Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning, once more, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations (including enacting a Billionaire's Tax and a stock buyback tax) to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act invests in our care economy, funds paid family/medical leave, lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, expands our fight against climate change, and permanently expands the Child Tax Credit. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the full $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Billionaire's Income Tax in the Build Back Better Act and assess a 2% tax on corporate stock buybacks. Remember when they said the 2017 tax "reform" would put thousands of dollars in everyone's pockets? What it actually did was let big corporate CEOs buy back stock, so that shareholder power is even more concentrated in executive hands. That used to be illegal, by the way! And it should be again. In the meantime, we should discourage it with taxation, and then use that money to do good works, which we will describe below.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in the care economy in the Build Back Better Act. What do we know about child care and elder care? That we'll all need one or the other one day, and they could both be a damn sight cheaper. And none of that is about "creating an entitlement society," but about relieving real burdens on working families that cripple their ability to contribute more to our society -- burdens that only exist to make corporate executives rich. Yes, that's your bootstrap society for you -- this civilization, such as it is, redistributes our income upward to the undeserving rich, and then harangues us to "just work harder." I want this income-redistribution-upward scheme dead before I leave this Earth. Supporting the care economy is just one way to do that.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Every other wealthy nation on Earth does it, but our leaders would apparently prefer to churn out corporate executives who buy 18 homes and a hundred classic cars, fly to the edge of our atmosphere and call it "space travel," and build atomic clocks in mountains. You can have one or the other, not both, and I know which one I'll take -- I'll take the society that gives everyone a chance to succeed, rather than worship the folks who've already "succeeded" and indulge their lust for mammon even more. And paid family/medical leave would cost so little! And don't tolerate any whining about "workers abusing the program" -- just catch and punish the ones who do. This ain't rocket science.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make large investments in climate change action. That would include investing in solar and wind power, and it'd also include a methane emissions tax, which would slash carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry. Yeah, you heard Joe Manchin doesn't want to do this in the Build Back Better Act, either! But he already got his corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations in that "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" he insisted on having, so where does his greed end? I say "his greed" because of his own large investments in the coal industry, of course. I mean, you'd have to explain his ignorance of his constituents' will somehow! And I think they ought to be heard, for once.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Medicare drug price negotiation (which Bob Menendez still opposes, can't someone in New Jersey primary his sorry ass in 2024?) would save tens of billions of dollars annually, and remember what Bernie Sanders said: dental care for seniors isn't an "entitlement." It's more than Medicare covers now, and that has to change.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Moms Rising, and the Juggernaut Project all help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent in the Build Back Better Act. Working families in America have been getting $250 or $300 checks every month since mid-July, but those will end at the end of this calendar year -- yes, for 2022, working families will still get the expansion in the form of one lump sum at tax time, but why not keep doing it monthly? Families stimulate the economy better with smaller sums of money than they do with large windfalls. And, yeah, it'll be like a political ad every time the check arrives; why on Earth would Democrats refuse such a gift? Oh, right, because they're geniuses at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And that's why we offer our counsel to them at critical moments like these, when they're about to let big donors crash their entire agenda.

Around the table: and now for another exciting chapter of "weak Democrats, insane Republicans."

When I hear that a majority of Americans don't know exactly what's in the Build Back Better plan, I'm inclined to say, no shit, Sherlock! The fact that Democrats allow the discussion to be all about "how much money we're going to spend" leads me to think they're all trying to tank it, not just the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis. I mean, if they told media outlets and their constituents "we want to lower drug prices, get everyone paid family leave, and cut taxes for working families, and we're going to pay for all of that by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations," people like Joe Manchin and Henry Cuellar would be irrelevant, because their own constituents would be raising hell with them in a way they couldn't avoid. It's sad that Democrats have forgotten how this works -- or, perhaps more precisely, "forgotten."

In a related development, four Senate Democrats say they won't back the Build Back Better Act if Joe Manchin guts all the climate change provisions in the bill. That's as it should be! Of course, no good deed goes unpunished in America, so liberals will get all the blame if this all fails, despite the fact that, again, it's been the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis saying "no" to things most American people want this whole time. (Also, the gas drilling corporations say we shouldn't enact a methane emissions tax because the cost "would be felt by consumers," as if said corporations have literally nothing to do with passing on that cost, and as if we should merely tolerate corporations doing immoral crap.)

Here's some good news: 20 state Attorneys General have sued to stop the DeJoy plan to cripple our Post Office, and oh boy the suit claims that Mr. DeJoy didn't follow the law in making changes to services and prices. Sound familiar? Of course it does -- it's the thing that tripped up every Trump Administration rule that died in court, which was a lot of them. You can't just do whatever you want in the Executive branch, and our Founders would spin in their graves to observe that, even if none of them could have foreseen a phenomenon such as the Administrative Procedure Act.

When I hear that Terry McAuliffe is hopping mad that the House didn't pass the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal," I feel compelled to wonder why he thinks this is the hill to die on. He knows full well why it didn't pass -- because actual liberals knew if it passed, right-wing Democrats in the Senate would kill the larger Build Back Better Act -- so he indulges in hippie-punching like it's 1993. He deserves to lose -- but more to the point, Democrats deserve to lose as long as they act like cowards. (I say "act like," of course, because, as I've suggested, I think they are acting -- they want to keep things the way they are, and losing their Congressional majorities in 2022 to fascists is part of the plan.)

Lawrence Torcello at The Conversation tells us "How Columbus Day Contributes to the Cultural Erasure of Italian-Americans." You may find that counter-intuitive, particularly if you're sensitive to how badly America's treated Italian immigrants over the years (and if you know that Columbus Day observances began as a sop to ill-treated Italian-Americans), but I'm an Italian-American myself and I'd much rather celebrate Chef Boyardee Day. I'm not kidding -- everyone eats spaghetti now, only because Ettore Boiardi made it seem less foreign to large numbers of Americans. Or how about a day for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ida Lupino, or Alan Alda?

Finally, Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post wonders "How Dumb Can a Nation Get and Still Survive?" Sympathetic as I am to his frustration over lies about masks and vaccines, I've long said it's not stupidity per se that afflicts us, but rage -- Fox News has been enraging folks en masse since at least 2002, and now they have a lot of imitators, both in media and in politics. Hate to sound like a broken record, but it'd help if Democrats would do good works with their power when they have it, lest we all witness the spectacle of a decisive number of voters actually preferring fascists to weaklings.

Action: concerning, once again, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations (including enacting a Billionaire's Tax) to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, funds paid family/medical leave, expands good Americans' access to clean water, and permanently expands the Child Tax Credit. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pay for all of the Build Back Better Act by making the rich and corporations pay more taxes and include the "Billionaire's Tax" in the Build Back Better Act. These are not contradictory aims, unless we no longer include billionaires in the "rich," which is a day I hope I never see. Billionaires have made almost $2 trillion more during this pandemic, so while "moderate" Democrats whine about how much to cut the Build Back Better Act, billionaires sit back and laugh. We don't have a merit-based society anymore, not when a catastrophic pandemic actually makes the ultra-rich richer. The first step to rebuilding that merit-based society is restraining the power of the rich, because they run roughshod over our freedoms.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. Brook no more excuses or bad arguments from your Congressfolk! No more rubbish about "killing jobs" (don't make me do the right thing, or I'll fire all my workers!) or "price controls are bad" (like people would hate paying less for drugs!) or "it won't do any good" (even a blind infant could see that it will, which is why 80-90% of Americans want it!) or "it's not fiscally responsible" (ah, to let government to pay less taxpayer money for Medicare drugs?). And brook no more silence from certain Congressfolk, either (cough Kyrsten Sinema cough). If they're going to screw us over, we should at least make them explain themselves.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep the Medicare expansion in the Build Back Better Act. I know, it ain't Medicare-for-All, but I don't let the perfect murder the good, and lowering the Medicare age to 60 (which will bring more healthy people into the Medicare pool, and thus save Medicare money!) and giving seniors dental/vision/hearing care are both good works. And let Bernie Sanders teach you how to respond to the Joe Manchins of the world who complain about "everything being an entitlement": "does Senator Manchin really believe that seniors are not entitled to...hear and see properly?" And don't let the Joe Manchins pearl-clutch about "getting Medicare solvent first." Tax the rich harder and we can pay for it. Let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices and we can pay for it. This ain't rocket science.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. I'm gobsmacked that Democrats want to do this but don't want to advertise that they're doing it! How afraid can they really be that Republicans will whine WHEREZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!! Jesus Mary and Joseph Republicans have been whining that for longer than I've been alive; you have to prepare for those arguments. Paid family/medical leave will help everyone in America, and even big corporate CEOs know that, and have come around to supporting it in recent years, just like most other Americans do. And there are a million ways to pay for it (Sen. Gillibrand's bill originally would have levied a tiny payroll tax amounting to $8 a month for someone making $50,000 a year), but Republicans act like not wanting to do it means it doesn't exist. We need to stop letting them gaslight us.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1352/S. 916, the WATER Act. Just so happens the best way to do that right now is to get a strong Build Back Better Act passed (which means the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" also passes); the email tool in the link above reflects this reality. Currently the two bills would spend over $30 billion to replace lead water pipes, which is about the amount the WATER Act would require to get the job done. Any amount of lead causes brain damage in children -- it may not be an accident that crime rates have risen and fell with the rise and fall of lead emissions from cars! -- so we can't have lead pipes anywhere in America. Remember what Alexander Cockburn used to say: without clean water, you don't have health in America.

Finally, both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent in the Build Back Better Act. Just as we demand more from our coddled billionaires, we demand more relief for those of us who work hard at real jobs, raise families, and still have trouble making ends meet. Through no fault of our own, I should add -- what, we should all just become hedge fund managers? It seems like a no-brainer to make the CTC expansion permanent, not least because it's put $250 and $300 checks in good Americans' pockets every month since July of this year, yet some "moderate" Democrats oppose the expansion. Because doing so makes them look "tough"? Yeah, snatching a check out of some overworked, underpaid worker sure is tough. I will work to make such "toughness" dead and dishonored before I leave this world.

