Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning big pharma and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Senators to stop big pharma drug patent abuse, and tell President Biden to put people on our USPS Board of Governors who will finally fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

U.S. PIRG helps you tell your Senators to stop big pharma drug patent abuse, one stratagem big pharma corporations use to charge absurd amounts of money on the drugs they develop. They use “patent thickets,” or multiple overlapping patents for the same product, and they also use “product hopping,” where they create new patents even for minor changes to a product, and they also use “pay-for-delay” agreements, where they pay plaintiffs to stop suing them because, hey, they’ve got crap-tons of money they made from all their other anti-competitive tactics which result EpiPens costing $600 and AbbVie charging five figures for Humira more than 20 years later and folks rationing their insulin because they can’t afford it. So our Senators need to hear from us.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to appoint two new members to our USPS Board of Governors who will finally get rid of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. He’s raised prices, cut services, and slashed jobs, all things our executive class calls “bold leadership” but which any reasonable person would call bad leadership. He’s also proposed closing Post Offices in rural areas which not only have no viable mail-delivery alternatives but which have to vote by mail because they don’t have actual polling places. And all of these “bold” moves may well kill good Americans, since so many of us depend on our Postal Service for life-saving medicines. I know, he wants to make our Postal Service run badly so he can privatize it. But why should we allow that?

Around the table: from bad airlines to bad education leadership.

Matt Stoller explains why airlines run so badly these days, and proposes a number of solutions to make them run better. Long story short: re-regulate them, and not just for our good, but for theirs, since regulating them as a public utility also guarantees them a certain amount of income, and the airline industry actually does suffer a lot more from external events (cough COVID cough) than other industries do. I bet the airline CEOs won’t go for it, since all they really care about is how much unearned money they’re making, but at some point we gotta talk to them like the whiny little brats they are.

David Moore at FAIR explains why polling “telling” us that most Americans think what’s happening at our Southern border is a “crisis” or an “invasion” is bunkum. If you ask “do you think what’s happening at our Southern border is a crisis” without giving respondents any other response option like, say, “a serious problem,” respondents will feel more pressure to say “crisis.” The “invasion” question was a true-false question (which pollsters rarely do, people hesitating to say “false” as they do) which gave you four options: “completely true,” “somewhat true,” “completely false,” or “don’t know,” and if you counted two “true” options and one “false” option, you know why that question’s bunkum, too – and you know more than at least two major media outlets, apparently. Hate to pile on, but “invasion” is one of those words right-wingers torture until it tells them what they want to hear. You know, like “caravan.” Or “conservative.”

Wondering if maybe a college degree is prohibitively expensive on purpose? Then you’ll want to note that an Eisenhower/Nixon/Reagan advisor said in 1970 that we were in “danger” of having an “educated proletariat,” and that right-wingers like then-Governor Reagan were already laying the groundwork for what the National Review called a “system of full tuition charges supplemented by loans which students must pay out of their future income.” James Madison, as it happens, had a much more sanguine view of publicly-funded education than those who would claim to be his ideological descendants – though Edmund Burke, you may know from his Reflections on the French Revolution, thought the working classes were incapable of deep thought. I don’t blame Mr. Burke very much for that – by the measure of his time, he was a liberal, and if you don’t believe me on that, believe Russell Kirk, who said he was a liberal up until his Reflections. I do blame contemporary right-wingers, however for not absorbing over two centuries of intellectual progress. The good news? They’re worse at covering up their evil than Ronald Reagan was.

In a peripherally-related note, here’s another reason the Biden student debt relief plan won’t increase inflation: because “debt payments are spread out over years, if not decades. The inflation impact depends on the extent to which savings in monthly payments are channeled into consumer spending.” (Italics in original, believe it or not.) Also too, canceling all student loan debt would free up an amount consumer spending equaling less than one-quarter of one percent of the total amount of consumer spending, so yeah, don’t listen to anyone crying BUT TEH INFLASHUNZ!!!!! Besides, if the payment moratorium ends in January, as the Biden Administration has proposed, then inflation ought to come down a tiny bit, shouldn’t it?

I think suggestions of Mehmet Oz’s impending downfall in Pennsylvania’s Senate race this year are a bit premature. Does attacking John Fetterman for his recent stroke mean Mr. Oz has “just had it,” or does it mean he’s actually counterpunching effectively for once? If he’d ever eaten a vegetable he wouldn’t have stroked out does have a crude humor about it, after all, and though many folks would think going after a guy’s near-death experience a low blow, others would be annoyed to hear that guy was sick and maybe hasn’t been fully truthful about it. And the article doesn’t mention Mr. Oz’s other recent counterpunch – that John Fetterman lived off his parents until he was 50. Neither of these counterpunches is true, but they still might resonate with low-attention voters. Some of them might even feel sorry for Mr. Oz, even though all his wounds are self-inflicted. I mean, seriously, did you see that bag of carrots? He wonders why it’s $4? It’s bigger than my left thigh!

Finally, a school district just northwest of Dallas, TX, votes to forbid any discussion (or recognition) of transgender issues in their schools. It’s like they said waaaaaaaah don’t make me expand my mind or heart! The good news? Most of the 200 comments from actual community members about their proposal opposed it, which means, once again, that the people are far wiser than their leaders. It’s almost like that’s been a theme here in America for decades now. It’s a shame we have such problems getting rid of bad leaders; part of that problem, of course, is we don’t get very many good leaders stepping forward anymore – maybe more than we used to, but still not enough.

Around the table: featuring the usual gang of tax avoiders, bad leaders, and empty suits.

I don't have much to say about the ProPublica report revealing tax evasion by famous high-income folk. We learn that Jeff Bezos paid zero dollars in income tax in 2007 and 2011, and that Warren Buffett, despite talking a good game about taxing the rich harder, hardly pays any income tax generally. Right-wingers will no doubt have a circle jerk over George Soros's tax-avoiding ways, though right-wingers talk about George Soros much, much more than we liberals ever do. And to those who'd say well, they pay themselves in property that doesn't get taxed until they sell it, what did you expect, we can only say that doesn't make it right. And, you know, imagining a better world is a worthwhile endeavor, even if it's hard.

We learn from Sharon Zhang at TruthOut that the nefarious Koch network and the nefarious Heritage Foundation have been influencing putative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, mainly by organizing his more right-wing constituents. We all breathed a sigh of relief when Republicans seemed unable to articulate a reason to oppose the American Rescue Plan, but that's apparently because they were organizing around influencing Mr. Manchin better than we were. Some liberals are starting to organize around influencing Mr. Manchin, as in yesterday's rally in D.C. supporting the For the People Act and the Common Cause effort to rally his constituents around same, and that's a good thing, because in America, having the better argument only takes you so far.

Republicans filibuster the Paycheck Fairness Act, and, as usual, their counterarguments are weak. I've given "frivolous lawsuits" so many headshots already I'm annoyed it's still coming, and you could also have predicted "a boon to trial lawyers," though it's telling that Mob Boss Mitch had to utter it, rather than farm it out to some eager young'un in his caucus. And "we've got three laws on the books, why do we need four?" is profoundly illogical; the number of laws doesn't matter so much as their quality, or, more specifically, how well they anticipate the ways corporations will try to work around them. Why don't they just admit that they'd rather have bosses fire workers for talking about their pay with their co-workers?

Siyanda Mohutsiwa at FAIR writes about the New York Times's reflexively grim coverage of COVID in Africa even though infection rates are actually fairly low there. We Westerners have, for decades, reflexively thought of African nations as "corrupt" and "miserable," perhaps even "ungovernable," and even when we assume 150 years of Western interference has made it so, we still fail to imagine Africans as the protagonists of their own nations -- in this case, we fail to imagine them as "epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists," "academics," or "journalists" -- and that failure is also pretty racist. Read the entire article, though, because I can't list all the persuasive (and damning!) arguments in one paragraph, and also because it'll lead you to Binyavanga Wainaina's "How to Write About Africa," one of the most devastating satires ever written.

Georgia's state Board of Education not only approves a measure aiming to restrict teaching of American racism in public schools, but shuts off comments on the live YouTube feed of the meeting in which they did that nefarious deed, and that sure ain't a good look. Right-wingers have been strutting about their "toughness" for decades, but can't even hear an opposing argument? Why can't such basic failures of leadership be a Democrat attack point? I mean, we just got a four-year seminar in Why Republicans Can't Lead, not too long after George W. Bush's double seminar in that same subject. Maybe Democratic politicians don't do that because they're evil. "Gosh, win an argument, instead of stand around while Republicans lose them? Then we'll have to do things with our power!"

