Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: from TikTok bans to bloodbaths.

Matt Stoller describes why “The TikTok Problem Is Not What You Think.” The article has a lot of great info (particularly on the Biden-led sea change in data privacy protection), but long story short: foreign corporations shouldn’t have so much personal data on American citizens, particularly when those corporations align so closely with obviously authoritarian governments, and TikTok abuses its users just as badly as Facebook does. Also, note well that China happily keeps American internet platforms out of their country and tries to control what foreigners say about China – just say something about Tianenmen Square in a TikTok video if you don’t believe me! No, I don’t want Steve Mnuchin owning TikTok either, but even that’s better than China controlling it.

Do people really not get that the Florida teenagers who used AI to create deepfake nudes of their classmates committed child abuse and child porn? People also really don’t get that the perps are too young to go to jail, but certainly they’re not too young to be shamed, and if they never get into their first-choice colleges as a result of their actions, I won’t shed a tear. In any case, might this be more proof that AI development is moving too fast with too little governmental oversight? Why, yes, I think it might! Don’t brook any nonsense like government doesn’t know enough about AI to oversee it, because that’d be like arguing that only banksters know enough to regulate banks.

From Johanna Richlin at The Conversation we learn that vaccine-skeptical mothers learned to be that way at least in part from all their bad experiences in the health care system. I’m reminded that 17th century poet John Dryden frequently aimed his ire at doctors, and of course we should empathize with women describing a health care system that injures them – you’ve heard that doctors will more likely tell women (especially Black and Brown women) that they’re just bellyaching? And yes, the mammon-worship endemic to our health care industry hurts us all. But what of the evil actors (i.e., Tucker Carlson, Andrew Wakefield, all the YouTube “influencers” who’ve hurt a lot of people but whom history will never remember) who have exploited this landscape?

Ho hum, ”liberal” media journalists actually read Robert Hur’s interview with President Biden over classified documents and suddenly discover that their initial reports on the investigation might have been a little overheated. We have all learned by now, I would hope, that reading is a good way to understand writing, but even after all these years of Donald Trump inflicting chaos and abuse upon good Americans, too many “liberal” media journalists still either cut corners or prefer sensationalism. Happily for Joe Biden, he delivered a State of the Union address earlier this month in which he did not appear to be the addled granddad our “liberal” media would seem to prefer.

Hard to believe, Harry, Special Counsel Jack Smith apparently put a Stephen Miller amicus brief about the Trump classified documents indictment through the woodchipper last week. In Mr. Smith’s telling, Mr. Miller apparently believes that “if a person illegally carries a firearm into a NARA facility or forcibly threatens a NARA employee,” then “NARA (would be) powerless to report that criminal conduct to the FBI,” and would have to “engage in notice-and-comment rule making to promulgate a regulation authorizing it to make such a referral.” But of course Mr. Miller doesn’t even intend to create a legal “precedent”, but merely to (in Steve Bannon’s immortal phrase) “flood the zone with shit” so the wheels of justice can slow down and maybe Donald Trump can win re-election before getting convicted of a crime.

Finally, I can’t wait to hear how right-wingers try to justify Donald Trump saying at an Ohio rally that there’ll be a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t get elected in 2024. Oh, he’s only joking (then explain how bloodbaths are funny!) and oh he’s only describing what will happen if he loses (it’s a good thing no one in human history has ever tried to influence history by pretending to predict it!). Seriously, though, if Trumpholes think Saturdays at the shooting range have prepared them for Civil War, they’re going to be very disappointed. The only people in America actually prepared to wage civil war are our soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of them just want the damn headaches to stop.

Action: concerning voting rights, defense spending, health care, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, cut defense spending, lower prescription drug prices, and strengthen the food stamps program. 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would authorize our Justice Department to pre-clear any voting rights changes from any state or locality with a history of vote suppression – and not just certain Southern states, as the original Voting Rights Act mandated (and which mandate our Supreme Court struck down in 2013). Granted, most of the states and localities suppressing the vote the hardest are still in the South, but this bill would restore the teeth our Supreme Court knocked out of the Voting Rights Act. And we all need that bill to have some more bite again.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the People Over Pentagon Act. We spend as much money on defense as the next eight countries on that list combined, and how did that do for us in Iraq and Afghanistan? I’ll tell you how well it did: it proved the old conservative saw that you can’t just throw money at a problem! But, as any liberal will tell you, you can improve good Americans’ lives by spending tax money wisely, and ensuring that defense contractor CEOs can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home while depriving good Americans of, say, paid family/medical leave or health care funding definitely isn’t wise. But they’ll keep doing it, until we make them stop.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. I guess with Eli Lilly’s announcement that it’ll cap insulin prices, our Congressfolk will say it proves that “only private sector action creates lasting change.” But, ah, insulin is just one drug, other big pharma corporations haven’t capped insulin costs, and without our FTC’s announcement of action against the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (or PBMs) that jack up prices as much as or more than big pharma greed, Eli Lilly might not have capped those costs, either. Of course I mention that FTC action because it proves government can help create lasting change in America – but only if we demand it.

Finally, Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, otherwise known as food stamps. Because weakening it is a stupid idea! Yes, I, too, have heard stories about folks getting food stamps when they’re not supposed to, but that’s a separate issue from ensuring everyone who needs them can get them. No, really, fraud is always a separate issue. You’re supposed to stamp out fraud and bring fraudsters to justice! That’s the law-and-order position! But you’re not supposed to let the mere presence of fraud make you throw up your hands and stop doing the right thing. That’s what bad people want, and why should they get all the say about everything?

Action: concerning Social Security, refugees, banksters, and the minimum wage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act, reject the TABS Act, and raise the minimum wage. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Civic Shout and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would ensure that income over $250,000 gets taxed into the system for the first time. Yes, currently Social Security doesn’t tax income over $160,200 annually, meaning that only working people pay into the system; the fat-cat class is exempt! I suppose right-wingers would argue that since they don’t need Social Security they shouldn’t have to pay into it, but that’s exactly the sort of everyone-for-themselves masturbation that’s gotten this country into the trouble it’s in. Rich folks need to pay more into Social Security, for the good of all Americans.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would help some 78,000 Afghan refugees living in America to get legal immigrant status. I can already hear the right-wingers saying when are we going to provide for our own people? As if a great nation has to choose! And, you know, as if giving legal status to a refugee really injures someone else. I didn’t ask for Tha Bush Mobb to invade Afghanistan, nor did I ask the Obama and Trump Administrations to stay there, so I also didn’t ask for tens of thousands of Afghan refugees. But I’m not an evil bastard, either, so I’ll still demand we take care of them, because that’s what great nations – and great civilizations – do.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (or TABS) Act, which would repeal our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB)’s independent funding mechanism, and instead subject it to the whim of Congressional funding. Other banking regulators have independent funding mechanisms, so why not our CFPB? Because banksters hate our CFPB, and Republicans live to suck up to their bankster overlords, that’s why. This may all be moot, since our Supreme Court obviously has the long knives out for our CFPB. But we should still tell our Reps how we really feel about their drama.

Finally, the Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour or more, since $15/hour has been a calling card for so long that inflation’s outrun it a bit. Don’t brook any right-wingers telling you good luck getting that through this Congress ha ha ha snort. Congress passed a minimum wage hike in 2007 why? Because they wanted to? Because Democrats had impregnable majorities in either House? No, because we demanded it. And don’t brook any where’s it going to stop? hysteria from right-wingers, either. That’s a loser’s argument. It’s going to stop when we get justice. Which is what they’re really afraid of.

Action: concerning product safety, Afghan refugees, and the debt ceiling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Hide No Harm Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act and abolish the debt ceiling. 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.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 9361/S. 5139, the Hide No Harm Act, which would hold corporate executives accountable for knowingly hiding their products’ dangers from good Americans. Some “law and order” types would call it “nanny state” legislation, but folks who’d injure or kill people to make money need a nanny! Others might throw up their hands at the prospect of ever getting a CEO to go to jail, and while I understand their pain, we should pass laws like this – even if they don’t put every law-breaker in prison, a lot of executives will think twice before knowingly putting out unsafe products, if only because fighting criminal charges is expensive.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4787/S. 8685, the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would help the thousands of Afghan refugees achieve permanent status a lot more quickly. There’s a lot of we-broke-it-we-bought-it here – we helped break Afghanistan, which sent a lot of refugees here, so we ought to take care of them. Folks who profess to be “worried” about having “potential terrorists” in America ought to consider that refugees run from oppression, and they should also consider that most terrorists in America are natural-born white supremacist killers. Maybe it diddles one’s rage gland to worry about foreigners rather than the real threat.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to just abolish the damn debt ceiling already. Because it never reduced public spending the way its adherents claimed, and because now Republicans just use it to manufacture a hostage drama. It doesn’t matter that Joe Biden and Senate Democrats will stand in the way of their using it to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, because I’m still scared of what Republicans might get with their little hostage drama – like defunding the police at our FTC, SEC, CFPB, and DOJ Antitrust Division, so their corporate cronies can merge into evil monopolies at will. Get rid of the debt ceiling, and we’ll never have to know.

Action: concerning taxes, refugees, and insulin.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, and cap insulin prices for all Americans. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, reform our nation’s credit reporting system, and pass the Equality Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

Action: concerning the Espionage Act, marriage equality, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act, protect marriage equality, and lower prescription drug prices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so that our government can’t use it to silence journalists and whistleblowers. You know, like they’re trying to do to Julian Assange for the crime of exposing American wrongdoing during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That embarrassed a lot of American elites, but embarrassing American elites ain’t no reason to use anti-spying legislation to silence journalists. And silencing whistleblowers? Who expose corruption at great personal cost? Anyone who says they love America should be ashamed of doing such a thing. Allow me to believe that shaming still works in America.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to codify marriage equality in our laws before our Supreme Court uses its dastardly “deeply-rooted rights” notion to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges. Because you know they’re just itching to do it – why, Justice Thomas said they should do it in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization which overturned Roe v. Wade. Hence we need our Congressfolk to act. It’ll take a while for a case to reach our Court that could outlaw gay marriage, but don’t let that make you complacent. Whenever our Court takes our rights away, it always seems like it’s too soon.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices already. Feel free to tell them exactly how in the space for comments – like, by letting Medicare negotiate drug prices, or capping insulin prices, or fining big pharma corporations when they raise prices faster than inflation. People like all of these ideas, and would it kill our Congressfolk to do some things that people actually like, and actually want them to do? As Drug Prices Are Too High suggests, it might even help them in the midterms this November.

Action: concerning health care, indigenous folk, good Afghans, facial recognition, and factory fur farms.

Long story short: tell Germany to support the pandemic waiver at the WTO, tell Tanzania to stop evicting indigenous folk from their ancestral lands, tell our government to release Afghani citizens' funds, tell our local governments to stop using ODIN facial recognition tech, and tell the European Union to ban fur farms. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell Germany's government to stop blocking the COVID vaccine patent waiver at the World Trade Organization (or WTO). Yeah, Germany's in on that, too, putting corporate intellectual property rights above the health of the world's people. Two and-another-things about that: one, we should be calling it, at the very least, intellectual property shared by corporations and our government, since taxpayer money and research made those vaccines, and two, by "the world's people" I mean all the world's people, not just the folks too poor to pay for COVID vaccines, because if they get it, then everyone's going to get COVID again, and maybe not as friendly a variant thereof as we've seen so far. Also, if we get Germany to back down, it'll make the Biden Administration's obstruction harder to justify.

Avaaz helps you tell Tanzania's government to stop evicting Maasai indigenous folk from their ancestral lands in the nation's northern area. It ain't just indigenous folk in the Amazon or Ecuador fighting this battle; indigenous folk are defending their land from big corporations all over the world, and it just might be that they know what's best for the land they live on. Too conservative? Not one "conservative" bloviating in public today would put indigenous people above money, even though all money goes the way of all flesh, while civilizations based on lasting values can endure forever. The Maasai may not be battling drilling and mining corporations, but they are battling a tourism/trophy hunting corporation from Saudi Arabia, so yeah, I think they know what's best for the land they've lived on for centuries.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to disperse good Afghan citizens' funds. Because the money belongs to them! And we should pressure the Taliban in ways that don't require starving Afghan people! You may well be asking yourself, self, what if the Taliban gets hold of this money before it can get to its rightful owners in Afghanistan? But I doubt they'll do that -- a government can only create so much chaos before it backfires on them, and when a mere 2% of Afghan children have enough food to eat, I think we can all see the Taliban is well past that point. Which means, again, the compassionate thing to do is also the practical thing to do. Funny how often that happens -- but not so funny how our politicians never seem to see it.

The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell your local governments to stop using ODIN facial recognition technology to spot and harass homeless folk. One more time: facial recognition technology sucks! And using it to arrest homeless folk also sucks! You know what wouldn't suck? Putting homeless folks up in tiny houses, which would cost less than picking them up and putting them in shelters or hospitals or jails. If folks saw how tiny these tiny houses would be, they wouldn't feel jealous of someone else getting "something for nothing," either. You know what else wouldn't suck? Well-funded public housing and rent control laws. When we stopped spending money on public housing in the 1980s, the homeless population exploded, and I think there's more than mere correlation there.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell the European Union to ban fur farms. Now I have nothing against folks making fur coats for themselves, just like I have nothing against folks raising chicken for themselves, but the fur farms that Italy has recently banned feature squalid conditions that you probably won't find completely unfamiliar, like almost impossibly small and almost impossibly dirty cages. That's right: fur farming is very much like factory farming of chickens and pigs in the United States! We might do better calling them factory fur farms, in fact! As I said, you want to make a coat out of animal skins, you go right ahead. But factory fur farms don't care about anything but efficiency -- or, more precisely, efficiently making their executives money -- and that goes hand-in-hand with soul-destroying cruelty.

Action: concerning war, education, student loan debt, violence against protestors, payday lenders, and social media.

Long story short: tell your government to avoid another senseless war, this time in the Ukraine; tell Florida state legislators to reject the "Don't Say Gay" bill, tell President Biden to forgive student loan debt, tell our Justice Department to fight anti-protestor laws at the state level, tell our FDIC to fight payday lenders, and tell Facebook to release its human rights assessment in re hate speech in India. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Do we want yet another stupid war, whose proponents will constantly accuse us of treason when we don't support it because it's stupid? No, we do not! Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk and your President to stop warmongering and fearmongering about the Ukraine/Russia crisis. Also, World Beyond War helps you find an anti-war protest near you. If Russia invades the Ukraine, they will quickly find themselves bogged down in the same sort of decades-long quagmire like we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet Western nations still go on about the "threat" to world peace if Russia invades. Don't worry that plenty of Trumpholes also oppose a war in the Ukraine; I welcome their help and their activism. Plenty of conservatives opposed the Iraq War, after all, not that you knew that from watching cable "news" at the time.

