Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, federal judges, and workers’ rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject another corporate tax cut, and tell your Senators to confirm as many federal judges as possible and re-confirm Lauren McFerran to our NLRB. 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.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight yet another tax giveaway for corporations. The incoming President wants to lower the corporate income tax to 15%, when corporate taxes should go up, not down. Corporations want you to think they need lots of profits in order to hire more people, but that's the exact opposite of how it works! Corporations would replaces us all with mounds of dung if they could – but if you tax them hard enough, they'll spend more money on jobs and products because money you spend isn't profit, it's an expense! So brook no stupidity from right-wingers – or your Congressfolk! – about this. Corporations already enjoyed record profits mostly from inflation, so they surely don't need any more handouts.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Senators to confirm as many federal judges as possible before TFG takes office. Democrats have 51 Senators at present, and Republicans can't filibuster judicial nominations, so for once they have the upper hand, and can use it to actually help people. Yes, better judges help people! When we sue the incoming Administration for all the harm they do to us, we'd better have some judges who'll actually apply the law and listen to us, instead of judges who'll just make up legal arguments that benefit rich people. Those are the kind of judges the incoming President will appoint, and we have long seen the harm they'll inflict – from destroying abortion rights to declaring free annual physicals "unconstitutional." Bad judges hurt people, so let's keep them out.

Finally, the Labor Force helps you tell your Senators to re-confirm National Labor Relations Board Chair Lauren McFerran. NLRB terms run five years, not four, and don't run concurrently with Presidential elections, so re-confirming Ms. McFerran to our NLRB will prevent TFG from nominating anyone to our NLRB until late 2026! That's a boon, folks! Just like our recent NLRB ruling declaring "captive meetings" illegal is a boon! You don't need your employer tearing you away from your work just to lie to you about how "bad" unions are. And buying a couple pizzas on Friday doesn't make up for low wages, wage theft, worker safety violations, and worker abuse – but unions can protect us from all of that! And so can our NLRB, if good people serve on it.

Action: concerning vote suppression, jobs, and electioneering.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate Florida's government for intimidating pro-choice voters and Elon Musk's SuperPAC for allegedly bribing people to register to vote, and tell Boeing's CEO to stop laying off workers and invest in them instead. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Civic Shout helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's anti-choice voter suppression tactics, including sending cops to the houses of folks who favor a ballot initiative that could enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution. On what probable cause? I kid, of course – those who know they're about to lose everything will do anything, law and order and morality be damned. America is full of law-and-order type who'll break the law and then say but my case is different! But this is only different in that it's overtly fascist to send cops to scare people into voting differently. So let's make sure he loses that vote – and let’s also hold him accountable for his fascism.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell Boeing's CEO to stop laying off workers and start investing in them instead. Let me guess: the Boeing machinist union strike is causing the layoffs! Because, after all, when you're already down workers, the obvious solution is to lay more off! They're really laying off workers, of course, so they can goose up stock prices and profits and indulge in more stock buybacks, none of which has anything to do with building planes that don't fall out of the sky. Would it be piling on to note that Boeing has gobbled up nearly $150 billion in corporate welfare handouts? No, it would not. Clearly Boeing needs us to help it see the light.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to investigate Elon Musk's SuperPAC for possible illegal electioneering. Apparently he's been paying Trump-leaners to register to vote in swing states, although these benighted folks are really getting a chance at a big payoff if they register; I guess that's how he'll claim it's not really a "payment," but a chance at a pile of money is still a bribe. We outlawed paying people to vote in the first place because the people with the most money can literally buy the outcome they want. Anyway, don't worry about exacerbating Mr. Musk's persecution complex; he'd find a way to do that anyway, and were he still so emotional, he could cry into his $200 billion.

Action: concerning government spying, corporate taxes, and debt limit dramas.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect journalists from government spying, raise corporate taxes, and end all debt limit dramas forever. 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 Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell Sen. Schumer to bring the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (or PRESS) Act up for a vote. The PRESS Act already passed our House; it would forestall Project 2025's efforts to force journalists to disclose sources. Is there nowhere Project 2025 doesn't leave a trail of slime? And the PRESS Act would also protect ISPs and social media outlets; no matter how stupid or sensationalist our media seems to be, they still need protection from government spying, just as we do.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut corporate taxes. But we can also demand that they hike the corporate tax rate to 55%, as it was in the New Deal era, because that high tax rate forced corporations to spend money creating jobs and products. (Expenses aren't taxable profits, after all.) These days we pretend that handing out corporate welfare tax breaks does that, which is like giving kids cookies before they do their homework! If it doesn't work at home, why would it work in our economy?

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Debt Ceiling Reform Act, which would not only end the debt limit "crises" that right-wingers in Congress constantly manufacture, but would protect Social Security and Medicare from such crises. Sadly, we have to do that, because our House Speaker has called Social Security and Medicare "the greatest threat to our national security" (and not right-wing domestic terrorists? Interesting!). But really, enough hostage-taking! Enough drama!

Around the table: green shoots rise above the muck, part 883.

When you hear that growing different crops on the same land not only enriches the soil but repels pests, you should be tempted to say well, no duh! But big ag corporations, anxious to write over our collective memory, insist that pounding the soil with endless rows of single crops is the only "efficient" way to feed people, though the only thing it does "efficiently” is redistribute worker income upward to executives. And while you can't just put any bunch of plants together and get the best results, keeping plants apart is far too good a metaphor for the anti-cooperative framework Our Glorious Elites incessantly push on us.

U.N. buys 3D printer called the Crane WASP to build homes for the nearly-four million unhomed households in Colombia. Inspired by the Mason wasp, which creates nests using mud, the Crane WASP can make a home using mud, clay, cement, and even farming waste; the printer costs $180,000, but can print a home for about $1,000, so maybe it could also fight homelessness in America – except that American right-wingers would yell that surely nobody aspires to live in a little home like that! Of course, right-wingers would just build more McMansions, which does little for our civilization except give bloggers something to laugh at.

Another day, another reminder that AI sucks up so much energy that it causes "stress on local power grids" and "mass water evaporation," that latter item especially problematic, as it may take a year for mass amounts of water used in AI development to return to the planet, whereas the water you use to, say, brush your teeth goes right back into the sewer, and gets cleaned up and used again fairly quickly. Google, naturally, blames its excessive energy use on its suppliers. Remember all of this the next time some organization claims that YOU AREZ TEH OPPRESSURZ!!!! if you oppose AI, because they do that now.

From the Indianapolis Star we learn that not only has school voucher cost gone up almost twentyfold in a little over a dozen years, but now families that are in no way poor get to use them, which should make you suspect anyone who says don't get so upset about vouchers, because they help poor people. Helping people pay for private schools is, of course, nowhere near as good as funding public schools properly, even if it doesn't look as sexy. And when former Indiana Governor/Bush Mobber Mitch Daniels tried to reassure everyone back in 2011 that his voucher program wouldn't be so big, he was fronting – now he's proud of how big his program has become, even though it's just corporate welfare for private schools.

While it's true that Donald Trump should really stop saying on TV that he plans to interfere with the 2024 election if it doesn't go his way, particularly when Special Counsel Smith has just secured another election interference indictment, we would do well to remember that when he refers to "interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it," he's signaling to his votaries that they have "every right" to consider anything they don't have as something someone else stole from them – and that they have "every right" to hurt anyone who "stole" it. Certainly we shouldn't be surprised when folks throw bricks through the windows of neighbors with Harris/Walz signs on their lawn.

Proving, once again, that large amounts of money constitute no impediment to stupidity, Elon Musk endorses a theory supposing that only "high-status males" – and certainly not women or "low T men" – should get to run a Republic that's "only for those who are free to think,” which of course means "free to think exactly like us." Well, it sure is a good thing nobody in the world ever attains "high-status" by committing massive fraud or hurting as many people as possible! I kid, of course. I guess only "low T men" give a shit about anyone or anything other than themselves.

Gannett shuts down its notorious AI-infected bad journalism website, which would be good news if it didn't also mean a lot of actual human beings will lose their jobs. Then again, for today's big corporations, that's killing two birds with one stone – destroy journalism with bullshit machines that don't have families and don't need time off, and then fire all the real workers who do! Gannett's CEO, of course, made $4 million last year; I wonder how much he whines that other media moguls make more.

Finally, former Vice President/Sith Lord Dick Cheney says he will vote for Kamala Harris in November because "there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump” and because Mr. Trump "tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him” and "can never be trusted with power again.” So, two things about that: one, given Mr. Cheney’s role in the 2000 election, one can’t help but wonder if his real problem with Donald Trump is that he’s bad at coup-ing. Two, a lot of Trumpholes make fun of Dick Cheney now, but damn near all of them were war-on-terror voters who called their family, friends, and neighbors “traitors” if they opposed the Iraq War.

Action: concerning paid sick leave and nutrition programs.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact real paid/family medical leave and invest better in food stamps and senior nutritional programs. 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact real paid sick/family leave legislation. What did we learn during the pandemic? That everyone needs access to our internet, for one thing, but also that everyone needs paid sick leave, which only a little more than one in four American workers now have. It should be four in four! It’s four in four in almost every other highly-developed nation on Earth! And it would cost an extraordinarily small amount of money! The Gillibrand bill from previous sessions would have funded it with a very small payroll tax amounting to about $8/month for someone making $50,000 annually, but I’d just as soon tax the rich. (Accidentally typed “tax the reich” there for a moment; how telling.)

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut food stamp benefits so they can increase big ag subsidies. Yes, Congress is really considering doing that – literally stealing from the poor and giving to the rich! Because that’s what farm subsidies have become: welfare for big ag corporations. And it helps make our kids fat! The price of Pepsi has literally not changed, even when adjusting for inflation, in over 40 years; if we subsidized fruits and vegetables the way we subsidize corn, we’d have a lot less childhood obesity, and a lot less diabetes. Thus those who think food stamps are some kind of “moral hazard” would have to concede that handing out corporate welfare to big ag concerns is a far worse moral hazard.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep investing in nutritional programs for seniors like Meals on Wheels. This is yet another program that would spend a little bit of money to do a lot of good, so naturally right-wingers hate it. Clearly they prefer programs that spend a lot of money and only do big corporate executives any good, like the F-35 “fighter” plane. Right-wingers also like saying they’ve got Social Security and Medicare, what more do they want? Two reasons that’s horseshit: one, Social Security and Medicare don’t cover everything, and two, right-wingers are constantly trying to kill the programs they say seniors are lucky to have! So enough with horseshit.

Around the table: enough with the drama and hysteria already! Part 992.

Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge partially blocks our FTC’s ban on non-compete clauses in worker contracts — clauses that prevent workers from getting new and better jobs! — and will probably strike it down not long before it goes into effect at the end of August. Saying our FTC “lacks the power” to make and enforce such a rule seems to me a conveniently narrow view of our FTC’s legal mandate to fight “unfair methods of competition,” and dig the right-wing view of this decision summarized in paragraph 12: “(b)usiness groups and many Republicans say that noncompetes are a crucial tool for businesses to protect trade secrets, confidential information and their investments in recruiting and training workers.” Horseshit! Laws prohibiting the revelation of trade secrets and confidential information protect those things, which right-wingers must know, or else they wouldn’t blunder on to whining about how hard it is to “invest” in and “recruit” and “train” workers. Look, either our corporate overlords are TEH GREATESTZ AMURIKANZ EVAHZ!!!! or they have trouble training and retaining workers; it can’t be both. Of course investing in workers costs money, money executives could use to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Another day, another reminder that right-wingers don’t “fear” a dictator so much as they want one. And that’s what folks do once they give in to masturbatory rage – though of course they deny wanting a dictator, or they say this time is different, as if no one in human history has ever said that before. Anyway, our Supreme Court, with its noxious ruling on Presidential immunity, has essentially declared the American Experiment over. But we will have something to say about that, and not just on Election Day.

Another day, another corporation hoping to gum up debate over its useless products with heart-tugging and ultimately meaningless statistics. This time it’s SoundThinking, which used to be known as ShotSpotter, until a bunch of cities who had invested heavily in its technology found it didn’t spot gunshots very well. Apparently no one’s tracking the data ShotSpotter, er, SoundThinking offers, and actually you can spot the lie, so to speak, in the grammar – “(f)rom 2022 to 2023, more than 380 lives were saved because of this technology,” not this technology saved 380 lives, which is the way folks would phrase it if they were sure of themselves. Again: always suspect the passive voice.

Want another reason to despise Project 2025? The Heritage Foundation’s proposed radical restructuring of our federal government would also steal earned benefits from our soldiers and convert that money into corporate welfare. They’re calling these benefits “extra compensation,” though if you had your leg blown off fighting for our country you’d probably see it a little differently. Project 2025 would also privatize our Veterans Administration, which is the only Medicare-for-All-style health insurance program our government offers. How many times must I tell these pimps! Privatizing always leads to higher costs in the long run! Our government couldn’t possibly do health insurance worse than private corporations do! The heavily-privatized system we’ve got, after all, causes the repossession of soldiers' prosthetic limbs.

