Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: of mansion taxes and antitrust victories.

When I hear that Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters have blocked over 300 highways in protest of his loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the Brazilian Presidential election earlier this week, all I can say is get over it! Your guy lost! I mean, even the bad man himself has told protestors to stop blocking highways, and has reportedly moved more quickly on his own transition than Mr. Trump did. These protestors would do much better getting organized about their concerns, if indeed they have any concerns they can articulate. In the meantime, this rubbish could be coming to America in a little less than a week.

Big news from Matt Stoller is that our Department of Justice has successfully blocked a proposed big corporate merger, that of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, and now might be a good time to remind everyone that if we put Republicans back in charge of either or both houses of Congress, they will defund all of our government’s efforts to fight monopolies. Another way of putting that might be that Republicans would defund the police. Seriously.

In a peripherally-related note, Sasha Abramsky at TruthOut reminds us that armed “election monitors” in Arizona are “Just the Tip of the Voter Intimidation Iceberg.” True law-and-order adherents like you and I will be heartened that Arizona Secretary of State/gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs has referred no less than half a dozen complaints to our Justice Department, but we won’t truly be safe until we successfully shame and shun right-wingers into complete and deserved loneliness. Sound harsh? Hey, it’s not violence.

When you hear that “celebrity politicians” are doing well in These Interesting Times by “getting the public to register transgressive behavior as entertainment,” you may be reminded that Satan was a much more compelling character than God in Paradise Lost. But we must remember that transgressive behavior is entertaining only if it’s fiction (and not always then, either!). We must also remember that Herschel Walker running for Senate is real, and if he wins, there’ll be real consequences.

Big real estate corporations have spent over $5 million trying to defeat a “mansion tax” in Los Angeles – and do the pro-mansion tax forces there understand that they have all the leverage? I mean, today’s moguls never think long-term financially, so that point where it costs less to pay the damn tax must be coming pretty soon. But to think they have the cojones to assert that a mansion tax would raise rents! Like they’re not already raising rents as high as they can! Like any civilized person should simply tolerate big corporations simply “passing their costs on to the consumer”!

Finally, when I hear that Paul Pelosi’s attacker was on a “suicide mission” to hold certain politicians accountable, all I can say is well, that’s how you’d have to do it! And seriously, I get tired of hearing assholes say they’re going to “hold politicians accountable” on a series of imaginary grievances. There are ways to hold Nancy Pelosi accountable for her actual corruption, but such thoughts will never touch the mind of David DePape. Let him rot in jail for the rest of his natural if he thinks breaking skulls solves anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: Republicans = drama, part 888.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: in which we identify the *real* extremists.

Surprise, surprise, an Anti-Defamation League study of 450 murders committed by domestic extremists in America (like the Buffalo murders earlier this week) concludes that right-wingers commit about 75% of them. (By their tabulation, Muslim extremists commit 20% and left-wing extremists commit a mere 4%.) "(T)he American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left," the article says, but that only means right-wingers will simply redefine "murder" until it includes things like not inviting right-wingers to your barbecues or shaming your right-wing father-in-law for watching Tucker Carlson. I've even heard right-wingers call such things "a kind of death"! You know what's "a kind of death"? Death.

Researchers at Brown University and Microsoft AI Health inform us that if every American adult had gotten vaccinated, we could have saved well over 300,000 lives. Against over 1 million dead, that's a sizable amount. An earlier Kaiser study put that number at 234,000 -- by not counting folks who'd died while vaccinated-but-not-boosted -- and I put more persuasive power in that figure, since not getting boosted was more likely not a matter of ideology. Still, that's more than one out of every five deaths. And the other side's argument is all waaaaaaah personal choice you can't tell me what to do stop the steal!

When I hear that "Online data could be used against people seeking abortions if Roe v. Wade falls" -- a perfectly explicable outcome, since most folks turn to the internet for information about reproductive health care! -- I am reminded that the FCC passed pretty good data privacy rules in 2016, but Congressional Republicans nullified them in 2017 with a quickness, because if it's an instance of government helping you, then Republicans must shit on it. Also too, law enforcement can search your cellphones without even getting a warrant because legislators either don't understand technology or go out of their way not to understand it because big campaign donors don't want them to.

Ho hum, Mississippi, the state that aims to end Roe v. Wade via its 15-week anti-abortion law, also just so happens to be the worst state in the Deep South for providing health insurance coverage to low-income women. Medicaid recipients get only 60 days' worth of post-partum care in Mississippi (though the Affordable Care Act allows expansion of that care to one year), though at least one study found that over 80% of post-partum health care costs come after 60 dats. Why, it's like that was the whole idea! I'd look for big corporations to pressure to pull out of Mississippi, but there ain't hardly any there to begin with; Republicans really are going to run that state into the ground, which will hurt all the good folks who live there.

Buried deep in this excellent Steven Rosenfeld piece about Pennsylvania's Republican nominee for Governor, Doug Mastriano is a description of the first Josh Shapiro attack ad against him, and it's like the ad's makers rolled up as much Democrat weakness as humanly possible into one ad, which you don't even know is an anti-Mastriano ad until the end! Look, here's how to attack Doug Mastriano: call him weak for refusing to accept the 2020 election results and doing his damnedest to overturn them. Republicans love wearing Democrat epithets, from "deplorable" all the way to "ultra-MAGA," as badges of honor; let's see Mr. Mastriano work that alchemy with the word "weak." I'd say I hope it makes him melt down in public, except that public melt-downs aren't the career-enders they used to be. Just ask our former screamer-in-chief, Donald Trump.

Finally, maybe the Buffalo shooter could evade any plagiarism charges Tucker Carlson might level against him, but the part of their collaborative work I can't stand is this anti-diversity argument from Mr. Carlson: "Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?" Ahem: civilization is not a marriage or a military unit; these two institutions are parts of civilization, and insisting that the whole of civilization be exactly like any of its parts is small-minded. Even 15 years ago I thought Tucker Carlson was doing the best he could as a conservative; now I think he was just fronting, and his current fascist-worship was the endgame all along.

Around the table: water is a human right! And other truths.

When I read about indigenous water rights activists traveling all over Mexico to protest corporate "looting" of good Mexicans' water, I feel a little ashamed that I'd never considered that hydroelectric projects could steal water from farmers. I mean, gas fracking corporations stealing water I knew about, but hydro still retains a green sheen that deflects criticism. I'm also reminded that Mexico's constitution literally guarantees the right to water to its citizens, and that corporate use of public water (which all water should be!) violates that right. I wish the water protectors in Mexico luck, especially since Mexico is one of those places where they'll shoot you in front of everyone for defying the will of corporations.

USC report finds that "what the safety net promises" low-income working families "and what it delivers are vastly different." And gives reasons! Some programs simply don't offer help to all those who need it, while others are so riddled with bureaucracy and complicated rules that eligible families simply give up applying, and that's before we get to language barriers, the absence of "a single go-to source of information that clearly and easily communicates what programs a family is eligible for," and, of course, the stigma of being a "welfare queen," which, as we recall, only existed in the darkest imaginations of Ronald Reagan. The good news? Even the Biden Administration seems to get there's a problem, and has taken steps to fix it, though we'll need to take more steps.

When I heard that many good Americans who oppose abortion would still help a friend of family member get one, I wondered if that meant those folks aren't very anti-abortion at all, but just fronting about it. But I should have known better! Not just because anti-abortion folks do set boundaries (only a few would pay for it, but more would help pay for it, almost half would help plan it, and three-quarters would offer "emotional support"), but because we all know from the gay marriage debates that the most rabid anti-gay marriage votary can easily crumble once it's his or her son or daughter who's gay.

I find myself far less impressed than many observers that Joe Manchin's approval rating in West Virginia has shot up over the last year-plus, despite his nefarious trashing of a popular legislative agenda, because the spike in his approvals comes almost entirely from Republicans. And those who would say he's really "got his finger on the pulse of West Virginia" should consider a) whether very many Republicans who approve of him now will vote for him in 2024 if a real Trumphole runs against him or b) whether someone who actually led on Build Back Better, and explained to his right-wing constituents why it'd be good for them instead of constantly cutting it down, could have achieved the same results. Seriously, when they say Joe Manchin "really understands his people," they're kind of cutting down "his people."

When I hear that Elon Musk's proposed purchase of Twitter might well "forc(e) us off a platform that we otherwise find just too hard to quit," I say we can only hope! I used to love my Twitter feed back in the day -- the old 140-character limit sure helped me say more with less! -- but it's always been a damn swamp where you could only stand out by being a prick. And I fear the mass exodus from Twitter won't be big enough, since (as Ms. Marcotte says) too many people think they need it to stay "plugged in" to current events. On one hand, I get that; I get most of my news through email, but I sure haven't left Facebook. On the other hand, anything worth doing is hard, and when do we start punishing trolls with shame and shunning?

Finally, when I hear that Democrats have yet to commit to a unified strategy for the midterm elections, I find I'm more than happy to help! What has unified Democratic government gotten us? an ad could say. The end of the pandemic. Seven million more jobs. The deficit cut by $1 trillion. Wages going up faster than they have in decades. Not a single American soldier lost in Ukraine. And the monopolies that cause inflation getting challenged in court for the first time in decades. And what have Republicans been doing all that time? Burning books. Defending dictators. Making it harder for you to vote. Whining about masks and vaccines. Oh, and this: (cut to January 6 footage). Vote Democrat on November 8. You're welcome again, Democrats.

Around the table: fighting the good fight, part 865.

You may want to see what some of your fellow Americans are telling our FTC and DOJ about how they want stronger antitrust enforcement. First off: in 2010, our FTC received 32 comments about antitrust enforcement rules; so far they've received over 100 times that amount! Second, a lot of these folks really know their stuff, and a lot of them have suffered serious abuse from their monopolist employers; after reading them, you will not be able to tolerate some corporate lobbyist telling you that most public comments come from people who don't know what they're talking about and only corporations really know what's going on.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: a whistleblower informs us that privatized Medicare plans are stealing millions of dollars from Medicare (and therefore the taxpayer, i.e., you and I). You may not read anything that surprises you -- OK, the woman who got diagnosed with prostate cancer might surprise you -- but the "aggressive medical record coding" will likely strike you as a euphemism for "inventing diseases so one can overbill for treatment." Remember that if Republicans take control of Congress, they'll refuse to fund going after Medicare fraudsters because "we can't afford it," just like they did last time. Law and order!

Should I have anticipated that a propagandist would one day slap the word FAKE over real video footage of dead war victims, as Russia has done in its war on Ukraine? Maybe, but if I'd put a detail like that in a short story back in the day, my creative writing professor would have rapped my knuckles. If I'd put in details about TV talking heads describing the dead bodies as "actors" or people Ukrainians supposedly killed after the Russians left to make the Russians look bad -- or about the whole "fact-checking" organ that just regurgitates state propaganda -- he'd still have rapped my knuckles, though he might have at least applauded all the effort I put in. The way things are now, I wouldn't even write satire about any of that.

David W. Moore at FAIR advises us not to trust polls on Florida's notorious "Don't Say Gay" law, mainly because pollsters tend to give folks incomplete information about the law when they ask them about it, rather than simply asking them about it. They give really incomplete information about the law, too -- how many Americans would support it if they knew it actually restricted instruction about sex through 12th grade and forced school counselors to rat on kids who tell them they're gay to their parents? I suspect folks don't actually approve of those things regardless of how they feel about gay and trans students.

Ho hum, TV ad claims that illegal ballot harvesting delivered both of Georgia's U.S. Senate seats to Democrats in 2020 -- as a way of attacking incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp, whom they see as inadequate to the task of fighting "voter fraud." Even the notorious True the Vote, which lodged the ballot harvesting complaint to which the ad refers, would not say the ballots harvested were themselves fraudulent, but of course that's only because saying so absent evidence would invite a lawsuit they'd almost certainly lose. Still, that doesn't prevent the masturbatory rage machine from churning onward, which I think is the whole point anyway.

Finally, people will give you a lot of reasons Donald Trump endorsed J.D. Vance for the Republican nomination in the Ohio Senate race, but let me be the one to say: don't believe any of it! Donald Trump latched on to J.D. Vance because Mr. Vance was starting to gain ground on Josh Mandel in polls, and with the primary less than three weeks away, Mr. Trump didn't want to get left behind, or be seen endorsing a "loser." I especially don't believe that Mr. Trump was "soured" by the Josh Mandel/Mike Gibbons chest-to-chest moment; the only thing that would have "soured" him about it, I would think, would be that it didn't come to actual blows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: why Russia will lose the war, and other truths.

Ho hum, states are rushing to cut taxes, using money from the American Rescue Plan Act as an excuse, though that money was a one-time expenditure. They'll use any excuse to cut taxes! And remember: when they cut taxes, usually they cut taxes a lot for their cronies and only a little, if any, for regular folks. At least the Nebraska Senate is currently filibustering one of the more nakedly pro-wealthy tax cuts out there. Some of these states have proposed cutting sales taxes, and I approve of that in a general sense, but most of them have not addressed how they're going to raise the resulting shortfall, and every state but Vermont, you may recall, has passed balanced-budget amendments to their constitutions.

Kamil Galeev argues, convincingly I think, that Vladimir Putin will lose his war with Ukraine. Long story short: Russia's more concerned with strutting its stuff than doing the hard work victory would require. Long story somewhat longer: Mr. Putin wanted to basically blitzkrieg the hell out of Ukraine without planning very much for what would happen if that didn't work -- and his blitzkrieg wasn't going to work, since he didn't even plan that well. There's even more to the story -- Russia made its military more efficient until the mid-2010s, when it turned to making its military look more impressive, and Ukraine basically went in the opposite direction. And hate to sound like a broken record, but a lot of this will sound familiar to those who followed our adventure in Iraq closely.

Samuel L. Boyd at The Conversation discusses "Why Translating 'God's Law' to Government Law Isn't Easy." The answer has nothing to do with woke mobs or deep states, of course, and more to do with the fog of passed time: what we, in retrospect, conceive of as "laws," like the Code of Hammurabi and a lot of laws described in the Torah, weren't actually laws -- Hammurabi issued plenty of decrees at odds with his Code, and how many folks during the time of Deuteronomy stoned their kid to death for drinking and rabble-rousing? Not when there was choring to be done on the farm, I bet! In addition, folks may have come up with the concept of a code of law that comes from God, as in Exodus, in order to fight the Kings who oppressed them with their laws. Folks who insist on punishing transgender folks as often as they draw breath won't be swayed by any of these notions, but the folks who would see Leviticus more as a book about universal precautions will. Note well that the latter crowd is considerably larger than the former crowd.

When I read that "Activists push Biden to Expand Renewables for Energy Independence From Russia" -- and entirely reasonable plan we would already have implemented if not for the intransigence of Joe Manchin -- I'd still be happier to read "Americans push Biden to expand renewables," not just because that's generally true of how Americans feel, but also because I'd like us all to think of ourselves as activists, since that's what defending democracy and defending civilization requires. I'd like us all to think of ourselves as activists even though some Americans only discovered their love of activism because they didn't want to wear masks at Costco. I'd also prefer to read that "big energy corporations push Biden to expand renewables," since they're the biggest obstacle to a more renewable energy grid. The article's still very good, though, namely for its lengthy refutation of the notion that fracked natural gas will solve our energy problems. I mean, gosh, you've got sun and wind everywhere.

Our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) finds, after analyzing over 70,000 blood samples, that over 140 million Americans, including a majority of our nation's children, have had COVID through late January. That's way more than official reports give -- Worldometers.info counts a little over 80 million infections total in the United States, which doesn't even mean 80 million people infected -- and it also maps on to The Lancet's finding from January that official sources have way, way underreported COVID infections.