Change.org helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject HB 1557/SB 1834, the notorious "Don't Say Gay" bill, which would (among other things) prevent Florida school teachers from bringing up homosexuality in class "in the primary grades." The bill's sponsor says that's grades K-3, and goes on to lament that all third-graders need to learn about in school is reading and math, but guess what? All of my 3rd grade classmates back in the day knew what "gay" was, even if they didn't actually know what sex was. Right-wingers pretend kids aren't ready for that stuff, but they're not just wrong about that, they're insulting those kids. And it's never too early to learn to not alienate other people just because they're different from you. Next they'll say kids can't hack masculine and feminine articles in Spanish.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to release the memo detailing his authority to forgive student loan debt, and then forgive up to $50,000 of that debt per student. His office prepared that memo almost a year ago; I wonder why we haven't seen it yet! By which I mean, of course, that it tells us something he doesn't want us to hear. He promised to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt on the campaign trail, then told us he doesn't really have the authority to do that, but since our federal government holds most student loan debt, I really doubt that's the case. Why would we forgive student loan debt? Because we promised them a secure and lucrative life if they went to college, and they don't have it! We broke a promise to those students, so we ought to make that right.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to fight anti-protest laws at the state level. Because those laws violate our rights, that's why! Even if you're blocking a road, you don't deserve to get run over! That's something those anti-vax truckers are going to find out about next month when they come down to D.C., amirite? Of course, states aren't passing anti-protest laws because of right-wing protestors; they pass them because of Black Lives Matter protestors and anti-Trump protestors and climate change protestors, and we know this because of the timing. In Tennessee you can't camp out at the state Capitol or else you'll be convicted of a felony, which would then deprive you of your right to vote; in Georgia, folks can threaten protestors with violence with immunity. We have to stop all that stupid crap.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) to stop letting payday lenders use banks as a front for their usurious loans. Because it's illegal in addition to being immoral! The Trump Administration actually allowed payday lenders to evade state interest caps by essentially laundering their loans through banks from states without interest caps; even after courts overturned their rule, the Trump Administration let those payday lenders keep at it! Now our FDIC has a chance to actually enforce the law, but we still ought to tell them to do it, lest some future Trump Administration try this kind of crap again. If our FDIC enforces the law and keeps good Americans out of runaway debt, we can truly say they've helped drain the swamp.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to release the full internal human rights report assessing hate speech on Facebook in India. They did it in 2020, but they're not releasing it, and although that's kind of a way of saying Facebook bears a lot of responsibility for Muslims in India fearing they're going to get beaten up or killed, you'd still like to see that responsibility broken down to cases. Facebook has already taken some well-deserved PR hits over its facilitation of hate speech in Myanmar (helping to bring about an ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims there), and hell, its algorithms in America help Nazi wannabes find each other without folks even creating or administering a group! Facebook should come clean; I mean, if they've done nothing wrong, they've got nothing to fear.

Action: concerning Afghanistan, Facebook, Steve Bannon, nuclear weapons, fossil fuels, and forever chemicals.

Long story short: tell our government to help suffering Afghans, investigate Facebook, charge Steve Bannon for defying a Congressional subpoena, and curtail development of nuclear weapons; tell big banks to stop funding big fossil fuel projects, and tell our EPA to regulate "forever chemicals" as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Win Without War helps you tell the Biden Administration to release and monitor Afghan assets. Key phrase in that formulation is "and monitor" -- nobody wants to release good Afghans' assets and just see the Taliban seize them. The former government of Afghanistan kept their citizens' money in international accounts, which is why this is even an issue in the first place, and now those citizens are at risk of starving to death and running out of medicine -- never mind that they can't even buy supplies or run businesses! -- and civilized people don't wish that fate on anyone. And it is their money, after all. Don't calculate that starving a few Afghans is the price we pay for isolating the Taliban. Again, civilized people don't do that, and besides, the Taliban live in a world where even ISIS hates them.

The American Economic Liberties Project helps you tell various Executive branch agencies (including our Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Federal Trade Commission) to investigate Facebook for possible crimes. Such crimes, per the incomparable Matt Stoller, may include: wire fraud (in inflating both video numbers and advertising "reach" numbers), securities fraud (in its failure to disclose such inflation to investors), violating the False Claims Act (an inflated number is a false claim), insider trading (Mr. Zuckerberg sold a lot of stock after learning of the Cambridge Analytica imbroglio), and price-fixing (Facebook allegedly got preferential treatment from Google in exchange for not competing with them). That's all illegal for good reason, and criminal charges may be the only thing that'll bring Facebook to heel. So let's demand that.

Left Action helps you tell our Justice Department to charge Steve Bannon for defying a Congressional subpoena. Our House subpoenaed Mr. Bannon in the course of its investigation of the January 6 attempted coup, but Mr. Bannon has claimed he could not testify until various executive privilege claims make their way through the courts. Presumably he has noticed that Donald Trump isn't President any longer, despite the fever dreams of right-wingers (including himself). Our House has since voted to hold Mr. Bannon in contempt; now the ball's in our Justice Department's court to decide whether to enforce that holding. If they care about law and order, they'll enforce it; you shouldn't be able to defy a Congressional subpoena during an investigation into an attempt to overthrow our government without consequences.

Peace Action helps you tell the Biden Administration how you want their Nuclear Posture Review to proceed. Chiefly, you'd argue for fewer nuclear weapons (and no new nuclear weapons) and you'd argue to take nuclear weapons off of "hair-trigger" alert, since we already have enough nukes to destroy the world hundreds of times over and they've never been particularly precise weapons. And how good a response is a nuclear strike to most of what happens in the world today? Should we have used nukes on Osama bin Laden after 9.11? Of course not, and too much of what harms our soldiers in the field are improvised explosives, suggesting that the future of warfare might be more about guerilla warfare. All new nukes do is make defense contractors rich, which ain't a good enough reason to do anything.

Daily Kos helps you tell the big banks to stop funding big fossil fuel projects. A lot of big banks express concern over the effects of climate change -- so why do they continue to fund big oil, gas, and coal projects? Possibly because they're not really telling the truth about their commitment to fighting climate change? It's a question worth asking! It's not just about pollution, either -- it's also about running roughshod over the rights of indigenous folks who live on the lands that big corporations would like to dig up. It sure seems like they'd do less harm to the indigenous if they concentrated more on solar and wind investment. They'd enable a lot less pollution, too. We deserve more of these win-win situations in our lives, but we won't get them unless we speak out.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to regulate "forever chemicals" as vigorously as possible. They call PFAS "forever chemicals" because they don't break down and once they get in your body, they stay there -- and then they wreak havoc, causing cancer, thyroid disease, reproductive issues, and liver damage, among other things you don't want to happen to you or anyone else. Unfortunately, you can find PFAS chemicals in damn near everything, from non-stick pans to fast-food wrappers to stain-resistant carpets to water-repellant jackets to firefighting foam. Maybe that all seems to big to fight. Who could blame you for thinking so? But back in the day, slavery was too big to fight, too, but we fought it and won. And we can win here, too -- but not if we stay silent.

Action: concerning voting rights, abortion, defense spending, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Women's Health Protection Act, cut defense spending, and end the filibuster. 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 and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. The Freedom to Vote Act would authorize early voting for 15 days in all states, enact same-day voter registration, make Election Day a national holiday, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering, restore ex-felons' voting rights, and restrict dark money campaign contributions, plus it would prevent states from interfering in elections so that a particularly party (cough Republicans cough) can "win" elections when their candidates get fewer votes. You know, like Donald Trump tried to do after he lost the 2020 Presidential election by seven million votes. Pass the Freedom to Vote Act, and we can better keep the unworthy from office. We just had a four-year seminar in what the unworthy are like, and I ain't going back.

Both Daily Kos and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would restore our Justice Department's ability to block state or locality voting rights law changes, in those states and localities that have demonstrated a pattern of vote suppression. That means (among other things) fewer state laws making it impossible to mail in or drop off a ballot, and fewer closed polling places in Black and brown neighborhoods. Yeah, states do this all the time, and though we saw as early as the 2020 Georgia Presidential primary that folks will wait in line all day to vote, why make them? Right-wingers love saying "voting should be hard." What they mean is winning should be easy -- for them. But they should earn victory like the rest of us do.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. Our Supreme Court refused once again to stop Texas's notorious SB 8 -- which gives literally anyone the right to sue over an abortion, since determining "injury in fact" per our Courts' ruling in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife is, apparently, something only "losers" do -- so that means we have to pass legislation at the federal level. We can't count on our Supreme Court keeping Roe v. Wade around, either; I still think they'll strike down Texas's law, for the reason I described above, but other, more direct challenges may give them the opportunity they obviously desire. Unless, of course, we pass the Women's Health Protection Act first.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending in the upcoming defense appropriations bill. President Biden is the umpteenth President in a row to propose increasing defense spending; has that made any right-wingers like him better? I kid, of course -- being a right-winger, today, is all about masturbatory rage, not about assessing situations as they are. But I feel compelled to mention, once again, that we spend more money on "defense" than the next eight nations on that list combined, and yet politicians still tell us WE'RE NOT TEH SAFEZ!!!!!! You have to wonder, also, when we can't turn Afghanistan around in 20 years, whether we're spending "defense" money on the right things. Maybe we're just spending it on expensive things.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to end the filibuster. Mitch McConnell actually has the gall to say if you don't like the filibuster you should win arguments, when the filibuster is a crutch for people who can't win arguments. And Republicans now use it, or the threat of it, against anything that might help the American people, and annoying as Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have been, the only reason they matter right now is that Republicans say no to everything -- why, they've even filibustered taking tax breaks away from corporations that outsource jobs! How do you filibuster that? And when you abuse a tool, we have to take that tool away, or else we just become hostages.

Around the table: against weak Democrats and insane Republicans.

Kiera Butler at Mother Jones takes us "Inside the Private Facebook Groups Where Anti-Vaxxers Plot to Get Religious Exemptions." And all I can say is: this is a long, long way to go just to avoid getting a potentially life-saving vaccine just so you can stamp your feet about Donald Trump losing the election, and the folks objecting on the basis of their "religion of hedonism" ain't nowhere near as funny as they think they are. Also, how do they think their body got to be a temple? All those mandatory vaccines they couldn't go to school without might have had something to do with that. And maybe, just maybe, God actually supports them!

Thought the war in Afghanistan was over? Think again: we're still conducting illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional drone strikes in Afghanistan, including one targeting an "ISIS operative" who was actually an aid worker and "explosives" that were actually water bottles. Oh, that one killed seven civilians, too. Greatest country on Earth! By the time you hear that 90 percent of all drone strikes hit the wrong target, you'll hopefully be reminded that machines don't do nearly as good a job killing people as soldiers do. You may even think that using drones is even more cowardly than sending someone else's kids off to fight a war to enrich your corporate cronies.

Ho hum, scammers now use Facebook Marketplace to target users and you better not expect Facebook to come to your rescue. But, hey, you know, move fast and break things! Creative disruption! Rules are for little people! Spoiler alert: Facebook leaves too much up to algorithms to spot fake listings, just like with everything else, plus also overworked, low-paid contract workers, because the future! "I got some Brazilian rainforest to sell you" would become a cliché if it weren't so sad. And given how Brazil is these days, maybe those guys weren't scammers.

When I read that House Democrats wouldn't roll out dental coverage in Medicare until 2028, my very first thought was that Democrats couldn't really run on the Affordable Care Act's more popular provisions in 2010 because they hadn't gone into effect yet! I am of course tempted to say when will these weaklings ever learn?, but of course they're not weak, they just want you to think so, so that you'll subscribe to their drama, instead of demanding what you want. Hence you would not be rude to call your House Reps and tell them WTF, and F'ing do better.

Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro now says, after much saying of the opposite, that he'll trust the election results, whatever they'll be. It's a lie! It's a lyin'-ass lie! He wants to lull good Brazilians into a false sense of security so when he does stage a coup, they'll be taken by surprise. Donald Trump not only wishes he could get away with what Jair Bolsonaro does, he wishes he were as good a fascist as Jair Bolsonaro is. In those moments Mr. Trump permits himself to be honest about how he feels, that is. If he has any.

Finally, a University of Chicago study estimates that over 20 million Americans not only think Joe Biden is an "illegitimate President," but would be perfectly OK with the use of force to return Donald Trump to power. I'll probably say this more than once: you should suspect every Republican you know of being a fascist. I said every one! You should act as if there are no good ones. No, not even the one who lives around the block and lent you his hedge trimmer that one time. After all, how do you really know which are the ones who just want judges and tax cuts and which are the assholes who tried to destroy our country on January 6?

Around the table: notes on COVID, Afghanistan, monopolies, mandates, and the Senate's biggest drama hound.

Remember all that BS about how Obamacare would create "death panels"? Well, thanks to right-wingers refusing to wear masks and get vaccinated, now we have them at hospitals in northern Idaho, and may soon have them in Washington state, as well, as good Idahoans try to figure out where to get urgent health care. Best quotation, from a guy whose heart surgery keeps getting put off: "My heart is failing without intervention. I can’t walk a block without stopping. But their choice (to not get vaccinated) just negated my urgent need." We should put it more or less like that to everyone who whines about "my personal choice." And given how hard it is for people to change their minds, especially when they're dead wrong, we'll have to do it numerous times.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, makes the most compelling case yet that we shouldn't have left Afghanistan. Of course, he's up against people like Lindsey Graham, who never met a war he didn't like, but I'll admit his argument gave me pause. Long story short: he argues that the Taliban are irredeemable fascists like the Nazis were, and that we kept them at bay in Afghanistan with a mere 3,000 troops. Some things are worth going to war over, and I never assumed Afghans simply didn't want to fight, but I still don't think we would have done enough good there if we had stayed, even if we had stayed another hundred years.

Matt Stoller explains "Why a Monopolized Economy Leads to Inflation and Shortages." If you recall how WalMart has killed small businesses all over America and how Amazon has killed smaller book store chains like B. Dalton's and Encore -- let alone have tried to find toilet paper at the supermarket in the past year! -- you'll already be sympathetic to his argument at the beginning, when he describes how Uber and Lyft killed the D.C. taxi industry. But it goes deeper, not just to economists so obsessed with inflation they're blind to shortages, but to corporations concentrating entire chunks of the supply chain (video tape in Japan, semiconductors in Taiwan) in the name of "efficiency." And it goes deeper than that; reading Mr. Stoller is a real education in how corporations manipulate our economy. (How about a law banning loss-leading from corporations worth over $1 million?)

Maggie Astor at the New York Times reminds us that "Vaccination Mandates Are an American Tradition. So Is the Backlash." At the turn of the 20th century, parents fought smallpox vaccine mandates by burning their own arms to mimic smallpox scars, like a bunch of G. Gordon Liddys, and parents actually did fight the child vaccination mandates of the 1970s that few folks complain about today (though they didn't fight the polio vaccine, partly because a non-profit made it and partly because no government mandated it). Nonetheless, "one thing distinguishes today’s anti-vaccination protesters from those of the past. The opposition was always political. It wasn’t always partisan." That's what makes folks like me so much less sympathetic to the other side.

Finally, it shouldn't be news by now that Joe Manchin is trying so desperately to be the center of the world again, but it might do some good to note that he's incorrect to say, in re the budget reconciliation bill, that "(w)e don't have the need to rush into this and get it done within one week because there's some deadline we're meeting." In point of fact, Congress must pass the reconciliation bill by September 30, per reconciliation bill instructions passed earlier this year, and though that may not literally be "within one week," of course people like Joe Manchin will drag this out to the last damn minute because power is a hell of a drug. And if they cause it to fail, that just affirms their power! But if the bill fails, Joe Manchin will only have that power for another year until Republican fascists take back the Senate and another Republican fascist beats him by 20 points at the polls in 2024, so I hope he enjoys it.

Action: concerning Guantánamo, student loan debt, uranium mining, cleaner cars, monopolies, and clemency

Long story short: tell our government to close Guantánamo already, fix the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, stop funding uranium mining, make cars cleaner, and break up Amazon, and tell the state of Illinois to show Christian Reichert some mercy already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both the ACLU and Amnesty International help youtell our government to close the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention center already. Opened by Tha Bush Mobb after 9.11, the Guantánamo Bay detention center has been holding decidedly non-threatening terror "suspects" for close to 20 years now, and if they were as "dangerous" as they were supposed to be, well Jesus Mary and Joseph we would have put some of them in jail, or, at the very least, charged them with something. What is the likelihood that the three dozen most dangerous people in the world are all in one spot? It's been one stupid and offensive lie with Guantánamo after another for two decades. We managed to get ourselves out of Afghanistan, painful and horrible as that was; getting out of Guantánamo should, quite frankly, be much easier. And when Lindsey Graham says this'll lead to another 9.11, he'll be wrong as usual.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Department of Education to fix the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. Authorized by Congress in 2007, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program aimed to forgive the student loans of good Americans who spent 10 years in public service (teaching, soldiering, volunteering in the Peace Corps, etc.) and kept up with their student loan payments all the while -- but only 2% of all applicants have ever gotten any kind of loan forgiveness from the program. And the failure happens for bad reasons, including both bad advice ("consolidate all your loans into one private loan whoops private loans aren't eligible") and the proverbial red tape (that somehow considers rounding up your loan payments to be "noncompliance" with your loan terms!) Could it have been designed to fail? Doesn't matter -- we can demand that it work, and we can make it work.