In a sign that wielding the Big Stick of PR is working, Donald Trump has “disavowed” Project 2025. I never said the man was dumb – I’ve specifically said that he plays dumb just like every other right-winger does – but I’d be dumb to believe him, and again, you can tell he’s lying just by reading intelligently: “I know nothing about Project 2025,” yet also “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” and yet also “(a)nything they do, I wish them luck.” You don’t wish someone “luck” if they’re “ridiculous and abysmal.” If Donald Trump were King Solomon, he’d not only have cut the baby in half, he’d have enjoyed it.

Finally, I’ve avoided looking at political news this week because I know it’s all hysteria about Joe Biden’s age, but ex-Republican Stuart Stevens at The Atlantic provides exactly the right corrective. Long story short: Joe Biden’s done a good job, so Democrats should “(s)how a little swagger, not timidity” and “seize the day.” At least one Biden campaign ad demonstrates a clue on how to do this, contrasting Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions with Biden accomplishments like raising corporate taxes and lowering prescription drug prices. These could be better accomplishments, but they are accomplishments, and the only path to getting better accomplishments doesn’t run through replacing Joe Biden – or through voting for the fascist whose followers will throw bricks through your windows if you put a “Love Wins” sign on your lawn.

Action: concerning banksters, corporate welfare, and judge-shopping.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect us from financial predators, reject new corporate tax cuts, and end the notorious practice of “judge-shopping.” 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.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to repeal the Biden Administration’s fiduciary responsibility rule. So what’s that about? The Biden Administration enacted a rule requiring financial advisors to look out for their clients’ well-being first. Seems common-sensical, right? But financial advisors are too often financial predators, so our government has to step in and make them do the right thing. Sad, but necessary. So naturally Republicans in Congress want to stop our government from making financial advisors do the right thing! They’ll call it evidence of a “nanny-state,” but it’s not our fault banksters too often act like they need a nanny. So let’s get to stepping.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject new corporate tax breaks Republicans want to enact, while Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to let a specific part of the Trump tax “reform” law expire, that being the “pass-through” loophole. All of the Trump tax cuts were far more for the rich than for you or I, but the “pass-through” loophole – which taxes entities like partnerships, sole proprietorships, S corporations at a rate much lower than income tax rates – also lets rich folks to take massive tax breaks, though of course they sold it as a “small business” tax cut. Like all corporate welfare, we should rocket it to oblivion.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform also helps you tell your Congressfolk to outlaw “judge-shopping,” or the practice of fishing around for a suitable district to file a lawsuit in so you can get the result you want. Now that’s picking winners and losers! We only need consider that stupid anti-mifepristone and misopropol lawsuit our Supreme Court recently struck down 9-0, because the plaintiffs totally went for the far-right Fifth Circuit because they knew they’d get a judge who’d tell them what they wanted to hear. File the lawsuit and get justice where you were actually hurt, that’s what I say. Of course, right-wingers hate that, because then they might lose. Right-wingers sure do need a diaper change if losing bothers them that much.

Action: concerning Social Security, clean air and water, and intravenous fertilization.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security by taxing the rich more, and pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and the Right to IVF Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect and expand Social Security by taxing the rich a lot harder than we’re doing now. Everything your right-wing uncle loves about America – good-paying jobs and benefits for working families, a neighborhood where you didn’t have to lock your doors at night – came about not because “we let big business innovate” but because we taxed the fuck out of the rich in the middle of the 20th century. And your right-wing uncle loves Social Security, too, even if he professes to “hate” socialism – and we could start taxing income over $168,600 into the system and make it pay out more in benefits. So how about we do all of that?

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and thus end tax breaks for oil and gas-producing corporations. Your right-wing uncle hates people on welfare, right? Then why doesn’t he hate big oil and gas corporations that get over $17 billion annually in corporate welfare from the taxpayer (including him!) when the three biggest oil and gas corporations in America made $85 billion in profits in 2023? Surely your right-wing uncle can think of better things to do with $17 billion – like, you know, fund infrastructure projects that create jobs. Your right-wing uncle should call his Congressfolk! But we should also do that.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to IVF Act, which would (as its title suggests!) protect intra-venous fertilization (or IVF) by establishing a statutory right to IVF access and compelling Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance corporations to cover IVF. You kinda have to do both, after all – as we are experiencing far more than we deserve right now, a “right” to health care means very little if you can’t actually afford health care. We’d be a lot better off if Medicare provided all of our health insurance needs; then we could apply pressure to keep costs down a lot more effectively than we can now. But this bill will do some good, so we should pass it.

Action: concerning domestic spending, polluter welfare, and Congressional stock trading.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject arbitrary spending caps on domestic spending, and pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and the ETHICS Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject arbitrary spending caps on domestic spending. Republicans made a deal with President Biden on domestic spending, but now they’re trying to go lower. They must think they’re Darth Vader! I am altering the deal; pray I do not alter it again. Republicans plan to cut Department of Transportation spending by 10% – just as Pete Buttigieg is starting to do his job! – and want to cut Labor, HHS, and Education by similar levels; these departments run programs that actually help good Americans, so let’s put a stop to these shenanigans.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would (as its title suggests!) repeal all sorts of tax breaks that big oil and gas corporations get. Those tax breaks might have made sense once, while these industries were getting started, but they don’t make any sense now that they’re well-established, and they make a lot less sense when you consider that they’ve not only turbocharged climate change but they’ve also lied about it – about both doing it and knowing they were doing it. Have I mentioned I love the use of the world “welfare” in this bill’s title? Turn their words against them, that’s what I say.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the ETHICS Act, which would ban Congressfolk from trading in stocks. Now, to far too many folks addled by four decades of right-wing rule, that will seem laugh-worthy – who’s gonna pass a bill preventing themselves from investing in stocks ha ha ha snort look at me I’m so smart! These folks, despite my ministry and that of others, still do not get that Congressfolk exist to serve the American people, not enrich themselves, and we can’t trust that Congressfolk who legislate about corporate conduct but have investments in corporations would ever put their self-interest aside. We may be optimists, but we’re not fools.

Action: concerning stock buybacks, corporate welfare, wind power, and tax cuts for the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, and the NOW Act, and tell your Congressfolk to let the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax “reform” expire. 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.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would raise the 1% stock buyback tax (enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022) with a 4% tax, which would, I would think, be at least four times as effective in discouraging stock buybacks, which used to be illegal, because they concentrated shareholder power in fewer and fewer hands, but now are as big a blot on our economy as the hedge fund or the monthly stock report. You know it’s always the folks who already have too much money (i.e., executives) who buy back the most stock, but the Stock Buyback Accountability Act would help make shareholders relevant again.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, which would restore the 35% corporate tax rate, close loopholes that allow corporations to move money overseas and outsource our jobs, and end, once and for all, the practice of using a Cayman Islands P.O. Box as a “headquarters.” Every year, too many big corporations pay literally nothing in taxes – or, worse, suck tax money out of our very pockets. That’s money that could pay for cops, libraries, and bridges! But the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act would help us get that money for the public investment we deserve, so we should do it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Nonrestrictive Offshore Wind (or NOW) Act, which would repeal the law (passed, sadly, in the Inflation Reduction Act) mandating that wind power leases can only occur after our government has handed out an offshore oil drilling lease. Hey, it was what Joe Manchin would let happen in 2022! And I’m sure more than a few Americans are still so timid about these “new” renewable energy sources that they don’t mind their development being so closely tied to the further development of “established” energies. But renewables have been around for decades, and really, we don’t need training wheels to use them anymore.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to let the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax “reform” law expire. That would, sadly, not include the corporate tax rate cut from 35% to 21% (which is why we need the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act described above) but it would include the big tax cuts for the top income tax brackets and the pass-through deductions that somehow only benefit the already-too-rich. Don’t expect a second Trump term to do anything but give bosses more unearned goodies; best that we take action now, and at least reveal to our Congressfolk a will they will have to work to ignore.

Action: concerning pollution and collusion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Mining Regulatory Clarity Act and hold hearings about possible collusion between American oil corporations and OPEC. 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 Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, which would let our government hand out public lands to big mining corporations with inadquate consideration for mining corporations polluting our air and water or desecrating sacred Native lands. Such is the “clarity” of desolation, the “clarity” of mammon-worship, the “clarity” of doing injury without taking accountability. And ironically enough, this bill’s supporters have resorted to parliamentary arcanity to keep it moving. I guess only the clarity of the people’s will can stop them, so we should get to it.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to hold public hearings on alleged big oil corporate collusion with OPEC, a heavily-reported matter about which our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has already sued. No one should smile at American oil corporations colluding with a foreign oil consortium that produces a little under 40 percent of the world’s oil and may sit on 80% of the world’s oil reserves – especially with gas prices going up, for no other apparent reason. And again, remember that when right-wingers say our FTC is “out of control,” this is what they mean – that they’re actually working for us for once.

Action: concerning health care and school meals.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban big pharma bribes to doctors and fully fund no-cost public school meals. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban big pharma bribes to doctors. Your doctor ever prescribe something without really explaining why you need it? That might be because big pharma corporations ply doctors with meals and travel and such so they can influence them into prescribing whatever they’re making! Big pharma shouldn’t get between you and your doctor either. But how will doctors know about our products? Big Pharma corporations will say. Gosh, publicize favorable studies in respectable medical journals, maybe? One would hope a billion-dollar corporation could promote its products without actually resorting to immoral behavior.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to help every child in America get no-cost meals at school. You’d think at a public school meals would be free since your taxes already pay for that school, but sadly, you would be wrong, and when school districts shame kids for having “outstanding school lunch debts,” you know we’ve gone seriously wrong as a civilization. Shaming kids for things that aren’t their fault and that they don’t really understand is bad enough! But shaming kids for things we could fix with legislation is evil. So how about we stop funding (for example) corporate welfare and tax cuts for the rich and put more tax money toward school meals instead?

Action: concerning voting rights, taxes, and paid leave.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to Vote Act, expand the Child Tax Credit, and pass the Protected Time Off Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote for the Right to Vote Act, which establishes a “fundamental right to vote in elections for federal office” in law, per Sec. 2(a), and would prohibit any “diminishment” of that right unless it were “the least restrictive means of significantly furthering an important, particularized government interest,” per Sec. 2(b). The Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act still deserve our support, but the Right to Vote Act at least would give us a fighting chance in court every time right-wingers want to suppress votes. And all we ever ask for is a fighting chance.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Senators to expand the Child Tax Credit for working families now, without poison pill amendments. Even our Republican House approved a CTC expansion – one weighed down with corporate welfare, to be sure, but we’ll get no better out of this Congress – and yet some Senators want to pile on even more harmful and unpopular legislative initiatives they could never get passed on their own, so we need to stop that. Is this CTC expansion as good as the 2021 CTC expansion? No. But will it lift half a million children out of poverty? Yes, and that’s worth doing.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protected Time Off Act, which would guarantee two weeks of paid time off for all full-time workers, which they may use for any reason, including caring for themselves or sick family members. Would that be as good as the 13 weeks Sen. Gillibrand’s bill would have offered, or the four weeks off the 2021 Build Back Better Act offered at one point before the Sinemanchin Axis killed it? No, it would not – as Andy Reid might say, we can all count. But would it be better than the zero weeks some 20 million American workers currently have? Yes, it would. So we should take it, and then fight for more later.

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare privatization, and IRS funding.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restore voting rights, prevent Medicare privatization, and fund our IRS. 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 restore voting rights in America, by passing both the Freedom to Vote Act (which would expand early voting and automatic voter registration, among other good works) and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (which would allow our Justice Department to pre-clear voting law changes from any state or locality which establishes a record of vote suppression, not just Southern ones). If Congress passes these bills, more good Americans will be able to vote – which politicians often don’t like, but they don’t get all the say around here.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all efforts to privatize Medicare. Privatized Medicare Advantage has become more and more a yoke around Medicare’s neck over the last few years – or maybe we’re just more aware of it – but we could take all the corporate welfare we’re handing out to private health insurance corporations so they can do a worse job serving seniors than Medicare does, and we could, you know, improve Medicare. I know, I know, insisting that government do things right is so uncool. Call me old-fashioned, then. I’ve been called much worse.

Finally, Demand Progress also helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all attempts to cut IRS funding. Right-wingers love asking aren’t you afraid if our IRS has more money, they’ll come after you? But what a stupid question! When our IRS was underfunded, they were only going after working families, because working families can’t hire lawyers as easily as rich folks and corporations can. Now, with our IRS funded much better thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, rich folks and corporations are starting to feel the heat – and Republicans have made cutting IRS funding their line in the sand! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Republicans only care about tax cuts for the rich.

Action: concerning the Child Tax Credit, medical debt, and IRS funding.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit without handing out more corporate welfare, cancel all medical debt in America, and fully fund our IRS. 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 Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit – but without tacking on the kinds of poison pill legislative riders they love to tack on to popular legislation. Like, you know, corporate welfare, which politicians call “tax breaks” or “tax incentives,” but which are really welfare handouts to the most undeserving “people” of all. And there’s no “you got yours, so I gotta get mine” argument to be made here – our Congressfolk aren’t supposed to “negotiate” with us, they’re supposed to do our will.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to cancel all medical debt in America. Right-wingers can’t even say if you didn’t want the debt, you shouldn’t have spent the money about medical debt! What do they want you to do, stay sick and then die? Wait, the answer to that question may not be rhetorical. But we don’t take on medical debt like we take on credit card debt – these days we too often find ourselves with medical debt because the boundaries of our health insurance networks changed without our knowing. Anyway, Congressfolk are such “Christians,” so how about they act like it for once?

