Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: tabulating weak arguments easily swatted down if we but have the will.

My initial reaction to the news that our government had blurry, heavily-edited video of Iranian patrol boats in the vicinity of two oil tankers several hours after they suffered attacks was to call it drama -- why would we suddenly go to war with Iran now over something they've been doing for decades? Because our President, or John Bolton, wants a notch on their belt? It was just icing on the cake to hear later that the owner of one of the attacked tankers disputed our government's account of events. I said years ago that President Obama's competence in the service of empire was nothing to celebrate, but this President's inability to run a convincing false flag operation might be.

Michael Corcoran at TruthOut describes the current state of health insurance industry propaganda against Medicare-for-All. ZOMG 150 MILLYUNZ WILL LOSEZ THEIR PRIVATE INSURANZ!!!!! is not a talking point only John Delaney had been using -- and though it's true support wavers for Medicare-for-All once the pollster says psst you'll lose your private health insurance, that's a damn slim reed to hold onto, since "you can keep your hospital and doctor" if they have to take Medicare-for-All health insurance, as they will. And private health insurance plans are only popular when folks don't have to use them. This is a big country, so not everyone's going to have a problem with their health insurance at once, hence polls suggesting private health insurance is "popular" are intensely misleading. Also, too, when Third Way-types say we shouldn't do it because it's "ripe for attack," you should recognize such argument as cowardly. And stupid -- after all, haven't Republicans demonstrated they'll attack anything Democrats propose, no matter how weak?

JP Morgan/Chase CEO Jamie Dimon tells a business roundtable that "(s)ocialism means that the government owns and controls companies" and that government would use them for "political purposes, for jobs and votes." After we remind everyone that some people cry "socialism" at whatever they don't like because they can't win the argument on the merits, we have to remind folks that government corruption is easier to fight than corporate corruption because you have a voice in your government, and we also need to remind folks that restraining the power of the rich to run roughshod over the rest of us (which is what Mr. Dimon's really afraid of losing here!) is the best way to promote freedom for everyone else. People like Mr. Dimon complain about government "own(ing) and control(ling) (corporations)" because they want to do all the owning and controlling. And corporate CEOs need to ask themselves if they really want banksters like Mr. Dimon controlling them.

Ho hum, one of the House architects of the 2017 tax "reform" now says it's "way too early to tell" whether deficits will be worse over the next decade, even though deficit-neutrality was one of Republicans' big selling points and even though deficits are significantly worse now. He adds, "I don’t think anything could have been worse for the deficit than to stick with the old economy and stick with the tax code that was so outdated," although, as I'm now going to say with the Italics Hammer, deficits are worse now. No truth to the rumor that he then added BUT WE ALREADYZ PASSEDZ TEH BILLZ ANDZ OURZ DONURZ GOTZ ALL TEH GOODIEZ SUCKERZ!!!!!

Finally, our President invokes "executive privilege" to keep our House from accessing documents concerning its rulemaking on the census citizenship question. First thought: case is being litigated by our Supreme Court as we speak, so maybe he can. Second thought: House has oversight duties, particularly if they're going to create law on the matter (and Congress has introduced legislation addressing the citizenship question), so maybe he can't. Third thought: our Supreme Court can take care of itself without Executive branch help. Fourth thought: "executive privilege" can't be the answer to everything any more than "national emergency" can be the answer to everything.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, June 5, 2019: Pete Buttigieg shows John Hickenlooper and John Delaney how it's done!

Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper gets booed at the California Democrats' state convention after declaring that "socialism is not the answer" to the problems of defeating our President in 2020 and "achiev(ing) big progressive goals." What does he mean by "socialism"? Well, he says that"(m)assive government expansions may not be strictly speaking socialism, but trust me: Republicans will make it seem like socialism." And he volunteers this strategy as a way of confounding Republican efforts to define Democrats! Enabling Republicans who call everything "socialism" is no way to fight them; hell, it's no way to fight. Still, it might be worse for him to offer "focusing on kitchen table programs that will actually improve people's quality of life" as an alternative -- as if "socialist" programs couldn't possibly do that! But here's what's worst: he insists we either take a center-right tack or the President gets re-elected, which is what, class? That's right, a manufactured hostage crisis -- don't communicate your will to your politicians, or your country gets it!

For all that, Mr. Hickenlooper fared better than former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, who got booed at the same event for a full minute after telling the assembled that Medicare-for-All "sounds good, but it’s actually not good policy, nor is it good politics." It routinely gets majority support in poll after poll and it's "not good politics"? His objection to Medicare-for-All as policy seems to be that it'll "kick() 115 million Americans off their health care" -- though it would give them cheaper, better health care, not "no health care." And naturally he took the criticism with the confidence and professionalism befitting a man who ought to be a frontrunner, right? Well, no -- first he said that "(i)ntolerance to alternative points of view is not what the Democratic Party should be about," which begs the retort that you cant 't President if you call criticism "intolerance." And then he said "(m)ost Republicans favor doing nothing and eliminating the ACA. What’s your choice?" Well, my choice is not to be part of your damn manufactured hostage crisis! You can't keep putting out a menu of wet oatmeal and a bowl of dung and expect people to say how great your restaurant is.

And these putatively "sane," "sensible" "moderates" could learn a lot from South Bend, IN Mayor Pete Buttigieg about how to hide your centrism from the masses -- he told the California delegates that "the riskiest thing we could do is try to play it safe" in 2020, which is a stroke of genius even if, like me, you don't believe he really means it. The flesh is willing with statements like "(our President) wins if we look too much like Washington" and "when (our President) inundates the imagination with a horror show of taunts and tweets, let’s change the channel," and certainly I'd be glad if someone with a megaphone actually took on the noble project of "breaking the Republican monopoly" on words like "freedom" and "security." But the flesh has also seen this game before -- "new thinking, bold action, and a focus on the future" will remind you of, well, virtually every Democratic Presidential candidate who's either lost or disappointed you, and he opened with that. And what is this "new thinking"? We don't learn, which leads me to think that eight years of a President Pete Buttigieg will be eight more years of we-tried-but-Republicans-wouldn't-let-us.

Around the table: in which the calculus of defeat reveals itself, again!

Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada, who has shepherded numerous anti-gay and anti-transgender bills through that state's House over the last few years, has announced he'll resign his leadership post in the coming weeks. A Tennessean report revealed that Mr. Casada had exchanged sexually explicit text messages about women with his Chief of Staff; that's despicable behavior, obviously, but would it be too much to ask that bad legislators resign in shame after trying to pass despicable bills? (Mr. Casada says he'll keep his House seat; other Republican legislators have objected, but I doubt that'll amount to much.)

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) becomes the first Republican House Rep to call for impeachment of our President, and Mehdi Hasan at The Intercept wonders why more Democrats aren't calling for it. They probably think it's "smart politics," but then they also think that running yet another center-right milquetoast who wants everyone to "get along" in the name of "bipartisanship" will beat our President in 2020, just like it didn't do in 2016. And they're also wrong, as Mr. Hasan says, to suggest that they don't want to do anything to rile up our President's base, because anything riles them up, and bases don't win elections without a lot of help. (And Jesus Mary and Joseph our President needs to shut up about "TREASON!" He's going to make the word meaningless, and that's one of those words we need to define accurately and precisely.)

I don't know that the Venezuelan media offer "far more diversity" than American media, but Lucas Koerner and Ricardo Vaz at FAIR make a fairly compelling case that the Venezuelan press is far more diverse than our "liberal" media would like us to think. No, I think imputing malice to our "liberal" media is entirely appropriate there -- weren't they just doing their damnedest to create the impression that a coup was about to take down the Maduro government any second now? Yes, they were. And the "facts" our "liberal" media often presents are easily refutable by folks who've actually spent any time in Venezuela. Maybe there's a solution in there, somewhere.

Fresh off his pardoning of a bankster who wrote a glowing book about him, our President is apparently thinking of pardoning a few actual American war criminals on Memorial Day. On Memorial Day! Could it be that our President really is a Democratic plant trying to make the very idea of ever voting for a flag-waving jingo again revolting? That's not the way to bet, of course, and (as Sen. Graham might say, if he weren't such a toady these days) the whole idea of being an American is most emphatically not to prove that you can act just as uncivilized as your enemy. (As an aside, I think the Times is rather optimistic to suppose that Attorney General Barr might be trying to prevent this from happening; Mr. Barr is, after all, the man who helped Bush the Better pardon all those Iran-Contra conspirators. I'd be happy to be wrong, of course!)

Finally, a warning about polls suggesting that folks feeling good about our economy won't help our President get re-elected: ask them again in late October of 2020. If the economy's still "good" then, and the Presidential candidates have spent six months tearing each other down, then I suspect a fatigued populace will be more likely to ascribe the drama to "both sides" and return our President to office, a tragedy continued Republican vote suppression will facilitate. But who knows? Maybe Democrats will nominate someone who changes the conversation away from our President and towards a just, sustainable, and hopeful future. I kid, of course.

Around the table: starring weak Democrats, malicious Republicans, and actual hard-working Americans.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, now seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination for President, seems to aim for a "middle ground" on climate change policy. Never mind that this "middle ground" looks suspiciously like we'd just be clawing our way back to the Obama-era status quo, or that a "middle ground" is less likely to save our planet than an agenda corporatists will label "radical" and "extreme" -- dig this flatugasm from a Biden spokeshack: "What we learned from the Obama administration is unless we find middle ground on these issues, we risk not having any policies." Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph: "what we learned from the Obama Administration" is that once you signal to right-wingers that you won't fight, they'll just move further right, and you won't "hav(e) any policies" worth a damn.

In a related note, Mr. Biden thinks that, once our current President is out office, Republicans will have an "epiphany" and work with Democrats again. The evidence, of course, points to the opposite conclusion, especially when you remember that Republicans stonewalled the center-right Mr. Obama in 2009 and 2010 and were rewarded with 63 more House seats and six more Senate seats. The only thing that'll shake Republicans out of their stupor? Shame and humiliation in unmistakeable proportions in 2020. And Democrats will surely prevent that, by running out as many "electable" "non-ideological" "problem-solvers" as possible.

Rachel M. Cohen at In These Times visits Kentucky -- where high-paying coal miner jobs have left an indelible mark in residents' minds -- to describe some of the issues we'd have in shifting to renewable energy. A coal miner who has transitioned to renewable energy work warns that the transition costs money (he had to intern for six months) and might not persuade coal miners used to making high five figures who honestly believe that the coal jobs really are coming back. And a liberal activist also reminds us that even though Kentucky has moved right (especially in recent years), "FDR was just a peg or two under Jesus Christ here," which again suggests that maybe we need more actual liberals, and fewer "electable" centrists, running for office.

Greg Stohr at Bloomberg notices that "Mystery Delays Push Divisive Supreme Court Issues Into Election Year." Some analysts cite the contentiousness of the Kavanaugh hearings as a possible reason, but they may be misapprehending the lesson of those hearings a bit, i.e., that if those hearings had gone on into November, we'd probably have a larger Republican caucus in the Senate, and we might not even have a Democratic House! Delaying decisions on abortion, immigration, transgender issues, etc., into 2020 turns Republican voters out -- and regardless of the outcomes! If they rule the way Republicans would prefer, then "the President delivered," but if they don't, then "the President must be re-elected so he can get better judges on the Supreme Court." In the long run, though, this ain't gonna help John Roberts convince everyone that federal courts aren't political.

Finally, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) is the lone Republican to vote against one of our President's judicial nominees, specifically citing, as his reason, said nominee's 2011 characterization of former President Obama as an "un-American impostor." And Politico treats us to five paragraphs about how this is Mr. Romney's "latest break with the President," citing precisely two other "breaks." And note that the judicial nominee still got confirmed, because, like all the rest of them, Mitt Romney only stands on principle when it makes no difference.

Penny Rants for Saturday, May 11, 2019: concerning Democrat weakness, "liberal" media propagandizing, and more of President Manchild's shameful behavior.

From the "How Many Times Must I Tell These Pimps?" file: Joe Biden says our current Administration represents an "aberration" as far as the Republican Party is concerned. We could tabulate, with ease, all the ways in which that's so full of shit it's coming out its eyes, but let's instead remember that Hillary Clinton rode that trope all the way to 48% in the 2016 election. And then let us remind ourselves that trying to "appeal to Republican voters" is a vain cause: 25% of our current electorate is bat-guano insane, and another 25% will hold their noses in the voting booth because he's pro-life or appointed good judges or "slashed regulations." Better that our Democratic candidates consider why 100 million people don't vote in Presidential elections and maybe figure out how to turn some of them out. Hint: people who don't vote don't give one rat's hind quarter if Democrats think Republicans are good guys, because that's drama; these voters only care about their government doing right by them.

Dave Lindorff, writing at FAIR, catches our "liberal" media trying to fool large numbers of Venezuelans and Americans into thinking that attempted coup against President Maduro was actually succeeding. Seriously, the only other way to interpret some of these "news" "reports" is to assume incompetence on an unprecedented scale -- how does one invent an election the would-be coup leader Juan Guaido "won" (as CNN did) or fail to notice zero supporters in an airfield instead of "thousands" (also CNN) or run photos of Mr. Guaido addressing supporters on a completely different day (the New York Times)? Luckily, there are plenty of news organizations -- ones that aren't so insecure as to call themselves "The Most Trusted Name in News" -- doing good reporting on Venezuela right now; Mr. Lindorff lists a few, though you'll have to go to the internet to find them. And this, again, is why we need a la carte cable packaging. And net neutrality. And anti-trust enforcement.

The aforementioned New York Times does dig into our President's taxes, again, finding that he reported losses of over $1 billion on his federal tax forms between 1985 and 1994, and naturally our President responds by simultaneously calling the report a (sigh) "highly inaccurate Fake News hit job" and explaining the report's findings away: "(y)ou always wanted to show losses for tax purposes...almost all real estate developers did -- and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport." So he says "show losses for tax purposes" and I say "steal food out of the mouths of our children and our children's children," and folks who agree that defunding schools and libraries and police officers is "sport" are not the kind of folks I want in my foxhole. (Hey, speaking of Fox, the Fox and Friends crew think the losses the Times report depicts a life that's "pretty impressive" and "beyond what most of us could ever achieve," without mentioning that such a life is more within your grasp when your father gives you hundreds of millions of dollars.)

Finally, speaking of our President, I really thought that 2017 ad that both extolled his record and told his critics to get off his back within 30 seconds was the most appalling example of self-absorption I'd ever seen, but this twittergasm -- "(d)espite the tremendous success that I have had as President, including perhaps the greatest ECONOMY and most successful first two years of any President in history, they have stollen (sic) two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back" -- tops it. Or bottoms it, as the case may be. How can you be TEH GREATESTZ PREZNITZ EVAHZ!!!! and have your entire term as President "stollen" at the same time? For the man who won 46% of the popular vote, struts around like he won 66%, and whines like he won 26%, such mental gymnastics are child's play. And you know he misspelled "stolen" on purpose, in order to get everyone talking about that, and not about how shameful it is to see a grown man -- the nominal leader of the free world, no less! -- act like this in public.

Around the table: a Presidential veto over Yemen, and other revolting developments.

Ho hum, our President vetoes resolution aiming to end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, calling it a "dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities." Ugh, one more time: Congress authorizes war, not the President. Also, too, he suggests the resolution will "endanger() the lives of American citizens and brave service members," which is, also, exactly the opposite of how it works -- no one kills us out of jealousy; they kill us because our government can't stop interfering in their affairs. And the safest way to protect our soldiers? Stop sending them off to stupid wars.

It's about time someone noted that our "liberal" media constantly insist that our agitation for better and more liberal policies constitutes a "purity test," but never use that term to describe the centrist insistence that liberals toe the centrist line. Of course the policies we advocate, like Medicare-for-All, just so happen to be popular across the ideological spectrum -- Medicare-for-All even gains support from a considerable number of conservatives. So "purity tests" means "elites being pressured in ways they don’t like." Well, waaaaaaah.

In a related note, Peter Bloom at Common Dreams says that Sen. Sanders's Fox News town hall "revealed a different way of bringing the country together" -- namely, a "new type of political unity -- one based on a shared desire to transform a corrupt system rather than tribal party allegiances." Centrists would no doubt agree that we can only create "national unity" by appealing to a broad cross-section of the populace, but they somehow think a broad cross-section of the populace wants Social Security and Medicare cuts and constant appeasement of the farthest right Republicans. I think we've spent a long time tabulating exactly what Americans do want, and it sure ain't whatever keeps Our Glorious Elites in power.

Proving once again that a little alliteration can be a dangerous thing, our Administration announces a new round of sanctions against the "troika of tyranny," Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Gosh, no one sits on their laurels like a right-winger does -- Venezuela is the only nation on that list that hasn't been a right-wing bête noire for decades. I also presume the inclusion of Nicaragua might be in advance of a few gazillion ads showing Bernie Sanders in Nicaragua in the early '80s, which they may be overestimating as a crippling blow.