Finally, President Biden delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday night -- it was a good speech, a little heavy on solutions, if anything -- but Republicans didn't waste any time acting like idiots about it. Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) boycotted it because he'd have to take a COVID test beforehand, and because "I only take a test if I'm sick." Why, it's like he hasn't learned after two years that some 40 percent of all COVID infections come without symptoms! I spy something that's going to wind up in Val Demings's campaign ads; she might even call it "Where's Marco?" Meanwhile, Reps. Boebert (Q-CO) and Greene (Q-GA) heckled Mr. Biden while he was talking with a "build the wall" chant; if Democrats have any brains/guts at all, they'll run at least the photo accompanying the story in campaign ads. Ain't nothing an independent voter likes less than a person shouting on TV.

Action: concerning the 14th Amendment, police brutality, student loan debt, and social media.

James Wagstaffe at Real Security writes that it's "Time to Reconsider the 14th Amendment for Trump's Role in the Insurrection," and he's right. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution states that no one who has "taken an oath...to support the Constitution of the United States" but who has then "engaged in insurrection or rebellion against" our nation, "or given aid and comfort to the enemies thereof" can hold office in state or federal government again. Surely Mr. Trump took that oath in January of 2017, and just as surely he "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" over a 2020 election result he didn't like and gave "aid and comfort" to those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 -- and all Congress would have to do is pass, via majority vote, a resolution affirming all of that. Maybe Senate Republicans can filibuster that resolution -- but maybe we should make them do that! Hence you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to support barring Donald Trump from future office using the 14th Amendment.

Meanwhile, President Biden announced weeks ago that it would release an Executive Order concerning our police departments getting surplus weapons from the military, but, strangely, hasn't released the Order. Was he trying to get some unearned good will? Possibly. Did someone get to him and tell him you can't do that when we just had an insurrection at the Capitol? Possibly, but that someone would be an idiot, since we've already witnessed police use military weapons on protestors of color, and they sure didn't do that at the Capitol on January 6. Maybe it was just me, but they didn't even seem all that enthused about using pepper spray. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk and your President that it's time for action to keep military weapons out of the hands of police. If you want police to respond to situations more appropriately, you don't give them grenade launchers -- and grenade launchers don't help you find drug dealers, nor do they help you find financial predators.

In other news, Roots Action helps you helps you tell President Biden to cancel all federally-held student loan debt in America. Objections to this action that go I paid my student loan debt, why can't they? should be met with jealousy is not a good foundation for public policy. I mean, yeah, I'd rather I had the sense to consider this years ago, too, but the best time to do the right thing is always now, and cancelling federally-held student loan debt (which is most of it) is the right thing to do, and not just because it'll stimulate the economy like gangbusters. Basically, we sold Americans a bill of goods when we signed them up for these giant student loans! We, as a nation, told them a college degree is the only way to enter the middle class (a claim our grandparents would have dismissed!), and then we extorted them for considerably more than that education is worth, and certainly more than anyone should pay. College was affordable only a few generations ago, and we'll have to work to make it that way again, but a jubilee in the meantime is a good first step.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell Facebook to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's Congressional and campaign pages permanently. You need not agree or disagree with her politics to sign this petition -- Ms. Greene has undeniably violated Facebook's terms of service with her various social media actions supporting violence and absurd conspiracy theories, and that's that. Ms. Greene herself would warn that booting her off Facebook would just make her stronger, but I doubt that, and even so, it should be hard to find right-wing nutjobs, just as it used to be hard to find pornography. I'm sure some folks will say this makes it harder for her to communicate with your constituents, but Facebook sure ain't the only way to do that -- what's wrong with having townhalls and meeting with constituents (which you can do even during a pandemic)? I suspect what's "wrong" with them is that politicians don't like facing accountability. But we need to make an America where accountability is what politicians should expect from Americans.

Around the table: in which we contemplate *other* election results.

Florida voters approve a $15/hour minimum wage to be phased in over the next six years. Florida voters, of course, also gave our President a four-point margin; it's like there's a lesson in there, somewhere, for Democratic politicians. A lesson they constantly resist, of course -- recall how Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas had nothing to say about the ultimately successful minimum wage initiative on his state's ballot in 2014, and how voters turned him out of office by 20 points, a result which may yet help give the world a President Tom Cotton.

Voters in Oregon substantially reduce criminal penalties for possession of most illegal narcotics -- though not their manufacture or distribution, and that's pretty much exactly how you split that knot. Oregon would also divert much of its tax revenue from cannabis production and sale to addiction treatment; I'm excited to watch this work. Voters in New Jersey, Montana, South Dakota, and Arizona also substantially reduced criminal penalties for possession of pot, and while you can imagine some police in Arizona, for example, fabricating a pretext for arrest or further investigation by miscounting their pot plants (Arizona now allows six per adult per household), you can also imagine a lot of police taking a deep breath that they don't have to go after pot-smokers so much anymore, and maybe go after some real criminals.

In a related note, University of Kentucky researchers adapt the Ryan White Care Act (which helps HIV sufferers get mental health help) to use for some rural patients suffering from drug addiction. Folks in rural areas don't often have easy access to addiction treatment programs, but researchers hope they can improve their options, and working on prevention of future health care issues by treating addiction is a way to be "fiscally-responsible" about reducing health care costs. And you know, this is the kind of problem that Medicare-for-All could help with!

The voters didn't do solid work everywhere on Election Day, of course -- California voters approved a ballot initiative that would exempt corporations like Uber and Lyft from a California law that forces corporations to treat their "independent contractors" more like employees. The forces of evil won here, apparently, partly by making some benefit concessions and partly by convincing people it was all about the employees' "flexibility," though we should all know by now that when we see "flexibility" in a job notice, it sure as hell ain't about our flexibility, as we discover when we need to care for our sick parents or sick children. Is it good news that Silicon Valley lit over $200 million on fire to fool voters into passing this initiative? Maybe, but it's also bad news that those clowns had $200 million to light on fire in the first place. (As an aside, the Uber investor who called AB5's author a "grifter" has exposed himself to charges of libel that I hope Assemblywoman Gonzalez pursues.)

The incomparable Jim Naureckas at FAIR informs us that our notorious punditoids have, as usual, "Miss(ed) the Signal in the Noise" when looking at exit polling data. Our "liberal" media is so quick to bang a gong about a two-point shift in Latinx support for Mr. Biden (or a two-point shift in senior support for our President), but not so much about the nine-point jump in under-30 support for Mr. Biden, and they also yammer on so much about our President's advantage among non-college-educated whites that they fail to see that this "advantage" comes entirely from non-college-educated whites making over $100,000. I guess they're afraid of being called "socialists" or something.

Finally, because we do need reminders like this, Zeynep Tufekci at The Atlantic reminds us that our current President isn't particularly good at being an authoritarian -- and that the next authoritarian who runs for President could be a whole lot better at it. Worse, Republicans entrenched their power in our Senate and in state legislatures, so the machine will be there for the next Republican authoritarian, one who doesn't tweet or have a chain of hotels or brag about assaulting women while the tape's running. One possibility Ms. Tufekci doesn't write about: that our current President will run again in 2024 -- after spending four years controlling some media outlet farther right than Fox News -- and Republicans won't be able to stop him. Of course I'm not sure that's a comfort.

Around the table: and now for another exciting episode of "irony or hypocrisy?"

Numerous whistleblowers allege "jarring medical neglect" ICE concentration camp, including an "inordinate rate" of hysterectomies and a refusal to test detainees for COVID-19. You'll recall, of course, that Nazi concentration camps were also notorious for forced hysterectomies, although, hey, that's happened plenty in America, too (remember Carrie Buck?). Sadly, too many Americans will hear of forced hysterectomies and think "good, don't let them reproduce" and "thank God our President is doing something." Remember that they also think of themselves as good people, perhaps even good people "driven" to do evil.

ProPublica finds no shortage of people who "Know How to Prevent Megafires," and wonders "Why Won't Anybody Listen?" I was all ready to guess it had to do with our leaders' refusal to solve problems and pretend that the persistence of problems makes them indispensable, but apparently not -- folks have an understandable-yet-tragic resistance to setting controlled fires, though controlled fires would reduce the amount of "fuel load" and thus reduce the number and intensity of the wildfires we're seeing all across the West Coast now. So maybe our President had a point when he blamed forest mismanagement -- not that you'd necessarily hear it over his refusal to admit climate change also plays a role.

I guess it's good that HHS spokeshack Michael Caputo apologized to his staff for saying he was fighting the "deep state" by trying to bully the CDC into issuing information more favorable to our President, but he also made a lot of excuses for his behavior. I mean, I would wish him well in resolving his health issues, and of course I don't condone any death threats made against anyone, but real leaders don't mention their personal problems; they just apologize for their wrongdoing and either resign or do better. Of course, every time our President sees a bad leader, he thinks that's my kind of guy!

Scientific American makes first Presidential endorsement in its 175-year history and, OK, it's Joe Biden. Their case first highlights our President's multitudinous failures and then lists Mr. Biden's proposals, which admittedly sound better than they did, say, a year ago. Just remember that a lot of the folks who say of Scientific American that THEYZ SHOULDZ STAYZ OUTZ OFZ TEH POLITICZ!!!!! are permanent students of YouTube University who of course wouldn't dream of "staying out of the science."

Former Administration economic "advisor" Gary Cohn says he's "not sure" if he'll vote for the President who used to employ him. Dig how he says "I actually vote on issues," as if all of us "little people" don't, and as if "keeping ignorant assholes out of office" isn't an issue. And just like the rest of them who pretend to make such a big show of their independence, you know which way he's really going. Hint: Joe Biden has pledged to roll back those tax-cuts-for-the-rich Mr. Cohn worked so hard to pass.

Finally, one of our papers of record publishes this slab of hot-and-steaming by one Danielle Pletka, who says she "Never Considered" voting for our President last time around, but she "May Be Forced to Vote for Him This Year." She argues that the far left controls Joe Biden, an argument not exactly buttressed by his record, and I'm sure her argument's resemblance to any argument our President has made is sheer coincidence. Worse than that, of course, is paragraph 9's casual equation of "execrable gun-toting racists" with the AOC/Warren wing of the Democratic party -- and by saying she might be "forced" to vote for our President, she has thus expressed a preference for the execrable.

Penny Rants for Monday, April 27, 2020: special "Our Glorious Elites still suck" edition!

When our President demands that our Post Office "raise the price" of its services "four times" or he won't approve any more funding, you have to remember that our President is demanding that our Post Office raise prices on us! He wants good Americans like you and I to pay more to send a letter though the post! The fact that our Post Office delivers good services so cheaply (despite all of our government's attempts to destroy it, I should add) is what makes it "a joke" to him -- it's just not serious, to him, unless some boss or other can parade his unearned wealth around. Consider, also, that "rais(ing) the price four times" is all that can make private mail-delivery corporations like UPS and FedEx competitive with our USPS -- they handle a fraction of the mail our USPS does, and frankly, they're not that much faster, not anymore. When right-wingers want to mismanage everything into oblivion to prove that "the private sector does it better," you should remember that when they do that, they are taking food out of your mouth. And how do you treat people who do that?

Right-wingers have their excuses for our President's apparent endorsement of injecting/ingesting disinfectants late last week, but they pale before the simple fact that calls about possible exposure to household cleaners more than doubled in New York City the day after. I have long hoped that our President would single-handedly destroy the Presidential bully pulpit merely through his bad behavior, and then folks would never trust what our President says again, as our Founders always intended. But I never imagined people might literally poison themselves first. We'll certainly never look at the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" the same way again. (As an aside, if we take his claim that "I was asking the question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen" at face value -- and when has divining his One True Intent behind his actions led anywhere other than rank absurdity? -- then you must conclude that a guy who would do that "just to see what would happen" is an evil bastard. And how do you treat evil bastards?)

Ryan Grim at The Intercept evaluates new evidence supporting Tara Reade's sexual harassment and assault complaints against then-Sen./now somehow presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden. As Mr. Grim reminds us, "(f)or Baker’s statement (denying that Ms. Reade had ever filed a complaint with Mr. Biden's office about his conduct) to be true, Reade would have had to have lied to her friend, brother, and mother about having complained to Biden’s office. There is no obvious reason Reade would make up a story to those closest to her about the Senate office not taking Biden’s harassment seriously, while at the same time resisting pressure to go to the press." Now might be a good time to remind everyone that Mr. Biden hasn't actually sewn up the nomination yet, and no one's advanced a sexual harassment/assault complaint against Sen. Sanders. (No, complaints of harassment and insensitivity against some of his campaign workers aren't the same thing, even if our "liberal" media did more pearl-clutching about that than they've done about Ms. Reade's accusation.)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Pat Robertson agrees with a viewer that God sent this pandemic to America as punishment for abortion, gay marriage, and anti-Israel sentiment. Oh, but not just that, his remaining defenders will say -- he also said "we have abused the poor," which most right-wingers consider a duty, not a sin. But listen to Mr. Robertson describe abortion -- "we have taken the life of the innocent, slaughtering them by the tens of millions, children made in the image of God" -- and then listen to him hesitate before saying "we have abused the poor" and then quickly turn to describing how the pandemic has ravaged us, and you might come to one of two conclusions: a) poverty just doesn't get his anger up like abortion does, or b) he threw "we have abused the poor" in there just to stave off criticism that he's just another heartless evangelical. But he's not very good at the latter -- does anyone remember him speaking out about the necessity of fighting climate change in 2006? No? Well, now you know all the good that did -- and maybe (especially since he's a denier again) all the good he intended it to do.

Around the table: exposing *even more* bad behavior and bad arguments.

Eric Cortellessa at Yes! magazine writes about "How to Save Elections from a Pandemic," by describing how voting-by-mail goosed up turnout rates in Salt Lake County, Utah. The sanitary effects of voting-by-mail are obvious, but it hadn't occurred to me before that transferring completely to voting-by-mail would not only eliminate the long lines at (certain!) polling places, but it would also create a paper trail that a voting machine couldn't easily obscure. Your state government could still use a voting machine to (mis)count the votes, but stealing an election would be harder -- at least in the long run, as corrupt state governments will no doubt entrust the transition to utter incompetents and hacks in the short run.

Our Justice Department indicts Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro for drug trafficking. Well, if you can't squeeze him out of office by taking a dump on his nation's economy, and you can't pretend a "movement" will topple him even with our "liberal" media's collaboration, I guess you could always indict him! Naturally "(t)he evidence they point to against Maduro is thin," in one observer's words, and six times as much cocaine flows through Guatemala as does Venezuela, but Guatemala's President is a right-wing prick just like ours, so he's not getting indicted! Maybe our President will invade Venezuela to arrest Mr. Maduro, as Bush the Better did to get rid of Gen. Noriega back in the day; admittedly, our President has had a very hard time getting Americans very emotionally-invested in his relentless anti-Maduro saucepan-banging, but then, that's always been a double-edged sword.

With a long line of right-wing blowhards suggesting that we should be forcing retired seniors to go back to work to help us out during the pandemic, Hamilton Nolan at In These Times has a simple suggestion: "Back to Work? You First." Then he imagines a litany of unpopular-and-deservedly-so characters waiting tables, bagging groceries, and running cash registers; not that these are bad jobs, per se, but it would surely humiliate folks like Arthur Laffer and Lloyd Blankfein to have to work them! So zing, as they say. As an aside, it has occurred to me that wishing people would die so the economy could get moving again isn't just cruel and heartless, it's bad economic theory. After all, people can't spend money when they're dead!

Our President's handling-the-pandemic numbers are -- surprise, surprise! -- going down again, and I'd like to think it's because of all his recent bad behavior! Saying our media want to "keep our country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success" reminds you that, like everything else, he thinks this pandemic is all about him. And when you come to grips with the fact that he only started making noise about ending physical distancing after six of his own properties got closed down, you are further reminded that he thinks everything is all about him. And here you thought America was all about us!

