dung; a great nation treats its prisoners like they can actually rehabilitate themselves and contribute to society when they've repaid their debt to society. Don't let your right-wing friends respond BUT TEH MURDERERZ!!!! Most folks languishing in jail right now haven't been convicted of any crime.

Big Ag's role in the pandemic has come under some scrutiny lately, as our President has invoked the Defense Production Act -- but not to force big corporations to make ventilators or masks, but to keep big food processing corporations (even the ones where COVID-19 runs rampant!) making food. That'd seem like a reasonable exercise of his power under the law, if our President made these food processing corporations take more precautions to ensure their workers don't die and kill everyone else in their vicinity before they die, but of course he didn't, which is why we're asking Congress to do that in the next pandemic relief bill. Hey, if one thinks food processing corporations are that important, one must also believe that protecting the workers who make the food are also that important. I mean, our President may think only other bosses like himself are important, but Americans aren't like that. Put six beers into any of his votaries and most of them will tell you that they're not like that! Food processing workers aren't just folks we should work extra hard to protect in a pandemic, they're also our family, friends, and neighbors.

When contemplating even more corporate welfare handouts for defense contracting corporations, you must ask: aren't big defense corporations happy enough with the hundreds of billions of dollars they've gotten from the 46% President than they would have gotten from the 48% President? You'd think these paragons of the American can-do entrepreneurial spirit would have, I don't know, saved some money for a rainy day, like they tell the rest of us to do! But they've still got their hands out -- gotta meet absurdly high profit projections or die, after all! -- so they can build even more nuclear weapons we don't need, even more weapons systems that don't work, and (of course!) our President's signature vanity border wall that can barely stand up to a stiff wind or a brutal gang of cutting implements from Lowe's. And, as Win Without War reminds us in its latest email missive, "(w)e need more N95 masks, not more F-35 jet fighters." It's even funnier because F-35 jet fighters -- with their expected cost of $1.5 trillion over the next half-century, think war-making will change any by then? -- have become the poster child for Defense Department boondoggles.

Our President still insists that if he caves in to any of our demands, we have to cave in to one of his -- namely, a payroll tax cut (or, more likely, the elimination of the payroll tax entirely and the alleged funding of Social Security "through other means"). Yeah, individual workers would get a little more money from a payroll tax cut -- but big corporations will get a lot more from it, since workers and employers each pay half the tax, and while workers most likely have only one employer, how many workers does an employer have? Yeah, that math shouldn't be hard. And, ah, payroll taxes actually fund something fairly important: Social Security, which gives our seniors a more dignified and comfortable retirement, as it should, since they worked for it and paid into it their whole lives. Using the pandemic as cover to destroy Social Security is profoundly evil, and anyone who would do such a thing is profoundly evil -- but, sadly, using the pandemic to destroy Social Security is just another day at the office for this President, who commits evil with nearly every breath he takes. So, yeah, the price of a few more dollars in your paycheck from a payroll tax cut/holiday ain't worth the harm it'll do, and I'd sure hate to think Americans could be bought so cheaply.

Both the Republican Senate Majority Leader and the House Minority Leader have insisted that the next round of pandemic relief must include protection from lawsuits for businesses! And there you have Republican priorities explained in just one sentence -- delivering medicines and ballots is optional, but things that would give CEOs "peace of mind" are non-negotiable! And while lawsuits against businesses have gone up lately, if a business has properly adhered to state and federal guidelines in reopening or containing the pandemic, it shouldn't have to worry too much about losing a lawsuit, and if a business is smart enough about it, its lawyers can get an actual frivolous lawsuit dismissed before it does too much financial damage. If a business isn't smart enough about all of that, of course, then we have to wonder why it must be allowed to continue, let alone receive corporate welfare from the taxpayer! But Republicans, despite their attachment to Social Darwinism, never wonder about that -- they consider lawsuits by people against corporations to be the highest form of sin, though you'd have to think they could make their case (so to speak!) with more than isolated anecdotes about those few times the system doesn't work. "Lawsuit liability protection" doesn't belong in this bill, let alone any other bill.

In closing (cue cheers from the convention crowd!), we deserve a lot better from pandemic relief legislation than we've gotten so far, and we need to be very specific about what we want, so we can get more of what we deserve. And we won't get any of what we deserve if we don't speak out. These Reps and Senators have isolated themselves from us -- the Democratic Congressfolk learned that "lesson" in 2010, whereas the Republican Congressfolk didn't learn it until 2017 -- so we have to apply pressure everywhere we can. If you call their Washington offices these days, you're likely to get sent to voicemail; it's not useless to leave a voicemail message, but you're much better off getting a live person, so you can take a few minutes out of their day that they might prefer to spend playing Candy Crush or commiserating with like-minded folks -- and if all of us call our Reps and Senators, we can take up a lot more of their time. I recommend that you go to your Reps' and Senators' websites and find their local phone numbers; I also recommend you program all those numbers into your cellphones. Sometimes I have to call all nine of one of my Senator's phone numbers in order to reach a live person -- and I'll do it, because they shouldn't get to isolate themselves from their-bosses-the-people and then keep winning. Not in my America.

Around the table: from actual frivolous lawsuits to frivolous charges of "domestic terrorism."

Seems like all I do when I talk about the Tennessee legislature is complain, and not without reason, but let's give them kudos for passing an anti-SLAPP bill with teeth. SLAPPs, as you may know, are "strategic lawsuits against public participation," or lawsuits designed only to silence otherwise First Amendment-protected speech, and Tennessee's bill (which only requires the Governor's signature at this point) would require the courts to consider motions to dismiss before allowing lawsuits to proceed any further. Hence, a blow to actual frivolous lawsuits; now if they'd just stop obsessing about gay and transgender folks.

Rod Dreher at The American Conservative does the dying cause of conservatism a solid by locating tyranny in corporate behavior for once. He locates that tyranny largely in corporate abridgment of your privacy and not in, say, laws and regulations that enrich banksters and corporate executives at everyone else's expense -- which latter item would upset conservatives as much as liberals, since conservatives profess an abhorrence for concentrated power -- but baby steps, folks. And I'm glad to hear someone else say that social media has as much power to serve bad governmental actors as it does to liberate us from them. I still think dissent is better off expressed than hidden myself, but I guess that's just one of the things that makes me a liberal.

Ho hum, twice as many Fortune 500 corporations paid zero dollars or less in corporate taxes this year, the first under the Republican tax "reform," than in previous years. Nobody could have predicted that slashing the corporate tax rate without closing very many corporate tax loopholes would have resulted in this! One day we'll get it through our "liberal" media's thick heads that tax breaks for corporations are completely unnecessary and illogical, since corporations already get to deduct expenses before paying taxes. I mean, gosh, how much more of this BS must we take?

Also from the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: our Administration lets private child adoption agencies take federal or state money and turn away Catholic and Jewish parents. Take federal money, follow federal rules, I've always said, and if our laws forbid discrimination, then you can't take federal money and discriminate, period, end of. But maybe in a year or two they can get a Supreme Court decision that explicitly says NO WE ONLY MEANT TEH GAYZ!!!!!

Our Administration apparently considered dropping off all asylum-seeking immigrants in so-called "sanctuary cities," as a sort of punishment to Democratic-leaning urban areas, I suppose, but although I abhor politicians treating people like they exist to be used, I almost sorta wish he'd gone through with it, just so the good folks in those cities could assimilate the new immigrants with no problems. Then again, if there'd been even one problem with an asylee in any city, you can bet Fox News would talk about it 24-7 for a week, so maybe this is for the best after all. (What a surprise to learn that this was all Stephen Miller's idea! Stephen Miller has a face even a mother could punch.)