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our IRS. Don’t believe the profoundly offensive horseshit that “now the IRS will go after little people.” Hello! Our IRS has only been going after “little people,” because they can’t afford lawyers like rich people can. Republicans are already bent on defunding our IRS – which you may read as “defunding the police” if you like, since that’s what it is – and they do that only because they do whatever their rich donors tell them to do. But if they hear enough from us, they’ll have a lot more trouble doing what they want to do.

Action: concerning taxes, corporate profits, and judicial ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand our Child Tax Credit, reject corporate welfare, tax big corporate windfall profits, and pass real anti-corruption laws for our Supreme Court. 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 Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit from 2021 in their year-end spending package – and reject any attempts to hand out corporate welfare in that same package. Chances are I don’t have to explain what an extra $250 or $300 check per child, per month would do for a working family. But if you still hesitate when you hear that corporations need “incentives” to create jobs, remember two things: a) high corporate taxes and high taxes on the rich do more for job creation than corporate welfare handouts, and b) corporations don’t drive our economy; you drive our economy. I mean, you buy things, right? So you’re the job creator.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big corporations. Whenever you see high inflation and high corporate profits happen at the exact same time, you know corporations are screwing you over, but you may not be able to prove it in a court of law; our government has been bringing price-fixing lawsuits against corporations, but they tend only to bring the ones they can win, plus they don’t always win. And it should be hard to prove criminal liability, even when fighting corporate power. But nothing prevents us from taxing profits that are larger now than they were in past years. It ain’t about “punishing success,” not when, again, they’re “earning” record profits at the same time we’re suffering from high inflation. Anyone can “succeed” at that!

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Supreme Court ethics bill that actually has some teeth. You know, unlike the ethics guidelines our Supreme Court recently adopted, the guidelines that don’t actually hold our Justices accountable. Gosh, anyone can come up with voluntary guidelines, but it is getting harder, I think, to convince large numbers of people that voluntary guidelines are “the same” as laws with punishments for breaking them. And corruption at our Supreme Court is getting pretty bad – and our Justices know it, or else they wouldn’t even try to convince us they’re working on the problem. But it’s our job to solve problems in America. And it’s Congress’s job to do our will, and our will is that corruption be punished, for real.

Thieves in the Temple will not post for the remainder of the year, and will return in early 2024, so everyone have a safe and happy holiday season!

Action: concerning taxes, AI, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit without poison pills, protect American workers from AI, and pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 that put $250 and $300 checks per child in working families’ bank accounts. You know, I feel like I don’t need to justify that action any further – fewer kids in poverty, more money for strapped working families, what else needs saying? – but it’s December, which means it’s end-of-year budgeting time, which means Congress will try to pass a bunch of noxious crap they’d never get through without it being an “emergency,” so go ahead and tell your Congressfolk to pass a CTC expansion with no poison pills attached! That means no corporate welfare and no more tax cuts for the rich – do the right thing, and nothing else.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect American workers from the spectre of Artificial Intelligence (or AI). We just watched the Hollywood actors’ union fight management’s attempts to replace them with AI-generated doppelgangers, but that won’t just happen to them – it’ll happen to any American worker who has a CEO who twirls his mustache at the prospect of replacing all his workers (and all their “costs”) with mounds of dung, and “any” includes you and you and you and I. Hell, it’s already happened, for real, at call centers all over the world. You ever try to fix a problem and wind up yelling “operator!” into the phone? Then you know what I’m talking about. Our economy needs more people in it, and fewer “big,” “bold” “entrepreneurs” who live to kill our jobs.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act, which would extend the benefit Medicare recipients get – namely, their insulin costs capped at $35/month – to all Americans. What a shame that we have to stop big pharma corporations from charging literally an arm and a leg for insulin, and what a shame we have idiots like Herschel Walker telling us that if we just eat right we won’t have to use insulin, which will definitely not impress anyone born with diabetes (or those who are rationing their insulin while keeping spreadsheets about their calorie intake). And if anyone starts ranting about “price controls,” you have a number of good rebuttals. Like you say “price controls” like it’s a bad thing. Or 1973 called; it wants its right-wing talking points back.

Action: concerning government shutdown dramas.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean government-funding bill without drama, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion without using it to keep handing out corporate welfare, and reject any attempt to slash IRS funding. 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.

It’s government shutdown week again, so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject cuts to programs good Americans actually need and fund our government without hysteria or drama. This is typical right-wing garbage: wail about TEH DEFICITZ!!!!! and then punch working families in the face while leaving cutting corporate welfare intact. But any one of us, at any time, might need food stamps or Head Start or, you know, affordable housing that doesn’t have lead paint in it – yes, this is what our Best and Brightest Leaders Ever have proposed to do! But cut tax breaks for corporations that outsource our jobs overseas? Republicans would never! And that’s why we fight them 24-7.

It gets worse! The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021, the one that put $250 or $300 checks per child every month in working families’ bank accounts – but Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk not to extend corporate welfare handouts. Rumor has it Republicans might support the former to get the latter, but we don’t have to have both to get one done! There’s negotiation, and then there’s hostage-taking; holding CTC expansion to corporate welfare is hostage-taking, and the parties can talk about their numbers in our House and Senate all they want, but they’re supposed to negotiate with us, not each other. No law on Earth compels us to accept a side dish of shit with our steak.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any Republican attempt to slash IRS funding. Don’t believe any BS that added IRS funding “gives them the ability to come after little people,” because hello! Our IRS was so underfunded they could only go after us “little people,” because we can’t hire million-dollar lawyers to get us off the way rich folks and corporations can! Strange that Republicans have stopped saying even that; it’s like they looked at the 2022 election results and found out that it didn’t get them enough votes! Most of us Americans, once we clear out all the distractions Our Glorious Elites force down our throats, understand that taxes pay for things we all use and rich people and corporations need to pay a lot more in taxes than working families do.

Readings for November 7, 2023.

Ho hum, Factcheck.org finds that the Republican Israel-funding bill doesn’t actually offset its cost with budget cuts as advertised. You already know the reason: cutting the increase in IRS funding actually results in considerably less revenue coming in and therefore larger deficits. Whatever happened to spending money to make money? Indeed, our Congressional Budget Office says the bill would actually increase the deficit by about twice as big as the bill’s size. Still, Republicans have a total hard-on for protecting rich folks from getting audited: I wonder why. And dig Mike Johnson’s rhetorical hostage-taking: “I think if you put this to the American people and they weigh the two needs, I think they’re going to say standing with Israel and protecting the innocent over there is in our national interest and is a more immediate need than IRS agents.” What would the people say if he’d made them choose between Israel and corporate welfare handouts? Of course we’ll never know, because he’ll never ask, because he’s evil.

David Swanson claims that our military has trained over 30% of all mass shooters in America, and though finding a military background for 40 of 127 mass shooters doesn’t complete the picture, I’m inclined to agree – it’s a lot easier to kill a lot of people when you’ve been trained to kill a lot of people, after all. Also, our “liberal” media don’t face this problem any better than they face police brutality: “statistically, virtually all veterans are not mass shooters. But that can hardly be the reason for not a single news article ever mentioning that mass shooters are very disproportionately likely to be veterans. After all, statistically, virtually all males, mentally ill people, domestic abusers, Nazi-sympathizers, loners, and gun-purchasers are also not mass-shooters. Yet articles on those topics proliferate like NRA campaign bribes.” We’d respond to this news, I would hope, by maybe not getting into so many Iraq-type wars in the future, since those wars send so many shells of people home.

Economist Hal Singer, who says he supports the Biden Administration’s “economic policies generally,” still explains the many ways it’s failed working families. Chiefly, he reminds us that higher Fed interest rates mean higher credit card interest rates (21 percent, up from 16 about a year and a half ago), higher student loan interest rates (almost six percent, about double what it was three years ago), and higher mortgages (almost eight percent now, when three percent loans were plentiful as late as 2020). What could Mr. Biden have done instead? Use the “bully pulpit” to shame corporate “greedflation” practitioners, or impose price controls, or have our government manufacture products like insulin, or go after price-gougers more aggressively (and appoint judges who don’t have their head up their ass about such things, I could add). So, a lot of wasted opportunity, there. It’s just Joe Biden’s dumb luck (and ours!) that our Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and Republicans can’t govern their way out of a paper bag.

Action: concerning medical debt, junk fees, and facial recognition.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to make it easier to escape medical debt, tell our government to break up the Ticketmaster monopoly and end the abusive practice of assessing “junk fees,” and tell states to ban facial recognition software from our schools. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you tell your state Senator to pass legislation helping good Pennsylvanians escape medical debt more easily. Don’t fall for any ball-swinging about how if you didn’t want the crushing debt, you should’ve done things differently, because thanks to banksters and big health insurance corporations anyone can take on medical debt at any time, no matter how many miles they run or how much fiber they eat, and it’s not like you ever have the “option” to just get sicker because you never know which medical practitioner is suddenly not in your network anymore. Our PA House already passed this legislation; now our Senate must act.

MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break up the Ticketmaster monopoly and end their notorious practice of assessing “junk fees.” You know what a junk fee is just by looking at the last ticket you bought and see all the “convenience fees” and “ticket fees” and “delivery fees” and “order fees” and “fuck you we do what we want fees” (did I make that last one up? It sure doesn’t seem like it) that balloon the price of your ticket far beyond what they said it’d cost. And Ticketmaster can get away with that because they basically control the entire ticket market these days. Monopolies only benefit already overpaid corpulent executives; regular folks like us deserve better.

Fight for the Future helps you tell states to ban facial recognition software in our schools. Where does one start with this absurdly shitty idea? With the software’s apparent inability to tell Black folks apart any better than your right-wing uncle does? With all the data this software collects about students that can be monetized and used against them? With the corporate welfare inherent in handing out taxpayer money to private corporations to create bad software? With administrators abandoning any pretense that they’ll simply walk around the school and find out where folks are and what they’re doing? I really don’t know where to start with this one. I know where to end, though: by telling states to kill it dead.

Readings for September 25, 2023.

We’ve heard enough about how subsidized economic development too frequently turns into corporate welfare for the undeserving rich, but is anyone doing it well? Good Jobs First finds two-count-’em-two American cities who are – Wichita, Kansas, and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Wichita’s Industrial Revenue Bond program is as transparent as they come, meaning that folks can learn whether corporations keep their wage and job promises when they take taxpayer money, while Grand Rapids spends a mere $14,000 per job, versus over $100,000 per job in nearby Lansing, and attracts over $30 in private investment per subsidized dollar. Hey, it’s only two examples, but it’s a beginning. Warning: the Wichita deep take link doesn’t work at this writing.

Sonali Kohatkar explains how the long-standing cooperative arrangement between Kaiser Permanente and its unions is about to fall apart, with the unions voting to strike at the end of this month. Long story short: Kaiser Permanente now acts more like a big corporate health care provider than the Medicare-for-All provider it occasionally seemed to be like, and the COVID pandemic put a strain on all hospital workers, to the point where they’re most definitely not content with half-measures. Will Kaiser Permanente come to its senses in the next few days? Probably not. Will its many satisfied customers ever be so satisfied again if they don’t? Certainly not. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere, admittedly a lesson few corporations know anymore, though all of them used to know it, or they’d face oblivion.

ProPublica reports that Massachusetts has several thousand subsidized apartments vacant despite having a 180,000-plus waitlist for folks who need housing. I’m going to say the big problems are that the state doesn’t tax the rich enough to fund programs like these, and (in a surely related note) they don’t hire enough people to vet applicants and fix apartments. I’m not sure centralizing applications state-wide (versus applying locally) is the root of all problems like some say, but the state should either develop a system that reaps the benefits of both (centralization reduces favoritism, while local authorities know their potential tenants better) or concede that favoritism simply isn’t as bad a problem as, you know, people with cancer living out in the street. If I can identify these problems, I’m sure they can, and they can almost certainly solve them better than I can, too.

Around the table: haters gonna hate, part 822.

Scientists give $7,500 to homeless folks, and find that they don’t blow it on alcohol, drugs, or other “temptation goods,” but do a lot more long-term planning, and not only hold onto jobs and housing better, but actually cost the taxpayer less. Caveats: the study didn’t hand money out to folks with substance abuse or mental health issues or to folks who’ve been homeless more than two years. Still, it suggests that a lot of notions we cling to – that folks just blow the money you hand out to them, that homeless folks can’t plan, that dealing with homelessness like it’s a constant emergency saves us money -- are really dumb. I presume I'll be making this point again, though, since I've made it before.

In a peripherally-related note, let us remember, as we contemplate the child poverty rate more than doubling in the year after the Child Tax Credit expansion expired, that this wasn’t just Joe Manchin’s doing, even though his utterance that those people are just using those $250 and $300 checks every month per child to buy drugs will justifiably live in infamy. No, we must remember, also, that 50 Republican Senators didn't lift a finger to prevent it from happening. Our “liberal” media always forgets the cruelty of Republicans, but we don’t.

These are the days we confront a headline like “School District Asks to Stop Being ‘Robbed’” and we leap to ask how exactly was this school district robbed this time. It’s the Riverhead Central School District in Long Island, NY, and the local Industrial Development Agency – which some center-right state legislature long ago gave the right to divert property tax money away from schools, how democratic of them! – has “robbed” the district of some $15 million over the last decade. On behalf of rich developers, I should add. So, you know, corporate welfare.

