Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning child labor, child care, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to toughen child labor laws, extend child care funding, and reject any “debt commission” to cut our earned benefits. 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.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act. In the wake of child labor violations almost doubling over the last year, and Iowa actually passing a law to allow more child labor that violates federal law, the Stop Child Labor Act would increase penalties for violations, allow our government to put repeat offenders in jail, and let children seek compensation for the harm done to them. This is basic law-and-order stuff here, and let’s be honest: do we want our kids to have real childhoods like we always say we do, or do we want them to grow up in sweatshops? We can’t have both.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the emergency child care stabilization funding first offered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yeah, the pandemic is over (or, more precisely, “over”), but some three million-plus kids will lose access to child care if we don’t extend the funding, and I don’t know about you, but if it only costs $16 billion (out of some $6 trillion in total federal outlays) to get these kids the care they need, I do it without blinking. Congressional monsters may not feel the same way, but they’re supposed to do our will, not beat their chests about whom they hurt. Personal to folks who say just have one parent stay home: you’ve never done any household budgeting, have you?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to use a “debt commission” to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or food stamp benefits. That’s right, food stamps too! Nobody lives like Elon Musk on food stamps, and anyone, including me or you, might need them some day. And that’s right, Medicaid too! Medicaid is actually pretty popular, though it also has an unearned reputation as Something Only Those People Get. Social Security and Medicare I trust I don’t have to defend once again. But we have to defend them from our own leaders! And if we do, we’ll win.

Action: concerning voting rights, child care, consumer protection, and bankster pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, keep investing in child care, reject efforts to defund our CFPB, and stop banking executives from cashing out right before their banks crash. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our freedom to vote, by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. Yeah, Republicans won’t want to do it, but let’s frame that the way civilized people should frame it: Republicans should get with the program and do what the hell we tell them to do, regardless of how they feel about it. Representatives are supposed to represent, after all, and both the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act would not only help more good Americans vote, it will give good Americans more tools to fight back when state and local governments try to suppress their vote. And good Americans deserve that! So we should get it, regardless of what Republicans “think.”

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep investing in expanded child care across America. I mean, if you’re going to tell people to get married, and you’re going to tell people to get jobs, and you’re going to tell them to have children, and then you’re going to pay them so little that both parents have to work, then you ought to help them afford child care, which is stupid expensive for no reason other than that some folks realized they could make unearned millions off child care merely because everyone needs it. The American Rescue Plan Act expanded federal funding for child care centers during the pandemic, but now that funding’s about to expire, with child care for over three million kids about to expire along with it, so how about we not be so damn cruel?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject legislation that would break our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Barack Obama was no dummy, so he insisted that our Federal Reserve fund our CFPB, rather than Congressional appropriations, and though our Congressfolk have no problem with such a funding structure in other contexts, they seem to get their shorts in a bunch about it with our CFPB. I wonder why. I kid, of course! I do not wonder at all! Republicans in Congress want to zero out CFPB funding whenever they like so they can do the bidding of their big bankster donors – and this they want to do when banksters remain approximately the most unpopular people in America! And unpopular across the political spectrum, I might add! So let’s remind our Congressfolk who their real bosses are. It’s us. We’re their real bosses.

Finally, Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RECOUP Act, so that we can finally prevent banksters from making craploads of money the week before their banks crash. Yes, this happened just recently! Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO sold over $3.5 million of stock right before SVB collapsed, while executives at First Republic Bank sold around $12 million of stock in the months before that bank went under; nice work if you can get it! Seriously, if they tell people their bank is doing fine, and then unload millions of bucks in stocks in their own bank, they’re saying that they lied to all those people when they said their bank was doing fine! I guess they think they’re OK because we may not have their lies on tape, but their actions gave away their lies, and anyway there’s no Constitutional right to millions of dollars in compensation when folks hurt all the people whose money they were holding for them, for “safekeeping.” This is Civilization 101 stuff.

Around the table: featuring the usual corporate lies and right-wing drama.