Finally, few-if-any politicians handle abuse better than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), but I wish she'd handled this incident a little differently. Upon being called a "domestic terrorist" by the Ohio College Republican Federation, she responded by saying "this puts me in danger every time" and "we get a spike in death threats" whenever some right-winger says something that awful. I'm absolutely certain she's not lying, but no one wants to hear a politician talk about how hard they have it. A better response would have been "I eagerly await hearing that you've actually called law enforcement about this very serious accusation and that you're not just making an ass of yourself in public," or "every time you call me a terrorist, you're admitting you can't win an argument with me."

Action: concerning a frivolous lawsuit, a "free" trade deal, and an evil war.

First things first: in what might be the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit, MGM is actually suing a thousand victims of last year's Las Vegas mass shooting, hoping to immunize itself from lawsuits those victims are filing. I suspect MGM's suit would likely fail in court -- the law in question, the 2002 SAFETY Act, would more likely immunize the security corporation MGM hired to cover the country music concert at which the mass shooting happened than it would immunize MGM. But winning probably isn't the point -- intimidating mass shooting victims into dropping lawsuits against MGM is probably the point. Which makes it a SLAPP lawsuit in addition to a frivolous one. And which puts mass shooting victims through the emotional ringer again, as if they haven't fucking suffered enough. Hence Melissa Holmes has started a petition at Change.org which helps you tell country music artists to boycott MGM until it drops its pre-emptive lawsuit stratagem.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk that any renegotiated NAFTA must serve the American people, not corporations, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. The harms "free" trade have done to good Americans are real -- not just in lost jobs, lost wages, and more pollution, but also in the nefarious "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system, which not only lets big corporations sue the American taxpayer for having the temerity to pass some labor or environmental legislation that "cost" them money, but allows those corporations to exact tribute from the American taxpayer for their "losses." Look, either entrepreneurs are our best and brightest or they constantly need bailouts from the taxpayer, but not both. And if "law and order" means anything, it certainly means "not letting external tribunals nullify our laws because it gave some corporate shareholder a sad." Seriously, you can't be "tough" and a weakling at the same time.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop American participation in the Saudi-UAE bombing campaign of the Yemeni port of Hodeidah -- an act which puts millions more good Yemeni at risk of famine -- then Just Foreign Policy and Change.org still help you do that. Our Congressfolk seem to inch ever closer to maybe voting against any further participation by our nation in the Saudi-UAE war against Yemen, but like Zeno's arrow they never hit their target, almost as if that's the whole idea. All we can do is tell them to stop supporting a war in which Congress never authorized our participation, a war that has caused unbearable pain and hardship for the Yemeni people, a war which just so happens to be killing off some of the best al-Qaeda fighters in the world (those being the Houthi rebels the Saudi-UAE coalition is so hot to exterminate). Seriously, when are we going to be smart in the Middle East?

Around the table: includes follies about healthcare, law and order, transparency, and big telecom service.

Dean Baker describes the "massive shift of resources" that would accompany a move to a Medicare-for-All, single-payer health insurance system. He generally finds less savings from single-payer than you'd hope, but also finds more savings in the area of prescription drug costs than you'd think, and he also thinks it's "a good working assumption" that, under a single-payer system, wages would rise by about the amount employers are paying for health insurance now, and I hope he's right, because I suspect big corporations would try their damnedest to keep that money for themselves and push the cost onto their workers in the form of payroll taxes. (He's also skeptical of raising taxes significantly on the wealthy, figuring they'll try harder to avoid it -- but we largely prevented that in the 1950s, so why can't we do that now?)

The Obamacare repeal deadline is all in the news these days (and the CHIP reauthorization deadline, which is the same day, uh, isn't,) but yet another health care-related funding deadline is coming up, and that's for federal funding for community health centers. 61 Senators, from both parties, have gone on record supporting reauthorization of this funding, so if Congress fails at this, it should be grotesquely easy to run ads against incumbents next year. If Congress kills it with poison pill amendments, of course, they could avoid defeat more easily, since most folks don't like to peer inside the sausage-making factory. But they would deserve defeat. Evil works always deserve defeat.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) demands information about "wasteful and potentially unlawful spending by the U.S. Marshals Service" with assets seized from civil and criminal proceedings. I do like it when Mr. Grassley performs actual oversight the way an actual people's representative would do, though his moments of partisan hackery, unfortunately, seem to get more attention. And if you'd prefer he concentrate his efforts on ending asset forfeiture, keep in mind that a damning indictment of asset forfeiture abuse would help such an effort.

The AP reports on state government bodies actually suing folks who request public records. Can you say "frivolous lawsuit," boys and girls? If you're even entertaining the notion that state government agencies might have a point, look at their argument -- "it’s best to have courts determine whether records should be released when legal obligations are unclear" (as the AP summarizes it) cries out for a punch in the nose. It's so obviously an attempt to intimidate watchdogs and muckrakers that the reactionary Michigan state House unanimously banned the practice earlier this year. It's so awful maybe even Neil Gorsuch would rule against it.

Finally, Verizon disconnects over 8,000 rural customers, thus threatening the ability of these residents to deal with emergencies (among other things). By the time you figure out the labyrinthine reason Verizon is dropping these folks, you'll be thinking maybe the real problem is that Verizon wanted to look like it was serving rural customers without actually doing the hard work that comes with serving them. Either that, or that they're just not very good at anything but making money. You know what would solve this problem? Community broadband! You know what big telecom corporations like Verizon spend inordinate amounts of time and effort fighting? Community broadband!

Action: fighting forced arbitration, the militarization of police, and corporate greed.

As you know, the House passed H.J.Res. 111 a mere five days after its introduction in July, which means H.J.Res. 111 must be a bad, bad bill. And H.J.Res. 111 would nullify the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's regulation keeping banks from forcing consumers into arbitration (and thus out of our courts) to settle disputes. Banksters love talking about how consumers win more money from arbitration than from class action lawsuits, but they, ah, leave out a few things. One, consumers rarely win in arbitration; if you don't win, you collect zero dollars, so it's no consolation that someone else, somewhere, won thousands of dollars. Two, banks can use arbitration against you, and they almost always win when they do, which means you lose thousands of dollars. And if you have a better chance of bringing a bankster to justice in a real court -- and this is the banksters' real issue! -- you should put aside your own lust for "winnings" and actually, like, win. I know that's a novel concept in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, but I advance it nonetheless. So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to protect consumers by rejecting H.J.Res. 111.

Meanwhile, given the Trump Administration's zeal for putting military weapons in the hands of local police officers, Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to put an end to the 1033 program that allows our Defense Department to give local police departments military-grade weapons. Why would the police need bazookas? Not to fight crime, surely, since a bazooka (or a grenade launcher, or a machine gun, or a tank) is actually a very imprecise tool toward the end of apprehending suspects and interrupting crimes. But bazookas, grenade launchers, machine guns, and tanks are very good for crowd control, of course, and what with the rise in anti-trump and anti-Nazi wannabe rallies over the past eight months, the Trump Administration is very concerned with controlling crowds, regardless of what they tell you. If the Trump Administration were actually concerned with doing the people's will, rather than holding onto power and wealth by any means necessary, they wouldn't have to worry so much about all these protestors. But Congress created the 1033 program, via a 1997 defense authorization bill, and Congress can take it away, too. So let's encourage them to do that.