In a peripherally-related note, right-wingers in Florida get a book called Christian, the Hugging Lion banned because of the two male characters in it. First right-wingers said gay relationships were always entirely about sex even when the gay couple in question didn’t get sexual in front of anyone, and now they think any same-sex relationship, even a friendship, must be sexual. It’s like you can’t win with them! So don’t play their stupid games. Book banners are always losers! Even if they’re also the neighbors who lent you their leaf blower last year!

No a Republican House Rep is not “calling out” Sen. Tuberville for his several hundred holds on military promotions. I mean, if “I really wish he would reconsider this” is “calling out,” then the phrase “calling out” is virtually meaningless. But then I never liked that phrase anyway, so maybe Rep. McCaul is actually doing us a favor by hastening its journey to the dungheap of history! That’s a small favor, to be sure, and slamming Tommy Tuberville for being a bastard/moron would be a much bigger one.

Finally, Republican Presidential nominee-in-waiting Vivek Ramaswamy wants to “diversify” colleges by adding a physical fitness component to SAT tests, saying “it’s a fact” that people who do well on math/science tests can hardly run a mile, when it is actually not a fact. I guess he was trying to say Black and Brown people can all run faster without actually coming out and saying it! But remember: if someone says “it’s a fact,” they’ve already given you good reason to believe it’s not a fact. Facts speak for themselves, but lies all too frequently announce themselves as “facts.”

Action: concerning regulations, food stamps, and defense spending.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the REINS Act and pass the RESTORE Act and the People Over Pentagon Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the REINS Act. Is the REINS Act really back, yet again? Yes, it is – the return of the REINS Act when Republicans control at least one House of Congress is now as predictable as water being wet, bears pooping in the woods, or the Pope being Catholic. The REINS Act would give Congress the right to examine Executive branch regulations again, even though Congressional laws already authorize our Executive branch to issue regulations, meaning Republicans actually want more bureaucracy. And you know as well as I do that they mean to go after anti-pollution regulations and anti-financial predator regulations, so let’s not give them more tools to create drama and chaos.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RESTORE Act, which would stop the cruel practice of banning people with felony drug convictions from our food stamp program for life. Yes, for life – because, as we know, no one ever rehabilitates themselves, nor do we put too many people in jail for drugs! Seriously, politicians who want to prove they’re “tough on crime” and “tough on Those People who use food stamps” push bans like this, but that’s exactly the kind of “toughness” that poisons a civilization. If we let people who stoke rage run our civilization, it won’t be very long before we don’t have a civilization, and passing the RESTORE Act would help us avoid that tragedy.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the People Over Pentagon Act. No doubt someone will retort that what good is putting people first if we can’t protect them ha ha ha snort? Of course, that supposes that we can only protect Americans if we spend so much money on defense – and that all the money we spend on defense actually protects us! We pissed away trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the money we could spend teaching children to think or ensuring everyone has health care would protect our civilization a lot better than all the corporate welfare for defense contracting corporations ever could. And it’s well past time we got that right.

Action: concerning taxes, drug policy, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, pass the RESTORE Act, and pass Medicare for All legislation. 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.

Tired of this debt limit drama already? Then let Americans for Tax Fairness help you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations if they insist on having this drama. Our media love to pretend that Republicans taking power just means an automatic debt limit crisis like that isn’t evil, and our media also love to pretend the only two choices we have are default or let Kevin McCarthy’s Band of Horribles cut all kinds of services that people need and none of the corporate welfare their rich donors eat up like Halloween candy. But those aren’t our only choices. They will be, however, if we don’t get in our Congressfolks’ grills about this drama.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RESTORE Act, which would repeal the ban on food stamps for folks with drug convictions. When are we going to get tired of swinging our balls about crime? When is the punishment given by a judge going to be punishment enough? We heap punishment upon punishment upon criminals when every additional punishment we heap upon them makes it less likely we’ll be able to rehabilitate them into functioning members of society – and more likely they’ll go back to prison. Rehabilitation is the duty of a civilized people, but endless, unquenchable revenge hollows out our souls and makes us uncivilized.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All legislation. Most Americans like the idea of expanding Medicare to include everyone, until some fool tells them ZOMG THEYZ WILLZ RAISEZ TEH TAXUZ!!!! But you don’t need to raise taxes on good Americans to pay for Medicare for All – you need only institute an employer-side payroll tax (that means only the employer, not the employee, pays it) which would capture all the money corporations are already paying on overly-expensive private health insurance. So, you’ll pay nothing extra, and your boss won’t pay any more, and we'll be able to cover everyone – what’s not to like?

Action: concerning taxes and debt-limit drama.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and stop cutting services for working families and tax all rich folks’ income the way we tax working families’ income, and tell House Republicans to keep their grubby mitts off our earned benefits in Medicare and Social Security. 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 is Tax Day, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on corporations and the rich and stop cutting services for working families. I’m old enough to remember when the top tax rate was 70%; now it’s 37%. Yet Congress still hands out corporate welfare “research and development” tax breaks when we already don’t tax research and development, because they’re expenses. And what drives most of our ballooning deficits? Tax cuts for the rich, that’s what – to the tune of $10 trillion in debt from the Bush and Trump tax cuts alone. So today’s a good day to get in their grills. So’s any day, really, but especially today.

In a related note, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to “tax their money like your work,” meaning tax the rich’s wealth as hard as they tax our work. We just discussed how low income taxes have gotten for the rich, but it’s even worse than that: rich folks make more money than any of us do from dividends and capital gains, which, guess what, have an even lower tax rate. Plus the Estate tax gets more lenient all the time, so that now rich folks can exempt the first $12.9 million from taxes! I think $1 million is more than enough to pass on; any more would deprive heirs of vital character-building opportunities, and we’re all about opportunity here in America.

Finally, Courage for American helps you tell House Republicans to “back off our benefits,” namely Social Security and Medicare benefits. Speaker McCarthy’s said they’re “off the table,” but if five members of his caucus decide they’re not, then he suddenly doesn’t have the votes for a debt-limit resolution, so we can safely ignore that "promise." He’s been putting together a debt-limit resolution lately; who knows if it’ll pass? I feel secure in saying it doesn’t matter if it passes; it only matters that he puts forth a resolution that doesn’t make Republicans look like complete ogres. But let’s forestall all this drama by getting in their grills about this now.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, endless war, internet privacy, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject yet more corporate welfare handouts, repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, do something useful about internet privacy instead of banning TikTok, and reject any effort to defund Medicaid or CHIP. 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.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 866, which would, in its words, “enhance tax benefits for research activities,” and you know what that means: more corporate welfare handouts. “Research activities” are, by definition, expenses, which make them exempt from corporate taxes (since we only tax corporate profits!); why should corporations get to essentially deduct expenses twice? Oh, right – because all they care about is jacking up their stock prices, never mind the quality of their products or services, and they need an “incentive” to do the right thing. Actually they need laws that make them do the right thing, not handouts.

M Power helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious 2002 authorization to use military force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Didn’t we get out of Iraq, after all? Yes, we did, more or less, but all of our post-Bush Presidents have used the 2002 AUMF to justify all manner of appalling extralegal military intervention, and you may remember that the Iraq War didn’t go so well. Not just because it spilled American blood and squandered American treasure and killed hundreds of thousands of “liberated” Iraqis, but because the subsequent American occupation helped create ISIS, the terror organization that makes al-Qaeda look like a bunch of bureaucrats. So let’s have no more of that.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop posturing about banning TikTok and pass some internet privacy laws with teeth instead. Because there’s nothing uniquely awful about TikTok except its privacy issues, and if you fix the privacy issues, you don’t need to ban TikTok. Personal to the Republicans grandstanding about privacy now: y’all voted to repeal pretty good FCC internet privacy rules in 2017, and that makes you a hypocrite now. Maybe hypocrisy doesn’t matter to Republicans, but that fact doesn’t make me the weakling! Strong people hold to their values even when it’s inconvenient; they certainly don’t forget them for corporate money or whiners’ approval.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislation that would defund Medicaid or CHIP. Remember that time the New York Times found that Trump supporters actually liked Medicaid (but hated all the “those people” they thought were on it)? Maybe we had a chance to bond there, but never mind reaching out to masturbatory rage addicts – defunding Medicaid or CHIP is the wrong thing to do, both morally and fiscally. No deficit peacock ever struts around about defense spending even though you’ll find a crap-ton of waste and fraud there. So how about we stop making regular Americans pay for politicians’ mistakes?

Action: concerning junk fees, immigration, and taxes.

Long story short: tell our CFPB to end credit card junk fees, tell President Biden to abandon the Trump-era asylum ban, tell our IRS to actually crack down on rich tax evaders, and tell our government to make tax filing free. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to outlaw credit card junk fees. Your credit card corporations doesn’t need to charge you $35 and $50 and $100 late fees when $8 will actually cover their costs! They only need to cover their costs! They don’t need to profit from your misfortune! Profiting from your misfortune is evil! Let me know if I’m not being absolutely clear here. And make no mistake, the banksters will still make money if we cap their credit card fees – it just won’t be as easy for them to make enough money to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, that’s all. And that’s not a hardship for a healthy civilization.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to scuttle his plans to revive the Trump-era asylum ban. This supposedly “conservative” notion – that we should default on the side of assuming that potential asylees don’t have a case, or that we should require them to seek asylum in a neighboring country, never mind how dangerous that country is! – actually increases immigration-related bureaucracy, as I’m sure Donald Trump intended. Naturally the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Trump ban; maybe Mr. Biden thinks our Supreme Court will overrule them. Better to evaluate asylum claims carefully, like civilized people would.

Daily Kos also helps you tell our IRS to actually crack down on wealthy tax-evaders, as intended by the Inflation Reduction Act. We need our IRS to prove that it can actually work the way we intended it to work. Anyone can screw up and then claim TEH GUBMINTZ DOESN’TZ WORKZ!!!!! – right, George W. Bush? – but getting our IRS to catch a couple of rich tax cheats will help defeat the right-wing zombie lie that more IRS funding means more poor people get harassed. If you’ve been awake these last few years, you know our IRS was so under-funded it could only go after the poor! That's why we must make our IRS do the right thing.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Daily Kos also helps you tell our government that tax preparation should be easy and free, and not corporate welfare for big tax-prep corporations. Think about it: your employer has already given our IRS all the info it needs to fill out a tax form, and you very likely don’t invest in the kind of convoluted schemes designed to evade our laws, so why do you need to get someone to help you fill out your taxes? Because our IRS made a deal with corporations that they wouldn’t create a free tax-filing option if those corporations did – and then they made those free options almost impossible for you to find! And we deserve better than that.

Readings for February 8, 2023.

Thank God for the good folks at Popular Information, who remind us that we should ignore anything we hear from the Koch network about their intention to “break with Donald Trump.” “What is not mentioned in any of these stories (about the Koch break) is that, for years, (Charles) Koch has repeatedly announced he was reorienting his political strategy away from far-right Republicans, including Trump – with no discernible change in his actual political activity. After each media-assisted rebrand, Koch quietly resumed business as usual. The reality is that few individuals have spent more money to legitimize Trump and his allies than Charles Koch.” Plus there's data! When I first heard about the "break," I believe my initial reaction was (checking my notes) “drama drama drama drama drama drama drama drama drama,” since that’s how we should regard any disagreement among Republicans, but it’s always nice to have data behind it.

Neall Pogue at The Conversation describes “How evangelicals moved from supporting environmental stewardship to climate skepticism.” I suspect they were sincere, but I also suspect that evangelicals of the ‘60s and ‘70s used environmentalism to do battle against (then-) infrastructure-obsessed liberals, but this view persisted into the ‘90s; Mr. Pogue doesn’t say so, but I also presume that Republicans catered to the religious right’s racial and sexual prejudices to the point where they could sway them on environmental issues, too. Thus Jerry Falwell started calling us “tree-huggers” in 1992, and I was thinking I can’t be too mad, resorting to ridicule as often as I do. But of course there’s no good reason to hate “tree-huggers” more than, say, the corporate welfare queens who are Republicans’ real constituency. And if tree-huggers make you feel guilty, just remember that folks who don’t have work or food also don’t have the luxury of guilt.

ProPublica tells us the story of the man whose health insurance corporation wouldn’t cover his ulcerative collitis – and his struggle to expose that corporation’s inner workings. Trigger warning: by the end of this article, you might think that Victoria Kavanaugh, Dave Opperman, Vikas Pabby, and Nady Cates are four of the worst human beings who ever lived, though if they lived in a universe that actually rewarded good works and not just love of money, they’d be much better versions of themselves than they seem to be here. You may also feel more than a little disgust at how right-wing news outlets can trumpet their “Universal Health Care Horror Stories” with impunity while stories like Christopher McNaughton’s story – or, for that matter, Nataline Sarkysian’s – don’t seem to impress our “liberal” media the way they used to. You can safely blame that on love of money, too.