Finally, as Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) declares her candidacy to oppose Sen. Marco Rubio in 2022, Mr. Rubio himself opines that "(n)one of them (i.e., Democratic politicians) will admit to being a socialist. She probably won’t. But she certainly has voted for socialist things." So, Sen. Rubio, ever driven a car on a road? Ever taken out a book from the public library? Ever called a cop? If your answer to any of these questions is "yes," then congratulations, Sen. Rubio! You're a socialist, too.

Action: concerning Social Security, social media, saving our Post Office, fuel efficiency standards, and pollution.

Long story short: tell President Biden to fire two Social Security Administrators, tell Facebook to permanently ban Donald Trump, tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy, tell our EPA to enact more vigorous fuel efficiency standards, and tell President Biden to block the proposed Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. You can call President Biden at 202.456.1111 or use the White House contact form, or use the email/petition/comment tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fire two Social Security Administrators Andrew Saul and David Black, and fix the Supplemental Security Income (or SSI) program. Messrs. Saul and Black have done their damnedest to set fire to as much of our Social Security programs as they can, making it unnecessarily harder to apply for SSI benefits and "forgetting" to send info to our IRS so seniors could get their stimulus checks. You'd also ask our President to increase benefits so they at least meet the federal poverty level -- contrary to what Rand Paul might thnk, $794 a month ain't inducing anyone to fake back pain -- and raise asset limits, which are stuck at 1989 levels. Among other things! Making programs work better and firing bad workers ain't "socialism." Actually, it's what we expect and deserve from our government.

Left Action helps you tell Facebook to make its ban of Donald Trump permanent. Yeah, Facebook extended his suspension for two years, but if you lose an election and then whine about it being "stolen" without any damn evidence and then incite an attempted coup at our Capitol, then Facebook can err on the side of caution and just wash its hands of Donald Trump. Folks who still think this is about "free speech" -- as if anyone's put him in jail for spewing his filth! -- need to remember that this is 2021, where virtually anyone can publish their rants, however good or bad, on the internet. Why, Donald Trump just started writing a blog not even a month ago! And then, not even a week ago, he stopped. So he certainly has little standing to complain about "free speech."

People for the American Way helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who tried to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump by gumming up the works at our Postal Service and is trying to raise prices and cut services as we speak. Of course, the news that our FBI is investigating him for illegal campaign finance is just icing on the cake -- and could this be the thing that finally spurs our USPS Board of Governors to move? I kid, of course -- the only thing that should spur them to move is our will, communicated vigorously. And we'll keep communicating it until we get the Post Office we deserve, again.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to overturn the notorious "clean car" "standards" issued by the Trump EPA, and then set more vigorous ones. Because saving money on gas and polluting less are actually very popular with the American people! You can only get them to go along with less fuel-efficient cars by lying to them ("it'll reduce car prices," as if you won't lose that sticker price discount over the years you're paying more for gas) or demoralizing them ("accept the results," "then win more elections," etc.). Neither of those is a lasting strategy for governing, or, indeed, for preserving and perfecting a civilization. So, yeah, let's fight that.

Finally, Presente helps you tell President Biden to halt construction on Enbridge's notorious Line 3 pipeline. As we speak, over a thousand activists have blocked further construction of Line 3, and they're calling attention not merely to Line 3's path through Ojibwe holy lands but to Enbridge's, ah, not-so-steller pipe safety record. Remember when an Enbridge line ruptured and created the biggest inland oil spill in American history? It was only a decade ago, and you can bet the good folks of Kalamazoo, MI remember, since that spill dumped oil into 40 square miles of the watershed there. President Biden can stop this pipeline, ignore the right-wing wailing about TEH JOBZ!!!! -- and then stop negotiating with Republicans so he can actually help create jobs. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, unemployment, our Post Office, immigration, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to divert the Child Tax Credit expansion to fund the American Jobs Plan and to prevent state Governors from prematurely ending extended unemployment benefits, tell our Post Office to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's plan to cut services and raise prices, tell President Biden to end yet another racist Trump-era immigration practice, and tell Senate Democrats, again, to end the filibuster. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

You know the latest Republican "counter-proposal" on the American Jobs Plan aims to repurpose unspent American Rescue Plan money -- but what you may not have realized is that "including unspent funds from the American Rescue Plan in the American Jobs Plan would repeal the Child Tax Credit Expansion that delivers $250 or $300 checks to working families every month for the next year. The fact they even proposed that shows how tone-deaf they are -- and how much confidence they have that it'll ultimately mean nothing in 2022. They might be right about 2022; these are Democrats we're talking about, after all, the same ones who are strangely not bringing up Republican involvement in January 6 every single day. So, yeah, repealing the CTC expansion should be an easy campaign ad for Democrats -- just show one hand passing a $250 check to another hand twelve times, and then show a Republican politician intercepting them all -- but, again, these are Democrats we're talking about. Which is why we need to get on the phone with our Reps and Senators and tell them no to repealing the CTC expansion. If Democrats allow that to happen, they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. And the American democratic experiment will likely be dead at that point.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop Governors in nearly half of American states from ending expanded unemployment benefits prematurely. Those expanded benefits expire at the end of September anyway; what's the hurry? Especially considering we still have over 6% official unemployment (the more telling U6 figure, which counts folks who've given up looking for work and folks who want to work more hours, stands at 9.9%)? The "hurry" is that Republican politicians want to look like they're "doing something," and as we should know from decades of watching this happen, politicians who look like they're "doing something," even something abominable, always have the political advantage. This is why we constantly tell Democrats to actually do something. Will they listen? If enough of us speak out, they'll have to.

Progress America helps you tell our Postal Regulatory Commission to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's proposal to raise prices and cut services. I keep putting it like that because it should be obvious what a bad idea that is. Do you remember being dissatisfied with our Post Office's performance before the pandemic? I don't, and I used it all the time! They did extremely well considering all the pressure our government puts on them -- taxes haven't funded our Post Office since the early '80s, and our laws mandate that our Post Office prefund its employee benefit plans over 80 years in advance, which no other entity has to do. But, sure, let's believe the Trumphole who came in and said he had to "get tough." "We have to raise prices and cut services"? How un-American is that?

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to end the Trump-era policy that used COVID as a pretext to expel asylum seekers without due process. "Always the wrong solution for the wrong reason" should have been Donald Trump's campaign slogan. Why is it wrong to kick asylum seekers out because they might have COVID? Because you can treat COVID, that's why! At least, you can if you have the slightest amount of competence; of course, when Mike "Let's Start an HIV Mini-epidemic in Rural Indiana Counties" Pence as your COVID policy leader, you don't have competence. It's also wrong because if someone really has COVID, you're sending them back to a country that probably can't treat COVID as well as we can, where they'll infect a lot more of their fellow citizens -- which also makes it more likely COVID will survive and mutate into versions that'll infect us again. Of course, for Stephen Miller, all that was probably a feature, not a bug. But if racism and bad leadership makes all your policy for you, then you're doing policy wrong.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Democratic Senators, once again, to end the Senate filibuster. Because they say it actually impedes bipartisanship, and they're right! Back when the Senate filibuster wasn't so easily invoked -- Senators used to have to talk for 48 or 72 hours to stop a bill, but now Senators just say they're not going to end debate, and then they go off to dinner or the theater or wherever, which actually ends debate! -- Senators would more likely support bills, knowing that'd give them a chance to shape it more like they wanted it. Now Senators filibuster bills that require campaign finance disclosure and prevent big corporations from taking tax breaks after they outsource jobs. You'd think, given how popular both those things are, Senators would risk losing elections doing that. But they don't, because the filibuster is too painless and too easy to use, so much so that Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) won't consider ending it even though his friends on the other side of the aisle just humiliated him by filibustering the January 6 commission bill. But that's why we remind them of our will.

Around the table: private corporations hunting citizens, and other horrors.

Tens of thousands of good Brazilians take to the streets to protest President Bolsonaro's continuing inability/unwillingness to handle the COVID pandemic and to demand his removal from office. I sure wish we'd done that in America -- and given that protesting in America can get you ridiculed but protesting in Brazil can get you shot, I applaud the courage of good Brazilians, and wish them the best in getting that irredeemable asshole out of office. (People say I'm not kind to call him that. Believe me, I am kind to call him that.)