Well, how about that, yet more polling telling us that Democratic legislative priorities – including paid family/medical leave, child care, and the expanded Child Tax Credit – are actually popular, garnering over 70% support in each case, and Newt Gingrich said back in 2008 that if 70% of the people want something, they should get it. So maybe people like Kyrsten Sinema and Josh Gottheimer ought to look at this data and ha ha ha ha ha I crack myself up – people like that care about nothing but sucking up to their big donors.

What is driving the huge increase of homelessness among seniors? I bet you just can’t guess – “a series of recessions, high housing costs and a shortage of affordable housing.” Everyone knows landlords are jacking up rent all over the country – why? Because software told them to, or just because they can – and we’d be foolish to think seniors wouldn’t be affected by that. But please, right-wingers, give us some more booga-booga about China when talking about any problem.

So how are the big tax-filing corporations trying to stop our IRS from offering Americans free tax filing? By claiming that free tax-filing would hurt Black folks! Of course you recognize that argument as hostage-taking – don’t let Americans file their taxes for free, or the Black guy gets it! – but you won’t be surprised to learn that a) Intuit has worked hard to plant this argument in Black and Brown newspapers or that b) it cites research that doesn’t support its argument, like, at all.

When you hear that some right-wingers think Speaker McCarthy “set up the Biden impeachment to fail,” remind yourself that this is no more a real thing than the news of Matt Gaetz’s “personal” “spat” with the Speaker. Right-wingers want you to think they’re divided just like they want you to think they’re stupid, so you’ll be off-guard. They also do it to create drama, of course, which is literally the only thing they’re good at anymore. Their drama-loving ways might not result in failure at the ballot box, but St. Peter may treat them differently at the Pearly Gates.

Nate Silver reminds us that the COVID death rate wasn’t any different in red states and blue states – until the vaccines came along, after which COVID death rates shot up in red states. We could reasonably ask whether death rates is the only statistic that shows this disparity, but the difference is nonetheless stark. And, ah, those right-wingers who got the vaccine themselves but said it’s a “personal choice” for everyone else? They may not be off the hook at the Pearly Gates, either. I know, being a good person is so hard – but so is anything worth doing.

Finally, just so happens that at least two Supreme Court Justices – Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito – have invested in corporations that could benefit from a favorable ruling in Moore v. United States, which aims to topple the mandatory repatriation tax in the 2017 tax “reform” law. (They’re the only two Justices who own individual stocks; the others invest in mutual funds and the like.) Note well that even if Chief Justice Roberts rules against corporate power here, he’ll almost certainly be in the minority when he does, meaning he can “clear” his conscience and still make bank. Justice Alito does not seem encumbered by similar concerns.

Action: concerning facial recognition, the care economy, and renewable energy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban facial recognition software at performance venues, invest more in our care economy, and ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefit renewable energy exclusively. 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.

Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to prohibit performance venues from using facial recognition software on event-goers. You don’t even have to know that facial recognition can’t tell Black people apart any better than your January 6-addled uncle can to tell Congress to ban its use; you only need know that facial recognition enables law enforcement fishing expeditions, and opposing those, I would think, would be something conservatives could get behind as well as liberals. If your right-wing neighbor retorts BUTZ I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!, just remind him that could be him getting profiled and wrongly-arrested the next time Bruce Springsteen rolls into town.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell Congressfolk to invest in our care economy. Sound like a tall order for a Republican House that cares only about drama? Doesn’t matter! Right is right, and duty is duty, and Congress has a duty to help us make our lives better, not stand by while nursing home corporations and child care corporations continue to gouge good Americans who can’t do without them. They say inflation is bad, but inflation has, for a very long time, been really bad in areas of our economy that folks can’t simply refuse to participate in – if you have kids or elderly parents, they need care. So our Congressfolk have got to help, not hurt.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefits renewable energy producers exclusively. Because there’s enough filth in our air and water already, and when politicians talk about the shift to clean energy “killing jobs,” they’re full of soup. Solar and wind and geothermal all create jobs; what they don’t do as well as coal and oil and gas corporations is redistribute more of your wealth upward to executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) are trying to take us toward more pollution and unearned income for bosses, so we’ve got to step up.