Finally, Sen. Mitch McConnell (E-KY) launches his re-election effort with a jab at Democrats over that Obama Supreme Court nomination Mr. McConnell's Senate refused to take up. I'm not going to lie and say it's not funny, but whom, exactly, does this convert? This does nothing but anger up the already-angry, and at some point angering up the already-angry simply doesn't work anymore -- particularly if (not that this is likely!) Mr. McConnell gets a decent opponent in 2020.

Around the table: thoughts about war, health care, clean water, and the absurd notions Our Glorious Elites entertain.

Saudi-led coalition bombs residential area in Sanaa, the capitol of Yemen, killing upwards of 11 people -- most of them children running away from a bombed-out school. But please, Administration spokeshacks, please keep telling us about your "serious constitutional concerns" about Congress for once asserting its constitutional war-making powers to keep us from slaughtering civilians in deference to an unreliable ally.

Dig this pile of horsedoodle from Forbes, entitled "Britain's Version of 'Medicare for All' is Struggling With Long Waits for Care." Tried to get an appointment with a specialist lately? Then you won't be impressed to hear that less than four-tenths of one percent of the British population have been waiting more than six months for some kind of indeterminate health care. Been to the ER lately? Then you won't be impressed to hear that 15% of good British folks have to wait more than four hours at the ER. Also, has it occurred to the author of this piece that if wait times are up or post-cancer longevity's down since some date in the past, that might just be due to a government running the program badly? In England, if your government's running the health care system into the ground, you can elect a new government. In America, we can't just elect new big health insurance corporations -- and the result is that Hep C patients face annual six-figure medical bills, diabetics ration insulin until they die, and folks at risk of anaphylactic shock go to the park without the $600 EpiPen that'll save them from death-by-bee-sting.

George Goehl at The Guardian asks if our "unsafe water crisis" can "unite Americans." Long story short: everyone drinks water, so yes. Long story somewhat longer: about one in 15 Americans drink unhealthy water now, and it's not just "those people" in Flint but also poor whites in the shadow of factory farms in Iowa, so hell yes. If Democrats are lucky enough to hold the House and win the Senate and the Presidency in 2020, they could help matters immensely by doing something good with their power for fucking once. We'll stay on them the whole way, but they have to do their jobs, too.

Alice Speri at The Intercept writes about, get this, American law enforcement officials supposing that (in her words) "the mostly black activists demanding an end to police violence in the U.S. might join with Islamic fundamentalist groups promoting violence abroad." How do law enforcement personnel (and media personnel!) draw a line from creating an oppressive "Islamic state" in the Levant to ensuring police don't beat the crap out of black folks in America? I kid, of course -- if you're an American ragehead, everything you don't like is equal to everything else you don't like, and all these everythings are part of a massive conspiracy specifically targeting you.

Finally, you knew this was coming: our Administration actually plans to run on its record "protecting" our clean air and clean water. Kudos to Bloomberg for calling our Administration's case "cherry-picking"! Of course, not only has our President benefited from laws and regulations put in place before he ever graced us with his presence, but he's also benefited from his own incompetence, as most of his attempts to roll back clean air and clean water regulations have died in court. And if you're impressed that WE HAVE TEH CLEANESTEST AIRZ EVAHZ!!!!!, remember that Tha Bush Mobb used to do victory laps every year about record homeownership.

Around the table: mostly about taxes, antitrust, and real compromise.

We learn from Jesse Eisinger and Paul Kiel at ProPublica that the IRS has had a tough time going after ultrawealthy tax-dodgers. Congress deserves some of the blame, for repeatedly slashing IRS funding and thus helping drive experts out of the agency, but of course the bad actors who design these labyrinthine tax-avoidance schemes deserve most of the blame. And dig the chutzpah of at least one IRS target proclaiming (successfully, it seems!) that the IRS's detailed questions about his dealings were themselves a "burden." As if their schemes aren't a burden for the rest of us!

In a peripherally-related note, another ProPublica report wonders why a particular impoverished Mississippi county has the highest IRS audit rate in America. You won't like the answer: because more than half the county uses the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC), and the IRS audits EITC recipients more than anyone but the very richest taxpayers. The article doesn't say it, but I would guess that EITC audits are pretty easy pickings for the IRS -- you don't exactly have an army of folks getting the EITC who know how to game the system as well as a billionaire does.

Sen. Wyden (D-OR) proposes taxing capital gains more like income, since it is, in fact, income. Details are scant at present, but the Wyden plan would go after the "appreciation of assets owned by the very wealthy as income each year" as income; if that strikes you as "taxing folks for the sin of holding onto their property," consider that letting the wealthy build up tens of billions of dollars this way essentially taxes folks for the sin of working, since we don't generally get the opportunity to buy property and sit on it. Also consider that wealthy folks frequently set up deals so that it doesn't look like they're selling their property when they actually are. (Mr. Wyden's plan would also eliminate capital gains tax cuts for the very wealthy, which would make that tax more progressive.)

Ho hum, our President promised that corporate tax amnesty repatriation would bring back as much as $4 trillion, but corporations have brought back less than $700 billion, and they're bringing the money back a lot more slowly now. Promise made, promise kept! Still, if his eventual Democratic opponent is just another Democrat who doesn't mean what they say, then this moron of a President will still get re-elected no matter how many promises he breaks.

Speaking of which, noted pre-emptive compromiser Barack Obama worries about a "circular firing squad" that could torpedo the next Democratic nominee. Uh, no: liberals demanding what they want and demanding that their elected officials actually fight for it will get us far better policy in America, and Mr. Obama certainly shouldn't act as if liberals being liberal "weakens the movement." The man piddled away his 2008 mandate from the voters by "reaching out" to an opposition party that did nothing but stamp its feet and yell no, so he has no standing to lecture us on the importance of compromise. You compromise from strength, not weakness.

Finally, if you're wondering how right-wingers and their enablers will attack Sen. Warren's proposal to break up big tech corporations, the incomparable David Dayen provides us with a primer on all their bad arguments. Go and study the whole thing, from the multitudinous conflicts of interest antitrust critics have to the irrelevant worst-case scenarios they concoct, and also note that breaking up big corporations is an honorable American tradition, over a century old, no matter how many corporatists call it "radical." Of course you already know that calling something "radical," like calling something "socialist," is a signal that the person doing the name-calling already knows they can't win the argument on the merits.

Around the table: featuring yet another reason we need *a la carte* cable packaging.

The incomparable Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs reads South Bend Mayor/Democratic Presidential aspirant Pete Buttigieg's autobiography, finds it wanting. There are literally dozens of insights here, but let's just say that Mr. Buttigieg is just another guy who wants you to think he's a liberal -- since liberal policy prescriptions are actually quite popular! -- but is actually just another center-right technocrat who values "bipartisan cooperation" with the political party that thinks cooperation equals capitulation. Also, too, when folks complain about "out-of-touch" elites, the Harvard- and Oxford-educated, consultant firm-groomed Mr. Buttigieg is really what they mean, no matter how nice he seems or how many languages he speaks. Every time he mentions "smart sewers" in the first debate, take a drink.

Study finds that employment in the solar power industry fell by a little over 3 percent last year, largely due to tariffs on Asian imports. I'd prefer we made the solar panels here, too, but I'm sure some fossil fuel CEO or other told our President that this would happen if he slapped tariffs on the nations that produce these panels (or the materials the panels need), and our President laughed with glee at the thought. But not only do these tariffs come down gradually and then disappear after 2022, federal tax credits will also come down gradually and then disappear after 2022, which means solar job creation will likely go back up in the short term, so I guess our President gets to take credit for that, too. Seriously, none of this is beyond his ability to calculate -- the man only wins political battles by manufacturing crises like these. Just like Mr. Bush.

Almost-bankrupt corporation Sears hands out $25 million in bonuses to executives, then cancels life insurance for its retirees. Bonuses for what? For finding a hedge fund to grind the corporation into the ground for good while sucking the marrow out of it for the executives? Always they demand loyalty, but never do they show it to us "little people." When a man realizes he needs to live in a gated community for his own safety, does he start to think that maybe the problem is him?

Our President, less than a week after saying he wanted to completely destroy the Affordable Care Act and make Republicans the "party of health care," has announced that Republicans won't vote on their new plan, whatever it is, until after the 2020 election, which sure isn't the textbook definition of courage. Also, why does he imagine that "private health insurance" is "beloved"? The only people who really like their health insurance are the people who haven't had to use it lately, and it's a long walk from "like it, I guess" to "TEH BELOVEDZ!!!!!"

Finally, Fox News's Jeannie Pirro returns to the air after a short hiatus, and declares that folks who accused our President of colluding with Russia are "traitorous" and "treasonous." I sure am glad she said both words, or I wouldn't have understood what she meant! Seriously, two things: one, Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution doesn't call accusations, or attempts to prove accusations, "treasonous." Two, don't people hate TV pundits who yell all the time? I'm old enough to remember when on-air meltdowns ended careers. This is yet another reason we need a la carte cable packaging -- we're paying for all these tantrum-throwers on our TV, even if we're not watching them, and if we could stop paying for them, they'd clean up their act right quick.

Penny Rants for Sunday, March 31, 2019: concerning scare numbers and rhetorical hostage situations.

Dean Baker at Common Dreams reminds us that most Americans think huge amounts of taxpayer money go toward things like food stamps when, actually, they don't. People think we spend "20 to 30 percent" of our federal budget on food stamps and welfare when the actual figure is more like two percent. Mr. Baker essentially blames scare numbers: "(d)iscussing budget numbers in millions, billions and trillions is incredibly irresponsible reporting," particularly when reporters don't discuss these numbers in the context of, say, an annual federal budget of $4 trillion. Also, too, reporters regurgitate scare numbers about budgets without mentioning that they're budget figures over 10 years, and I'd be lying if I said that was solely a right-wing problem. And while some folks seem to think Americans are math-challenged, I don't -- I think Americans hate confronting the fact that they don't make enough money to pay their bills. We'd all be a lot better at math if we could make the math in our lives work.

When I first confronted the headline "Equality Act = Female Erasure," I said that of course it had to be written by Rod Dreher, the man who seems to think compassion and hysteria are interchangeable concepts. How would extending protections of the Civil Rights Act to gay and transgender folk "erase" "females"? By putting men in women's locker rooms, apparently. While it's true that women would fear a man in their locker room more than a man would fear a woman in theirs, women don't live very much of their lives in locker rooms, and locker rooms are not a law of physics unto themselves -- they're spaces that could be converted to single-person water closets with minimal difficulty. Anyway, leading with an anecdote about a transgender woman who acted badly in public (when will our laws ever protect property from destruction?) sure doesn't make it any more convincing. And the idea that men will call themselves women simply to win sporting events? Yikes, doesn't Mr. Dreher remember peer pressure?

When I first confronted the headline "The Liberal Case Against Bernie," I said that of course it had to be written by Eric Alterman, the man who hates Ralph Nader so much that he once dismissed his entire consumer protection legacy. And just as Mr. Alterman blames George W. Bush's Presidency on Mr. Nader and not, for example, on George W. Bush, he naturally blames Mr. Sanders for Mrs. Clinton's loss, and not Mrs. Clinton for her inability to defeat the worst Presidential candidate anyone can remember running. And he says the "take-no-prisoners" campaign Mr. Sanders supposedly plans to run would alienate the electorate? "Playing not to lose," by supporting candidates who don't mean what they say unless they say it to big corporate donors, actually alienates the electorate! This President's an ogre, but the professional hostage-takers on the left won't beat him. (I did click through to Mr. Eichenwald's summary of Republican oppo research on Sen. Sanders, but we all had worse on our President, and he still won.)

Around the table: featuring a series of unsurprising developments.

It may be surprising at first to contemplate a study concluding that social media usage actually has very little effect on folks' beliefs, but when you think about it, most of us seek out sources that we already more or less agree with (and can do so more easily than ever before). The study's author concludes that something else compels Americans to hold to ridiculous beliefs; I submit that cause is a Republican party that makes ever more desperate and hysterical arguments to hold onto power it hasn't earned.

Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us that "Renouncing Violence is a Demand Made Almost Exclusively of Muslims." After all, can you remember CNN dragging a white nationalist on to renounce violence? More likely CNN will wring its hands over whether the KKK can "rebrand" after 150 years of murder! We should also remember that only folks with socioeconomic privilege have the option to renounce violence; George W. Bush never had to commit violence himself because he was able to get other people to commit violence on his behalf.

Our Supreme Court stops execution because Texas wouldn't allow a Buddhist cleric to attend, a far cry from last month's decision not to stop a different execution because Alabama wouldn't allow a Muslim cleric to attend. Boy, I really wish it were more complicated than this -- the word "Muslim" juices up a rage gland the way "Buddhist" doesn't. Didn't conservatives tell us that confirming their judges would ensure that judges wouldn't interpret the law however it suits them?

U.S. District Court Judge strikes down Administration plan to water down the definition of "Association Health Plans" so that virtually any organization or corporation could evade the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Requirements like, you know, making health insurers cover certain health conditions that everyone but this Administration and its cronies want to cover. Sometimes this Administration's animus -- in this case, toward pre-existing condition bans -- is really hard to understand. Except, of course, as wanton evil. But voters won't punish them, as long as Democrats keep putting up candidates who don't mean what they say.

Lisa Beach at Yes! magazine describes an Orlando, FL farmers market that helps fight teenage pregnancy, crime, and dropouts. Not just by "putting those ungrateful kids to work," but by putting them to work maintaining our civilization, as farmers markets most assuredly do, far more than, say, penny stock trading. And this farmers market just so happens to serve a primarily African-American community largely bereft of grocery stores. This would be a thing that would help stop school shootings, too -- as I recall from my youth, kids desperately need something to think about other than themselves, and running a farmers market would surely do that.

Finally, speaking of folks who clearly never thought very much about other people as a child, our President thinks the two FBI officials having an affair with each other and exchanging negative texts about our President while investigating his ties to Russia should be in jail for treason. How many times must I tell these pimps! Working with someone's political enemies -- and we'd still have to prove that Messrs. Strozk and Page actually did that! -- does not violate Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution, which requires an actual enemy, not just "someone the President doesn't like." File this, too, under "The President is Not America."

Around the table: tabulating another reason why satire doesn't seem to work anymore.

You heard that wages went up 2.8% over the last year? Well, Patrick W. Watson at Forbes reminds us that inflation went up 2.7% over the last year, meaning that just about all that wage growth got eaten up before good Americans could benefit from it. Between this news and a weak March jobs report (only 20,000 jobs created), our Deal-Maker-in-Chief had better hope that the economy doesn't enter a recession while he's in office, because then the only reason to vote for him is racism. And even in America, that ain't enough.

In a peripherally-related note, February's federal budget deficit was an eye-popping $234 billion, a one-month record even President Obama's Great Recession-hobbled economy couldn't match. Of course, our Administration alternates between outright denying the deficit has gone up and blaming Democrats, neither of which exactly constitutes leadership. (Neither of these are even true -- the Republican-controlled Congress has handed our President many budget resolutions he didn't like.)

Alarmed that our "liberal" media is calling the Venezuelan opposition leader a "moderate"? Well, Alan McLeod at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media calls pretty much everyone it likes a "moderate" or a "centrist," at least as far back as Adolf Hitler, apparently! Also, too, our "liberal" media allows right-wingers to smear actual moderate centrists like Barack Obama as "socialists" without raising objections. I do wonder whether calling Mr. Guaido (and others like him) "social Democrats" is all that smart, though, given that our "liberal" media constantly excoriates "Democratic socialists," and that dichotomy invites unhelpful comparisons to the well-noted enmity between the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea.

Presidential hopeful Beto O'Rourke slams Israeli President Binyamin Netanyahu, saying he has "openly sided with racists." I'm surprised to learn that he's made similarly unconventional statements about Israel in the past, but though I'd be happy to be wrong about this, I can't help but think he'll walk back such comments within 48 hours, thus demonstrating why he'd lose to our current President in a general election. People hate politicians who don't mean what they say, after all, and our President gives the appearance of meaning what he says even when he says stuff that flatly contradicts other stuff he's said.

Ho hum, right-wing news outlets treat as actual news a "satirical" story about a fictional Kamala Harris bill proposing that police get supervisor approval before shooting people. At least Blue News Network (where the story originates) doesn't claim to be a "news and satire website," like many actual fake news websites do. But their satire, frankly, isn't very good, not even in a Lindsay-Anderson-playing-it-close-to-the-chest sort of way, and it makes you wonder if maybe folks can't tell satire from truth at least in part because you can find so much more bad satire out there than you could in the old days. I haven't heard of anyone confusing an Onion story for truth in a long time, after all.

Finally, Igor Derysh at Salon reveals that our Administration has lost a staggering 94 percent of lawsuits over its regulatory changes, which isn't surprising to those of us who have been attending our President's apparent incompetence in following the law. You have to remember, also, that he's losing a lot of these cases before a federal judiciary that's mostly Republican-appointed over the last 40 years. I hope it won't be too much to ask that our President's "national emergency" declaration and his FCC's net neutrality repeal also die in court soon.

Around the table: the worst word in the English language, and other revelations.