From the "Dystopia Is Here" file: Joseph Cox and Jason Roebler at Vice describe how the creator of an app called Citizen -- which purports to alert its users to crimes in progress, thus "enabling" them to stop them -- stalked an innocent man all night, purportedly for arson, even putting a five-digit bounty on him. Citizen sounds like Nextdoor on meth -- one former employee calls it an "anxiety sweatshop" -- and hopefully you can see how Citizen employees working undercover in major cities can turn into a corporation's private dictatorship. Which, I maintain, would be even worse than a government dictatorship, particularly since it would have the volunteer "assistance" of large numbers of folks who think every suspect is a perp and every perp must be Black.

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo tells the story of a man detained at a private prison, in solitary confinement, for almost a year, without having his day in court, until the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals finally set him free. He must have been some kind of super-villain, right? You already know the answer to that, I trust: police originally arrested him on "marijuana-related charges." And we all know that in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, the real super-villains always get off scot-free. Sometimes they even get elected President.

Not too many years ago, my great-uncle asked why colleges charged so much; I responded, "because they can." But Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns, and Money gives us a much more exhaustive explanation. Preceded, of course, with a refutation of all the wrong reasons: that public investment in colleges has gone down (it hasn't), that faculty salaries have gone up dramatically (that is to laugh), that the monetary "value" of a college degree has gone up dramatically (that is also to laugh). Which mainly leaves, you guessed it, administrative expenses, which not only include more (and more highly-paid) administrators, but an administrator "class" that moves around from college to college and mainly concerns itself with, you guessed it, making more money. I'm old enough to remember when an education had intrinsic value.

Right-wing garbage merchants claim that Moderna's COVID vaccine has a "secret ingredient," and then try to "prove" their assertion with a safety data sheet that describes the ill effects of chloroform, not the "secret ingredient" in question. It's a little like trying to prove eating beef is dangerous by describing all the ill effects of eating cow dung. And if you decided that this wasn't a mistake but malicious evil -- that there is no way someone promotes this garbage by accident -- well, how could I blame you?

Tierney Sneed at Talking Points Memo catalogues, at great expense to her well-being I would think, the right-wing's mania for election "audits" they all think will return Donald Trump to office. What part of "accept the results" and "get over it" did they not hear? And note well that when even the most sympathetic auditors don't deliver the results right-wingers want, right-wingers just turn on them. Remember when Rush Limbaugh used to say liberalism was easy? He was wrong about that, too: being a right-winger is easy, because you never need to accept something you don't want to.

Around the table: it's the COVID relief bill follies!

Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) flexes his muscle as the One True Great American President of Bipartisanship by spending 10 hours securing cuts to enhanced unemployment benefits in the COVID relief bill. Mr. Manchin will lose his 2024 re-election effort by 20 points no matter what he does, but I'm gobsmacked that more politicians don't see that cutting unemployment benefits is a stupid political calculation, particularly for a Democrat, from whom voters (for better and worse) expect more. I had hoped he'd be satisfied with Neera Tanden's head on a plate, but I was wrong. I'm starting to think my optimism is a fault, not a strength.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) brought a chocolate cake to the Senate -- supposedly to help out staffers who'd been up all night working on the relief bill -- before nixing Sen. Sanders's amendment to put the $15/hour minimum wage back in the bill. She may not have literally said "let them eat cake," but gosh, what a bad look, and I find her story wanting, too -- is cake what you want when you've been up working all night? Does nobody do chicken and waffles in D.C. anymore? (In a related note, I hope the sight of her incomprehensibly swaggering thumbs-down vote to that $15/hour minimum wage amendment launches a thousand memes. You have to have the presence of mind not to look like that when you're denying higher pay to over 40 percent of American workers. Hate to pile on, but Kyrsten Sinema is supposedly one of the Democrats' most disciplined messagers.)

Olivia Goldhill at STAT catches Florida's government giving COVID vaccines meant for rural black residents to rich white ones. No, you can't explain this away by saying "black people hate vaccines," not when black folks make up 18% of Palm Beach County but only 4% of vaccine recipients; go ahead and blame Gov. DeSantis's decision to let the Publix supermarket chain (whose owners donate bigly to his campaigns, naturally) administer the vaccines, because guess which supermarket chain doesn't have stores in places like Pahokee and Belle Glade. Also, he apparently decided not to tell any locals the vaccinations were happening.

From John Logan at TruthOut we learn that Amazon spends $10,000 daily just on consultants who help them keep unions out of their warehouses. Gosh, they're rolling in money during this pandemic, more than just about any other corporation; can't they do something better with all that money? See, when we say "corporations should make as much money as possible because they'll do more good," we have to remember that if you give them too much money, they'll spend it consolidating their power, and that's why we taxed them at 55% during the Eisenhower years. And don't believe Amazon's PR hype. We've delivered millions of meals to people in need! Meaning, gosh, every person who lost their job because of the pandemic got maybe one sandwich? (As an aside, dig the union-busting consultant who claims unions "demonize consultants," like it's some kind of big lift for Americans to demonize consultants.)

Kentucky state legislators, knowing the state's Governor is a Democrat and sensing that Sen. McConnell might not be in the best of health, are scrambling to change state laws so that if Mr. McConnell retires or dies, his seat can easily stay in Republican hands. They say none of that has anything to do with it, of course, but we're not schmucks, and it's telling that "letting good Kentuckians fill the seat via a special election" is lower on their wish list than making Gov. Beshear pick from a list of three Republican names. What do they have to be afraid of? That Charles Booker might actually win a Senate race in the state that killed Breonna Taylor? (As an aside, I'm pretty sure Nick Storm thoroughly enjoyed writing that Mr. McConnell recovered from polio as a youth "with his mother's persistence.")

Finally, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, now the biggest asshole among world chiefs-of-state with Donald Trump out of power, tells his citizens to "stop whining" about things like spikes in cases and record death numbers and lack of vaccines. Even worse, he says "we need a solution" to the pandemic with no apparent awareness that maybe good Brazilians are looking to their fucking President to lead them toward a "solution." At any rate, we must remind too many folks that there is in fact a profound difference between whining about things like "cancel culture" and "whining" about your own government -- which belongs to you and should work on your behalf -- leaving you to die.

Action: concerning voting rights, Ted Cruz, our Post Office, and the filibuster.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Today would be a good day to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The For the People Act, as you know, contains a lot of goodies -- campaign finance disclosure, same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration, 15 days of early voting, independent commissions to redraw districts, and an end to those nefarious "address verification forms" that only seem to lead to folks of color getting de-registered. I would be hard-pressed to think of good reasons to oppose any of those things, though I know right-wingers will keep yammering on about them. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would require any state or locality with a record of vote suppression over the last 25 years to get pre-clearance from our Justice Department before changing their laws. This bill still doesn't have a bill number at this writing, but go ahead and say you want it anyway -- the more of us who say we want it, the more likely it'll get introduced, and passed, and become law.

Meanwhile, both Daily Kos and MoveOn (wow, sounds like a fresh breath of 2004!) help you tell Sen. Ted Cruz to resign from our Senate. We don't even need to go back to his enabling of the January 6 attempted coup; all we need do is recount his sins from the past week! As millions of his constituents were left without electricity, water, or heat from an uncharacteristically bad winter storm, he flew with his family to Cancún, only returning several days early once news of his flight became known; he even requested that beleaguered Houston police (big storm, remember?) escort him through the airport before flying to Cancún and upon returning. Would it be piling on to mention that he's taunted other politicians for pulling similar stunts? No, it would not. And don't brook any gaslighting from right-wingers about how little Sen. Cruz could have done. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who does not exactly hail from a neighboring state, has raised close to $5 million for Texas food banks, while Beto O'Rourke, who almost beat Mr. Cruz in 2018, organized nearly a million wellness calls and delivered food and water to good Texans. Seems they're better Senators for Texas than Mr. Cruz is.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to appoint four decent human beings to our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. And make no mistake about the end goal: the end goal is to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, because that's what a decent human being would do. A decent human being would not sit there and let himself be gaslit by Mr. DeJoy's "big plans" for our Post Office. The only big plan he has for our Post Office is to make it run so badly we'll be "forced" to use private (and more expensive) mail carriers for everything. Our Post Office is a jewel, its workers some of the most diligent I've ever seen, and don't let anyone tell you differently. And if we want real reforms for our Post Office, we should stop making it pre-pay decades of benefit funds in advance (the source of most of its money problems) and we should allow it to offer basic banking services again. Like so many other things, this just ain't that damn deep.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to eliminate the filibuster, then Common Cause still helps you do that. I know, I know, I used to say my fellow liberals were dumb for wanting to do that, but you know what? I was wrong; they weren't dumb, and since our Senate hasn't listened to any of my principled calls for making the filibuster an actual talking filibuster, I say take their damn toy away. Republicans filibustered even the mildest reforms proposed by Barack Obama, and they should have suffered for them! I mean, filibustering legislation that would stop tax breaks from going to corporations that outsource their jobs? Everyone who filibustered that should have lost their next election! But it ain't just Democrat weakness (I mean, did they ever run ads about that?) to blame; it's also a system that lets them obstruct in the dark, without their nefarious deeds ever being brought to the light. And if you believe in accountability, you know it's got to stop.