Finally, the good people of Mina la India, Nicaragua, are trying to keep the British mining corporation Condor Gold from mining for, you guessed it, gold in their locality. Gold! It's like they live in the 19th century. Doesn't matter that a Canadian corporation mined gold here for close to 20 years in the middle of the last century -- it only matters what the good folks of Mina la India want, which, sadly, doesn't seem to matter to their government, which has handed over more than half of the mining concessions Condor Gold possesses in the area over the last decade. The Condor Gold project threatens to displace families from their homes, destroy livelihoods, and pollute the waters, and the corporation has even gone so far as to sue the citizenry there. So here's where the Big Stick of Bad PR comes in: the Condor Gold project's second-largest investor is the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank; if we can get the IFC to pull its money from this project, this project will have a much tougher time succeeding, and the good folks of Mina la India will be closer to securing their future. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell the IFC to divest from Condor Gold's efforts to build a gold mine in Mina la India.

Around the table: time for another exciting round of "When's That Terrorist Attack Coming?"

Uh oh: Jonathan Chait figures out that the Trump budget assumes that $2 trillion in miraculous economic growth over the next decade will pay for both $2 trillion in tax cuts and enough growth in government revenues that the budget will balance -- but they can't both be true. The Administration's responses are even worse than I imagined they'd be, but let's not congratulate ourselves on the Administration's "$2 trillion math error," because that's exactly the kind of "mistake" evil people make when they're pretty sure circumstances (when's that terrorist attack coming again?) will cover them.

Administration Budget Director Mick Mulvaney insists that his President's multitudinous attacks on federal programs that actually help people actually show compassion for the taxpayer. Now here's why that's a pile of dung: anyone who pays taxes may, theoretically, need to avail themselves of the programs for which those taxes pay -- not just programs ensuring clean air, clean water, and working roads, but also programs like food stamps and Medicaid. In America, we should invest in each other, not redistribute income upward to the undeserving wealthy, as is Mr. Mulvaney's fervent wish.

Jesus Mary and Joseph why is anyone reporting that "Paul Ryan and the White House are barreling toward a tax reform show-down"? There will be no showdown -- only the drama they pretend to have so they can distract the people from the real evil they're about to do. We learn, at least, that the Republicans want to sell their "border tax" by saying it "ends the 'Made in America' tax," which is a pretzel of a notion to try and sell, and where were they when the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act came up for a vote? Filibustering it, of course.

Comcast sends cease-and-desist order to a pro-net neutrality website called Comcastroturf.com, saying the website's name is "confusingly similar to the (Comcast trademark) because it sounds the same, looks the same, and is spelled similarly to Comcast." The good news? If Comcast actually filed a copyright infringement suit against Comcastroturf.com, a judge would laugh it out of court in about 30 seconds. The bad news? Comcastroturf.com still couldn't sue under a federal SLAPP law, because it doesn't yet exist. Still, ain't nothing so pitiful as a big corporation that can't take a joke. Waaaaaaaah!

Finally, the Department of Labor decides it'll implement the 2016 "fiduciary rule" after all -- but activists wonder if the Trump Administration will actually enforce it. Like them, I suspect not -- but failing to protect pensioners from fund managers' selfishness (as the rule would do) would likely invite legal challenges, and trying to junk it as part of Mr. Trump's effort to randomly kill regulations would almost certainly invite more. Plus, sooner or later we'll get a President who'll enforce it, even if he's another center-right Democrat.

Action: "free" trade, and another state-level counter-boycott of the ongoing boycott of Israel.

We now live in a world where even my junior Senator, a long-time "free" trader, opposes the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," but the Obama Administration is still pushing for Congress to ratify the deal during the lame-duck session, and given that most big corporations also support the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," you can't count on Congress to adhere to the people's will in this matter. Hence CREDO helps you tell Democratic Congressional leaders to publicly oppose any lame-duck vote on the TPP this year. Why bother calling Democratic Congressional leaders? Because Republican Congressional leaders have already said they don't think a TPP vote is likely this year, and it sure would be nice if Democrats would live up to their reputation as defenders of the common folk. The TPP most certainly does not defend the common folk, no matter what line of fecal matter the Obama Administration tries to feed you; it would allow big corporations to sue their way out of abiding by labor and environmental laws, and that doesn't make our lives better, but only makes corporate CEOs richer. And they don't get all the say around here.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state legislature has lately passed HB 2107, another one of those bills that would prevent a state government from contracting with corporations that participate in the BDS (boycott-divest-sanctions) movement, a movement fighting the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I'm not comfortable calling this a "First Amendment" issue simply because nobody has a First Amendment right to taxpayer money. But we expect our governments to act on the will of the people (or we should!), and I'd be very surprised to find that most Pennsylvanians really want to keep their tax money from going to a contractor simply because that contractor sympathized with Palestine. I know a great majority of our elites feel that way, but, as I think I've said once or twice, Our Glorious Elites are quite alienated from the people they nominally serve, and they really need to get right with us. And if the anti-BDS forces were really all that secure in their stance, they wouldn't be fighting us like this; they'd be ignoring us. So Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf to veto HB 2107.

Action: "free" trade, fuel efficiency, and women's health.

I'll admit that things are looking up on the "free" trade front, with French and German leaders declaring the TTIP "free" trade deal all but dead, and Congressional leaders saying they won't bring the TPP up for a vote during the lame-duck period. I think they're lying, of course -- they could attach its ratification to one of the many must-pass spending bills Congress will leave to the last minute. Still, breathe deep and consider that the only reason our leaders haven't rammed these "deals" through already is that the public opposes them, which is exactly how it's supposed to work, but too often doesn't. So Sum of Us helps you tell Our Glorious Elites to end the use of the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) courts that "free" trade deals empower -- not only because they nullify our laws, enable pollution, and keep their rulings secret, but because they encourage corporations to shop around the world for trade-related problems that'll allow them to manufacture grievances with governments and extract taxpayer tribute. In other words, corporations use ISDS to file frivolous lawsuits.

Meanwhile, our government mandated stronger auto mileage standards back in 2012, and auto manufacturing corporations embraced them. But if you thought that seemed too good to be true, maybe you were on to something: the EPA and the NHTSA are now reviewing the standards, and some automaking corporations are pushing them to weaken them. So Consumers Union helps you tell our government to keep fuel efficiency standards strong. Upon hearing that seven in 10 Americans think auto mileage standards should be stronger, I imagined right-wingers advancing the argument that those three-in-10 who disagree are an aggrieved minority who should get veto power over the standards. Majority rule is not always the right thing to do -- if seven in 10 Americans decided that the other three-in-10 should be their slaves, we would not permit that, because that would oppress the three. But higher mileage standards, frankly, don't oppress three in 10 Americans -- not even if they feel "oppressed" by less pollution, less climate change, and lower health care costs.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 448/S. 217, the Women's Health Protection Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Women's Health Protection Act would essentially repeal all the state-level laws we've seen over the last five-plus years -- which include laws requiring medically unnecessary ultrasounds, absurd physical plant requirements for abortion clinics, unnecessary hospital-admission privileges for abortion practitioners -- that don't actually protect women's health or even reduce abortions, but merely harass women who seek an abortion. Women already approach the decision to end a pregnancy with a gravity that I, as a man, cannot even contemplate, and mandating all the extra hoops and guilt trips demonstrates a profound disrespect for women that is precisely the kind of childish thing a man should put behind him. And, please, withhold the "just don't have sex if you don't want to have a child" lecture. A man, certainly, should know better than to preach abstinence to anyone -- particularly if he's going to turn around and tell his buddies about his latest conquest.

Around the table: lobbyists get their own celebrity magazine, and other absurdities.