In a peripherally-related note, our President all but admits that he's going out of his way to make life harder for good Americans in certain states merely because their Governors have "not (been) appreciative to me." What a big baby! Our President isn't the first to play these games, of course, but that doesn't make it right, and hanging such corruption out for all to see will not only make it easier for the next President to act like a petulant brat, it'll make it easier for all of us to do such things in our lives. He's a role model, whether he likes it or not. And as a role model, well, he's falling short.

Finally, because we need some good news: a federal District Court judge tosses all of the permits our Administration issued for the Dakota Access pipeline, citing all the public comments our Administration ignored in the permitting process. You know, like that "the pipeline’s leak-detection system was unlikely to work, that it was not designed to catch slow spills, that the operator’s serious history of incidents had not been taken into account, and that the worst-case scenario used by the Corps was potentially only a fraction of what a realistic figure would be." See, if you're going to issue permits for a project like this, you actually have to address these things, because it's the law. The ruling doesn't stop the pipeline (which had at least five spills in the first six months of its operation) from operating, but that might be coming. In the meantime, go treat yourself; some restaurants are still open for pick-ups and deliveries, after all.

Around the table: our President blusters and blunders on, part 685.

World Health Organization starts using the phrase "physical distancing" in place of "social distancing," and boy is that overdue! "Social distancing" always implied, certainly to me, that you were supposed to completely isolate yourself from other people, and boy wouldn't Our Glorious Elites like it if we were all completely isolated from each other! That has always been the downside of physical distancing -- I discussed this in a little more depth on Monday -- and we still have to beware of it. And let's not get too excited about social media filling in the gaps; yes, if this pandemic had happened in 1979 and we'd practiced physical distancing we'd have suffered much worse for it, but social media can be just as much a distraction as a help. I would hope we all know how to connect with and relate to each other by now.

Katie Bo Williams at DefenseOne explains why our President still isn't using the Defense Production Act to ramp up productions of ventilators and respirators (among other things). I was ready to say the answer was "because you can't prolong the drama by actually solving the problem!" But Ms. Williams's answer -- that our President really believes TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!! can do the job better than our government, even though it's not doing anywhere near as good a job as he says it is -- is better, even if it leads to the same result, i.e., prolonging the drama.

In a related note, author Max Brooks explains on NPR exactly why our President is wrong not to have invoked the Defense Production Act already. Key statement: our President "is spinning some sort of tale about...black helicopters coming in and taking over factories. That's not how it works at all. What happens is the federal government has the network to identify where the production chain is and how to help the private sector work through this, because the private sector doesn't know. And as an example, I have a World War II rifle made by the Smith Corona typewriter company. Smith Corona worked with the federal government to then partner up with the Winchester Company, to then share resources and to share tools and talent to then produce the rifles that we needed. That's how it works. It's not some sort of KGB coming in and taking over everything. It is guidance and streamlining. And only the federal government has the experience to know how to do that." Of course, it's much easier to claim BIG GUBMINT KNOWS TEH NOTHINGZ!!!! when you populate your Administration with know-nothings. And again, I could have written exactly the same sentence about Tha Bush Mobb.

Nick Sholders at In These Times describes "How White Conservatism Stole Country Music." It ain't a long and winding road from pain to nostalgia to bitterness, of course, but the critical moment seems to have come a little less a hundred years ago, with the segregation of blues and country in the marketplace, even though both musics derive from rich and diverse sources -- if you remember how '80s classic rock stations played virtually no black artists aside from Jimi Hendrix, you'll have a sense of how that worked. We also tend to think of rural America (and therefore country music) as white, even though the slide guitar is a Hawaiian instrument and the banjo originated in West Africa.

Finally, Sasha Abramsky at The Nation provides a decent summary of how His Assholiness, our President, has been "managing" the coronavirus crisis in the last week or so. Spoiler alert: by blaming everyone else for his mistakes and causing bad things to happen. "(T)wo months...that could have been spent building up stockpiles of medical supplies" could be one of his epitaphs, but note well that in addition to ignoring unemployed airline workers as he tries to bail out their bosses and letting the virus fester in overcrowded concentration camps, he recalled all Peace Corps workers from overseas and then fired them -- because some Peace Corps volunteer made a joke at his expense once? I don't know, but it really might be for that small a reason, given that he's that small a man.

Around the table: special "our President still sucks at leadership" edition!

David Corn at Mother Jones reminds us that "the GOP's war on government paved the way" for our current President's incompetent response to the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, leadership during a pandemic is one of the things we deserve to get for the taxes we pay, but we've been hearing for so long that government is corrupt and incompetent that we've forgotten that this is our government, and the proper response of a citizen isn't to destroy the government that belongs to you, but to reclaim it. I'm doing my best to teach this lesson.

I never watch our President on TV before bed, but the thing that most struck me about his address to the nation about the coronavirus pandemic is what a masturbatory, narcissistic exercise it is. A leader wouldn't call the things he's doing that other folks have done before and better "unprecedented" or brag about TEH GREATESTZ ECONOMIEZ EVAHZ!!!! in the midst of explaining how he'd lead us through this crisis, but this clown does. And I would invite anyone who tabulated all the "I"s in Barack Obama's State of the Union speeches to explain how our President's actual and constant patting himself on the back isn't far worse.

You know what else a leader doesn't do? Grasp at straws to blame his predecessor for his problems, as our President also did last week. But I suspect calling Mr. Obama's handling of the 2009-2010 H1N1 pandemic a "disaster" won't resonate with folks -- particularly the ones who didn't get sick! That's before we get to the fact that the Obama Administration had H1N1 tests ready within two weeks of the first reported case, whereas this Administration still won't have one for at least six weeks, as our CDC is reporting over 1,600 cases of coronavirus in America.

My first reaction to the sight of Administration Treasury Secretary/man who wears glasses so people don't punch him in the face Steve Mnuchin calling the pandemic "a great investment opportunity" was and they wonder why we hate them! Then I realized that he was saying this on CNBC, an all-business news channel that (like all other cable news channels!) doesn't use all that time it's on the air to report actual business-related news, but spends all its time bloviating about drama and cheerleading some crony or other's business interests, and so my second reaction was: and they wonder why we hate them!

Finally, Peter Wehner at The Atlantic tells us that our President's term is effectively over and that most Americans are now on to his con game. Mr. Wehner's tabulation of our President's multitudinous errors in managing this crisis is edifying, and I would like very much to believe that this is an "inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation," but you know, I've read this obituary so many times now that I won't believe it until we humiliate this President in the manner he deserves. And with right-wing Democrat Joe Biden about to be his anointed challenger in November, he may not get that humiliation for a few more years.

Penny Rants for Tuesday, January 21, 2020: of economic "prosperity" and Presidential immaturity.

Joseph Stiglitz reminds us that our current economy is not a "good" economy, regardless of any propaganda from our President or our media -- and also says we should be looking at indices other than Gross National Product or the Dow Jones Industrial Average to determine our economy's health. "Neither tells us what’s happening to ordinary citizens’ living standards or anything about sustainability," he says, and thus he offers life expectancy, disposable income, percentage of citizens with health insurance, and "deaths of despair" (i.e., deaths from suicide, alcoholism, and drug ODs) as better indicators of our economic health. We'd need more kinds of data to measure the effects of climate change on the economy, of course, though measuring property damage due to extreme weather events is a good start. (And if you're still wondering how to counter our Administration's constant bellowing about TEH LOWEST BLACK UNEMPLOYMENT RATEZ EVERZ!!!!!, consider that black wages still lag well behind white wages.)

Jonathan Chait reminds us that our President has long desired to weaken the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, even once saying, out loud, that "(i)t’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas." His economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, says the Administration is still "looking at" changing the law, though it's hard to imagine the House going along with that, having just impeached our President after he essentially tried to bribe a foreign leader with the prospect of getting more business overseas in mind. When you hear statements like we need to bribe people more -- and when you contemplate, frankly, everything else he's ever done -- you'll find it easy to conclude, as Mr. Chait does, that our President "actually approves of corruption." But, sadly, our President's votaries also approve of corruption, and not just because our President is Their Bastard -- it's also because they think they're a lot smarter than everyone else when they're just a lot more cynical than everyone else.

In the wake of reports that our President apparently called our highest-ranking military officers "a bunch of dopes and babies" to their faces, I feel compelled to remind you, again, that nothing will split the insane 25% of the electorate away from our President -- they'll insist that our President loves the soldiers so much that of course he hates their leaders, and I suppose that's what passes for class solidarity among that lot. They'll also point out that our President loves winning wars, and it's true that we don't dominate the world despite spending more on defense than the next eight big-spending nations combined, although, well, there may be another lesson in there. And naturally they'll also scrub their memories of all those times they slammed Barack Obama for "not listening to the generals enough," since being a votary of our President means (just as being a Bush Mobb votary meant) never having to admit you've ever been wrong about anything, ever.

Around the table: from Kentucky to Syria, and guess where we find more hope?

Hazard (KY) job program helps give recovering drug addicts work, pay, and "a sense of purpose" as they help build affordable housing. "Research is starting to show what advocates have known anecdotally: having a job makes a significant difference in long-term addiction recovery," but try getting a job without skills, or with a criminal record. The program helps half a dozen folks annually gain construction skills and get jobs; maybe a few of our billionaires could break off some of their largesse and fund more programs like these, particularly in rural areas like Hazard? Or do we have to tax them harder to get it done? It's a question worth pondering.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media repeatedly insinuates that Messrs. Sanders, Warren, and Biden for being "too old to be President." Mr. Sanders's heart attack is obviously worth contemplating when deciding whom to vote for in a Democratic primary, but writing off all septuagenarians as physically and mentally unable to do the job is an awfully convenient argument given that the Democratic nominee will almost certainly be one of three septuagenarians. Maybe the one who takes selfies for four hours after a rally? And our "liberal" media never seem to mention the 73-year-old who currently occupies the Oval Office. Maybe that's because he constantly acts like a spoiled brat.

Also ho hum, Republican megadonor/notorious "America Firster" still manages to get H1-B visas for foreign workers even as our President cracks down on said H1-B visas. Of course, our President also uses undocumented immigrants wherever he can, and his votaries excuse that, because BUILDZ TEH WALLZ!!!!!. When Charles Baudelaire said that genius was the ability to hold two disparate ideas in the mind at one time, I don't think he was actually describing hypocrites or their enablers.

Uh oh: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has apparently violated a court order preventing her office from going after some indebted Corinthian College students, and could face jail time. You'll remember Corinthian College as the for-profit college chain that went under in 2015, but not without putting a lot of its students in a big debt hole first; the Obama Administration set up a program to help some of them get loan forgiveness, but this Administration's Education Department has virtually (and unlawfully) shut down the program, resulting in students incorrectly getting billed for loans and even getting their wages or tax refunds garnished. Again: you can't just skimp on your duty under the law just because you don't want to do it, or because you don't believe it's your duty under the law.

Finally, I've been loathe to go after our President for pulling out of Syria, since I'm no fan of our presence in the Middle East, but I find it hard to believe that our only two choices were "stay in Syria indefinitely" or "let the Turks kill all the Kurds," especially with this supposedly uniquely talented "deal-maker" in charge. Naturally our President has opened himself to charges of corruption, given that he has, well, business in Turkey that he doesn't have with the Kurds. One sad part of all of this is that now even more of our descendants will say this is the way the world is and there's no sense in trying to change it. We can help avert that catastrophe by making this President into the poster child for How Not to Be.

Around the table: in which we examine a lot of whining and bad arguments from right-wingers.

The National Review publishes a 13-article issue called "Against Socialism," and the incomparable Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs rips it apart. Seriously, read the whole thing, and witness how right-wingers consistently set up straw men because that's all you can do when you can't win the argument on the merits. (Former Bob Novak protege/antiwar.com contributor Timothy Carney survives Mr. Robinson's scrutiny much better than the others, which isn't surprising, since Mr. Carney's a good egg.)

Thinking maybe this particular Administration, having promised to do better on terror-related issues than its predecessors, might actually be living up to that promise? Well, Dave Lindorff at The Nation finds our government's terrorism watch lists have expanded -- apparently to include him, as he has been searched several times at airports. And surprise, surprise, our government has padded these watchlists mainly with journalists and activists. Recall that Paul Craig Roberts has more than once asked why, if a no-fly list has a million people on it, we don't have a lot more terrorist attacks.

Dahr Jamali at TruthOut examines the ongoing fires in the Amazon rainforest and finds, guess what, a right-wing asshole in charge of a government that's bending over backwards to hand over more and more of the Amazon to logging, mining, and big ag corporations. And of course Mr. Bolsanaro, as disgusting a human being as has ever walked the Earth, plans to target the indigenous populations who have done the most to protect the Amazon from corporate pollution. Which is a big deal, actually, as the region, popularly known as "the lungs of the world," produces about one-fifth of Earth's oxygen.

The New York Times begins a "1619 Project" that puts slavery more at the center of American history, and right-wingers whine about it. Rebecca Onion is absolutely correct to note that we liberals shouldn't waste our "good faith on old, dead-end conversations" with right-wingers who can't take criticism, so I'll that I think it's more patriotic to face your sins and correct them than to whine about the people who actually do it. Also, hasn't the right been telling us for years that whining isn't conservative? You do have to wonder why they do it so often.

Finally, you know our President said a lot of stupid crap on Twitter this week, and I can't even say any of it is worse than any of the other crap he's said in that forum; perhaps I'm just weary of the pile. Thus I'm going to make a simple rule for this blog: if our President said it on Twitter, I'm not covering it. Also, I have blocked our President's Twitter account, and I think all y'all ought to do the same. It'd be nice if our media would follow suit, too. We might even call it "starving the beast." (And if anyone tells you you're "violating his free speech rights," remind them that our First Amendment does not require us to sit passively while someone screams in our face.)

Action: concerning lead poisoning and obnoxious racism.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 930 would protect Pennsylvania's children against lead in their schools' drinking water, by requiring testing, mandating testing result disclosure to parents, and keeping lead levels in school drinking water below five parts per billion. We're now five years after the Flint drinking water crisis, and residents across Pennsylvania are finding lead in their school drinking water, but we still don't have vigorous standards against lead, though any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, and they don't exactly grow out of that. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Reps to protect our children by cosponsoring and passing HB 930. What's the argument against testing our schools' water for lead, I wonder? That "we don't have the money"? If a civilization accepts that as a reason for failing to protect our children, then that civilization deserves to die -- particularly if it keeps handing out endless welfare to corporate cronies.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Twitter to do a much better job policing hate speech on its site, then Color of Change still helps you do that. And to those who squeal TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!!, recall that our First Amendment protects us from our government, not from commercial media -- just as your local newspaper is under no obligation to print your neighbor's rants about black folks merely because he wants to be heard, Twitter can ban any speech it likes, and its executives need only worry about whatever PR backlash might result. And if (as Dean Baker said not long ago) Facebook is a publisher and thus should be held to the same standards to which we hold other publishers, then so is Twitter. Twitter's CEO, unfortunately, seems to think obnoxious racism is difficult to define. Here's a clue: when they start putting up swastikas, it means they're obnoxious racists. I mean, you'd have to be, to take up the banner of a nation we defeated in war over 70 years ago.

Around the table: no, every problem is not a Gordian knot! And other insights.

Politico wonders: "How Do You Solve a Problem Like 8chan?" Simple: you do what Dean Baker suggested we do last week -- you hold corporations like Facebook and Twitter accountable for the public postings of their users, in much the same manner you hold book publishers accountable for what they put out. (People who post privately to their friends will have to rely on their friends to tell them when they're full of it.) But you certainly don't throw up your hands and say the First Amendment "protects" hateful speech without specifying exactly how it does that (i.e., that it protects you from your government, and not your publisher).