Action: concerning Medicare privatization, corporate taxes, and price gouging.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get private corporations out of Medicare and close corporate tax loopholes, and tell our FTC to investigate the egg industry for price-gouging. 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 your Congressfolk to get private insurance corporations out of Medicare. Tha Bush Mobb opened the door to private corporations taking taxpayer money to deliver worse service than our government – and thus “prove” the right-wing canard that TEH BIG GUBMINTZ DOESN’TZ WORKZ!!!! – and even under President Biden that door’s opened wider, even though higher costs and worse service accompany every privatization scheme. And instead of worrying that your granddad won’t get dental and hearing care, ask yourself why every Medicare recipient doesn’t get dental and hearing care. (Spoiler alert: Kyrsten Sinema wouldn’t allow it in 2021, because bipartisanship!)

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to close corporate tax loopholes. Of course, another way to describe corporate tax loopholes is corporate welfare, since corporations are getting public money for doing not a damn thing. Or for doing what they were going to do anyway! Seriously, corporations need an “incentive” to spend money developing products? What the hell else do they have to do? Yes, I know, corporations have spent the last 40 years doing nothing but whatever raises their stock prices, and some of President Biden’s policies have started to break that nefarious trend. But we still need to tell our Congressfolk that corporate welfare is evil and that they need to fight it.

Finally, Demand Progress also helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to investigate egg-producing corporations for price-gouging. Yes, anywhere you see price spikes like the one you’ve seen for eggs, your first suspicion should be fraud, and here just as elsewhere, the offending corporations are raising prices and garnering record profits. It’s a shame it’s come to that, but I think it’s pretty obvious by now that big corporations are trying to steal all the money they can before President Biden’s FTC, SEC, and DOJ start winning too many antitrust cases. So we the people are not exactly at a disadvantage here – and we need to press our advantages wherever we can.

Action: concerning violence against protestors, real tax cuts, and insurrectionists.

Long story short: tell the Iranian government not to execute Amir Nasr-Azadani over that nation’s head-covering protests, tell your Congressfolk to put kids over corporations in their year-end budget-making, and tell your Congressfolk to expel Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for her anti-American comments about the January 6 attempted coup. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Change.org helps you tell the Iranian government not to execute pro footballer Amir Nasr-Azadani for alleged involvement in the killing of three “morality” “police” members during the Iranian protests over the death of Mahsa Amini. They’re not saying whether he plotted or he pulled the trigger, but they have charged him with, get this, “waging war against God,” which “crime” carries a death sentence. Well, that sure would be the easiest way of killing the folks who protested the Iranian government’s insane preoccupation with forcing women to wear head-coverings, as Mr. Nasr-Azadani did! Again, only snowflake governments charge people with “waging war against God.”

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk, once again, to “put kids over corporations” in making year-end appropriations bills. That means, of course, bringing back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 and not handing out all kinds of corporate welfare goodies to their big donors – the CTC expansion actually helped kids stay out of poverty, while the corporate welfare handouts just funnel taxpayer money (that is, your money!) to some politician’s cronies. And enough about research and development tax breaks. R&D is an expense, so it already doesn’t get taxed; how much hand-holding do corporations need?

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to expel Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA). I know, she says she was joking when she told the New York Young Republican Club earlier this month that “(i)f Steve Bannon and I had organized (the January 6 attempted coup), we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed,” but I was joking get over yourself is what all assholes whine when we catch them being assholes. Not to mention nothing she said was actually funny, except to folks who’ve made their cynicism into an idol. Not to mention that telling folks you’d have overthrown the government over WAAAAAAAAH!!!!! is stupid and evil.

Action: concerning taxes, Medicare, and the war on Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to cut taxes for working families, stop handing out welfare to corporations, get rid of privatized Medicare programs, 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.

First things first: Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all tax cuts for corporations in year-end legislation. This ain’t that damn deep: working families need the extra $250 or $300 per month per child to make ends meet, and corporations don’t need any more welfare handouts from the taxpayer so they can pretend to create jobs while just enabling their executives to buy back stock. Which used to be illegal! Because it concentrated corporate decision-making power in the hands of the few! It’s a shame Congress doesn’t understand these things anymore – which is why we have to make them understand.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to get rid of private insurers within Medicare. Yes, I’m speaking of the so-called “Medicare Advantage” program, which has opened the door to private corporations for two decades now. I’m sure you’ve read the reports of Medicare Advantage overbilling and fraud; right-wingers used to say the private sector can do things more efficiently and cheaply, but Medicare Advantage clearly hasn’t done that with our tax dollars. Don’t be swayed by your friends and neighbors telling you that they know someone with Medicare Advantage and it’s really helped them. Medicare would have helped them the same, only for less money and with less fraud.

Finally, the Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution ending our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Which has been going on for over a dozen years now, which hasn’t accomplished the Saudis’ supposed “aim” of a “stable” government, which has pushed millions of good Yemeni to the brink of famine, and which has mainly targeted the same Houthi rebels who are also some of the world’s best fighters of al-Qaeda. Really, no one in their right mind would set out to do any of this! And I hate to pile on, but our Constitution gives Congress, not our President, the power to decide when and where to go to war. So Congress needs to stand up, just like we stand up.

Action: concerning monopolies, corporate welfare, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, tell the Argentinian government to end fossil fuel subsidies, and tell President Biden to get rid of USPS Postmaster Louis DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger. You don’t have to believe that no corporation should be able to own any other corporation (as I do!) to see why the Kroger/Albertsons merger is such a bad idea – like all other mergers, it means killed jobs, higher prices, fewer choices, and more worker income redistributed upward to corporate executives. In this particular case, it also means a $4 billion payout to hedge fund banksters as they bleed Albertsons dry, and what did they do to deserve that? You already know the answer: nothing.

350.org helps you tell the Argentinian government to end all fossil fuel subsidies. What, Argentinians deserve freedom from corruption less than we do? People are people, after all. And the Argentinian government has become notorious for funneling taxpayer money to crony fossil fuel corporations, to the tune of over $3.5 billion just between 2016 and 2018, just to corporations operating in the Vaca Muerta area of western Argentina. Again, Argentinians deserve the freedom that clean water affords anyone who has access to it – mainly, freedom from illness – and they also deserve a government that spends their money on them, not on corporate welfare. So let’s help them get that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to finish the job of getting rid of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. You know the main story by now – Mr. DeJoy, another in a long line of talentless CEOs our economy belches out like it’s just had a bowl of beans, has slashed jobs, cut services, and raised prices, which ain’t good for all the Americans who rely on our Postal Service for life-saving medications. But the side stories – his efforts to hijack voting by mail and block electric mail trucks, and his investment in the corporation that just so happened to provide the free COVID tests our Postal Service sent out – also testify to his evil.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, tribal lands, and marriage equality.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop handing out corporate welfare and pass the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act and the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act, and tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop handing out corporate welfare to big corporate donors like they do every year. We just had a midterm election that was, ah, not as big a win for Republicans as they’d hoped; once they formally organize to lead our House again, they’ll propose all kinds of stupid corporate tax cuts for their big donors, so we need to communicate our will to our Congressfolk, again. Like I said, they do this every year, at the end, when we’re all preoccupied with the holidays, but there’s another reason to deny them this year: corporate profits are driving at least half of the worst-in-40-years inflation we’re suffering. Make sure to tell them that.

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8108/S. 4421, the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act, and H.R. 8109/S. 4423, the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act. The former bill would prohibit sale of any public land where a native American nation has treaty or other reserved rights, while the latter would establish a federal system protecting sites of cultural significance to native Americans. That all sounds pretty common-sensical to me; the only people who’d hate it are the big corporate executives who want to turn everything into a mine or a mall. And we’ve already taken enough away from native Americans.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which somehow still hasn’t passed our Senate, despite getting 47 Republican yea votes in our House back in July. And sadly the other side’s arguments against it are profoundly disappointing – they won’t say they just don’t want gay and interracial couples to marriage, so they can’t land a punch! One announced that “This Depraved Law Would Allow Pedophiles to Marry Children,” as if there's literally no such thing as consent, as if our laws don’t already prohibit adult-child marriages. So let’s not let bigots have all the say about everything.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, health care, and homelessness.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to cut corporate taxes, to sustain expanded Medicaid and CHIP coverage, and pass the Ending Homelessness Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut corporate taxes during the upcoming lame duck session. Corporations are making record profits, said profits being responsible for half our current inflation, so why give them more handouts? We know cutting corporate taxes is unpopular, not just because Republicans cut them dramatically in 2017 and lost the House the next year, but also because our Congressfolk always leave corporate welfare giveaways until the end of the year, when they hope everyone’s tired and not watching anymore. Well, we’re watching, and fatigue doesn’t keep us from our duty, so let’s give them what-for.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect expanded Medicaid and CHIP coverage in end-of-year legislation. You know, instead of their aforementioned habit of handing out corporate welfare! You’d think our Congressfolk wouldn’t dare cut children’s health insurance – the first three letters of CHIP do stand for “children’s health insurance,” after all – but then Congress totally let the CHIP program lapse in 2017 because they were working too hard on tax cuts for rich folks and not hard enough for, you know, our children. So, yeah, we need to remind them to work for working families.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4496, the Ending Homelessness Act. Rents are shooting through the roof and folks are behind on their rent thanks to pandemic job losses, so yeah, we’d be cruel not to give working families more help affording a place to live. The bill also prevents our government from using criminal history to deny housing assistance – gosh, do we believe in rehabilitating people or not? – and would also prohibit housing discrimination because of a renter’s veteran status. Hey, it ain’t our soldiers’ fault we make them fight stupid wars, so let’s not injure them coming and going.

Action: concerning drug prices, marriage equality, and affordable housing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans, tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, and tell your Congressfolk to expand affordable housing in year-end spending bills. 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans. The Inflation Reduction Act caps insulin prices for Medicare patients, since that was all they could get through reconciliation; Democrats did try to get 60 votes for legislation capping insulin prices for everyone, but 43 Republican Senators opposed, so that legislation failed. Are Democrats running ads excoriating them for their vote on the insulin cap, particularly since they all also voted against the insulin cap for Medicare patients? If they are, they’re being quiet about it, which defeats the purpose of advertising. So we’ll do it for them, then.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which would codify gay marriage and interracial marriage rights into our laws, preventing our Supreme Court from obliterating them, as they did with abortion rights in the Dobbs decision. Word on the street is that Democrats almost-but-not-quite got 60 votes for the bill or for some version thereof, but decided to wait until after the midterms, when they figured the voters might have delivered more Senators to the Democrats. But who cares what they want? They’re supposed to do what we want – to protect rights for which we’ve fought.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand affordable housing funding in their year-end spending bills. Because that sure would be a better way of spending money than handing out yet more corporate welfare in the form of “tax extenders”! Eviction moratoria are long gone, too many Americans are way behind on their rent, and rich folks are still buying up too much of our housing just so they can show “assets” and get cheap loans from banks. That last era is about to end, thanks to our Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, but good Americans still need – and deserve! – affordable housing, and where the “free” market won’t deliver, our government must.

Action: concerning taxes, refugees, and insulin.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning our media, Social Security, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, fully-fund our Social Security Administration, and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. 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.

Remember that time I told you to tell your Congressfolk to reject the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act? Well, Matt Stoller has convinced me I was wrong, so feel free to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass it. I said the bill would have “link taxes” in it, and while such a thing could happen, it hasn’t happened in Australia, where a similar bill passed and has revitalized the journalism industry there. The bill would basically allow newspapers to collectively bargain for better ad rates with Google and Facebook; newspapers can’t do that now because it would run afoul of antitrust law, but farmers get this exemption under certain circumstances, and newspapers should, too.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to fulfill President Biden’s request for additional Social Security Administration funding. We’re finally starting to fund our IRS so we can go after rich tax cheats, and Republicans are telling lies about it – the IRS is coming for you, working person, as though that wasn’t all they were already doing! What will Republicans say about funding our Social Security Administration so it can reopen offices and extend hours? I mean, Rick Scott already said any cut to Medicare spending equals a cut to benefits, so the opposite must also apply, right? I kid, of course – they’ll say whatever. But our seniors deserve more help.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel corporations. Joe Manchin made sure the Inflation Reduction Act had some of those, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still tell our Congressfolk that we don’t want to spend any more taxpayer money (i.e., our hard-earned money) on dying industries that pump filth into our air and water. But, as the Inflation Reduction Act also does, we need to subsidize emerging renewable energies more than we subsidize oil, gas, or coal. And the only folks who don’t see that are the folks who make all their money from oil, gas, and coal – and the Congressfolk they buy, of course.

Action: concerning Social Security, crypto, and the war on Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, stop treating the crypto “industry” with kid gloves, 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.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723/S. 3071, the Social Security 2100 Act. This bill would provide the kind of reforms Social Security really needs – like increasing benefits, adjusting cost-of-living increases more realistically, and taxing income over $400,000 into the system – versus the kind of “reforms” our “liberal” media says it needs, like cutting benefits and privatization so it can go up and down and up and down and up and down just like the stock market does. But people don't want Social Security to go up and down; they want it to be there, and do well by us, and the Social Security 2100 Act will help it do that better.