Action: concerning public lands, right-wing media, racism in health care, and saving our Post Office.

Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell President Biden to stop leasing and permitting for coal operations on our public lands. President Biden has lately put a stop to oil and gas drilling on public lands, but he's strangely left coal out, possibly calculating that he can't lose a single vote in a state like Pennsylvania in 2024, but possibly also calculating that coal, as an industry, is going south and doesn't need another punch in the face right now. But I would say building out renewable energy operations on public lands would be a smarter political move, as well as a smarter move generally. If coal corporations are crashing one by one, they hardly represent a threat to the political order, though their displaced workers might. But we can retrain them to rebuild a renewable energy infrastructure a whole lot more easily than we can "teach them to code." Construction and coding are different skills, after all. And if you really want to "build back better," you also have to build back smarter.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. I'd tell them to stop advertising on Newsmax and OANN, too, but Sum of Us must smell blood in the water. Fox News, as you know, faces a $2.7 billion defamation/disparagement lawsuit from Smartmatic over some of their nefarious "election fraud" claims, a lawsuit that seems to have made right-wing news organs a little less obnoxious generally. Now you may be tempted to say haven't they suffered enough? But the answer is no, they have not suffered enough. From calling Iraq War opponents traitors to fearmongering over immigrants to whining about the deficit to whining about regulations to demanding jackboot lockstep support for police who kill black folks without a trial or even a charge to carrying Donald Trump's water for four years, Fox News has done incalculable damage to our civilization, and the only just punishment for their evil works is annihilation. Advertisers finally pulling out in large numbers might, at last, help us begin that necessary work.

In other news, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 666, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act. The bill would create a National Center for Racism and a Law Enforcement Violence Prevention Program at our Centers for Disease Control; the latter program would operate within our CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. If your right-wing friends and neighbors protest ZOMG TEH BUREAUCRACIEZ MULTIPLIEZ!!!!!, remind them that corporations have bureaucracies, too, and maybe a bureaucracy dedicated to researching (and ultimately helping to prevent) the health care burdens we all know folks of color bear in America, and the unique amount of violence done to folks of color by our police isn't such a bad bureaucracy after all. Folks of color are less likely to be paid well, less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to live near a landfill, so we ought to do something about that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to appoint four decent human beings to our United States Postal Service's Board of Governors -- four decent human beings who might then decide to do the only decent thing and fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy -- then MoveOn still helps you do that. Just about every American who gets mail (i.e., every American) can testify, using only their own recent experiences, that he's not doing a good job, but I expect the right-wing media will whine that he's being "targeted" (or "hunted"!) by nefarious forces like us, even though we're really not "nefarious" -- we just want our Post Office to run well, as our Constitution guarantees. If I had a dollar for every lousy boss I've ever had I might not have to work another day, and I suspect most Americans (again, from sad experience) are at least as good at telling a good boss from a bad one as I am. But we certainly shouldn't tolerate bad leadership from our Post Office.

Around the table: what we have here is a failure to lead, part 259.

As the estimable Defending Rights and Dissent organization argues against using the January 6 Capitol coup to gut Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- which currently shields social media corporations from accountability for the harm they've caused -- I remain compelled to argue that net neutrality, not Section 230, created the free internet, and to reiterate that any reform to Section 230 should not only distinguish between service providers and content providers, but should also distinguish between "private" and "public" utterances (as Facebook already does). I'm perfectly happy to let people say what they want to each other on Facebook without any interference from the state (friends can still stand up to each other, I would hope!), but we can't keep letting Facebook actually aid and abet white supremacist Trumpholes broadcast their venom in public without fear of being sued.

Natasha Lennard at The Intercept argues that the "Hunts Point Strike Is the Bold Labor Action the Country Needs." Workers at the Hunts Point Produce Market in New York City (through which most of the fruits and vegetables sold in the city pass) worked fearlessly through the pandemic, then asked for a mere $1 more an hour; when management countered with a "slap in the face" offer, workers went on strike for almost a week, and appear to have won significantly more than their original "slap in the face." Some folks say this proves essential workers shouldn't be allowed to strike; I say it proves we better treat our essential workers right.

President Biden issues Executive Order requiring Executive branch agencies to buy American products, which could affect the spending of $600 billion annually and help keep jobs here in America. Of course, the fools who've been whining about TEH NINETIEZ THOUSANDZ JOBZ LOSTZ!!!! after he stopped Keystone XL (actual number of permanent jobs created by Keystone: 30) won't remember the "Buy American" order. That's because nothing can get through their thick skulls. We really shouldn't try to reach them anymore, and we should take comfort in the fact that they're not a majority.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the man who gives the empty suit a bad name, says that even though Donald Trump "bears responsibility" for some indeterminate part of the January 6 attempted coup, the Senate shouldn't try him for it because that would just "stir it up even more." Your law and order party, ladies and gentlemen! Your accountability party, ladies and gentlemen! Your brave party, ladies and gentlemen! Also, too, you can't avoid "stirring people up" who live to be stirred up anyway; as William S. Burroughs used to say, junkies want junk, and they don't want anything but junk.

Finally, how did Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) respond to news that she used to like posts on Facebook calling for the execution of prominent Democrats? By saying that she can't control all the people who operated her Facebook page on her behalf! She's a star, after all! So, either she's demonstrating a complete inability to lead people, or she's merely throwing her underlings under the bus -- both of which are quite Trumpian.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Administration incompetence, and our "liberal" media.

You've heard, perhaps, that Congress is thisclose to passing a COVID relief deal -- and you've likely also heard that this "deal" will contain no money for states and localities and stimulus and unemployment relief amounting to half of what we got under the CARES Act, while bringing back all of the CARES Act's corporate welfare. Here's what we should do in response: call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act! Now that was a stimulus bill, and our House passed it seven months ago (remember that the next time you hear your right-wing uncle cry that TEH DIMOCRATZ AREZ HOLDINGZ UPZ TEH BILLZ!!!!), and the HEROES Act would fund states and localities, fund COVID testing and tracing, fund unemployment benefits at the level of the CARES Act, repeal the big hedge fund manager tax cut given out by the CARES Act, and give working Americans bigger stimulus checks than the CARES Act. Bigger than whatever this Congress tries to pass this week, too! So don't think you just have to take whatever Congress dishes out, and certainly don't act like you do.

Meanwhile, you've likely also heard that states are getting many, many fewer doses of the Pfizer vaccine than they thought they were getting, and our Administration, being the very embodiment of leadership and accountability, apologized for getting that wrong. Nah, I kid -- this Administration has not accounted for itself to the states, but our HHS Secretary has blamed Pfizer for the foul-up, which naturally they deny, saying they have millions of doses ready to go but have heard nothing from our Administration, whose nominal head seems to spend most of his time on Twitter savaging fellow Republicans and spreading even more lies about "voter fraud." This, as more Americans die from COVID each day than died from the 9/11 attacks, which were, as I recall, a Damascus moment for a whole generation of right-wingers! Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our Administration to get its act together and get folks the vaccines they need. Yeah, I know, this Administration doesn't ever seem to listen when we tell them to do their damn job, but they ignore us in the hope we'll go away. But after they're gone, we'll still be here.

Finally, you may have heard, from our "liberal" media, that Venezuela has fallen upon economic hard times -- but you may not have heard, from our "liberal" media, that one of the main reasons good Venezuelans have it so bad is that our government has imposed sanctions upon them for years! One of FAIR's recent email missives catches the New York Times doing this very thing earlier this month, describing how Venezuela's midterm elections went yet again for the United Socialist Party to which Messrs. Chavez and Maduro belong (again, after opposition parties boycotted the election; maybe our Republican party will start getting similar ideas in America?) and describing the "deep economic challenges" Venezuela faces without mentioning American sanctions as one of them. Make no mistake: just as our "liberal" media seemed sanguine toward Brazil's irredeemable asshole of a President because he'd be "good for business," they hate folks like Mr. Maduro because they won't turn over their economies to multinational corporations. The link above helps you encourage the Times to correct the record.

Around the table: in which we confront historical demons both recent and ancient.