Action: concerning the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, funds paid family/medical leave, permanently expands the Child Tax Credit, and addresses climate change. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act by hiking taxes on the rich and on corporations. Virtually everyone in America wants them to do it, so it shouldn't be such a big lift -- even to the "moderate" Democrats facing stupid Club for Growth ads about the tax hikes. If you're a Congressperson, and you can be swayed by big corporate advertising, then you should resign immediately. The number of folks who actually believe taxing the rich will put people out of work or take money from working families is laughably small, and most of them are rageheads anyway. And they shouldn't get all the say about everything in America.

Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to ensure the Build Back Better Act allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Which will save the taxpayer at least $450 billion over the next decade! It's a pay-for, not a service we "just can't find the money for." Providing the service also provides the money! Anyway, what day of the Kyrsten Sinema Hostage Crisis are we in now? Has she explained her objection to letting Medicare negotiate drug prices? I kid, of course -- she'll never tell us, because we're the people at the other end of her fuck-off ring. But word on the street is that her actual constituents in Arizona have been giving her an earful about it, so let's all do that with all of our Congressfolk.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to include Medicare expansion in the Build Back Better Act. Specifically, you'll tell them to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 and give our seniors vision, dental, and hearing care. It's a bit of a surprise they can't get that now, actually -- unless they get Medicare Advantage, which isn't really Medicare but a private health insurance plan that Medicare funds. Why does Medicare fund a private health insurance plan? Because George W. Bush, that's why. Naturally a prominent "moderate" Democrat opposes expanding Medicare in this way, but this time it's the notorious Joe Manchin of West Virginia (who, as recent reports tell us, also doesn't listen to his constituents). How about making sure all seniors get the "advantage"?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Like everything we've discussed so far, paid family/medical leave is popular with large majorities of Americans -- so why won't Democrats talk about it? If they'd go on TV and say we're trying to expand Medicare, enact paid family/medical leave, and let Medicare help lower drug prices, "moderate" Democrats would feel pressure to change their stupid tunes. Which I guess answers that question -- Democratic politicians act like "unity" is more important than doing the right thing, but if they don't do the right thing -- and, this is very important, take credit for it -- their unity will mean nothing, because they'll be back in the minority. Oh, and fascists will be the majority. So wakey wakey, House and Senate Democrats!

Both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to include a permanent Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion in the Build Back Better Act. The American Rescue Plan Act included a temporary CTC expansion, which delivers $250 or $300 checks into the bank accounts of working families with children every single month, which is rather like a campaign ad every single month. But you just know the Manchin/Sinema axis waits for Just the Right Moment to demand an end to the CTC expansion expire, because "fiscal responsibility" or something. That's why we need to get in our Congressfolk's grills now -- to make such machinations harder to pull off. And seriously, why should we let Democrats constantly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Again, the alternative is fascism. And that's no alternative.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make large investments in climate change action. I haven't said enough about this, perhaps, but it's a no-brainer: invest in renewable energy and we'll create jobs and beat back the ill effects of climate change. If Democrats don't do it, because fiscal responsibility job killing international competition unity über alles, then, again, they're Ben Simmons standing right under the basket and failing to dunk. The only people who don't like solar power and wind power are a) big fossil fuel corporations and b) the Americans who let right-wingers propagandize them about wind turbines making people sick and solar panels losing their effectiveness to gamma radiation that the Van Allen belt keeps out anyway. And, again, they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

A final word about this issue: don't get caught up in Democratic "negotiations" over these bills -- simply communicate your will, and often. The only folks they're supposed to negotiate with are us. And every time we hear about media pundits and corporate lobbyists opposing higher taxes, lower drug prices, and better policy generally, our politicians and our media insult us. They're supposed to serve us, after all -- and we Americans aren't anywhere near as divided as our politicians and our media would like us to think. As long as they whine about critical race theory, abortion, Dr. Seuss, etc., we look divided. But on everything I've described above, we're not divided. Only they are divided, by their own corruption and venality. And so we've got to get in their grills until we bring them to heel.

Around the table: why insane Republicans keep winning, part 463.

So which monopoly is behind our chronic medical supply shortages, according to the incomparable Matt Stoller? The Group Purchasing Organization (or GPO), "a kind of Costco or Sam’s Club for all sorts of medical supplies and medicines, with hospitals as the members." Sounds like a good idea, right? Not when GPOs can collect fees (i.e., kickbacks) from medical supply producing corporations -- and, more recently, when hospital executies can collect the same kickbacks from the GPOs themselves. Mark Meadows, of all people, wrote a bill in 2017 that probably would have put a stop to all of that; if it had passed, Donald Trump might have gotten re-elected in spite of himself.

In case you were wondering, scientists tell us that the murder rate shot up in 2020 for three main reasons: "(m)ore guns, pandemic stress, and a police legitimacy crisis." I'd include financial stress in "pandemic stress," of course. Getting 2020 figures in 2021, unfortunately, allows right-wing assholes to blame Joe Biden for a phenomenon that happened the year before he became President, and right-wing news sources won't issue corrections about that in any case you might actually see it. I'm perfectly alright with blaming Joe Biden for his own mistakes, but I fucking hate stupidity.

Uh oh: When South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem's daughter didn't qualify for a state real estate appraiser's license, the Governor apparently reamed out the state official in charge of such licenses -- and four months later, her daughter miraculously got the license! Also, the state labor secretary demanded the retirement of said state official a mere week after the meeting with the Governor. Naturally the Governor's spokeshack claims coverage of this matter is about "disparaging the Governor's daughter in order to attack the Governor politically," and if you didn't hear a denial in there, you're not the only one. If any spirited Democrats remained in South Dakota, I'd say that between this and her (likely deliberate) mismanagement of the pandemic, Ms. Noem's career might be over. (Billie Sutton only lost to Ms. Noem by about 3 1/2 points in 2018, but he doesn't strike me as someone who goes for the jugular.)

Of course people who whine about kids "suffocating" with "diapers" (i.e., the same masks surgeons wear for 8-12 hours every day without ill effect) on their faces are diaper-faces themselves, but that phrase "with their pockets full" is exactly why folks confuse right-wingers for populists! And Democrats never talk like this when they're trying to sell their policy prescriptions -- if Democrats would say "you can't let rich folks and corporations sit there with their pockets full while you don't have paid medical leave and pay a thousand dollars a month for insulin," our Reps and Senators' phone lines would crash. We keep telling Democrats how not to be weak, and they keep ignoring us. I guess we'll have to keep telling them.

Speaking of which, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) actually held a fundraiser a few days ago with the exact same corporate lobbying groups trying to kill the Build Back Better Act. Meeting people with their pockets full instead of her constituents -- see how easy that was? Again, that fuck-off ring is for us, and "us" includes, not incidentally, the 80% of good Arizonans who support Medicare drug price negotiation. (Also, New York Times, the word you're looking for to describe Sen. Sinema is not "inscrutable" but corrupt.)

Finally, FedEx driver loses his job -- whether he quit or got fired isn't clear -- after ranting on TikTok that he wouldn't deliver any packages to houses with Biden/Harris or Black Lives Matter signs. When Rosa Parks got arrested for refusing to sit in the back of the bus (I know this FedEx clown thinks he's just like Rosa Parks, so let's get ahead of him), she knew she was breaking the law, but she calculated that breaking the law in that instance would create more opportunities for real justice everywhere. In this, she was right, but all this clown did was spit into the wind. And too many of today's martyrs think they're entitled to all the notoriety of martyrdom but none of the accountability. (But I couldn't let this pass without noting that FedEx treats their drivers like trash, which makes them more likely to go off on these right-wing rants; why, it's almost like that's the whole idea.)

Around the table: against weak Democrats and insane Republicans.

Kiera Butler at Mother Jones takes us "Inside the Private Facebook Groups Where Anti-Vaxxers Plot to Get Religious Exemptions." And all I can say is: this is a long, long way to go just to avoid getting a potentially life-saving vaccine just so you can stamp your feet about Donald Trump losing the election, and the folks objecting on the basis of their "religion of hedonism" ain't nowhere near as funny as they think they are. Also, how do they think their body got to be a temple? All those mandatory vaccines they couldn't go to school without might have had something to do with that. And maybe, just maybe, God actually supports them!

Thought the war in Afghanistan was over? Think again: we're still conducting illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional drone strikes in Afghanistan, including one targeting an "ISIS operative" who was actually an aid worker and "explosives" that were actually water bottles. Oh, that one killed seven civilians, too. Greatest country on Earth! By the time you hear that 90 percent of all drone strikes hit the wrong target, you'll hopefully be reminded that machines don't do nearly as good a job killing people as soldiers do. You may even think that using drones is even more cowardly than sending someone else's kids off to fight a war to enrich your corporate cronies.

Ho hum, scammers now use Facebook Marketplace to target users and you better not expect Facebook to come to your rescue. But, hey, you know, move fast and break things! Creative disruption! Rules are for little people! Spoiler alert: Facebook leaves too much up to algorithms to spot fake listings, just like with everything else, plus also overworked, low-paid contract workers, because the future! "I got some Brazilian rainforest to sell you" would become a cliché if it weren't so sad. And given how Brazil is these days, maybe those guys weren't scammers.

When I read that House Democrats wouldn't roll out dental coverage in Medicare until 2028, my very first thought was that Democrats couldn't really run on the Affordable Care Act's more popular provisions in 2010 because they hadn't gone into effect yet! I am of course tempted to say when will these weaklings ever learn?, but of course they're not weak, they just want you to think so, so that you'll subscribe to their drama, instead of demanding what you want. Hence you would not be rude to call your House Reps and tell them WTF, and F'ing do better.

Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro now says, after much saying of the opposite, that he'll trust the election results, whatever they'll be. It's a lie! It's a lyin'-ass lie! He wants to lull good Brazilians into a false sense of security so when he does stage a coup, they'll be taken by surprise. Donald Trump not only wishes he could get away with what Jair Bolsonaro does, he wishes he were as good a fascist as Jair Bolsonaro is. In those moments Mr. Trump permits himself to be honest about how he feels, that is. If he has any.

Finally, a University of Chicago study estimates that over 20 million Americans not only think Joe Biden is an "illegitimate President," but would be perfectly OK with the use of force to return Donald Trump to power. I'll probably say this more than once: you should suspect every Republican you know of being a fascist. I said every one! You should act as if there are no good ones. No, not even the one who lives around the block and lent you his hedge trimmer that one time. After all, how do you really know which are the ones who just want judges and tax cuts and which are the assholes who tried to destroy our country on January 6?