The incomparable Thomas Frank writes about the Politico daily newsletter called Influence, and what it teaches us about this historical moment. A sort of celebrity magazine for Washington lobbyists, Influence describes "every squeaking turn of the revolving door" between influence-peddlers and our government "with a certain admiration," and conceives of the lobbying industry as a "community" that's "happy, prosperous, and joyously oblivious to the plight of the country once known as the land of the middle class." And yet it is so "brazen" in its celebration of the lobbying life that it also reveals real embarrassments -- protestors against the CFPB who admit they're actually "day laborers," "expert" witnesses giving "nearly identical written statements" to Congress. Could it, one day, be its own undoing? We can only hope!

Chris Morran at the The Consumerists describes SLAPP lawsuits in some depth. A SLAPP (or Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) is the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit, usually filed by some big actor to shut up some small actor merely exercising his or her right to free speech; they're betting that the target of their lawsuit won't want to spend the time or money fighting it. In some 28 states, you can fight SLAPPs to varying degrees, but no federal anti-SLAPP law exists -- and the bill that could create one, the SPEAK FREE Act, could also have unintended consequences.

Arun Gupta at Yes! magazine suggests that "(i)f we listen carefully to Trump's supporters, we can hear their desire for progressive policies." He's 100 percent right. Trump is what happens when weak Democrats don't offer voters anything of value -- and "at least I'm not an ogre like that guy" is not a thing of value, not least because even Republicans play that game against their brethren. I'm sure some folks think racists are irredeemable, but I don't -- real economic populism, versus the bait-and-switch kind peddled by Donald Trump, would go a long way toward bringing them back.

Donald Trump tweets, then deletes, an image of Hillary Clinton with the words "Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!" contained within an apparent Star of David, and then, of course, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski goes on TV and calls the controversy over the tweet "political correctness run amok." Which, of course, leads me to think Mr. Trump didn't fire him so much as he redeployed him. It's just "a simple star," he says; it's "the same star that sheriff's departments" use, he says -- and it's also a Star of David, and it doesn't take very much "reading into" to get there, and it wasn't the only way to get that message across, as Mr. Trump proved mere hours later when he put the tweet back up, but with a circle. Too many folks think they're proud of their bullshit-detector when they're just proud of their ignorance.

Finally, Obama Administration revises fossil fuel royalty regulations so that coal, oil, and gas corporations will have to pay more to our government for extracting resources from public lands. We advocated for this, and the revisions don't go as far as we would have liked, but it is nonetheless progress. And if coal/oil/gas drillers want to whine about "consumers having to pay more for energy as a result" -- which, of course, you'll recognize as a manufactured hostage crisis -- they may want to remember that drilling on public land means you follow the public's rules, and it also means you pay the public.

Action: real tax breaks for real working families, and patent reform for real innovators.

By now, you know the drill -- politicians blame taxes for your struggle to make ends meet, and then, once you put them in power, they go and cut taxes for their big donors and not so much for you. In fact, they're likely to raise the taxes that hurt you the most, like sales taxes, once their big donor tax cuts reduce government revenues and thus cripple the government services upon which we all rely. But "liberal" media cynicism aside, it doesn't have to be that way, and short of the campaign finance reform that would cut off the lifeflow of big donor money to policymakers, we still have a voice, and we still have representatives that are supposed to, you know, represent. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk why tax breaks that really support working families work for you. You know that things like the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit do help you make ends meet. And you know that the benefit a corporation gets from stashing billions of dollars offshore or depreciating an executive jet over a period of years doesn't ever trickle down to you -- but, sadly, you also know that too many Congressfolk try to convince you that their pet corporate welfare handouts are really "tax breaks for working families." Always remember: you're the job creators in this economy.

Meanwhile, Congress has, at times, seemed enthusiastic about enacting patent reform that would actually enable innovation in America, but then they seem to lose that enthusiasm. I doubt it's because we haven't been consistent enough in our advocacy -- I'll bet Congressfolks' big donors make them afraid of what would happen to them if they tried to keep "patent trolls" from patenting everything they can think of willy-nilly. These patent trolls aren't even trying to win lawsuits -- they're just trying to discourage you from marketing some innovative new product or process, because the lawsuits would be too expensive to fight. Would it be uncivil to call opponents of patent reform objectively pro-frivolous lawsuit? The tort "reform" crowd always cries about class-action lawsuits, after all, but they're quite mute about patent trolls. Still, S. 2733, the VENUE Act, would force plaintiffs to file patent lawsuits in the judicial districts where the defendants work and/or committed the alleged infringement, instead of shopping around for a favorable district that will give them whatever they want -- but Judiciary Chair Charles Grassley (R-IA) seems unwilling to move the bill forward. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you urge Sen. Grassley, via Twitter, to move the VENUE Act for a vote. (If you don't use Twitter, you can also find his contact info using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page.)

Around the table: government spying, frivolous lawsuits, euthanasia, corporate taxes, and the "liberal" media.

Philadelphia Police Department admits it put a Google Maps logo on a spy van. I'd be less annoyed about that if I knew the spy van was being used in an investigation on a specific matter using a warrant from a judge -- but the van was chock-full of surveillance equipment that has "fishing expedition" capabilities. Yes, we liberals already know the "right balance" between surveillance and privacy; it's called getting a damn warrant and collecting only the information you need to fulfill that warrant.

Alabama landfill operator sues three Uniontown activists who had been making noise not merely out of concern that the 10-year-old landfill was making residents sick, but out of a quite understandable sense that the landfill only got sited there because it was a historically-black area. If the landfill's suit sounds like a frivolous lawsuit to you, you're not alone -- but this is how corporations roll, calling any allegation, reasonable or not, part of an ongoing investigation or not, a "threat to their livelihoods." (In case you were wondering, the activists Alabama state regulators may have broken federal law -- specifically, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act -- by taking federal money and then allowing corporations to site numerous landfills right next to black neighborhoods.)

Dutch doctors allow a woman in her 20s to euthanize herself; she had been a sexual abuse victim through most of her childhood, and the doctors declared her resulting PTSD incurable. I'm no squealer about death panels, but I tend toward optimism in wondering if folks can recover from even the worst abuses, so of course I wonder if she chose to end her life, unencumbered by the self-interest of others -- we can all think of a number of folks (doctors looking to prove a euthanasia method works, insurers looking not to pay for chronic conditions) who would have some self-interest in having people kill themselves.

Donald Trump says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is using the Washington Post (which he also owns) to attack him -- apparently because he would "tax Amazon like they should be taxed." As you may know, I'm not sanguine on anyone owning more than one corporation, or any corporation owning any other corporation, but I have no idea what Mr. Trump actually means (a higher corporate tax rate? More sales tax collection?). But I do know that whatever he means, he'll be able to deny it later, depending on his audience. That's because he's a flip-flopper.

Finally, Atrios snaps out on "liberal" media types who somehow underestimated Mr. Trump's chances to become the Republican Presidential nominee. "First of all, we all didn't (underestimate him), you and your circle jerk did," he says, and sadly, "circle jerk" describes "liberal" media punditoids pretty accurately. And those Democrat voters who are also "blithering idiots" "aren't treated as Real Americans by every mainstream news outlet," "aren't given their own response to the State of the Union address," and "don't make up a third of the House of Representatives." A thorough and inspiring analysis, though not safe for workplace reading.

Around the table: email privacy, "religious liberty," journalistic disclosure, voting trends, frivolous lawsuits, and failed dolls.