And now for the WHEREZ TEH DATAZ!!!!!! crowd: researchers using FBI data on 248 active shooter incidents over 17 years, find that semiautomatic weapons "roughly double" victims' chances of getting killed or wounded. My initial reaction: they only double your chances of getting killed or wounded? But the Brigham and Women's Hospital study didn't count incidents with the largest death tolls or with multiple shooters. Headline from the no-gun-control-ever lobby: SEE TEH SEMIZ DON'TZ KILLZ TEH PEEPULZ MORE EFFICIENTLYZ HAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Of course, the more pertinent finding (and the one that aligns with common sense) is that semis do hit more people and thus result in more deaths.

Ben Freeman, Nia Harris, and Cassandra Simpson at TomDispatch explode the myth that military spending creates jobs. You've likely started to suspect that military spending enriches big defense contractor CEOs more than anything else, but it's nice to have some facts behind it. Lockheed's share of taxpayer money went up about 37% between 2012 and 2018, but their total workforce went down almost 13% -- and their CEO's salary went up 32%. Two other big defense contractors also cut jobs over that time, and two more only "gained" jobs because they bought other corporations. Stick that in your Tea Party uncle's hat next time he talks about defense creating jobs -- and then pivot to things that actually create jobs, like infrastructure, renewable energy, and health care spending, and you'll likely find a sympathetic audience. If only Democrats would act on this insight!

Another day, another finding that the 2017 tax "reform" hasn't goosed up capital investment like its supporters said it would, and this finding comes from our Administration's Commerce Department, which you would think would have an interest in saying the exact opposite. Then again, maybe not, as long as our President is willing to say whatever. But cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% did not, in fact, "free" corporations to spend more money on capital projects. Historically, the only thing that does that is a higher tax rate, since corporations will spend more money on capital projects once they realize it's going to get taxed away if they don't. (That's also why corporations don't really need "incentives" to do research and development -- research and development are expenses, and corporate taxes only tax profits.)

Finally, our President voices his apparent belief that his "rhetoric" not only doesn't divide our nation but actually "brings people together." And it is possible that he may be right about that one day -- at that moment where we can all observe his rhetoric bringing people together against him. Sadly, that moment isn't now, because his votaries are still too eager to make excuses for him -- this, even though conservatives always told us conservatism wasn't about making excuses for people!

Action: concerning Social Security, renewable energy, and Presidential bad behavior.

2020 is coming, which means more fearmongering from the Koch brothers and their like-minded ilk about "runaway" "entitlements," and which likely also means that our President will go back on his promise not to touch Social Security because of TEH DEFICITZ!!!! he made worse with his tax cuts for the rich (probably not until after re-election, though). And it also means that the "liberal" media outlets that supposedly hate our President will be considerably more blunt then he about the "need" to cut "entitlements." So let's head them off, by telling our Congressfolk that we must expand Social Security, not cut it, as Social Security Works helps you do. The haters keep trying to sound "reasonable" and "serious" about cutting Social Security, and they keep failing -- but only because we stand up to them. We worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and when we retire, we deserve to enjoy it. So don't let the haters and their scare numbers take it from us.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend funding for clean energy programs. Would it be crass to mention to them that they take big campaign donations from the fossil fuel corporations they still subsidize even though they don't really need it? No, it would not be crass. Would it be crass to mention that we just had the hottest June in recorded history and massive heat waves devastating the country in July, and that using more renewable energy and less fossil fuel energy would help us suffer less of that? Would it be crass to mention the increased health care costs from dirty air and dirty water caused by pollution from fossil fuels (and, ah, not from renewables)? The answers are, in order, "no" and "no." And though renewable energy has grown tremendously across America over the years, it still only provides about 10% of our electricity, and it still needs support from our government -- which really means support from us, the taxpayers. We should get the livable future we pay for, right?

Elyse Marin has begun a petition on Color of Change which helps you tell the Anschutz Entertainment Group (or AEG) to stop hosting our President's rallies. That's right, it's time for the Big Stick of Bad PR again -- if you're a corporate sponsor giving stadium space to our President so he can have his little Nuremberg rallies where his votaries all squeal "lock her up" and "send her back" and other noxious crap, then you deserve to be pointed out and shamed until you change your behavior. I know there are still folks who are so proud of their cynicism that they'll say well how do you say no to the President, huh? Gosh, 54% of the electorate said no to him on Election Day 2016 (though, as you know, he's not a man who takes "no" very easily!), and anyway, saying no to our President is part of our birthright as Americans, a lesson I bet meant a lot more to the cynics when Barack Obama was President. Is it too much to ask that no big arena in America enable our President's obnoxious behavior?

Light posting notice.

Posting will be light a bit longer, as I am thisclosereally to getting book number three to the printer.

I do have goals for the new year, though. I want 2019 to be the year we start kicking this President to the curb. The Special Counsel's report notwithstanding I don't particularly want him out of office, but I want good Americans to shun and shame him out of any serious discussion about America's traditions and America's future. I guess I really want him to become the proverbial Mayor of Deadwood, a man who aches to get in on the action only to get pushed out of the way. But I also want 2019 to be the year that America gets tired of drama. And by "drama" I don't just mean all of the right wing's manufactured outrages -- I mean a culture that can't stop showing folks acting obnoxious in public, a culture that follows celebrities around and calls it "news," a culture that winks with approval at corruption. Big dreams, I know, but America is the place for big dreams.

Around the table: starring unsolicited advice from an unwanted quarter.

Hoo boy: group of Nazi wannabes based in Alabama starts a Russian-language page extolling all the alleged similarities between Russia and the American South. You know, "same general gene pool," "similar values," and, of course, "our common faith," though I bet they'd be surprised at how they'd really worship in Russiabama. I can't dismiss the possibility that they started this page just to piss off liberals. I can, however, dismiss the possibility that I'll ever speak of this particular clown car again.

Our Administration's Energy Department places new restrictions on the oversight the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board performs. Worse, the order essentially mandates that Energy Department employees stonewall the Board -- how else to interpret an order to speak to the Board "with one voice," an order executives usually know better than to put in writing? The Energy Department says its order will "decrease costs," including, I would think, the "costs" of the problems advisory boards are always telling you to fix. But cleaning up a lab accident (or, heaven forbid, a meltdown) would cost a lot more.

From the "Dystopia is here!" file: a TruTV game show called Paid Off helps contestants pay off their student debt if they can answer questions correctly -- and helps losing contestants call their Congressfolk to tell them do something about student loan debt. I bet there'll be a hundred TV shows like this in the future; there should already be a game show for writing off your health care debt. I suppose Paid Off will do some good, but what a shame it's come to this. And note well that for many right-wingers this is exactly how the "free" market is supposed to work.

Former FBI Director James Comey, who had lately advised all Americans to vote Democrat this fall, now says we should avoid voting for the "socialist left" (presumably in Democratic primaries) and vote instead for "sensible, balanced, ethical leadership." Pardon me if I regard his counsel as yet another attempt to drag the center ever further right. After all, right-wingers call anyone to their left a "socialist" anymore, and suggesting that, say, a House candidate who supports Medicare-for-All and taxpayer-funded higher ed is by definition insensible, imbalanced, and unethical is a bit rich, particularly in a world where right-wing policy prescriptions are actually insensible, imbalanced, and unethical. But even more to the point: Democrats have spent the last quarter-century getting behind the kind of center-right Democrats who might best meet Mr. Comey's criteria, and what's that gotten us? It's gotten us a sick, immoral, and decadent society, and an insane Republican party. So, thank you for your input, Mr. Comey, but I think you've done enough.

Finally, after the Iranian President says, rather colorfully, that our President shouldn't "play with the lion's tail" with regard to possibly blocking Iranian oil exports, our President responds by twittering a lengthy threat to Iran in all capital letters. And I realize: this is how trolls do it! Trolls write in shouty caps whenever someone gets under their skin! And they must have been absolutely ecstatic to see their President "stick it" to Iran exactly the way they would! I just hope they wiped their screens off afterwards.

Around the table: on "Establishment" Democrats, asylum seekers, internet freedom, and voting rights.

Here's a great article by Richard Eskow at the OurFuture blog, reminding us that "Establishment Wins are Bad for Democrats -- and the Country." I mean, if the Democratic establishment was so great, Hillary Clinton would be President right now and Democrats would control the Senate. Say what you want about Republicans (I do!), but they sure know how to get new blood every few years or so, while Democrats constantly wage war on all their new blood. (Mr. Eskow also reminds us that Tha Bush Mobb paved the way for our current President, and yes people sure do look at those years with rose-colored glasses anymore. I remember those years; they sucked. And the subsequent eight years of a Democrat establishment sucked only a little less -- and also paved the way for our current predicament.)

Our Supreme Court, in yet another 5-4 decision, upholds the state of Ohio's ongoing effort to purge voters from the registration rolls for missing one election. It's bad when the dissent accuses the majority of having simply misread the law. Justice Alito essentially argues that the right to vote -- specifically, the right not to be deregistered simply because you haven't voted, a right actually codified in federal law -- is less important than the "right" of states to "clean up" their voting rolls. Call me old-fashioned, but I think state administrations should serve people, not the other way around.

Attorney General Sessions orders immigration judges to curtail asylum grants to gang violence and domestic violence victims. If the countries from which they came could actually protect these good people from such violence, I'd agree with Mr. Sessions's decision, but since they can't, it just looks cruel. And Mr. Sessions has no business saying America can't let everyone in, when America finds it fairly easy to let in cheap labor for our President's resorts and our President's winery. Seriously, once we end corporate "free" trade deals, enact a $15/hour minimum wage, and repeal the exclusion of farm workers from the National Labor Relations Act's protections, our government will be in a far better position to be as compassionate as its people are.

The ACLU instructs us as to "How Net Neutrality Will End." Long story short: as I said yesterday, freedoms die better a bit at a time. Long story somewhat longer: "Once June 11 comes and goes, we should expect the ISPs will do little to nothing in response. Then, after some time has passed, they will point to their inaction as proof we were wrong to distrust them and their promises not to violate net neutrality in the absence of a federal mandate. And guess what will happen next? Drip. Drip. Drip. And before we know it, a flood will have washed away the free and open internet we all rely on." Pay special attention to the second sentence in that quoted passage, since that'll also be the Republicans' answer if Democrats actually run pro-net neutrality ads this year. Remember, also, that most big telecom corporations are monopolies in the media markets in which they operate, so when one of them starts censoring websites, you and I can't just "go buy from someone else."

Republican candidate for the New Jersey's 2nd U.S. House district says "(t)he whole idea of diversity is a bunch of crap and un-American." There's really no putting lipstick on that pig (the "whole" idea? Really?), especially in a country where most folks think the whole idea of who-you-know elitism is un-American. Now, maybe this fellow thinks facing a right-wing Democrat in the general election lets him be as obnoxious as he wants to be (I wonder where he got that idea!), but in New Jersey, which the President lost by 14 points and where a seven-term incumbent Republican got turned out of New Jersey's 5th for being too stridently anti-gay, he could mark himself as someone too obnoxious to hold public office.

Finally, a U.S. District judge in Indiana has issued an injunction against an Indiana state law that would automatically deregister voters who appear on the notorious "Interstate Crosscheck" database. That'll probably hold until after the midterms -- but eventually the Supreme Court will gets its hands on it, and given how they ruled in the Ohio case (second paragraph above), they'll probably reinstate it. Where is the plaintiff who will assert that deregistering a voter based on appearance in a ridiculous database constitutes punishing someone without proving they committed a crime? I mean, that's the law-and-order argument, and I'd like to see Neil Gorsuch squirm in his seat after being confronted with it.

Around the table: with important reminders about "far-left" policies, privatizing prisons, and political bad actors.

And here's the best headline I read all week: "The Surprising Popularity of 'Far-Left' Policies." The only way it could have been better is if they'd put ironic quotation marks around "surprising," because only Our Glorious Elites and their "liberal" media enablers would consider "protecting more public lands," "limit(ing) corporate tax loopholes," and "raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy" to be "far-left" positions, when in fact these policy proposals generally get majority support (and therefore bipartisan support) from Americans! But, as I've been saying for a long time, they love calling popular, good proposals "extreme," when their own solutions to everything -- make war on other countries so you can swing your balls around, cut spending that actually helps people, cut benefits for programs you've paid into all your life! -- are actually quite extreme.

The city of Tucson, AZ adopts resolution banning the privatization of its prison system. The even better news? Tucson isn't even the first locality to outlaw private corporations running their detention centers and jails, and a lot of the other localities that have done so are, like Tucson, in very red areas of the country. Of course, if you thought about it for a minute, you'd see that private prisons have no "market" incentive to improve prisoners' lives, because the more miserable they are, the less they'll be able to make it on the outside, and thus the more likely they'll become "repeat customers."

"Nearly Half of You Reading This Have Bullshit Jobs," announces the headline of this Daily Beast interview with the author of (you guessed it) the book Bullshit Jobs. The term "bullshit jobs" describes jobs that are a) quite well-paid and b) quite useless, the kind of job that exists to make other people look good, or at least not incompetent. They can range from the receptionist who takes one phone call daily but has to exist to make the boss look important to the "people who provide unnecessary supervision" to corporate-lawyer "goons." And they don't exist in spite of our "free" market ideology, but because of it, and its mania for quantifying everything. (Read the whole article; it contains, among so many other things, the best argument for a universal basic income I've yet heard.)

California Republican U.S. House candidate actually films herself harassing a transgender woman trying to use the bathroom at a Denny's. I won't name name this U.S. House candidate, since we shouldn't give jerks too much sunlight. But I will highlight her stupid argument, that a transgender woman was "invading my privacy" (italics in original) merely by a) being born male and b) wanting to use the women's room. Setting aside that following someone into a bathroom and then harassing them is an actual invasion of privacy, I could more easily argue that this House candidate is invading my privacy merely by being such an asshole that I noticed it. The good news? She'll be lucky to lose by only 50 points in this district, and thus she's the proverbial walnut in the batter of eternity.

Finally, upon hearing the so-far-unsubstantiated rumor that the Administration might fire Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, my first thought was: who on Earth do they think they're going to find to do that job better than she does it? By "that job," of course, I don't mean "informing the American people about what the Administration's doing," but the job of putting entire cartons of lipstick on the pigs this Administration keeps trotting out. Seriously, even Tha Bush Mobb's notorious last Press Secretary, Dana Perino, couldn't match the sheer will-to-lie of Sarah Sanders. Then again, I'd hate to report, in a few months, that I'd spoken too soon.

Around the table: a modest proposal for hedge fund managers who lose taxpayer money, and other items.

In re the slaughter of Palestinian activists by Israeli soldiers this past Monday, Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that "Media Can Tell Readers Who's Killing Whom -- When They Want To. The good news, this time, is that some "liberal" media outlets seem to want to, including the Washington Post, but you've still got a lot of the same tortured headlines (the ones that seem to say protests kill people, not "people kill people") that you get for police shootings.

Radley Balko at the Washington Post tells us why the so-called Protect and Serve Act (H.R. 5698/S. 2794, in case you were wondering) "is a response to a problem that doesn't exist," i.e., the "war on cops." Calling crimes against police "hate crimes" ignores the simple fact that "they are about as far removed from a vulnerable group as one can imagine," since they, you know, "carry guns and other weapons," "have the power to detain, arrest, and kill," and "literally have the entire government at their backs." Seriously, if you think black folks "whine" about the fear of being executed by a police officer without even a charge, let alone a trial, you should reacquaint yourself with the definition of whining, because demanding to make police officers a "protected class" is pretty much it. (Hate to pile on -- OK, I don't -- but Mr. Balko also reminds us that crime against police officers actually isn't skyrocketing, even though we as citizens are a lot more skeptical about police officers than we were even five years ago.)