Penn Environment helps you tell our government to stop funding uranium mining. Why do we need uranium? Mainly to make weapons and nuclear reactors; nuclear power hasn't made money for decades, and we already have enough damn weapons. I know, we also use uranium for silk and wool dye and stage lighting bulb filaments, but gosh, should we pollute our air and water everywhere we mine for uranium so we can have those things? C'mon, this is a can-do country! But our government wants to create, essentially, a massive corporate welfare program for uranium mining corporations; does that seem like a good use of taxpayer money, i.e., your money? No, it does not. A better use of taxpayer money might be, oh, I don't know, creating public utilities that use renewable energy. They'd work, and they'd belong to us.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous fuel efficiency standards possible. What's that, you say? You heard that President Biden already did that? Well, our EPA proposed much tougher fuel efficiency standards than those adopted by the Trump Administration, but a public comment period follows every rule proposal, and our EPA reviews all those comments, and then adopts or adjusts the standards based on the comments. And you don't want all the pro-pollution commenters to drown you out, right? Because the big auto corporations are getting their PR flacks to do just that. Granted, their comments will suck, while our comments will be good -- no, it really will be pretty much like that, don't let big corporate PR hacks bamboozle you! -- but if we don't leave comments, we won't get heard. So let's get heard.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break up Amazon. Amazon has proposed buying MGM studios for $8.45 billion, and for once, our FTC is investigating the matter. And our FTC has some vocally anti-monopoly Commissioners these days, so this investigation might yield results! Still, if we-the-people don't communicate our will, they might get cold feet, as our leaders so often do these days in the face of corporate power. And we'll have plenty of good reasons to oppose the merger -- not just because it'll allow Amazon to prevent MGM from letting any streaming service other than Amazon Prime carry their content, but because of all the jobs and competition that'll get wiped out, since that happens every time we let big corporations merge. It's well past time our government actually enforced antitrust laws with some vigor.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell the state of Illinois to free Christian Reichert. Mr. Reichert somehow got 23 years in jail for pot possession, after what may have been his first significant encounter with law enforcement; I couldn't tell you how he managed to get such an overblown sentence, but I can tell you that you don't even need to believe he's been a model prisoner for the last seven years to think he should get out -- hell, you don't even need to think pot should be legal for him to get out. You don't even need to suspect his trial wasn't on the up-and-up to think he ought to get out! All you need know is that pot is now legal in Illinois, which makes his absurd predicament even more absurd. So letting Mr. Reichert out is a bank shot as far as doing the right thing is concerned.

Around the table: more thoughts about Afghanistan and Trumpholes.

Another lesson in the utter uselessness of moderates: a lot of Congressional Democrats are working hard behind the scenes to scuttle tax hikes on the rich. They have to work behind the scenes, of course, because if they worked in the light of day, they'd burn to a crisp like the vampires they obviously aspire to be. And when you learn that former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp used to want to repeal a particularly notorious tax-cut-for-the-rich, but now gets paid to advocate exactly the opposite position, you'll remember that money corrupts everything. That's before we get to raising the SALT cap, a cause for which "moderate" Democrats are apparently willing to kill every legislative endeavor.

Patrick Cockburn's excellent analysis about the Taliban's efforts to appear respectable by opposing ISIS deserves further comment. It's quite telling that "ISIS itself has denounced the Taliban as collaborators with the US," and while it may not be true, strictly speaking, that "only an understanding between the two can explain the speed of the Taliban advance and of the Kabul government’s collapse," as ISIS claims, I'm sure it still looks that way to a lot of folks. But in saying so, ISIS also plays into the Taliban's narrative; why, it's almost like that was the whole idea. We may be done pouring gasoline on the flame in Afghanistan, but we're not done seeing "war on terror"-related drama.

If you're scratching your head wondering how Florida Gov. DeSantis can still penalize schools that impose mask mandates even after a Leon County Circuit Judge said he couldn't, you could surmise that the ruling must only apply in Leon County, but your best bet is to consider that Mr. DeSantis makes the same calculation he always makes -- that "the bigger a jerk I am, the more my voters will love me, whether it works or not," and in the absence of a spirited Democratic alternative, it's not a bad political calculation. Maybe Charlie Crist could get some fire in his belly about something people care about for once, rather than simply rely on being the only non-jerk in the race? That would teach Ron DeSantis and his votaries right quick.

At long last Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) is taking flack from Trumpholes over his rather tepid statement that there's "nothing obviously skewed about the results" of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, and wouldn't it be something if this was The Last Straw for him? "Sheesh, I shill ivermectin everywhere I go, I say the coup wasn't so bad, I say we need an election audit in Wisconsin, and they're still not satisfied? Where would these clowns be without me?" I won't be particularly sympathetic if he throws up his hands and quits, but I will approve of the result, since he's in better shape to win 2022 than any other Republican who might run. Unless they hire his ad agency, maybe.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo runs down "The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout of August 2021" over our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Long story short: "the great majority of the criticism we’ve seen amounts to ignorance and deflection." Long story somewhat longer: the government fell faster than we anticipated, but we still got over 100,000 good folks out, and our "liberal" media still seems obsessed with optics, when they're the ones taking all the pictures! I don't think our "liberal" media should even be in the meta-commentary business. Historians and social scientists should be, of course, but the folks recording the news shouldn't be manufacturing it as well. Call me old-fashioned. (Also, too, if 20 years of occupation ain't enough to make a supposedly home-grown government last more than a week, then what's another six months going to accomplish?)

Finally, Jonathan Chair argues that Republicans aren't actually trying to hurt Democrats with their anti-vax strategy, but I"m not convinced by his argument. True, "Republican posture toward the coronavirus has not fundamentally changed since Biden’s election" (if not the beginning of the pandemic, I'd say!), but that doesn't rule out the possibility that Republicans have been using the entire pandemic, not just the vaccine, to try to hurt Democrats' political fortunes. And his puzzlement that Republicans would support one thing under Trump and the opposite under Biden can be answered with "gosh, they do that, like, all the time!" I'm not even sure they're "absorbing damage" with their machinations -- yeah, many more of their supporters (and voters) are dying these days, but you can always create new supporters by appealing to their thirst for rage, particularly when Democrats don't appeal to their highest natures, or look down on them.

Around the table: what looks large from a distance, close up ain't never that big.

Mother Jones reminds us that right-wing assholes don't just stumble over each other on Facebook -- Facebook actively aids and abets their meeting. I'm old enough to remember when you had to work to find like-minded folks on social media! Now Facebook's algorithms, here likened to "a speed-reading robot that curates everything you see," are not only "biased in favor of inflammatory content," but also biased in favor of right-wing news sources. Add in their "recommendation" tools like "Groups You Should Join" -- literally responsible for almost two out of every three folks who join some group of Nazi wannabes -- and you have a complete shitshow. I've been contemplating deleting my blog's Facebook page and doing all my promotion over email; this is why. I mean, I won't become an obnoxious right-wing prick, not least because I'm an obnoxious left-wing prick.

Spencer Snyder at FAIR tells us why "MSNBC Can't Look Back" on its origins in celebrating 25 years on the air. I've never thought they were all that liberal, and I rather vividly remember when they tried their damnedest to ape Fox News, but their history is so, so much worse than that -- they gave Laura Ingraham her big cable news break, they provided a soft landing to Tucker Carlson after Jon Stewart shamed Crossfire into oblivion, and even Keith Olbermann, now fondly remembered for being just about the only cable news personality who'd take on George W. Bush during his second term, wouldn't STFU about Monica Lewinsky during the late '90s. Of course, we should remember that they're a freaking cable news channel, which guarantees a certain level of suckitude. They clearly lucked into having Ed Schultz, God rest him, and naturally they fired him for no good reason.

You remember that ProPublica report about how awful asset forfeiture has gotten in Massachusetts? Well, now Massachusetts state legislators are making noises about overhauling the entire asset forfeiture system there, so that maybe fewer DAs can just hang on to your money and/or property for years after they decided not to charge you with anything. So, yeah, good journalism can lead to good works -- maybe folks who only watch cable news don't know that! -- and even if Massachusetts state legislators are only playing their constituents now, the good citizens of that state have something to say about that. Many things, I would think. And now all they need do is say them until they get the justice they deserve.

Ho hum, defense contracting corporation whines that the end of the Afghanistan War is costing it money, but will fund a pro-war think tank nonetheless. You see the inherent contradiction, I trust -- gosh, why not go into, oh, I don't know, renewable energy? There's a lot of call for that now, and nobody with any real work to do remembers the name of big defense contracting corporations anymore. Oh, and yeah, there's a "feedback loop," where big defense contractors fund think tanks which employ "experts" to go on the TV and tell us why we need to go to war all the time. And no "liberal" media outlet that gives them airtime will force them to disclose their potential conflicts of interest. I am, strangely, more than a little annoyed this zombie won't fall. I say "strangely" because I see apparently unkillable zombies all the time in politics.

Patrick Cockburn predicts -- quite accurately, I think -- that the Taliban will "Escape Pariah Status By Posing as the Enemy of ISIS." Isis, you may have heard, has made quite the return in Afghanistan. I've long thought that ISIS gave al-Qaeda a huge opening to claim legitimacy -- you can, I trust, imagine al-Qaeda terrorists saying hey, we did what we had to do, but we're not total barbarians like ISIS! -- but apparently it falls to the Taliban to seize that opportunity, and the better relations with other countries that could come with it. Yes, even with the U.S. -- you think the Taliban might have a few things we want? And you think maybe Joe Biden calculated all of this ahead of withdrawal? I'd be surprised if he didn't, frankly.

Finally, Jonathan Chait says "we have no idea what the rationale is" for "moderate" Democrats slashing President Biden's proposals to hike corporate taxes and tax hikes on the rich. Maybe he's too polite to say it, but I sure as shit ain't: Democrats plan to piss all over yet another slab of extremely popular legislation so that they completely demoralize their base and lose our House and Senate in 2022, thus keeping us in the same absurd and perverse hostage crisis that has yielded the Contract on America and Tha Bush Mobb and the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Maybe the Josh Gottheimers of America should consider they'll never win another election if Congress is full of open fascists, as it will be if they get their way this time. If superior arguments clearly don't move "moderate" Democrats, I won't be above appealing to their self-interest.

Around the table: in which the whole concept of negotiation seems to perplex some Democrats.

Sen. Sanders (I-VT), upon being told "moderate" Democrats might try to shrink the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, says "I already negotiated," adding that "(t)he truth is we need more" and "(t)his is, in my view, the minimum of what we should be spending." It's good to be reminded that when you ask for more than you want, you get more of what you want, even if Democrats like Sen. Kaine seem befuddled at how all of that is supposed to work. Now all we need to do is clog up our Reps' and Senators' phone lines so that the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis doesn't move the goalposts again.

Steven Rosenfeld, about as good a writer on voting rights issues as we have, notes that a lot of Republicans are starting to come out against the Arizona "fraudit" of Maricopa County votes. More important, though, is Mr. Rosenfeld's speculation that when the Cyber Ninjas finally release their report -- which they were supposed to do this week but couldn't, reportedly because three of the "fraudit" leaders got COVID -- the "fraudit" will not merely "revive debunked conspiracy theories" but "find small administrative problems 'that could be twisted into appearing to be evidence...of voter wrongdoing or voting irregularities,'" in the words of an American Oversight report. I sure am looking forward to another few months of people who never knew anything about how we count votes in 2019 breathlessly sharing every single report of a suitcase moving somewhere they didn't expect in 2020.

With our Supreme Court striking down President Biden's attempt to extend the eviction moratorium, we learn that state and local governments have distributed a mere 11% of the money the American Rescue Plan Act allotted for helping folks withstand getting evicted. State and local officials cite the possibility of fraud as a reason to go slowly, but that's a little like saying you didn't pull the baby out of the fire fast enough because you were afraid you'd break its arm. Anyway, I think state and local officials aren't going fast enough because Republicans run most states, and they want the eviction assistance program to fail, so that Joe Biden gets blamed for it right before the 2022 midterms. Hey, it's not like Republicans can run on their superior ideas!

Republicans are already trying to make the Afghanistan withdrawal and all its problems "Matter in the Midterms,", but what is the "biggest hurdle" in them accomplishing this aim? The calendar currently says 2021, that's what! Which leads one to suspect that Mr. Biden -- who thus far hasn't budged on his August 31 deadline for getting the hell out, and if a Republican was similarly unmoved by circumstances, you know they'd be calling you "traitor" for criticizing him! -- is the real political animal here. Or maybe we shouldn't give him too much credit, since he really only had a choice of two different calendar years to withdraw from Afghanistan in the first place.

Yes, that was Donald Trump's former spokeshack going on Fox News to say that "when President Trump was President, you didn't see crisis after crisis. You just didn't see it." She adds, "I shudder to think about what COVID would have been like under Joe Biden," though Joe Biden's worst day for COVID cases is still January 20, and that was still only two-thirds as bad as Donald Trump's worst day. Anyway, remember when Bush Mobbers went on TV in 2009 and said you never had a terrorist attack while George W. Bush was President, no, sir? Well, this is even worse gaslighting. But I don't think Americans have forgotten how awful the Trump Administration was, or how he did actually have "crisis after crisis," most of which he manufactured, whether through his incompetence or through his insatiable thirst for drama.

Finally, notorious former Blackwater/Xe CEO Erik Prince offers to evacuate folks out of Afghanistan -- for $6,500 a pop! You've heard by now that around half of all Americans can't scrounge together $400 in an emergency; now consider that the poverty line in Afghanistan is around $700 annually, and that a little less than half (in the Asian Development Bank's conservative estimate) of Afghans sit below that line, and you'll start to think that Mr. Prince is only trying to get two kinds of people out: 1) rich people and 2) people he can make into slave workers. No wonder people say he has no soul!

Action: concerning jobs, war, refugees, voting rights, police violence, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to pass the reconciliation budget blueprint, tell your Congressfolk to repeal the "war on terror"-era AUMFs, tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap on Afghan refugees, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, eliminate qualified immunity for police officers, and pass the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: call your House Reps and tell them to vote in favor of the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint the Senate passed a few weeks ago, the budget blueprint that will enable all sorts of good things to happen in America -- higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, a stronger care-based economy, and paid family/medical leave for all workers, just to name a few. A few "moderate" Democrats are trying to take the bill hostage, but theirs is the calculus of cowardice -- the result of their actions, which may also be the aim of their actions, will be to scuttle both the reconciliation bill and the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" at whose altar they kneel. If they do that, they will lose not only their own seats, but the House and Senate -- and this time, they'll lose them to Republicans who openly identify as fascists. So brook no silliness from your House Reps about "the difficulty of raising taxes in an election." You know what's harder than raising taxes in an election? Winning elections in a fascist state when you're not a fascist.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs) that started the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and thus end our "forever war." Some people, and by some people I mainly mean people on the right side of the political spectrum, just aren't happy unless we're at war. Put six beers in them and they'll say war is the way to remake the world! Helluva job they did in Afghanistan, if so. War isn't the way to "remake the world," it's the way to redistribute income from taxpayers into defense contracting CEOs' pockets. You may note that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) has sponsored these AUMF repeals, as she has done in the past, and you may remember that Rep. Lee was literally the only "nay" vote against the Afghanistan AUMF. If I were her, I'd wear an "I WAS RIGHT" baseball cap from now until the day they put me in the ground. But first, let's have her being right about that count for something.