Good news: the House of Representatives has unanimously approved H.R. 699, the Email Privacy Act. We've fought for this bill's passage, so congratulate yourselves -- and then get ready to get this bill past the Senate. Last year, Sens. Leahy (D-VT) and Lee (R-UT) introduced S. 356, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act, which is virtually identical to H.R. 699; this bill, however, only has 28 Senate sponsors (vs. the 315 House sponsors H.R. 699 had). The good news? 10 of these 28 sponsors are Republicans, so maybe the bill has a shot -- if we act. As soon as I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Not all the news is good, though: Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has signed the notorious counseling pro-discrimination bill, which would allow counselors to avoid giving help to gay clients if that would conflict with their "sincerely-held principles" (a House amendment changed the wording from "sincerely-held religious beliefs"). Possibly Mr. Haslam looked at the overwhelming votes in favor of the bill in House and Senate and decided to throw the far-right a bone. Still, I'm long past tired of people whining that they have to serve people they don't "agree" with in order to do the jobs they've already agreed to do. It's like they just don't want to be grown-ups.

Ho hum, Vox's Matthew Yglesias writes a very, very positive piece on Goldman Sachs's entry into commercial banking -- without disclosing that Goldman Sachs funds a Vox podcast. And Vox has performed similar services for Comcast in the past. I hope Mr. Yglesias doesn't respond that Goldman Sachs only funded the podcast, not the particular piece he wrote -- but I also fear he'll tell us that that corporate sponsorship really doesn't mean all that much, because isolated anecdotes hifalutin jibber-jabber.

Hispanic voting rights advocate predicts that nearly two million more Hispanics will vote in 2016 than in 2012. And most of them will vote against Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, who've both been swordfighting over who'd build the bigger wall, but I'm not seeing a figure actually describing the "skyrocketing" rise in registration among Hispanics, and of course Voter ID laws may well suppress this turnout, just as its supporters intended it to do.

Paul Kiel, writing at ProPublica, describes how Nebraska became a paradise for collection agencies to sue people over relatively small medical bills. Why? Because it only costs $45 to file a lawsuit in Nebraska, which makes suing over $200 medical bills a relatively cost-effective option for collectors -- and makes working families more susceptible to having their checks garnished and their savings accounts emptied out, when higher filing fees would, at least, force creditor and debtor to work together so debtor can stay afloat. Have any doubts that's the reason? Then note how, when a legislator proposed raising that cost by one dollar -- one dollar! -- he met with a storm of resistance from state collectors. Some folks will do anything to protect their frivolous lawsuits.

Finally, remember that "Hello Barbie" doll that could have compromised children's privacy with its artificial intelligence and wi-fi connection? Well, it's hardly selling, and reviews from folks who've bought it aren't very good, with almost a filibuster-proof majority of Amazon reviewers giving the thing one star out of five. One! Not even two! Yet Mattel hardly seems chastened -- a spokeshack said it was "representative of Mattel’s relentless goal to push boundaries and question limits" -- and the business press helpfully points to its capacity to "create buzz." Hey, whatever gets you through the night.

Action: patent trolls, money bail, and cage-free eggs.

Congress didn't pass comprehensive patent reform legislation last year, but S. 2733, the VENUE Act, would only allow plaintiffs to bring patent infringement suits in judicial districts where defendants actually work and/or where they have allegedly committed the infringement. The VENUE Act would also mandate that both parties have "a regular and established physical facility" "not primarily for the purpose of creating venue," which would close the loophole patent trolls exploit, where they go fishing for a judicial district that seems more sympathetic to patent infringement claims than others -- like, say, the Eastern District of Texas, which hears almost half of all patent-infringement suits in America. We need further reforms to stop patent trolls from filing these frivolous lawsuits that don't protect property but merely extract tribute from folks who actually make stuff, but the VENUE Act would do some good. The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell the Senate to begin reforming our patent system by passing the VENUE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4611, the No Money Bail Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The No Money Bail Act would do pretty much what it sounds like it'd do -- it would prevent our federal government from extracting money for bail in federal criminal cases, and would also cut off certain federal grants to states that continue to use money bail. But if we can't demand money for bail, I can already hear right-wingers saying, how are we going to protect the public? Oh, gosh, I don't know -- maybe by doing police work? If the state suspects you of a crime, but doesn't have enough evidence to detain you and can't prove you're a flight risk, why should you have to pay to go free? Particularly when money bail hits the poor a lot harder than everyone else? I look forward to the day we stop punishing drug addicts and start treating them, because then a lot of the problems with our criminal justice system will fall away. Until then, we argue for the right thing, and we demand the right thing.

Finally, a lot of supermarket chains (including Kroger, Food Lion, and Target) have moved toward cage-free eggs -- meaning that the hens who lay the eggs don't live in tiny cages -- but Publix hasn't, and they have more than 1,100 stores in six Southeastern states. Egg-laying hens typically live in "battery cages," so named because of the arrangement of cages more or less like battery cells, but you could be excused for thinking a different kind of battery goes on, because these hens live absolutely miserable lives: often crammed eight or 10 to a cage the size of a filing cabinet drawer, these hens suffer from many of the same problems other factory-farm chickens do (dirty conditions, increased illness, no space even to stretch their wings), plus others -- they live in the dark and have their beaks trimmed, so they don't peck at or cannibalize other birds, though, of course, they wouldn't do these things if they weren't living in those damn cages! So Change.org helps you tell Publix to get with the times and move toward cage-free eggs.

Around the table: the "war on drugs" and other matters, properly explained.

In the wake of the Brussels attacks, Sen. Ted Cruz says we need to "empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized." Remember this, the next time you're tempted to think of Ted Cruz as a civil libertarian. And he has the cojones to blame "political correctness" for the attacks! Where was his hysteria after the two Ankara bombings in February and March of this year, the Burkina Faso attack and Istanbul bombing in January, and the Bamako hotel attack of November 2015? Nowhere, that's where -- because only foreigners died in these tragedies. Only getting hysterical when Americans get hurt? Now that's politically correct!

Julian Sanchez seems awfully skeptical that the FBI just discovered a "new" way to crack the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone. The Department of Justice, you recall, served that up as its excuse for asking for a postponement of a hearing it hoped would force Apple to build a "back door" into its iPhone encryption. But, as Mr. Sanchez notes, the FBI has had upwards of two ways to get into the iPhone without needing a master key to get into all iPhones, neither of which you or I would know off the top of our heads, but both of which the FBI would know about, being, you know, in the business of detection and law enforcement. At least nominally, that is.

Ain't nothin' North Carolina can't do that Kansas can't do worse: a pair of "bathroom bills" under consideration in that state would actually allow students to sue their schools for up to $2,500 every time a transgendered student shows up in a bathroom with them. They're calling this a "bounty," but why not also call it a boon for frivolous lawsuits? And when one of the bills talks about the "potential embarrassment, shame, and psychological injury" to the students who are "forced" to "share" a bathroom with transgendered students, right-wingers reveal themselves to be precisely the politically correct weaklings they so often accuse liberals of being.

Wharton County, Texas prosecutor says that county's District Attorney "told him to keep black residents off juries in criminal trials in order to improve the prosecution's chances of winning the case." So they could beat black defendants, you understand. Whether the DA gave "instructions" or "advice," he's broken the law. Boy, it sure is a good thing racism is dead.

Finally, speaking of the non-death of racism, Dan Baum, writing at Harper's, recounts a 20-plus-year-old conversation with former Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichmann where Mr. Ehrlichmann why President Nixon embarked on the first "war on drugs": "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." Nice to have first-person testimony, I suppose, and sadly, it makes sense: Mr. Nixon didn't touch the safety net while President precisely because so many folks were in the streets, so a long-term strategy for discrediting them would be important to the Presidents who would dismantle the safety net. (This covers only the first few paragraphs of Mr. Baum's article, by the way; the rest is a lengthy and thoughtful argument favoring drug legalization.)

Action: "free" trade, lymphedema treatment coverage, and corporate land grabs.