Ho hum, our EPA has (so far) squashed an HHS study of water contamination from toxic chemicals, with at least one White House aide saying, in an email, that they couldn't get the HHS agency to "realize the potential public relations nightmare this is going to be." That's almost like saying it out loud! Of course, when your President says all kinds of things out loud that civilized people wouldn't say out loud, I guess you can't expect the underlings to do better. And no, saying it's "important for the government to speak with a single voice on such a serious issue" to head off the release of a study that'll give you bad PR is intolerable bullshit.

Also ho hum, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has basically dissolved the team in her department that investigated for-profit college abuses. And then hired some of the officials at for-profit colleges being investigated! How many times must I tell these pimps! For-profit colleges take taxpayer money! Punishing them when they're corrupt is a no-brainer! Thus more evidence that the only value of contemporary "conservatism" is executive profit, and also more evidence that when our President promised to "drain the swamp," he meant "get rid of all the liberals," which is, I'm pretty sure, exactly how his votaries understand it.

And even more ho hum, CIA Deputy Chief Gina Haspel, up for the big job there despite her well-documented past support and enabling of torture by CIA agents, now says torture was actually a bad idea -- thus giving Senators cover to vote for her, and (more importantly) allowing her to get away with the torture she's already supervised. You'll recall that Scott Pruitt also saved his nomination when he intoned that people cause climate change, a belief he sure hasn't acted on as EPA Administrator. When people talk about the moral breakdown of society, they should be locating it in occurences like these, not in gay marriage or birth control or "everyone making the cheerleading squad" or whatever diddles folks' rage glands these days.

Finally, Dean Baker suggests that, instead of harrumphing about whether Medicaid recipients "work enough," we should "focus() on whether the people at the top are working for their money." Meaning, of course, that if a rich hedge fund actually underperforms index funds while taking craploads of taxpayer money, maybe they should "work to pay off the fees the state paid them." They'd balk, of course, not just at making very little money and thus spending craploads of hours working them off, and they'd say things, out loud, like "we can't work under this kind of pressure." Hey, I have to do a good job everyday; why not a rich hedge fund manager?

Around the table: containing two of the President's best stratagems for winning the midterms.

With both parties of Congress anxious to give our President even more unconstitutional war-making powers, it's left to Pat Buchanan to remind us not only that Israel struck Iranian forces in Syria first last week, but that the neocons who supposedly hated our President so much now control his foreign policy. Mr. Buchanan rightly reminds us that the notion that "Iran is on 'a quest for nuclear weapons'" is a "Bush-like assertion," and that "the foreign policy that America Firsters voted for" is "being replaced by the Middle East agenda of Bibi and the neoconservatives," but I bet these "America Firsters" were never that committed to ending foreign wars, especially now that their Personal Lord and Savior seems to favor one. Who wants to bet that this Administration will start banging the drums for war right around a month before the midterms?

Administration spokeshack says opposing torture-approving Gina Haspel for CIA chief would be somehow anti-feminist, and our "liberal" media seems to agree. I presume that a real feminist would know that women are, being human, as capable of evil as men are, and a real feminist certainly wouldn't let someone else's bean-counting get in the way of the truth. And, seriously, the CIA doesn't employ a single woman who can lead and who opposes torture? That seems unlikely, not just because the CIA is now almost half female, but because the world is a big place, much bigger than torture apologists tend to imagine.

Our President rolls back transgender protections for prisoners, meaning transgender prisoners will have to use the bathroom of their birth gender and get the crap kicked out of them by other prisoners as a result. Also, too, federal prisons will have to use "biological sex at birth" to determine housing assignments, which will also result in a lot of beaten-up transgender prisoners. I guess our President really doesn't care who gets hurt, as long as religious bigots get to diddle their rage glands.

There's so much to say about Vice President Pence's statement that "in the interests of the country, I think it's time to" end the Mueller investigation into his Administration, but I'll just say this: Mr. Pence should not act like the Administration "fully cooperat(ing)" with the Mueller investigation is some great gift to the American people -- "full cooperation" with a criminal investigation is, frankly, the minimum we, as Americans, have a right to expect from our government. (Is this what moved George Will to declare that Mr. Pence is even worse than our President? I don't know, but that statement certainly merits further evaluation.)

New NRA President Oliver North claims his organization is a poor, poor victim of "civil terrorism" by the multitudinous political activists who now oppose it. And, he adds, the NRA faces even worse opposition than even the civil rights movement did back in the day, though I suspect marchers who got the crap kicked out of them by police will beg to differ. All together now: waaaaaaaah! Remember: folks who present themselves as tough guys are more likely the real snowflakes.

Finally, we learn that our President would like the upcoming midterms to be "a referendum on his Presidency" and that he's far more likely to talk about himself at rallies than the candidates he's nominally supporting. Of course our President loves talking about himself, but this instinct may also be the Republicans' best path to victory in 2018 -- talking only about him erases the hopes and dreams of good Americans from the conversation, after all, and surely we remember how he rope-a-doped the Clinton campaign into talking only about him as Election Day approached in 2016, until TV became an onslaught of two-sided negative advertising that kept a lot of Americans home. If Democrats make this midterm all about our President's bad behavior, rather than what good Americans deserve from their government, then they deserve defeat.

Around the table: the persistence of redlining, and other horrible truths.

If you're looking for some really depressing reading, Earth Justice provides this list of bills under consideration by Congress that would curb your right to get redress for grievances in our courts. The courts have been our most effective weapon against the injustice this Administration constantly perpetrates, so of course Congress wants to take that weapon from us! Now, many of the bills that got passed by the House stand a good chance of dying before a Democrat filibuster, but that's no reason to get complacent. When I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Reveal's analysis of over 30 million home mortgage records finds that -- surprise, surprise! -- folks of color still get turned down for conventional mortgages at a considerably higher rate than whites, even though discrimination is, you know, against the law. Banksters say it's not what it looks like -- that they deny mortgages based, to a large degree, on credit scores. But they also refuse to release the credit scores, saying, at various times, that it'd violate privacy rights (hey, no one's demanding names!), would be too expensive (waaaaah!), and wouldn't actually tell us anything (then what are you afraid of?). Someone should tell them that three bad arguments don't add up to one good one.

Ho hum, Dear Leader says his destroy-all-regulations-and-cut-all-taxes-for-rich-people policies have brought electricity prices down, when -- hard to believe, Harry! -- electricity prices have actually gone up over the last year. They've gone up 3 percent, which outstrips inflation by a little less than a percentage point, but again, this is the guy who not only thinks he can turn around a cruise liner on a dime, but tells everyone he's done it after utterly failing to do it. And, seriously, big corporate tax cuts lowering energy prices? That is to laugh. Big corporate tax cuts gild the plumbing in a CEO's 19th vacation home, and nothing else.

Now we know why EPA Administrator Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt has to fly in a special first-class safe space: because one passenger told him he was "fucking up the environment." All together now: waaaaaaah! You know, when someone says something nasty to me -- and people say much nastier things to me than that! -- I don't demand a "safe space" from them at taxpayer expense; I give these morons exactly the amount of what-for I think they require, and then I move on. That's what good people do. It's not what our current Administration's officials do, which not only makes them snowflakes, it makes them bad people. Don't get your shorts in a bunch about life's many shades of gray when I say that. These people are bad. No navel-gazing is possible about this matter.

The story of the Florida shooter being vaguely associated with the Nazi wannabes at the Republic of Florida turns out to be a hoax -- perpetrated by right-wing trolls, of course. How the Republic of Florida leader who had identified Mr. Cruz as an associate got similarly "pranked" I can't tell -- either he's a bad leader or he was in on the joke to begin with, and neither of these possibilities flatter him. And anyway, the Republic of Florida got more publicity than it was going to get, and now it gets to play the victim card, by virtue of being unfairly associated with an evil school shooter (by the Anti-Defamation League, no less!). Sad that right-wing "pranksters" never seem to suffer for their sins, though.

Finally, the President tweets that the FBI missed "the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter" because they were too obsessed with the Russia investigation -- and gets an earful from students who survived that shooting. Sadly, Reuters does not report on the students who took the President to task specifically for making their tragedy all about him, as he seems to love to do. Maybe he'll block these kids, like he blocks anyone else who gets the better of him in an argument! I must say I've just about had it up to here with this disgusting piece of filth who somehow got elected President.

Around the table: the cabal of lawlessness decries lawlessness, and other sad ironies.

Attorney General Sessions announces that Trump Administration will lift limits on military equipment going to local police departments. It is a bit rich that Mr. Sessions grandstands about "not allow(ing) criminal activity, violence and lawlessness to become the new normal," given that he works for a man who enables violence and clearly thinks law and order is only for little people. Suggesting police brutality is a "superficial concern" is a bit rich, too, when at least one out of every 10 Americans worry that their next police contact will be their last.

You won't be surprised to learn that ProPublica and the Texas Tribune told us almost a year and a half ago that Houston would be "a sitting duck for the next hurricane." Very often, local officials in Texas say it's our federal government's job to fix the problem -- a statement with which I wouldn't necessarily disagree, particularly given the Houston Ship Channel's importance to our economy, but also a statement which sounds odd coming from politicians who've long been ideologically predisposed to cripple the governments for which they work.

Dean Baker at TruthOut performs an enormous public service by instructing us that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a pro-growth agency. Right-wingers have drummed it into our heads that Big Gummint always strangles economic growth in its crib, but if the CFPB's new forced arbitration ban "costs" banksters $1 billion annually, that billion dollars comes from ordinary consumers like you and I, and that's not just a cost to us, but to the economy, which could use the extra $1 billion in stimulus. Also, the money banksters spend concocting ways to rip consumers off (rather than ways to provide better services than their competitors) comprises a drag on economic growth.

Illinois becomes the 10th American state (that was quick!) to pass an automatic voter registration law. Getting registered to vote whenever you renew a driver's license or a state ID should counter the nefarious effects of the Interstate Crosscheck database somewhat, but most folks aren't going to think to get new IDs done on Election Day, or have time to do it once they find out they've been mysteriously "de-registered" -- or, ah, have the ability to get to a DMV in a state that's closed as many of them as it can get away with!. Also, very few red or swing states have implemented automatic voter registration. I suspect the best solution to Interstate Crosscheck is a very good lawsuit striking it down as a violation of a citizen's due process rights.

Finally, the incomparable Matt Taibbi blames the media for creating "A World Dumb Enough for Trump." His article is a good tonic if you've been at all impressed with the "liberal" media's tough-on-the-surface coverage of Mr. Trump's Presidency -- after all, "(t)he Trump presidency is like a diabolical combination of every schlock eyeball-grabbing formula the networks have ever deployed," the creation of media that constantly push "(b)ig headlines, cartoonish morality, scary criminals at home and foreign menaces abroad" because "they all sell." Amen.

Around the table: in which fools grapple with white supremacy, to unsurprising results.

Treasury Secretary's wife brags about flight on government plane and all the big-name fashion brands she wore on that plane -- then unloads on one of her critics thusly: "Have you given more to the economy than me and my husband? Either as an individual earner in taxes OR in self sacrifice to your country? I’m pretty sure we paid more taxes toward our day ‘trip’ than you did. Pretty sure the amount we sacrifice per year is a lot more than you’d be willing to sacrifice if the choice was yours." Well, much is required from those to whom much is given! We'll always have people who think they're better than us; our task, as civilized people, is to contain their evil.

Notorious big pharma executive Martin Shkreli has been buying up internet domains with the same names as some of his critics (mayakosoff.com, carolinemoss.com, etc) so he can better mock them. I used to tell people that Michael Jackson's Neverland was a great argument for the 91% tax bracket, but of course I never dreamed of the Pharma Bro back then. How is buying up websites so you can mock journalists an example of the genius of the free market? Hell, how is jacking up the price of a life-saving HIV drug 5000%?

Long-time seller of white supremacist merchandise decides to shut down his store and find "spiritual peace" after making the front page of the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer. So how quickly did he get from ZOMG FRONT PAGE ABOVE TEH FOLD OF TEH INQUIRER WE HAVE ARRIVEDZ!!!!! to all my neighbors have stopped talking to me? Quicker, I bet, than he gets from TEH BOTH SIDEZ ARE TO BLAMEZ!!!! to I was wrong and I have no excuses.

Vice President Pence says we shouldn't take down Confederate monuments, but just build more monuments that "celebrate the progress that we’ve made since that history." How did Mike Pence ever make it as a right-wing talker? Because let's-keep-the-racist-monuments-and-then-make-new-better-monuments is about as far from straight talk as you can get; it's a little like King Solomon suddenly splitting the baby in half. And I bet historians who spend most of their time making sense of medieval balance sheets also roll their eyes. (Also, too: how is anti-racism "some contemporary political cause"?)

Finally, the Department of Justice got a warrant demanding extensive information on everyone who visited an anti-Trump website hosted by Dreamhost, but now the DOJ has amended its warrant request so that it doesn't look like a fishing expedition. Frankly, trying to convict 200 protestors of "felony rioting" is still a damn fishing expedition, but still, a little sunlight can go a long way.

Around the table: in which we are reminded that the work of defending free speech is very hard.

The ACLU, under considerable pressure from misguided liberals, announces it will scrutinize which hate groups it represents a bit differently than it has in the past, its executive director giving the wish to protest with "loaded firearms" as an example. But I find it far too easy, frankly, to defend protesting with loaded firearms as a legitimate free speech act protected by the First Amendment, even if the folks doing such protesting are assholes. Of course shooting people with those firearms isn't "protected speech," but maybe our police officers could prepare for such things, you know, the way they seem to do when liberals march?

From the "Liberals Do Obnoxious Swordfighting Too" file: Katherine Cross, at The Establishment, asserts that "(e)very person who’s ever misused arguments for free speech to defend Nazis or white supremacists...has some measure of Heather Heyer’s blood on their hands." Gosh, I guess that includes me! Call me old-fashioned, but I think James Alex Fields and no one else has Ms. Heyer's blood on his hands, and more than a few liberals (Dennis Miller may be the most famous example) have switched sides after people like Ms. Cross kept shouting at them that they weren't liberal enough. Luckily for me, God made me a liberal, and I stopped bucking God a long time ago.

The Straight Dope's take on net neutrality -- the principle that says you, and not some corporation, should get to decide where you go on the internet -- isn't all that deep, but it contains one brilliant observation: that the worst thing that could happen as a result of its disappearance is "a time when an ISP might think carefully about what kind of content it allows to be seen on the Web, for fear of poking the orange dragon," i.e., our infamously thin-skinned President. That's weapons-grade PR, right there, so tell all your friends: Donald Trump wants to kill net neutrality so he doesn't get criticized on the internet.

I agree with this Las Vegas Sun editorial's description of Republican efforts to recall two state Senators (one Democratic, one independent) as "an abuse of the recall provision" and "an attempt to hijack the democratic process,", but that doesn't mean I want to stop the recalls. Let the endangered incumbents campaign against the inherent stupidity of the recall -- it's possible to do that without sounding self-pitying, you know! -- and show Republicans that future efforts to nullify democratic elections will fail. I'm not even particularly upset by the notion of "nonstop elections" -- elected officials should expect to be accountable to their bosses, the people, at any time.

Finally, you've no doubt heard that Steve Bannon's out as President Trump's "senior strategist" or whatever, and has made a soft landing at his old employer, Breitbart. And just like his old boss he continues to let his mouth write checks his ass can't cash, saying "I've got my hands back on my weapons" (I shudder to think what he's actually got his hands on) and that he's "definitely going to crush the opposition," which is what approximately zero people who crush the opposition say before they crush the opposition. I look forward to ignoring him, just like I did before he joined the Trump Administration.

Penny Rants for Friday, July 27, 2017: well, *someone* had a really good week.