In a related note, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap for Afghans fleeing from the Taliban, so that more of the 300,000-plus Afghans who helped our military during the war effort can get out. You've already heard famous right-wing blowhards warn us about the coming "invasion" of Afghans, but this should be pretty simple to figure out from a moral perspective -- we did this to them, by invading their country, toppling their government, and promising them we would make their lives better. Now the government we toppled is back in power like the last 20 years didn't happen, and right-wingers expect we'll put racism above letting the Taliban murder the folks who helped us? So much for being the "guardians of morality." Let's not let them make all the damn decisions around here.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Remember when our Supreme Court knocked the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder? H.R. 4 would put those teeth back. In the aforementioned Shelby County v. Holder, our Court held that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states by forcing them to pre-clear their voting law changes with our Justice Department -- but our Court also held that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass Constitutional muster. God only knows if that's true anymore, what with Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the Court now, but H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of voting rights violations to Justice Department pre-clearance. And with so many states trying to suppress the vote as we speak, we need H.R. 4. So brook no silliness about "how the South has changed," because this is about America.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk and the Biden Administration to prioritize ending "qualified immunity" for police officers when they execute Black folks without even charging them with a crime. I put that last phrase in there because it gives some people pause -- folks will "support the police" without thinking very hard about what it means, but they generally will not support "killing people without charge." A few will, believe it or not, but then every generation has had to deal with crazy people. Without getting too inside-baseball (I've done that in other posts about this matter!), "qualified immunity" restricts your ability to sue a police officer for a wrongful death, and restricts that ability way, way beyond the bounds of common sense -- to the point where parents of teenage kids shot by police can't get the justice they deserve. So let's get our government to do the right thing here.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Postmaster General DeJoy's response to USPS funding shortfalls? Raise prices and lower services. The Postal Service Reform Act's response? Stop forcing our USPS to pre-fund retiree benefits for employees who ain't even born, get postal retirees into Medicare, and allow our USPS to offer additional services like postal banking -- though the bill doesn't specify postal banking, so you may want to say that you want that in the bill when you talk to (or write) your Congressperson. Virtually all of our USPS's problems can be traced to the pre-funding of retiree benefits, and in my experience, our Post Office continues to deliver exemplary service even with all the crap they have to put up with, and services that work you want to keep working. So let's keep our Postal Service, and let's help it thrive.

Around the table: concerning tax cuts for the rich, asset forfeiture, stupid COVID ideas, and Afghanistan.

ProPublica finds yet another reason to hate the Trump tax "reform": it widened a loophole allowing CEOs who also own their own businesses essentially reclassify salaries as profits so they can pay less in taxes. Thus an effective top tax rate falls from 40.8% to 29.6%, which adds up at a CEO's income level. CEOs would have to justify the decrease in their salaries to our IRS -- if our IRS audits them, which hardly happens to rich folks anymore thanks to over a decade of our Congress defunding our IRS. WeatherTech CEO David MacNeil will probably regret taking ProPublica on a tour of his floor-mat empire, since he comes off like a self-centered jerk, to put it mildly.

ProPublica also tackles assert forfeiture laws in Massachusetts -- specifically, how hard it is to get your property back there even several years after the state decided not to charge you with whatever suspicion prompted them to confiscate your property in the first place. Seriously, the lengths the state goes to just to avoid giving you your property back (waiting years, putting your name in fine print along with a hundred others, demanding that you respond in court when you did nothing wrong) would be comic, if it weren't unconstitutional. If you still think drug charges are a serious enough reason to violate our Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful searches and seizures, note that Massachusetts will seize your property without a drug charge. Also, how well has that strategy worked in reducing drug addiction? By the evidence, not well at all.

Ho hum, Gov. Ron DeSantis (E-FL) pushes Regeneron treatments ahead of vaccinations as a hedge fund CEO invests millions in Regeneron and millions more in Mr. DeSantis's campaign. And when one of the few remaining Democratic state legislators points out that Mr. DeSantis is "not a full-blown anti-vaxxer" but also someone who "doesn't want to upset those who support the vaccine," you start to think he might actually be a pretty good politician. You will not, however, think he's a very good Governor, or a very good leader. The only reason Florida's seven-day moving average of new cases is under 20,000 is that Florida doesn't report every day, which would lead you to think Mr. DeSantis has something to hide.

Heard that the horse-dewormer drug ivermectin might be a "miracule cure" for COVID? Nicole Karlis at Salon explains why you should be, ah, skeptical. And when your Trumphole aunt says "but I read about it in the Wall Street Journal," you can reply that the Journal op-ed piece they read (or, more likely, heard about) was co-written by a drug industry "consultant" who worked for the corporation that created ivermectin. Also, the studies that "prove" ivermectin's effectiveness were almost absurdly small, or took place in test tubes which aren't human bodies, or retracted due to data manipulation. And I'd just leave it at that -- even Trumpholes who used to carry The Pill Book around at their jobs will go la-la-la-la when you tell them about side effects and drugs you should never mix ivermectin with.

Why oh why are we allowing the folks who started the Afghanistan War offer their opinions on its ending? There are plenty of astute observers our "liberal" media could use instead -- why, there are even folks who don't say one thing in public and another thing in private, as Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Lute have done. There is, of course, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), the only House Rep to vote against the Afghanistan War to begin with! Think she might have something interesting to say about all of that? To most of our "liberal" media's preferred voices on Afghanistan I would simply say: thank you for your input, but I think you've done enough.

Finally, Jon Schwarz at The Intercept reminds us who really "won" the Afghanistan War: big American defense contracting corporations. The biggest five defense contracting corporations in America have seen their stock returns go up almost 900 percent since 2001, while stocks generally have gone up by a bit over 500 percent, meaning the big five defense stocks did about 58% better than the stock market as a whole. All that, to put the same right-wing extremist government back in power that we were supposedly trying to dislodge when we went in almost two decades ago. Nice work if you can get it!

Action: concerning voting rights, taxes, working families, the right to repair, and worker rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, raise taxes on the rich, expand the Child Tax Credit permanently, and pass the Fair Repair Act and the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As Senate Democrats whittle down the For the People Act into uselessness -- apparently because Joe Manchin doesn't have anyone on his staff who actually reads bills -- the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act becomes the gold standard of voting rights legislation, as it would put the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act after our Supreme Court knocked them out in Shelby County v. Holder. This would be a big deal, as so many American state legislators, still wondering how a nice guy like Donald Trump could lose, are trying to restrict voting rights so that next time he (or some similarly nice person!) doesn't lose. So let's get this done.

Both Americans for Tax Fairness and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich already. Sometimes we need to send the message simply and plainly, and this is one of those times, as our House comes back early next week to vote on the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint the Senate passed earlier this month, and as several "moderate" Democrats have threatened to vote against that blueprint if they don't get to vote on the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" first, which, like, waaaaaaaaaaah. Could they be trying to scuttle both? They sure could! Should it matter? No, it should not! The popular will should matter, and polling has told us for years that large majorities of Americans want to tax the rich harder.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The second monthly $250 or $300 check has just arrived in the mailboxes or bank accounts of millions of good American families, and there'll be at least four more of those, reminding everyone that maybe your government can actually do some good on your behalf! But why shouldn't there be approximately infinity more of those monthly checks? Because TEH FISKULZ RESPONSIBILITIEZ!!!!!? Rubbish -- no deficit peacock ever cared about blowing over $2 trillion in Afghanistan just to return extremists to power after 20 years. So, yeah, how about we spend money helping kids stay out of poverty?

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4006, the Fair Repair Act. You remember watching your dad or granddad fix his car in the driveway? That's largely a thing of the past now, thanks to a society that believes we should never corporations what to do. So now corporations throw up endless roadblocks in front of the good Americans who want to fix their phones and computers, or hire someone who can. The Fair Repair Act would help change that, by forcing corporations to provide manuals, parts, and tools to anyone who wants to fix their products, and not just yowl TEH TRADEZ SECRETZ!!!!! anymore. Don't we value our independence as Americans? Then we ought to pass the Fair Repair Act.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The bill would override state-level "right to work" (for less!) laws, and would also prevent big corporations from forcing their employees to sit through anti-union propaganda while they're on the clock; the bill would even allow workers to use card-check to organize rather than a secret ballot election (which employers tend to manipulate, right, Amazon?). I'm old enough to remember when Senate Democrats took turns joining a Republican filibuster against the Employee Free Choice Act, but now we've got it embedded in a larger bill. And if we get in our Senators' grills, we can make it law.

Around the table: more thoughts on the end of empire.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch -- possibly the world's best reporter on the Middle East -- says "It is Government Weakness, Not Taliban Strength, That Condemns Afghanistan" -- as in the Afghan government's "weakness and unpopularity," which his Afghani contacts describe as "no better than a gang of racketeers gorging themselves on US aid money or on juicy supply and construction contracts." Also, despite the $2 trillion-plus outlay, "Afghan soldiers were often short of food, ammunition, fuel and could not even get defective weapons replaced," in large part because "the American aid money never made it past the sticky fingers of US consultants and security companies." The story won't end here, though, because Afghans don't like the Taliban any better than they like the Americans.

Philippa Rizopoulos at TruthOut reminds us that privatization of Medicaid and Medicare also stands in the way of getting to Medicare-for-All. Medicare Advantage, an "innovation" of George W. Bush, now has over 40 percent of American seniors in its grip, and worse, nearly 70 percent of Medicaid recipients get their care, such as it is, from Medicaid Managed Care Organizations (or MCOs), and these developments don't lead to better care, or even cheaper care. They do lead to shifting networks, reduced benefits, and rejected claims, and they also lead to public programs bearing the burden of private corporations, just like with charter schools. Best to expand Medicare to include everyone, and all care, not least because we'd save money.

Does the fall of Afghanistan into Taliban hands again make you wish we'd "done more"? Here's a reminder from Alice Speri at The Intercept that "(t)he biggest al-Qaeda plot the FBI claimed to have foiled in the years following the 9/11 attacks involved no weapons, no plot, and no al-Qaeda." You say that's not precisely relevant? Perhaps not, but consider that we "did more" for 20 years in Afghanistan, throwing away over $2 trillion to get no further than the status quo, and consider, also, that "doing more" in Iraq helped al-Qaeda establish a presence there they didn't have before, and then helped birth ISIS. Maybe "doing more" shouldn't be our first impulse, particularly at those times we're trying to prove we're "right" about terrorist threats.

Uh oh: Minnesota GOP Chair Jennifer Carnahan faces calls to resign after one of the state party's big donors (and a close friend and fellow podcaster of hers!) gets indicted for sex trafficking. And just as the folks who squeal about "voter fraud" ignore all the Republicans who get caught committing it, the QAnon crowd will promptly ignore this scandal precisely because it implicates Republicans. In each case, you'd think right-wingers would take an opportunity to appear "independent," but they don't -- blunt force is their only strategy, in both argument and action. (And just like the rest of them, Ms. Carnahan issues a statement that's 60% about how badly she thinks she's been treated. That's how you know she's a Trumphole -- everything's a drama, and they're always the star.

In case you were wondering how Fox News's biggest stars were spinning our defeat in Afghanistan, both Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham focus on Afghan refugees, with Mr. Carlson calling them "invaders" coming to "your neighborhood." "Fuck you" was my immediate reaction to this news, but after I'd given the matter more thought, I found myself saying is this the best they can do? America may have stopped being a great power today, and all these clowns can think to do is bash immigrants who ain't even here yet? That'll be a hell of a footnote to the history of this war, if anyone's around to write it.

Finally, I read President Biden's Monday remarks about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, and I note that while his repeated insistence that "one more year, five more years or 20 more years" wouldn't make a difference is absolutely correct, it's also absolutely calculated to impress independent voters (as is his relentless blaming of the Afghan government and military), which might just make up for "the buck stops with me" most emphatically not impressing them. I don't want to bash the guy who actually got us out of a war, but I do also wonder how he didn't get heard about this matter during those eight years he was Vice President.

Around the table: from PR hackery to dumb wars.

PR hacks look for "normal, everyday" Arizona residents to write letters-to-the-editor supporting binding arbitration -- and when they can't find any, even in Arizona, they offer $2,000 a pop! Nice work if you have no soul! It's like even Arizona right-wingers know that binding arbitration is the way corporations keep customers and workers out of our courts, and ensure that customers and workers lose more of the cases against them than they would in our courts. Next time you hear about "crisis actors" and "paid protestors" on the left, remember that PR hacks paying people to write pro-corporate screeds is the evil that actually happens. I'm not sure why they're targeting Arizona, though -- maybe Mark Kelly's not the easiest get, but they'd probably have Kyrsten Sinema at hello.

When I read that Donald Trump has "politicized the most basic of pandemic safety measures," and that it's "as if he named Band-Aids un-American, and demanded that we bleed to show our heedless fealty," I'm tempted to respond let's not give the man any more ideas! I can all too easily imagine him saying why do we drink water anyway? Only losers drink water! Own the libs by refusing to drink any more water! And then his votaries would not only stop drinking water but demand that we gut the clean water standards that are the main reason we have any decent health care in America at all. I wish this were harder to imagine.

Ari Paul reminds us that "Right-Wing Cop-Bashing Didn't Start With Trump." You'll be reminded of the white supremacist stand-off at Ruby Ridge and the FBI raid on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco -- both of which prompted right-wingers to yell about federal cops -- and G. Gordon Liddy's repeated admonitions to his listeners to shoot federal agents in the head. All that's just from the '90s. But, yeah, everyone who proudly brandishes their I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! sign has a line that can't be crossed, one that will turn them into the kind of folks who try to impale Capitol police with flagpoles. And they'll yell at you when you point out their hypocrisy, which is a hell of a thing to take to the Pearly Gates.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who has spouted more unscientific nonsense about COVID than most Republicans and that's saying something, didn't bother reporting his wife's investment in a corporation producing a drug to fight COVID until 16 months after our laws required. Right at the beginning of the pandemic, too, which sure makes one suspect he had, you know, insider information. I wouldn't want to go into a re-election fight with this baggage; indeed, Richard Burr decided it wasn't worth it, and Kelly Loeffler lost in 2020. Then again, if the Democratic establishment forces another Amy McGrath-type candidate on the good citizens of Kentucky, then Rand Paul will get away with it.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (S-GA) responds to news that hospitals are filling up with COVID patients by saying "(e)veryone needs to get back down to common sense and needs to remember, we're human, we can't live forever." I'm old enough to remember when politicians ended careers by saying such things, but we live a sick, immoral, and decadent era in which a quarter of our electorate can only feel one emotion: rage. Also, her district is so gerrymandered she probably couldn't even lose to Jesus H. Christ himself. If only our House had passed a bill that could address this intractable problem! Oh, right, it did, and Joe Manchin won't let it come to a vote because bipartisanship with people like Marjorie Taylor Greene is somehow far more important.

Finally, as we confront the humiliating end to our 20-year presence in Afghanistan, I guess it's good to hear at least one "liberal" media outlet suggest that our whole adventure there was a stupid idea to begin with. $88 billion we threw away on training Afghan soldiers to fight the Taliban, and now we learn about "years of overly optimistic assessments from U.S. officials that obscured -- and in some cases, purposely hid -- evidence of deep-rooted corruption, low morale, and even 'ghost soldiers and police' who existed merely on the payrolls of the Afghan Defense and Interior Ministries." Sadly, none of this is particularly surprising, and if you thought maybe the whole point of the Afghanistan war was to bleed the taxpayers, I wouldn't blame you. And that sure wouldn't bode well for sticking around another two or 20 years to "fix things."

Around the table: awww, no one wants to cuddle with a Trumphole! And other cautionary tales.

Surprise, surprise, about half the Republican Senators who signed on to the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" announced by President Biden a few weeks back now have, ah, reservations. Now imagine them having "reservations" -- maybe each week a new Senator comes up with a new one! -- long enough that the deal falls apart, and then Sens. Manchin and Sinema refuse to sign onto the reconciliation bill that would work around Republican intransigence because of the failure of the "bipartisan" bill. Hey, if I thought of it, you know they have. I don't say this to depress you -- I say it to prepare you for the fight.

Dean Baker helps you "com(e) to grips" with the fear-mongering about runaway inflation coming from right-wingers. Long story short: the price hikes we're seeing mostly look like temporary price hikes, versus ones that reveal deeper structural issues (though if oil prices were to surge, that could change), and the bond market, where a lot of rich folks have a lot of money, is presently acting nothing like it would if runaway inflation were coming. Of course, if you were already inclined to see the pandemic as a temporary thing (even though it has gone on for almost a year and a half now), you were probably already immune to the fear-mongering.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media would really, really prefer it if we kept fighting the 20-years-and-counting Afghanistan War we're pulling back from now and really never should have fought in the first place. And they keep thinking war-mongers (whose number has included President Biden for a long time!) are "smarter" than everyone else, or "bolder" than everyone else, when fact is they're actually stupider and more cowardly. Jesus Mary and Joseph it doesn't take "courage" or "brains" to send a bunch of other people's children to die for the benefit of your corporate cronies.