Action: concerning health care, child care, and the war on Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices, lower child care costs, and end our involvement in the war on Yemen. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices now. It doesn’t matter that 50 Senate Republicans block everything that might help good Americans! It doesn’t matter what Joe Manchin wants to do or what Kyrsten Sinema’s "thinking" is! People hate paying an arm and a leg for the medicines that keep them healthy – or alive. And 80% of Americans want Medicare to be able to negotiate lower drug prices; if 80% of Americans want something, and it’s a good thing, than your Senators have to do it. Otherwise, they’re just evil. And I mean evil! Sometimes nuance is a wedge between you and wisdom, and this seems to happen a lot in American politics.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Senators to lower child care costs for good Americans. People also hate paying more for child care than they might pay at a public university! And why do they have to do it? Because child care is so much more intricate than it was 50 years ago? No: they have to do it because most families are two-job families now and if they don’t, either the kids stay home unsupervised or the family can’t pay the bills on one income. In other words, the child care corporations charge absurd amounts because they can. That ain’t the “free” market at work; that’s an evil market at work. Hey, all they have to do is not be evil.

Finally, the Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Senators to end American involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. The realpolitik types will tell us we have to be nice to the Saudis and keep their war on Yemen going (and thus keep Yemeni children starving and keep killing some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth) because if we don’t, Russia and China will get the upper hand in world affairs, but that’s a load of horsedoodle. Anyone can justify anything by mouthing booga-booga about Russia and China; but folks of courage and wisdom can step back and say no to chaos and disorder, and we need to create more of these folks.

Penny Rants for June 29, 2022: good news for Democrats! Which is bad news *to* Democratic politicians.

For some reason, Kerry Eleveld’s report about the fall of Roe “disrupting” the Republicans-will-crush-it-in-November narrative starts off with reports about Democratic and Republican enthusiasm in the wake of Roe’s fall, when the big story, it seems to me, is that the generic ballot polls have been trending hard in the Democrats’ direction. NPR’s generic ballot poll, which was 47-44 for Republicans in April, is now 48-41 for Democrats; that’s a 10-point swing, basically, in two months. (A Politico/Morning Consult poll found a three-point swing toward Democrats in one week, albeit the week our Supreme Court overturned Roe.) Republicans had better hope gas stays at $5/gallon! Seriously, as I’ve said, people really hate politicians who take away things they count on, just like they did in 2017-18 when Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Nobody stopped them but the people. That’s how it’ll have to happen again.

Virginia Republican House candidate Yesli Vega – like most of today's Republicans, desperately trying to appear more anti-abortion than anyone who's ever lived – suggests that it’s a lot harder to get pregnant from rape than from consensual sex, “maybe because there's so much going on in the body” and/or “(b)ecause it's not something that's happening organically,” or because “the male” is doing it more “quickly.” Even worse than all that, though? She suggests that it must not happen all that often merely because she only saw it happen once in her decade-plus as a police officer, like she’s the center of all human experience or something. Admittedly, she may be a little harder to trap into a humiliating loss than Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin was, precisely because she’s clearly more prone to word salad, but it’s a long campaign, so I suspect she’ll give us other opportunities. Bonus: if Abigail Spanberger actually loses to her, she’ll have to confront the fact that the problem was never “defund the police” or “socialism” but her.

Finally, when I hear that Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) not only won’t say he’ll support President Biden in 2024, which, like, who cares, but won't say whether he'd run for President as a third-party candidate, I feel compelled to first take a deep breath and then ask: what sane person thinks Joe Manchin is the answer to anyone’s problems? Our chattering class always whines that there are just no moderates anymore whenever a moderate is President, but Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans stopped us from raising taxes on the rich. Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans took monthly $250 and $300 checks away from working families. Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans prevented American workers from getting four weeks of paid sick leave. And Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans kept child-care prices astronomically high for American families while pissing and moaning about inflation. And were he so dense as to run for President, that’s the ad I’d run over and over and over again until he slinks away into the oblivion he has most certainly earned.