Around the table: from hidden monopolies to stupid Governor tricks.

Another week, another excellent Matt Stoller article showing how monopolies create shortages. You won't necessarily know the names of the monopolies in question (Shimano and SRAM for bike parts, Thermo Fisher and VMR for plastic lab supplies, Newell Brands for Mason jar lids), but you will get the point. You'll also witness the folly of producing most of our plastic resin in Texas, like no other American states had a shale boom last decade. Seriously, when they talk "market efficiencies," they really mean "efficiency in redistributing income upward to executives," because letting one or two corporations control everything -- even in niche industries -- is damn inefficient, actually.

From ProPublica we learn that landlords use algorithms to rate potential tenants, and surprise, surprise, no federal agency regulates this activity, nor do landlords make it particularly easy to find out what your "score" says about you, despite the fact that the Fair Credit Reporting Act actually mandates that they give you that info. There is literally no reason any of this should be a secret, and that includes how these algorithms work, or, perhaps more precisely, "work." Certainly no one would want us to think the answer to that question might be "it works in whatever way delivers the most money to landlords." (The CFPB also has some good advice in the article.)

Oh, splendid, now Joe Manchin gets to write the climate plank of the Build Back Better Act, which not only means he'll make sure big polluters get their welfare handouts, but that he'll get to seriously injure the bill before he figures out what bullshit reason he'll use to torpedo it completely. Or he'll just tag-team Kyrsten Sinema and she'll torpedo it! The New York Times leads with the fact that Mr. Manchin himself made half a mil last year from "coal production," but making half a mil in dividends from coal stock isn't really "production" per se; how interesting that a clearly dying industry can make so much money for some people, but not for, say, actual coal workers.

Speaking of Ms. Sinema, Tim Murphy at Mother Jones not only runs down the absurdity of "moderate" Democratic opposition to Medicare drug price negotiation generally, but reminds us that Ms. Sinema ran for Senate on lowering drug prices. In case you're thinking AHA TWO DIFFERENTZ THINGZ!!!!!, letting Medicare negotiate lower drug prices will lower drug prices generally, and not just for the more than 60 million Americans on whose behalf Medicare would negotiate drug prices. Once big corporate employers see the deal Medicare gets, they're going to want to get that deal, too. That doesn't mean we should just tolerate the existence of private health insurance; it just means we use the world we're in to get the world we want.

At least President Biden has said he'll negotiate no deals with Republicans in exchange for their voting to raise the debt ceiling; he learned that much from Barack Obama, who famously refused to give in to Republicans over this same matter in 2013, though I thought he learned that lesson rather late himself. Speaking of learning lessons, Democrats ought to lift the debt limit on their own and stop complaining that "both parties increased the debt, so both parties should lift the debt limit." The message they should bring to the midterms is we governed, they whined, and I think lifting the debt limit on their own actually helps spread that message.

Finally, did Gov. Brian Kemp (E-GA) really say that you shouldn't mandate the COVID vaccine because they didn't mandate the AIDS vaccine and that worked out? Yes, he really did say that -- more than once! -- and the only true part of it is that, yes, no one mandated an AIDS vaccine because the AIDS vaccine doesn't exist. So, is he trying to prove he really "cares" about people by suggesting that he supports a nonexistent AIDS vaccine? How 1999 of him. Well, they say right-wingers have trouble catching up with the times.

Around the table: featuring the usual -- evil politicians, evil tech magnates.

Operation Demoralize the Base has kicked into high gear, with the report that Joe Manchin wants to delay the budget reconciliation bill into 2022 and Kyrsten Sinema won't support Medicare drug price negotiation. What is Sen. Manchin's big-picture strategy? You will search in vain for the answer; perhaps he wants his eventual Republican opponent to run ads about Mr. Manchin's opposition to free community college, paid family leave, and Medicare drug price negotiation, and such ads wouldn't exactly be lies. And what is the basis of Ms. Sinema's opposition to Medicare drug price negotiation? Again, she won't say, so your guess is as good as mine; I suspect both our guesses would be "because she gets big bucks from big pharma corporations." That would mean 90% of the people wanting Medicare drug price negotiation means nothing to her, and if you point that out to her, you might get this reaction.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Facebook was still showing troll farm content to 40% of Americans as late as 2019, which sure leads one to believe that they have never been very emotionally-invested in their vaunted commitment to fix its little fake news problem. "When the content producers that win that system are exploiting communities on our platform rather than building and supporting them," one former Facebook data scientist says, "it becomes clear that the ranking system does not reflect our company values." Facebook cares only about "engagement," never mind if the "engagement" does nothing but diddle your rage gland. They're even putting Rick Scott posts in my newsfeed. They must have high hopes of turning me into an asshole.

Max Chafkin excerpts his book about Peter Thiel, and provides a chilling account of the sociopathic nature of big technology corporations today. "Move fast and break things" sounds cool in certain contexts, I suppose -- sometimes you might be tempted to hope that someone "moves fast and breaks things" in the Democratic Congressional caucus! -- but these clowns move fast and break America. And it's really no comfort that Messrs. Thiel and Zuckerman might one day destroy each other if they destroy all of us in the meantime.

I was surprised to see, in this rundown of Republican candidates' efforts to use the "stolen" 2020 election as a 2022 campaign theme, that notorious Colorado political operative Dick Wadhams -- if you look at his name twice, you know his nickname -- has railed against these absurd theories! They drive independent voters away, he says, and he's right about that. There's some hope for Democrats in 2022, I guess, since they're not going to win their races by doing good works, the way they're going.

Finally, in a related note, Republicans are already running attack ads against Democrats on tax increases. The electorate, by and large, no longer believes Republican BS about taxes -- if they did, they would have rewarded Republican tax-cuts-for-the-rich at the ballot box in 2018! -- but, again, Republican arguments on taxes can still work, if Democrats do nothing for the American people between now and then, which sure looks like the preference of Messrs. Manchin and Sinema, if not the entire party. Why can it work? Because it's an argument. What will the Democrats' argument be? We couldn't stop stepping on our own dicks, but c'mon, our opponents are evil? That has worked exactly once in recent memory, and it worked against a guy who bungled a pandemic response and had 400,000 deaths on his watch; I wouldn't count on making that into a pattern.

Action: concerning evictions, corporate lobbying, taxes, paid family leave, and Medicare.

Long story short: tell your state's Governor to distribute eviction assistance funds immediately, and tell your Congressfolk to stop listening to corporate lobbyists, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enact paid family/medical leave, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, expand Medicare, and enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Daily Kos helps you tell your state's Governor to get to stepping about distributing federal rental assistance funds. With only 11% of these funds distributed so far, and with the federal eviction moratorium ending, I trust the urgency is clear. But it wasn't clear enough to certain American states, which contracted with private corporations to distribute the money, and these corporations, guess what, haven't done a very good job of it, which may have been the whole idea. When governments contract with private corporations that screw up, it's still government's fault. Of course, they're not just screwing over tenants, they're also screwing over the landlords who are trying to get paid, so let your Governor know your will today.

Clearly Congressional Democrats have lost their way with the Build Back Better Act, so it's time to remind them of our will. First, Daily Kos helps you remind your Congressfolk that they work for us, not the big corporate lobbyists who are trying to preserve the Trump tax cuts for their paymasters. A lot of Democrats appear to have forgotten that fighting corporate lobbyists is actually quite popular with voters! Instead they're acting like big corporate lobbyists get a million votes each while everyone else gets zero, so we need to make a pointed statement about their continued appeasement of big corporations. Big corporations don't drive our economy; people do. Big corporations don't make the big changes; people do. And big corporations don't have the power; people do -- if we but exercise that power.

Concurrent with the preceding paragraph, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax the rich and corporations much harder than we currently do in order to pay for the Build Back Better Act. The American people have pretty much spoken about both of these matters, in poll after poll after poll over the years -- nobody falls for the "corporations need to pay less in taxes to create more jobs," especially considering how poorly the Trump Administration sold it. Also, Barack Obama openly campaigned on raising taxes for the rich in 2012 and won re-election, while Republican tax cuts for the rich and for corporations didn't prevent Democrats from taking back the House in 2018. The American people know the score, better than we did during Tha Bush Mobb's rule. Now we need to take the fight to the politicians.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family/medical leave program in the Build Back Better Act. Again, paid family/medical leave is quite popular with folks who work for a living -- the folks who worry about whether they'll get fired if they take a day off to care for a sick parent or child, or if they get sick themselves and don't want to infect their co-workers, and that latter issue has become a bit more pointed thanks to this pandemic, amirite? Of course, people like our Congressfolk -- who can miss votes at will or pretend their attempts to gin up campaign funding is "work" -- generally don't understand how it is for working people. And that's why we get in their grills until we make them understand.

Both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The Child Tax Credit expansion just started delivering another $250 or $300 check into the bank accounts of working families across America; why would Democrats want that to stop? Out of "fiscal responsibility," no doubt, and why do they feel the need to act like Republicans? Especially when Republicans themselves are just acting? Politicians will say THERE'S NOZ MONEYZ!!!!! whenever we propose doing something good for the American people, but they'll tell us that corporate welfare will "pay for itself." Those Trump tax cuts were supposed to "pay for themselves"; how did that work out? Working families deserve a little breathing space; it sure ain't like their bosses give them that.

Finally, both Daily Kos and Penn PIRG help you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices in the Build Back Better Act. It's a pay-for, no matter how much "moderate" Democrats pretend "we can't afford it." If someone asked you if you could "afford" having more money, you'd think they were stupid. I've written extensively about this lately, so I'll just add one more thing: "moderate" Democrats would have no right to accuse people of "failing to compromise" with them over this matter, because H.R. 3 (the model for the Medicare drug price negotiation plank) is already a compromise, since it wouldn't cover every drug. It's like Joe Manchin coming up with new reasons to sink a bill every time he agrees to something. And we can't let that kind of behavior win in America.

Around the table: from the influence of Occupy Wall Street to the failure of the latest right-wing rally.