"Protestors" cause violence at a town hall hosted by Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), with Ms. Porter at one point putting her arms around an elderly constituent to keep her from getting hurt. The only person police arrested was a Porter supporter, which is not at all suspicious. And note well that Trumpholes seem to be protesting the Democrats who actually fight the corruption they always say they hate, and not, say, the Democrats who actually worship big tech and consort with banksters. It's like Trumpholes aren't really honest actors or something.

Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin has already pulled out of a debate, because the moderator once gave $250 to the Clinton Foundation for earthquake relief in Haiti! And here you thought "helping people survive an earthquake" was a relatively apolitical cause! Of course Mr. Youngkin, merely by creating a big drama using the word "Clinton," has dog-whistled the hell out of the Trumpholes, but it also looks like he can't actually win an argument. If Virginia Democrats don't run a million ads depicting Mr. Youngkin whining in crap-loaded diapers, they deserve to lose this race.

Finally, in a peripherally-related matter, Andi Zeisler writes about "(t)he question keeping Trump-loving men up at night: Why won't women date us?" Of course, this is how civilized society is supposed to work! If you earn shame and shunning, you get shamed and shunned! And yet some right-wing "thinkers" actually argue that the state might best be put to service getting these men partners, which sure is a hifalutin way of saying you don't give a fuck what women want. Seriously, this is an extraordinary article, one that uses the tenets of conservatism itself against the men who whine that no one wants to cuddle with them.

Around the table: send the kids to jail for life! And other cruelties.

Our Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, OKs life without parole for children who commit certain crimes -- and Justice Kavanaugh, in his majority opinion, appears to eviscerate precedent even as he claims to uphold it! I do recall this being exactly the kind of thing we feared from a Justice Kavanaugh. And where's the sense, from some of our highest judges, that if a child fails to badly that we even contemplate shutting them away in prison forever, that we, as a civilization, have failed that child? You could count on that, at least, from Anthony Kennedy.

Uh oh: Congressional investigation finds at least one Capitol Police official ordering, on the morning of January 6, that police look only for "anti-Trump" protestors, not the pro-Trump ones who then tried to stage a coup. Characterizing that order as "be on the lookout for counter-protesters because that is often where we have clashes between both sides," as one official does, ain't exactly a denial, and in any case I certainly hope the subsequent events of that day disabused them of the notion that "anti-Trump protestors" is where you look for the violence.

You might be irritated to confront a headline like "State-Supported 'Clean Energy' Loans Are Putting Borrowers At Risk of Losing Their Homes," but the full story is even worse: one of the Obama Administration's brilliant ideas from 2009 was to help low-income homeowners pay for improvements to their homes by giving low-interest loans to municipalities, who would then loan the money to homeowners and have them repay it in their property taxes! Nobody could have predicted that this would be a way to repossess those homes! And I'm pretty sure you were nodding off as you were reading the first sentence of this paragraph, but people with bad, convoluted ideas count on that.

Upon hearing that Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) seeks to "establish her independent bona fides as she faces a tough re-election battle in New Hampshire next year," you have to wonder why she thinks voting against a $15/hour minimum wage and opposing an end to the 20-year war in Afghanistan are good ways to do that. Assert your independence from Joe Biden, sure, but we might more reasonably say that Maggie Hassan is "asserting her independence from the public will," and that never ends well for a Democrat.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) vetoes a bill that would have banned transgender girls from participating in girls' sports, and the state Senate fails to overcome his veto, meaning the bill is dead, for now. Ah, but don't give him too much credit: this may be how they all want the drama to shake out. After all, if you "solve" a "problem," it's much harder to stoke rage over it later. Isn't it?

Finally, the Tennessee state House passes a bill banning state and local governments from requiring COVID vaccines, and all I can say is waaaaaaaaaaah! That's some "conservatism" there, preventing municipalities from determining what's best for themselves! But today's "conservatives" care about nothing but stoking rage in people, and they dishonor their forebears in doing so. I guess they don't see the irony.

Around the table: ho hum, Republican politicians are full of rage and cowardice and whining and ignorance.

President Biden announces the U.S. will withdraw from Afghanistan by 9.11.21 -- really? After only 20 years? -- and naturally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) thinks such a withdrawal would be "dumber than dirt and devilishly dangerous," proving, once again, that a little alliteration is a dangerous thing. Of course Sen. Graham wants us all to be cowards, clinging to military aggression in order to "keep safe" from the Middle East terrorism that said military aggression has made much, much worse. Why, it's almost like that's the whole idea! Besides, you know what keeps people safe? Stopping the rich from running roughshod over them, a principle folks like Lindsey Graham pretend not to understand.

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut suggests there may be, ah, something else behind Sen. Manchin's repeated calls for "bipartisanship" -- namely, campaign contributions from the banksters who benefited most from the corporate tax cut of 2017 and don't want to see it go back up. To these banksters, the obvious response would be maybe there are other people in America besides you. They should count themselves lucky they're dealing with Joe Biden, who has only proposed raising the rate to 28%, and not those of us who would raise it to 55%, which is where it was in the '50s, the last decade we stopped the rich from running roughshod over us. You know, maybe we should make it so they have to deal with us.

In a related note, big corporations have started to run ads telling us we better not raise corporate taxes during an economic downturn! These clowns tell us we can't raise taxes because times are bad and then we can't raise taxes because times are good, but I think most Americans can now tell the difference between the taxes they pay and the taxes rich folks and corporations pay. And dig the Mike Pence crony who actually has the nerve to call his tax-fighting lobby the Coalition to Protect American Workers! Instead of spending $12.5 million to run ads opposing corporate tax hikes, maybe you could spend that money, oh, I don't know, safety in the workplace? You know, something that actually deals with "protection"?

In the wake of yet another Breathing-While-Black shooting by police, we are reminded that police can, in fact, pull you over in many states for hanging something from your rear-view mirror, ostensibly the "probable cause" police used to pull over Daunte Wright before shooting him dead. But I've had something hanging from my rearview for over a dozen years, and the next time I get pulled over for it will be the first. I'm pretty sure that's because I'm not Black! Naturally police say they need to be able to pull you over for hanging an air freshener from your rearview so they can investigate all the other sordid things you might be doing, which doesn't sound at all fascistic. But gosh, fellows, ever walk a beat? You know, find out what's going on in a community by talking to the people in that community? Some things we did do better in the old days. Even if you can't always quantify it on a spreadsheet.

When you hear that Republicans want to forge a "truce" between former President Trump and Senate Minority Leader McConnell, please remember that this is all drama. No Republican operatives actually care if Messrs. Trump and McConnell "get along" or whatever -- in fact, they have more of an interest, I would think, in keeping the discord going, not just because it distracts people from more nefarious doings (i.e., the wave of anti-voting bills and anti-transgender bills Republicans are forcing down good Americans' throats at the state level), but because it misleads people into thinking Republican politicians really are a very diverse group with very diverse ideas, when, fact is, they're all whining, bigoted seditionists.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, David Frum at The Atlantic argues that Republicans might actually be screwing themselves with their vote suppression legislation. To which I would respond: we can only hope! Seriously, he does make a lot of cogent arguments, among them that suppressing mail-in voting actually hurts rural voters who trend Republican at least as much as the urban voters who trend Democratic, though I would like to see a bit more evidence (i.e., turnout rates from more than two counties in Kentucky). But Mr. Frum is absolutely right that "winning votes is better than suppressing them," which leads me to assert, again, that Democrats could make all this speculation worthless by using their power to do good things this year and next, instead of letting Joe Manchin scuttle everything by demanding that we work with Republicans who want to burn everything down.

Around the table: the dirty secret about the Republican agenda! OK, it's not much of a secret.

Sonali Kohatkar tells us "Why Republicans Are Betting the Farm on Attacking Transgender People." Long story short: they're trying to stoke rage in voters, and besides, what else they got? And note well that anti-transgender bills are "not being requested by constituents," in one observer's words, but you hear people talk about how much they don't like transgender people solely because it's "in the news" -- and it's only in the news because Republicans push these bills! Gosh, how do such things happen?

Republicans are circulating a memo on Capitol Hill calling the Biden infrastructure plan a "slush fund," but that's easy to counter: is my job a "slush fund"? Is my house a "slush fund"? Is clean water a "slush fund"? Is my kid's school a "slush fund"? Is high-speed internet for everyone a "slush fund"? Is the bridge I take to work a "slush fund"? Is retraining my coal worker uncle a "slush fund"? One could go on.

In a related note, Lindsay Koshgarian at TruthOut reminds us that the Biden infrastructure plan could very easily be funded given the amount of money our government pisses away on wars and tax cuts for the rich. Why, after you confront $6.4 trillion we've spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that have made everything in the Middle East even worse, plus the $2.3 trillion budget gap the Trump tax cuts will cost through 2027, you may come away from this article wishing the Biden plan was bigger! Might as well spend trillions of dollars on stuff we use, after all.

Ho hum, law enforcement officers allege that an antifa activist shot at them first -- thus presumably justifying their shooting him to death -- but their investigation may have left a few things out, such as the fact that the activist in question had a gun with a full clip on him at time of death, or the witness testimony that contradicted the witness testimony cited in their investigation, or the utter dearth of body camera or dashboard camera footage. Indeed, police may even have led an eight-year-old witness upon whose testimony the investigation relied heavily. Still, BUT ANTIFA! is likely to become the BUT HER EMAILS! of the new decade. Seriously, just try talking to a right-winger about January 6.

Finally, Sen. Cornyn (R-TX), noting that President Biden doesn't go on cable news programs, wonders if he's "really in charge." Jesus Mary and Joseph what if he's not going on cable news programs because cable news sucks? I mean, I wouldn't want to go on TV with a bunch of shouty know-nothing assholes either, and everyone's been pretending cable news is far more important than it really is for decades now; if our President wants to shame them by refusing to grace them with his presence, I'm all for it. Besides, Joe Biden ain't supposed to be "in charge" -- we are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning endless war-making, predatory lenders, and climate change.

As the Afghanistan War enters its 19th (!) year, it's well past time for Congress to investigate the sheer folly of this effort, hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Afghanistan Papers, which describe how our government has been lying and BSing its way through this war for almost two decades. The Washington Post, as you may recall, obtained the "Afghanistan Papers" through a Freedom of Information Act (or FOIA) request, and published them in early December; the papers expose government officials declaring the war unwinnable in virtually every conceivable sense but plugging on with the disaster anyway, apparently adhering to the belief that the only thing worse than doing wrong is admitting you're wrong. You may wonder why we're bothering to get Congress in on this. Why, because it's their job -- as it has been all these years! -- and we must always tell them to do their job. And saying we-can't-win-but-let's-lie-about-it-rather-than-change-it is one thing in a memo you don't intend to ever see the light of day, but it's another thing entirely under oath, before the people's representatives. At least, it should be -- and we should make it be.

Meanwhile, banks used to evade state interest rate caps by "partnering" with out-of-state banks that don't face interest rate caps, but our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) cracked down on them during Tha Bush Mobb years, of all times. But guess what? Times are changing back! With an Administration determined to destroy every regulation that might help good Americans suffer a little less, at least two banks -- FinWise (of Utah) and Republic Bank (of Kentucky) -- have restarted the notorious "rent-a-bank" scheme that lets them offer loans with interest as high as 160% to good Americans facing emergencies, thus assuring that they'll be trapped in a pit of debt for years to come. Nice work if you can get it! But, as I've said, this is already illegal, so the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our FDIC to crack down on banks gaming the system to trap vulnerable folks in usurious loans. No use telling me "this isn't the job of government," not unless you want me to call you objectively pro-financial predator. We should be using terms like these a lot more; maybe they'll help bring shame back to our civilization.

Finally, if you've been attending the wildfires in Australia, you know climate change ain't no "Chinese hoax," as our President put it long ago, and you know we have a lot of work to do to counter its effects -- mainly, move from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Legislation supporting renewable energy is one way to do that, but it's not the only way -- another way is to get private corporations to divest from fossil fuels. We've told banks to divest from fossil fuels, and they've started to get the message, but we also have to get state pension funds out of fossil fuels, so Daily Kos helps you tell your state governors and legislators to get state pension funds to divest from fossil fuel corporations. Our opponents will tell us that we would be "hurting pensioners" if we did that, but you recognize that as a rhetorical hostage crisis by now, and besides, pension funds are kind of in the driver's seat here -- corporations want their business, after all! Maybe state pension funds should act like they're in charge, then?

Around the table: why our media ignores the Afghanistan papers, and other hard truths.

Alex Shephard at The New Republic wonders "Why the Media Is Ignoring the Afghanistan Papers." Short answer: "everyone is to blame, which means no one has much of an interest in keeping the story alive." Somewhat longer answer: our media's thirst for partisan conflict makes coverage of "bipartisan failure" harder. Also, too, our President spews forth so much drama that "more complex stories, like the situation in Afghanistan, are often buried in favor of the political equivalent of sports sideline reporting." Mr. Shephard may be too nice to spell it out, but I also think we've become so cynical, all of us, that when we hear evidence that our government knew it was bollocksing up Afghanistan, we're proud of saying "and you're surprised?" As Americans, we deserve a better government than that, meaning we deserve actual surprise at such things.

This is really good news: the ACLU of Kansas has managed to shut down that state's notorious Interstate Crosscheck program, meaning it won't operate in the 2020 elections. That doesn't mean the ACLU has killed it dead, since it used a rather arcane argument to do so (that Interstate Crosscheck didn't keep voter data secure, of all things), and a lot of states still have previous Interstate Crosscheck databases and might use them to purge more voters. And the notorious Kris Kobach might create new purge lists himself -- though he's also running for Senate in 2020, and running a vote suppression operation while running for Senate might actually make him lose. Yes, even to a Democrat! Hell, he did it a year ago.

Ho hum, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy studies corporate tax avoidance during the first year after the 2017 tax "reform" that dramatically cut the corporate tax rate, and finds over 350 Fortune 500 corporations paying, on average, a little over half the new 21% rate. That tax "reform" cut the tax rate (from 35% to 21%) without closing corporate tax loopholes, but that shouldn't surprise us when our nominally "liberal" politicians' position is "cut the tax rate, but close the loopholes." An actual liberal position would be "tax the corporations harder and stop giving them welfare handouts." And then you might have actual compromise in America again. Maybe even actual bipartisanship!

Scientists point to another driver of climate change: inefficient energy grids. These energy losses -- caused by (among other things) bad wiring, poor and/or corrupt management, or natural disasters -- emit almost as much carbon as heavy trucks do, which is saying something. Getting energy corporations to upgrade their infrastructure, of course, is like pulling teeth -- they always want a welfare handout or six just to do the thing they should already be doing, the thing we would simply make them do if our lawmakers didn't all have spines of jelly.

Finally, Republicans are jumping up and down about New Jersey House Rep. Jeff Van Drew's announcement that he'll switch to the Republican party shortly, but the part of America not responding to that news with "Jeff Van Who?" is probably responding "he was a Democrat?" And how precious he is, complaining that impeachment isn't "bipartisan" enough -- has he been awake the last couple of decades? I suspect he'll lose the 2020 Republican primary in New Jersey's 2nd -- he may not even come in second! -- and then a year or two later he'll imagine the Democrats are desperate enough to take him back, and he'll be wrong, all of which will make him (as Mario Cuomo might say) just another walnut in the batter of eternity.

Around the table: featuring the continuing misadventures of President Manchild.

Although I think telling big Democratic donors they need to pay more attention to getting the message out in rural areas is not where we should concentrate our efforts, certainly Democrats should attend the fact that advertising in rural areas is a lot cheaper than in urban ones, and unions ought to think outside "we're giving to the Democratic candidate" as the solution to most political advocacy problems. Knowing Democrats, though, I bet they blow their rural ad budget on ads trumpeting "entrepreneurship" and "innovation," rather than tax-funded college and trade school and treatment for drug addiction, which we know rural folks would rather talk about.

Our Glorious Administration spent valuable time during the shutdown gutting an Obama-era regulation requiring employers to submit detailed reports on workplace injuries to our government. Because they only care about bosses, not workers! It's a shame I even have to say it out loud! Of course, given our Administration's track record in trying to gut regulations, this'll probably die in court, too -- though if you get seriously injured on the job in the meantime, that probably won't be as much comfort to you.