Action: concerning baby formula, child care, gas prices, big ag, and "forever chemicals."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to break up baby formula monopolies, help working families better afford child care, tax big oil windfall profits, break up monopolistic big ag practices, and keep "forever chemicals" off our farmlands. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell Congress to pass legislation ensuring we never get this short on baby formula again. Right-wingers tell us we're here because we have too many regulations gumming up the works, but that's ridiculous -- we're short on baby formula because four big corporations control the entire market, and a food safety issue at one of them has emptied our shelves. Thus we tell our Congressfolk to break up corporate monopolies; after all, as our President says, capitalism without competition is exploitation, and the only "efficiency" we really "gain" from monopolies is the efficient redistribution of income upward from workers to executives. I'd rather have babies not starve myself.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation expanding preschool and helping working families afford child care. It is a bit breathtaking that legislation about child care specifically has floated around for years, but now our President has embraced it, and the only reasons it hasn't passed, basically, are a) the opposition of Republicans and b) the Joe Manchin Drama Machine. But child care costs have plagued families for decades -- like health care, corporations charge what they want because they can! -- and families need relief now. Expanding preschool can also help deliver that relief; after all, if kids are in preschool, they're not in some private child care service. See? Big Gummint helps sometimes.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a big oil corporation windfall tax. As I've said, anyone who can't see the link between record profits and record-high gas prices by now simply doesn't want to see it. And folks (including Democratic politicians!) who claim that taxing unearned profits of oil corporations will "decrease the supply of oil" are all but saying not only that oil corporations have all the power, but that they should have all the power. It's rhetorical hostage-taking: don't make oil corporations pay their share of taxes, or the gas supply gets it! And if you're pro-freedom, you don't take that from anyone.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act, which would ban new factory farms, split up existing factory farms into smaller operations, and end the stranglehold middlemen have over meat production and sales. Yeah, this is a theme with us -- bigger is badder -- and it's a theme because bigness infects every part of our economy, and most Americans, be they liberal or conservative, oppose concentrated power. Right-wingers give lip service to small businesses, but they aim to give all of our power to large corporations. Because that keeps the big campaign donations coming! But we outnumber them, so we must overpower them.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep PFAS chemicals off our farmlands. You can find PFAS chemicals -- which scientists link to certain cancers, birth defects, and immune system issues -- in firefighting foam, fast-food packaging, waterproof jackets, and non-stick saucepans, but you can also find them in agricultural wastewater treatments, meaning you can also find them in our food, water, feed animals, and agricultural workers. They call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" because our bodies can't break them down; they should call them everywhere chemicals too! Odd how the more "efficient" they make our food-producing apparatus, the less healthy it becomes.

Action: concerning guns, climate change, taxes, child care, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to do something about mass-killing machines already, fight climate change, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, cap child care costs for working families, tax corporations at a minimum of 15%, and lower prescription drug prices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Today's as good a day as any other to call your Congressfolk and tell them to a) amend the National Firearms Act of 1934 to include semi-automatic guns as well as automatic ones and b) require gun owners to register their guns, get shooting licenses, and buy liability insurance. Thom Hartmann describes this plan in more detail here. Don't believe any right-wing hype that this program would "kill our freedoms," because item a) already exists and keeps automatic weapons off our streets and item b) is what we already do for automobiles. And this plan wouldn't infringe on your right to own a handgun or a hunting rifle! (If you turn your hunting rifle into a semi, see item a).)