John Mauldin at Forbes announces that "The Average American Can't Save Enough to Retire" -- and that's mainly because the average American doesn't make enough money. Take that, rich boss who looks down on everyone who's not like him! I can't really fault Mr. Mauldin for talking about retirement in terms of "cruises and golf tournaments," or bills only in terms of paying off your house or car, since I imagine that's how his intended audience at Forbes thinks about these things. And perhaps some of them will get the message, however muted, that they're not paying their employees enough to have a decent-sized IRA.

Fran Quigley at TruthOut warns us that big pharma corporations are trying to deflect from their role in pricing life-saving drugs too high by nattering on about middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers." Because what else can they do when you have them dead to rights on jacking up the price of insulin so much that some diabetics skip doses which diabetics cannot ever do? Just remember that big pharma corporations pay their executives tens of millions of dollars and report profits as high as 40%, and that the price of insulin has increased tenfold over the last 20 years, which is, to say the least, a lot faster than inflation. (Also, note that pharmacy benefit managers don't set a drug's list price.)

Buried in this account of how our President hates the idea of self-driving cars, not that he's doing anything about it, is the statement that Administration Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao faces a "challenge" to "manage safety concerns while promoting U.S. innovation." If a car isn't safe, how is it "innovative"? Are we "innovating" on the definition of safety now? To include, you know, stuff that's not safe? "Innovation" is really the worst word in the English language. You can safely decide that anyone who deploys it as an unambiguous positive is a fool.

Janine Jackson at FAIR reminds us, in the wake of the news that the Venezuelan government didn't blow up those aid convoys at all, that "Exposure of Another Pro-War Lie Doesn’t Make Media More Skeptical of Pro-War Claims." You have to wonder why our "liberal" media keep going to the same people who are always wrong about everything -- a phenomenon we've observed repeatedly, such as when folks who swore up and down that the Iraq war would be easy-peasy kept getting cited as "experts" in news reports -- but of course we already know why: because war makes big corporations money, and media outlets don't challenge money.

If you're wondering why this session's Medicare-for-All bill has fewer House Democratic supporters than last session's Medicare-for-All bill did, despite there being, you know, more Democrats in the House this session, you can take comfort in the fact that quite a few of last session's Democrats supported it because it had no chance of passing, and its chances of passing grow with the passage of time. You can take less comfort in recalling that Democrats sure do have a habit of sabotaging good ideas when they have the power to do so -- but you can take more comfort in knowing that our job isn't to elect more Democrats, but to make the politicians in power do our will.

Finally, in a related note, David Dayen reminds us that California Senator/Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris loves to celebrate her role in getting that $25 billion settlement from banksters over foreclosures, but that the settlement itself is nothing to celebrate. That goes beyond the fact that banksters were able to write that $25 billion off their taxes, and none of them went to jail, even though they obviously broke the law -- a lot of that settlement money didn't actually help anyone keep their home, though that was, ostensibly, its whole purpose. Think of that the next time someone tells you that you have to support Kamala Harris because she's "electable" or "sensible" or whatever -- in these times, these words mean "part of the problem."

Around the table: starring the usual cast of right-wing whiners and Democrat weaklings.

You should read Bess Levin every day, though you don't need her to tell you that our Administration's 2020 budget is a "next-level horror show" -- though, then again, maybe you do need her to help you confront the extreme BS coming from yet another "acting" member of this Administration, acting OMB Director Russ Vought, who thinks it's some kind of achievement for a President to "attempt to tackle the debt within eight years." "Attempt"? Really? I guess our President wants a participation trophy.

Uh oh: Administration claims that forces allied with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro set an aid convoy on fire, but video evidence shows that an anti-government protestor did it, although apparently by accident. I was going to say "and there's yet another reason this Administration isn't as bad as Tha Bush Mobb," but then I remembered that Tha Bush Mobb couldn't get Mr. Maduro's predecessor, Hugo Chavez, out of office even after literally staging a coup. Other Administration claims about Mr. Maduro burning food and medical aid have also changed subtly upon being confronted with contrary evidence. I bet we didn't see any of that on the TV news, though.

Did you know there was a "debate" over whether payday lenders gouge people? According to NPR, there is, and it's a debate that appears to have our CFPB, a handful of payday lending corporation spokeshacks, and literally one person who used payday loans on one side, and the rest of us on the other. If NPR is too "liberal," as inattentive folks often say, then it must be a Robert Frost kind of liberal -- you know, the liberal who's "too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."

White Pennsylvanian man puts up a billboard that says "whites have rights too" and calls possibly every politician of color he knows a "racist," then says he really only meant to "start a dialogue." "I just wanted to start a dialogue" is, as you know, the whine that emanates from everyone who talks without thinking, and did you notice he talked about how much he cares about "how you stand for my flag" and then corrected himself to say "our flag"? I sure did. All together now: waaaaaaaaah.

Finally, Rahm Emanuel gives his fellow-Democrats and us uppity liberals "advice" about how to beat our President in 2020 I won't tabulate my objections to Mr. Emanuel's piece, since they number approximately one per point made, but I will say this: nearly 100 million Americans didn't vote in 2016; what if even one-tenth of them are waiting for a Presidential nominee who might actually, you know, do stuff that helps people? The candidate who captures them will be unbeatable, "socialist" or not.

Around the table: describing a couple of false alarms about Medicare-for-All as well as some instances of Our Glorious Elites acting badly.

We shouldn't be surprised that Medicare-for-All has lost some support as those politicians who've only recently come out to support it don't know how to answer basic questions about it, but check out the Wall Street Journal's statement that "net support" for Medicare-for-All has fallen among registered voters in polling from 30% to 12%. What is "net support"? "Net support" is a figure you get by subtracting opposition from support in poll numbers, meaning that 12% more voters support Medicare-for-All than support it -- and it's also a figure you trot out if you want to associate Medicare-for-All with a much smaller number than, say, the number of voters who actually support it, since that number's just about always above 50%. You might even call it a "scare number," since people use it so they can scare you into giving up the fight.

And here's a news item that helps explain the previous one: the day Rep. Jayapal introduced the new Medicare-for-All bill, stocks in health insurance corporations dropped by almost five percent. You need to be ready for right-wingers telling you that "yet another reason" we can't have Medicare-for-All is that it'll cause "too much havoc on the markets." Worse, you'll need to prepare for a Democratic President we settle for (who is not to be confused with the ones we might fight for) saying the exact same damn thing, and thus insuring nothing but continued Democratic electoral losses at the federal, state, and local levels.

Former Maine Gov. Paul LePage says getting of the Electoral College would effectively keep white folks from becoming President anymore, which is fitting, coming from the fellow who always strutted around like everybody voted for him but who only won two terms (with 37% and 48% of the vote, respectively) because a third-party candidate drew a lot of support. It's also fitting that he struts around openly defending "white people" when he undoubtedly experienced hate from other Maine residents due to his Franco-American heritage. Remember, good peoples: don't forget where you came from, because you don't want to be like Paul LePage.

Ho hum, our President says he was "misinterpreted" after saying that he accepted Kim Jong-Un's assurances that the latter simply "didn't know" about the late Otto Warmbier's treatment while detained in North Korea, despite his original comments (the ones that provoked the Warmbier family into speaking out) existing on tape. I guess it really would kill him to admit he's wrong about something, but of course that isn't a demonstration of strength, as his votaries seem to think; it's a demonstration of weakness. Strong people can admit they're wrong, make amends, and move on. Our President can't. What a role model.

Finally, dig Sen. McConnell (E-KY) trying to blame the imbroglio in North Carolina's 9th Congressional district (where the election fraud perpetrated by a Republican operative was so pervasive that they have to do the election over) on Democratic refusal to support Republican vote-suppressions schemes. Of course Mr. McConnell (I watched his little speech so you wouldn't have to!) mischaracterizes complaints about Republicans' vote-suppression efforts as a "lack of concern" about vote suppression, and of course we all knew sooner or later Republicans would step up and claim that only they could stop the voter fraud they seem to be the ones getting caught doing. But am I being too optimistic to note that, once again, it's Mob Boss Mitch delivering a message better delivered by a junior Senator looking to make his bones?

Around the table: unexpectedly with more political analysis than usual.

House passes "resolution of disapproval" aiming to nullify the "national emergency" declaration our President has used to fund his vanity border wall, but with only 13 Republicans joining virtually the entire Democratic caucus, which means the House doesn't have enough to override a veto. The resolution might pass the Senate, too, with at least three Republicans saying they'll vote for it at this writing, but squeaking to a 51-49 victory won't override a veto, either -- which means it'll probably die in court, at approximately the moment a judge contemplates an emergency that the President himself said he "didn't need" to declare, but declared anyway so he could build his vanity wall more quickly.

Let's not get too anxious about Gallup's finding that "Conservatives Greatly Outnumber Liberals in 19 U.S. States," not just because the most "conservative" states tend to be the least populous (New York state, for example, has a higher population than Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina combined) but mainly you're asking people whether they think of themselves as "conservative" or "liberal." For instance, how many of these self-described conservatives support Medicare-for-All health insurance, which our "liberal" media constantly tells us is a "far-left" position? Given the majority-to-supermajority that Medicare-for-All gets in most polls these days, quite a few.

Poll finds more Democratic and Democratic-leaning partisans wanting their party to move in a "moderate" direction than a "liberal" direction, which you'll find as meaningless as I do if you're invested less in the direction of some political party and more in the direction of our country. You'll find it even more meaningless when you find that close to six in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaners want their party to move in a more conservative direction, like they all enjoy all the swordfighting their standard-bearers have been doing over "who's more conservative."

Some pundits think that Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) would have an easier time beating Beto O'Rourke (who hasn't yet declared his intentions for any 2020 race) than Ted Cruz did, because the "spread" between Mr. Cornyn's favorable and unfavorable ratings is larger than Mr. Cruz's in a Quinnipiac poll. I say they're wrong. First Read doesn't spell out that Quinnipiac has Mr. Cruz's favorable rating at 51%, much higher than Mr. Cornyn's 43%, which tells me that Mr. Cruz is the more formidable opponent despite his unfavorables (40% to Mr. Cornyn's 26%), because people would always prefer to vote for someone. Mr. Cornyn will skate to victory anyway if Democrats don't nominate someone people want to vote for; perhaps Mr. O'Rourke would have the best chance at simulating such a person.

Finally, the estimable Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs advises us to "Ignore All Arguments About What Is 'Politically Feasible.'" If you were as sick as I was of hearing Democrats refuse to do anything bold because of the "landscape" -- they were talking about the "landscape" when they had a Democratic President, a Democratic House, and a filibuster-proof Senate majority, you recall! -- you'll find this article quite sympathetic, even though its truths ("predictions tend to assume that the range of possible outcomes today is going to be the same tomorrow," "(e)ven from a purely pragmatic and compromising perspective, aiming low is irrational") transcend particulars. But you'll also find it sympathetic if you've been watching Republicans consistently ignore what's "politically feasible" and win.

Around the table: our Supreme Court does a good thing, plus a lot of other people do bad things.

Our Supreme Court unanimously rules that states and localities must adhere to our Constitution before they can indulge in asset forfeiture shenanigans. To be sure, their ruling won't end asset forfeiture, but it will give defendants a way to argue that seizing their property without being able to convincingly tie them to an actual drug funding network violates our 8th Amendment protections against excessive fines. Maybe one day we'll be able to get our Supreme Court to recognize that seizing property without convicting someone of a crime is itself an excessive fine, but the arc of history surely bends toward justice even when it looks less like an arc and more like a plank.

I'm not sure saying that our "liberal" media have been busy lately "erasing" the positive effects of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela gives us the whole picture, because it sure seems to me that our "liberal" media have never acknowledged these gains! The Chavismos have definitely reduced poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and even racism; does that make it OK for the late Mr. Chavez to have demanded (and received) "rule-by-decree" power in 2000 and 2007, for example? No, of course not. But painting the works of the Bolivarian revolution the way our "liberal" media do sure doesn't tell us the whole story, and not least because they all forget to mention U.S. sanctions on Venezuela as the main contributor to Venezuela's economic woes.

Another day, another report showing big corporations getting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax rebates despite making hundreds of millions (or billions) in profits. And another day, another "expert" asserting that corporations should never pay more taxes than they owe because they're supposed to please their shareholders, when the issue is actually that we don't make them owe enough in the first place! Seriously, that statement has almost everything I hate about right-wing argument in it -- the gaslighting, the changing of the goalposts, the tacit admission that they can't win on the merits.

Surprise, surprise, our President talks tough about stopping migrant smugglers while undermining actual efforts to do that. Typical. To be sure, this state of affairs results (at least in this Administration) from overzealousness in one area (deportation) resulting in neglecting another (attacking smuggling rings), but when a man spends so much time talking about how super-awesome he is, you do tend to be less forgiving of his faults, and who could blame you? Besides a ragehead, that is.

When you encounter a poll indicating that Sen. Mitch McConnell's poll numbers are seriously underwater just 20 months before he goes before the voters again, you may remember we were at this point in 2013, also, and he went on to paste his opponent -- you remember his opponent, Alison Lundergran Grimes, the one who refused to say whether she voted for Barack Obama for President? Lesson: if Democrats won't put up someone people will want to vote for, then Mob Boss Mitch will cruise to another term, no matter how little Kentuckians seem to like him.

Finally, with his Administration's own climate change assessment and intelligence community having the temerity to tell him things he doesn't want to hear, our President is putting together another climate change panel, to be headed up by an unregenerate climate change denier who has said -- sit down for this one! -- that the "demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler." Just like! Remember how we kicked carbon dioxide out of our schools, segregated it into its own ghettoes, boycotted and vandalized its shops, made it wear yellow Stars of David, and then froze its property and assets when it tried to leave for other lands? When they say a little learning makes a man dangerous, this must be what they mean.

Around the table: starring jobs that create jobs! Which are not boss jobs.

If you thought about it for a minute, you'd realize that yes, manufacturing jobs actually create even more jobs simply because of all the jobs folks need to have to support them, but it's still nice to have some data behind it. When you think that auto workers not only support the jobs that make the tires and the windshields but also the jobs at the restaurant where they go after work -- not to mention the taxes all those workers pay! -- then you know that when bosses say "American workers make too much money," you can just tell them "that's the price you pay for American workers creating jobs."

Surprise, surprise, an anonymous-of-course Democrat has been talking about ginning up a primary challenge for Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). That'll show her! Even Ms. Ocasio-Cortez couldn't care less if she gets primaried next year, but I gotta say that talking about all the "numerous council people and state legislators who’ve been waiting 20 years for that seat" sure ain't winning talk. A seat in Congress is no pearl of great price, but it still goes to the one who seizes the moment more than the one who "waits their turn."

Alan McLeod at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media define "'the Venezuelan people' as a term that exclusively means "anyone who agrees with US policy." Remember that when you read individual letters-to-the-editor claiming they "speak" for those Venezuelans who returned Mr. Maduro to office at a higher clip than anyone did for our last two Presidents, and remember, also, when they show you photos of anti-Maduro protests, they're not telling you about the sizable pro-Maduro protests, let alone the polling information showing that the Venezuelan General Assembly (headed by Venezuela's putative savior, Juan Guaîdo) is about as unpopular as Mr. Maduro. Also, too, how much good has American intervention done lately? Besides for American corporations, I mean?

Former CEO/independent Presidential hopeful Howard Schultz says Elizabeth Warren asked him for a donation once but he wouldn't do it because he thinks her policies would "lead to socialism." I'm sick of people who throw the word "socialism" around to describe whatever they don't like. I'm even sicker of people who once depended on public housing (not to mention everything else taxes pay for!) throwing the word "socialism" around. But you know what I'm most sick of? People who call things "socialism" and then, when mildly pressed on whether that's what they really mean, retreat to calling them "a level of socialism." The world would be a much better place if folks would just keep their mouths shut when they don't know stuff.

Our Supreme Court temporarily stays a Louisiana anti-abortion law from going into effect until later on this week. I thought they'd either let it go into effect or stop it entirely, but I should have considered that they might issue a temporary stay and let the drama go on another week -- as a prelude toward issuing a ruling that would let the Louisiana anti-abortion law go into effect permanently, though it differs little from the Texas law our Court struck down. I guess I should have figured that Chief Justice Roberts would want to peruse every definite article in a law to make sure it's the "same" law they already struck down.

Finally, there's Kellyanne Conway, the pride of Atco, NJ, saying that if Sen. Booker "were a Republican running against (declared female candidates), they immediately would call him a sexist for running against these women in the Democratic field." Just like we called every single male Republican candidate in 2016 a "sexist" for having the temerity to run against Carly Fiorina? Wait, we didn't do that? Of course we didn't do that. We might have called them sexist because they were being sexist, but not for running against a woman for the nomination. Stupid people need to go away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: concerning the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-All, among other topics.

Ellen Brown instructs us that a nationwide network of public banks could fund the Green New Deal that's all the talk these days. I'd prefer bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income myself, but public banks are a good thing (as the good people of North Dakota can tell you!), and I'm sure they can help. Be sure to note America's Last Economist, Michael Hudson, instructing us that hyperinflation has just about never resulted from "governments just printing money," but rather from "foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate." The dollar is virtually a world currency, so I suspect that's even less likely to happen here.