Michael Levitin at The Atlantic informs us that "Occupy Wall Street Did More Than You Think." Now, the movement didn't "appear to vanish" so much as President Obama used federal law enforcement to break it up, but it did help change the conversation about the rich -- from THEY ARE TEH GREATESTEZ!!!!! to the more-accurate they live off our labor like parasites -- and it spurred a new generation of liberal activists from the Fight for $15 to Black Lives Matter. And if Occupy never materialized into a wave of actual liberal Democrats taking back the House, you can blame that on the fact that (unlike the Tea Party "movement") it never had millions of dollars in corporate support. Gosh, I wonder why that was!

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut points out the, ah, conflicts of interest of at least two of the three "moderate" Democrats who voted down Medicare drug price negotiation last week. Rep. Peters of California not only takes a crap-ton of big pharma money but is married to a CEO involved with the industry, while Rep. Schrader of Oregon inherited a crap-ton of money from his big pharma bigwig granddad. "It's more than campaign money for these two," Mr. Pitt writes. "It's in the family." The good news? The House Ways and Means Committee also voted on Medicare drug price negotiation, and they passed it, at least. Close to 90% of Americans want Congress to let Medicare negotiate drug prices; if Democrats whiff on this, they deserve to lose Congress next year. They'll deserve it even if we don't.

Mother Jones compiles some stories about "Bad Bosses," and I'd be surprised if the shock of recognition didn't hit most readers, even if you're not an overworked COVID nurse or a gig worker ruled by an algorithm. But I feel compelled to point out that a lot of these bosses are assholes because they're getting pooped on by their bosses, and that's not always easy to see from the perspective of the pooped-upon worker. One could even argue that our entire make-money-now-screw-the-future economic system poops on even the big bosses, but that argument certainly requires more generosity than I possess. I mean, if you have millions of dollars, you're not exactly a prisoner.

Oh, splendid, now France has a right-wing news channel that's winning all the ratings races and ginning up rage in the populace. C News is a network for people who feel like they "can't say anything anymore" because their friends and neighbors have had it up to here with all the filth that comes out of their mouths -- in short, it's for the outcasts who deserve to be outcasts. Now watch right-wingers take over France and completely dismantle their gold-standard health insurance system after promising they-would-never, while doing nothing about crime or immigration or whatever they're supposedly mad about, because you sure don't create the next generation of hotheads by doing good works!

I might not have noted the COVID-related death of yet another right-wing radio host who wouldn't get a COVID vaccine, except that this particular individual -- Bob Enyart, and after this we will never mention him again -- used to celebrate AIDS-related deaths on his show back in the day by playing Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, as you likely know, died of AIDS in 1991. You just as likely remember "Under Pressure" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and "We Will Rock You" and a few dozen other terrific songs more than you remember how he died -- unless you're a right-wing asshole, that is.

Finally, in case you were wondering, the "Justice (sic) for J6" rally went considerably more quietly than January 6 itself did, with a mere 200 attendees, not counting reporters and heavily-armored Capitol police. Also, the rally only lasted an hour, instead of an eternity, and did not end with Confederate flags flying through the Capitol, this time. I'd say it's nice that some right-wingers seem to be coming around to the idea that solitary confinement is torture -- remember, I don't blame people for seeing the light only when it affects them, like we're supposed to learn everything through thought experiment! -- but I'm pretty sure they'll put their newfound convictions aside as soon as someone they don't like gets thrown in the SHU.

Regarding Medicare drug price negotiation.

On Wednesday, three "moderate" House Democrats on the Health and Pensions Committee voted with Republicans against a Build Back Better Act provision that would have allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and since the resulting vote was 29-29, the provision didn't advance out of committee. While the arc of history bends toward justice, as Dr. King told us, that arc sure looks flat while we're standing beneath it, so we can't merely dismiss pessimism about the Democrats' efforts to use what power they have to do good works for the American people. And Medicare drug price negotiation is a slam dunk as far as the popular will is concerned -- both the Kaiser Family Foundation and Data for Progress have found close to 90% support for it in recent polls -- which would make the Democrats the Ben Simmons of political parties if they can't get it done.

"Moderate" arguments against Medicare drug price negotiation sure ain't slam dunks, either. One of the three "moderate" Democrats who voted against the bill, Rep. Kathleen Rice (NY-14), floated the suggestion earlier this week that Medicare drug price negotiation was "not fiscally responsible," an argument that offends not just intelligence but sentience. Our Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) estimated the savings on drug prices for Medicare drug price negotiation (as per H.R. 3, which wouldn't even let Medicare negotiate the prices of all drugs) at $456 billion over 10 years; House Democrats have, more informally, estimated the savings at $700 billion, and, as I may have mentioned on occasion, the right-wing Mercatus Center rather unsuccessfully buried their finding that Medicare drug price negotiation would save a whopping $840 billion. The fiscal-irresponsibility argument thus fails under the most cursory scrutiny, but "moderates" stand ready to deploy substitute arguments. Rep. Scott Peters (CA-52), having apparently failed to grasp the literal meaning of the word "negotiation," warned of "government-dictated prices" for drugs, and Rep. Kurt Schrader (OR-5) loosed the zombie lie that Medicare drug price negotiation would "kill() jobs and innovation that drives cures for these rare diseases."

The "fiscal irresponsibility" and "government-dictated prices" lies are evil, of course, but persuading folks of that is much easier than it was a dozen years ago. But the "kills jobs and innovation" lie is worse, because it still gives too many good Americans pause. If drug corporations make less money in profits, they'll have to cut jobs? Sounds cut-and-dried! Except, of course, that it's not, and not just because what a corporation spends on research isn't "profit" by definition. For 40 years Our Glorious Elites have conditioned us to accept that literally any time a corporation loses money it should just fire people. But the big pharma corporations could also pay their CEOs less, enable less CEO stock buy-back activity (since that's what normally happens when you give corporations the kind of "freedom to innovate" we're talking about here!), or spend far, far less money on advertising. Or they could take even more taxpayer funding than they already do. As I've said before, American taxpayers funded the Moderna COVID vaccine in its entirety, and as it happens literally every single drug our FDA approved between 2010 and 2016 received at least some taxpayer funding.

But the innovation lie does more harm than that, and it does harm we can quantify, as the aforementioned Data for Progress study found that support for Medicare drug price negotiation softened somewhat (from 86% to 81%) if you mentioned innovation as a reason to oppose it. The "stifles innovation" argument doesn't admit the nature of innovation as we have understood it for thousands of years. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a cliché for a reason, after all, and corporations, like people, don't innovate because they have the "freedom" to do so, but because they have. The "freedom to innovate" is a meaningless phrase, because none of us "innovates" unless and until faced with an obstacle or problem of some kind. And that's not all the harm the lie does. Let's say corporations simply said they wouldn't research new drugs unless we let them sell to Medicare for how ever much money they wanted, and damn the cost to the taxpayer. Why would we tolerate that? We're Americans, which means, among so many other things, that we don't think of ourselves as hostages; we think of ourselves as free people. Should free people simply let big corporations charge as much as they'd like for prescription drugs under threat of future painful death due to a willful lack of drug research?

I said earlier that the failure of this vote -- which we can rectify, if we do our jobs and get in our Reps' and Senators' grills about it -- makes the Democrats seem like the Ben Simmons of political parties. But there is always the possibility they just want us to think so -- that they fully intend their big budget reconciliation bill to die by a thousand cuts, of which this Medicare drug price negotiation failure would be one, all so that they can continue the horrible drama of post-Reagan American politics, where Democrats do nothing with the power they get, lose their power to Republicans, fundraise on Republicans' evil behavior, and then only gain power back when Republicans do the unconscionable. And though making "moderate" Democrats vote against a popular legislative initiative has some utility, this bill also has more paths to failure now. Voters won't blame Joe Manchin now if the bill fails; they'll blame all Democrats, which would surely usher in a Republican Congress, and also a fascist one. Regardless of Democrats' good or evil intentions, our task is the same: we tell them to do the right thing, and not the "politically safe" thing that is actually the politically poisonous thing. We tell them, if you can bear another sports metaphor, to stop going into the prevent defense with three minutes left in the fourth quarter, because you know what they say? The prevent defense prevents winning.

As always, use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's contact info. Good luck and God bless.

Action: concerning Medicare, Guantánamo Bay, vaccines, Arctic drilling, public water, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, close Guantánamo Bay, prevent big pharma monopolies from stopping worldwide vaccine production, ban Arctic drilling, and stop private corporations from taking water from our public lands, and tell corporations to stop bankrolling the campaigns of Texas state legislators. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Word on the street is that the House Energy and Commerce Committee, currently marking up the Build Back Better Act, actually doesn't have the votes to pass Medicare drug pricing reform. Virtually everyone thinks Medicare should be able to negotiate drug prices -- everyone, that is, except big pharma corporations, who appear to be getting all the say about everything, yet again. This is why independents vote Republican in the midterms -- because Democrats are too scared to offend their big donors and do big things. And in 2022, it'll be worse, because most of the Republicans running will be out-and-out fascists. The three members of the Committee most opposed to Medicare drug pricing reform are Rep. Schrader (D?-OR), Rep. Rice (D?-NY) and Rep. Peters (D?-CA). If you're a constituent of any of these three, please call them and tell them to do the right thing, not least because the alternative is fascists taking Congress. Call them even if you're not a constituent, though. It's that important. And big pharma ain't anyone's "constituent," so any Rep who treats them like one has pretty much forfeited the right to nitpick about whether any of their callers are constituents.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center already. He promised he would, so he ought to keep that promise! As you know, Saturday marked the 20-year anniversary of 9.11, which means almost 20 years of pretending the "terrorists" we've held in Guantánamo Bay without charge and without trial were "too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release," in the Obama Administration's immortal words. It was all a lie, and we have done our civilization incalculable damage since 9.11 -- and if right-wing crybabies get their way, as they far too often do, we'll continue to suffer the fruits of that damage for years to come. That makes it all the more urgent that we close this self-inflicted wound on our national honor.