The Green New Deal Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight climate change now. You may have heard lately that our One True Great and Real American President Joe Manchin has started talking about a climate package with Senate Majority Leader Schumer again, but forget about that, at least until they actually produce a package that may or may not improve on what we've already got. Best thing right now is simply to communicate your will that Congress do something about climate change before we're all the proverbial frogs in the proverbial pot of boiling water. In the end, their dramas don't matter; our will matters, and lasting change comes when we express our will in numbers they can't deny.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion and cap child care costs at 7% of a family's incomes. The original Build Back Better Act would have done both of these things, and neither one is on the table in the Manchin/Schumer discussions, but that only means we have to keep telling them we want these things. Millions of kids went right back into poverty when the CTC expansion ended -- and inflation didn't go down, you'll notice! -- and child care has become so absurdly expensive it now rivals health care expenses as the thing corporations will charge whatever they want for because you have to have it. That ain't America, folks.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax corporate profits at a minimum of 15% and stop letting them pretend they're making money overseas when they're making it here. This, too, relates to whatever discussions Messrs. Manchin and Schumer are having, and the 15% minimum tax appears to be the only thing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) would agree to do regarding corporate taxes. I said "appears," of course, because she doesn't "negotiate through the press." And here you thought accounting for herself to her constituents via our press was part of her job! That's because we're not galaxy brains like she is. Anyway, corporations need to pay more in taxes and we need to tell our Congressfolk that until they do it.

Finally, both Public Citizen and Drug Prices Are Too High help you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices. Public Citizen's email tool specifically mentions Medicare drug-price negotiation, while Drug Prices Are Too High's petition suggests that maybe supporting lower drug prices would help them in the midterms! And it should -- Medicare drug price negotiation foe Kurt Schrader lost his primary last week, and another Medicare drug price negotiation foe, Kathleen Rice, decided not to run for re-election; such fates should befall any politician who opposes the clear will of at least 80% of Americans. Including Kyrsten Sinema, up in 2024.

Action: concerning law and order, pollution, labor, corruption, and privatization.

Long story short: tell Texas Gov. Abbott to grant Melissa Lucio clemency, tell Citigroup to get out of the Amazon rainforest, tell Verizon to recognize retail worker unions, tell our EPA to cut pollution from trucks and buses, tell our government to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy, and tell BlueTriton to stop taking the public's water. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first: Ultra Violet helps you tell Texas Governor Greg Abbott to grant Melissa Lucio clemency. A jury convicted Ms. Lucio of murdering her two year-old daughter in 2007, but, well, let's just say it's a bad sign for a verdict when five of the original jurors want a do-over because of evidence they didn't get to hear, evidence that included how thoroughly investigators coerced her to confess in the first place. I'm sure some folks would rather just adhere to the original verdict, not out of laziness but out of a sense that we've got rules, but I think they're misguided: one of the ways we protect our civilization is we make damn sure someone's guilty before we do something like kill them, since you can't really take that back. Erring on the side of innocence is a feature of civilization; too many folks think it's a bug.

Stand.Earth helps you tell Citigroup executives to stop funding oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest. Yes, that still happens, and not just because Jair Bolsonaro runs things in Brazil! But Citigroup executives meet today for their Annual General Meeting, so now's as good a time as any to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. They've funded oil drilling in the Amazon -- the world's best weapon against climate change, I feel compelled to restate -- to the tune of $40 billion over the years, which doesn't just mean pollution, but also means running roughshod over the rights of indigenous folks who live there. And yeah, it also means collaborating with the aforementioned irredeemable asshole whom I hope Brazilian voters will be able to turn out of office this year. Yeah, I said collaborating. As Rush Limbaugh used to say, words mean things.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg to recognize the Verizon retail workers' union in Washington state. Stop me if you've heard this before, but Verizon made over $4 billion in profits while cutting retail worker pay, which I guess is how they answer the question how do you think I got so rich? Verizon workers also suffer from the chronic understaffing and absurd scheduling practices that plague so many retail workers in America; could that be the reason Starbucks and Amazon workers are trying to unionize? Don't believe the hype that retail jobs are just unstable and workers should know that when they sign up. As if they have much of a choice! And anyway, calling misery "natural" betrays a profound lack of imagination.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to cut pollution from buses and semi-trucks. Again, throwing up your hands and saying they're big vehicles and they're just going to pollute! shows a profound lack of imagination. Semis and buses pump out a quarter of all pollution from vehicals despite comprising only five percent of all vehicles, and if they only get, say six miles to the gallon, wouldn't they be twice as clean if they got 12? This is the kind of imagination that makes good policy! You can't just sit there and say we'll never get them to get 50 miles to the gallon, so let's give up, but right-wingers want you to make that mistake non-stop, because then their paymasters (like big corporations that don't want to buy all new trucks) get everything they want. And why should they?