Our government still plans to pursue the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," another "free" trade deal that would outsource our jobs and nullify our laws -- despite the outcry from good Americans across the ideological spectrum! -- so Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the TPP. You may recall how Congress repealed country-of-origin meat labeling laws after the WTO stated they violated two prior "free" trade agreements, but recent headlines also provide us with "free" trade horror stories, like the $15 billion lawsuit filed by TransCanada alleging that the Obama Administration's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline violates the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, i.e., NAFTA (or SHAFTYA). And one of those "investor-state tribunals" will hear the suit! Why should the American people pay a $15 billion bailout to a corporation that couldn't overcome well-organized public opposition to their pipeline? Can you say frivolous lawsuit, boys and girls?

Meanwhile, Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1608/S. 2373, the Lymphedema Treatment Act. Lymphedema allows damaged fluid to accumulate in areas of the body where lymph nodes and vessels are damaged, resulting in extreme swelling and a higher susceptibility to infection, and though some folks are born with it, most folks get it after undergoing radiation therapy for cancer. We can't cure lymphedema at present, but we can manage it, usually with compression therapy. So what would the Lymphedema Treatment Act do? It would mandate that Medicare cover lymphedema compression treatment items, and when Medicare covers them, that increases the possibility that private health insurers will one day cover them, too. Two of the bill's four Senate sponsors are Republicans, as are 64 of the House version's 179 sponsors (and the bill's main sponsor, Mr. Reichart of Washington), but since the bill doesn't actually injure someone, the "liberal" media won't call it "bipartisan." All the more reason to support it!

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to fight the transfer of sacred Oak Flat national forest land in Arizona to copper mining corporations, then CREDO still helps you do that. Lately Sen. Sanders (I-VT) has introduced legislation (S. 2248) that would repeal the land grab; if you're tempted to castigate the Vermonter for getting involved in Arizona politics when Arizona's two Senators backed the land grab, you may want to note that copper mining corporation Rio Tinto (which owns the corporation that'll get the land) has contributed buku bucks to Senator McCain -- and that Senator Flake used to lobby for Rio Tinto before he ever got elected to Congress. Clearly nothing to see here! Mining corporations have been trying to get their grubby mitts on this land for decades; I guess folks like Barry Goldwater and Dennis DeConcini and Jon Kyl were somehow holding them back. And, ah, if we're so concerned about "religious conscience" in America now, how come we're not concerned about Apache religious beliefs here? I would hate to think it's because they're not Christians.

Around the table: Chelsea Clinton goes Karl Rove on Bernie Sanders, and other follies.

Look out: Chelsea Clinton says Bernie Sanders, if President, will "dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance." And neglects, apparently, to mention that Mr. Sanders has proposed a single-payer plan covering all Americans that would merely replace those plans. I fault Mr. Sanders for not simply saying he wants to expand Medicare to everyone, but that's a mere messaging matter, whereas the above-quoted passage is some Karl Rove-level BS.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation finds that the huge jump in patent suits might well be explained by the sharp rise in "patent trolling" in the Eastern District of Texas. That news may well prompt you to say, Texas, stop your grandstanding and secede from America already, but the news isn't all bad: even this Republican Congress has shown some interest in dealing with the problem, and lower court rulings have also chipped away at those trolls who patent every damn thing so they can win frivolous lawsuits against honest, hard-working Americans.

Virginia state legislator actually proposed legislation mandating that schools ban transgendered students from any bathroom other than the bathroom of the sex they got at birth. Now that's some small government there! And though the bill would "leave it up to schools" to figure out how to enforce the ban, we might as well call it the "Touch Kids' Junk" bill.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin informs our federal government that he plans to scuttle the state's legendarily successful health care exchange, Kynect. He's clearly learned from Scott Walker to do all your asshole stuff at the beginning of your term, so voters have four years to get used to it. Problem here is that Gov. Bevin would force half a million Kentuckians onto ZOMG OBAMACAREZ!!!!!, which means he might actually have trouble from his right in 2019. I know it's hard right now to imagine anyone to Mr. Bevin's right, but I assure you the forces of evil are building that beast as we speak.

Finally, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is getting a lot of good press for her Republican rebuttal to President Obama's State of the Union address the other night, but really, our "liberal" media should attend these things to the end, rather than just reach for the first quotation that might be about Donald Trump and run with it. It's sad we credit her for suggesting we need to "turn down the volume" of our disagreements, but we don't discredit her for presuming taxes aren't low for working families at the federal level, or for saying we "demonize" "innovators" when we criticize banksters, or for taking yet another Republican pass on what precise health care reforms would "lower costs," or for suggesting we can somehow let bigots discriminate against gays and still "respect differences in modern families."

UPDATE. I should have made clear, originally, that low taxes for working families is something that really only exists as far as federal taxation goes -- working families still get disproportionately hit by sales taxes and flat state income taxes. Error rectified above.

Around the table: cheating automakers, venal Republicans, and other bad actors.

Nearly 60 law professors urge Congress to pass legislation banning SLAPP lawsuits, or lawsuits designed to stifle free speech that might embarrass someone. Bills that would curb SLAPP lawsuits do attract bipartisan support, yet they just don't attract the fervor that bills curbing class-action lawsuits do. I wonder why. And please understand that by "I wonder why" I mean "because curbing class-action lawsuits pleases Congressfolks' corporate paymasters, whereas curbing SLAPP lawsuits would only help people."

EPA orders Volkswagen to recall almost half a million cars after Volkswagen installed software that induced certain of its models to reduce emissions only during emissions tests, meaning these cars have been polluting the atmosphere for years. Right-wingers who use this incident to claim that GUBMINT RULEZ DOEZN'T WORKZ!!!!! should note that a) all the cars involved are diesel cars, which hardly comprise a majority of cars on the road, or even Volkswagens on the road and b) Volkswagen got caught. In any case, someone had better go to jail over this.

Sens. Heller (R-NV) and Heinrich (D-NM) introduce bill repealing the "Cadillac" tax in the Affordable Care Act. Repealing the Medical Device Tax and the various Medicare taxes affecting only high-income earners would be dumb ideas, but repealing the "Cadillac tax," which affects high-end health insurance plans starting in 2018, would not be, because the folks with better health care plans aren't necessarily the most well-off individuals. Of course, you wouldn't have to jump through hoops like this if we just had a single-payer health care plan like Canada's.

Ho hum, Irving, Texas police also violated Ahmed Mohamed's rights by keeping him from contacting his parents while being fingerprinted and questioned. Let me say that racism and Islamophobia aren't the only factors compelling school officials and local police to act like utter circus clowns throughout this incident -- I think "zero tolerance" and "tough-on-crime" mindsets are as much to blame. But if Ahmed Mohamed lost all trust in adults for the next few years, I wouldn't blame him.

Liz Stinson at Wired describes a "Smog-Free Tower" in Rotterdam that stands close to 23 feet tall and purifies one million cubic feet of air per hour. That may be less impressive than it sounds -- Ms. Stinson tells us that would purify the equivalent of a Madison Square Garden every 10 hours, but most cities are much larger than that, and polluters keep on polluting, as you know. Still, if it can be scaled up, it might be quite the revolutionary device.

Finally, in case you missed Ice-T's livetweeting of last week's Republican Presidential debate, Factcheck runs down the lowlights. Key moments: Mr. Trump apparently making up a figure to describe the economic burden undocumented immigrants supposedly cause, Ms. Fiorina conflating several disparate bits of "testimony" in the Planned Parenthood videos into an image that doesn't actually exist therein, and Sen. Rubio assuring us that doing something about climate change would be "absolutely" useless as if doing the right thing and polluting less is ever useless. As a bonus, we get more vaccine-related stupidity ("anecdotes ARE TOO science!" from Mr. Trump, and "even if the science tells me I'm wrong, I still have the right to do my children harm, because freedom!" from Mr. Paul, who is still not his father.)