And now, another reminder that just because we hate our President doesn't mean we should love our FBI: they investigated a California antifa group as a "terroristic threat" after one of its members got stabbed at a neo-Nazi rally. The FBI sure put on its kid gloves talking about the KKK, too, actually saying that "some perceived" the KKK's agenda "to be supportive of a white supremacist agenda." "Some perceived"! That's not tough-cop talk, is it? In fact, it's very post-modern of them to suggest that lynchings and assaults and murders and cross-burnings and actual terroristic threats on black folks' doorsteps are justd a matter of perception.

Gunar Olsen at FAIR catches our "liberal" media worrying about a "quick exit" or a "rushed exit" from Afghanistan. Yeah, I guess 17 years isn't that long a time -- especially when you consider how long it took for us to decimate the Native American population! I'm not kidding; one "liberal" media pundit -- Max Boot, who gets unearned plaudits from folks for hating our President as if that's some big accomplishment -- actually referenced our 300-year effort to destroy the American Indian as justification for suggesting that, hey, wars take a long time if you do them right. Our war in Afghanistan has now gone on a full decade longer than World War II.

Now our President says his intelligence chiefs told him they were "totally misquoted and totally taken out of context" -- quite a feat, to be both at the same time! -- when they contradicted him on virtually every cornerstone of his foreign policy as evidenced by transcripts just about anyone can find on the internet. I really thought he'd go the "fake news" route before he went the "those people who work for me suck at their jobs" route; I just got the order wrong, then. And so did he -- if he just went the "fake news" route, he'd still be a jerk, but he might not have shown the entire world, yet again, that he's the worst boss anyone has ever had the misfortune to work for.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Administration Press Secretary-still Sarah Sanders says God "wanted" our current President to be elected President. And this might be true! Just as it might also be true that God chose him in order to a) make us, at last, completely sick of the drama that surrounds such men and b) make us, at last, stop admiring people merely because they've accumulated a lot of money. I mean, if God chooses you for something, you'd best not do a victory lap about it, because you don't know how the story's supposed to turn out.

Action: concerning war-making and pollution.

Win Without War helps you tell our Congressfolk to end the war in Afghanistan now. I know, I know, it's only been 17 years! And tolerate no backtalk from your Congressfolk (and, remember, we heard this from both parties in 2007!) about how "ending the war" would put our troops in harm's way, as if there's just no way to get soldiers out of a war zone. Wow, that phrase "ending the war would put our troops in harm's way" really is a cluster bomb of stupid. Also tolerate no hifalutin rubbish about how privatizing the war --as Erik Prince would like to do, his corporation (The Artist Formerly Known as Blackwater) having done so much for the Iraq war effort! -- would sate the public's desire to get out of the Afghanistan War without, you know, actually ending the killing and destruction. Certainly don't tolerate anyone saying the private sector does everything better than the public sector, not when the malicious and the weak take turns controlling the public sector.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to scuttle its plan to weaken fuel efficiency standards, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. Again our Administration wants to get all law-and-order on black folks, but pretends that making cars pollute less and get better mileage is a hardship. They also act like cars costing less because they're less fuel efficient (you can click your heels together three times for that one if you like) is somehow better than gas costing less for the entire life of the car. And recall, also, that our Administration actually thinks that lower gas mileage will save lives because folks will drive less and thus die in fewer car crashes. I suppose not being able to breathe the air reduces the chance you'll die of cancer, too, but what sane person would say that with a straight face?

Around the table: in which another fight between right-wingers gets exposed as drama.

Our President pulls the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, incorrectly calling the deal "one-sided" and presuming that he'll get a "better deal" out of Iran than one that already verifies the absence of nuclear weapons development. Incomprehensibly he also seems to think this strengthens his hand with North Korea. The other five nations party to the deal have said they'll continue it (and Iran remains a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons), so it's just possible this is another meaningless ball-swinging exercise from our President. But the smarter bet would be to prepare for a PR offensive ending sometime in October with war against, ahem, regime change in Iran. This, after we all remember how regime change went in Iraq and Afghanistan!

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says the stock buybacks which are the main result of Republican tax "reform" are actually good for the economy, because they "return capital to shareholders," who then "recycle() that capital through the economy." Of course, we already know that corporations were already sitting on a ton of capital they weren't "recycl(ing) through the economy," and we also know that giving a shareholder a ton of money in no way guarantees they'll actually spend it, either on jobs or cheeseburgers. Is there a lie too evil for the Foreclosure King to tell?

In a related note, Dean Baker at TruthOut gives us some hope in These Interesting Times: with stock dividend yields falling, and with so much CEO pay tied to stock options, CEOs may -- just may -- be screwing themselves out of the absurdly high salaries to which they've become accustomed! And "the sight of top management getting rich while providing mediocre returns (for shareholders) may provide sufficient motivation for shareholders to organize." Ah, but I can just see Congress passing another stupid bailout if CEOs lose too much money. We should be out in the streets if that happens.

Don Blankenship's little "Cocaine Mitch" ad (in which he infamously talks about "China people") may have aided his effort to win the Republican Senate nomination in West Virginia, but Alec MacGillis at ProPublica reminds us that when one of Mr. Blankenship's corporations spewed out a larger-than-the-Exxon-Valdez coal slurry spill that polluted the water of over 25,000 good Kentuckians back in 2000, none other than Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell was there to help him avoid taking any significant responsibility for it. Which should remind you that a lot of these "outsider" candidates are really insiders, and a lot of their "fights" are just drama. And they're not even good drama.

Finally, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman quickly resigns his position after several women accuse him of sexual assault. They call it physical abuse, he calls it "role-playing," but with his resignation a mere three hours after the New Yorker's initial report of the accusations, I guess we know which one it was. What a damn waste -- Mr. Schneiderman's resignation won't make financial predation popular or anything, but folks who do good works in the public sphere need to stop making other people's lives hell in the private sphere. I really don't care how hard that is. Anything worth doing is hard.

Around the table: featuring lessons from a Nazi wannabe rally in Georgia.

"Militarized Cops At Tiny Georgia Neo-Nazi Rally Arrest Counterprotesters For Wearing Masks" is a headline you should never have to read in a civilized society, but yeah, that happened over the weekend. And they used an anti-KKK law (no protesting in white hoods, get it?) to do it! Which just goes to show that making laws to keep people from demonstrating -- even Nazi wannabes who would very much like everyone who opposes them to die -- just isn't a good idea. The good news? These little Nazi wannabe rallies are drawing fewer and fewer people. Maybe they really are vampires shriveling up in sunlight!

From the "All Corporate Media is Bad!" file: Comcast makes MSNBC's Morning Joe program run an eight-minute plug for "Comcast Cares Day," celebrating how magnificent Comcast is. Comcast owns MSNBC, as you know, as well as at least eight other NBC channels that also ran some version of that plug. It's good to be reminded, also, that Morning Joe threw Comcast's CEO softball questions on the air during Comcast's aborted attempt to assimilate Time-Warner, and that Comcast did its damnedest to stamp out coverage of the hated Trans-Pacific "Partnership." I guess it's good news that Comcast, still one of America's most hated corporations, didn't get what it wanted in either battle. And the fact that they continue to use David Fricking Cohen as one of their public faces suggests they have no idea how to win hearts and minds.

White man with no pants kills four and wounds four at a Nashville Waffle House, and a black man stops him from doing further harm by taking his rifle from him, suffering burns to his hand and forearm in the process. I sure hope I'm wrong about this, but I fear that I'm going to be hearing in a few days that James Shaw "is no angel." Because I'm already hearing about how "troubled" the shooter is.

In a completely unsurprising development, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) voted for the nomination of Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State in committee, after saying he wouldn't. Sen. Paul said he changed his mind after "receiving assurances" that Mr. Pompeo also opposes the Iraq and Afghanistan oh Jesus Mary and Joseph why do I bother? Unlike his father, Rand Paul only has principles when it doesn't matter; when it does, those principles are always negotiable. And given that the Pompeo nomination already had enough votes to succeed, why didn't he simply "stick to his principles," since it no longer mattered? Seriously, I don't see his endgame here -- it's not like he's ever going to be President.

Finally, a study finds that the President's most devoted supporters aren't driven by "economic anxiety" but by fear of losing their status in society -- or, as the study's author puts it, "It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all." All together now: waaaaaaah! My opinion doesn't count for everything anymore! But if you tell these voters that this is America and you should create your own damn status, they'd just respond that black people have their status handed to them -- a patently absurd contention if you have the ability to think clearly for seconds at a time -- and by the time you respond that what they call "handouts for blacks" are actually just attempts to keep white people from depriving blacks of their rights, these voters will have moved on to whatever else diddles their rage gland. The good news? Only 25% of the electorate is batshit insane, and the rest of us can -- and must -- contain them. It is the job of civilized people, after all.

Around the table: featuring a busy President, war-hungry media, a depleted EPA, and evangelical racists.

President Trump pardons former Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff/infamous racist Joe Arpaio, convicted of ignoring a judge's order to stop detaining Latinos merely on suspicion of having immigrated to America illegally. But you know, this is the kind of thing that won't hurt Mr. Trump or his fellow Republicans at the polls, as long as Democrats keep trotting out these little Ossoffs who stand for nothing and stand up to nothing. 2018 won't be the year the "sane" politicians strike back; it'll be another year for "shoot from the hip" outsiders to clean up, and weakling establishment Democrats will realize this too late, if at all.

President Trump prepares to give formal instructions to the Department of Defense in re his plan to ban transgendered folks from serving our country in the military. But, in what he may imagine to be a compromise, he'll leave it up to the military to decide whether to expel transgendered folks based on how readily they'll be able to fight wars or complete lengthy missions, which sure sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Again, heckuva job, establishment Democrats who counted on Donald Trump to lose the Presidency all by himself!

FAIR finds too many "liberal" media types still getting all hot and bothered about how "Presidential" Mr. Trump was when announcing his expansion of the Afghanistan war. It isn't as bad as it was the last time Mr. Trump dropped some bombs (or didn't yell at the top of his lungs on TV!), but any amount of enthusiasm over war-making is too much -- a lot of folks who make war for a living will tell you that, too! -- and slamming the "liberal" media for forgetting all about Mr. Trump's enthusiasm about Afghanistan mineral resources is of course entirely appropriate.

Eric Katz at Government Executive reports that the EPA has lost about half of its criminal investigators over the last decade. Folks who constantly shout about law-and-order should be quite upset; if they're not, I guess that means they don't think pollution is really a crime -- or they're buying into New Democrat bullshit about the technology for this kind of crime detection being so much better than it used to be. Call me old-fashioned, but I think people are the best "technology" for crime-fighting.

On that note, we learn that Google's Artificial Intelligence (or AI) project aimed at curbing toxic online commentary isn't very good at what it tries to do. To the degree that we should be doing this, why in the world aren't we hiring people to do it? People are, after all, a lot more subtle than the subtlest computer, and the number of people who alienate everyone around them is actually very small. Maybe they use AI because they don't have to pay AI. But if you want nice things, you have to pay workers to maintain them.

Finally, Randall Balmer at the Los Angeles Times instructs us that "Under Trump, Evangelicals Show Their True Racist Colors." His business roundtables have abandoned him in Charlottesville's wake, but his big-name evangelical supporters haven't, except for the one Clinton/Obama voter who had one foot out the door anyway. Good, also, to be reminded that racism, not abortion, was the original driving force behind right-wing evangelism -- and a lot of these old school evangelicals are still with us. Maybe we could isolate their supporters from them?

Action: Afghanistan, and GMO food.

President Trump's votaries won't regard his plan to increase American forces in Afghanistan as Dear Leader transforming into Just Another Politician, but the rest of us should remember how "nation-building" began in the first place -- war is unpopular enough that Congress hasn't formally declared one since FDR, and Tha Bush Mobb correctly sussed out that A War to Hunt Terrorists wouldn't be enough to keep America voting Republican, even after 9.11. Tha Bush Mobb also correctly sussed out that deadlines for withdrawal blunted some of the criticism they deserved, a luxury Mr. Trump now won't have with his declaration that his new plan is "results-based," whatever those results would be. We should also remember how impressed Mr. Trump has been lately with all the rare earth metals one can find in Afghanistan. Anyway, Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that three Presidents have now abused to start or ramp up wars all over the planet without getting proper, Constitutional authorization from Congress.

Meanwhile, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, has issued a 120-day ban on a Monsanto pesticide called Dicamba, due to the hundreds of complaints from state farmers about Dicamba drifting into neighboring fields and harming crops. Dicamba is yet another Monsanto pesticide designed to kill weeds on its own crops they've genetically-engineered to withstand it, which of course will ultimately have the effect of killing all the crops in the field but Monsanto's -- and forcing farmers to switch to Monsanto's GMO seed or go out of business! Can anyone say antitrust violation? I mean, seriously, this is out of a dystopian sci-fi novel. And I almost forgot to mention that Dicamba stays in the soil for a year, can find its way to nearby water sources, and thus harm fish as well. Gov. Hutchinson has done the honorable thing and listened to his constituents in this matter, but now he must ban the stuff forever and for always, so Avaaz helps you tell Gov. Hutchinson to keep Dicamba out of Arkansas's fields, and thus help ensure food safety for good Arkansans and their descendents.

Action: pollution, unconstitutional war-making, and automatic voter registration.

By now you know that the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency has put the the Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) in clear peril, what with Mr. Trump himself having declared his hostility to all regulations and having vowed to abolish the EPA, with a "senior advisor" who calls people who care about clean air and clean water "greentards," and with a transition head who decides to make a big drama of tearing up the Paris climate accord, as if that's how a grown-up acts. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Senators to ensure that the EPA continues to protect good Americans from pollution. Because, after all, your elected officials are still supposed to answer to you, not their big donors, and that's true regardless of what they think. And nobody in America wants environmental "policy" that gives polluters everything and people nothing and that drives up health care costs far beyond the "costs" (mainly to CEO pocketbooks) of keeping our air and water clean. And if, like me, you were outside this past Christmas Day in 74-degree weather in the Northeast, you know climate change isn't some "hoax" perpetrated on the American people, and most Americans would seem to agree with you about that.

Meanwhile, the Oval Office's current occupant, President Obama, has lately (as in right after the election) asked Congress for another $11.6 billion to fight all those undeclared and unconstitutional wars we're currently waging in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Wait, you thought those last two were over? As if! Mr. Obama, if anything, has damaged our Constitutional war-making capability even more than Mr. Bush did, by failing, even, to make a show of coming to Congress to authorize adventures in Libya and Syria. (His Administration says the 2001 AUMF gives him all the authority he needs. Nobody could have predicted that power would get abused!) So Roots Action helps you tell our government to abandon plans to spend yet more billions of dollars on yet more undeclared wars. It's not enough to note that the U.N. instructs us that $11.6 billion could remove barriers to clean water for everyone on the planet, or that $11.6 billion represents all by itself more money than all but 15 nations (including the U.S.) spend on their military -- asking for more money for more undeclared wars in regions that don't pose an existential threat (seriously, now, are we ever surrendering to ISIS?) is not just unconstitutional, but immoral.

Finally, given reports about voters disenfranchised by the Interstate Crosscheck database and by organizations like the Voter "Integrity" Project, it's good news that six states (and the District of Columbia) have legalized automatic voter registration, where you get registered every time you get or renew your driver's license or get or renew other state ID. And despite what you may have heard, none of these states actually force people to register to vote; in each of them you can opt out of registration if you so desire. These six states include blue states like Oregon and California and red states like West Virginia and Alaska, so you'd probably figure that automatic voter registration has actual bipartisan support, versus all the stupid corporate crap that politicians and their "liberal" media enablers call "bipartisan." Hence Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to pass laws enabling automatic voter registration. As always, don't pay any regard to the arguments of haters, who say it's "already easy enough" to register. In states where right-wingers can challenge black folks' voting rights merely by alleging they've moved, and have their local governments simply toss the registration, it ain't all that easy.

Around the table: key findings about the Middle East, the working class, "Broken Windows" policing, methane emissions, and Olivia de Havilland.