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Justice and United States Postal Service Inspector General to investigate Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for possible lawbreaking -- specifically, by holding onto investments in the corporation that just so happened to produce all those free COVID tests we got in the mail. No, it's not a matter of using your connections in the business world! For one thing, our government should have made the damn tests themselves, and for another thing, you're not supposed to personally benefit from the decisions you make on behalf of the public. I'm old enough to remember when public servants avoided the appearance of corruption; now they wave it in your face. Waving it in our face should get them punished, but it won't, unless we act.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell BlueTriton CEO Dean Metropoulos to stop taking public water from the drought-addled communities, or, indeed, any communities. BlueTriton, as you likely know by now, used to be Nestlé’s North American water stealing ahem bottling operation last year, but it's time we reminded the world there ain't no putting lipstick on that pig. And why should there be? Why should corporations get to siphon public water and then charge hundreds of times the amount they paid for the water? They call it "preserving a resource," but governments can do that. The most important thing here is that water doesn't go the way of health insurance, higher education, child care, and, hell, rent -- as an essential item that working families can't afford anymore.

Around the table: they're banning *math textbooks*! And other absurdities.

When I heard that the Florida Department of Education had rejected 41 math textbooks for various reasons, including "references to critical race theory," I found the tale was so absurd I wondered if media outlets were overplaying it. Apparently they are not! Even though Florida also said they'd rejected the math books for "inclusions of Common Core" and "the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics," I noticed they put their objections to critical race theory first, so I guess this really must be mostly about math books containing word problems about Tony and Aisha taking a train together. Banning math books is weapons-grade PR, of course -- for the Democrat who actually uses it! Don't worry about being civil, gang, because Republicans never do.

You won't be surprised to hear that child care and elder care programs can reduce inflation, even though it's the opposite of the Gospel According to Republicans and Joe Manchin. They're still complaining that those $1,400 checks you got a year ago have caused all this inflation, and not the greed of corporations making record profits. Anyway, child care and elder care both cost an arm and a leg -- because what are you gonna do, not get it? -- and thus subsidizing these things can help working families fight the effects of inflation. No, that won't cause more inflation! Remember: corporate greed causes inflation, and we've got tools against that, like good tax policy and strong antitrust enforcement.

When I hear that "Liberal Cities Are Not Immune to Mounting Attacks on Abortion Rights," I remember that cities are actually pretty diverse, and that while a lot of folks in them vote Democrat mainly because the alternative is untenable, not everyone who does that is pro-choice, and the anti-abortion movement can peel some of those folks off, and in the long run maybe even convert them to Free Marketeers. And sadly, though my world is big enough for a liberal anti-abortion group, the "Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising" hangs out with too many right-wing nutjobs to be that group.

Here's something we should be saying a lot more: "Ron DeSantis loves using very young kids as political props." The phrase "using children" should be weapons-grade PR enough, frankly, particularly when you're surrounding yourself with children as you sign anti-abortion legislation and anti-education legislation. It works the other way for him, too, when you recall that he bullied a group of college students into taking their masks off because wearing them, he said, was "COVID theater." That man sure does know all about theater, that's for sure. But not a whole lot about leadership.

At last someone else sees why Ron Johnson keeps winning Senate elections in Wisconsin -- not just because Democrats prepare for victory so badly, but because Mr. Johnson himself sounds like a jerk on right-wing radio but then seems so nice on his TV ads. Something for everyone! Democrats hammering him on how he personally benefited from the 2017 tax "reform" might work, but Democrats showing off his two-faced nature to everyone might also work. Some folks will secretly root for a guy who "sticks it to the man" by getting himself a tax cut -- this, even though the taxpayer is "the man" here -- but folks like liars a lot less.