Good Jobs First report finds that South Carolina lost over $400 million in property taxes last year due to all the tax abatements they handed out to corporations. Always remember: tax breaks for them are, essentially, tax hikes for us, since governments still have a job to do (whether they like it or not!) and now have less money to do it. Also, too, as Paul O'Neill instructed us many years ago, corporate welfare handouts have little-if-any influence over where a corporation decides to locate or build, as we saw when public outcry over handouts for Amazon didn't actually prevent Amazon from building a new office in New York City.

I alluded to this the other day, but America unfortunately has a long history of sterilizing criminals, which is particularly upsetting when you realize we also have a long history of criminalizing dissent and otherness. Right-wingers will still try to turn this knowledge to their advantage by implying that we're making much ado about "nothing new," but saying something isn't "new" enough for your taste (or "and you're surprised?") is generally a way of avoiding saying it's wrong, and they really have no good reason to be afraid of saying so. Do they?

Jeet Heer at The Nation reminds us "Biden Republicans Are a Political Illusion." Precisely because they actually like everything about this Administration except the obnoxiousness of our President -- and they can forget his obnoxiousness once a hundred or so Federalist Society-approved judges get lifetime appointments to federal courts. Of course, if you've wondered who listens to George Will or Max Boot or James Comey anymore, or if you remember those pro-Hillary ads Republicans cut in 2016, you are not surprised by this finding.

When I'm confronted with our President saying out loud that trees "just explode" from being so dry for so long, I think, yeah, I know what he meant. But note well that whenever a Democratic Presidential nominee misspeaks one-twentieth as much as this, Republicans act like it's the end of the damn world. Why, in 2012 they made a convention slogan ("we built that"?) by wrenching an Obama utterance completely out of its context! Someone needs to remind them that hysteria isn't very becoming of conservatism. Or, more precisely, we need to keep reminding everyone else that hysteria isn't very becoming of conservatism.

In a peripherally-related note, Oregon state Senator who twice joined a Senate walkout to deny a quorum for climate change legislation watched his own home burn down due to recent wildfires -- but actually blames the anti-pollution crowd! Setting aside the tantrums too many politicians throw when anyone mentions climate change, Sen. Girod can't articulate his point very well, either, which suggests that "forest management" is just a phrase he heard that he thinks will shut people up. He'd do better to try to persuade folks -- unless, of course, he's one of these politicians who thinks persuading people is beneath him.

Finally, I know digging out the worst thing Bill Barr has said this week is a three-shovel job, but I'll try anyway: about his own Justice Department, he unfurled this truly awesome dung nugget: "(n)ame one successful organization or institution where the lowest level employees’ decisions are deemed sacrosanct, there aren’t. There aren’t any letting the most junior members set the agenda. It might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it is no way to run a federal agency." Clearly he regards anyone other than him having a say about anything as an existential threat -- and, uh, can anyone think of a "successful organization or institution" that works pretty well when it's run from the bottom up? That's right, American democracy.

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.

Around the table: in which a Presidential offspring makes less sense than an AI language generator.

Our President told Bob Woodward that he knew COVID-19 would be profoundly deadly but told Americans differently (i.e., "it's going to be fine") because "I don't want to create a panic." But that's not leadership -- leadership would have sounded more like this is going to be bad, but we'll fight our way through it and we'll come out on top. And it would have reduced "panic," though I seriously doubt it would have saved very many lives, since "show(ing) strength" only goes so far if you don't actually know what you're doing. Don't expect this to be a Damascus moment for your Confederate flag-flying neighbor, though. We must leave their instruction to God.

In a peripherally-related note, Tucker Carlson claims that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) -- who has spent years positioning himself as a staunch ally of our President -- brokered all those interviews with Bob Woodward which are garnering our President so much deservedly negative publicity now. But only weak people and drama addicts look for someone to blame all the time. And, ah, Mr. Graham is up for re-election this year, in an unexpectedly tight race, and now South Carolina's Presidential votaries might be thinking he's not a "real conservative" (particularly since he's also lately bashed QAnon).

The putatively more capable Presidential son won't condemn Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, saying "(w)e all do stupid things at 17." OK, everyone who did something stupid when they were 17, raise your hand! Yeah, that's my hand up, too. Now everyone who shot three protestors when they were 17, raise your hand! Not so many hands now, eh? And thus we are reminded, yet again, that money can't buy a clue.

Having heard that Americas PAC radio ad about Biden family finances, I remind you that ProPublica covered the long story of how Jim Biden has benefited financially from being Joe Biden's brother. Of course, our President has done far, far worse than anything ProPublica relates in their reporting, but then that's the whole point: every time you bring up our President's obvious corruption, his votaries say "well, what about the Biden family?" And though "well what about" is what people say when they can't win the argument on the merits, his votaries don't care about persuasion so much as shouting you down.

Finally, AI language generator GPT-3 writes an op-ed at The Guardian to reassure us that artificial intelligence isn't such a bad thing. The op-ed is actually a human-edited melange of eight op-eds, and the human editors basically told it what to say. Even so, I still think we have less to fear from AI than from greedy/stupid people making AI do more of our work than it should. Anyone who's ever dealt with the self-checkout kiosk at the supermarket or been disappointed yet again by autocorrect knows what I'm talking about.

Action: concerning physical distancing, our Post Office, and pollution.

It ain't just red state Governors who are reopening their states too early -- it's also Democratic Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, who's planning to loosen physical distancing standards (OK, you know them as "social distancing standards," but I'll keep trying) in the coming weeks, without securing the widespread testing and tracing we need to fully understand the threat we still face. I would hate to think all those stupid right-wing protestors had an outsized say in the conversation yet again! So let Keystone Progress help you push back against stupidity, by helping you tell your Pennsylvania state government to put people before profits and let the science dictate when we start relaxing physical distancing standards. One more thing: we've now had a million confirmed coronavirus cases in America, but we hardly test for it, so we don't know how many we've really had -- unless New York state's finding, that more than one out of every eight of its residents have COVID-19 antibodies, is instructive. I would hate to think we'd have another spike in cases because our leaders don't have the patience we elected them to have.

Meanwhile, a consortium of good government groups (including Progress America, Demand Progress, and Daily Kos) helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest an additional $25 billion in our U.S. Postal Service. I mean, we just pissed away $350 billion in a "small business relief fund" that mostly went to big corporations, and we're pissing away some $150 billion every year in lost revenues thanks to the 2017 tax "reform," so $25 billion ain't that much to ask to keep a good service going, one that helps all Americans. Right-wingers have wanted to privatize our Post Office since time immemorial, and to them every crisis is an opportunity to do evil, but we don't have to put up with that. Nor do we have to put up with our President calling our Post Office "a joke" because it doesn't charge us four times as much! Note well, however, that our President did say there are circumstances under which he'd authorize more funding -- absurd circumstances, to be sure, but I say he just showed us weakness, and it's well past time we attacked when right-wingers are weak.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to reverse its new, supposedly pandemic-related policy of not enforcing any damn clean air and clean water regulations. Like I said, cynical right-wingers imagine every crisis as an opportunity to do evil, and thus the ones who run our EPA think a pandemic that attacks good Americans' ability to breathe means nothing so much as a time to let big polluting corporations make our air harder to breathe. As a young man, and an aspiring cynic, I suppose I would have found this amusing, but having long rejected cynicism and, hell, having become a man and having put away childish things, I find it all quite disgusting. I wish I could be sure that the worshipers of mammon will find their hell -- or maybe I would simply prefer that they find their hell in this lifetime, so we can all see it, and so future generations can be taught how not to be. In the meantime, I suppose we'll all have to settle for merely doing our duty as best we can.

Penny Rants for Tuesday, April 7, 2020: special "our leaders still suck, except for the few who don't!" edition.

From Julia Carrie Wong at The Guardian we learn how hydroxychloroquine became a coronavirus "miracle cure." It began in March with a study out of France that didn't draw treatment and control groups from the same population and didn't ensure that physicians didn't know which treatment they were giving out -- that's basic science, you know -- plus they gave some-but-not-all patients an additional antibiotic (at which point you don't really know whether the drug did its work or not!), plus they used a tabulating loophole to be able to claim a "100% cure rate" that didn't exist. Then a drama king study co-author made a viral social media video, fellow drama king Elon Musk tweeted about it to his 33 million followers, and drama king right-wing news outlets (including Fox News) banged the saucepan about it. And then our drama king President (who, not incidentally, has a small financial interest in a corporation that makes the drug) jumped on the bandwagon. Not for nothing, but not only have folks have killed themselves taking this drug, but other patients who need the drug for its intended purposes have less of it now, proving, again, that it's too short a walk from government stifles the individual to only I matter!