Patrick Cockburn finds us not learning from our Middle Eastern adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria very well. Key point: "in most of these countries, where Islam is the dominant religion, extreme Salafi-Jihadi movements, including the Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda, and the Taliban are essentially the only available vehicles for protest and rebellion. By now, they have completely replaced the socialist and nationalist movements that predominated in the twentieth century." Which you'll find resonant, not just if you read about the growing gap between rich and poor in Syria, but if you remember that our troubles with Iran started with a CIA-aided overthrow of the popularly-elected nationalizer-of-BP-oil Prime Minister Mossadeq, which paved the way for the Shah, which paved the way for the Ayatollahs.

Beverly Silver at Roar finds declarations of the death of the working class and/or the labor movement to be premature. They declared the labor movement dead in the early 20th century, of course, before its heyday starting with the New Deal, and though it's easy to look at the data and call what's been happening over the last 20 years a "race to the bottom," Ms. Silver notes that whenever corporations look for cheaper labor, they wind up creating new working classes wherever they land, who will soon have new grievances that corporations ignore at their own peril. Will there, one day, really be "nowhere left for capital to run?" We can only hope!

Josmar Trujillo at FAIR reminds us that "The Busted Theory of Broken Windows Still Has Media Defenders." So when even the NYPD Inspector General reports that cracking down on low-level lawlessness actually doesn't reduce felony-level lawlessness, what does the "liberal" media do? Act like it's the "bombshell" revelation it's clearly not, regurgitate the Broken Windows gospel with their fingers in their ears, or launch truly hysterical attacks against the report (with one "liberal" media outlet claiming the NYPD IG report was flawed because the NYPD IG's office is "filled with prosecutors and cops," which phrase I had not previously encountered from the "liberal" media as a criticism).

Over 100 community/environmental groups ask the EPA to investigate whether the EPA's Science Advisory Board Chair, Dr. David Allen, produced fraudulent research on methane leakage. When the inventor of the Bacharach Hi-Flow methane sampler goes on the record saying his machine has a fault that causes it to tend to low-ball methane emissions from gas drilling, I'd think you'd at least have to look into that -- but Dr. Allen, of course, doubled down on his research rather than be a grown-up and admit he might be wrong. The punchline: Dr. Allen gets some of his research money from oil and gas corporations.

Finally, two-time Oscar-winning actress Olivia de Havilland turned 100 on July 1, so Thomas J. Stipanowich at the Los Angeles Times recalls the time Ms. de Havilland "Took on the Studio System and Won." Finding herself unexpectedly not at the end of her seven-year contract in 1943 -- for years she'd been "arm candy" in films with male stars, and had even willfully taken on suspensions-without-pay so she could avoid such roles -- Ms. de Havilland sued her employer, Warner Brothers, and a California appeals court agreed with her that Warner couldn't lawfully "tack on" all that suspension time to her contract. Then she won her two Oscars, and actors began to find contractual terms considerably more favorable to them. She took on big money and not only lived to tell about it, but she thrived. That makes her a hero.

Around the table: from unelected bureaucrats in Puerto Rico to a transgendered woman in the Utah Senate race.

Robert Reich describes the five basic principles of patriotism. "Coming together," "sharing the burdens," "preserving...our democracy," "work(ing) to improve our government," and avoiding "divisiveness" are five pretty good values, of course, but why are they American? Because Americans say so, that's why, and if a foolish and venal aristocracy has seized power in our land, that doesn't make us less patriotic.

Over 50 retired generals and admirals call on both political parties to reject torture in party platforms. And this is where that constant right-wing refrain "listen to the generals" comes in! Or not -- right-wingers know, in their hearts, that they only listen to the generals (and everyone else!) when they already agree with them.

Senate approves their version of the nefarious PROMESA Act, which would allow unelected bureaucrats to take money from good Puerto Ricans and give it to banksters. Maybe if Democrats put it like that, it wouldn't have passed. No use telling me that "Puerto Rico should pay its debts like everyone else," when a) everyone else doesn't pay their debts, especially the very wealthy, and b) they don't have debts because of good Puerto Ricans, but because of corrupt banksters and politicians.

John Nichols profiles Misty Snow, a trans woman who just won the Democratic nomination in the Utah 2016 U.S. Senate race. Ms. Snow ticks off a lot of the right boxes -- she supports a $15/hour minimum wage, Medicare-for-all health care, and campaign finance reform, among other things -- though I'd be really impressed if she also says that all of Mike Lee's feints left (on Afghanistan, criminal justice reform, and government spying) don't seem to have amounted for much. Utah is one of the most Republican states in the union, so this could be a very educational race. Maybe even Democrats will learn something from it!

Michael Corcoran at TruthOut tells us Hillary Clinton's short list for VP has only three names on it. Elizabeth Warren won't get it because Wall Street will have a hissy fit, and that leaves Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine and HUD Secretary Julian Castro. I've been telling co-workers that Mr. Kaine is the pick, but then I read this passage about Mr. Castro: "because he has never served in Congress or run for federal office, it is hard to examine his financial backers or even find out his statements on scores of issues." So it's Castro, then.

Finally, The Straight Dope reveals why tabloids generally don't get sued into oblivion. The biggest theoretical issue, of course, is proving they printed information they knew was false; it's not like you can cut open a reporter or an editor and count rings. "Ah, 59 rings! A prime number! He knew!" More interesting, though, is the first paragraph's account of defamation lawsuits against Gawker secretly funded by Peter Thiel, who's still sore about being outed by Gawker back in 2007, summarized thusly: "If you’ve got enough money, you don’t need to prove libel or privacy violation in your own case...You just have to spend eight or nine years burying your nemesis in other people’s cases until you find one with enough merit to put ’em out of their misery."

Around the table: environmental racism in Guatemala, and other issues.

Guatemalan activists fight the continued contamination of Lake Atitlán. Local government bodies are supposed to attend to environmental matters, of course, but they tend to ignore complaints and then say they've got no money when they can't ignore the complaints anymore. Then some larger, extra-national body moves in and imposes a solution that doesn't address the problem (unless you consider "a momentary shortfall in my cronies' wallets" to be a "problem"). And it's curious that indigenous populations seem to bear the brunt of environmental damage in Guatemala, just like non-whites do here in America.

Iraq and Afghanistan war vets are suffering serious health problems due to massive open-air "burn pits," designed to dispose of trash. Everything went into these pits -- medical wastes, weapons, plastics, metals, tires, even body parts -- and naturally Kellogg-Brown-Root (then a Halliburton subsidiary) built them not just in violation of our own clean air laws but also the military's own environmental regulations. Thus, any soldier who lived near one is in danger of having serious health problems, from respiratory issues to cancer. But, hey, bygones, as long as Tha Bush Mobb's cronies made money.

Get your surprised face ready: the National Low Income Housing Coalition can't find a single state in America where someone can afford a two-bedroom apartment on the federal minimum wage without paying more than 30% of their income. (That last part is important, as banks used to hold you to the 30% standard before giving you a mortgage -- until they stopped caring about making good loans, that is.) Even a $15/hour minimum wage wouldn't get you a two-bedroom apartment in more than 16 states, and likely not in the biggest cities of those 16 states, either. But please, right-wingers, tell me again how easy it would be for anyone to make it if they would just sell their souls and act like banksters.

The New York Times finds Hillary Clinton "Struggl(ing) to Find Footing in Unusual Race." That couldn't be because she's trying to beat a rich idiot while trying not to lose the financial backing of other rich idiots, could it? I didn't read that in the article anywhere, possibly because the New York Times has a similar problem. Hillary Clinton will have trouble beating Donald Trump because only two kinds of candidates have won elections since 1992: a) incumbents and b) candidates who've been able to sell themselves as a "different kind of politician." And Hillary Clinton is neither one.

Finally, Gary Johnson and William Weld secure the Libertarian party nods for President and Vice President. Convention balloting was unusually contentious, especially for Mr. Weld, a former Republican who governed Massachusetts more or less like a Democrat. Now, perhaps, the Koch brothers can open up their purported $900 million warchest for a Presidential ticket that doesn't have Donald Trump but still shares their values of limited government. I kid, of course.

Action: retirement advisors, refugee families, and antibiotic abuse.

You recall how late last week, the Department of Labor ruled that investment advisors handling retirement accounts and pensions must adhere to a "fiduciary standard," meaning they must put their clients' best interests before their own? You'd think that's pretty common-sensical, right? Yet some Congressfolk are talking about passing legislation preventing the Department of Labor's rules from taking effect. If Democrats weren't such weaklings, this is an argument they'd relish having -- I'd be running statements like do you seriously oppose making retirement advisors work for their clients rather than themselves? in ads all over TV and the internet, but Democrats would probably call that "uncivil." But again: it doesn't matter what greedy Republicans and spineless Democrats want; it matters what we want. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to stand up for retirees and future retirees by rejecting legislation that would weaken the fiduciary standard for retirement advisors.

Meanwhile, Mohammad Yousaf Yahyapur worked as a translator and administrative liaison for American journalists in Afghanistan during the war, and so naturally he faced death threats and sought refuge here in the U.S. He's been a refugee since 2013 (would Donald Trump call him "one of the good ones"?), but the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (or USCIS) hasn't acted on his request to bring his wife and three kids over for permanent residency status. Hence Megan Phan, of Syracuse, NY -- whose own grandfather did similar work in Vietnam during the war, and suffered similar hardships until he was able to emigrate with his family to America -- has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Senators Schumer and Gillibrand of New York to push the USCIS to grant permanent residency to Mohammad's family. If Mr. Yahyapur faced death threats for his work in Afghanistan, what do you think his family faces now? Are we in the business of stifling our generosity to those who risk their lives to help our war efforts? Not in my America, we're not.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell five major fast-food corporations to stop serving meat from animals shot through with antibiotics. With nearly four out of every five antibiotics in America used not on sick people or animals but on healthy animals just to make them produce a little more meat and endure their squalid living conditions a little better, two million Americans get hit by superbugs every year, and 20,000 of them die, and that's too high a price to pay for richer big ag CEOs. You may well be saying to yourself, self, why go after fast-food corporations for this? It's not like they're in the business of making healthy food anyway! But fast-food corporations are very sensitive to bad PR -- they get a lot of it already for, you know, serving unhealthy food and contributing to childhood obesity and paying their workers in dung pellets -- and they have lately proven somewhat nimble in adjusting their practices. And a lot of people eat fast food, so antibiotic abuse puts a lot of people in danger. So let's help each other out.

Action: soldiers' benefits, drug sentencing, and paid sick leave.

H.R. 3016, passed by the House last month, would cut the monthly Basic Allowance for Housing (or BAH) for children who've inherited their parents' Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits -- by hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month! -- and now S. 425 would not only make that same cut, but would lengthen our soldiers' minimum term of service before they can pass on benefits to their children in the first place (which, yes, is also a benefit cut), and then cut the cost-of-living increase to veterans' housing benefits by one percent every year over the next five years. Remember when our politicians told us that when we opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria, we were "against the troops"? Nickel-and-diming our soldiers after they've served their country is appalling enough, but there should be a special level of Hell for politicians who would do that to the soldiers who did their best for the criminally insane morons who sent them to the Middle East in the first place. IAVA helps you tell Congress to stop playing budget-hawk with our soldiers.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Malone, of Huntsville, AL, has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Obama Administration to pardon his son, Edwin Walter Rubis, who has served 18 years of a 40-year sentence for pot possession. Even if this wasn't Mr. Rubis's first offense, forty freaking years for drug possession? I would call that criminally insane. The story of Mr. Rubis's conviction is extraordinarily sad -- his lawyer told him to rat out other drug users, but Mr. Rubis apparently couldn't do that, because not every drug user knows every other drug user, and was thus punished for his "reticence" with a draconian sentence -- but the story of how he's used his time in jail, at least, is rather less so. Still, you do have to wonder about a society that would rather punish drug addiction than try to change it. I think most Americans are tired of being "tough on crime," but it's not enough to presume the existence of an arc of history bending toward justice -- we still have to bend it.

Finally, the Obama Administration's Department of Labor has decided to continue to take public comments on the Department's plan mandating paid sick leave days for employees of federal contractors -- up to seven annually, for some 800,000 workers -- and Moms Rising helps you leave a comment supporting paid sick leave, if you haven't already. We already know the reasons why paid sick leave is a good thing: workers won't go to work sick and then make their co-workers sick as often; workers will be able to better care for sick children; and workers trying to escape domestic abuse situations will be able to take time off from work to take care of that. It isn't just workers who think paid sick leave is a good idea -- a lot of corporate executives see it, too. But if Republicans want to continue ignoring not only the will of the people but the will of corporate executives, then I would like to encourage you to call their anti-paid sick leave stance objectively pro-domestic abuse. Or objectively pro-sick child. I'm well past done fighting intransigence with sweet reason.

Around the table: terrorism brings out the *worst* in Our Glorious Elites! And other stories.

Frank Barat, writing in Counterpunch, tells us some hard truths about the terrorist attacks in Brussels. You don't need to be completely against prisons (as some of my compatriots on the left and right are!) to remember that the OGs of ISIS all met in Iraqi internment camps. And it's funny that Turkish Kurds, who are actually beating ISIS on the ground, can't get any help from Our Glorious Elites. But you better believe they'll fight like hell to be able to break into your phones whenever they want.

Zack Cartwright, writing at USUncut, finds "Five Outrageous Examples of Voter Suppression in the Arizona Primary." You'll recognize number one -- the absurdly long lines of voters in Maricopa County, which for some reason opened less than one-third the polling locations they opened in 2012 -- from the long lines you saw in the more, ah, urban areas of Ohio during the 2004 Presidential elections. You'll also be very surprised to learn that the more Hispanic areas of Maricopa County hardly had any polling locations open at all. The other three examples aren't any better.

Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, finds a litany of Bush Mobb-era pro-torture punditoids "suddenly concerned with human rights" now that President Obama has visited Cuba. These include the coiner of the phrase "enhanced interrogation" and a "putative liberal" who "had not once tweeted out the words 'human rights'" in 6,000 twitterings until President Obama went to Cuba. I'm pretty sure that if a Republican President had gone to Cuba, they'd have made fools of themselves giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Ho hum, banksters are fighting the notion of a financial transaction tax (a.k.a. the "Robin Hood tax"). In other news, burglars don't think laws against burglary are necessary. And what is the banksters' reasoning? That it would prevent them from redistributing more money upward to themselves "weaken markets and hurt small investors." Always the big guy takes the little guy hostage when you try to take the big guy's unearned goodies! And the banksters "weaken markets" much better than any government ever could, with their hifalutin financial "instruments" that have nothing to do with loaning money to build businesses, create jobs, and improve processes.

Finally, Newsweek reminds us that Joseph E. Schmitz, who has actually been named as a "foreign policy advisor" by Donald Trump himself, had to quit as Defense Department inspector general in 2005, amid allegations (mainly from Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley) that (among other things!) he blocked investigations into Iraq and Afghanistan contractors. In other words, he was too corrupt even for Tha Bush Mobb -- so of course he's now he's a Trump advisor! Another fun fact: Mr. Schmitz's father was expelled by the John Birch Society -- for his extremism.

Around the table: the crocodile tears of Washington, D.C.'s former Mayor, and other follies.

Tennessee House Civil Justice Subcommittee votes down Tennessee Natural Marriage Defense Act in well-attended hearing. If you agitated against that bill last week, congratulate yourself. But now, the bad news: Tennessee state legislators have filed no less than eleven bills aiming, in some way, to injure gay and transgendered folks, presuming to elevate the whole poop-sticking-to-wall process into a Pollock-style masterwork. More news, and alerts, as they arrive.

Janine Jackson at FAIR writes about our "liberal" media's tendency to give Donald Trump "a near-constant, legitimizing megaphone" instead of actually covering what he says and does with any critical acumen. It's one thing to presume that "liberal" media journalists are so lazy they settle for big drama like the kind Mr. Trump keeps dishing out -- but it's another thing entirely to find CBS CEO Les Moonves actively cheer on the "rancor" because it brings his media corporation more money. He even says "Go Donald!" Ten bucks says he's so post-modern he thinks it's all a joke.