Finally, I guess I'm not surprised that President Biden has reopened fossil fuel drilling leases on public lands -- legalese aside, the guy can do very little about the corporate greed that's actually driving inflation, but he has to at least look like he's doing something, though giving out a lease doesn't produce more gas tomorrow. But I am a little surprised (and pleased!) that his Administration raised the royalty rate for drilling on public lands by 50%; oil and gas drilling corporations will whine about having to pay the taxpayer more for the privilege of drilling on public lands (i.e., our lands), and sadly that could well mean that President Biden changes his mind! I sure hope not, though. If we're going to have drilling on public lands, let's at least make some bank. And if the "high price of drilling" scares oil and gas drilling corporations away, well, I'll just have to deal with it.

Around the table: featuring yet another parade of pretenders!

As Hungarian Prime Minister/irredeemable asshole Viktor Orban proves even harder to dislodge than Bibi Netanyahu, the American right-wing press heralds his most recent re-election "as a victory against secularism and wokeness" and "an example for the Western world." I've always said we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society, but Mr. Orban is the very emblem of that decadence, not a warrior against it. And all the folks who think the absurdly high costs of rent, college, child care, and health care aren't the "real" problem with our society, but some kid who prefers "they" as a pronoun is? They're nothing more than Useful Idiots for decadence.

Cory Doctorow asserts that "gig companies" are either "violating employment law, or they’re violating antitrust." "(A) neglected -- and powerful -- aspect of antitrust is its prohibition on 'vertical restraint': when a company seeks to control the business of its suppliers," he writes, and when corporations like Uber and Doordash prevent their "contractors" (who are their suppliers, essentially) from working for other corporations or setting prices they can charge customers, that's "control(ling) the business of its suppliers." So: big gig corporations violate minimum wage and health care laws if they call their employees "employees," and violate antitrust law if they call them "contractors." They obviously counted on never seeing another President who'd go after monopolies. Ha ha!

For those of you keeping score at home, Starbucks workers at 200 stores have now filed for union elections, with at least 13 of them successfully forming one. Starbucks has nearly 9,000 stores in the United States (with close to 6,500 more that it licenses to operate within other stores), but note well that workers hit the 100-store milestone in close to six months and then hit the second 100 in a hair under seven weeks. Starbucks is still pretty powerful, and surely can peel off inattentive workers with even the stupid arguments they've made so far, so I wish these folks the best in their efforts to organize one of the largest chain-store corporations in America.

This article describing Congressional candidate Daniel Lee's work on the Culver City Council successfully enacting rent control, tenant protection, and single-family home zoning ordinances during the last few years may be even more valuable revealing the workings of one of Mr. Lee's main opponents, the notorious "assassin journalist" Ron Bassilian. (So does he shoot journalists, or is he a journalist who shoots other people? The world may never know.) Mr. Bassilian founded Protect Culver City -- which sure sounds innocuous enough, until you ask from whom -- and describes himself as a "moderate," but not only did he write an early "alt-right" tract and spew racist filth on Twitter, he just so happens to be most energized by things that also offend Our Glorious Elites, who don't want any of the little people to tell them they can't charge whatever they want for rent! In short, he's another Useful Idiot for corporate power pretending to be jes' folks.

When you read about Great Plains farmers fighting the prospect of a network of CO2 pipelines crossing their land, with the aim of pushing carbon emissions deep into the ground like that's going to undo climate change, you may be compelled to wonder what all the "salt of the earth" types who preen in Congress think about that. Don't they love the small farmer above all else? Don't they have a unique connection to those people, and to the land? More likely these peacocks will dismiss the grievances of actual small farmers as "special interest agitation" or conflate them with the Lakota "terrorists" who have fought alongside small farmers against previous pipelines. (And not for nothing, but most corporations won't even sequester the "recovered" emissions in the ground, but use them in future fossil-fuel projects.)