I was ready for a big argument with Michael Corcoran at TruthOut about his statement that "Democrat Support for a Public Option" is the "Biggest Obstacle" to a Medicare-for-All health insurance system. I still regard all the ZOMG TEH 34 TRILLYUNZ OF DOLLARZ!!!!! scaremongering as the biggest obstacle, and if you slay that dragon, the others will fall more easily. But the litany of Democrat weakness he tabulates is still pretty depressing, and we all remember how President Obama put a wedge between us and single-payer with the "public option" he clearly had no intention of fighting for. And we also remember when Sen. Lieberman supported the Medicare buy-in until approximately the moment it had a chance of passing, which should serve as a warning to Sens. Harris and Booker as they try to "support" Medicare-for-All without actually helping us to get there.

Kelly Blanchard at TruthOut says "It's Time for an Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill," but if you remember Carly Fiorina supporting that during the last Presidential campaign, you do have a question: what will the cost of the over-the-counter birth control pill be? Prescriptions do tend to save money on your out-of-pocket drug costs, even on drugs commonly available over the counter, so making birth control more affordable will also require intervention from our federal government -- which is always less likely when Republican winged monkeys get too much of the say about everything. Hard to believe that, for Barry Goldwater, the uterus was one more thing our government had no business interfering with.

Adam Johnson at FAIR catches our "liberal" media getting its shorts in a bunch about some prisoners, somewhere, getting steak once a year during the holidays. Yes, it's not fair that prison guards work without pay because our President holds our government hostage over a wall, but our "liberal" media don't bust out best stock photos when prisoners find maggots in their food. And I think it may be a bit sanguine to call this story "(c)lickbait that'll soon be forgotten" -- in fact, I bet a lot of our President's votaries will bring up TEH PRIZNURZ EATINGZ TEH STEAKZ!!!!! every time someone corners them in an argument about inhumane prison treatment.

Finally, American carbon emissions jumped over 3 percent last year. You may recall that the IEA found carbon emissions dropping worldwide as late as 2015. But dig our EPA Chief's attempt to take credit for carbon emissions dropping from 2016 to 2017 -- you know, before he stopped doing the things that helped carbon emissions come down! The road to hell is paved with the skulls of men like Andrew Wheeler.

Around the table: another net neutrality death, another Republican pretending to be human, and other sideshows.

You probably didn't hear about this, but the FCC just reclassified text messaging as a Title I "information service" versus a Title II "communications service," meaning that big telephone corporations will now be able to censor, block, or throttle your text messages if they like. Naturally the FCC claims it's all about preventing "spam," but that's utter BS, because what are they doing about the actual problem of spam phone calls? And don't think this won't happen to you, because corporations have been blocking text messages from political activist groups while screaming "controversy" for years now.

Color me unimpressed that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) now makes the same complaints about the 2017 tax "reform" that the rest of us do -- particularly that it enables stock buybacks over worker raises. He voted for the damn thing, after all, and all he did at the time was turn the bill's 15-percentage-point corporate tax rate cut into a 14-point cut. And his proposed solutions (taxing stock buybacks at the dividend tax rate! Instead of, heaven forfend, outlawing stock buybacks like we did until 1982!) sound positively Clintonian in their capacity to a) lull voters to sleep and b) utterly fail to solve the problem. Marco Rubio: he gives empty suits a bad name.

So what's the worst thing about outgoing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signing legislation to curb the power of the incoming Democrat Governor and Attorney General? That state Republicans will get even more power to nullify clean air and clean water regulations? That early voting will get curtailed again even though courts have struck similar efforts down before? That Mr. Walker resorted to a Venn diagram to "prove" the bill doesn't hurt the incoming Governor all that much? That it lets state Republican legislators waste taxpayer money on private lawyers when they get sued? Or that Gov. Walker made sure he gave $28 million more in corporate welfare to Kimberly-Clark (which has, as you know, already laid off about one out of every eight of its workers in February, and after getting all that corporate welfare from the federal tax "reform" bill, no less) the day before signing a bill that would have prevented him from doing that? It's hard to know where to start. Indeed, it's almost like that's the idea.

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut surveys some of the recent damage this Administration has done to veterans and refugees and concludes that it all "serves only as yet another bowlful of blood spooned to Trump’s execrable base." But, sadly, this base has been around for decades -- you remember all those "war on terror" voters and Tea Partiers and "Regulation Nation" teeth-gnashers and "All Lives Matter" squealers? Well, these are all the same people. And what really made them? A government of malicious Republicans and weak Democrats that funnels taxpayer money to its cronies and does little other than give us the back of its hand. Really, given how terrible our government has been over the last 40-odd years, we should take credit as Americans for not having more crazy people.

I have to dig into my "Stuff I Should Never Bother With" file to note that when right-wingers are passing around memes on social media attributing a quotation to Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that she did not say because that quotation's been around since before she was born, they're admitting that they can't beat you any other way than by just lying about you. The good news? Right-wingers have apparently decided they can't beat Ms. Ocasio-Cortez any other way than to lie about her before she has even served one minute in Congress.

Finally, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke will, per one of our President's ubiquitous tweets, be leaving his post at the end of the year. Naturally he says he just can't "justify spending thousands of dollars defending myself and my family against false allegations," which I presume include the half-dozen open investigations of his work and conduct, including one referred to our Justice Department. Well, he rode into Interior on a horse, and it looks like he's going out a horse's ass. (And seriously, does our President really not understand that bad actions attract bad press?)

Around the table: in which we begin to calculate what public schools lose to corporate welfare.

Our Administration declares its goal of ending subsidies for electric cars and renewable energy. This Administration's severe animus toward renewable energy stands in stark opposition to the people's will -- regular Americans probably support renewable energy to about the same degree they opposed "free" trade agreements in 2016, and how did this President come to power? By opposing "free" trade agreements. The good news? That suggests that the next President could easily come to power by bear-hugging renewable energy.

A Good Jobs First study estimates that public schools across America lose nearly $2 billion annually to "economic development tax incentives granted to corporations," i.e., i.e., corporate welfare. The bad news? The real number is almost certainly higher, as more than a few state and local governments are not following the law and reporting their corporate property tax breaks -- which, as you know, directly affect public school funding like all other property taxes do. The good news? At least we know what we know. Hell, some enterprising Democrat might even use it in campaign ads. A man can dream.

Washington head coach Jay Gruden, who has now lost two quarterbacks to broken legs this year, says he's not likely to sign former 49ers QB/police brutality protestor Colin Kaepernick, suggesting he might have been more inclined to sign Mr. Kaepernick if it were week one and if his "skill set" were a bit different. How do we know that's utter BS? Because Mr. Gruden's current starting QB has been there a month -- and, perhaps more importantly, because his current starting QB is Mark Freaking Sanchez Who Has No Skill Set. Q.E.D., pimps!

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is apparently "laying the groundwork to launch a bigger Presidential campaign than his first," which is an awful lot like saying he didn't win the primary in 2016 because raising over $200 million didn't make him big enough. Mr. Sanders has been going around the country stumping for other candidates and debating anyone who'll take him on, so another Presidential run sure wouldn't be a shock. I just hope by "bigger" he doesn't mean "with a lot more Democratic consultants," because no one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like the Democrat consultant class.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has told "close allies" he will not run for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2020. I had fallen asleep even before the part where he followed up two terms as Governor with a tenure at Bain Capital. You remember Bain Capital, that stick Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney over the head with in 2012? And Mr. Patrick's supporters, by the way, are dead wrong that his background as a prosecutor and a businessman would "blunt some Republican attacks." We now have 16 years of data telling us that no amount of pretending to be (or being like) a right-winger ever blunts attacks from right-wingers.

Horror and hope, 2018 edition.

First, the good news. Colorado and Michigan voters passed ballot initiatives creating redistricting commissions for their states; Utah voters also mulled the matter, and with 95% of the vote counted at this writing, the "yes" votes have a narrow lead. Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah voters passed ballot initiatives expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while Maryland and Nevada voters approved same-day voter registration. Florida voters restored voting rights for some ex-felons by a 25-point margin, while Massachusetts voters banned gender identity discrimination by a 40-point margin; Michigan voters legalized recreational marijuana, while Utah voters legalized medical marijuana. So a lot of so-called "purple state" and "red state" voters approved good policy on Election Day -- which they've done a lot in recent years, often over the wishes of their elected representatives -- and that's always a good thing. And the election results broadly instructed us that our President's support for avowed white supremacists remains an anvil around the Republican party's neck. In a nation where too many of us still have too many private racisms, we shouldn't over-congratulate ourselves for that, but at least those morons walking around in their Hitler T-shirts whining about how "oppressed" they are received no mandate whatsoever from the voters this week.

And now, the bad news: for the third consecutive even-year election cycle, Republicans outperformed the polls, such that Democrats took back the U.S. House, but flipped fewer seats than estimable organizations like the Cook Political Report and Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball predicted they'd flip, and Democrats lost seats in the U.S. Senate, which likely guarantees Justice Thomas's retirement in 2020 and makes taking back the chamber later that year a much longer shot. Democrats flipped seven Governor's offices, but flipped only six state legislative houses, gaining around 350 legislative seats, which actually isn't that impressive (America has almost 7,400 state legislators). These gains at the state level will make a right-wing Constitutional convention considerably more unlikely, but they don't assure better redistricting next decade, let alone better policy -- for example, while I'd love to savor Scott Walker's defeat in Wisconsin, and I will, Republicans still have huge majorities in both legislative chambers there.

How did Republicans outperform the polls? By running on their record of good works animated by good policy and skillful communication with voters? Ah, you know me better than that by now. Republicans won, to some extent, with the vote suppression tactics (gerrymandering, Voter ID, Interstate Crosscheck, and the like) that have characterized Republican stamp-out-the-vote efforts since 2012. Obviously we should fight vote suppression wherever we find it (and we have fought vote suppression tirelessly at this blog). But the main reason Republican politicians seem harder to kill than zombies? Democrats just don't seem to have a clue. Republicans all over America have run this vote suppression scheme three times now, and Democrats have been caught flat-footed each time; the higher turnout this midterm no doubt delivered them the House, but we deserve the credit for that, not them.

And this apparent cluelessness goes deeper than their inability to win races on the ground -- they don't seem to have a clue about what to do when they have power, either. When they have power, they piss it away trying not to offend corporatist donors and trying to "build bipartisan consensus" with a party that deserves oblivion. We used to get mad at Tha Bush Mobb for insisting that they "create reality," but the truth is the Democrats do the same thing -- they piddle away the mandates the voters give them, and when Republicans storm back into power, Democrats tell us the landscape is difficult and all they can do is play for time. Well, since we're talking about time, this state of affairs describes the last 38 years of American politics. And how did that era start again? With the 1980 Republican Presidential candidate who decided he was going to change the landscape! I know changing the landscape is an easier task, logistically, when you have big corporate power behind you, as Mr. Reagan did, but surely if this is the greatest democracy on Earth, it's not that big a lift for those enterprising Democrats who can get the American people behind them.

So change is absolutely possible -- if we demand it. Now, you will not find very many echoes of my theses in "liberal" media analyses. They'll proclaim that Democrats ran too many far-left candidates and should have run more "electable" candidates who could "win" (again, in this self-fulfilling prophecy of a "landscape"). Never mind that for every Kara Eastman the pundits can cite I can find an "electable," "mainstream" Democrat who also got the silver medal on Tuesday. Never mind that the Democrats' Senate losers on Tuesday were all "electable" "compromises" with the "harsh realities" of the political "landscape." The fact is this: when you do no good works with your power, people won't work that hard to keep you in power -- and this is as it should be! We beat up on our fellow Americans for not being more engaged with politics, but the sickness, immorality, and decadence of our political class is a far bigger and far more urgent problem. If you fix the latter, you will fix the former. I know it's a big task, but only the big solutions last. And this humble blog will continue to help you push the big solutions on your representatives -- until they have no choice but to follow the popular will, regardless of their party or ideology.

Around the table: with hard lessons and strange bellwethers.

I'm not sure I agree, precisely, that "The Cruelty is the Point" of our President's rapport with his votaries. Yes, folks do bond over their shared hatred of others, but I bet these folks don't think of themselves as cruel people, or even people who enjoy cruelty done to their enemies; more likely our President has convinced them, as all right-wing bastards do, that their rage-against-others is necessary, and when you have a quarter of the electorate in a constant state of rage, it's easy to activate prejudices within them, even prejudices they've worked to eliminate in the past. Again: all of this would be a historical footnote if Democratic politicians were less like Hillary Clinton and more like Bernie Sanders.

In a related note, Matt Grossman at Five Thirty-Eight theorizes that "Voters Like a Political Party Until It Passes Laws." There's evidence to support that on the face, I suppose (voter antipathy toward the Affordable Care Act in 2010, voter antipathy toward Republican efforts to gut the Affordable Care Act in 2017), but gosh that theory makes us look like a bunch of jerks, doesn't it? It may be impossible to test in these times, but what if voters actually liked the laws that politicians passed? You know, instead of holding their noses and accepting the half-measures politicians pass because TEH ARTZ UV TEH POSSIBULZ!!!!!? Shame we can't test voters "liking" a party that expands voting rights protections, expands Medicare to include everyone, and builds out a renewable energy grid, because that party doesn't exist in America.

Some pollsters and Republican operatives point to a spike in Republican voter enthusiasm for the midterm elections, which I presume is, in fact, happening, though we're not seeing a drop in Democratic enthusiasm nor (and this could be more important!) in independent voter enthusiasm, and anyway this spike in Republican enthusiasm may be coming too early: Election Day is still over a month away, the Kavanaugh vote (which I expect will go his way) will wrap up the drama causing this particular spike in Republican enthusiasm by the end of the weekend, and there's still plenty of time for Democrats to remind everyone that, hello, health care! Of course, we'd be counting on Democrats to actually do that, when they're probably outsmarting themselves about this matter as we speak.

Ho hum, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who does not presently have activists in his face at the Senate elevator, declares that the FBI's supplementary background report on Judge Kavanaugh did not "corroborate" Christine Blasey Ford's allegation. But that's actually a bait-and-switch -- Mr. Flake said on 60 Minutes earlier this week that Mr. Kavanaugh's nomination wouldn't go through if he lied to the Judiciary Committee (which seems fairly obvious, even if the lies all seem like "little white lies"), but now he says the Ford accusations are "uncorroborated," which, frankly, isn't the same as saying Mr. Kavanaugh told the truth. So between this and Sen. Collins's clucks of approval for the FBI's work and the rumors coming out of Sen. Manchin's camp, I guess we'll get to see how well this whole thing will work out for Republicans in the midterms. I'd like to think independent voters, at least, are sick and tired of Republican drama, but I've trusted independents too much before.

Finally, from the "Ain't Nothing So Bad Mitch McConnell Can't Make It Worse" file: Sen. McConnell (E-KY) says the Senate would set a "fundamentally un-American precedent" if it sinks the Kavanaugh nomination over the sexual assault allegations Ms. Ford has leveled against him. OK, deep breath: worse than the un-American precedent of simply refusing to consider a President's Supreme Court nominee because it'd tip the ideological balance of the Court away from you? Seriously, this being the "Age of McConnell" really does suck at times.

Around the table: our Administration writes another Democrat attack ad for them! And other tales.

Did you know that 49 states have the ability to bill prisoners for their stay when they get out? And 46 states can put you back in jail for failing to pay your five-digit "debt" to the state. I put "debt" in quotation marks for a reason: you pay your actual debt to society by serving your sentence. And if you get saddled with a $50,000 bill for the cost of incarcerating you, you'll almost certainly never make enough to pay it back (most criminals can't find work as banksters, after all). You can't work it off in prison, either, and certainly not at 50 cents an hour. But wait, there's more! The problem is even worse in states that have privatized their prisons. What a racket!

Ho hum, our President said that tax "reform" would bring $5 trillion back into America -- from corporations that stashed it overseas and pretended it was money made in foreign countries -- but a mere $147 billion has come back. Nobody could have predicted that, given the choice between paying a low percentage on their "foreign" profits and no percentage, corporations would choose the latter! Well, except anyone who thought about it. You like how our politicians act like there's just no way to make corporations pay the taxes they owe? Even though they routinely kill bills that would do that? (And, in a peripherally-related note, Administration economic advisor Larry Kudlow tells the Economic Club of New York that it'll be time to go after Medicare and Social Security after the midterms -- you know, since tax "reform" blew another hole in the budget, not that Mr. Kudlow will say that. His statement is, of course, a Democrat ad that writes itself, and thus a Democrat ad we're not terribly likely to see.)

Michigan's reactionary state legislature passes a paid sick leave law which also makes the minimum wage the same for tipped workers as for everyone else -- but labor activists aren't celebrating. Both of these initiatives were going to go before the voters in November, but now that the legislature has passed them, they're not -- and the legislature can now change the law with a simple majority, instead of the three-quarters supermajority they'd need to overturn laws passed via ballot initiatives. You know how politicians talk about "polishing this turd" when they support bills they know aren't perfect? Well, this is kinda the opposite of that. You might even call it "turding" a bill.