Americans for Financial Reform helps youtell your Congressfolk to avoid handing out corporate welfare to the crypto “industry.” Some call it my prejudice, but crypto ain’t real money, and “managing” it ain’t real work. How did crypto corporations spend $30 million lobbying Congress, then? Same way any elite does it: by rigging the rules to get far enough ahead so they can redistribute worker income upward to themselves and come up with new scams at will. Sadly, a lot of our Congressfolk think their crypto buddies are the future. They’re not – people and love are the future, like always – and we should regulate crypto so it does no harm, not let Congress go light on them.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Why are they waging war on Yemen? Because the Saudis didn’t like Yemen’s new government many years ago. Why didn’t they like the new one? Damned if I know, and I’ve tried to find out! Only things I can say are a) the war has driven Yemen to the brink of famine for many years and b) the Houthi rebels who are supposedly the Saudi/UAE coalition’s target are some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda in the world. But ask the Kurds how much grace such a title gets you. It’s almost like Our Glorious Elites want to keep the “war on terror” going. And that’s why we fight them.

Around the table: how billionaires could ruin even more of the world, and other horrors.

Surprise, surprise: Work Opportunity Tax Credits – which aim to help marginalized folks get permanent jobs – too often go to corporations that give such folks temporary work. Which makes it what, class? Corporate welfare! Turns out this is especially true for workers with felonies in their past, which is why we’ve tried to “ban the box” on job applications. Right-wingers will cite this example as YET ANOTHURZ REASONZ TEH GUBMINTZ DOESN’TZ WORKZ!!!!! – even though the Work Opportunity Tax Credit is a right-wing policy prescription from the ‘90s! – while reasonable people will more likely say we ought to at least reform the program.

Ho hum, Pennsylvania Republicans appear to be rallying around their gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano, despite Mr. Mastriano’s long history of being a right-wing extremist. This is not exactly unexpected! I often chide Democrats for their lack of courage, but we shouldn’t underestimate the cowardice of Republican politicians, either. Still, Mr. Shapiro leads by 26 points among independents in one poll, which is the clearest sign that while Democrats should stay on their guard, they shouldn’t panic. I also think (contra at least one GOP operative) that concentrating on abortion and election denialism is a winning combo for Democrats pretty much everywhere this year. People hate having their rights taken away, and independents hate people who can't stop whining about things that happened two years ago already.

When I hear that Arizona and Nevada will probably have their share of Colorado River water cut, and all 40 million Americans who rely on the Colorado will likely face some pain in the near future, I’m reminded that when I was in Arizona over a decade years ago I thought the Colorado River was running awfully low, and that less than a decade before that when I was in Nevada I thought the same thing, though it wasn’t as pronounced. I also thought that maybe running all those fountains at Las Vegas casinos wasn’t such a good idea. I mean, between that and everyone’s drinking and bathing water, the choice should be easy.

3rd District federal judge blocks Utah law barring trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams, writing that blocking trans girls, but not cis girls, from sports teams represents “plainly unfavorable treatment.” Sadly, Utah still “vets” transgender athletes by “evaluat(ing) a player's wingspan, weight, and height – and whether a player is taking hormone blockers – to determine if a transgender girl, in particular, might have an unfair advantage in a sport by being born male,” which isn’t just creepy, it’s stupid. One player with a wider-than-expected wingspan for her age automatically spells victory, as if no opponent could possibly strategize around her? Gosh, too many people want to win before they even play anymore.

Our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) certifies a switchblade flying car (so named because the wings could fit under the car’s chassis) as airworthy, meaning it’s ready for test flights. I’ll admit flying cars have always intrigued me, and not just because I don't ever want to sit in a traffic jam again again. Many regulatory obstacles remain, and of course the proper attitude toward those obstacles isn’t DITCH ALLZ TEH REGULASHUNZ!!!!! but “let’s make a flying car that’s safe on both ground and air.” After that, it’ll take a long, long time for regular folks to be able to afford a flying car – unless gajillionaires buy up the corporations that make it, in which we’ll never be able to afford it.

Finally, some very good news: our FDA has greenlighted over-the-counter hearing aids, which could be in stores as early as October. The most expensive OTC hearing aids will cost a little less than one-eighth as much as prescription hearing aids, which most health insurers, private and public, don’t cover (you remember Sinemanchin being on the wrong side of that policy discussion last year too, right?), and while even $300 (for the cheapest OTC hearing aid) is a lot of money, more folks will be able to get them – not least because they’ll be dealing with the pharmacists who are both more plentiful and more accessible than audiologists. One also hopes they’ll eventually come down in price and help break the hearing aid monopolies. But again, if billionaires buy them up, all those bets are off.

Around the table: the most pro-corporate Supreme Court ever! And other total non-surprises.

I’m sure you already knew that the John Roberts-led Supreme Court is easily the most pro-corporate Supreme Court in recent memory, but it’s still good to have some data behind it, even if we’d also like to know how the Roberts Court compares on this matter to, say, the Courts led by Salmon Chase or Morrison Waite. How incoming Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson writes on corporate issues will help tell us whether President Biden actually wants to change our politics so that ordinary Americans count again, or whether he just wants to look like he's doing that.

I wouldn’t blame you for being skeptical that “the teacher shortage in America has hit crisis levels,” because our “liberal” media cry “crisis” at a lot of things (cough crime cough) that aren’t actual crises, and the fourth paragraph of this article admits it can’t teacher levels well, at least not beyond data and anecdotes from (by my count) nine “state and district-level reports.” To the degree that it’s happening, though, I point the finger at right-wingers yelling and screaming at (and threatening!) teachers over wearing masks and getting vaccines and teaching about racism. Yes, the pandemic was rough on teachers, but I’d lay money that all the right-wing whining afterward tipped more teachers over the edge.

Not long before Kyrsten Sinema finally signed off on the Inflation Reduction Act after forcing through at least one significant change-for-the-worse, someone in the “liberal” media actually wondered why Democrats “left (her) out” of negotiations on the bill. Gosh, I don’t know – maybe because they hate her even more than they hate Joe Manchin? Joe Manchin is garden-variety corrupt, after all, but Kyrsten Sinema thinks she’s so much smarter than us, and the next person I meet who actually likes people who think they're so much smarter than everyone else will be the first. And anyway, “mavericks” don’t go to bat for banksters, not when even Donald Trump says nasty things about them.

Surprise, surprise, study links “Earning Persistently Low Wages” “With Faster Memory Decline In Old Age,” which results include dementia. I’ve long said that people aren’t “bad at math” or “bad at budgeting” so much as they don’t make enough money to make a budget work, and I’ve also suspected that failure at that task alone (never mind the consequences of that failure, like foreclosure and eviction and getting your water and your heat and your electric turned off) makes you less sharp as the years go by. I’ve even suspected that not having savings to fall back on (as low-wage earners rarely have) also makes you less sharp. Now we have data that supports these notions.

The money shot from this article about how John Fetterman’s parents supported him and his family well into his 40s shows pretend-Pennsylvanian Mehmet Oz calling Mr. Fetterman a “pretend populist,” but I don't care that Mr. Fetterman grew up in a (his word!) “cushy” suburb or needed a substantial cash infusion from his parents as late as 2015. No child picks where they’re born or where they grow up, and if you're lucky enough to have privilege, your life's work is leveraging that privilege for all the folks who don’t have it, so in that light, giving up an insurance underwriting career to mentor young orphans and high-school dropouts seems heroic. And how did Mr. Oz leverage his privilege at pandemic's outset? By telling Sean Hannity that some kids would have to die to keep the economy going. Gallant, meet Goofus.

Now Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI), the man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name, wants Congress to have to renew Social Security and Medicare every single year. As a way of “controlling government spending,” something the Ron Johnsons of the world never do when it comes to all the welfare handouts they give to corporations. But Americans like their Social Security and Medicare, and the only way this ends well for Mr. Johnson is if Mandela Barnes – the presumptive Democratic nominee now that his top three Democratic opponents have bowed out – simply doesn’t mention it in campaign ads. Sadly, this is not difficult to imagine. Too many Democrats preoccupy themselves with being “different” and “special” and "thinking outside the box" when what they really need to do is go for the throat.

Finally, let us take a moment to celebrate good Kansans turning back an anti-abortion constitutional amendment by an impressive 59-41 margin. The people of Kansas accomplished this despite a) voting on the matter during a primary election which always has lower turnout, b) a poorly-worded-probably-on-purpose ballot question, and c) a mysterious effort to mislead pro-choice voters into pulling the wrong lever that’s almost certainly going to send someone to jail. The news wasn’t all good from primary Tuesday, though: Lucas Kunce, as impressive a candidate as Democrats have ever lucked into in Missouri, lost his bid for the Senate nomination to (sigh) the beer heiress who goes-along-gets-along with Republicans like that has ever energized turnout. Even that cloud’s got a silver lining, though: Mr. Kunce’s strong showing (he lost 43-38; a lot of folks ran) puts him in a good position for a 2024 Senate race against Josh “Running Man” Hawley.

Around the table: featuring some of the usual suspects -- monopolists, corporate welfare kings, weak Democrats.

Actual epidemiologist David Martinez, who's worked on both COVID vaccines and COVID treatments, informs us that future COVID vaccines will have to adapt to (and predict) new COVID variants. Flu shots do this now, and they don't always predict ascendant variants perfectly because, as they say, the future is the hardest thing to predict. But better to go with what we know works, and to improve on what works, than to trust the "truth" of social media "influencers" looking for eyeballs, or right-wing media "personalities" who gin up rage for ratings.

Matt Stoller discusses how banksters are "gobbling up" baby formula manufacturing corporations like that won't make our problems even worse. Along the way he presents even more evidence of monopolists saying I want higher prices out loud. And yet folks still blame higher wages and/or more government spending for inflation, and I don't think they're "not getting it," I think they don't want to get it. But let them be complicit with this massive income-redistribution-upward scheme -- we can shame and shun them once they're out in the open, and then God'll sort 'em out at the Pearly Gates.

Ho hum, Atlantic City casinos plead pandemic-related poverty to get corporate welfare, and good citizens suffer, since cities run on tax dollars, after all, and if big corporations pay less, regular Americans pay more. And the crushing irony? The casinos actually did what any self-respecting corporation would do -- invest more heavily in online gambling after predicting that its on-site gambling would plummet due to COVID -- and still demanded, and got, the PILOT tax break! I guess right-wingers will tell us next that they "earned" the tax cut by doing the right thing! Tell that to the good citizens of Atlantic City who have one real grocery store in the casinos' shadow and whose kids have the highest level of lead exposure in the Garden State.

The National Rifle Association planned to hold a massive fundraiser at a farm owned by a nominal Democrat running for Senate in Missouri. Said candidate, Trudy Busch Valentine (yeah, of those Busches), apparently convinced the farm's board to cancel the event, but only after the Intercept published its article, and ain't no scrubbing 15 years of her family funneling money to the NRA. Actual Democrat Lucas Kunce should run ads about this, in addition to all the legitimate issues (monopolies, financial predators) he can run winning ads about. Only the furthest right folks in America still approve of the NRA, after all, and there ain't enough of them to win elections on their own; all we need to beat them is a Democrat who stands for something other than "winning," which is all a lot of losing Democrats (like Ms. Valentine) stand for.

The Biden Administration will forgive any remaining federally-backed debt owed due to attendance at the notorious Corinthian Colleges, the for-profit college chain which went defunct in 2015 after a raft of corruption-related allegations. Forgiveness, here, includes both the end of future loan payments and a rebate for past loan payments on still-outstanding loans, and this money will go mostly to folks who went to Corinthian for vocational training, exactly the folks who too often get left out of the student loan debt conversation. Now cue some crying from Marco Rubio, who called Corinthian Colleges a "constituent" back in the day, a label he has never affixed to any good Floridians who got the shaft from Corinthian.

Finally, yes, Virginia, Republicans have actually advanced a climate change "plan" that consists almost entirely of corporate welfare to the fossil fuel industry. "Streamlining permitting" mostly means "skipping reviews that would catch and prevent pollution," and the Republican plan doesn't actually set any goals for reducing emissions -- after all, why would you ever want to measure your progress? -- so you'd be right to wonder if Republicans simply concocted the worst plan they could think of, just so they could gin up rage about it. Shouldn't work, right? People hate pollution, after all! Still, Republicans have created a new constituency out of book banning this year, so I can't say they'll fail here.

Action: concerning taxes, abortion, discrimination, and ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit, protect abortion rights, pass the Equality Act, and strengthen ethics provisions for our Supreme Court Justices. 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 Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk not to pass a massive research and development tax break for corporations without first bringing back the expanded Child Tax Credit. You can also say expand the CTC and reject that slab of corporate welfare in the first place! But really, this is simple: working families should pay fewer taxes, because it's harder for them to make ends meet, while corporations flush in record profits should not get any tax breaks. They can write off their research and development already, because it's an expense; why are we letting them deduct that twice? And where's Joe Manchin's concern about inflation whenever the topic of corporate welfare comes up?