Finally, Stanford University engineers develop solar panels that can work at night. Solar cells actually have a lower temperature than the air around them at night, so by attaching a thermoelectric generator to a solar cell, you can produce a small amount of electricity. While some observers say you can't produce very much electricity this way, the Stanford engineers say they see "no intrinsic difficulties" in scaling up their product so that it can produce a lot of power; I suspect the truth is in the middle, which would still represent progress. Now watch the Fox News crowd guffaw over the prospect of "solar panels at night," like they think their own ignorance is a power source.

Action: concerning Ukraine, housing, government spying, monopolies, domestic workers, and the war on Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, pass the Homes for All Act, outlaw geo-fence warrants, pass the Open App Markets Act and the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act, and end our involvement in the war on Yemen. 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.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk not to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Nobody wants to see good Ukrainians suffer at the hands of Vlad the Bad, but nobody wants the U.S. embroiled in a war with Russia, either, since basically everyone will lose that one. Folks don't always understand what a "no-fly zone" really is, either: it's not some magic invisible dome that covers Ukraine, but U.S. planes flying over Ukraine and shooting down Russian planes, which, again, leads to war with Russia, and, again, very likely to Earth's destruction. And polls find majority American support for no-fly zones -- until pollsters explain exactly what that means, and then polls don't find majority support anymore. Yes, it's frustrating when bad people get their way. But a no-fly zone won't constrain Vlad the Bad.

Renters Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7191, the Homes for All Act. This bill would help build new public and private affordable housing, and it would help combat gentrification and promote alternative home ownership models, i.e., to "landlord owns and charges you through the nose." Prices for so many essentials -- health care of course, student loans because they tell you you're worthless if you don't go to college, child care and rent because what else are you gonna do? -- have been going up for much longer than our recent battle with inflation would indicate. And they do it because they can! People don't just up and move whenever they like, certainly not if no apartments will do any better by them. If the "free" market doesn't provide, our government has to step in. That's not "socialism," it's common sense.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing geo-fence warrants. A geo-fence warrant lets law enforcement ask big tech corporations what devices were in a specific area at a specific time, which may sound like a smart way to catch bad guys, but which actually violates our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as a U.S. District Court Judge has lately ruled. Law enforcement would comply with our Constitution if they got a warrant to find out whether a particular individual's devices were in a specific area at a specific time, but why do all that work when you can go on fishing expeditions? If it's wrong, and if law enforcement won't stop doing it, Congress has to step in and stop them, on our behalf. That's not "big government," it's common sense.

Free the iPhone helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act. You're thinking that if app makers want to sell their wares on an app store owned by Apple/Android/Google/Microsoft, they have to do whatever the app store owner wants? That's only true as far as making their apps compatible with particular operating systems (if they app maker fails to do that, it'll become apparent to the user right away!). But app stores typically do a lot worse. The Open App Markets Act would prevent corporations like Apple, Microsoft, and Android from forcing app makers to use proprietary in-app payment systems, forcing them to charge the same price in every app store, or punishing app makers who do either of the above. If corporations want "free" markets -- which they all say they do -- then they have to stop choking off competition.

The National Domestic Workers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4826/S. 2569, the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act. Our laws extend many protections to working folks, but for some reason our laws often exclude domestic workers from these protections (and by "for some reason" I mean "because they're poor and/or foreign"). The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights would not only extend minimum wage and maximum hour requirements for domestic live-in workers, it would ensure that those workers get certain other protections (for privacy, paid leave, sane work scheduling, and against discrimination) that, really, all workers should have, but which live-in workers feel particularly acutely. If you live where you work, your boss can abuse you plenty and easily, and nobody should have to put up with that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers resolution ending our involvement in the Saudi/UAE-led war on Yemen. Because starving two million children to death is wrong, because fighting undeclared and therefore unconstitutional wars is wrong, and because helping the coalition kill some of the world's best fighters against al-Qaeda is wrong, and ain't it funny how often that last item happens? Ask the Kurds how well we stood by them after they proved their mettle against al-Qaeda! President Biden did promise he'd get us out of this mess, but most of his moves over the last year haven't gotten us out, but more like further in. That means Congress needs to step in -- which, per our Constitution, they should have done in the first place!