Don't believe the hype that President Trump wants a middle-class tax cut and he wants rich folks to pay more. Not just because he's already proposed massive tax cuts for rich folks: don't believe it because we know that Mr. Trump will say anything to foment drama and chaos, and that fomenting drama and chaos is the only way he can get anything done. Of course, he's not really talking to us, at any rate -- he's talking to his votaries, who will dutifully cling to the belief that TRUMP CUTZ MY TAXEZ!!!! even as they're figuring out for the 20th straight month whether to keep the gas or the lights on. I really had my fill of government-by-drama-and-chaos during Tha Bush Mobb years; obviously God decided that, as a nation, we really didn't learn our lesson. Too often -- like, when I contemplate sensationalistic "liberal" media coverage in 2016, or how thoroughly Democrats have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory over the years -- I find it hard to argue with that conclusion.

Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo explains why he doesn't "lay into" President Trump like many of his fellow Democrats do: "As a general rule, I haven’t found nasty ad hominem attacks on a person whose cooperation is needed to help your state especially helpful." Anti-kudos to Mr. Cuomo for using the word "help" twice in five words -- and that's not counting the synonym for "help" he used four words before that. "He decided early on he wasn’t going to stick a finger in Trump’s eye" would have considerably more gravity, of course, if Donald Trump didn't spend all his time sticking his finger in everyone else's eye. And Mr. Cuomo's statement also translates pretty well into "I'm happy being a hostage to circumstance, as is our unique heritage as Americans." If Mr. Cuomo is the Democratic nominee in 2020, Mr. Trump will beat him to a pulp -- why, Mr. Trump may even win the popular vote if Mr. Cuomo runs! He may even get a majority of the popular vote!

Hot on the heels of Mr. Trump's announcement of a ban on transgendered soldiers, ostensibly because their health care "costs so much," Josh Hafner at USA Today informs us that the added cost of transgendered soldiers' health care needs is equivalent to about four trips the President takes to his resort in Mar-a-Lago. It's also equivalent to 14 hundredths of one percent of our government's spending on our soldiers' health care, but the Mar-a-Lago figure is the most telling. I said yesterday that the up-to-$8.4 million added cost of transgendered soldier health care would be "chump change" in any other context to Donald Trump, but I forgot that his corruption always goes deeper than that: he also high-fives himself for sticking the cost of a month of weekend travel to Mar-a-Lago on the taxpayer, while crying crocodile tears about the "disruption" and "burden" of covering transgendered soldiers' health care for an entire year. What a fucking asshole.

Around the table: in which we confront financialization, again, and traumatic brain injury in NFL players, more fully.

Another economist reminds us that "financialization" of the world economy has turned it into a "house of cards." Read the whole thing, and then recall that Republicans, the "conservative" party, have become the apostles of handing over our economy to banksters (even more so than Democrats!), and ask yourself if chasing short-term profits and strangling corporations and households with debt exemplifies "conservative" values. I always figured being in it for the long term was more "conservative."

Greg LeRoy argues that politicians shouldn't hand out tax breaks to Amazon in an attempt to get them to bring their warehouses to their state or locality, but rather should impose new taxes and fees upon them. After all, Amazon has largely destroyed local retailing almost everywhere, more, even, than giant chain stores ever did, and while Amazon has been collecting sales taxes for some time now, they've been seeking out corporate welfare handouts to offset that "loss." So why won't politicians impose new fees and taxes? Answers could range from "abject cowardice" to "the hope that Amazon will kick back some campaign donation cash."

Boston University study finds evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE) in a staggering 110 of 111 brains of deceased former NFL players. There's tremendous "selection bias" in the brains, warns a lead researcher -- BU examined only 111 of some 1,300 brains of players who died after 2008, and many of these brains came from a player's family, some in accordance with the player's wishes -- but even if none of the others showed evidence of CTE, the resulting percentage would still dramatically exceed what you find in the general population. Note well, also, that a lot of these players had long retired before the era of the 300-pound-plus offensive lineman, meaning we can no longer blame the size of the players. We have to blame the game.

Finally, in a development sure to unnerve close readers of the Book of Revelation, a Wisconsin corporation actually plans to offer implantable chips to employees -- so those employees can "open doors, buy snacks, log in to computers, and use office equipment like copy machines." Which we know is absolutely necessary, since it's not like there's any other way to do any of these things. The implants are optional, of course -- until a series of "equipment upgrades" makes them "necessary," no doubt! As Leonard Cohen might say: I have seen the future; it is murder.

Finally, President Trump speaks to the Boy Scouts Jamboree in West Virginia and does what he does best: act like he's the center of the universe and nobody else, even his audience, matters.. I'm not particularly bothered that he "brought politics" to the Jamboree, or even that he yammered on about "fake news" or joked about firing his HHS Secretary or called our Capitol a "cesspool," but it's profoundly uncivilized behavior to take an event that belongs to other people and talk about nothing but yourself and your obsessions, and taking adult topics to a meeting of youngsters, frankly, just heaps injury upon insult. And seriously, segueing from "a scout is trustworthy, loyal" to "We could use some more loyalty"? You could try earning some loyalty, Mr. President.

Around the table: in which we contemplate the "war on terror," free speech, the "liberal" media, smart birds, and an actual conservative health care plan.

Good news, everyone: U.S. House of Representatives passes two amendments to its defense authorization bill that would prevent American involvement in the Saudi-led war against Yemen. Yes, these amendments could well get conferenced out in reconciliation, particularly if President Trump demands it (and what an "independent" he'll be if he does!), but it's still a good first step -- particularly since it should be hard for Mr. Trump to use the 2001 AUMF (specifically aimed at those who attacked us, or harbored our attackers, on 9.11) to justify continuing to participate in a war on the same side as al-Qaeda and against Houthi rebels who fight ISIS well.

Ed Dolan at Vox explains "What a Good Conservative Health Care Plan Would Look Like." How do I know that these are actually conservative ideas? Because I'd actually be willing to implement some of them (definitely greater price transparency and drug reimportation from Canada) in an honest negotiation about health care reform -- though the other side would at least have to give up a public option, of course. I mean, negotiations have to be win-win. And I hasten to point out that a Medicare-for-All, single-payer system would wipe away any complaints about employer-sponsored insurance tax deductibility.

Glen Frieden at FAIR notes the relative absence of actual liberal populists from NPR's "varied mix" of on-air perspectives, while giving yuge airtime to right-wing commentator Jonah Goldberg, often without identifying his political bent. NPR professes to like Mr. Goldberg because he's not as "predictable" as the others, but the only thing "unpredictable" about him is exactly which tortured road he will use to arrive at the same place all the other right-wingers go. Also, he's really bad at punditry -- I can't tell you how many columns of his I've read where he accidentally destroys his own argument, and not even by trying to be hip.

Ho hum, Trump lawyer threatens unnamed individual in a string of profane late-night emails. The lawyer later apologized, and I suppose we could argue whether Mr. Kasowitz's threats rise to the level of criminality ("I already know where you live" and "You will see me. I promise. Bro." sure weren't his two best ideas that day), but certainly responding with four profane, rage-addled emails to someone best ignored describes a man who may not be the best person for whatever job he's got. I can already hear Mr. Trump saying I hire only the best people, the classiest people! The best!

Finally, researchers find ravens able to plan for the future. Ravens already save food for later, but scientists suspect that ability may be hard-wired, so they trained them to a) choose a rock from among a series of items, and then drop that rock into a tube to release a treat from a box, and b) exchange a token for a food reward. And ravens show more long-term planning than a lot of politicians do, by actually doing better on experiment a) when waiting 17 hours for a reward than they did after waiting 15 minutes, and by preferring to hold on to their tokens for the promise of a better reward later in experiment b). So think about all that next time you watch The Birds.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 472.

President Trump suggests he could stop funding subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, saying Congress hasn't authorized them. If he does do that -- something neither Congress nor health insurance corporations appear to want at this point -- he might wind up with his very own Hawley-Smoot tariff, and for what? To "make Democrats negotiate" without giving them a damn thing worth negotiating for? That's like creating a hostage situation and then just killing the hostage! He'd be better off funding subsidies and running Obamacare into the ground in other ways, which is I'm sure where he'll be before long.

David Dayen reminds us that the economic "populists," such as they were, have far less sway in the Trump Administration than the Goldman Sachs crowd now. Which is not a pivot to the center, as anyone who thinks about it knows! No one voted for Mr. Trump because they wanted banksters running things -- in fact, his voters expected completely the opposite. And the center isn't Where Our Glorious Elites are -- it's where most Americans are, which is, again, not with the banksters.

Alex Pareene at Fusion reminds us that airlines like United can "treat you like garbage because they're an oligopoly." "When everyone gets mad at Pepsi, Pepsi has to apologize because it is very easy to not drink Pepsi," whereas airlines "do not need to do anything to convince people to fly with them, because they all merged and consolidated until there were just four firms controlling the vast majority of domestic flights." It's not a monopoly per se, but it might as well be. All praise the new economy!

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has requested 24-7 bodyguards, possibly because he's going to fire one out of every four EPA workers. Seriously, right-wingers walk around like they have the biggest balls, and yet they need the biggest security details, paid for with our tax money, no less. You'd think there'd be a lesson in there, somewhere -- you know, like if you don't hurt people, you don't need so many goons protecting you.

Some good news out of California: the state is making so much solar power that wholesale solar prices are actually in the negative for a few hours a day. This isn't about residential customers generating so much power that utilities have to pay them -- this is about corporations that generate solar power having to pay utilities on occasion, because it's apparently cheaper to do that than to simply stop generating power. So the utilities may not die a horrible death after all. These really aren't bad problems to have, you know.

Finally, in a truly impressive display, Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) says at a town hall that it's "bullcrap" that taxpayers pay his salary. He "meant" to say he pays his own way in the world and does what he does in Congress as a service, but all anyone's ever going to hear is "you said you paid for me to do this? Bullcrap!" And if he thinks he's in a safe Republican seat, he might want to talk to Lee Terry about that -- or Ron Estes.

Penny Rants for Sunday, April 2, 2017: false flags, "free" trade, and internet privacy.

Emphatic non-truther Paul Street says "the time has never been riper for a false flag terror attack." Approvals in the 30s not even three months in, his first attempt at repealing Obamacare falling flat on its face, his first two anti-Muslim executive orders dying in court, his utter inability to put the Russian hacking story to rest -- yeah, the new President has sure made an entrance, and don't forget that 54% of the electorate voted for someone else. And don't forget, also, that George W. Bush didn't win the popular vote either, and sure looked headed for a one-term Presidency before 9.11 became his "opportunity" (Condi Rice's word, not mine). At least Mr. Bush actually put together a government; Mr. Trump hasn't even done that much, meaning there'll be fewer people in the conspiracy if there is one (and of course the bigger the supposed conspiracy, the more likely it doesn't exist). Remember that, incidentally, when the attack comes -- along with his refusal to attend intelligence briefings, his purge of the State Department, his golfing weekends in Florida, and his general strutting around like he's got the biggest cock in the universe. But, really, Mr. Trump may not need a conspiracy -- as one of my co-workers says, Mr. Trump's election is ISIS's endgame.

Mr. Trump says he won't scrap NAFTA, formerly "the worst trade deal," but will keep many planks in place when he goes to renegotiate it. And I bet you just can't guess one of them. That's right, the investor-state tribunal -- which the Times doesn't even mention until paragraph 20, though I'd say the mere existence of such tribunals, which threaten to destroy law and order in America and any other country in which they exist, was the main reason folks across the political spectrum hated the Trans-Pacific "Partnership." Were you wondering how Trump was going to fail us on "free" trade? This sure looks like how. But Paul Ryan's smoke-blowing aside, Mr. Trump hasn't exactly convinced everyone he's a "closer," and it looks like our neighbor to the north -- you remember that Canada was also a party to SHAFTYA, right? -- might have more urgent concerns about Mr. Trump's aims than Mexico does. Let's not allow the existence of Mexico's national sales tax lure us into accepting Mr. Trump's proposed American national sales tax "border tax," either. I'd be happy to accept our withdrawal from NAFTA. I'd even be happy to give Mr. Trump credit for it, as I do for our withdrawal from the TPP. (Not too much credit, though. We really deserve most of that.)

Wondering how to navigate the post-internet privacy world, as delivered by Congress this past week? Quincy Larson at Quartz advises us to set up a Virtual Private Network (or VPN) and certainly to enable HTTPS on our browsers, while Emily Dreyfuss at WIRED advises us to check out the Internet Noise website, which opens five tabs on your browser to websites chosen at random, and then visits five more websites every 10 seconds until you tell it to stop. I will admit to being quite attracted to the latter item -- as we learned in the Star Trek episode "Charlie X," one good way to deal with someone who's got too much power is to give them too much to handle -- but I also imagine that the better ISPs (and the better data-buyers) will ultimately figure out which traffic is trash. You should also worry (especially since Internet Noise's creator hasn't even evaluated all the search terms he uses) that an unscrupulous actor will concoct a terrorist plot from these searches -- Cardinal Richelieu once said "give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him." There's more than one way to give evil too much to handle, though -- one of my random searches led me here, and that sure brought back some happy memories.

Around the table: Paul Ryan is a dumb guy, and other truths.

Robert Levering describes "How Anti-Vietnam War Activists Stopped Violent Protest from Hijacking Their Movement." "(T)he primary way to deal with those who advocate violent tactics is to isolate them," he writes, "(to) do everything possible to separate them from the peaceful demonstration," because violent protestors need the cover of nonviolent protestors the way fire needs oxygen. Also, nonviolent movements need to "train() marshals" to "essentially be our own force of nonviolent peacekeepers." You just know the "liberal" media would rather talk about violent protestors than the vast, vast majority of nonviolent ones.

Like Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post, I'm tired of the media pretending Paul Ryan is a smart guy, when (as someone once said) he's a dumb guy's idea of a smart guy. He says "(t)he people who are healthy paying for the people who are sick" like that's not how insurance usually works (except the people who are sick are also paying for the people who are sick). And you and I and everyone you know will belong to both groups at different times in life. I was surprised to learn that Mr. Ryan is so terrible he even makes Tucker Carlson look good for a minute, though I'm sure that's exactly how they both intended it.

You've perhaps heard Sean Spicer declare that "the deep state" has it in for President Trump, but Mike Lofgren, the man who coined the phrase "the deep state," reminds us that Mr. Trump's actions thus far suggest that he and the deep state actually have the very same aims. It's more tax cuts for the rich, more freedom for banksters, and more war against the Middle East all down the line, even if "free" trade is gone (for now!). It's enough to make you think (as Mr. Lofgren says) that Mr. Trump could save Our Glorious Elites' political agenda "by masking it in a façade of fake populism and reality-TV stage management." Unless we step up with real populism, that is.

Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) alleges that President Obama is staying in D.C. to create a "shadow government," and then his office walks his comments back. Say obnoxious crap and then say you didn't really mean it -- well, that was the formula for getting attention in America, at least before Mr. Trump cut out the second step. But Mr. Kelly says so much obnoxious crap that some enterprising Democrat in his district could put together a greatest hits ad -- though let's learn from 2016 and not run only that ad, OK? Because if you want to hold public office, you have to do something.

Finally, we learn how the "Kalamazoo Promise" -- where a Michigan town pays 65 to 100% of your college tuition if you graduate from a Kalamazoo public school and meet certain other criteria -- has improved lives there. Lower dropout rates, higher college-completion rates, alleviated student loan debt, a rebounding population -- and yet some of the folks who've benefited the most still fret that other folks will find out they got help to go to school, when everyone gets help to do everything. Why, some of our richest Americans are completely dependent on Big Gummint, though they prefer you to think otherwise.

Around the table: the Continued Amazing Adventures of the Citizen Legislator! And other absurdities.