Lisa Song and Al Shaw at ProPublica inform us that Hurricane Florence is very likely to destroy homes that have already collected federally-funded flood insurance payments. And naturally climate change is going to make all that much, much worse. Remember that time John Stossel all but admitted he built a house on the beach so he could collect flood insurance payments? Good times! Seriously, you can't tell people where to live, but it seems to me you can tell developers where to build.

Verizon ends its membership in the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) because of its association with the notorious David Horowitz. You may well be asking, as I did, "Stand Your Ground didn't do it, Voter ID didn't do it, climate change denialism didn't do it, but David Horowitz did?" Mr. Horowitz has, after all, been a sort of ambulance chaser of right-wing causes for decades. But, yeah, he says profoundly ugly crap that's unworthy of a civilized people. And anyway I'll take a hit to ALEC's pocketbook however I can get it.

Finally, Fareed Zakaria takes to the Washington Post an alleged "Threat to Democracy -- From the Left." How has this threat manifested itself? Well, two colleges disinvited right-wing speakers three years apart, the New Yorker changed its mind about having Steve Bannon on a panel last month, Roy Innis never got to debate William Shockley about racism in 1974 though he really really wanted to, and John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes said things about freedom of speech. Really, that's the whole argument. Here's a better, shorter one: the First Amendment only protects you from your government; it does not guarantee a public audience for your views, nor does it guarantee a reputation as a public intellectual. Even if one of our papers of record routinely prints your ramblings.

Around the table: we need ourselves more than we need a "blue wave," part 234.

We start with a warning about treating politics like we treat team sports: Aaron Rupar at ThinkProgress calls our President "clueless" for demanding that Apple avoid Chinese tariffs and price hikes on its products by "mak(ing) (their) products here," but he winds up defending Apple for sending parts to China for assembly because "workers there are paid much less than they would be in the United States." A lot of professional liberals won't reckon with the destruction wrought by "free" trade because our President happens to be on the right side of the issue much of the time despite being a Republican, but those of us who fight for good ideas and good policy, instead of Democratic ideas or Democratic policy, don't have this problem. And Mr. Rupar also assumes that higher costs inexorably lead to higher prices, like corporations don't routinely use the specter of "higher prices" to resist any worker wage hike or any worker safety regulation.

Another day, another study demonstrating how the Republican tax "reform" actually fattens the wallets of CEOs, not workers. This study, from our Federal Reserve, concerned the tax amnesty in the recent tax "reform," where corporations got to pay a lower tax rate on income they "repatriated" from "overseas," and it finds that, much like the 2004 tax amnesty, corporations didn't use their unearned tax break to create jobs, but to (a man does get tired of writing this) buy back stock, which delivers unearned money to shareholders and concentrates corporate decision-making power in fewer hands. Also, too, more money for stock buybacks means less money for investment in making-stuff-selling-stuff-saving-money, though doing these three things (call me old-fashioned!) actually makes economies work. (By "work," I also kinda mean "not jumping from one bubble to the next.")

The incomparable Umair Haque reminds us that it's not the "prole" who becomes a fascist but the "frustrated bourgeoisie," "(t)he one whom capitalism promised to make a capitalist -- but only did it to sell him on capitalism." My first thought, honestly, was that this point maps quite well onto the notion that it ain't the poor Middle Easterners who commit terrorism, but the middle-class Middle Easterners who watch the poor suffer. A lot of Nazi wannabes would be upset to hear how much they're like the guys who flew planes into buildings on 9.11, but not all of them. That doesn't mean the folks who aren't upset at the comparison are somehow "not racist"; it just means they admire evil.

And now from the "Blue Wave Won't Change Nothing" file: Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in line to become Speaker again if Democrats retake the House, announces she'll reimpose the "pay-go" rule for House budgets. That would be the rule the Republicans constantly ignore when it doens't suit them. Again: Democrats never get any of benefit from playing the role of "the reasonable ones," because Republicans just act crazier, the rage-added eat it up, and the "liberal" media covers the rage-addled like they're the only people in America. And if a "pay as you go" rule seems like gospel to you, then honestly account for all the times you went into debt to get ahead. You know, like those times you bought a house or took on a car loan or a college loan.

The notorious Nestlé corporation has told the Australian government that its efforts to root various forms of slavery and sexual servitude out of corporate supply chains could raise prices for consumers. Which is what, class? A manufactured hostage crisis -- don't make my suppliers stop using child labor, or the low price of your Crunch bar gets it! Then again, perhaps they were emboldened by the Australian government's apparent refusal to impose financial penalties for modern slavery practices. Give big corporations an inch, and they'll take your past, present, and future.

Finally, Robert E Gutsche Jr at The Conversation reminds us that the latest Bob Woodward book about our Administration doesn't really tell us anything new. He's right to denounce our "liberal" media for caring about little other than salacious "scoops," but I wish his call for "journalism that joins the dots of bad language, misfires, and intentional wrongdoing to larger systems of power and to individuals who can be held accountable" was a bit more specific, criticism of salacious journalism being itself a species of salacious journalism if it doesn't offer more of a roadmap out.

Around the table: the moral of every story learned, at last!

Another day, another reminder that making a "blue wave" the be-all-end-all of your life is very shortsighted, to say the least: Matt Stoller at the Washington Post says "Democrats Can't Win Until They Recognize How Bad Obama's Financial Policies Were." No, really, as in Mr. Obama's response to the foreclosure crisis was nothing more and nothing less than "a wholesale attack on the American home (the main store of middle-class wealth) in favor of concentrated financial power." It goes on from there; by the time you get to the point where the Obama FTC goes after "such villains as music teachers and ice-skating instructors" rather than, you know, any of the dozen job-crushing monopolies you or I could name, you'll hopefully be reminded that you are the Great Person you've been waiting for, not some Democrat politician who'll sell you out in the name of "bipartisanship."

I don't know that Brett Kavanaugh committed perjury per se during all of his various confirmation hearings over the last decade-plus -- some of the arguments made at the link are stronger than others, and the strongest argument anyone will really care about (what, you think the average voter could give one rat's hind-quarter how much input he really had into William Pryor's nomination?) concerns his testimony about torture. But politicians never seem to be as offended by torture as the people are, so I doubt Democrats will make much of an effort there -- though it'd be easy for Democrats to paint Mr. Kavanaugh as a "coward" for trying to distance himself from unpopular policies when convenient.

And now, from Sam Levin at The Guardian, here's "The Dark Side of California's Ending Cash Bail." What is the downside to ending the unconstitutional practice of detaining folks in jail indefinitely before convicting them of a crime? Well, the law's writers decided they had to come up with some system to keep suspects in jail, purportedly out of concern for public safety, but they came up with "risk assessment" algorithms to predict who's a threat, and guess whom they're most likely to "predict" are a threat? Poor, black, and brown folks, that's whom, since they're the folks law enforcement will most likely arrest in the first place! Maybe in time we can polish this turd, but right now we've just given rageheads another tool to impose their biases on the rest of us.

Uh oh: Louisiana state police were apparently circulating a list of antifa members they got from a Nazi wannabe website. Oh, and it's not even a list of real antifa -- probably just folks Nazi wannabes don't like, which means you or I could be on it! That'd be a little ominous, of course, but it would also make me a little proud. Naturally the Louisiana police tried to block the list's release, saying that doing so could "compromise" an investigation and out a "Confidential Informant" (caps in original), because, as we know, there's just no way civilized people could protect actual confidential informants and pursue justice at the same time.

I know our President didn't really mean all protests should be illegal, just the ones that take place during hearings on his Supreme Court nominees hearings at our Capitol, but he said what he said, and anyway he's dead wrong: our government belongs to us, so we've got as much right to be at our Capitol as our Representatives do, and if they get all angry-dad on us, we have every right to say "are you effing kidding me?" and act like the bosses we are. Seriously, if protestors dog your every move, don't you wonder what you might have done wrong?

Finally, Michaela Haas at Yes! magazine shares with us "Seven Strategies to Turn Trauma Into Strength." You're always better off trying to turn the bad shit that happens to you into some sort of positive, and I can tell you from experience that meditation, self-compassion, gratitude, and you-need-a-mess-of-help-to-stand-alone (to name four of the seven strategies) are big helps in doing that. And yet I also feel compelled to caution you against using positivity against folks who seem to have more trouble overcoming their suffering than you'd expect. You know, the way right-wingers do to poor, black, and brown folks? It seems like "don't be like right-wingers" is the moral of every damn story I tell.

Around the table: hard work and hard lessons about racism, betrayal, greed, activism, corruption, and weakness.

Here's some good advice from Briahna Gray at The Intercept: "Beware the Race Reductionist," i.e., the folks who say every policy proposal that doesn't directly attack racism first is either worthless or racist itself. Ms. Gray also devotes space to discussing "bad-faith" actors who can't reasonably attack programs like Medicare-for-All or "democratic socialism" (or fair trade, I'd add) unless they call them racist. The folks who actually think fighting racism is the be-all-end-all of activism (I was one once!) may hold us back, but they're still more our allies than the folks who claim that we shouldn't bother breaking up the big banks because that won't necessarily end racism.

Ho hum, even freaking Politico finds it easy to tabulate all the ways our President has injured worker safety regulations. Make no mistake, cutting mine safety inspections doesn't help the miners who have to go into less-safe mines keep their jobs -- it helps CEOs make more money. Counting on CEOs to hire more workers with whatever money they save from having to ensure their mines are safe, instead of keeping that money for themselves, is a fool's game. And counting on industry figures (let alone industry figures who have themselves been cited for safety violations!) to police their industries is also a fool's game. (Hate to pile on, but dig the National Pork Producers Council science and technology director who says that the effect of speeding up pork inspection lines on pork inspection workers is "really outside our area of expertise." And here you thought science and technology would have something to say about worker safety.)

I'm not sure it's good news that a Texas hospital slashed a patient's heart attack care bill from almost $109,000 down to a little over $330 after NPR ran stories about it. On one hand, I'm happy when our media shames corporations; on the other hand, I know our media doesn't cover everyone to whom this happens, and I'd certainly prefer our media do a little more shaming when health care bills go before legislatures, so we don't have this kind of BS in the first place. I mean, seriously, any politician trying to make it easier for hospitals to spring six-figure surprise bills for life-saving procedures deserves shame, right?

James Kilgore at TruthOut explains why this prison strike is getting more mainstream media coverage than the 2016 strike did. One reason: activists have kept working on issues like cash bail and immigration detention/deportation specifically and liberal economic and social issues generally. Another reason: activists have worked more closely with the prisoners themselves and not necessarily just on activism, and the movement has made some leadership, messaging, and tactical changes (not least the focus on boycotting commissaries, which allows prisoners to exercise some economic power). Of course, things no activist would plan (the Lee riot, prisoners valiantly fighting wildfires in California) also helped put the issues out front, but that always happens.

Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL)'s blind trust has somehow made investments into at least two corporations that have business before the state, and between these investments and the somehow-similar investments his wife made, the Scotts have cleared at least half a billion dollars. Even before you get to the part where both the trust fund and Mrs. Scott have invested in two dozen Cayman Islands-registered hedge funds, this all sounds like a tailor-made Bill Nelson ad. You know, if Bill Nelson's even awake!

Finally, about that massive document Brett Kavanaugh document dump Republicans orchestrated mere hours before hearings about his Supreme Court nomination were to begin: I hate to be a hardass, but Democratic Senators wouldn't be in this mess if they'd actually stop being such pusillanimous weaklings. They could start by winning elections with bold-but-popular proposals and then using their power to work for their bosses, the people, instead of counting on the inherent ugliness of Republicans to slide them into office and then letting their big donors do all their work for them. If they had worked for us all these years, Republicans would be in no position to kick sand in their faces now.

Around the table: in which our Administration starts yet another long game against the American people.

U.S. State Department starts denying passports to Americans born to certain midwives who practiced in Texas's Rio Grande Valley during the second half of the 20th century, declaring that they can't verify those Americans' citizenship after said midwives admitted forging a handful of birth certificates. Didn't know being born poor and Hispanic just inside our borders was a crime, did you? Didn't know a midwife forging one or two birth certificates made thousands more birth certificates suspect enough to provoke criminal investigation, detainment, and even deportation? It's exactly as simple as this: if you disagree with our Administration, they want you gone -- unable to criticize them, unable to shame them, and certainly unable to vote them out of office. And this is only the beginning: the mostly black, brown, poor, and old folks born outside of hospitals at any time over the last 80 years are next.

So what happens when our Federal Trade Commission installs a Bureau of Consumer Protection Chief who used to represent corporations being investigated by the FTC, and Public Citizen files a Freedom of Information Act request to discover his conflicts of interest? The FTC pumps out almost 500 pages of documents and redacts nearly all of it. Because the documents don't relate to specific lawsuits, and also because trade secrets. Should I praise them for resisting the urge to declare BECAUSEZ TEH NASHUNUL SECURITEEZ!!!! No, I should not. I doubt our laws allow this sort of chicanery, so I suppose the FTC is just following the example of our President and his Cabinet, by daring you to stop what they're doing.

Ho hum, our Administration creates a special "Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee" dedicated to persuading the public to abandon its will to legalize pot. And this Committee told other Administration departments to highlight "the most significant data demonstrating negative trends," while apparently avoiding finding anything out about how often folks consume pot or whether legalized pot reduces other drug use. Recalling that our Attorney General has a zeal for criminalizing pot should also remind you that criminalizing pot is mostly a way of putting more black people in jail. (No, John Ehrlichmann spelled that out for us years ago.)

I'm not sure that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals actually said you have a First Amendment right to feed the homeless. Their ruling actually says that Food Not Bombs has a First Amendment right to feed the homeless during their community organizing events in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, since feeding the homeless, in this context, comprises "an act of political solidarity meant to convey the organization’s message." So it doesn't appropriately shame governments that would issue thousand-dollar permits to individuals who give food to the homeless -- although I suppose we could all go out in well-named and well-promoted groups to feed the homeless. It'd be a whole lot simpler if we'd just stop pretending that our only obligation in America is to ourselves.

Kudos to Jake Johnson at Common Dreams for noting that our President has declared a pay freeze for 2 million of our federal employees while at the same time proposing a capital gains tax cut that would benefit the super-rich and virtually no one else. It is odd, isn't it, how they always say "we can't just keep spending money we don't have" when talking about paying workers, and never about, say, building nukes we don't need or giving the rich more tax cuts or handing out more "research and development" corporate welfare? OK, maybe it's not odd, per se, once we accept the fact that we are ruled by vampires.

Finally, maybe we shouldn't rush to celebrate Rep. Beto O'Rourke's challenge to incumbent Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as an "Obama-like" campaign. Mr. O'Rourke has a gift for speaking well, but so did Barack Obama, and we all know how his Presidency went: he coddled Our Glorious Elites instead of giving them the bitter medicine they earned, he extolled bipartisanship while half of the partisans tried to burn everything down, and he helped prepare the ground for a new President who seems to hate all the good and love all the evil in our world. So if Robert Rubin and Larry Summers have already gotten to Beto O'Rourke, we could be in for another turn of the vicious Republican/weak Democrat wheel, and as I've said, we've got to break that wheel.

Around the table: why the Democrats will fumble away the Oklahoma gubernatorial race too, and other lessons.

As actual liberals win the Democratic gubernatorial primaries in Florida and Arizona, Matthew Chapman at AlterNet speculates that Democrats may pick up the Oklahoma gubernatorial mansion as well, given that Democrats nominated a fellow who's won a lot of state-wide races and Republicans just nominated a "train wreck." Remind you of anything? Democrats will fumble this one away, too -- maybe Drew Edmondson's primary opponent, former Oklahoma state Senator Connie Johnson, didn't do enough to stand out, but I remember thinking she was a pretty damn good candidate and I would have liked to see her win. Mr. Edmondson, I bet, loses 51-48. Yes, even though Mary Fallin turned out to be very unpopular once good Oklahomans saw that all her tax cuts would have consequences. But people want to vote for people, not against people.

CFPB's student loan ombudsman resigns from the agency, specifically citing the agency's direction away from protecting students from predatory lenders under Acting Director/Man Who Wears Glasses So People Don't Punch Him in the Face Mick Mulvaney. So is this what right-wingers mean when they say good people aren't motivated to stay in government? I kid, of course.

Another day, another report finding that while worker pay is stagnating or going down, executive pay is going way, way up. Which you already knew, but it's still good to have yet another set of data points about it. Also, too, CEO pay went way up in large part due to exercised stock options -- which was, of course, an entirely foreseeable effect of cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, as corporations used almost all of their tax break ($37 for every dollar they spent on worker pay!) on stock buybacks, which goosed up stock prices, which made cashing in those options far more attractive. Why, it's almost like that was the whole idea.

Upon hearing that our President thinks Google searches are completely biased against him, a number of quick responses leap to mind: waaaaaaaah!, whining is losing, maybe do something good for America for once and you'll get better news coverage! But if Democrats were clever (c'mon, let's pretend!), they'd be wondering out loud if maybe our President would like a sort of "fairness doctrine" applied to our media -- you know, like the Fairness Doctrine the FCC enforced on broadcast media until the late 1980s. And I bet our President would support that idea! At least, until someone in his braintrust reminds him that such a doctrine would also apply to Sinclair, Breitbart, Newsmax, the News Corporation, et al.