Both MoveOn and Change.org help you tell your Congressfolk to protect abortion rights in America. Abortion is health care -- for the woman whose fetus has no brain or organs, for the woman raped by her brother, for the woman who will die if she gives birth, for the woman terrorized by her partner over her pregnancy, and yes, also for the woman who knows she can't raise a child now because she has no money (not everyone can just go work for a hedge fund, after all!) or because she knows she won't raise that child right. And we've lately learned that between 60 and 66% of Americans (depending on the poll) think abortion should be legal in most circumstances, so I think the people have spoken here; now we must remind our representatives to listen.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. By the reasoning, if you can call it that, of Justice Alito's draft opinion, they'll overturn Obergefell v. Hodges at the first opportunity, so we need to codify equal rights for gays and transgender folks in our laws -- otherwise right-wing governments will continue to use the specter of gay and transgender folks to induce rage in our weakest Americans. Plus banks and landlords will be able to deny services to gay and transgender folks just because of who they are. That's what'll continue to be if we don't pass the Equality Act, and that reality should offend all of us.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation holding our Supreme Court Justices to the same ethical standards to which we already hold all other federal judges. It's tempting to blame Sam Alito for all of this -- since his draft ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade has convinced just about everyone who can still be convinced that our Supreme Court is just another political body -- but actually it's Clarence Thomas who didn't recuse himself from a decision involving his wife's involvement in the January 6 attempted coup. Remember: your job, as a citizen, isn't to "trust your government"; it's to make your government worthy of your trust.

Around the table: now with *even more* corruption and whining from the right!

No, it is not absurd to claim, as Sonali Kolhatkar does at Counterpunch, that "Policing Causes Violence, Not the Other Way Around." Not just because the science tells us it's true, and not just because you can easily recall recent incidents (like the recent New York subway shootings) that increased police presence did not prevent. I think we've all experienced the phenomenon where we make problems worse by paying much more intense attention to them! And I'm old enough to remember when conservatives said "you can't just throw more money at a problem and hope it'll go away." But even those conservatives told us out of the other side of their mouths that we should throw all the moneys at police because crime. Also too, if we stopped using them as the Swiss Army knives of the state, we'd have better police officers for less money.

Hard to believe, Harry, but big nursing home corporations have sued to stop a New York state law that would force them to spend more money on patient care. Because they'd lose money! What cojones! They think the very notion of losing money an apocalyptic drama, but the neglect they foist on their workers and their patients is the real apocalypse. See, this is why we don't "let business be business," or "let big business make the important decisions." Also too, the very existence of "profits" in such a business testifies to the amount of care patients don't get -- after all, patient care is an expense. Bring back the 55% corporate tax rate and I bet we see a change right quick.

McDonald's franchises used Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) money to pay rent to McDonald's. No, really! McDonald's, the parent corporation, owns the land upon which individual fast-food joints operate, and collects rent from them, so the franchises took money meant to keep good Americans working and used it to keep franchises more or less current on their rent. Nice work if you can get it! See? Government doesn't work! right-wingers exclaim, though it was their heroes who ran government so badly. Public Citizen's Lisa Gilbert must be being very polite to say that PPP had "noble intentions," because I never got that vibe, particularly after big corporations collected so much welfare. I mean, people don't think their local McDonald's is a "small business," do they?

In a related note, some policy bigwigs are now asking "whether the stimulus checks were a mistake" given all the inflation we're having now, and all I can say is: seriously? We're debating this? It's never a "mistake" to keep tens of millions of good Americans out of poverty they would have descended into through no fault of their own; I would have done it differently (less PPP, more CTC), but to say it's not worth it because corporations are now taking advantage of us and jacking up prices at will? And not for nothing, but those checks amounted to $3,200 total over 12 months, and I sincerely hope we all know by now how quickly we can go through $3,200.

Another day, another far right-wing whiner running for state Senate in Michigan who laments that he "(c)an't even watch a college basketball tournament without commercials telling me I have to feel guilty because I think a family should be a white mom, a white dad and white kids." Reminds me of all those years I couldn't even watch cable news programs without pundits telling me I was a traitor and a terrorist sympathizer! So yeah, Randy Bishop, fuck your feelings. I will say -- not at all in his defense! -- that while I approve of all the interracial couples I see in TV advertising, I fear that future historians will one day conclude that our society was a whole lot more accepting of interracial marriage than was actually true. But since (as Franz Boas used to say) racism disappears when interracial marriage becomes accepted, I hope that point will be moot in 20 years or so.

Finally, after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) calls herself a "victim" of the January 6 attack, a Capitol police officer displays graphic photos of the actual injuries he suffered that day. That's some expert counter-trolling on the part of Aquilino Gonell, though I'm sorry he had to go through it at all. But we're all victims of Ms. Greene's slow-motion train wreck of a Congressional career.

Around the table: featuring stories about the power of organizing.

When I hear that far-right Christians aim to redeploy the "Astroturf" stratagem that worked so well for them in Virginia in 2021, I feel compelled to remind everyone that once we reveal such a stratagem (and I'll continue to reveal it as often as I can!) it becomes less effective, and also that as even E.J. Jackson knows, running against Terry McAuliffe isn't the hardest thing a candidate can do. Their stratagem might succeed, though, if Democrats don't point out all the Astroturfing going on in these races. People are too quick to accept that someone they know personally couldn't possibly be part of an Astroturf group! But too many of them are, and borrowing a hedge-trimmer from one of them doesn't make them more "real."

Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone not only digs up evidence that our FBI did, in fact, know a lot about the January 6 attempted coup before it happened, but also reminds us that our FBI professes that it simply doesn't have the legal tools to detect right-wing agitation before it happens but can detect and disrupt more peaceful liberal agitation with laughable ease. Which further reminds us that law enforcement agencies always use events like the January 6 attempted coup to justify even more surveillance power over the American people, when they hardly need it! They just don't focus very much on right-wing protestors, for some reason. Also, they don't seem to need to get warrants very often; there's a reason we get warrants.

On March 29, wind power produced more electricity than either coal or nuclear power for the first time; though not as much as natural gas. I can already hear the right-wingers squeal that TEH BIG GUMMINTZ GIVEZ TEH WELFAREZ TO TEH WINDZ POWERZ!!!!!, as if either coal or nuclear power would be able to provide any power at all without massive federal taxpayer support. Think how much power wind could supply if big corporations had done the smart thing and embraced it long ago! Versus the dumb thing of clinging like grim death to fossil fuel technology that's going to make our planet unlivable. (No, they're not "smart" merely because they've made a lot of money. Try taking money with you to the Pearly Gates.)

Luis Feliz Leon at New York Focus reminds us that the Amazon Labor Union organizing effort in the Staten Island warehouse "broke many of the traditional rules of labor organizing, while making history." The ALU had virtually no funding, no prior experience organizing, and no support from other unions; they also made "amateur missteps" like filing for an NLRB election before having majority card-signing support and refraining from home visits and door-knocking. So how did they win? They organized by talking to workers in break areas and in the cafeteria rather than at home -- since, as one organizer suggests, most folks look at their home as a safe space from work -- and used social media apps to specifically to reach workers whose command of the English language wasn't that great face-to-face. Besides, they're not the first independent union to win! In the '30s, those unions won all the time -- and after ALU won, more established unions supported them.

Mark and Paul Engler at Waging Nonviolence interview Rebecca Tarlau about "What U.S. Organizers Can Learn From Brazil's Landless Workers Movement." "(W)e need to contest power in all spaces of social life" (i.e., not just in the political sphere), "whether that’s in the media or the schools or with the land," and Brazil's Landless Workers Movement has been doing that for decades, whether through gaining permanent settlements or through establishing and maintaining health care clinics, educational curricula, and food processing plants. So they've essentially seized power without very much compromise by providing for their own needs as much as possible and through that service "prefiguring an alternative way of being" -- though when the Black Panthers (among others!) tried something similar in the United States in the '70s, our governments demonized them and our law enforcement took them down.

Finally, Indonesia's Parliament passes a bill criminalizing many forms of sexual violence, the first of its kind in that nation. Many observers think it doesn't go far enough -- it tackles domestic abuse, child marriage, forced marriage, and sexual exploitation but not rape -- while the religious right there complains that it doesn't include proscriptions against extramarital sex (like those guys really want that!) and "deviant" sexual orientations. My father would say if all the extremists are upset, it must be a good bill; I won't go that far, but I will call it progress, even if, as I suspect, getting it passed was (in Ronald Reagan's famous phrase) like crapping out a pineapple.

Around the table: why we need Utopian thinking, and other truths.

Paul Rosenberg interviews historian Victoria Walcott about why we need Utopian visions to create social change. Ms. Walcott's new book (Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement) not only reminds us that the rapid-fire successes of the Civil Rights movement only came about through decades of education and agitation, but that young Coretta Scott gave Martin Luther King, Jr., Edward Bellamy's famous Utopian novel Looking Backward while they were still courting, and the book informed much of Dr. King's thinking during the '60s. She also reminds us that the notion that "working-class people had a right to leisure, had a right to intellectual life, had a right to artistic endeavors" was once a Utopian vision. Her book comes out later on this month. (And not for nothing, but far too many of us embraced dystopian thinking during the '80s and '90s, not just because of the right-wing ascendancy in America, but because of our own immaturity.)

Robert McChesney and John Nichols, writing at the Columbia Journalism Review, propose a "Local Journalism Initiative" to revive local news organs. The internet (and monopoly news corporations, don't forget) have basically killed the advertiser-funded model of journalism, so Messrs. McChesney and Nichols would turn to taxpayer funding to restart the web of local news organs that kept us all connected until recently. The Initiative would send a lump sum of money to every county and then that county's eligible voters would vote on which three news organs to spend it upon (though, depending on the vote, more news organs than that could receive the money); the only news organs that could receive that money would be non-profit, county-based, functioning for six months, completely independent of any larger entities, and publish original content at least five days weekly. All that's for folks who read "taxpayer funding" and saw only the spectre of totalitarianism -- and for folks who think the BBC's failures mean NO GUBMINT INVOLVEMENTZ EVAHZ!!!!!!

From the "He's Not Wrong!" file: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wants a "strategic pause" on negotiations over the COMPETES Act, saying that Jeff Bezos shouldn't get a "$10 billion bailout to fuel his space hobby." And they say there are no populists on the left! Of course there are; our "liberal" media just ignores them. But the way he puts it is the way we should all put it, not just because nobody actually likes "bailouts," but because once right-wingers weaponize a word or a phrase, it's only right that we should take the words from them and point them back at them. (His repurposing of Sen. Manchin's "strategic pause" phrase is just icing on the cake here.)

Iowa judge rules that former one-term Rep. Abby Finkenauer can't appear on the Iowa Democratic Senate ballot in early June, because a few of the signatures she gathered for the campaign have no dates on them. Losing this case by literally three signatures sounds petty, but if you're that close to the line (Iowa requires a certain number of signatures, but also requires that at least 100 of them come from at least 19 different counties), you didn't do your job. Overall, I'd say this is no great loss. And it's also a boon for Admiral Mike Franken, who's been all over my Facebook feed saying how bad Fox News is for his soldiers, which sure doesn't make me hate him.

I'll admit I was surprised that Donald Trump endorsed Mehmet "Dr." Oz for Pennsylvania's Senate seat this year -- I'd figured he'd just prefer to wait to see who won and then pretend that was his choice the whole time. David McCormick's road to the nomination just got a lot harder -- and, ah, nobody really thinks Rick Santorum's quickly-issued endorsement will save him, right? Rick Santorum lost his last statewide election by 18 points 15 years ago and he was the incumbent! -- but I can't say Jeff Bartos's road to the nomination got that much harder; one could see benefits and drawbacks to having only one opponent he can call a carpet-bagger. If Mr. Oz is the nominee, then Republicans may not have as easy a time saddling John Fetterman with the story of the Black man he chased down with a gun, since their guy basically said on TV that we'll have to sacrifice more children to the economy. (Also, don't believe that the Trump brain-trust is having a "meltdown" over this endorsement. It's always drama when right-wingers fight in public, and of course it's bad drama.)

Finally, this just may be my favorite headline so far this year: "U.S. Didn’t Expect Major Explosions When an ISIS Bomb Factory Was Bombed." The article describes "a flawed 'collateral damage estimate' before an airstrike that killed scores of Iraqis in 2015," but (and I know this will come as a shock to you!) I don't think stupidity explains this mistake; I think malice does. Not in the I WANTZ TO KILLZ TEH NONWHITEZ PEEPULZ!!!! sense, but in the sense that you find it harder to prove to everyone you're "tough on terror" if you pass up targets "merely" because they might literally blow up and kill innocent people. I'm not sure I can say that's better, though. (And brace yourself for yet another iteration of nobody could have predicted in one of the post-strike assessments.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning health care, monopolies, pollution, and bad cable news channels.

Long story short: tell President Biden to lower prescription drug prices, tell our government to reject a big bankster merger, tell our EPA to ban the herbicide dicamba and require more electric heavy-duty trucks on the road, tell our government to stop flogging "carbon capture" as a climate-change solution, and tell cable corporations to stop carrying the Fox News Channel. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to use his lawful power to lower prescription drug prices. After all, certain Congressdolts said "no" to Medicare negotiating drug prices, and in a Congress with slim margins a few miscreants can always get their way, so let's stop trying to negotiate with them and let's start trying to get President Biden to do the right thing. Specifically, the above-linked petition helps you ask President Biden to use "march-in" rights, granted by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980, to manufacture cheaper generic drugs. At least 80% of Americans supported Medicare drug price negotiation, and I bet 100% of Americans oppose price-gouging and live-saving medicines breaking their bank accounts, so I would hope Mr. Biden would feel fairly secure in taking action the people need and want. Boy, I'd hate to be wrong about that.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Federal Reserve Bank and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (or OCC) to reject a proposed U.S. Bank/Union Bank merger. Never heard of either one? Well, let's keep it that way! And, in fact, let's break up both those banks so the resulting banks will be even less famous! Fame might be a good reason to buy a book, but it's no reason to choose a bank. And once upon a time, you had a savings and/or checking account at a bank that only had one branch, and because this bank only had one branch, the folks who worked there knew the folks living nearby and could tailor their services to those good folks. Now, big banks expect you to tailor your needs to them. And you deserve better than that! So let's fight this merger.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban herbicide dicamba from use on our farms. Dicamba has wreaked enough havoc on farms that don't use it -- it's a notorious drifter! -- that even Republican politicians have restricted its use, but the 2021 growing season saw no less disturbance and disruption than previous growing seasons, which means using it at all threatens farms everywhere. Monsanto figures in this story, of course, first by manufacturing a "better" version of dicamba a few years back and then offering dicamba-resistant crops as a "solution." But these are not solutions to those of us who do not worship mammon! We should treat food as a right rather than a thing to be sold; in the meantime, let's get dangerous chemicals off our farms.

Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell our EPA to start strengthening emissions standards for heavy-duty shipping trucks, with the goal of getting them all electric. Right-wingers will look solely at the goal and say pie in the sky much, liberal? Ha ha ha snort! But no reasonable person says that! Everyone knows it takes time to get internal combustion engines out of commercial trucks, but the need is no less urgent: these trucks comprise about a quarter of all carbon emissions in America, meaning that getting them to pollute less would be, as a famous philosopher once said, a BFD. And not for nothing, but highways more likely run through Black and Brown neighborhoods, exposing those folks to more pollutants than the rest of us. Why, it was almost like that was the whole idea! But we can do better.

Stand.Earth helps you tell our government to stop giving corporate welfare handouts to "carbon capture" corporations. Only when we embrace solar power, electric cars, geothermal heating, and hydroponic farming will we slow our roll toward climate disaster; "solutions" like natural gas, nuclear power, and "carbon capture," where corporations capture the carbon emissions before they hit the air and either store them in the ground or reuse them for other purposes, might make some executive rich, but they won't help us keep our planet. Carbon capture, it turns out, is nowhere near as far along in its development as it would have to be, plus corporations use a lot of the carbon they do capture to dig for oil! What a way of telling good people all over the world to fuck off and die! If you take as kindly to that as I do, give your government what-for.

Finally, Inequality Media Civic Action helps you tell big telecom corporations to stop offering Fox News on their networks. We've made some headway starving the beast that is the One America News Network, but going after Fox News, now the number one source of right-wing rage for over two decades, will, I expect, be harder, even though I presume most of its viewers will find other, better things to obsess about once they can't easily get to Fox News. Now, some folks don't like to do things like this; they call them censorship. But governments censor; when consumers band together against a product they don't like, that's just the churn of civilization. Why, some folks would even call it the free market in action!

Around the table: the Starbucks empire strikes back, and other developments.

Here's something I hadn't considered before: David Swanson, in discussing a recent ethics book written for popular consumption, says ethicists constantly ask the wrong questions -- "How should I drive? How should I shop? How should I tell my friend his hat is ugly? Who the fuck cares? Are you or are you not helping to build effective movements to decarbonize, demilitarize, and deplutocratize?" And my memory of classical philosophy is that no, these questions rarely-if-ever come up, for a lot of reasons you can imagine. Even questions like "should I eat this veggie burger if it comes from across the country and therefore contributes to climate change?" only deal with the very, very smallest of choices we make -- it seems ethicists never consider "should I pressure my Congressdolt to stop blocking climate change legislation?" And that's much closer to the beginning of activism than its end.

Amazon's had a rough news week, and deservedly so: an ITEP report found that Amazon dodged over $5 billion in taxes just last year, while a Good Jobs First/UNI Global Union report finds that Amazon has extracted another $4.7 billion in corporate welfare globally over the last decade -- I know they call them "subsidies" or "tax breaks" or even "tax incentives," but corporate welfare is the best term for them, and maybe only because "money they stole from our future" is a little unwieldy. It gets better: Amazon execs worry that they go through warehouse employees so quickly they'll eventually run out of people to hire. I was going to say it's like they're a 17th century sugar plantation, but those workers generally lasted a couple of years, where Amazon workers all too frequently last only a few weeks, so I guess Amazon is more like the Omicron variant than a sugar plantation.

Those completely apolitical Supreme Court Justices of ours just voted, by a 5-4 margin, to let an Alabama racial gerrymander stand until they can hear the appeal, which will almost certainly be long after the 2022 election. Sad that it's left to Chief Justice Roberts, who's done as much to injure voting rights as anyone, to reason for the minority that the three-judge panel from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama had struck down the gerrymander according to already-existing law "with no apparent errors for our correction." Justice Kavanaugh, of course, said it was too "(l)ate" to indulge in "judicial tinkering." "Late? It's February! Primaries aren't until May! They can redraw the maps in a week! And when Republicans challenge the New York gerrymander, it'll suddenly be a matter of extreme urgency for Justice Kavanaugh no matter where on the calendar it is by then.

Democratic Senate candidate Gary Chambers burns a Confederate flag in a new political ad, not long after smoking a doob in a previous ad. OK, those are pat descriptions of two ads you really, really need to see (and which you can see, at the link above); after that, check out his January Senate announcement video -- yes, I easily predicted which phrase got turned on its head by the end, but I was no less thrilled. That's about four minutes of video total, after which you might well start to hope this Baton Rouge-based community organizer crushes John Kennedy against all odds in 2022. Unfortunately, he'll first have to get past the former soldier/moderate the party no doubt prefers in the primary.

You may have noticed that right-wingers use the word "woke" a lot more than liberals do; hence it should be no surprise that someone has made a list of all the things Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says are "woke," a list so expansive that "at this rate, Ron DeSantis will have trouble defeating wokeness. To him, it seems to be nearly everything." This should be a campaign ad against him! Have him saying the word "woke" over and over and over again, list all the things he says are "woke" (your education, your job, your computer, maybe even your roads) and close with a scene of Mr. DeSantis getting cornered by ghosts chanting the word "woke" until he loses his mind! Nah, Democrats will never run that; after all, it might work, and then they'll have to do something with their mandate.

Finally, Starbucks fires seven workers who were trying to organize a union at a Memphis cafe, ostensibly for "violating several safety and security policies," including at least one policy that may not exist. I guess the only surprise is that this didn't happen sooner; how strange that calling in workers on their day off to propagandize them about unions didn't work! My days off are sacred, and I bet most folks feel the same way. Reminds me of the two Madison, WI Whole Foods workers fired in 2002 for "improper disposal of a latte," who just so happened to be trying to organize a union there! (This story has a happy ending: that store did ultimately unionize. I hope this one has a happy ending, too.)

Action: concerning corruption, health care, pollution, and forced arbitration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, the PASTEUR Act, the REDUCE Act, and the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. This bill would prevent any Congressfolk from engaging in most stock trades and from serving on for-profit boards, plus it would also include short sales. When someone sells a security intending to buy it back later, that's a short sale, and folks don't do this unless they think the value of that security is about to tank. You can imagine why we would want to keep our Congressfolk from doing that -- in their oversight duties, they may already know a particular security (or a particular sector of the economy!) is about to tank, and certainly they shouldn't profit from that. Why, it might lead them to pass laws that cause other securities to tank! And that'd be evil, so we should stop that.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. This bill would prevent Presidents from doing a lot of the awful things Donald Trump did while he was President, like limit national emergencies (like the vanity border wall "emergency"), prevent removal of Inspectors General without cause (like he did through much of 2020), and limits our President's ability to pardon the unworthy (like Steve Freaking Bannon!). It does a bunch of other things, too, like require Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates to provide 10 years of tax returns, without excuses! And no, this ain't "looking backward" -- particularly if Donald Trump comes back in 2024. Or if someone worse wins the Republican nomination!

Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act. This bill would fund $11 billion in grants to develop new antibiotics, and if that seems like a lot of money, consider that the bill would fund $11 billion once, not annually, and also consider that $11 billion a drop in the water in the vast ocean of a $4 trillion-plus federal budget, plus it would actually do a lot of good. The world is full of superbugs like the one we're battling now; antibiotic abuse has certainly made it a lot easier for superbugs to wreak their havoc, but we also need to develop new antibiotics that'll kill these bugs dead. Better to spend taxpayer money on that than on, say, welfare for oil corporations that already make crap-tons of money. We could make a longer list than that, but you get the idea.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5389, the REDUCE Act. Make sure it's H.R. 5389; there are other REDUCE Acts out there this term, of varying quality. This REDUCE Act would impose an excise tax on virgin plastic -- which is to say, plastic manufactured for the first time -- and would create a Plastic Waste Reduction Fund to help clean up the mess we've made from all the plastic that's in our oceans and landfills. Folks throw away, on average, 287 pounds of plastic every year, which is close to a pound a day (and this pandemic sure hasn't helped that figure, has it?), and our EPA tells us that less than 10 percent of the plastic we try to recycle actually gets recycled, so clearly we've got to do better as a civilization. That's why we have to reduce the amount of plastic we make to begin with.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4445, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. We should be ending forced arbitration for everything, but let's at least make our Congressfolk say I oppose giving sexual assault victims and sexual harassment victims their day in court. Don't let them say this is a boon for trial lawyers! If people don't want trial lawyers to prosper, they should do less evil! If your boss gropes you without your asking for it, your employment contract might require you to submit your complaint to an arbitration board that'll almost certainly rule in favor of your boss, but H.R. 4445 would simply prohibit that where sexual assault and harassment are concerned. So let's do that.

Around the table: Joe Manchin is wrong, wrong, wrong! And other, less obvious observations.

The Lancet says the COVID-19 pandemic may end as soon as March -- given that by then a "large proportion of the world will have been infected with the omicron variant" -- and though of course the coronavirus will stay with us, it won't wreck our lives as badly. "The impacts of future SARS-CoV-2 transmission on health," they write, "will be less because of broad previous exposure to the virus, regularly adapted vaccines to new antigens or variants, the advent of antivirals, and the knowledge that the vulnerable can protect themselves during future waves when needed by using high-quality masks and physical distancing." I figure a two hundred year-old medical journal probably knows better than I do, and definitely knows better than any five dozen internet "influencers" one could name.

The Kansas government wants state legislators to approve a $4 billion slab of corporate welfare so it doesn't lose out on a big project -- but offers scant details. A lot of state legislators are acting like they have no choice but to pass the legislation, so that Kansas doesn't "lose out" on big corporate facilities, but if they're acting like hostages, that's a sign they can't win the argument on the merits. Also, too, if it looks like dung, and it smells like dung, you don't have to taste it just because the Kansas state government says it's meatloaf. Looking for a more politically pragmatic argument? Look up "Foxconn" and "the end of Scott Walker's career as Wisconsin Governor."

When I hear that a supermajority of Americans do not want our Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, I'm reminded that I think the American people are actually pretty wise -- just like I am whenever I confront polling about Medicare-for-All and raising taxes on the rich. I know a lot of smart folks who disagree with me about that, and I don't really blame them, since our media constantly push the worst people in America in our faces until we forget all the good folks we know. It's really our media's fault that people watch Tucker Carlson and listen to Joe Rogan; the notion that they're somehow the best American civilization has to offer is a profoundly offensive notion.

When I hear that Joe Manchin says he's ready to start a big spending bill from scratch and will talk with anyone who'll listen, I wonder how many good Americans still want to talk to Joe Manchin. I mean, he led us on for eight months on Build Back Better, so I don't know why any sane and rational person would trust him now. Is he going to spend another eight or ten months making demand after demand and then, after Democrats give in to all of them, suddenly throw up his hands at some imagined slight and say I've tried but I just can't get to yes? It's a question worth asking! And it's also a question worth answering in the affirmative, so we don't waste all of 2022 like we wasted all of 2021. He needs to be shamed and shunned, just like Kyrsten Sinema does, and that's true even though we can all count to 50.

I've also got a bone to pick with Mr. Manchin's suggestion that he does what he does because the rural folks he represents are so much different from urban folks. I mean, even if his constituents would rather hold hands and pitch woo than make a party out of loving, that doesn't mean they turn up their nose at paid family leave and a Child Tax Credit expansion like he does. Polling also tells us that rural folks, even the ones who identify as conservative, like a lot of liberal policy initiatives, like Medicare-for-all, taxpayer-funded community college, and treating-not-imprisoning drug addicts. So folks like Joe Manchin are just pretending they're speaking for them, and what is that, class? Drama, that's what, and not particularly good drama at that.

Finally, suggesting Black folks aren't American wasn't actually the stupidest thing Mitch McConnell's said lately -- the stupidest thing he's said lately was when he responded to a question about what a Republican majority would prioritize with "(t)hat is a very good question, and I'll let you know when we take (the majority) back.". So the party that makes such a drama about hating post-modernism acts awfully post-modern; what a surprise! Look, here's what they're going to do: they're going to yell and scream about crime and vaccine mandates and critical race theory, and while you're watch that, they're going to try to cut taxes on the rich, outlaw class-action lawsuits, cripple Medicaid, privatize Medicare and Social Security, and defund all the parts of government that still help good Americans. They're sure as hell not going to run that ad! Sadly, Democrats won't, either, because it'd be uncivil.