Attorney General Sessions may have committed perjury when answering questions about any contacts with Russia that he might have had, but the "liberal" media spins the story to his benefit. I sure hope all those right-wingers who demanded Mr. Clinton's impeachment because he lied under oath will be just as outraged when they find that Mr. Sessions has done the same thing. I kid, of course -- the rationalizations should be quite irritating. In the meantime, note well Mr. Naureckas's point that the internet hasn't destroyed traditional media organs (at least the big ones!) but has broadened their reach.

Priorities USA gives advice -- some good, some bad -- to Democrats looking to stop President Trump's economic plans. Their assessment that calling tax-cuts-for-the-rich a wealth redistribution scheme doesn't work is quite irritating, but pounding the "border tax" as a middle-class tax hike is a particularly good idea, not least because it's true, and "highlighting companies...that are proceeding with plans to send jobs to Mexico" is an even better one, not so much because it's true but that it'll send Mr. Trump into a tantrum.

From the "Not All Clickbait is Bad" file: Nithin Coca at Shareable gives us "Five (More) Reasons to Delete Uber" and offers "Some Ethical Alternatives." You won't be surprised by the five reasons (Uber "breaks laws," "strong-arms cities," "competes unfairly," "doesn't take safety seriously," and "exploits drivers"), but you may need to be reminded of the alternatives, which encompass not only cab-hailing apps and public transportation, but also certain taxi co-ops (not that they're everywhere yet).

If you're still convinced that privatization of public services is the way to go, Dave Johnson at the OurFuture blog provides a handy primer about privatization's multitudinous harms. This is the phrase that snuck up on me: "the people would make a public investment and share gains from that investment." "Share" is a powerful word in this context, and not just because the "sharing" economy is such horsedoodle, but because privatization cripples our ability to "share" in the "gains." Oh, and Mr. Trump wants to privatize the VA; we'll stay on that.

Uh oh: the office of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the man who still gives the "Citizen Legislator" a bad name, sends a cease-and-desist letter to Milwaukee resident Earl Good after Mr. Good calls Sen. Johnson's Washington office hundreds of times to express his will. OK, I'd have called the local offices a lot more quickly than that, but what Mr. Good did hardly "cross(es) the bounds of decency," and the notion that "the well being of visitors to the office and staff" is their main concern in sending the letter, well, that is to laugh.

Finally, some good news: after a massive outcry from the citizenry, Arizona's House Speaker has decided not to move the nefarious SB 1142, the so-called "Plan a Protest, Lose Your House" bill, which would have used racketeering laws to attack protestors. I didn't emphasize this enough on Monday, so I'll do it now: calling us "paid protestors" is an attack not just on our ideas, but our patriotism. We do what we do because we love our country, and don't let anyone tell you any differently.

Around the table: everything old is new again, again.

So you've seen all those headlines about the "Confederate flag-waving couple" who got 33 years in prison? Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us -- as "liberal" media headlines somehow don't! -- that they were also waving a shotgun at black folks. Which might explain the longer sentence a little better! Personal to the folks who say ONLY READINGZ TEH HEADLINEZ IZ TEH STUPIDZ!!!!: you're telling me you read every single story for which you see a headline?

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) pushes natural gas as a climate change solution at townhall meetings. Methane emissions, as you know, are a fairly persistent side effect of fracking, and pack a climate change punch much larger than even coal emissions, and I just can't imagine how Mr. Cassidy will vote on H.J.Res. 36, the "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify BLM rules limiting methane emissions from gas drilling on public lands.

Ho hum, the IRS is hemorrhaging experienced criminal investigators, though tax cheats still work around the clock. One could reasonably ask whether the IRS investigates too many cases that aren't directly related to tax fraud, but the main culprit here, of course, is Republican budget-cutting and Republican-engineered dramas about IRS investigation of right-wing groups. If you want to get all "law and order," you should maybe start with the tax cheats that steal from all of us.

President Trump's new National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, apparently rather dislikes using the term "radical Islamic terrorism," unlike his boss and millions of whining right-wingers. Because, he says, being a terrorist is "un-Islamic," rather like it's also un-Christian and un-any other religion you can name. And how many times must I tell these pimps! Demanding that everyone use the term "radical Islamic terrorism" is the very soul of political correctness!

Finally, about the President's address to Congress Tuesday night: let's not give the man so much credit for deciding that pretending you care is a better stratagem than constantly acting like a prick -- and let's also consider whether this "Presidential" persona will merely enable his votaries to label his prick-nature "fake news." And, really, Donald Trump telling someone else to cut it out with the "trivial fights"? That's Bush Mobb-level chutzpah, right there.

Around the table: banksters wilt under reporting requirements boo-hoo, and other tales.

Trump Administration rescinds Obama Administration's guidance on transgender folks using the bathroom of the gender they identify with. The Times reports that Education Secretary DeVos initially resisted, and while I'd love to believe that's true, I don't -- I believe, of course, that the report of her initial opposition exists to lull us into a false sense of security about how well the Trump Machine is running, when it's running exactly the way Our Glorious Elites want it to run.

The incomparable David Dayen informs us that banksters want to reduce federal reporting requirements on suspected money-laundering -- you know, the kind of thing that helps catch drug kingpins, tax evaders, and terrorists. Banksters' apparent inability to comply with federal law on this matter might suggest that the reporting requirements are onerous, but they're not, and with banksters, of course, you have to ask how their notorious incompetence in following the law might be intentional. Read the whole thing, though, because the banksters' bad arguments just get worse and worse. And if Mr. Trump wants to be a law and order President, he should be paying attention.

Sue Sturgis at Facing South explores another way to dilute minority voting power in a region: make all the representatives "at-large." She's talking specifically about the Board of Commissioners of Jones County in North Carolina, and I guess defenders of the "at-large" nature of the five Commissioners will happily explain how Commissioners aren't "representatives" per se. But I'm equally happy to call such an explanation pedantry, since federal courts have ruled against County Commissioners on Voting Rights Act grounds before.

Issie Lapowsky at Wired writes that "The Internet Gave Us Milo" Yiannopoulos, and "The Internet Can Take Him Away." But as Ms. Lapowsky acknowledges, he wouldn't have gotten anywhere without mainstream media coverage of his internet shenanigans, and he may find he made a major mistake taking his book to a major publisher, when, you know, he could have self-published the thing and made a lot of sales. Think maybe he didn't go full-indy because he wanted to be legit? And think maybe he's regretting that now?

Wellesley College's Davis Museum removes works created by immigrants -- in effort to highlight contributions made by immigrants to American culture. I can already hear right-wingers squealing that they can't imagine any immigrant Muslims making such contributions, oblivious to the fact that folks once said that about Germans, Irish, and Italians. And a lot of the right-wingers who squeal about such matters have German, Irish, and Italian blood, too.

Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court allows convicted murderer Duane Buck to ask for a new sentence, given that one of the reasons prosecutors gave in arguing for his death sentence in 1997 was that he'd be more likely to commit crimes in the future because he was black. This one was easy enough that Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion; one day I may regard his compulsive literalism as an idiosyncrasy rather than a flaw, but he's firmly anti-racist when the evidence is obvious enough or the forces of evil sloppy enough, and I guess that's not nothing.

Around the table: with glimpses into the innards of the Trump propaganda machine.

The economy created a hair over 225,000 jobs in January, and suddenly Donald Trump is all happy about the jobs reports he previously criticized as "phony." But of course he did all that on purpose, so that his votaries can squeal ZOMG HE CUT TEH UNEMPLOYMENT RATEZ FROM TEH 42 PERCENTZ TO TEH FIVE PERCENTZ DO TEH HEILZ!!!!!! And when they do, you probably won't be looking right at the Department of Labor's website -- though bookmarking it now might help!

Most spokeshacks who described a terrorist "massacre" that never occurred would find themselves out of a job posthaste, but not in Donald Trump's America, and certainly not in Donald Trump's Administration. Kellyanne Conway is doing exactly what Mr. Trump wants her to do -- help him create an alternate reality in voters' minds so he looks better in four years. There'll be no Bowling Green Massacres under President Trump, that's for sure! Until there are, at which point he'll blame everyone but himself for it.

Speaking of the big man, yes, President Trump literally said he wants to reverse financial services reform because his "friends" "with nice businesses" "can't borrow money." I know about 25% of the electorate, being bat-guano insane, lives vicariously through Dear Leader and would also make big decisions based on what their own "friends" told them, but surely the rest of us can make a bigger noise than they can. And look! Lately, we have been -- I guess the other side only spray-paints swastikas on synagogues when they're flush with victory.

Wired wonders whether -- times being, as I've said, interesting -- you might want to get yourself a burner phone. Thus follows a list of a few burner phones, which sure have improved -- some are getting to be like smartphones anymore! -- plus the Burner App which can disguise your phone number. I bet more than a few scam artists are using that app already, though. Seriously, if I thought of it, it must be happening now.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), in a completely unsurprising development, says he'll vote for Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary, thus virtually ensuring a 50-50 vote in the Senate that Ms. DeVos will win when Vice President Pence breaks the tie. Dig the ridiculous framing, though, both from Sen. Toomey -- who suggests that only his opinion of Ms. DeVos matters! -- and the article itself, which claims that he's upset "the left," and not, you know, the majority.

Finally, Christa Hillstrom at Yes! magazine describes the Northeast Investment Cooperative of Minneapolis, MN, "a first-of-its-kind co-op in the United States that pools members’ money to invest in commercial real estate." Some 200 local residents own property, share in the decision-making and the profits, and help keep local businesses thriving. They're hoping to export the model to other states, and I certainly would prefer a co-op to a bankster owning property they only bought so they can squeeze money out of it. I wish the NIC luck.

Around the table: the Trump infrastructure plan as "developer welfare," and other hard lessons.

Michael Hudson aptly describes "Trump's Infrastructure Plan" as "Developer Welfare." He describes how the Wall Street-financed construction of the 2nd Avenue line in New York City benefits the landlords along the line -- who are already raising rents on the people who were supposed to benefit from the line! And of course the MTA financed 2nd Avenue by borrowing from banksters, and now will be paying banksters interest in perpetuity. And that's the kind of "infrastructure" you'll see from Mr. Trump -- infrastructure that doesn't actually help ordinary Americans, but helps banksters and landlords, who seem to be his real constituency.

Spencer Woodman at The Intercept now finds eight U.S. states contemplating laws criminalizing peaceful protest in some way. What do they have to be afraid of? Well, North Dakota is mulling whether to make it OK to run over a protestor "accidentally," and supporters of that initiative actually have the cojones to tell you that the momentarily-successful Standing Rock protests make such legislation necessary! You know what else might make Standing Rock-style protests go away? Committing to renewable energy sources like solar and wind. Of course, big fossil fuel corporations think there's no money in that, but they're wrong.

Fox News poll shows the Affordable Care Act is actually more popular than Donald Trump right now. And finding that 50% approvals for the ACA is fairly unprecedented -- during that interminable debate over the matter in 2009 and 2010, you couldn't find even 40% approval for the thing (though, as the "liberal" media usually ignored, a lot of folks, and not all of them liberals, disapproved of it because it wasn't single-payer). Could it be that folks like something better as soon as they fear they're going to lose it? Or that Republicans have failed so badly at convincing people they can do better? It's probably both.

Lost in the brouhaha over "grizzly bears" at Betsy DeVos's last confirmation hearing was her apparent conviction that disabled students shouldn't get equal access to public education under the law, which conviction not only runs afoul of over 40-year-old federal law, but also of basic human decency. Privatize the whole system, as Mr. DeVos is eager to do, and you're likely to have a crapload of corrupt charter schools taking public money to break public laws. Anyone else think we ought to just commit to making our public services be the best they can be, instead of giving in to the promises of snake oil salesfolk?

Surprise, surprise, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama has found the state guilty of "unconstitutional racial gerrymandering" in 12 state legislature districts (three Senate, nine House). Alabama will have to redraw those 12 districts before 2018, if they don't appeal, which they may do, even though the plaintiffs alleged that 36 districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. Still, it's something that the state drew a dozen districts so badly that even Judge William Pryor (lately mooted as Mr. Trump's next choice for the U.S. Supreme Court) wasn't willing to explain them away.

Finally, San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich lights into President Trump in a radio rant. You may not have known the five-time NBA champion head coach was also a champion of civilization, but he is, declaring that "respect has to be earned," that "if our children would've said (what Mr. Trump said when he mocked a disabled reporter)" he'd have "grounded" them, that "the people around (Mr. Trump)...have the cynical approach and disingenuous attitude to really defend him and try to make it look like he didn't say what he said," and that Mr. Trump can't reach out to people he's hurt or offended because "bullies don't do that." And I haven't heard this anywhere else: "Instead of honoring the 117 people behind him (who died in the line of duty) where he was speaking (at the CIA offices), he talked about the size of the (inauguration) crowd." So what's Mr. Trump gonna do? Call Pop a loser?

Around the table: tales of rage and hubris -- and hope.

Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept reminds us that the evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election is really quite scant at present -- amounting to nothing more than anonymous leaks to the "liberal" media. That's not to say that we won't find out more, or even that we won't find out we were totally played by Russia's government, but we've had many, many years to learn to be more skeptical (remember when George Tenet said the WMD case against Iraq was a "slam dunk"? Good times!), and calling anyone who disagrees with you a "Russian stooge" is really not how civilized people act.

In a related note, former U.N. Ambassador/complete asshole John Bolton insinuates that this whole Russians-hacking-the-election-thing might be a "false flag" operation coming from the Obama Administration. I was going to say, "imagine what a right-winger would say if you called 9.11 a 'false flag' operation," but I don't have to -- any deviation from Dear Leader Bush's vision was a treasonable offense to his votaries back in the day. And that's some cojones Mr. Bolton's got there, saying the Obama Administration has "politicized" the CIA, after Tha Bush Mobb purged all those CIA personnel at the beginning of his second term.

From the "Don't Look Now, But" file: Emma Grey Ellis at Wired tells us that "Thousands of Invisible Oil Spills Are Destroying The Gulf." The big spills (like Deepwater Horizon) get all the ink, but actually we suffer around 30,000 oil leaks annually (that we know of, that is -- our Coast Guard kind of relies on an honor system for oil leak reporting), and that means less clean air, less clean water, and more health problems. (By the way, after you read this article, you'll know what to say when some right-wing gaslighter comes along and says oil leaks are natural and have been occurring forever -- that those leaks are so slow that nearby life forms have evolved to adapt to it, and anyway, that's no damn excuse for the far more massive pollution perpetrated out of greed.)

James Fallows at The Atlantic reminds us that Donald Trump's victory in the Presidential race is not, as his spokeshack put it, a "historic" "landslide" or "blowout." Mr. Trump's electoral vote margin ranks a mere 46th out of our 58 Presidential elections, and his popular vote share -- 46%, in case you missed it the first 221 times I said it -- outpaces only two elected Presidents. I recall Rutherford Hayes being called "Old 8-7" by contemporaries, because of the narrow vote on the Commission that awarded him 20 contested electoral votes; why not constantly call Donald Trump "The 46% Man"? He'll get angry, but everything gets him angry. And this is one hornet's nest I think we should prod, over and over again, because we're stronger than he is.

Finally, Zenobia Jeffries at Yes! magazine profiles a Detroit woman who's trying to turn her block into a "solar-powered ecovillage." One that provides important resources for her community, too, like after-school meals and homework help for local kids. I'll admit that buying up distressed properties and turning the area into a renewable-energy hub has long been quite attractive to me, and I wish Ms. Harris the best in her endeavors. After all, who's going to do it if we don't? Big corporations ain't gonna do it, and big government ain't gonna do it, either, until we make it impossible for them not to.

Around the table: at long last, the Trump health care plan! And other disappointments.

A heavily-promoted Trump/Pence "conversation" about health care turns out to be a long, long wait for two-count-'em-two ideas: allow health insurance to be purchased across state lines (already tried, doesn't work), and, naturally, the "health savings account." OK, one more time: the whole point of insurance is that folks come together and pitch in toward a fund that helps one or another of those folk out at various times. A "health savings account" is thus, in that sense, not insurance, because you lose the bargaining power that comes from being part of a group. And you tell people working two jobs and still deciding which utility to pay this month while feeding their kids to "just save money."