Former Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray claims WalMart "shafted" his city by cancelling the construction of build two stores in poor neighborhoods after building three stores in more gentrified areas of the city. Naturally, WalMart's promise was "subject and contingent upon business conditions," and I'd feel like an idiot to presume that Mr. Gray and the rest of his government didn't already know that. It's enough to make you think that when Mr. Gray vetoed the city living wage ordinance in 2013 while Walmart was reminding him of their quite conditional "partnership," he was the one really doing the shafting.

Jeb Bush praises Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder for "stepping up right now" to handle the Flint water crisis. That would be the water crisis Gov. Snyder caused by appointing an "Emergency Manager" to run Flint with a mandate to cut costs, but bygones! I guess Mr. Bush figures he's reminding people that leadership is harder than Donald Trump would like you to think, but he's actually reminding people that he's on the side of the most despised Governor in America right now. Remember when I said you couldn't count a bastard out? I think maybe now you can count Jeb Bush out.

Finally, President Obama sits down for an interview with Politico, and suggests that "the degree to which the Republican rhetoric and Republican vision has moved not just to the right but has moved to a place that is unrecognizable." Why has that happened? He doesn't tell us and Politico doesn't ask, but it could be because of a center-right President too "busy" with "sav(ing) the auto industry" and "stabiliz(ing) Afghanistan" and the like to push politics where folks wanted it to go, which was leftward. I mean, did Ronald Reagan worry about cleaning up Jimmy Carter's mess, or did he announce a new sheriff was in town? This is why we still have a "running thread" asking "(w)hy are we still constrained by the terms of the debate that were set by Ronald Reagan 30 years ago?"

Action: war in Afghanistan, environmental regulation in Pennsylvania, and sentencing reform in America.

As you know, President Obama has reversed course somewhat in Afghanistan, saying he'll leave almost 10,000 troops there through 2016 and then more than 5,000 troops there afterward -- but, as you also know, President Obama promised he'd end the war in Afghanistan for-real for-real, so CREDO helps you remind President Obama to keep his promise to end the 14-years-and-counting Afghanistan war. Not that we should be surprised -- he said he'd end the Iraq war, too, before beginning his unauthorized-by-Congress air strikes in Syria purportedly designed to attack ISIS. Still, a man does become concerned with his legacy six or seven years into his Administration, and a man does become concerned, also, with the multitudinous promises he's made that he hasn't kept. At least you'd like to think so! We're not exactly dealing with a promising military situation there, either -- the corrupt Afghanistan government can't seem to get by without us, and they need a lot more of our help than we're willing to give. I was long a proponent of the get-bin-Laden-get-out school. Well, we got bin Laden, so we should have gotten out long ago.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state legislature apparently plans to take up, as early as today, HB 965/SB 562, which would impede the ability of the state to implement and enforce environmental regulations. We strive to impede the ability of the state to spy on us and throw us in jail when we haven't done anything wrong, but we strive to improve the ability of the state to keep big corporations from polluting our air and water, and we do both of these things because we love freedom -- not just the freedom from state harassment, but the freedom to be healthy and pursue happiness. And no, corporate titans do not "exercise their right to pursue happiness" when they try to cajole legislatures into passing bills that would reduce public transparency on regulatory changes and allow Assembly committees to essentially nullify regulatory changes without actually going through the trouble of passing laws -- they're running roughshod over our right to pursue happiness. So both the Sierra Club and Penn Environment help you tell the Pennsylvania state legislature to respect the regulatory process and reject HB 965.

Finally, Congress comes back to work today, and the Senate Judiciary Committee might actually act on S. 2123, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, beginning with a hearing on sentencing reform today. S. 2123 wouldn't gut the mandatory minimum sentencing regime in America, but it would take steps toward making that regime less repressive -- it would reduce some mandatory minimum sentences, give judges more room to give non-violent drug offenders sentences lower than the relevant mandatory minimums, and would apply previous mandatory minimum reforms retroactively, i.e., to prisoners who were sentenced before the reforms went into effect. When we supported the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, you may recall, we wanted current federal prisoners to be eligible for the reduced mandatory minimums the law mandates, and couldn't get it; with S. 2123, we can. The bill isn't everything a good American could want, but it will put us in a good position to get more of what we want in the future. Hence the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Senator to support reasonable sentencing reform in America by supporting S. 2123.

Action: saving an Afghan interpreter, and punishing corporate climate change deniers.

First things first: Jeramie Kenyon of Huntsville, AL has started a petition on Change.org with which you can tell our government to help her friend Sayed (no last name given, for reasons which will become obvious), who has interpreted for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan for six years and has applied for a Special Immigrant Visa, come to the United States. Whatever we may think of the "war on terror," Sayed helped our war effort in Afghanistan for the best of reasons: he lived under the repressive Taliban regime there, and wanted to help his country change for the better. Sayed has apparently saved countless lived and survived two IED attacks himself, despite getting seriously injured each time -- but, as you might imagine, he is unable to return home, lest Taliban marauders kill his family, as they have threatened to do. And with American soldiers finally leaving after 15 years, soon he's going to be out of a job. I never said we might as well stick out these wars since we were already there, because that's hostage reasoning. But we owe it to those folks who've helped us that we should help them escape oppression.

And now, here's a novel petition from CREDO, one which helps you tell President Obama and the Justice Department to prosecute ExxonMobil for its decades-long campaign to deceive the American public about the seriousness of climate change. Turns out there's precedent for such a prosecution: our government prosecuted tobacco corporations under the RICO (or Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations) Act, and that prosecution revealed that the tobacco corporations knew all about the deleterious health effects of their products, but lied about it. Likewise, we know that ExxonMobil not only knew fossil-fuel pollution is a main cause of climate change, but actually helped scientists learn about climate change during the late '70s and early '80s. Does that make this a slam-dunk case? Not by itself, no -- Exxon's leadership has changed enough over the years that I suppose they could defeat a suit by claiming their ignorance is just that. Still, I certainly think there's enough here to start an investigation. Jim Inhofe won't like it, but he doesn't get all the say around here.

Around the table: our elites descend further into barbarism -- but a woman built a successful girls' school in Afghanistan.

An elderly woman at a Jeb Bush townhall in New Hampshire is America's greatest citizen today, for questioning Mr. Bush's stated desire to "phase out" Medicare. With "I paid into that for years and now you want to take it away?" and "It's not an entitlement, I earned that," she says the things I wish everyone would say to anyone who wants to kill Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid! (You pay into that last one, too -- and you might need it one day.) And n.b. that when Jeb's on the ropes, he retorts that Medicare is "actuarially unsound," a phrase sure to resonate with the right-wing rageheads he needs to win primaries.

The House of Representatives passes H.R. 237, which would revoke your passport (or deny its renewal) if you've ever "aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise helped" terrorists. And what constitutes "help"? Read the bill as many times as you like, and you still won't know. Again: the Constitution defines treason, in Article III, Section 3, as "only in levying War against them (i.e., the United States), or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." But our government wants to keep lowering the bar until it can oppress you for supporting its own enemies, not America's enemies. There's always a difference.

It sure looks like Face the Nation's John Dickerson, in his questioning of Secretary of State Kerry and Secretary of Energy Moniz over the proposed Iran nukes deal, wants everyone to know how big his testicles are. Showing skepticism of Administration statements is his job, but he's not doing his job here -- civilized people shouldn't treat Mr. Netanyahu's criticisms like they're not hysterical, and how would Mr. Dickerson like it if Iran insisted on anytime-anywhere inspection of any place in the U.S.?

Boeing President says it's important to renew the Export-Import Bank's charter because Boeing needs to compete with foreign airline corporations on a "level playing field." ITEP Director Matt Gardner finds that funny, because Boeing hasn't paid one dime in federal or state corporate taxes in over 13 years. I guess by "level," Boeing's President means "completely tilted in my direction so I can obliterate all competitors."

Finally, Kristin Moe and Nathan Tobey interview Razia Jan, who built a girls' school in rural Afghanistan not only without getting herself killed, but by patiently working to get the support of the men there. No spoilers, because some of the material in here is quite moving -- it'd make a great film. And there are lessons for us, as liberals, as we try to make the world better in the face of right-wing opposition.

Action: fighting "honor killings" in Afghanistan, and fighting corporate campaign donations at the state level.

A 10-year-old girl named Brishna got raped in Afghanistan last May, possibly by a local mullah -- and as if that isn't enough, now her male relatives want to "kill her and dump her in the river." Why on Earth? Because folks in Afghanistan think that rape survivors bring shame upon families, hence the menfolk "erase" the shame by killing her, in what they call an "honor killing." Yep, heaping murder upon rape sure does "restore" honor quite nicely, doesn't it? And Afghanistan's legal code, while not explicitly allowing this sort of thing, does mandate reduced sentences for "honor" killings -- which is a loophole I'm sure never gets abused in Afghanistan. Despite the explicit threat to her life originating from within her family, police returned the girl to her family a few months ago, which is real Pontius Pilate of them. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell Afghanistan's President and Attorney General to protect Brishna and repeal that part of Afghanistan's penal code that lets people off easier for "honor" killings. It's their country, but no law prevents us from applying the Big Stick of bad PR.

Meanwhile, I can't believe I didn't think of this before: since our Congress won't do anything to fix the problems exacerbated by the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC decision -- you remember, the decision that declared that corporations are "people," and allowed far more corporate spending on political campaigns than ever before -- perhaps the states will do something. And Maryland state Senator Jamie Raskin has crafted model legislation at the state level that would require corporations to put proposed campaign contributions to a shareholder vote, and would stop those contributions dead unless those votes got a majority in favor. Congress won't listen -- even that asshole Mitch McConnell, who has nothing to offer the good folks in Kentucky aside from his bottomless hatred of Barack Obama and his ability to raise campaign funds, is about to get re-elected -- but your state legislators, who are more likely to actually face their constituents, might be more responsive. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators and Governors to curb corporate campaign contributions.

Action: humanitarian aid for an Afghan family, tax relief for domestic violence survivors, and getting forced arbitration clauses out of your contract with your bank.

First things first. Mohammad Usafi was an Afghani native who volunteered to serve the U.S. Marines as an Afghan interpreter, and the Taliban hasn't forgotten -- first they tortured and murdered his father in 2009, and then four years later they held his three-year-old brother for ransom, forcing them to make the drop at his father's grave. Afterward, Mr. Usafi and his family fled to Pakistan, and while a friend in the Marines was able to help get Mr. Usafi a visa to the United States after three years via the Special Immigrant Program (with some vital assistance from Sens. McCain and Shaheen), his family remains in hiding in Pakistan, unable to work, go to school, or even leave their residence. Hence Mr. Usafi has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Department of Homeland Security to grant Mr. Usafi's family "humanitarian parole" so they can come to America at least temporarily. DHS instructs us that "temporarily" generally extends for the length of the humanitarian emergency that caused the request, so if we get them here, they could be safe for a while.

Meanwhile, as you know, the Affordable Care Act extends tax credits to help pay for coverage via the federal health insurance exchange, and married couples have to file their tax returns together to get the tax credit. However, the law also allows the IRS to make rules that could help survivors of domestic violence get the tax credits they need without having to file jointly with a partner who's beating the crap out of them, and the IRS is now taking public comments on proposed rules. So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the IRS that survivors of domestic violence should be able to get a hand up from our government via a tax credit for health insurance. Among other things, the NWLC helps you ask the IRS for a "transition" period that would help folks who are separated but not divorced -- since domestic violence survivors frequently find their spouses less than willing to divorce, for reasons you might imagine -- and permit consideration of exceptional circumstances, since many abusers doggedly refuse to obey a calendar when abusing their loved ones.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell five big banks to stop putting forced arbitration clauses into their customers' contracts, then Public Citizen helps you do that. You may well be asking yourself: self, why should the big banks care what we think? It goes beyond my oft-stated law that there is-so such a thing as bad PR -- as it happens, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is mulling whether to keep banks from forcing these clauses on good Americans like you and I, and what do you suppose banks will say? That everybody loves forced arbitration? Of course not -- they'll say our customers don't really care about forced arbitration. Go on the record as saying you do care that banksters want to deny you a day in court when they do you wrong, and instead want you to go before an arbitrator they choose and they pay for and they will find it much more difficult to claim their customers "just don't care." Whenever a corporation tries to take your rights from you, you should care.

Around the table: the future of the American economy revealed! And other stories.

FAIR tackles "Four Myths About Obama's War on ISIS." These are: that ISIS is anywhere near attacking the U.S., that Mr. Obama is a "reluctant warrior," that Congress's Constitutional authority to declare war "gets in the way" of good policy, and that we stood and watched while Syria deteriorated and could have prevented all of this if we'd just gotten in earlier. That last item is a particularly pungent slab of hot-and-steaming -- like the CIA wasn't already arming Syrian rebels, like our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have "prevented" bad things from happening.

Nate Cohn tells us "Why Democrats Can't Win the House." Long story short: when Democrats win urban districts by super-duper-majorities, that doesn't help them win other districts -- hence Mr. Obama won 54% of Michigan's votes while Democrats carried barely over a third of Michigan's House districts. Mr. Cohn doesn't give us the main reason Democrats can't retake the House, though: because they will not embrace economic populism, which can more easily retake now-red areas of the country more surely than "acting red."

Chris Morran at The Consumerist points out that Facebook now labels Onion "news stories" as "satire," but doesn't label "news stories" that are basically big advertisements as such. This is an problem at the big news channels, too; at least, if you're looking at your Facebook newsfeed on Firefox or Chrome, you may be able to avail yourself of a plug-in that can mark off certain "news stories" as advertisements.

America's last journalist, Greg Palast, catches British Petroleum using "the Three Stooges defense" in its civil trial. The "Three Stooges defense" essentially amounts to "we were so incompetent you can't find us guilty of anything actually malicious." And someone probably ordered someone else to run the "negative pressure test" on the wrong piece of equipment (as Mr. Palast first describes in paragraph 4), but CEOs generally aren't dumb enough to get caught giving that order, which may be what you'd need to assess a fine big enough to actually deter bad behavior.

Matthew Harwood at al Jazeera says worker-owned co-ops are "the future of the American economy." It's a pretty comprehensive and engaging article, one that explains why worker-owned co-ops should appeal to conservatives as well as liberals. Of course the profoundly undemocratic and anti-family big corporations won't relinquish their stranglehold over our government easily, but we might have something to say about that, being, you know, the owners of government.

Around the table: power to the people, no delay!

Chris Mooney provides yet more proof that the EPA's recently-announced carbon emissions limits won't "cost too much." Long story short: cost estimates tend to be hysterically overblown. Long story somewhat longer: cost estimates also tend not to count benefits, like reduced health care costs. In a related development, corporate members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are not exactly rushing to support the Chamber's doomsaying.

Commander at a training camp for terrorists in Iraq accidentally blows himself up, along with almost two dozen pupils. You wish they were all that stupid, but you know they're not -- as too many of Iraq's citizens know better than we do.

Tarrance Group poll finds Republican Alex Mooney leading Democrat Nick Casey by 10 points in West Virginia's second district, currently held by Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, now running for that state's open U.S. Senate seat. But that's not the most surprising finding: the Libertarian candidate gets 6 points, but a candidate running well to Mr. Casey's left, ex-CBS reporter Ed Rabel, gets 10. Populism: it really does work everywhere.

Oliver North demands to know whether President Obama paid "a ransom, a fiscal, financial, money transaction" to the Taliban to get Bowe Bergdahl back from Afghanistan. That's right, it's Oliver North, hoping you've forgotten all about that arms-to-Iran-for-hostages thing. No truth to the rumor that he also demanded to know if the transaction was pecuniary or remunerative.

UC-San Diego researchers figure out how to erase and restore memories in rats. I guess I'd be appalled if I were more impressed -- a rat learned, "forgot," and "re-learned" how to fear having certain optic nerves stimulated, which hardly compares to the multitudinous ways we willingly erase and transform memories.

Finally, a Dutch corporation has apparently developed a small, almost-silent wind turbine that could be combined with a solar power array to take the average American home completely off the grid. Well before then, of course, the coal corporations will have come up with a wind tax to go with the sun tax they're trying to make everyone pay. Such is the price of progress, I suppose -- not that it should make us shun progress.