From Eileen Applebaum and Rosemary Batt at Naked Capitalism we learn "What Wall Street Doesn’t Want You to Know About Hospital Emergency Rooms." This will explain -- better than anyone else has, I think -- why you get all those surprise medical bills from your ER visit! A doctor might work in a hospital emergency room, but her employer will be a "physician staffing firm" that the hospital contracts to run the ER -- and that "physician staffing firm" will likely be out of your health insurance corporation's network, hence the surprise bills. Hey, guess what you wouldn't have to worry about if Medicare covered all Americans? Networks, that's what. But if you think BIG GUMMINT!!!1111 shouldn't run health care, you would have to explain why you think hedge fund managers should -- or you'd have to come up with an alternative that isn't "the free market," since "the free market" got us into this mess. In the meantime, you should look at TeamHealth's firing of Dr. Lin (for blowing the whistle on equipment shortages and bad hospital safety practices) as, well, exactly the sort of thing that happens in a totalitarian state. And then ask yourself whether you can vote out, or put popular pressure on, hedge fund managers the way you can do on our elected officials.

From Suze Wilson at The Conversation we learn how New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Arderns's handling of the coronavirus pandemic "is giving most Western politicians a masterclass in crisis leadership." As often happens, a lot of leadership is messaging -- "stay home to save lives" puts the action and the goal pretty succinctly -- but it's also about having a plan early, sticking to it, and getting people to buy in without threatening the Heavy Hand of Law Enforcement (that latter tool a favorite of those leaders who don't get it right early). And it's also about being genuinely accessible to your bosses, the people, which for Ms. Arderns happens in daily briefings that don't go completely off the rails, as well as in live Q-and-A sessions on Facebook. And where American punditoids flail about demanding a "date certain" when they can go back to their favorite coffee shop again, New Zealand stands virtually alone among Western nations in setting a goal to eradicate COVID-19, instead of just hoping we get through it. In short, I couldn't blame you for turning this into a big "Goofus and Gallant" strip with Ms. Arderns as Gallant and our President as a diaper-loaded Goofus.

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: 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.

Action: concerning good bills and bad leadership.

Happy Monday, good citizens! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). These are excellent bills that would secure our voting rights, protect our public lands, protect us from predatory health insurance corporations, and restore real internet freedom -- among many other good works! But of course our Senate runs on Mitch McConnell time, which is "never." So tell them they need to run on Do the Right Thing time, which is now.

Meanwhile, the notorious Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act -- which authorizes various federal agencies to spy on citizens without offering us the due process of law our Constitution requires -- expires on March 15, and you know what your Congressfolk are like: they're scaredy-cats who would rather let good Americans lose our rights than take a stand that'd be unpopular with the bullies among Our Glorious Elites. This, even though our own NSA shut down its metadata surveillance program last year! And word on the street is that Congressional leaders might use a coronavirus spending bill as the vehicle to ram through an extension or reauthorization of Section 215, which would be an act of unconscionable cowardice. And rather than wait for Rand Paul to stand up for our freedoms -- although, to be fair, he's gotten some of our freedoms back with his machinations in the past -- we should stand up for them. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to reauthorize Section 215 without reforms that would protect our rights, especially if they try to use the coronavirus as cover. Seriously, no one who would do such a thing should ever be allowed near an elective office ever again. Both Democrats and Republicans should attend that statement.

Finally, The Other 98 helps you tell our Administration to remove Vice President Pence from his position overseeing the American response to the coronavirus. All ye need know about Mr. Pence's ability to manage a crisis is that while Governor of Indiana, he let an HIV mini-epidemic spread in rural Scott County rather than let that county run a needle exchange program, arguing for two years that needle exchange programs encourage drug addiction, which, like, no it does not. And now he goes on Pravda TV and tells everyone what a great job he did for Scott County, since he did ultimately relent and allow needle exchange programs in Scott county two years later, which sure will comfort the families of those who died in the meantime. So we have an executive who knows nothing, thinks he knows everything, and then lies about his record of knowing nothing and thinking he knows everything -- gosh, it's like we learned nothing from George W. Bush. And not for nothing, but maybe, just maybe, if our President really wants to get the coronavirus under control, he should stop whining about how everyone's out to get him. People hate leaders who whine about the jobs they signed up for. They also hate leaders who make everything about themselves all the time, like our lives are their big drama.

Around the table: concerning health care, student loan debt, Astroturf protests, and bad leadership.

When I hear that our Administration spent $11 million to redesign a Medicare plan-finding tool that gives seniors inaccurate info, I'm gobsmacked that seniors can still support this President. I mean, of course I know the real reasons they still support him, but I do wonder how many more times the mustache-twirling villain can tie the girl to the train tracks before the girl stops voting for him. And, not for nothing, but a single Medicare-for-All program that covers everything would obviate the need to distinguish between plans in the first place.

Economists say that cancelling all student loan debt would boost the economy -- mainly by freeing people to spend money buying homes and starting families instead of paying debt installments. Economists may also overstate the effect that the resulting taxes would have on economic growth, forgetting, perhaps, that tax hikes on the rich don't hurt (and I'd say help) economic growth. In any case, I guess this is where the right "remembers" its "morals" and says we can't forgive debts just because it would be good for the economy. We could forgive the loans because they were extortionate to begin with, but no right-wing "moral" ever leads to criticism of big money.

Nathan Robinson warns that Sen. Warren talks a good game about slamming the rich, but "her campaign seems suspiciously designed to stave off revolution." I think he made the case better here back in September, but all I'll say is this: Sen. Warren did help build the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and it's not her fault this Administration has gutted it, but she's never really passed any legislation, and Sen. Sanders has passed a lot of it -- mostly amendments to other bills, but that's still legislation.

Hamilton Nolan warns that "Billionaire-Funded Protest is Rearing Its Head in America," although of course we all remember that billionaires funded the Tea Party "movement." Sadly, where billionaires may not be able to find a whole lot of pro-war, pro-pollution, or pro-racism protestors, they will find a sizable number of pro-charter school protestors, since charter schools purport to help poor folks, particularly from areas where public schools aren't funded well enough -- though that does suggest that funding our public schools properly would be a better solution.

Great Moderate/Billionaire Hope Michael Bloomberg said back in January that legalizing pot would be "perhaps the stupidest thing anybody has ever done." He actually had a sympathetic message buried in that dung nugget -- that addicting substances curtail freedom and thus shouldn't be legal, though I would argue that pot's a lot less addictive than heroin, and I wonder what he'd do about the legality of tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine -- but saying "stupidest thing anybody has ever done" just about insures that message will never get heard. I mean, George W. Bush did far, far stupider things nearly every day of his Presidency.

Finally, we learn from S.V. Date at the Huffington Post that our President has spent $115 million on security and travel expenses just on his weekend golf excursions. Yeah, $115 million ain't a whole lot in the context of a $4 trillion federal budget, but corruption is corruption, and the next time our President goes on about how the Mueller investigation cost TEH 35 MILLYUNZ OFZ TEH DOLLARZ!!!!!, you can mention that he's spent more than three times that in taxpayer money just playing golf. Oh, and that some of that money has gone into his own pocket. Oh, and he kicked transgender folks out of our military because their health care costs would have amounted to about one-fifth the cost of his golf trips.

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.

Action: concerning trademarks, national forests, and bad leadership.

Big construction equipment corporation Caterpillar has actually asked the U.S. Trademark Office to remove trademark registrations that have the word "cat" in them, particularly that of Cat and Cloud Coffee of Santa Cruz, CA! Where do we begin with this? With the implication that anyone would ever confuse the maker of asphalt pavers and backhoe loaders with a freaking coffeeshop? With the notion that any apparel sold by a coffee shop could possibly be confused with any apparel sold by Caterpillar? Folks, this is what happens when we, as a civilization, decide that corporations should police themselves because they know their businesses best -- instead of innovating new products and processes, as a heavily-regulated civilization would force them to do, they just look for ever-more convoluted ways to make money without working, like frivolous patent requests. Hence Change.org helps you tell Caterpillar to stop bullying small businesses and stop acting like the world's biggest trademark troll.