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) plans to advance a corporate tax amnesty and use the money to pay for infrastructure repairs, and, perhaps not surprisingly, liberals don't like it. And why should we? We should be keeping corporations from pretending they made their profits overseas in the first place, not let them bring those profits back at a reduced tax rate, like that will ever encourage good behavior. Three other things: one, noting that Mr. Schumer "has shown a willingness to take on the liberal base in the past" is faint praise in a land where every Democrat indulges in hippie-punching; two, his plan will face Republican opposition, because that's all Republicans do anymore; and three, where does he get off suggesting that "progressive" and "constructive" are such mutually exclusive terms?

U.S. "Trade" "Representative" Michael Froman thinks Congress could pass the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" if Congressional leadership would just hold a vote. What makes him so confident? That "lawmakers are increasingly recognizing industry support" for the deal, though Mr. Froman doesn't speculate on whether he's noticed that lawmakers have noticed the American people's utter lack of support, which I think, in a representative form of government such as ours, is a far more pertinent issue.

Ho hum, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr -- who might get cut down by a Democrat wave local only to North Carolina -- says he, too, will ensure the Supreme Court only has eight seats by the end of a Hillary Clinton first term. The best part? All the HOW CAN TEH SUPREME COURTZ ONLY HAVEZ TEH EIGHTZ JUSTICEZ!!!!!! handwringing he did in 2005 after Chief Justice Rehnquist died. (Oh, and BTW, BFD that he apologized for those nasty things he said about Hillary Clinton. Everyone says nasty crap so they can get attention, and then they apologize so they can get more; Mr. Trump's reluctance to apologize after saying/doing nasty crap is, in that light, almost refreshing. I said "almost.")

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name, announces that he won't serve more than two terms in the Senate. Of course, he faces Wisconsin voters in less than a week, and he's widely considered to be the most endangered Republican in the Senate, so he's going to need a lot of help from Wisconsin Voter ID laws to even get a second term in the first place.

Finally, David Brooks at the New York Times excoriates the Republican Party for abandoning conservative principles. I know you hear right-wingers say that a lot, usually about how their party doesn't punch gays and women enough, but Mr. Brooks makes a convincing argument, in part by describing precisely what the GOP has abandoned: "conservatism stands for intellectual humility, a belief in steady, incremental change, a preference for reform rather than revolution, a respect for hierarchy, precedence, balance and order, and a tone of voice that is prudent, measured and responsible." Any of that sound like Ted Cruz, the biggest "conservative" swordfighter of them all? Or Newt Gingrich? I'd feel better recommending this article to you if I didn't know that Mr. Brooks signed on to a lot of the "thousand small betrayals of conservatism" that helped get us here.

Around the table: attaching a dollar figure to the harm caused by banksters, and other revelations.

UMass-Amherst economist says that banksters wind up costing the average American household well over $100,000 over the course of a lifetime. Not just with credit card late fees, ATM fees, and overdraft fees -- and, for poorer families, with payday loans -- but with a lot of retirement funds, whose managers have limited or no fiduciary responsibility to work on your behalf, and who charge exorbitant fees for funds that perform little or no better than the stock market does as a whole. What are banksters good for? For redistributing your wealth upward -- to themselves.

National Labor Relations Board upholds appeal of earlier ruling permitting the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America to endorse a boycott of Israel. The Israeli legal center bringing the original suit (and the appeal) cited labor law preventing unions from encouraging workers at "neutral employers" (that is, employers not involved in a dispute between the union and its workers' employer) to stop work or go on strike in arguing that unions also could not encourage workers to "cease doing business with Israelis and Israeli companies." If it seems like a bit of a leap from one to the other, well, you're not alone. And now I'm rather interested in rolling back the law preventing unions from encouraging other workers to go on strike, as it seems a plain violation of their First Amendment rights.

New CFPB rules mandate that debt collectors now have to make some effort to prove that debtors actually owe them any money. New rules would make debt collectors limit their number of weekly contacts, notify debtors when statutes of limitation have passed on old debts, and get a whole lot more information about your supposed debt than just your phone number -- among many other absolutely needed reforms (though not all the reforms we'd like, of course). But please, Republicans, keep mouthing off about how the CFPB is just another "bureaucracy" preventing honest businessfolk from making money, when it's actually a tool to keep banksters from running roughshod over our lives.

University of Zurich study suggests that internet trolls are more obnoxious, not less, when they're using their real names. But only in limited contexts, it seems to me -- the study looked at comments on online petitions, where you have to give your real name but can request the petition manager to withhold your name from public exposure; the study doesn't look at, for example, Facebook or Twitter comments, though it seems to me you'd more likely find obnoxious behavior there than on online petitions. So clearly, this subject needs further research.

Finally, 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals strikes down North Carolina's Voter ID law, finding that the state legislature went very far out of its way to "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision." Gov. McCrory of course replies with the whole you-need-ID-to-buy-Sudafed-so-you-should-also-need-it-to-vote, as if he's never, ever heard anything anyone has ever said about the matter. And no Republican appeal of this law will ever survive Supreme Court scrutiny, not when your legislature not only goes very far out of its way to find out exactly how many non-whites their law will hurt and not only enacts that law anyway but writes all of their doings down.

Around the table: law-and-order issues, plus welfare and medicinal marijuana.

In light of recent events, TruthOut points us to a 2015 essay from Rachel Herzing explaining how we might get to a "police-free future," by advancing reforms "that lead toward the erosion of policing power rather than reinforcing it. I support a lot of the reforms described herein, but just as I dislike calls to "dismantle government" because politicians put their donors' interests ahead of ours, I also remain in the keep-police-but-oversee-them-more-effectively camp. Even if I were to accept, without qualification, the notion that the sole function of police is "armed protection of state interests," I still insist that we are the state, and if the state doesn't act in our interests, we change it into one that does.

Uh oh: ProPublica reports that police all over America are using a $2, 40-year-old drug test that routinely gives false positive readings. You think science has changed any over the last 40 years? Think maybe chemical processes have become more accurate? Among the problems: the kits don't have precise directions, and lots of other things turn these chemicals a different color. Moreover, the DOJ declared, shortly after these kits came out, that they shouldn't be admissible in court -- but, it turns out, unscrupulous/stressed people in law enforcement and the courts can work around that pretty easily, simply by pretending it's not true. I've worked enough jobs to know how overworked police officers and lab techs are, but that doesn't excuse the corporations that put out drug testing kits like they work.

Why are we having such trouble passing incremental criminal justice reform such as the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act? Alexander Bolton at The Hill suggests it's because Senate Majority Leader/Greatest and Brightest Shining True American King of Presidents Mitch McConnell doesn't have the cojones to face down two Republican Senators who might object. The bill's sponsor, Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, has carried plenty of water for Republicans over the years, but I doubt Mr. McConnell conceives of the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act as a payment for that water-carrying -- rather, he considers the water-carrying as payment for all the times he's let Mr. Grassley alone to do, you know, actual governing and oversight on behalf of his constituents.

John Cheese at Cracked talks about "The Four Types of People on Welfare Nobody Talks About." The article contains many necessary insights -- a substantial chunk of welfare recipients get it for seven months or less and then don't need it any more, which is kind of how it's supposed to work, while more than 90 percent of welfare benefits go to disabled folks, seniors, and folks who are also working (i.e., at McDonald's or WalMart), which means folks who constantly complain about lazy people getting free money are either stupid or deliberately lying to you. And don't miss Mr. Cheese's own reminiscences about being on welfare as a child. Spoiler alert: despite not asking to be born, he felt quite ashamed of himself.

States that have legalized medicinal marijuana saw a drop in Medicare drug spending between 2010 and 2013. If it were legal everywhere, you might see a half-billion dollar drop nationwide, which isn't a very big part of Medicare's budget -- but, ironically enough, it's very, very hard to research the medicinal benefits of pot, which means some folks using pot to treat their problems probably shouldn't do that. I suspect the big pharma corporations that make money off the antidepressants and painkillers that pot can replace will advance this point posthaste -- without recommending, of course, that we should make marijuana research much easier than it is.

Finally, former U.S. House Rep/talk-radio fixture Joe Walsh said this on Twitter after the shootings of at least a dozen Dallas police officers: "This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter (sic) punks. Real America is coming after you." (Naturally, he deleted the tweet not too long afterward.) While this flatugasm may not qualify as "threatening the President" (and only because the threat is rather non-specific), it certainly qualify as "being an asshole in public." Well, they always say you should do what you're good at.

Around the table: nominees set, wreckage surveyed.

Harold Meyerson surveys the post-California landscape, and hopes Democrats are able to "build on" both Mrs. Clinton's victory in securing the Presidential nomination and Mr. Sanders's victory in "the battle of ideas." But I fear how Democrats will "build on both victories" is to co-opt the Sandernistas and offer them the same narrow choice between a weak legislative agenda and the spectre of far-right dominance, even though this strategy has achieved disaster both in 1994 and 2010 (and will likely do so again in 2018). Republicans will happily cooperate by squealing like pigs at every perceived insult.

Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) loses her House primary to another sitting Republican House Rep, George Holding. Ms. Ellmers started out as a far-right teabagger, but in just six years the right has portrayed her as a sellout for very, very miniscule sins (like being chummy with House leadership, or is that what she wanted House leadership to think?). Certainly redistricting helped doom her and that was probably the point, but mainly Ms. Ellmers has fallen victim to incessant swordfighting over Who's More Conservative, swordfighting that likely won't end even after an actual rabid raccoon wins a House seat.

Gary Legum, writing at Salon, tells us about that time Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) helped keep a hold on an Obama nominee for Ambassador to the Bahamas until the nominee died of leukemia. He kept the hold going, apparently, because it was "a way to inflict special pain on the President." Gosh, Sen. Cotton, all out of adult diapers? Seriously, if Arkansas Democrats ever figure out how to be populists, they could use this event to send Mr. Cotton back to the oblivion he so richly deserves.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid apparently has a serious jones to put Sen. Elizabeth Warren on the ticket with Hillary Clinton, but doesn't want to lose her Senate seat (Massachusetts's Republican Governor would get to pick her successor, at least in the short term). I still wonder who will be the first "liberal" media hack to question whether Hillary Clinton should have a male on her ticket for "balance," even though no one has ever asked a similar question with a male at the top of the ticket. My money's on Chuck Todd.

Finally, Donald Trump is so terrible that Matt Bai can skewer him. The crux of Mr. Bai's analysis -- that Mr. Trump is "a man tragically enslaved to his own neediness," and his "insecurity is not a manageable motivator" but "the black hole that consumes him" and, potentially, the Republican party -- is entirely apt, but I doubt it will actually consume the GOP, not just because the GOP can poop money whenever it likes, but because Trump supporters have been voting GOP for many years, and the "insurgent" candidacy of Mr. Trump is just another way to keep them involved without them suspecting they've been had.

Around the table: clean water, taxes, voting rights, Social Security, and the "liberal" media.

The water engineer who helped expose the Flint water crisis thinks that tragedy is only the beginning of our troubles with our water supply. After all, the lead in Flint's water didn't cause all the infections, rashes, and hair loss -- other systemic problems did. And when public water systems fail because our governments keep handing out corporate welfare like candy, those same corporations will swoop in and declare that only they can do it right! Which will, of course, leave us in far worse straits -- your government, at least, belongs to you.

Washington state Supreme Court rules that a particularly odious anti-tax initiative would be unconstitutional. The initiative requires state legislators to propose a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds supermajority vote for all tax increases -- or else face a one percentage-point cut in the sales tax. That's even more of a hostage crisis than right-wingers usually try. And though I'm fairly opposed to sales taxes myself, I'm pretty confident I could win an argument about sales taxes on the merits, without resorting to Rube Goldbergian legislative contraptions.

Greg Palast and Dennis J. Bernstein reveal that California poll workers have been told to give independent voters provisional ballots, which is against the law there. Independent voters can vote in partisan primaries in California, and we all know what happens to provisional ballots -- they get thrown in the trash. California's primary, naturally, starts in three days.

President Obama calls for an expansion of Social Security benefits in a speech in Indiana. I feel compelled to note, however, that Mr. Obama will be out of office in a little over seven months and has a Congress that won't try to expand Social Security, so his support is not exactly a profile in courage. Perhaps he would have been better off thumping this saucepan back when his party had a 70-seat House majority and a filibuster-proof Senate majority. We know that using those huge majorities to appease Republicans sure didn't work.

Finally, we learn that "liberal" media coverage of that notorious Donald Trump press conference from earlier this week -- the one where he repeatedly insulted reporters who had questioned him about his donations to veterans' groups -- has, ah, tended toward the deferential. One CNN headline proclaimed that "When Donald Trump Hits Back, He Hits Back Hard." Is that what we're going to call it now when someone's too cowardly to admit that he misrepresented his donations to veterans' groups -- and, indeed, only coughed up the money after the Washington Post shamed him? I may have been premature in suggesting that maybe Donald Trump has insulted the "liberal" media one too many times.

Around the table: "sacrificing human lives" as "the proper functioning of a market economy," and other absurdities.

I sort of expected an article entitled "Charles Koch's Disturbing High School Economics Project Teaches 'Sacrificing Lives for Profits'" to be a bit of clickbait, but it's real. You can read this right on the so-called Common Sense Economics website: "The charge that sways juries and offends public sensitivities...is that greedy corporations sacrifice human lives to increase their profits. Is this charge true? Of course it is. But this isn’t a criticism of corporations; rather it is a reflection of the proper functioning of a market economy." Remember that the next time some corporation says it favors more "choices" in education -- apparently teaching people to be assholes is just another "choice."

Belgian court rules that the "right to be forgotten," which allows Europeans to have unflattering references to themselves removed from the internet, also extends to newspaper archives. The "right to be forgotten" has centuries-old precedent in European law, but Americans would find all of this extremely hard to understand, and though these laws generally take into account any public interest in "remembering" the information, I can too easily imagine a citizen running for high office demanding that the media "forget" all the bad things he did, and finding a judge who'll agree with him.

Rebecca McCray, writing at TakePart, notes that the recent Supreme Court decision in Foster v. Chatman -- wherein the Court threw out a death sentence because of the prosecution's racially-motivated jury selection -- won't change very much about racism in jury selection. Of course, it's not really supposed to do that, and we all know the reason the Court acted here is that Mr. Foster's prosecutors left so much written evidence of their racism that even John Roberts couldn't ignore it (though, of course, Clarence Thomas still could). Still, you'll value the insight that judges might not want to accuse prosecutors they work with every day of racism.

Chinese plants appear to be having some success turning toilet waste into power. In China, "sludge" (as they call it) often finds its way into landfills, gets used as fertilizer (it's not clean enough for that!), or gets burned as an alternative to coal (it's not dry enough for that!). The process of harvesting methane from sludge is fascinating, but powering 400 automobiles with several hundred tons of sludge isn't as impressive as it sounds (that's, what, about a ton per car?), and methane, as you know, packs a considerably bigger climate change punch than coal. It's possible it's better than nothing, particularly in a nation with over a billion people who are kinda stepping in it all the time.

Finally, presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump spats with reporters during a press conference. Insulting Hispanics and women is just something the "liberal" media "covers," but insulting reporters? Particularly after one could say they've actually done their jobs? That's another thing entirely. Could this latest tantrum be the moment that does Donald Trump in? I wonder -- I would say, "ask Scott Walker how well he did after constantly insulting the media," but then Scott Walker also had Donald Trump sucking up all the oxygen the room, and Donald Trump doesn't suffer from that problem any more than he suffers from any of the other problems he foists on other people.