Rethink Trade helps you tell the Biden Administration to use every tool at their disposal to ensure vaccines can be produced and administered worldwide. Because the alternative is COVID-19 mutating and coming back to bite us in the ass again and again -- recall that scientists first spotted the Delta variant, currently slicing its way through red states, in India. At the point of life-or-death, things like "big pharma's intellectual property rights" don't matter a whole lot -- or, at least, they shouldn't. And "every tool at their disposal" means pushing for an intellectual property waiver from the WTO, of course, but it also means using already-existing legal authority to force big pharma corporations to produce vaccines worldwide. Taxpayer money invested in them, after all -- taxpayers like you and I paid for the Moderna vaccine in its entirety, in fact -- so we get a say in how they're used.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell our government to stop drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). Opening up ANWR to oil drilling was a key "achievement" of the Trump Administration, but we all know why we would put "achievement" in quotation marks there -- scientists have long told us we're not getting very much oil out of ANWR, and we know that drilling in the Arctic Ocean presents unique problems, like the near-impossibility of cleaning up the inevitable oil spills in near-freezing water. But you know, the will of the Gwich'in Native Americans who live there, and the Porcupine caribou they depend upon, aren't chopped liver, either. Often, the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do -- but too often, the politicians ignore both in favor of whatever pleases some crony or other. You can fight that by leaving a public comment opposing Arctic drilling.

Environmental Action helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to deny any permit applications to corporations attempting to draw water from our San Bernardino National Forest in California. BlueTriton, formerly Nestlé Waters North America, drew some 58 million gallons of water from Strawberry Creek in the aforementioned San Bernardino National Forest just last year, but at least California wasn't in a state of drought or anything. Oh, wait, they were! And the drought is even worse this year! This, as farmers struggle to water their crops, to the point where they actually use fracking wastewater on them. Hmm, fracking wastewater on crops, private water siphoning -- could it be that preventing the latter could make the former unnecessary? Why, yes, it could -- but only if we speak out in numbers they can't ignore.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop bankrolling the campaigns of Texas's most extreme right-wing legislators. These would be the legislators who passed both SB 1, Texas's notorious anti-voting law, and SB 8, Texas's notorious abortion ban, and if corporations want to do something more than issue PR releases sympathetic to the plight of women, they can, you know, stop bankrolling the campaigns of these politicians. Of course, they may not want to do more than issue sympathetic PR releases, which is why we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR. (As an aside, don't be too impressed that Salesforce has vowed to relocate any Texas employee who wants to leave because of SB 8. If you're an employee who requests that, your boss has just learned a lot about you, and you're much better off keeping yourself to yourself as much as possible at your job.)

UPDATE. And on cue: Rep. Kathleen Rice (D?-NY) says she cannot support Medicare drug price negotiation because it is "not fiscally responsible." Wondering how saving the taxpayers $84 billion every year is "not fiscally responsible"? Yes, I bet you are, as is any sentient life form on Earth. Her D.C. office number is 202.225.5516. She deserves to lose her re-election bid, and the way Republicans are going, she'll lose it to Zombie Adolf Hitler.

Around the table: from the prototypical Trump endorsee to the latest Joe Manchin betrayal.

Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate Jeff Bartos says rival Sean Parnell, endorsed by Donald Trump mere days ago, is "unelectable" because of past protection-from-abuse orders Mr. Parnell's wife filed against him during their divorce. Mr. Parnell denies everything, despite documents attesting to the existence of these orders (if not their precipitating events), and, more importantly, he shows both rage and self-pity in his denial, and thus you have the two reasons Donald Trump endorsed him and the two reasons his votaries will fight to the death for him. So Mr. Bartos doesn't look "desperate" so much as he looks like an accomplice. If Mr. Parnell winds up facing Conor Lamb in the 2022 Senate race, I bet he wins -- he only lost the PA-17 House race to Mr. Lamb by two points in 2020. I can think of at least one way to avoid that result (cough John Fetterman cough).

Facebook wants to start a digital wallet app, and wants you to know that they know there's a "trust deficit" with our federal regulators, at least, though they don't take any of the blame for that. The 150 million Americans who lost their personal info in the last Facebook data breach might blame Facebook for this "trust deficit"! And Facebook executive David Marcus alternates between sounding like an abusive domestic partner ("this time you can trust me, pinky swear!") and a man who can't stop telling you how much smarter than you he thinks he is ("you may not know you want blockchain, but you do!"). Between all that and his resemblance to Rahm Emanuel, he may have just become my least favorite American. (Hate to pile on, but "if I could redo it all over again" is redundant, and a sign that he knows he's shilling snake oil.)

California Republican gubernatorial candidate Caitlin Jenner says that she "supports a woman's right to choose" but she also supports a state "having the ability to make their own laws," meaning that she's somehow both pro-choice and a supporter of Texas's anti-abortion law SB 8. That argument's so gob-smackingly awful it may have stunned the CNN anchor into failing to ask a follow-up question like "so a state could reinstate Black slavery, then, because it has a right to 'make its own laws'?" California's far right -- which still exists and is still quite obnoxious -- won't be happy with either her "disagreement" with the law or her hedging about it, which may be why California Republicans have turned their attention to Larry Elder in the gubernatorial recall race.

Speaking of which! Larry Elder tells Candace Owens this about reparations: "When people talk about reparations, do they really want to have that conversation? Like it or not, slavery was legal. Their legal property was taken away from them after the Civil War, so you could make an argument that the people that are owed reparations are not only just Black people but also the people whose ‘property’ was taken away after the end of the Civil War." I must say that playing devil's advocate is something you should really grow out of by the time you're, say, 23; but Larry Elder is three times that age now. Let me also say that if (as he suggests) the price of avoiding a Civil War would have been paying off the Southern slaveowners, then give me Civil War, because some things are worth going to war over.

After signing a heinous abortion bill and a heinous vote suppression bill a mere seven months after mismanaging a winter storm about as badly as a Governor can, Texas Governor Greg Abbott's approvals are underwater, for once -- 41% approve and 50% disapprove, the latter number revealing his vulnerability. Sadly, he will get re-elected in 2022, if Democrats once again run a do-nothing candidate who "fits the state" and "can win" but mostly just walks on eggshells around right-wingers. If you must talk to right-wingers at all, you talk to them directly, and if they whine about it afterward, that's their problem.

Finally, not long after returning to West Virginia from a possible plane trip to see Mitch McConnell in Lexington, KY, Joe Manchin has declared that he won't accept a budget reconciliation bill over $1.5 trillion. He already voted for the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint last month; so much for keeping one's word, eh? So yeah, no Medicare expansion, no paid family leave, no care economy expansion, no renewable energy spending, no getting lead pipes out of our water system, all because the One True Great and Real American President Joe Manchin worries about inflation. But if over $5 trillion, in deficit spending, over a mere nine months only hiked the inflation rate to 5% -- and I don't say that it actually did -- how would $4.5 trillion, in paid-for spending, over 10 years, cause inflation to "run away" from us? I hate it when horseshit wins. Obviously we need to be a lot louder.

Around the table: from corporate electric utilities to Democrat weakness.

Thomas M. Hanna at In These Times argues that New Orleans's loss of electricity after Hurricane Ida proves "We Need Public Control of Our Energy Systems." You know, if that Enron BS in California in 2002, or Texas's utter failure to keep the lights on in a snowstorm in 2021, didn't already prove that! Recall that Greg Palast recently characterized what happened in New Orleans last week as something that wouldn't happen in Bangladesh during a monsoon. Mr. Hanna lists yet more of Entergy's sins in New Orleans, and also informs us that Sacramento's publicly-owned electric utility has functioned well through wildfires and worse. (You may remember that Nebraska is the only state in America which uses entirely publicly-owned electric utilities.)

An AP/Univision/Center for Public Integrity story finds that our USPS managers have been stealing wages from mail carriers for years. You may get that Louis DeJoy stink off this story, but this has been going on at least since at least 2005; managers got "disciplined" with things like more training, which, like, how much "training" do you need not to change your workers' time cards? Just so happens 2006 was the year our government mandated that our Postal Service pre-pay retiree benefits 80-odd years in advance, which has pushed our Postal Service almost $200 billion in debt even as it's cut over 140,000 jobs over the last 13 years; gosh, could all of that have something to do with the wage theft they tolerate? Remember: when something goes wrong, look to the bosses first.

Federal judge grants immunity from further prosecution to the Sackler family -- until recently the owners of Purdue Pharma, now widely-hated as the corporation that got everyone hooked on OxyContin -- as part of a bankruptcy settlement. Naturally the Sacklers admit no wrongdoing -- because settlements can't even get that done anymore! -- and though they'll lose Purdue and $4.3 billion as part of the settlement, they'll still get to hold on to over $5 billion and they'll still be one of America's wealthiest families. Law and order! At least our Justice Department plans to seek a stay on the judge's ruling; how vigorously they'll seek it I can't say, but I'm old enough to remember when a Democratic Administration wouldn't even do that, because looking forward economic crisis free markets.

I'm not a fan of headlines like "John Roberts Has Lost Control of the Supreme Court," because why do we assume this? Why do we assume that he's actually been trying to "control" the Court? Why don't we imagine that the chaos we saw over their non-grant of the ACLU's emergency petition to stop the Texas abortion law from going into effect -- a ruling that doesn't even rate as a conservative argument! -- is the desired end result? Yeah, I know he excoriated the ruling in his own opinion, but that could just be part of the drama: he gets to act all principled about precedent, while he also knows our Court has enough far right-wingers now that it doesn't matter.

Finally, Paul Waldman, in writing that "The Harsh Truth of This Moment" is that "Republicans Understand Power" and "Democrats Do Not," has just about summed up the last 40 years of American politics. It's enough to make you think that even when the Democrats passed a COVID relief bill that was actually as good as the HEROES Act of 2020, they were just playing us -- they have no intention of doing anything else that could actually make America a more perfect union, and that bodes ill for the budget reconciliation bill they have to pass this month. I think the American people have something to say about that -- but we have to actually say it.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, paid leave, "forever chemicals," and drug policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, expand Social Security, enact paid family/medical leave, protect us from "forever chemicals," and pass the Drug Policy Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations in the budget reconciliation bill. You've heard that lobbyists have gutted the tax-raising provisions in the bill? We might have something to say about that! But only if we, you know, actually say something. I mentioned yesterday that I think Democrats are trying to destroy the bill to keep us all in the perverse hostage situation we've long been in, where Democrats do nothing with their power, then Republicans take over, then Democrats try to cleave us to them by saying "we're not ogres like them!" You can tell your Congressfolk you're on to that plan, and if your Congressperson is on the Gottheimer/Cuellar axis, just remind them that their corporate paymasters will desert them for a Republican at the first opportunity.