Meanwhile, our Administration is totally hot to open up Alaska's Tongass National Forest to logging corporations -- thousand year-old ecosystems apparently being a profound insult to our Administration's ongoing program of inculcating short-term thinking into every governmental decision process -- but H.R. 2491, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, would revoke the U.S. Department of Agriculture's power to grant exemptions to the famous "Roadless Rule," which, as you may know, keeps roads and the associated development out of national forests. Of course big corporations would like to have roads in national forests, because that would make it a lot easier to extract the natural resources from national forests -- and, ah, to ruin national forests with their pollution, though big corporations will never admit they've ruined a forest even after they cut the last tree down. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect national forests and (as Penn Environment says) "keep wild areas wild" by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our Administration's nomination of Barry Myers to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA), then a consortium of good government groups (including CREDO and People for the American Way) still helps you do that. Mr. Myers used to own AccuWeather (more on that in a minute!), and as its owner constantly banged his saucepan to privatize our National Weather Service, and now our President wants to put him in charge of the National Weather Service? Also, when Mr. Myers divested from AccuWeather, he sold his ownership stock at cut-rate prices to family members; does that seem on the up-and-up to you? And the numerous sexual harassment claims filed by AccuWeather employees during Mr. Myers's tenure there -- claims that resulted in a six-figure fine assessed by our government -- also call Mr. Myers's leadership abilities into question generally. NOAA administrator is a leadership position, after all.

Around the table: the real reason Republicans keep falling, and other lessons.

J.F. Sargent reveals "The Real Reason Social Media Makes Hollywood So Nervous." Surprise! It's the same reason social media makes traditional print/TV media so nervous: it "has destabilized centuries-old power structures and amplified voices that have historically been ignored, silenced, trampled and punished." Yes, social media is "also vulnerable to the worst impulses of mob-mentality, petty grudges, rumor-mongering and cruelty," but if that latter picture is the only one Hollywood wants to focus upon -- and not, say, the very social-media-savvy #MarchForOurLives movement -- you have to wonder why.

No, the polio vaccine did not "cause cancer," any more than vaccines "cause" autism or "cause" disease because they generally have a tiny piece of the disease they're inoculating against -- you know, to teach the body what it's fighting? -- inside them. OK, the story FactCheck tells gets into considerably more detail than that, and is totally edifying, but sheesh, too many people don't know jack and yet are so proud of their University of Google degrees.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt will return from his Capitol Hill testimony to an agency "demoralized" by Mr. Pruitt's repeatedly throwing EPA employees under the bus during his testimony. Nobody could have predicted! And Administration votaries will continue to look at Mr. Pruitt, and his employer, as a "fighter," even though both men "fight" mainly by blaming all their problems on other people. Then again, most Administration votaries blame all their problems on other people -- and usually the wrong people.

Rep. Pat Meehan (R-PA), who had announced his retirement due to a sexual harassment scandal, has now resigned his seat. Which means another special election, likely in July or August, and what appetite will Republicans have to hold onto that seat, particularly since the districts will all change for the 2018 election? Seriously, this is a no-lose proposition for Democrats. Then again, they've demonstrated quite the aptitude for losing those.

Finally, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says "you have to wonder" if the fear of assassination is driving all these Republican retirements in Congress! OK, so I've dutifully wondered, and the short answer is no. The somewhat longer answer is no, you whiny snowflake. The somewhat-even-longer answer is no, they're not retiring because one out of the last bajillion mass shooters can be positively identified as a liberal -- they're retiring because they fear accountability from voters in November, just like they feared accountability from voters at all those townhalls they didn't have. Why does Rep. Brooks want to disappear voters from his analysis, I wonder?

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: terrible Presidential debates throughout history! And other lessons.

The incomparable Rick Perlstein describes "The Unmaking of the Presidential Debate 2016." No, it's not about the debates we've had this year, but mainly about why we didn't have any until 1960 and why we didn't have any more until 1976, the debate during which Gerald Ford said, "(t)here is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe," which just about everyone who watched it understood, in context, until the media all pretended they were six years old. After that, of course, came the sound bite -- but before that came the legions of communications researchers tasked with getting Jimmy Carter to smile more.

The Republican Presidential nominee has been getting a lot of attention over the weekend, of course, but what of the man who might actually run America? Erin Schumaker at Huffington Post tells us the story of how Gov. Mike Pence essentially created an HIV epidemic in Scott County, Indiana during 2015. It started, of course, with the county's only Planned Parenthood clinic leaving, since that Planned Parenthood clinic was the only one in the county doing HIV tests, and then progressed through Mr. Pence's "moral" opposition to needle exchanges (hey, dumbass: drug addicts can't just say no to drugs! That's why they're addicts!), which he finally rescinded, but too late for the nearly 200 good Indianans who've now got an incurable disease that's expensive to treat. Why, it's almost like being a right-wing leader means creating more crises for you to "lead" people through.

Shane Burley and Alexander Reid Cross describe "How the Alt Right is Trying to Create a ‘Safe Space’ for Racism on College Campuses." And no, "safe space" isn't the authors' term -- it's the term preferred by certain white supremacists. And they think liberals always sound like a bunch of politically-correct weaklings? And that's before you get to weaselly talking points like "race realism" (their "realism" claims whites are smarter than blacks; think they're doing craniometry experiments?). Seriously, though, this is a good report, not just on the white supremacists trying to influence Our Impressionable Youth, but also on the anti-fascist organizations sprouting up in response.

Writer Sarah Nyberg creates Arguetron, a Twitterbot that baits right-wing bigots and gets some of the them to fight for hours on end. I stand in awe of her achievement, not just because I'm lucky to know a handful of HTML tags, but also because getting these morons to argue with nobody, it turns out, is really not that hard! (Creepily, getting them to hit on nobody also isn't that hard.) Seriously, though, right-wing arguments aren't that original -- which means that when some white supremacist (ooh, sorry, alt-right, mustn't hurt racist fee-fees) makes his own Twitter bot, it won't be as good as Ms. Nyberg's.

Finally, Melissa Hellmann profiles the D.C. Black Workers' Center. Like other members of the National Black Workers Center Project, the D.C. Center provides job training skills and helps connect workers with employers, of course, but it also helps black workers form co-ops, so that workers can have more control over their lives. If we're lucky, right-wingers will one day focus all their ZOMG COMMUNISM SOCIALISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!!! fire on these Workers' Centers -- I say "lucky," of course, only because that means those Workers' Centers will be very successful.

Around the table: an *even worse* boss than Donald Trump, and other amazing stories.

Lawsuit seeks to end Georgia's practice of throwing out voter registration forms that don't precisely match information in other state databases. Apparently even an extra hyphen in your name can get you disenfranchised -- and, surprise, surprise! Black folks seem to get their voter registration forms thrown out at a disproportionate rate. That reminds me of the "Interstate Crosscheck" database, which states use to disenfranchise voters with similar names to voters in other states -- another tactic that just so happens to hurt minorities at a disproportionate rate. All to catch the phantom "voter fraudster," which Tha Bush Mobb's Justice Department couldn't even find in any significant numbers.

How's this for cojones? Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf blames his employees for all those fake accounts Wells Fargo created for its customers. Those would be the same employees under constant pressure to meet sales quotas -- though of course Mr. Stumpf never actually said "break the law or I'll fire you," and while that may be the only evidence John Roberts would admit in a fraud case, the rest of us aren't so literal that we screen out the truth. And our leaders wonder why we don't respect them anymore!

Donald Trump's campaign deletes lengthy press release/diatribe against the "FDA Food Police" and "inspection overkill" from its website. You think they heard, maybe on the news or something, that food poisoning is unpopular? Or did they learn that the most recent food safety overhaul in Congress (passed in 2010) actually had broad bipartisan support in both Houses? Strangely, throwing up for hours on end because of something you ate is a far worse prospect, for most Americans, than stricter regulations on farmers and food production facilities -- and, truth be known, regulations are really only unpopular with a) the corporations that have to comply with them and b) the rageaholics they can manipulate into being angry about that, in addition to all the other things they're angry about.

House Democrats urge the Justice Department to investigate the Donald J. Trump Foundation, at least in part because of that suspicious campaign donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. I just can't wait for the first right-winger who calls such a thing "unprecedented," as if Mr. Trump's opponent didn't get investigated for her private emails and for the Benghazi disaster. (And if you confront a right-winger thusly, and they quickly say well, hers was justified, it's perfectly OK to remind them that they've just changed the subject -- which was that a Trump investigation would be unprecedented -- and that changing the subject concedes the point.)