Finally, several Democrats ask Federal Trade Commission to investigate Verizon's admitted throttling of Santa Clara County firefighter data in the middle of a wildfire. Since Verizon has already admitted wrongdoing, an FTC investigation would have to be conducted by blind, deaf, and dumb infants to fail to find said wrongdoing -- but then this is today's FTC, and thus likely to declare the matter settled because of all of Verizon's apologies. Law and order is for us little people, after all, not big corporations.

Around the table: a dying mule, still kicking hard.

"What Happens When a Pipeline Runs Afoul of Government Rules?" asks ProPublica regarding an on-again-off-again West Virginia pipeline project. "Authorities Change the Rules." In letting pipeline construction continue before legally-mandated environmental reviews have been completed, state and federal regulators have repeatedly abrogated their duties over the last two years, until finally a three-judge panel from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals halted construction. Law and order: it's only for us little people.

Speaking of which, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh may have perjured himself by testifying to the Senate under oath 12 years ago that he was far less involved with Charles Pickering's 2002 judicial nomination than he really was. Yeah, I'd question the wisdom of going after him for this, too -- if I didn't hear so much BUT HE LIEDZ UNDER TEH OATHZ!!!!! about Mr. Clinton in the late 1990s. I guess perjury means more to right-wingers when there's a Democrat and a penis involved.

When I heard that Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-IL) defended his vote for the Republican tax "reform" by asking his constituents at a townhall whether they were better off now than they were "two or four years ago" and most of them said "no," my immediate response was "well, I guess he won't be holding townhalls anymore, either!" But then I clicked through, and, gosh, this Randy Hultgren sure sounds like he thought Chauncey Gardiner was a real person worth emulating! "We all benefit when the economy is growing" and "I see so many people who are working" and "families are seeing growth and opportunity" and "jobs are good for people" are not reasonable responses to "I'm not seeing a whole lot of tax cut in my paycheck." And he defends himself from the charge of cutting taxes for the rich just like the rest of them, by citing the "average" tax cut, when the average of a rich person's tax cut and your tax cut won't put more money in your bank account.

Randy "Iron Stache" Bryce wins Democratic nomination to contest Paul Ryan's House seat, and Republicans promptly run a radio ad accusing him of "spen(ding) his life breaking the law" because of his nine arrests from the '90s. Did you see "arrests" and immediately ask "what about convictions?" If so, good for you -- and if you noticed all those arrests occurred during his twenties, when most men do the majority of their carousing, good for you again. Seriously, though, "breaking the law"? That's grounds for a slander suit, right there. (There's some good news, though: all of those center-right Democrats who said Bernie Sanders cost Hillary Clinton the election are now castigating Mr. Bryce's primary opponent for "trying to lose the seat for the Democrats" by bringing up his arrests in the first place. I kid, of course.)

Finally, I'm going to link to this one time, and only so that you know to avoid it like the plague upon our civilization it is: Nate Silver says Democrats have almost a 75% chance of winning back the House. Seriously, has he not learned a fucking thing from the 2016 election, when he forecast a 70%-plus chance of Hillary Clinton winning the Presidency right up until Election Day? Sorry to deploy two cuss words in a single paragraph, but I need to impress upon you the importance of my point: don't look at any of this horserace shit, ever, because it induces you to treat our democracy like a spectator sport, rather than the living, breathing thing that belongs to you and to which you must tend -- and you must tend to it every day of the year, not just Election Day, because you know from experience that, absent our counsel, Democrats will interpret any mandate you give them as a mandate to suck up to Republicans. And I hate to pile on -- OK, I don't -- but your democracy belongs to you, not to the smartypantses who create "models" "predicting" "what will happen."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: melting snowflakes since 2005.

And just like that, Congressional Republicans cave to our President and decide not to reimpose penalties on Chinese corporation ZTE, which, lest we forget, violated American sanctions on Iran and North Korea. The next time you see a Republican slamming our President, remember that this Republican does what this President wants him to do 99% of the time. But would it kill a Democrat to simply say "law and order!" sarcastically whenever these things happen?

University of Alabama study finds that terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims get 357% more media coverage than terrorist attacks perpetrated by anyone else. And before you retort that TEH MUZLIMZ COMMITZ TEH MORE TERRORIZMZ HA HA HA SNORT!!!!!, attend the finding that, actually, "white and right-wing" terrorists commit twice the terrorism of Muslim extremists. If, upon reading that, your next retort begins with "well, what about," stop. Just stop. And admit you're wrong. You'll feel a whole lot better.

"States Purged 16 Million Voters From the Rolls Before the 2016 Election" does indulge in scare numbers a bit -- some 12 million voters got purged from the rolls before the 2008 election -- but the problem it describes is real. And the Brennan Center for Justice found that voter purges went way up in areas that used to be subject to pre-clearance under Sec. 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, the section our Supreme Court struck down in 2013. I sure hope whomever takes Interstate Crosscheck to the Supreme Court does a better job arguing our case than the folks who argued Husted and Janus did.

From NBC News we learn that "moderate Democrats" held a retreat last week to try and figure out how to neutralize the more progressive movement within the party. Like the French building an ever-longer Maginot Line, the Third Way types drone on and on about how they're "tired of losing" without ever realizing that they're the main reason Democrats lose. And three words for folks who think folks like us couldn't win in the Midwest: Sanders won Michigan. (As an aside, did NBC really call the convention a "safe space" for moderates? Yes, they did! What snowflakes they must be!)

How terribly surprising to learn that the EPA went to great lengths to protect former Administrator Scott Pruitt from a desk cleaned with formaldehyde, at virtually the same time the EPA also went to great lengths to bury an EPA report warning about the dangers of formaldehyde! It gets better: the new desk Mr. Pruitt ordered came from California, where formaldehyde is more strictly regulated, so the EPA aired the desk out in a warehouse for a week out of an abundance of caution! So, long story short: snowflake EPA workers protect their snowflake Administrator while having no intention of protecting, say, the American people. Did I mention snowflakes?

Finally, we learn how a Facebook group for sexual assault survivors got taken over by trolls who promptly started harassing the victims. With threats to call their abusers or call child protective services on them, among other evil works. Facebook sure seems anxious to apply just about every solution to this problem except hiring more workers to monitor groups, which they could do if only they'd break off some of that billionaire income in the front office. Hire humans to do jobs! It really does make a difference. In the meantime, if you think it's "funny" or "subversive" to pull stunts like harassing sexual assault victims online, could you do us all a favor and scratch "ASSHOLE" into your forehead with a knife so we all know to shun you when we see you on the street?

Around the table: chronicling an unusually high amount of low-level corruption.

Our President pardons the two Oregon ranchers, currently serving five years for arson on public lands, who "inspired" the Bundy brothers' 2016 seizure of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Public lands belong to whom, again? To the people. That's kinda why they call them "public." The Hammonds and Bundys of the world, of course, act like they're the "public" and no one else is, but ain't nothing they can do our President can't make worse. Law and order!

Actual rich liberal populist wins Mexico's Presidential election, and the "liberal" media here in America hope for "business-friendly" change. I guess that's an improvement from saying Mr. López Obrador is "just like" our President (just like him, except in, you know, nearly all of his policy proposals!), but "business-friendly" shouldn't be everyone's first concern, when corporations go around ruining everything in the world just so they can squeeze it for money. Remember, kids: money doesn't last, but civilization does.

Ryan Cooper at The Week asks an obvious question: "If democratic socialism is so bad, why is Norway so great?" Important lessons: don't confuse democratic socialism with things like Communism (particularly as practiced by the Soviets) and don't put yourself in the position of arguing that elite individuals should control the economy but the people shouldn't. And wasn't our President complaining about not getting enough immigrants from non-"shithole countries" like Norway? (As an aside, the relatively high U.S. per capita income is undoubtedly goosed up by our world-leading supply of super-rich, which, as I've often said, doesn't mean you see a bump in your bank account.)

Uh oh: Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY) has been putting GPS tracking devices in campaign signs so he can locate the people who steal them! Which has led him, no, not to an Antifa or Black Lives Matter protestor, but to a retired pastor. I wouldn't steal campaign signs myself, but maybe Mr. Reed should have considered that getting all Captain Queeq about a campaign sign makes him look like a small man. And really, if you were to serve the good people of New York's 23rd district, instead of serving mammon, you wouldn't have to worry about who's stealing your campaign signs.

Double uh oh: shortly after voting for that massive tax "reform" last fall, Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), who personally stood to gain $2.1 million from that tax "reform," bought himself a million-dollar yacht. Naturally his spokeshack whines about negative campaigning and "partisan smears," and the fact that Mr. Buchanan disclosed the purchase is irrelevant, like following the law is some gift he gives to us or something. This little yacht purchase is exactly the stuff of classic (and relevant) campaign ads. I wouldn't lay money on his Democratic opponent having the guts to run it, though.

Finally, Democrats seem to be meeting the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination with "mixed messages," which is, admittedly, always a danger when a nominee is so completely awful on everything. But I can help with that problem! Here's the message: Judge Kavanaugh thinks Presidents should be even more powerful, which would make the American people less powerful. You're welcome, Democrats. (Full disclosure: Democrats never take my advice.)

Around the table: meet the new boss, same as the old boss, part 785.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: ISIS fighters have moved back into Raqqa, Syria, not even a year after coalition forces allowed 250 of their fighters to leave Raqqa with their families and all the weapons they could fit into a three-mile long convoy. It sure is a good thing our new national security braintrust isn't overly preoccupied with truly ridiculous projects like regime change in Iran! Oops, sorry; I forgot which evil alternate universe I was in for a moment.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigns/is fired, citing "unrelenting attacks on me personally" because waaaaaaaaaah! And our President's votaries now see Mr. Pruitt as One of Them, because he gets attacked by Those Librul Elites just like they do! Never mind that they'd never tolerate a Cone of Silence from a Democrat. (Also, a former coal lobbyist now runs the EPA, on an "interim" basis that I expect to last at least until the end of 2020.)

In the face of yet more "liberal" media hand-wringing over Just What Those Red State Voters Are Really Like, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us that the glue that really binds them (and their messy lives) to our President (and his messy life which is now our messy life) is sexism. "The anti-abortion campaign is all about punishing women for sex, not men," right-wingers don't "put a 'higher value' on marriage" so much as they "stigmatize not being married," by which they mean women not being married -- all true, and as long as men are trying to get sex from women (and imagining themselves somehow disenfranchised if they don't), this'll all remain a problem.

Ho hum, privatizing IRS tax collection functions has caused our government to lose money, which Nobody Could Have Predicted! Worse, private tax collectors more typically go after low-income working families than big fish, which Nobody Could Have Predicted, Either! We talk about this kind of stuff all the time, but our elected representatives never seem to listen. That's why we need to keep talking about it. Can't some enterprising Democrat somewhere run campaign ads about this? Or would that be uncivil?

Max Boot becomes another major right-wing figure (a la George Will) to openly root for Democrats to win back the House and Senate this fall. Of course, Hillary Clinton was able to find plenty of Republicans willing to endorse her and even shoot ads for her; how did that work out? And how much pull do folks like Max Boot and George Will really have with regular Americans? Hell, how much pull do they have with other elite right-wingers, most of whom, I imagine, are saying we're getting rid of regulations and getting two Supreme Court Justices out of all of this as we speak?

Finally, leave it to Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall to point out that simultaneously telling Democrats "we have to fight or we can't win" and "if we do fight, it will backfire and we also can't win" is utterly absurd. He also approves of the "Abolish ICE" slogan because at least it's got "clarity and power," like, you know, all right-wing slogans do no matter how stupid they are, plus "(i)f your political language tip toes around what you think or shows you’re not quite sure what you think or shows that you know what you think but may not be willing to act on what you think, that has bad consequences. It signals weakness and irresolution. It shows you may not have the resoluteness to act." Which explains how Scott Walker/Sam Brownback/Paul LePage/Rick Snyder/Rick Scott somehow won all those elections -- they're wrong about everything, but they're resolutely wrong.

Around the table: starring fake Republican courage and bad Democrat advice.

David Wang at Cracked explains "Why You're Being Kept in a Constant State of Impotent Rage." The major points -- that we can entertain ourselves so much more easily than back in FDR's day, that we let corporations make too much of our lives like pop culture fandom, that "the same media that connects us profits by making us all feel like we're under siege" -- are, of course, indisputably correct and artfully-put. But I maintain that even if you're part of the problem, you can also be part of the solution -- indeed, I suspect it's impossible not to be both. (And, as an aside, that jerkwad who put up the "no gays allowed" sign got what he deserved -- the knowledge that he could lose money and good will for being a jerkwad.)

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) says flat out that a Supreme Court nominee who would overturn Roe v. Wade "would not be acceptable." Now here's why that's utterly meaningless: if Roe v. Wade comes up in the hearings, the nominee will either dance around the issue or make positive noises about Roe v. Wade and stare decisis, and then, having secured Ms. Collins's vote, he'll vote to overturn Roe v. Wade at the right opportunity. Look, if I've figured that out, I'm sure she has. And how many potential future Roe v. Wade annihilators has she already helped put on the federal bench during this Administration?

Sen. Ted Cruz R-TX) says flat out that the good voters of Illinois's 3rd district vote for anyone, even a Democrat, instead of Republican House nominee/Nazi symp Arthur Jones, even going so far as to say "(t)his bigoted fool should receive ZERO votes." He's absolutely correct about that, of course, but it's not exactly the height of courage to say "don't vote for an avowed Nazi" out loud; we're just more inclined to think so because our President has encouraged so many Nazi wannabes to come out of the woodwork, a matter about which Mr. Cruz has had little comment. And would Mr. Cruz have said anything if Mr. Jones wasn't running against the famously center-right Dan Lipinski, but someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Speaking of which, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's thumping of a 10-term incumbent in New York's 14th district Democratic House primary sends, to Ryan Grim of The Intercept, a "sobering message to Democrats reliant on big money: it won't save you." And you would think Democratic pols would find this not a "sobering" message but an uplifting one! And not just because our elected officials really don't like spending half their time trying to scare up campaign donations, but because, in America, we all think we want more money, but what we really want is freedom from money.

Finally, here comes Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois -- who lost her only competitive Congressional race, in a Democratic wave year, no less! -- to instruct us that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's politics won't play well in the Midwest. Really? "They have money, but we have people" doesn't catch the average voter's elbow? And telling your primary opponent that you'll have to go to your supporters before committing to support him should he win the primary isn't how most people already think democracy should work? This critique, mind you, comes from the woman who had half her limbs blown off in Iraq but when asked in 2006 if she supported the war, said "there's good and bad in everything," which came off more as wishy-washiness than zen equanimity. So, one more time: as much as your positions matter, how you talk about them matters more. Or, to put it another way, if you have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's politics but you talk about them like you're Tammy Duckworth, then yes, you'll lose, anywhere in America.

Around the table: it's Mitch McConnell's world, but we don't have to take it! And other hard-to-face facts.

What else did our Supreme Court get wrong when they upheld our President's Muslim travel ban? They forgot to consider that the Muslim ban actually violates two international treaties, and thus already violates U.S. law. Yes, that's what treaties become when our Senate ratifies them, and our Senate ratified both the the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Doesn't matter that our Senate entered reservations to both (or even that we might have agreed with some of those reservations), because our Constitution says international treaties become the "supreme law of the land." Of course bold thinkers still think international law shouldn't apply to them, because MURIKA!!!!

Alec MacGillis at ProPublica reveals "How Mitch McConnell Made Donald Trump." Mr. McConnell "has created the world in which we are now living" -- a world as accomplishment-free as his shrine at the University of Louisville library -- with his steadfast support for big campaign money and his obstruction of Democrats at every turn, which latter item, of course, also exposes the weakness of modern-day Democrats. But if this is, indeed, the Age of McConnell, then the age and the man certainly deserve each other.

Ho hum, CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney has slashed a fine against a South Carolina payday lender. Dig the CFPB spokeshack calling the payday lender -- which charged triple-digit loans and actually roughed up borrowers -- part of the "productive sector" of society! This really is the Age of McConnell! Mr. Mulvaney did receive over $60,000 in campaign donations from the payday loan sector while running for and serving in Congress, though the article doesn't say if Security Finance (what cojones, that name!) was one of his donors.

Josmar Trujillo at FAIR notes that even though the "liberal" media have stopped uncritically flogging stop-and-frisk as the solution to violent crime (and have even, in some cases, walked past support for stop-and-frisk back), they're now uncritically flogging secret gang databases as the solution. You might be in a gang database used by the police yourself, even if you're as young as one year old -- no lie! -- and you can't find out if you're in a gang database, which means what, again? Folks get arrested on the basis of evidence they can't challenge, which is, you know, not democracy. Personal to those who say we need to "support cops" by using these databases: you do know that "support" doesn't equal "jackboot lockstep agreement," right?