Around the table: various sillinesses concerning the deficit, Syria, federal contracting, and the "war on terror," plus a short summary of the Donald Trump Problem.

C. Robert Gibson at Occupy.com reminds us that, with Fed interest rates still near zero percent, we could be spending more money rebuilding our infrastructure. I maintain that the perfect tonic to right-wing squealing about Teh Deficit is to pay for infrastructure with a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, just like in the old days, and though right-wingers will continue to squeal, they'll only be defending the super-rich when they do.

FAIR reminds us that when we hear "liberal" media pleas to DO SOMETHING!!!!! about Syrian refugees, they tend to forget (or, more precisely, "forget") that America is already "doing something" in Syria -- like funding Syrian rebels to the tune of $1 billion annually. And, of course, noting that we're already "doing something" in Syria opens us up to charges of doing the wrong or ineffective thing in Syria, which is a much more difficult thing to cover than the myth that we're doing nothing. Still, doing the difficult thing builds character.

PR Watch finds one of the world's largest temp agencies (Manpower, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and you can bet they heart Scott Walker and he hearts them back) agitating against President Obama's recent executive order requiring our government to take labor violations into account when awarding federal contracts. Specifically, PR Watch finds that a Manpower executive just so happens to sit on the board of a trade association advocating against the Obama order -- and Manpower has accumulated over $13 million in fines and settlements so far this millenium, while vacuuming up over $10 million in federal contracts just since 2013. Nope, nothing to see here.

And now, from the "actual frivolous lawsuits" file: two Montana state Senators sue to stop two Native American nations from taking over the Kerr Dam, because it could lead to terrorist attacks. No, really: because "the Turkish government and Turkish-American organizations have looked to establish business and cultural exchanges with Native Americans," and Turks are Muslim, there could be terrorists in there, and THE DAMN GOES BOOM! But please, right-wingers, tell me again how class-action lawsuits are inherently "frivolous."

Finally, I said I wasn't going to talk about Donald Trump anymore, but he's demonstrated enough staying power at the top of Republican Presidential polls even after saying all that racist and sexist crap that I feel compelled to weigh in. Mr. Trump's populism is certainly ironic (coming, as it does, from a billionaire), but it also appears unmediated -- that is, he sounds like he's talking off the top of his head. What consultant would have advised him to say, for example, that hedge-fund managers "get away with murder"? But this is a man who would never have gotten so rich back in the day when we taxed the rich hard and regulated markets for the common good, and his populism is all attitude. And I think his act is just the latest establishment Republican ploy to regain the Presidency -- sure, establishment Republicans sound like they hate him, but when have they ever told you the truth?

Action: climate change, sexual assault, and women's health care.

H.R. 2042, the so-called Ratepayer Protection Act, moved quickly through the House Energy and Commerce Committee at the end of last month, getting formally introduced and passed in a mere 48 hours. The bill hasn't come before the full House yet, but it's just a matter of time, and, as with so many bad ideas, they'll probably put it to a vote when no one's watching. Hence Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your House Rep to vote against the Ratepayer Protection Act. Why would we want them to reject something so innocuously-named? Because the name's a scam: the bill would essentially let states opt out of the EPA's plan to limit carbon emissions, by allowing them not to implement any reductions as long as some lawsuit against the plan, somewhere in their state, is being litigated. The only "ratepayers" this bill protects, then, are big coal corporations. All this mess, even though said plan gives states a lot of leeway in producing their own methods of meeting carbon reduction goals! That'll teach President Obama to reach out to the other side, right? I kid, of course.

H.R. 1310/S. 590, the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, would start to address the problem of on-campus rape, by toughening up penalties for colleges when they don't report sexual assaults accurately, surveying students in a consistent and transparent manner, mandating uniform codes for investigation and discipline, and requiring a minimum amount of training for college personnel so they don't interfere with sexual assault investigations. If you're the fellow who says it's too hard to tell what women want, or that the lines between rape and consensual sex are too blurry, then please stop reading. No, seriously: I would feel tainted if you read on. Maintaining a civilized society requires maintaining boundaries, and it also requires seeing beyond your own self-interest, and statements like "it's too hard to tell what women want" lend themselves too easily to a lot of men's self-interest. Here's a good rule: if you're not sure she wants to have sex with you, don't have sex with her. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Campus Accountability and Safety Act.

Finally, HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell affirmed earlier this week that health insurers are to provide all the legal options available to them that the Affordable Care Act mandates. If you're wondering why she went through the trouble, note that the National Women's Law Center studied plans from 100 health insurers and found that half of them -- half! -- failed to cover all FDA-approved birth control methods and/or demanded co-pays for birth control and preventive care for women and/or limited maternity/postnatal coverage rather arbitrarily and/or skirted their responsibilities in other ways. For those of you who saw the words "birth control" and immediately decided it was all based on "sincerely-held religious beliefs": if you think your religion abhors birth control, you wouldn't respond by limiting coverage or demanding co-pays; you'd refuse to cover any of it. No, I think health insurance corporations are just being jerks here. So CREDO helps you tell health insurance corporations to give women all the health care options the law requires them to give.

Action: against pro-pollution bills, against anti-consumer protection bills, and for pro-solar power bills.

Rep. Whitfield (R-KY) calls his new bill the "Ratepayer Protection Act." The bill would let states put off submitting their own carbon emissions plans to the EPA until all lawsuits against the EPA's carbon emission plan are decided -- and surely no one would file a litany of frivolous lawsuits just to prevent carbon emissions plans from ever taking effect, would they? The bill would also allow states to refuse to submit plans or implement federal plans merely upon determining that those plans would adversely affect grid stability or "retail, commercial, or industrial ratepayers." See? You might have thought you were the "ratepayer" being "protected" by the bill, but alas, no -- when they say "ratepayers," they mean big electricity corporations. Of course they'll say "ratepayers like you" or "small businesses" when they talk to Fox News, but we know who butters their bread. So Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the bill that should really be called the "Polluter Protection Act."

Meanwhile, the House has begun to hold hearings on a pair of bills that would undo some of the work we've done as a society to protect people from predatory and unsafe mortgages. H.R. 685 is the Mortgage Choice Act, and as soon as they put the word "choice" in the bill you know the "choice" isn't going to be for you. The bill would allow certain higher-fee mortgages to exclude the price of fees (including title insurance fees) from the cost of the loan, even though, novel idea, if you pay it, it's a cost. The other bill, H.R. 650, the Preserving Access to Manufactured Housing Act, would allow corporations to offer mortgages on manufactured houses with interest rates as high as 14%! That's not "preserving access," that's taking hostages -- they're saying, don't make me offer mortgages at reasonable rates, or this sector of the economy gets it! Americans for Financial Reform helps you oppose Congressional efforts to deregulate mortgages. Really, it's like they think we don't remember what crashed the economy.

Meanwhile, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Congress to extend solar power tax credits. That's right, the ITC (the Investment Tax Credit for solar power) will expire at the end of next year, because, apparently, only fossil fuel corporations and nuclear power corporations get tax credits that go on for-freaking-ever, while renewable power tax credits become hostage to some politician's 13-dimensional chess game every few years. Perhaps you're wondering why we're worrying about this now, more than a year and a half ahead of the ITC's expiration. Well, we're worrying about it because fossil fuel corporations are worrying about it, already trying to pressure Congressfolk to let the ITC expire, just as they're trying to pressure state legislators to make home solar panel users pay a sun tax on the absurd belief that they're "free riders." You have to wonder what the fossil fuel corporations have to fear. Well, you don't really have to wonder, if you know the solar power sector adds jobs ten times faster than the economy does overall.