Finally, dig this ad by Missouri Secretary of State/U.S. Senate candidate Jason Kander. I'm not behind background checks for terror suspects, because that's a loophole an aspiring dictator can drive a Mack truck through, but the ad really is a masterful document -- he acknowledges Sen. Blunt's attacks on his gun-control positions without repeating them, then talks about his military service and his record in the state legislature, all while putting a rifle together blindfolded. If this ad is any indication of his political skill, Mr. Kander has a good chance of winning his race -- polling presently puts him between three and seven points behind the incumbent, but Roy Blunt ain't exactly beloved by the Show Me State.

Around the table: notes about clean water, health care, banksters, and gay marriage.

Uh oh: Michigan state officials were shipping clean water to at least one state building in Flint as early as January of last year -- or some nine months before Michigan finally acknowledged Flint's water had lead in it and was unsafe to drink. No doubt Michigan state officials will point to the presence of trihalomethanes, not lead, in the water as the reason for those shipments -- though given that many trihalomethanes (created as a by-product of chlorine treatment of water) are themselves carcinogenic, I'm not sure how that makes the state look better.

Surprise, surprise, Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, finds big "liberal" media organs funding attacks on single-payer -- big "liberal" media organs who just so happen to have big financial holdings in our current heavily-privatized health care system. Washington Post CEO Jeff Bezos has, of course, invested in several private health care initiatives, and Comcast (which owns Vox) has long partnered with the Kaiser Family Foundation, which itself has heavily invested in the Affordable Care Act's success. It's synergy! Haters will tell you that's no big deal because everyone is invested in everything else, like that's some natural state of affairs we should accept. I am puzzled that haters win so many of these rhetorical battles when they live in (and want you to live in) such a grey world.

The inimitable Mike Konczal explains why Bernie Sanders's Wall Street-related proposals won't do enough to rein in the banksters. I don't agree that breaking up the big banks and reinstalling Glass-Steagall won't do much -- saying they wouldn't have prevented Bear Stearns and Lehmann Brothers from going under in 2008 does not they wouldn't prevent the next catastrophe, or that they didn't prevent previous ones from happening -- but I do agree that the biggest problem with the banks is that they're so undercapitalized, because they're so obsessed with shareholder payouts. You'd think shareholders would be aware of the problems that would cause, too. Perhaps I've had too high an opinion of them all these years.

Oklahoma state House overwhelmingly passes bill "getting the state out of the marriage business" and handing it over to churches. That's how much some folks hate gay marriage, though of course this monstrosity's author cites the hardship suffered by county clerks who now have to sign off on gay marriage licenses. Such tough stuff right-wingers are made of! Of course, as the author points out, marriage is a legal contract, and as such always subject to oversight by the state on the people's behalf -- hence a lot of good Oklahomans are going to find themselves completely without the rights of marriage in the coming years, or, perhaps, they'll find their hated federal government administering those rights.

Finally, in a related note, infamous Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis agrees with a suck-up radio host that God chose her to stand against gay marriage. And you know what? She may be right! God may well have chosen her! And, like so many folks who broadcast their feeling that they were "chosen" by God, she may want to consider whether God chose her to be the face and voice of her cause so that her cause would fail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: bacon as carcinogen, Black Friday as day off, hacking as security measure, and other ideas.

You've heard reports that ZOMG TEH BACUNZ CAUSEZ TEH CANCURZ LIKEZ TEH SMOKINGZ!!!!! Well, Sarah Zhang at Wired advises us that we should take that with the proverbial grain of salt. The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer did declare that the scientific evidence linking processed meat (including bacon) to cancer is as solid as the evidence for linking tobacco to cancer -- but that doesn't say bacon is as likely to give you cancer as tobacco is, and, the scientific evidence linking, for example, sunlight to cancer is equally strong. Verdict: you should of course eat fewer servings of processed meat, but you shouldn't go off the deep end worrying about it. If you're smoking, on the other hand, quit. I know it's hard, but do it.

Outdoor retailer REI declares it will not only close on Black Friday this year, but will give its employees a paid day off on that day. It's the right thing to do, letting workers spend time with their families, and it won't cost REI in the long run as much as Wall Street thinks, but the haters are already saying REI is a co-op and thus isn't as "hamstrung" in doing the right thing as big corporations with shareholders are, as if it's somehow unfair to organize your business as a co-op that's actually more accountable to your customers. But very few propagandists are good enough to provoke widespread sympathy for those poor, poor huge corporations that can't close on Black Friday because of money.

As you may know, the Copyright Office evaluates digital rights management (or DRM) exceptions every few years, and The Consumerist reports on the most recent exemptions. Gamers will be pleased to learn they can jailbreak games for local use where far-away servers have gone under, and security researchers can continue to hack into cars, medical devices, and voting machines as long as they don't cause anyone actual harm (i.e., hack into a pacemaker that someone's using). You still won't be able to move Kindle books to your new Nook, however -- apparently their creators feel the .mp3 file was a serious tactical error.

You've heard, perhaps, that Sen. Marco Rubio doesn't enjoy being in the Senate because things move so slowly? Well, the Miami Sun-Sentinel editorial board reminds us that the voters sent Mr. Rubio to the Senate to do a job, and if he doesn't like it, he ought to resign it, as Rep. Boehner did. They note, also, that Sens. Paul and Sanders have hardly missed any votes while campaigning, that Sen. Rubio is a hypocrite for calling out VA workers for failing to do their jobs when he's hardly at his own, and that Floridians actually have pressing issues, including "clogged highways" and "eroding beaches," requiring a staunch Senate advocate. This editorial contains all the campaign ad fodder Democrats would need to beat him soundly -- including Mr. Rubio's contention that "voting is not the most important part of the job." After John Kerry's voting record crippled him in 2004, you'd think Democrats would be sensitive to that.

In a perhaps related note, Ohio Gov. John Kasich says, at a debate "send-off" rally in western Ohio, that he's "about had it" with the "nonsense" in the Republican Presidential race. He may yet emerge as the establishment answer to Messrs. Trump and Carson, but let's remember that he'd govern this country as a far right-winger just as surely as the rest of them -- and he might be worse, since he'll have convinced everyone he's a "moderate" next to Messrs. Trump and Carson, when virtually anyone looks like a "moderate" next to those two. They love moving the center ever further right, when the real center in America is actually moving left.

Finally, courtesy one of our readers, here's a list of news sites, including some satirical ones and some other "satirical" ones, which pump out fake news that shows up in "liberal" media reports with alarming regularity. The list isn't comprehensive -- just yesterday I saw a "news" story from usatoday.com.co, which is most definitely not USA Today -- but it is instructive. Sadly, this development is more likely to provoke more "cybersecurity" legislation from Congress than to provide teachable moments about parsing truth from lies. I'd be happy to be proven wrong about that.

Around the table: Red Cross failures, Voter ID horror stories, bad Governors, and another Fox News "jihad.".

This is sad news: a ProPublica/NPR investigation finds a litany of Red Cross failures during the two 2012 storms that hit the East coast. Really, it is a heartbreaking story, and if it looks to you like someone took over Red Cross and started running it like a heartless corporation, you could be forgiven -- the Red Cross hired a corporate executive as their new CEO in 2008, and at one point she had workers drive around in empty ambulances, for "visibility," I presume. Kids today, I swear, they forget that visibility from good works is ten thousand times better than visibility from PR voodoo.

Emily Badger describes "What It's Like to Try to Get a Voter ID When You're Disabled, Poor, or Don't Drive." Apparently such tales still don't get told enough, since too many morons still insist that getting a Voter ID is not that big a deal. Said morons were almost certainly not born in a poor hospital that didn't write out birth certificates in the early part of this century, for example.

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) drags out his Lieutenant Governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, to say Scott Walker supports equal pay for women -- two years after Gov. Walker signed a repeal of Wisconsin's equal pay law! He's a political animal, this one. Or is he? He put this ad out on a Tuesday; I might have waited until Friday, giving his opponent just one working day before Election Day to try to kill it. Ah, it doesn't matter. He's going to win. And then our nightmare really begins.

The Center for Media and Democracy describe Maine Gov. Paul LePage's efforts to privatize the town of Fryeburg's water. It's as nasty as these things get: a corporation packs the relevant public oversight board with cronies, and then when they get ethics all of a sudden, the Governor gets legislation passed that gives him the right to appoint their replacements! Paul LePage grew up dirt poor, by the way, and he was basically homeless for two years as a child, thanks to his abusive, alcoholic father. I guess he forgot where he came from.

Finally, Fox News blowhard Keith Ablow says we should start an "American jihad," whereby we force other nations to adopt our ways, for their own good, of course. If your first response was isn't that what we already do?, you're not alone. Just remember that if the man spouting this filth had dark skin and a head covering, Keith Ablow would want him dead. Better we just never mention him again.