Our Government Accountability Office (or GAO) can't say whether Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke broke the law by reportedly threatening both Alaska Senators -- because Interior wouldn't cooperate in the GAO's investigation! They act like they have no idea how such things look -- either because they're really that cynical or they want you to be that cynical, or (at least) accept that much cynicism. But all this really means is that good folks regard anything that comes out of Mr. Zinke's mouth as the word of a dishonored man.

Finally, unions may be down as badly as we've ever witnessed in our lifetimes in the wake of our Supreme Court's Janus decision, but George Lakey at Waging Nonviolence reminds us that unions have been down before, and have surged back -- specifically, after the Great Depression, when GM workers, backed by the United Auto Workers union, occupied their plants (without causing any damage to them, since GM would have used that to justify violence against them), and then used their success at GM to reach out to the more interracial workforce at Ford. That means coming back is going to take a good deal more than we've given thus far -- but don't complain about that to civil rights marchers!

Around the table: summarizing the latest in bad news.

I told you the Supreme Court wasn't done: the Court rules, in Janus v. AFSCME, that making government employees who are not union members (but work in union shops) pay certain union-related fees violates their First Amendment rights. Conflating money with speech is a persistent fault of the Roberts Court, but did the AFSCME make the best possible case? I mean, if a Supreme Court Justice won't figure out for himself how to distinguish between fees funding a union's political spending and fees funding spending on (for example) services that support workers in the workplace, it shouldn't be that hard to figure it out for him. (Then again, Justice Alito's opinion indulges in right-wing scaremongering about the "mounting costs of public-employee wages, benefits, and pensions.")

Both the Government Accountability Office (or GAO) and the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General plan to investigate our President's handling of family separations at the border. I wonder how long it'll be before our President loudly declares the GAO and all these pesky Inspectors General to be part of the "swamp" he says he wants to drain (recall that he wanted to replace all of our Inspectors General right after taking office, before being told, you know, how that would look).

In a related note, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds us that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. In other news, voter fraud is not particularly common, the "liberal" media is not particularly liberal, "moral values" are not particularly about whatever hurts gays and women, and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are not particularly real. Sometimes I do not understand why 25% of the electorate prefers to remain in a constant state of rage about utter bullshit.

The "liberal" media won't shut up about "civility" this week, but this New York Daily News article reminds us that a cookie shop owner refused to serve then-Vice President Biden in 2012 and nobody wrung their hands about "civility" then. Why, that's a better example of right-wing hypocrisy than the one I came up with off the top of my head the other day! It may be too much to hope that I'll only have to say this once, but protecting civilization is a lot more important than protecting civility.

Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez pulls off a stunning upset in the New York 14th House District Democratic primary, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says no bigs, it's just one district, takes all kinds of Democrats, yadda yadda yadda. Gosh, is Ms. Pelosi showing smarts here? Republicans win so often at least in part because they pretend to be so different from one another, though of course they're all cut from the same reactionary cloth, while Democrats have a well-deserved reputation of strangling new blood in its crib in their insane zeal for victory without work. Maybe, just maybe, Ms. Pelosi's finally getting it.

Finally, I know everyone's upset about Justice Kennedy's retirement, but as Mother Jones reminded us several hours before his announcement, Justice Kennedy hasn't been a swing vote, like, at all this past term. Yes, he was, over the years, better than we could have expected on gay rights and criminal justice reform, but n.b. that Chief Justice Warren was the swing vote in the cellphone warrants case. And Justice Kennedy was as corporatist as the rest of them -- recall that he wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United v. FEC.

Around our table: lesson #3088 in "why 'more Democrats' isn't the solution to our problems."

California state Assembly members blow massive holes in the state Senate's gold-standard net neutrality bill, to the point where the Senate bill's original author tries to withdraw it from consideration. And they announced their amendments late at night and then voted on them the next morning without debate, sorta like Daryl Metcalfe did to those anti-gerrymandering bills in Pennsylvania. And in case you were thinking all our problems would be over if we just elected more Democrats, note well that Democrats absolutely dominate both houses of the California state legislature, and they not only let this happen, they helped it to happen.

Here's something you may not know about our President's plan to let "small businesses" offer crappier health care plans that let insurers evade Obamacare coverage mandates: it has a loophole that allows big corporations to join "small business associations," as long as it doesn't upend a total size requirement, I presume. I mean, I'm not sure how else to read paragraph 17's report that "(u)ntil now, the Labor Department...often looked at the size of each company, rather than the group as a whole, to determine if it was a large or small employer." Thus will big corporations be able to foist crappy health insurance on their employees! (As an aside, it sure is odd that whenever we say "making insurers cover maternity care," our opponents say "burdensome regulations." I wonder why that is.)

Jessica Huseman's ProPublica report on the court case that struck down Kris Kobach's pet show-me-your-citizenship-papers-if-you-want-to-vote law catalogues a mighty dung-mountain of incompetence and malice, and is thus well worth the considerable amount of time it takes to read it, but I want to highlight, if I may, how Mr. Kobach came up with all those scare numbers about TEH THREE MILLYUNZ VOTEDZ ILLEGULLYZ!!!!! The academic who came up with that number found less than 40 folks out of 32,000 who said they were non-citizens registered to vote in 2008 -- and then said anywhere from 38,000 to 2.8 million folks had voted illegally, which is a range wide enough to be utterly meaningless. Naturally Mr. Kobach fell in love with the bigger number, just like our President. Look at them balls swing!

Ho hum, Factcheck.org reminds us that Presidents Bush the Lesser and Obama did not, in fact, separate families at the border with the sheer zeal of this Administration. And, you know, "they did it too" is bad argument even when it's correct -- it's a way of saying "I'm not going to defend my position on the merits, but I am going to subtly accuse you of hypocrisy for not crying out when the other guy did it." When they deflect to insulting you, they're announcing they're losers. I wish everyone understood that.

I was, frankly, hoping for more from this article, entitled "The Hope of a Blue Wave is Dangerous to Democracy." I take the author's point about everyone being overconfident about the 2016 elections, too (wasn't Chuck Schumer measuring drapes for the Majority Leader's office?), but I'd hoped for a larger message -- that "hoping to get more Democrats in office" has already disappointed the hell out of us, certainly, but more that democracy isn't about who we support but about what we do, every single day of our lives. It's a lesson those folks who went to townhalls to press their representatives about health care seem to have learned well, but we all need to learn it.

Finally, I do not believe that the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, VA, has a "right" to kick Sarah Huckabee Sanders out, even for being the face of our Administration's evil propaganda machine. People can eat where they like -- I mean, a big chunk of the civil rights movement was about that! And a big chunk of the gay rights movement is about similar matters! -- and the First Amendment right to free association does not flow in only one direction at a time. And, as any cook or waiter will tell you, there are subtler and more effective ways to get someone not to eat at your restaurant anymore.

Around the table: concerning automation, corruption, wage theft, tax cuts for the rich, more tax cuts for the rich, and rogue ICE agents.

With all the anti-worker hysteria of ZOMG TEH AUTOMATIONZ WILL KILLZ ALL TEH JOBZ!!!!!, Neil Irwin at the New York Times highlights a number of very reasonable solutions we could implement to prevent such a job-ocalypse. These do not include a universal basic income, which right-wingers will use to destroy Medicare and Social Security -- they include work-sharing programs, codifying "maximum employment" policies in law, and shortening monopoly protections for trademarks and patents. But they should also include bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, which really is the thing that will prevent executives from throwing living-breathing workers under the bus for their not-very-well-working machines.

Ho hum, Florida Gov. Rick Scott's decision to issue "emergency contracts" for hurricane cleanup will cost Florida taxpayers at least $28 million more than if he'd relied on existing contracts for hurricane cleanup. I am, of course, reminded of Florida Republican U.S. House Rep. Carlos Curbelo instructing us last August that doing hurricane cleanup the right way saves more money than doing it the quick way, but Gov. Scott spent valuable time and money doing the whole rebidding process over again. Why, that's something you'd do if you were trying to help out your cronies, not protect taxpayers from "special interests"! The POGO general counsel's statement that Mr. Scott's decision did not reflect "good business sense" should be a Democrat campaign ad, but then again, these are Democrats we're talking about.

Sam Pizzigati wonders why big corporations, which can afford not to commit wage theft, still do so. Decline in unions yes, attacks on regulation certainly, but also the simple fact that "(t)he outrageously generous rewards that have become so commonplace in Corporate America give the executives who run our top corporations an ongoing — and almost irresistible — incentive to behave outrageously." Best way to fight the problem at its source? "(E)nd" "eye-popping CEO pay packages." At the risk of beating a dead horse, bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income would be the best way to do that -- certainly better than the so-convoluted-they-must-be-designed-to-fail ways center-right Democrats have come up with over the years.

Remember when tax "reform" supporters in the White House claimed that their tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-for-corporations would put an extra $4,000 in every family's bank account? Well, it's fair to ask where that "$4,000 Raise" went, as Leo Gerard does. Wages actually went down 0.1% for non-supervisory workers from May of last year to May of this year once you factor in inflation -- and I think you would only "forget" to factor in inflation when you're trying to lie about economic policy! -- while less than five percent of American workers got raises or bonuses. Most of that tax-cut largesse, as you probably recall, goes toward executive stock buybacks and higher dividends for shareholders. I may have mentioned this before, but you could run a lot of good ads along the "Where's My Tax Cut?" meme -- you could even send out bloodhounds to find it, like Mitch McConnell did in those ads for his first Senate campaign back in the day. But again, Democrats would have to run these ads, and they wouldn't be civil.

Greg LeRoy at CityLab informs us that workers at Amazon's second headquarters, wherever they build it, will very likely be paying their state taxes directly to their employer, since whichever states "wins" the bid to host HQ2 will be giving massive corporate welfare handouts to Amazon. Where is the state that will stand its ground and say no, you clowns already get to deduct your expenses, so further "deductions" would be immoral, since it would cheat present and future generations of the services they pay for with their taxes? I don't know, since 18 of 50 states are in the running, and maybe the other 32 would like to be, but can't be, for various reasons, possibly including that Amazon would consider a lot of those states "flyover country."

Finally, ICE agents detain 62-year-old man who has permanent resident status and has been in America for literally almost half a century -- over an 18-year-old domestic violence complaint for which the man had already completed probation and anger management. Even if you want to spend valuable time and money combing through all these records for the "bad" immigrants -- hell, even if you want to assert that domestic violence should carry a worse sentence than that! -- you have to respect our nation's traditions and laws enough to leave people alone who have already paid their debt to society as mandated by the court that convicted them. Then again, for a lot of Americans, generally the ones who complain about "law and order" the most, there really is no law and order; there is only whatever satisfies their prejudice and their rage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: fighting for internet freedom, law and order, and clean water.

Net neutrality officially ended yesterday. You may not have noticed, possibly because the big telecoms are awaiting the results of a litany of lawsuits against the FCC's net neutrality repeal, or possibly because they're waiting to see if the House follows the Senate's lead and passes the "resolution of disapproval" that would reverse the FCC's repeal -- but most likely because Jesus Mary and Joseph even the big telecoms aren't that stupid! If Comcast or Verizon were to suddenly, say, put data caps on everyone's broadband today, or start censoring websites today, their customers would clog their phone lines for days! No, the big telecoms know, just like all corporations know: deprive people of their freedoms a little at a time, and they tend not to notice -- or revolt. Let's stop this catastrophe by telling our House Reps to sign on to the discharge petition that would force a vote on the aforementioned "resolution of disapproval," as Consumer Reports helps us do.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the UAE plan to attack the Hodeidah port in Yemen, through which 80% of the nation's food exports pass through, which would make the already-near-famine conditions in Yemen considerably worse. I know someone is responding to that news with a shrug and a well, that's war, you hit your enemies where it hurts them the most. The problem with that philosophy -- besides, you know, the cruel way it makes a game of life and death -- is that Yemen is not our enemy, and our government continues to arm Saudi Arabia in its war against Yemen, in violation of both our Constitution's War Powers clause and the 1973 War Powers Act. Hence Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Congressfolk to use our leverage as the most powerful nation on Earth to stop this planned attack on Yemen. Why, even the Washington Post opposes this attack -- and they usually cheer on our war-making! That should be a sign.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5609, the WATER Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. What would the WATER Act do? The WATER Act would allocate $35 billion annually to improving clean water and wastewater infrastructure. You remember our President running on infrastructure, right? And you remember how the state government of Michigan poisoned Flint's drinking water? And you've been hearing about how thousands of American neighborhoods have twice the lead poisoning levels as Flint did? It's hard to imagine your Congressfolk opposing making good Americans' drinking water cleaner, isn't it? I kid, of course -- it's not hard to imagine our Congressfolk being the cruel and heartless people they too often actually are. That's why we communicate our will to them -- and it's also why we shame them when they ignore our will. (We could turn them out of office a lot more easily, too, if Democrats would actually stand for things.)

Around the table: in which we examine gutting pre-existing condition bans, letting businesses turn away folks of color, and other stupid ideas.

Our Administration plans to argue that the Affordable Care Act is null and void now that its mandate no longer carries a financial penalty. Are there really that many people out there who still feel so angry that Barack Obama passed the Heritage Foundation's health care plan from the '90s? Because I bet more people would be angry if our Administration succeeds in getting rid of the pre-existing conditions ban, which is what striking down the Affordable Care Act would do. And not even five months before midterms!

Thanks to the vagaries of social media algorithms, yesterday I came across Neil Clark's 2014 requiem for Pete Seeger in The American Conservative called "Pete Seeger's Conservative Socialism," and Mr. Clark explains why healthy civilizations need conservatism better than I've done any of the 500 times I've tried to do it. I don't mean, of course, that healthy civilizations need what passes for contemporary "conservatism," with its corporatism, nativism, and politically-correct swordfighting -- I mean something more like "a vision of the ideal society" "rooted firmly in the past," a vision that fights selfishness instead of worshiping at its altar, and a vision that just so happens to reject "culture wars" and asks whether technological advances will wind up making our problems worse. We need real conservatism to root us so we can make real progress in delivering justice to those who deserve it; too bad the "conservatism" you see on TV is all people shouting at you.

South Dakota state legislator claims that businesses should be able to turn away folks of color if they like -- adding that "(p)eople shouldn’t be able to use their minority status to bully a business," which, like, wow, misunderstand the nature of power much? Always these clowns want businesses to have more rights than people! The legislator later apologized for his statement (after scrubbing it from his Facebook page, of course), but, ah, what apology is possible once you've said you're pro-discrimination? And didn't he get the memo from our President, that apologies for your obnoxious comments are no longer necessary?

Mitt Romney says our President will "solidly" win re-election in 2020. I'm inclined to agree that our President, despite his abominable term thus far, is in a very good position for re-election, but I utterly disagree with Mr. Romney's reasoning that Democrats likely nominating a "fringe" candidate (cough Bernie Sanders cough) is one of the reasons why. I would argue -- indeed, have argued -- that nominating yet another let's-all-get-along-but-inevitably-compromised moderate is the surest way to ensure our President's re-election. You don't beat a freak with a candidate like that.

Should we be that upset that the DNC has adopted a rule stating that all Democratic Presidential candidates must declare themselves to be Democrats? I mean, yes, it looks like it's aimed squarely at Bernie Sanders, and it gives the appearance of having learned exactly the wrong lesson from 2016, but Mr. Sanders actually has run in numerous Democratic primaries in Vermont and won them, only to decline the nominations and then run in general elections as an independent. So the rule change might more likely affect the attempt of some billionaire (cough Mark Cuban cough Tom Steyer cough) or some movie star (cough The Rock cough) to run in Democratic primaries.

Finally, gosh what a mess Scott Pruitt has gotten himself into because he can't keep his grubby hands off of anything. Surely Chris Christie (the first, and fired, head of the Administration transition team) would have found an EPA Administrator who'd gut clean air and clean water regulations without being so obviously corrupt. Alas, we have Scott Pruitt, who uses people, and uses them up. Our President must find him quite the kindred spirit.

Around the table: from ballot initiatives to social media dramas.

From Michael Corcoran at TruthOut we learn why Republicans fear ballot initiatives. The good news? You can scare up more righteous anger at, say, a state "right-to-work" law than you can scare up righteous anger in support of it. The bad news? The rage people feel at liberal policy initiatives sure does seem to get more attention. We need to amend our Constitution so we can have national ballot initiatives, by the way. I'd tell the states to do it, too, since less than half of them do it now.

The New York Times publishes a lengthy report on how economic austerity policies in Great Britain are decimating that nation's once-formidable safety net. I'd say it's interesting that the Times writes about austerity like it's a bad thing, but then again, they're probably more comfortable writing about the austerity that's happening far away than the austerity that's happening here.

Surprise, surprise, corporate CEOs are actually starting to come out and say they're not using any of their tax "reform" windfalls to raise worker pay. OK, I suppose it is a little surprising that they'll say it out loud, just as in a few months they'll be saying, out loud, that yeah we're going to cut all these jobs now because we have big balls. Think some of these CEOs can be the stars of Democrat attack ads? I kid, of course -- these are the Democrats we're talking about.

Of course we should investigate whether there's any relationship between the President's daughter getting five trademarks in China mere days before the President decided to bail out the Chinese corporation ZTE, but fact of the matter is our President seems to do something every minute of every day that points to some corrupt act or other. And the lesson? Don't elect people with so many conflicts of interest!