Action: humane working conditions, wind power, and accountability for retirement planners.

Qatar will host the World Cup in 2022, which should mean all kinds of job-creating construction -- except that corporations are taking advantage of Qatar's "guest worker" program, in which folks come from nearby countries with the hope of making a better life, and then get their passports taken away and are made to slave away in 120 degree heat with little or no food or water. And this has been going on for a while -- 2014 saw the deaths of over 180 workers in some World Cup-related project or other. Luckily, we can apply pressure, not just to Qatar's government, but to the American corporation overseeing much of the World Cup-related construction: CH2M Hill, whose CEO lives in Colorado. CH2M Hill blames the worker abuse the government of Qatar and local contractors there, but if CH2M Hill's leaders didn't know Qatar was a wage slave zone, then I'm Benedict Cumberbatch. (Full disclosure: I am not Benedict Cumberbatch.) So Avaaz helps you tell CH2M Hill and Qatar's government to treat Qatar's guest workers a lot better. Personal to those who say, well, those workers took their chances: is abusing workers ever OK?

Meanwhile, the Cape Wind offshore wind farm, long delayed by wealthy folks on the Cape who claim that the gotta-squint-to-see-it wind farm constitutes an eyesore, has met another obstacle: the nearly two dozen lawsuits against it over the years have helped cause Cape Wind to miss crucial financing and construction deadlines, which prompted National Grid to cancel its power-purchase agreement (or PPA) with the wind farm. National Grid would have bought half of Cape Wind's power, but no longer; without utility corporations to buy Cape Wind's power, Cape Wind has rather less chance of succeeding. And if the numerous lawsuits against Cape Wind seem a little odd to you, consider that one of the driving forces behind the Alliance for Nantucket Sound, which has filed many of the suits, is none other than Bill Koch -- that's right, of those Kochs -- which tells me it's not an "eyesore" issue at all, but an issue of a coal guy not wanting any competition from a power source he can't control. You know what that makes these lawsuits? Frivolous lawsuits, that's what. Hence CREDO helps you tell National Grid to get back on board with the Cape Wind project.

Finally, some good news: the Department of Labor has decided it will require all financial advisors to put customers' interests ahead of their own when giving retirement account advice. You'd think that'd be common sense, but common sense is the bitter enemy of the financial sector today, which cares about money and nothing else. And already the banksters are advocating against it: too many financial planners will lose their jobs, they say, as if no one else -- hell, maybe even some honest people! -- could possibly rise up to fill the resulting void. Banksters argue for the "genius of the free market" and the "creative destruction" it supposedly works upon economies when anyone else is on the receiving end, but let banksters themselves be the target of actual free market justice, and they whine like diaper-loaded brats until they get their handouts and bailouts. Well, perhaps that's unfair: diaper-loaded brats can eventually get their diapers changed, but banksters will still be banksters, demanding taxpayer handouts and giving nothing back to civilization. So Public Citizen helps you support a vigorous fiduciary responsibility rule for retirement planners.

Around the table: Arctic drilling, CEO pay, "jump-outs," wage theft, pension theft, and bad cartoons.

Good news: President Obama has indefinitely banned oil and gas drilling in Bristol Bay, Alaska, a cause for which we've agitated here. Only an incoming President can reverse the ban, which a Republican President almost certainly will, because Obama. Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) doesn't oppose the ban, but finds it "frustrating" that the Obama Administration sees "conservation" as Alaska's "most pressing need." Then again, Republicans see "more money for their corporate paymasters" as all of America's most pressing need.

Fifteen Senators sign a letter to the SEC demanding that they implement a CEO-to-worker pay disclosure rule as mandated by the Dodd-Frank law. Financial corporations -- being, as they are, run by people without any sense of shame -- have pressured the SEC to delay or water down the rule, and they seem to be getting their way so far. SEC Chair Mary Jo White may prove to be an even worse Obama appointment than FCC Chair Tom Wheeler.

Nicole Flatow at Think Progress tells us all about "jump-outs," which is when a handful of police officers drive up and jump out of their cars all armed and armored-up -- and these police usually "jump out," observers tell us, at congregations of young black men on the street. Warrants? We don't need no stinkin' warrants! Funny how the drug problem never seems to get better in America, no matter how many unconstitutional acts we throw at it. It's almost like that's the idea. And the "war on terror" is exactly the same.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, upholding a seven-year old lower court ruling, ordered WalMart to pay $188 million in a class-action wage theft lawsuit. But WalMart will keep appealing, all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary, out of its CEOs' obviously very-deeply held conviction that all those people who sued them shouldn't have been allowed to sue as a class. That looks more to me like a "frivolous lawsuit" than any of the stupid stories tort "reformers" belch out.

And here's yet another odious result from that omnibus spending law Congress passed over the weekend: it allows pension plan trustees to cut benefits for current pensioners. Everybody understands that the future is the hardest thing to predict, but everybody also understands that pension funds should be investing safely, rather than giving themselves over to hedge funds, and everybody also understands that, you know, you should keep your damn promises.

Finally, fossil fuel corporation front group creates a cartoon calling the alleged effects of EPA environmental regulation "torture." But fossil fuel corporate CEOs will have a tough time convincing very many Americans that making a little less money -- the only actual negative effect of clean air and clean water regulations -- is anything like being beaten up, being forced to stand on broken feet, or being waterboarded. More likely they'll convince Americans that they're the biggest whiners in American history.

Around the table: why we shouldn't blame white evangelicals for Democrat losses, and other lessons.

The Center for Economic Policy Research asks whether happier workers bring a corporation higher profits. They find the case ambiguous, at least scientifically, but for decades now "cost-benefit analyses" have only measured the "cost" to corporations when we make them do the right thing, and corporations these days seem dedicated only to maximizing short-term economic gain, which they can now get without actually doing (or even investing in) any worthwhile work at all. The social scientists may develop the research tools to prove that happiness-is-profitable-too, but I find the moral case for happier workers quite sufficient.

The Center for Effective Government finds that seven of America's 30 largest corporations actually paid their CEOs more than they paid our government in taxes. In other words, you have every right to suspect that when CEOs say they need to pay less in taxes so they can invest in jobs, what they really mean is that they need to pay less in taxes so they can pay themselves more. The return of the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income sure would come in handy right about now.

Major polluters join out-of-state Attorneys General and legislators to sue the EPA for its Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan. From the sound of it, a sane society would call this a "frivolous lawsuit" -- far from handing a mandate down from Mt. Sinai, the EPA worked with states to craft a cleanup plan, and it's an open question whether the folks filing the suit even have standing to sue (only one state involved in the cleanup plan, West Virginia, has joined the suit). And when you hear politicians talking about "states' rights" in this context, you have every right to wonder whether they're really talking about corporations' "rights."

Pope Francis I tells a multifaith traditional-marriage conference that "children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother." No use parsing his words to ask if he really meant "a family should be able to teach how masculinity and femininity can work together" -- you can hardly expect the Pope to abandon millenia of tradition (rank-and-file Catholics can do that more easily, which is as it should be). Still, gay marriage doesn't evoke "the culture of the temporary," or else it wouldn't be about, you know, marriage.

Finally, exit polls indicate that white evangelical Christians actually made up the same proportion of the electorate in 2014 as they did in 2012 and 2010. And voted more or less the same way, too, though you expected that. Further, white evangelicals made up roughly the same proportion of voters in 2008 and 2006, too, but broke harder for Democrats in those years, especially in 2006. In other words, perhaps we should look elsewhere to figure out how Democrats did so badly -- starting with weakness when in office, I should think.