This month marks the 86th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. You've heard that Social Security will stop paying full benefits by 2037? I'm old enough to remember when that date was supposed to be 2016! So, yeah, it's a load of rubbish -- these hysterical projections never take economic growth into account, for example, when even evil politicians try to grow our economy! -- and we should change the conversation about Social Security from ZOMG IT WON'TZ BE THEREZ!!!! to "if we start taxing income over $142,800, we can strengthen benefits for everyone." People generally prefer optimism to pessimism, in my experience, so we might as well respect human nature in our persuasive efforts.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid/family medical leave in America. We're about the only "wealthy" country that doesn't have it, and that's nothing to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about, so let's fix it. And let's not brook any stupidity from "moderate" Democrats that we "just can't pay for it." Why, Joe Biden's a moderate himself, and he'd pay for it by taxing corporations more and taxing rich people more! Of course, the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis will mumble their excuses at that, so let's just say this: Sen. Gillibrand's paid family medical/leave bill (S. 337, from the 115th Congress) would have paid for it with a payroll tax of one-fifth of one percent, which, for someone making $50,000 annually, would work out to about $8.50 a month. $8.50! So no HOW WILL WE PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!!! It's damn stupid.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act. They won't be as unwilling as you'd think -- even the most right-wing Senators get regular correspondence on the effect of these "forever chemicals" on soldiers' health, since soldiers use, like, a lot of PFAS chemicals in their work -- but you never know when some right-wing Senator will hold popular legislation hostage to, I don't know, forced ivermectin injections for children (gosh, I wish that sounded a lot less likely!), so it's always best to get out ahead of it and communicate your will. We don't need cancer-causing "forever chemicals" in damn near everything we use. And if the big corporations who make the stuff don't like it, just tell them to find another way! This is America, the can-do country!

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4020, the Drug Policy Reform Act. The Drug Policy Reform Act would start getting us on the long-overdue path to treatment of drug addiction rather than criminalization -- and think about it: how does putting someone in jail for being addicted really help them? The bill would end criminalization of drug possession (though not drug dealing, you'll notice), start expunging and sealing drug convictions, eliminate "collateral consequences" of drug possession offenses (like losing your right to vote!), and start funding treatment programs. You know who'll really, really hate this bill? Private prison corporations, which feast on drug offenders. But they don't get all the say around here.

Around the table: more thoughts about Afghanistan and Trumpholes.

Another lesson in the utter uselessness of moderates: a lot of Congressional Democrats are working hard behind the scenes to scuttle tax hikes on the rich. They have to work behind the scenes, of course, because if they worked in the light of day, they'd burn to a crisp like the vampires they obviously aspire to be. And when you learn that former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp used to want to repeal a particularly notorious tax-cut-for-the-rich, but now gets paid to advocate exactly the opposite position, you'll remember that money corrupts everything. That's before we get to raising the SALT cap, a cause for which "moderate" Democrats are apparently willing to kill every legislative endeavor.

Patrick Cockburn's excellent analysis about the Taliban's efforts to appear respectable by opposing ISIS deserves further comment. It's quite telling that "ISIS itself has denounced the Taliban as collaborators with the US," and while it may not be true, strictly speaking, that "only an understanding between the two can explain the speed of the Taliban advance and of the Kabul government’s collapse," as ISIS claims, I'm sure it still looks that way to a lot of folks. But in saying so, ISIS also plays into the Taliban's narrative; why, it's almost like that was the whole idea. We may be done pouring gasoline on the flame in Afghanistan, but we're not done seeing "war on terror"-related drama.

If you're scratching your head wondering how Florida Gov. DeSantis can still penalize schools that impose mask mandates even after a Leon County Circuit Judge said he couldn't, you could surmise that the ruling must only apply in Leon County, but your best bet is to consider that Mr. DeSantis makes the same calculation he always makes -- that "the bigger a jerk I am, the more my voters will love me, whether it works or not," and in the absence of a spirited Democratic alternative, it's not a bad political calculation. Maybe Charlie Crist could get some fire in his belly about something people care about for once, rather than simply rely on being the only non-jerk in the race? That would teach Ron DeSantis and his votaries right quick.

At long last Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) is taking flack from Trumpholes over his rather tepid statement that there's "nothing obviously skewed about the results" of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, and wouldn't it be something if this was The Last Straw for him? "Sheesh, I shill ivermectin everywhere I go, I say the coup wasn't so bad, I say we need an election audit in Wisconsin, and they're still not satisfied? Where would these clowns be without me?" I won't be particularly sympathetic if he throws up his hands and quits, but I will approve of the result, since he's in better shape to win 2022 than any other Republican who might run. Unless they hire his ad agency, maybe.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo runs down "The Great and Cowardly Press Freakout of August 2021" over our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Long story short: "the great majority of the criticism we’ve seen amounts to ignorance and deflection." Long story somewhat longer: the government fell faster than we anticipated, but we still got over 100,000 good folks out, and our "liberal" media still seems obsessed with optics, when they're the ones taking all the pictures! I don't think our "liberal" media should even be in the meta-commentary business. Historians and social scientists should be, of course, but the folks recording the news shouldn't be manufacturing it as well. Call me old-fashioned. (Also, too, if 20 years of occupation ain't enough to make a supposedly home-grown government last more than a week, then what's another six months going to accomplish?)

Finally, Jonathan Chair argues that Republicans aren't actually trying to hurt Democrats with their anti-vax strategy, but I"m not convinced by his argument. True, "Republican posture toward the coronavirus has not fundamentally changed since Biden’s election" (if not the beginning of the pandemic, I'd say!), but that doesn't rule out the possibility that Republicans have been using the entire pandemic, not just the vaccine, to try to hurt Democrats' political fortunes. And his puzzlement that Republicans would support one thing under Trump and the opposite under Biden can be answered with "gosh, they do that, like, all the time!" I'm not even sure they're "absorbing damage" with their machinations -- yeah, many more of their supporters (and voters) are dying these days, but you can always create new supporters by appealing to their thirst for rage, particularly when Democrats don't appeal to their highest natures, or look down on them.

Around the table: what looks large from a distance, close up ain't never that big.

Mother Jones reminds us that right-wing assholes don't just stumble over each other on Facebook -- Facebook actively aids and abets their meeting. I'm old enough to remember when you had to work to find like-minded folks on social media! Now Facebook's algorithms, here likened to "a speed-reading robot that curates everything you see," are not only "biased in favor of inflammatory content," but also biased in favor of right-wing news sources. Add in their "recommendation" tools like "Groups You Should Join" -- literally responsible for almost two out of every three folks who join some group of Nazi wannabes -- and you have a complete shitshow. I've been contemplating deleting my blog's Facebook page and doing all my promotion over email; this is why. I mean, I won't become an obnoxious right-wing prick, not least because I'm an obnoxious left-wing prick.

Spencer Snyder at FAIR tells us why "MSNBC Can't Look Back" on its origins in celebrating 25 years on the air. I've never thought they were all that liberal, and I rather vividly remember when they tried their damnedest to ape Fox News, but their history is so, so much worse than that -- they gave Laura Ingraham her big cable news break, they provided a soft landing to Tucker Carlson after Jon Stewart shamed Crossfire into oblivion, and even Keith Olbermann, now fondly remembered for being just about the only cable news personality who'd take on George W. Bush during his second term, wouldn't STFU about Monica Lewinsky during the late '90s. Of course, we should remember that they're a freaking cable news channel, which guarantees a certain level of suckitude. They clearly lucked into having Ed Schultz, God rest him, and naturally they fired him for no good reason.

You remember that ProPublica report about how awful asset forfeiture has gotten in Massachusetts? Well, now Massachusetts state legislators are making noises about overhauling the entire asset forfeiture system there, so that maybe fewer DAs can just hang on to your money and/or property for years after they decided not to charge you with anything. So, yeah, good journalism can lead to good works -- maybe folks who only watch cable news don't know that! -- and even if Massachusetts state legislators are only playing their constituents now, the good citizens of that state have something to say about that. Many things, I would think. And now all they need do is say them until they get the justice they deserve.

Ho hum, defense contracting corporation whines that the end of the Afghanistan War is costing it money, but will fund a pro-war think tank nonetheless. You see the inherent contradiction, I trust -- gosh, why not go into, oh, I don't know, renewable energy? There's a lot of call for that now, and nobody with any real work to do remembers the name of big defense contracting corporations anymore. Oh, and yeah, there's a "feedback loop," where big defense contractors fund think tanks which employ "experts" to go on the TV and tell us why we need to go to war all the time. And no "liberal" media outlet that gives them airtime will force them to disclose their potential conflicts of interest. I am, strangely, more than a little annoyed this zombie won't fall. I say "strangely" because I see apparently unkillable zombies all the time in politics.

Patrick Cockburn predicts -- quite accurately, I think -- that the Taliban will "Escape Pariah Status By Posing as the Enemy of ISIS." Isis, you may have heard, has made quite the return in Afghanistan. I've long thought that ISIS gave al-Qaeda a huge opening to claim legitimacy -- you can, I trust, imagine al-Qaeda terrorists saying hey, we did what we had to do, but we're not total barbarians like ISIS! -- but apparently it falls to the Taliban to seize that opportunity, and the better relations with other countries that could come with it. Yes, even with the U.S. -- you think the Taliban might have a few things we want? And you think maybe Joe Biden calculated all of this ahead of withdrawal? I'd be surprised if he didn't, frankly.

Finally, Jonathan Chait says "we have no idea what the rationale is" for "moderate" Democrats slashing President Biden's proposals to hike corporate taxes and tax hikes on the rich. Maybe he's too polite to say it, but I sure as shit ain't: Democrats plan to piss all over yet another slab of extremely popular legislation so that they completely demoralize their base and lose our House and Senate in 2022, thus keeping us in the same absurd and perverse hostage crisis that has yielded the Contract on America and Tha Bush Mobb and the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Maybe the Josh Gottheimers of America should consider they'll never win another election if Congress is full of open fascists, as it will be if they get their way this time. If superior arguments clearly don't move "moderate" Democrats, I won't be above appealing to their self-interest.