Perhaps the most bizarre moment during Roseanne Barr's sudden crash-and-burn earlier this week was the spectacle of right-wingers taking to social media to insist that Bill Maher should be fired for the same thing! (Which was "comparing someone to an ape," though if you compare a black person to an ape, as Ms. Barr did -- and as Mr. Maher did not -- you're taking part in a long tradition of American racism.) What a surprise it must have been that liberals largely responded by saying, essentially, whatevs, yo. And the lesson? Fight for ideas and policies, not people. By the evidence, liberals seem to be taking this lesson to heart more than right-wingers are.

Finally, Louisiana-based televangelist starts soliciting donations for a brand new $54 million private jet, saying that, if Jesus were here on Earth today, "he wouldn't be riding a donkey" but would be "in an airplane flying all over the world." But would Jesus insist on his fourth private jet in 40 years because there are too many "demons" to pray away in coach? That sure doesn't sound like the Jesus I've known since I was a little kid.

Around the table: starring hubris, shame, corruption, greed, and gerrymandering.

Dave Lindorff explains, at some length, exactly why our current Administration is headed for disaster with North Korea and Iran. You should read the whole thing, because it covers just about everything, but long story short: our Administration will fail because they think they can bully their way to get whatever they want from these two nations. Long story somewhat longer: they've also subscribed, rather uncritically, to an American tradition of "negotiation" that demands that the other side give them everything they want before "negotiations" even begin. Of course, if you've ever heard, from anyone, that actual negotiations have to be win-win, this way of "negotiating" will seem strange to you.

It took me a minute to sort out exactly why I can't stand the "liberal" media's absurd habit of blaming right-wing excesses, particularly those coming from our President and his votaries, on "liberal smugness," but here goes: blaming the President on his opponents's "smugness" is a way of trying to silence criticism of the President, calling the President's opponents "smug" is a way of trying to keep us from shaming the President and his votaries when they deserve it, and why do we blame liberals for what right-wingers do in the first place? And why do we never right-wingers called "smug" when they shame people? I suppose pointing to the "smugness" of liberal critics is also a way of saying you can't win the argument on the merits.

National Democratic politicians suddenly release a plan to deal with governmental corruption, the "Better Deal for Our Democracy" -- and it's not at all bad. I mean, it has plenty of good proposals, but they also divide neatly into three categories (voting rights, ethics, campaign finance) that have broad support across the ideological spectrum. Question is: will they run on it? I mean, these are Democrats we're talking about, obsessed with polishing their civility trophies and appearing "bipartisan." They could fumble away this opportunity like they've fumbled away so many others. So we gotta stay on them.

Ho hum, Harley-Davidson makes big bucks from the Republican tax "reform" bill, then closes a heavily-unionized plant in Kansas City, displacing 800 workers, and announces a close-to-$700 million stock buyback. It gets worse: their York, PA plant will add 450 workers, many of whom will be temps and other contract workers, for a net loss of 350 well-paid, highly-skilled, permanent workers. It gets even worse! Harley will also open up a plant in Bangkok, Thailand, later this year -- not to outsource jobs, they assure us, but to avoid paying taxes in the United States. No, they said it out loud! Maybe whomever runs against noted Harley-rider Scott Walker in Wisconsin can tie all of this nastiness to him?

Finally, a Pennsylvania state Senate committee unanimously passes the famous anti-gerrymandering bill, SB 22, with the full Senate about to take it up presently. But the Senate State Government Committee did amend the bill, and not for the better: if the Commission can't approve a new redistricting map, for example, the legislature, not the state Supreme Court, gets next crack at it (though the hurdle for approving that map is still high at both points -- 7 of 11 Commissioners, then two-thirds of the legislature). But it's still worth your support -- at least until Daryl Metcalfe gets a hold of it and makes a grotesque mockery of it, like he did with those other two redistricting bills earlier this year.

Around the table: concerning internet freedom, executive pay, health care, clean water, and the folly of trying to get the President's votaries to "respect" you.

Senate passes "resolution of disapproval" aiming to nullify the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal by a 52-47 margin. I expected 50-49, didn't expect Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) to vote "yea," and I guess I owe Sen. Kennedy (R-LA) an apology for hemming and hawing for two months over whether to be the 51st vote -- or maybe I don't, since 50-49 (sans Sen. McCain, still being treated for brain cancer in Arizona) was pretty much the foregone conclusion. Another foregone conclusion: the House reportedly won't take up the bill. We'll just have to get in their grills until that conclusion is no longer foregone. (And I know, 52 is still 15 short of the total we'll need to override our President's eventual reflexive veto, but one thing at a time.)

U.S. House Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) has released the first report of CEO-worker pay disparity data mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and it's not pretty. The vast majority of the corporations the study tabulated have a 100-to-1 disparity between those corporations' CEOs and their average workers (not "lowest-paid," since then the disparity would be closer to the 300-to-1 figure that's become commonplace by now), but a handful of corporations have truly absurd ratios, like Six Flags, with a ratio of 1,920-to-1. Remember that most Americans think the ratio of executive pay to unskilled factory worker pay should be seven-to-one, which means we'd almost certainly prefer the executive-to-average-worker ratio to be even narrower than that.

From Politico we learn that Democratic Congressional candidates are running on "GOP Health Care 'Sabotage,'". For once, this actually is good news for Democrats -- unless they shoot their wad on this topic now and decide everyone's tired of hearing about it in October, and you know no one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like a Democrat. Particularly one with a lot of consultant "help." (It might also help if Democrats would remind everyone that double-digit premium hikes have been a constant feature of our privatized health care system for decades, lest Republicans blame the hikes that have happened on their watch on Obamacare, which has -- though this is nothing to put on your tombstone -- slowed the acceleration of premium growth.)

In a peripherally-related note, Paul Waldman at The Washington Post explains why Democrats can never hope to win the "respect" of our President's votaries. I'd have said "because they're bat-guano insane" and left it at that, though Mr. Waldman is more generous -- both to those votaries (who do have legitimate grievances, though not the ones they're constantly airing) and to Democratic politicians, who do natter on about "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" and "adapting to changing times" more than Mr. Waldman grants. His answer is not to "play the game" of pandering to right-wing voters, which is good advice, but the better advice is to do things that actually make their lives better. A rage-filled voter can go either way -- toward blaming the wrong people, or blaming the right people. Do things that make their lives better, and they'll blame Black Lives Matter and obscure liberal college professors a lot less.

Finally, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us that water contamination is also rampant in rural America, where agriculture's dependence on phosphorus results -- almost every other day in America! -- in a toxic algal bloom leaving carcinogens in our drinking water. She also reminds us (and I needed this reminder this week!) that Big Gummint programs offering money to big farming corporations to clean up their runoff isn't as good a tactic as simply mandating that they clean up their runoff. No need to object that mom-and-pop farmers get hurt, because there ain't that many of those left anymore, thanks to nearly 40 years of farm policy that puts corporations above people. And corporate profits above clean water.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 818.

If you've noticed that you hear an awful lot of criticism of alleged "radical leftists" in the mainstream media but you don't actually hear these "radicals" themselves, well, you're not alone: Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs wonders why we can name virtually every talking head who slams "political correctness" and "social justice warriors" but hardly anyone who's politically correct or a social justice warrior themselves. You can answer this question in at least two ways: 1) because these talking heads who style themselves as "dissidents" are actually card-carrying members of Our Glorious Elites, and how do you get people to go along with ridiculous ideas if you can't deflect to some "common enemy"? And 2) waaaaaaaaah! (I remain convinced, by the way, that the real reason so many right-wingers use the "SJW" shorthand is that it shares two letters with "Jew.")

We learn from George Joseph and Liam Quigley at The Intercept that plainclothes police officers in New York City commit a rather disproportionate number of police shootings there: they comprise around 6% of the force, yet commit over 30% of the shootings. Why? Some observers suggest that plainclothes cops can get mistaken for robbers, but many others suggest that the lack of a "blue suit" gives them the "freedom" to "act like gangsters" -- and it is more difficult to get a badge number if it's not displayed, or a unit number from an unmarked car. Just so happens they don't wear body cameras, either.

Michigan state legislators push a Medicaid work-requirement plan that just so happens to target majority-black cities while leaving majority-white rural areas alone. I'm happy to oppose Medicaid work requirements for blacks and whites myself, and not just because most folks on Medicaid are already working like we should be proud of that as a civilization -- no, really, we should be proud of a civilization where everyone can get good-paying work and only need programs like Medicaid when times get tough, as times do for virtually everyone except the crowd who constantly hector us to work harder. (Also, dig the Chamber of Commerce lobbyist's "(w)e were just trying to be helpful" act. She must think we're all suckers.)

Ho hum, the New York Times reports on how "national Democrats have been embracing recruits near the political center" in red states. What's the definition of insanity again? And what authority do the same folks who lost 2016 all over the map now have to say "but here's how you win in Kansas"? After all, a liberal Sanders acolyte came within six points of defeating Rep. Ron Estes in Kansas's 4th early in 2017, in a district Mike Pompeo used to win by 30 points. The Times might even get this, at some level, because they simultaneously describe Rep. Conor Lamb (D-PA) as one of those "moderates" and as someone with a "populist economic message." (I will concede that Clarke Tucker, the star of this article, has a good shot in Arkansas's 2nd since if he makes health care his issue, as it looks like he'll do.)

Finally, our President wants to help out a Chinese corporation punished by his own Commerce Department. A corporation punished for violating sanctions against Iran and North Korea, no less! What will the President's votaries say when they learn he's suddenly so obsessed about Chinese jobs? Wait, let me guess: leave him alone give him a chance he knows what he's doing he got a great deal but her emails but Benghazi he shoots from the hip both sides do it fake news shutup traitor.

Around the table: rageheads gonna rage, part 374.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches a New York Times columnist alleging that certain opinions about free speech and identity politics are somehow "taboo," when in fact the Times ventilates these opinions all the time. This stratagem is as old as time itself: pretend your critics are way, way more powerful than you are, even though you have all the megaphones. And if the only defense you can muster for your arguments is that you have "free speech," then you're admitting you can't win the arguments on the merits! Our Glorious Elites: if they don't have everything, they act like they have nothing. I'd say they should try actually having nothing for a minute, but that'd probably send them into an even deeper spiral of self-pity.

David Cooper at the Economic Policy Institute studies the trajectories of the Wisconsin and Minnesota economies since 2010, and finds the Minnesota economy performing better for working families in just about every way. More jobs, more growth, higher wages, less poverty -- think Gov. Walker's 2018 Democratic opponent, whomever that may be, could maybe use all that information in a campaign ad? The inclusion of the word "Democratic" in the previous sentence should suggest the likelihood of that event.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will shut down its student loan office. Which is the natural outcome of returning some $750 million to bilked students and helping put the notorious Corinthian College out of business -- if you're objectively pro-financial predator, that is. CFPB head Mick Mulvaney says he wants to scale the bureau back so that it does "only what is required by law," but how much do you want to bet his efforts to do so have already violated existing law? I mean, it does seem like that's the Administration way: do whatever you want, even if it's illegal, and dare America to stop you.

It begins: a group of "deplorables" set up a billboard warning "liberals" to "get your guns if you try to impeach" our President. Absent undeniable evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors I'm inclined to let the man twist until 2020, but threats of violence are, as you know, not First Amendment-protected speech. And we've still got almost six months until Election Day; you think the threats will ratchet up a bit? Of course they will -- what else can a ragehead do but diddle his rage gland and let his mouth write checks his ass can't cash?

Finally, our intrepid Attorney General says the "ACLU effect" -- i.e., what happens when the ACLU speaks out about law-and-order matters -- caused a spike in Chicago homicides in 2015 and 2016. The trouble with that theory, of course, isn't just that Chicago ended its "stop-and-frisk" practices in 2015 without an actual ACLU lawsuit, but that the murder rate went down in 2017 without Chicago going back to stop-and-frisk! Seriously, though, what a scaredy-cat Jeff Sessions is. If you're that afraid of dissent, perhaps you need to go live in an actual police state.

Around the table: power, corruption, and lies, part 864.

Against the advice of EPA career staffers, most of whom he's going to throw under the bus before too long anyway, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt approves waiver exempting large swath of southeastern Wisconsin from smog rules -- and Gov. Scott Walker's favorite corporate crony, Foxconn, just so happens to sit there. But, ah, is Mr. Walker absolutely sure he wants to run on all that corporate welfare he handed out to Foxconn?

David Mislin at The Conversation explains how "Anti-war Protests 50 Years Ago Helped Mold the Modern Christian Right." Mainly, a lot of Protestants left the anti-war churches -- most of which had never protested a previous American war -- and joined the more fundamentalist ones. You do have to wonder, of course, what role racism also played, given all the tension over (among other things!) open housing laws in the mid-'60s.

Ho hum, ThinkProgress finds that Rep. Martha McSally (R-AZ), now running for Jeff Flake's Senate seat, has totally broken her pledge to vote against her party 20% of the time. I never would have made such a pledge in the first place ("that was four pro-party votes; I sure hope the next one's something uncontroversial!"), but she did attack her opponent's bipartisan bona fides back in 2014, so she made her bed. For the record, she's voted the President's way 97% of the time since January 2017. That's a campaign ad waiting to happen -- but Kyrsten Sinema would likely be the one running it, so forget about seeing it.

With the West Virginia Republican U.S. Senate primary less than a week away, an Evan Jenkins campaign ad doctors a photograph of Patrick Morrisey so that it looks (vaguely!) like he's shaking hands with Hillary Clinton, when in the actual photo he was shaking hands with the President. I expect this to backfire on Mr. Jenkins bigly, though not necessarily to Mr. Morrisey's benefit (Don Blankenship is also running, and oh boy would he get buried by the right campaign ad). In any case, the Jenkins flack who said the campaign was just "tak(ing) creative license while arranging images in order to help make a substantive point" is an evil bastard whose career in politics should be over, though of course it won't be.

Get a load of House Speaker Paul Ryan claiming that the end result of Democrats winning back Congress would be "subpoenas and gridlock." In reverse order: this clown couldn't repeal Obamacare even though Senate Democrats couldn't filibuster it, and even the Republicans' list of evil achievements is actually pretty small, basically comprising tax-cuts-for-the-rich and a few overturned Obama Administration rules. And as for subpoenas, that is to laugh: a Democrat politician's default setting is don't rock the boat. There won't be subpoenas until and unless the President's guilt is obvious to a deaf, dumb, and blind infant. Who was it who called Paul Ryan the stupid person's idea of a smart person?

Finally, while it's grotesquely easy to tabulate the multitudinous ways in which "400 years of slavery" isn't a "choice," as Kanye West suggested to TMZ a few nights ago, let's not let pass the putative genius saying he admires the President because he did "the impossible." So, by implication, Mr. West thinks it's less impossible for black folks to overcome redlining, police brutality, and environmental racism than it is for a white billionaire to become President. Success really does make people forget where they came from.

Around the table: how Democrats will lose in 2018, and other lessons.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims to have evidence that Iran "lied" about the nuclear deal -- but only proves that Iran wanted to build a nuclear weapon before the deal, a fact no one has actually disputed. Iran's intentions aren't particularly relevant, after all -- Iran's actions are, and 55,000 documents from an apparently unlocked warehouse later, we can't say they're building nukes now. Which makes Mr. Netanyahu's address what, class? Drama, that's what. No wonder our President loved it.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (E-PA) guts yet another anti-gerrymandering bill in his committee, one that also had the support of more than half the members of the lower house. I was going to say he's left quite the trail of slime over the years, but then I realized how insulting that'd be to slime. Is it too much to ask that the man who talks like he's never going to lose an election again lose his next election? I don't care if Zombie Charles Manson beats him.

Branko Marcetic at Jacobin looks at the Democrats' "Red to Blue" list of approved Congressional candidates, finds it wanting. The woman who lost bigly to John McCain in 2016, the dude Steny Hoyer likes so much he told one of his primary rivals to get out of the race, the guy who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory against Sam Brownback in 2014, the woman who worked in Tha Bush Mobb's foreign policy apparatus, and so on -- it's bad when the guy running in Utah's 4th is one of the more courageous candidates. If Democrats can't win back the House despite all the wind at their back, this is why.

Former HHS Secretary Tom Price said that repealing the individual mandate penalty in the Republican tax "reform" will result in higher prices for those who use the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Because healthy people will drop out, you see -- gosh, where have we heard this before? Oh, right: from almost every single American who thought about the matter for 20 seconds. What a stalwart defender of the forgotten man he was, back when he had the power to do something!

Now Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) says "there's no evidence whatsoever" that the recent Republican tax "reform" bill -- for which he voted, because of course he did -- has helped American workers. He's not quite in Sen. Corker territory, I suppose, but The Economist really needs to attend Mr. Rubio's "ideas" more closely, so they could tell us that he would like to "increase()" the "child tax credit" so that very rich people could get it too, and that his "provision for paid family leave" would steal from Social Security to pay for it. Marco Rubio: he gives empty suits a bad name.