Action: concerning voting rights, clean water, saving our Post Office, pollution, corruption, and bad nominations.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, remove all lead water pipes in America, pass the Postal Service Reform Act, bring back the "Polluter Pays" tax, pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, and reject Rahm Emanuel's nomination as Ambassador to Japan. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Our House passed H.R. 4 last week; now our Senate needs to follow suit, so that the Voting Rights Act can have some teeth again, after our Supreme Court knocked them out in Shelby County v. Holder. Our Court ruled, in that case, that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states in its pre-clearance formula (solely because more Black folks vote now than they did before the law, a line of reasoning the late Justice Ginsberg likened to throwing out your umbrella merely because it's stopped raining). Our Court also ruled that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass their muster; hence H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of vote suppression to submit its voting law changes for Justice Department pre-clearance. Republicans will argue we don't need it, but the evidence of your own eyes will say otherwise.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to replace all lead water pipes in America. Just so happens the budget reconciliation blueprint passed by both House and Senate this month could do just that! And that's what we should demand from our Congressfolk -- the removal of all lead pipes. LCV estimates that $45 billion would get it done, and that's, frankly, not much higher than other bills (most famously the WATER Act) have aimed to allot. And when "moderate" Democrats come at you with "we're afraid to tax corporations more due to international competitiveness," you can come right back with so we should tolerate brain damage from lead pipes anywhere in America? Because that is what these irredeemable weaklings really stand for. And it's about time all Americans understood this dark calculus.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. The Postal Service Reform Act would address the real cause of our Postal Service's recent financial troubles -- namely, the mandate to pre-fund retirement benefits for the next 85 years, like literally no other entity, governmental or corporate, has to do. If you had to pre-fund 85 years of retirement funds, hopefully you wouldn't go around wondering why your pockets are empty all the time. Get rid of that absurd mandate, and most of our Postal Service's financial problems will fix themselves, and we won't have to cut services or hike prices (as Postmaster General DeJoy would do) or close Post Offices (as Congressfolk occasionally propose). Why should only stupid ideas get implemented in America?

US PIRG helps you tell your House Reps to reinstate the "polluter pays" tax, so that big polluting corporations have to pay to clean up their messes. You'll recognize the principle, no doubt, from childhood discussions/arguments with your parents: you make the mess, you clean it up. We all accept that as axiomatic these days, yet we don't make corporations pay to clean up their messes, even though their messes are bigger than any pile of dirty clothes you ever left sitting around. We don't make them clean up their messes, I guess, because of "international competitiveness," but seriously, we should tolerate pollution just so a corporation can "compete"? If that's the price of competition, give me cooperation. And maybe these corporations should talk to your mother about cleaning up their messes. If they're lucky, she won't be holding her wooden spoon.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. The Ban Conflicted Trading Act would prevent Congressfolk from trading in stocks and securities while they're in office. Because doing such a thing would be a conflict of interest the minute you did it, given that you'll likely be voting on issues that would affect your trading, whether you sat on a finance-related Congressional committee or not. Really, that is the standard to which we should hold ourselves -- even the stink of corruption should send us running in the other direction. Some people argue against passing such laws because they're "common sense." In doing so, they ignore the mountains of evidence that trading corrupts politicians, but they also miss the point -- laws like this wouldn't "insult common sense" so much as fight malice.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Rahm Emanuel to be Ambassador to Japan. What is this, a "lifetime achievement" award? If so, Mr. Emanuel's hardly earned it on the merits! He's been pushing corporatism on the Democratic Party for decades, and he marred his tenure as Mayor of Chicago with (among other things!) his aggression toward the city's education system, his cover-up of the Laquan McDonald shooting, and his privatization of city parking services. And after that record of "accomplishment," we'd put him in charge of relating to a nation with over 100 military bases and the third-biggest economy on Earth. Wasn't Michael Jordan available? He's more accomplished, after all.

Action: concerning evictions, Democrats, Medicare, taxes, whistleblowers, and prisons.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction moratorium, tell "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to kill the reconciliation bill, tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass the False Claims Amendments Act, and end slavery in American prisons. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Now that our Supreme Court (by the expected 6-3 margin) has ruled the most recent Biden eviction ban unconstitutional, the Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction ban at least through December. Right-wingers will continue to shriek about TEH LANDLORDZ!!!!!, but landlords can weather bad times better than renters, and anyway that's beside the point -- the point is that our government enacted renter relief in the American Rescue Plan Act that hasn't gotten to renters yet, so it would be evil of us to let people get thrown out in the streets before we've made sure they got all the help they could get. That won't convince right-wingers, but nothing does anymore, except DIDDLEZ MY RAGEZ GLANDZ!!!!!

Now that our House has passed the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint, the National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell the notorious "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to sabotage it. Remember: when they say "the price tag's too high," what they really mean is "we don't want rich people and corporations to pay more taxes," even though wanting rich people and corporations to pay more taxes is the majority position in poll after poll after poll and it ain't even close. We could have better Medicare, lower drug prices, paid family/medical leave, better jobs for care workers, and real tax relief for real American working families, except that for some Democrats, big donors are more important than anything. They need us to remind them whom they actually work for.

Speaking of lower drug prices, the aptly-named Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to give Medicare the power to negotiate its own drug prices. It isn't just a good idea, it's a funding mechanism! Seriously, even the right-wing Mercatus Institute told us a few years ago that letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would save the taxpayer over $80 billion annually; times that by ten and you've got $800 billion, which all by itself is more than one-fifth of the aforementioned reconciliation bill's $3.5 trillion price tag. Also, it is a really good idea, since Medicare is the biggest buyer of prescription drugs in America and can use its leverage to reduce drug prices for everyone. We deserve good things from our government, but we won't get them unless we speak out.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The American Rescue Plan Act helped deliver $250 or $300 monthly checks to mailboxes and bank accounts all over America, so of course some right-wing Democrats want to end it; I guess they're just more comfortable going hat-in-hand to some big donor who didn't earn his millions or billions than they are running on, you know, actual accomplishments. If they really want to choose the guy who gilds the plumbing in his 19th vacation home over the kid who got lifted out of poverty, they can go right ahead. But we have to speak out so that if they choose unwisely, they'll get hurt at the polls. And anyone who puts big donors over poor children deserves that hurt.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2428, the False Claims Amendments Act. The original False Claims Act helps our government go after federal contractors (among others) who defraud the taxpayer; and the qui tam provision (literally hundreds of years old, don't let anyone tell you any differently!) has helped numerous whistleblowers get a part of what our government is able to recover; S. 2428 would strengthen anti-retaliation provisions and prevent judges from setting an arbitrarily higher standard for proof in fraud cases. Despite this bill's bipartisan sponsor list, the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" didn't include it, even though it would raise revenue. But that suggests that we need to be more vocal about it.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end slavery in American prisons. Specifically, you'd ask Congress to amend the 13th Amendment -- which allows slavery "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" -- and then apply our minimum wage laws to prisoners. We'll see how lucrative private prisons are after that! If you're thinking if they didn't want to be slaves they shouldn't have committed crimes, you're making a number of errors in your thinking: one, that any slavery is tolerable, anywhere, at any time; two, that anyone who commits a crime thinks like that; and three (and perhaps most important), that we're only supposed to punish prisoners, not rehabilitate them. So let's not hold ourselves hostage to cruelty.

Around the table: the drama, it burns!

FDA formally approves the Pfizer COVID vaccine, which likely means more vaccine mandates from businesses and local governments. It might also mean that a few folks who've hit upon "it's not fully-approved" as a reason not to get the vaccine will get it now. But the right-wing punditoids who've been yelling about full FDA approval will just give the Lazy Susan of Bad Arguments a spin and start mouthing off about something else -- at which point it should be clear, if it's not already, that right-wingers are stirring things up (and enabling the death of tens of thousands) solely so they can get power back in 2022. What, they're going to win with their policy proposals? (In the unlikely event you're on the fence about FDA approval processes, Nicole Karlis at Salon should assuage your fears with her detailed description of how FDA approvals work. It's certainly better than watching Fox News pull its "some critics say" crap.)

Clinical psychologist Doreen Dodgen-Magee writes extensively about the problems we face fighting social media misinformation, including social media algorithms that reward drama over sobriety, the "commitment bias" that leads folks to believe noxious crap for years just because (as Bruce Bartlett might say) it's hard to turn around a cruise ship, and the illusion of "stardom" social media too often affords. I agree that "more private messages and fewer elevated comments in social media spaces, quieter conversations, and, possibly offers of voice-to-voice conversations" would work better for friends and neighbors than public shaming, but I still think we ought to shame professional jerks and their most devoted followers -- not so much for their benefit, but for the benefit of others who may not be thinking clearly enough.

Because sometimes you need to confront Teh Stupid head-on, Marissa Higgins at Daily Kos does us all a public service in discussing the Virginia elementary school teacher who quit, in a public meeting, over being told to refer to trans students by their correct pronouns. Naturally she cites her "Christian" "values," and not, say, whether kids can really know whether they're trans or not -- I don't think boys just up and say they're really girls (and vice versa) in a world where peer pressure is even worse than it used to be, but even if I'm wrong, what the fuck harm does it do to call people what they want to be called? Too often the adults create all the drama when they're supposed to be modeling a better way.

Ho hum, the Trump Administration suppressed an EPA report stating that formaldehyde causes leukemia. You'd think all the hospital environmental workers in America would want to know that! How big a deal is this? A 30-year-old EPA assessment blamed formaldehyde for more than half of all cancers caused by industrial pollutants; the suppressed 2018 report says formaldehyde is three times more carcinogenic than that. Nonetheless, the unpublished findings somehow made their way to big chemical corporate lobbies, and then got suppressed, ostensibly because it was in the "wrong format." But people hate politicians who use arcane reasons to do nothing almost as much as they hate the nakedly corrupt.

Lo and behold, the right-wing New York Post institutes a mask mandate for its employees, after spending months slamming mask mandates in general, and while you wish the Post's readers would have a V8 moment over this -- they've been telling me to do one thing, and now they're doing another! They must never have meant anything they told me! -- you know as well as I do that the Lazy Susan of Bad Arguments sure is hypnotic when it spins. Maybe a "caravan" is coming to the border! Maybe Afghan refugees are moving in next door! Maybe there are transgender folks in my bathroom! There's always something when rage is all you care about.

Finally, Democrats struck a deal on the reconciliation bill, passing the budget framework immediately while promising to schedule a vote on the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" by September 27. "Moderate" Democrats should know by now the value of promises, and I guess it's nice to see Nancy Pelosi school them in it, rather than Mitch McConnell. But they'll have to finish both bills up by September 30 thanks to budget reconciliation rules, and how hilarious it will be to see Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema or Josh Gottheimer or Henry Cuellar come up with stupid reasons to scuttle everything. At which point Democrats would doom themselves to the minority in Congress in 2022, which is dangerous, since they'd be losing the majority to avowed fascists.

Action: concerning jobs, war, refugees, voting rights, police violence, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to pass the reconciliation budget blueprint, tell your Congressfolk to repeal the "war on terror"-era AUMFs, tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap on Afghan refugees, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, eliminate qualified immunity for police officers, and pass the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: call your House Reps and tell them to vote in favor of the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint the Senate passed a few weeks ago, the budget blueprint that will enable all sorts of good things to happen in America -- higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, a stronger care-based economy, and paid family/medical leave for all workers, just to name a few. A few "moderate" Democrats are trying to take the bill hostage, but theirs is the calculus of cowardice -- the result of their actions, which may also be the aim of their actions, will be to scuttle both the reconciliation bill and the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" at whose altar they kneel. If they do that, they will lose not only their own seats, but the House and Senate -- and this time, they'll lose them to Republicans who openly identify as fascists. So brook no silliness from your House Reps about "the difficulty of raising taxes in an election." You know what's harder than raising taxes in an election? Winning elections in a fascist state when you're not a fascist.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs) that started the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and thus end our "forever war." Some people, and by some people I mainly mean people on the right side of the political spectrum, just aren't happy unless we're at war. Put six beers in them and they'll say war is the way to remake the world! Helluva job they did in Afghanistan, if so. War isn't the way to "remake the world," it's the way to redistribute income from taxpayers into defense contracting CEOs' pockets. You may note that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) has sponsored these AUMF repeals, as she has done in the past, and you may remember that Rep. Lee was literally the only "nay" vote against the Afghanistan AUMF. If I were her, I'd wear an "I WAS RIGHT" baseball cap from now until the day they put me in the ground. But first, let's have her being right about that count for something.

In a related note, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap for Afghans fleeing from the Taliban, so that more of the 300,000-plus Afghans who helped our military during the war effort can get out. You've already heard famous right-wing blowhards warn us about the coming "invasion" of Afghans, but this should be pretty simple to figure out from a moral perspective -- we did this to them, by invading their country, toppling their government, and promising them we would make their lives better. Now the government we toppled is back in power like the last 20 years didn't happen, and right-wingers expect we'll put racism above letting the Taliban murder the folks who helped us? So much for being the "guardians of morality." Let's not let them make all the damn decisions around here.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Remember when our Supreme Court knocked the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder? H.R. 4 would put those teeth back. In the aforementioned Shelby County v. Holder, our Court held that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states by forcing them to pre-clear their voting law changes with our Justice Department -- but our Court also held that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass Constitutional muster. God only knows if that's true anymore, what with Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the Court now, but H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of voting rights violations to Justice Department pre-clearance. And with so many states trying to suppress the vote as we speak, we need H.R. 4. So brook no silliness about "how the South has changed," because this is about America.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk and the Biden Administration to prioritize ending "qualified immunity" for police officers when they execute Black folks without even charging them with a crime. I put that last phrase in there because it gives some people pause -- folks will "support the police" without thinking very hard about what it means, but they generally will not support "killing people without charge." A few will, believe it or not, but then every generation has had to deal with crazy people. Without getting too inside-baseball (I've done that in other posts about this matter!), "qualified immunity" restricts your ability to sue a police officer for a wrongful death, and restricts that ability way, way beyond the bounds of common sense -- to the point where parents of teenage kids shot by police can't get the justice they deserve. So let's get our government to do the right thing here.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Postmaster General DeJoy's response to USPS funding shortfalls? Raise prices and lower services. The Postal Service Reform Act's response? Stop forcing our USPS to pre-fund retiree benefits for employees who ain't even born, get postal retirees into Medicare, and allow our USPS to offer additional services like postal banking -- though the bill doesn't specify postal banking, so you may want to say that you want that in the bill when you talk to (or write) your Congressperson. Virtually all of our USPS's problems can be traced to the pre-funding of retiree benefits, and in my experience, our Post Office continues to deliver exemplary service even with all the crap they have to put up with, and services that work you want to keep working. So let's keep our Postal Service, and let's help it thrive.

Around the table: featuring vote "fraudits," corrupt bullies, and deficit peacocks.

David Gilbert at Vice profiles one of the ringleaders of the January 6 attempted coup, Amy Kremer, who now wants to conduct an Arizona-style "fraudit" of the Georgia vote. She does get around, I'll give her that -- she does a lot of pro-Trump rallies and events relying on financing of, shall we say, indeterminate source. And she's somehow just "a regular mom who loves (her) country" and a founder of the Tea Party, meaning she's been deeply involved in far-right causes for the last dozen years, including, you guessed it, birtherism. I wonder how her kids are doing.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) announces his intention to resign after a damning sexual harassment investigation and at least one criminal complaint, and Tim Murphy at Mother Jones reminds us that he was "a petty, corrupt bully." He only gives a few examples, but I'm sure the historians will have a much longer story to tell of the man who governed badly and covered it up with bluster and threats, though that's an ever-more familiar story, amirite, Trumpholes? My guess is we'll remember him as a meaner, grabbier Evan Bayh.

Suddenly faced with a mayoral candidate not of their choosing, the Buffalo Democratic party is seriously mulling getting rid of the Mayor's office just so actual liberal India Walton doesn't win. All together now: waaaaaaaaaah! Doesn't anyone have any damn shame anymore? And sadly, their machinations could defeat Ms. Walton -- as those familiar with Upton Sinclair's 1934 run for Governor of California, or Matt Gonzalez's run for Mayor of San Francisco in 2003, or Nina Turner's recent run in the Ohio 11th Democratic House primary, already know. Read the whole thing for some of the truly non-explosive charges against Ms. Walton.

In the wake of Senate passage of a $3.5 trillion budget resolution, Republicans ready their big spender charges against Democrats. The ad is total horseshit, as you would expect -- "record inflation" is to laugh if you're over 40, and without an ounce of shame they call letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices "control(ling) what medicines you can get"! But ooh, ooh! I know what to say in response: my Republican opponent would overthrow the government just because his guy lost and he's a big crybaby; do y'all want to be represented by a big crybaby? You're welcome, Democrats.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) voicing "serious reservations" about the budget resolution he'd just voted for is just another dull moment in American politics. Look at his stilted, repetitive diction and you'll see nothing "serious" about his argument, just as you saw nothing serious about his argument against the For the People Act which named exactly zero things he didn't like about the For the People Act. Recall that he also took the American Rescue Plan hostage for 10 hours at the beginning of this year so he could posture about "irresponsible" spending. Maybe Kyrsten Sinema is right, and Joe really does love the attention.

Finally, folks are telling a lot of stupid stories about the "Biden economy" -- folks who complain about gas prices have no memory of gas prices more than doubling under George W. Bush, apparently -- but it does some good to confront Teh Stupid. Case in point: the North Carolina restaurant owner who claims he spends $200 more every week just for mayonnaise, which some Twitter users happily calculated means this clown goes through at least 250 gallons of mayonnaise every week, which sure seems like a lot of chicken salad and Caesar salad dressing. Which reminds us, once again, that the only way to beat scare numbers is to do the math.

Around the table: tabulating yet more right-wing drama.

Jonathan Cohn at the HuffPost describes, in some detail, why vaccine requirements are, in fact, perfectly legal -- and highlights some of the libertarians who agree. I have so little patience for right-wingers these days that I was all ready to nitpick the libertarians' arguments, but that's my failing, because Jessica Flanigan, Jason Brennan, and Ilya Somin all argue their case much better than Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, and Elise Stefanik argue theirs. This would make a good Goofus and Gallant strip -- "Goofus runs around shouting about freedom all the time, while Gallant makes sure he doesn't infringe on others' freedoms."

D.C. District Court judge wonders why our Justice Department is letting some January 6 insurrectionists plead down to a misdemeanor. I didn't like the answer, either -- that the intent of a particular defendant can't always be nailed down so neatly, like any of them were there for any other reason than overturning the election. I'll admit I'd have snapped out on the defendant who said he was trying to overturn the election only to have his lawyer say that of course he wasn't there for that. That may be one reason I'm not a judge.

Some "moderate" Democrats are hot to get rid of the Sales and Local Taxes (or SALT) cap, which prevents folks from deducting more than $10,000 in SALT from what they owe on their federal taxes, and I gotta say I find both their priorities and their vehemence quite irritating -- and look how our "liberal" media won't call Reps. Gottheimer and Suozzi "extremists," though they have literally pledged to stop the reconciliation bill dead if they can't get rid of or raise the SALT cap. What a thing to take to the Pearly Gates! They claim rich folks who can't deduct large amounts of SALT taxes take their money to Florida and Texas, but I don't buy that any more than I did when Republicans argued for cutting rich folks' taxes -- it's the same old hostage crisis no matter who's taking the hostages.

Charlie Sykes reminds us that "(e)ven as many Republicans rail against mask mandates and spread skepticism about vaccines, GOP leaders have settled on one place where they take the spread of COVID very seriously -- the border." But of course -- for Republicans, everything is just a tool to be discarded as soon as it's fulfilled its purpose. And again: when liberals get "tough" on immigration; they get exactly zero support from the right -- not least because right-wingers can only get support by doing things like insisting the border is on fire.

When you hear that a "MAGA civil war" may be brewing between Trump's inner circle and Fox News, after Fox edited out yet more "stolen election" claims before uploading an interview with Mr. Trump to YouTube, just remember that it's all drama! It's all distraction! Right-wingers love looking like they're at odds, not just as a big possum game but as a way of deflecting criticism over marching in jackboot lockstep about everything. (You probably also noticed that the Fox host who conducted the interview, Dan Bongino, essentially conceded the point to the MAGA crowd, which tells you who's still the boss.)

Finally, former President Donald Trump opines thusly about the recent COVID spike: "Could you imagine if I were president right now and we had this massive attack from the coronavirus? If that were me, they would say, 'What a horrible thing, what a horrible job.' And I don’t ever hear that." Regardless of what Mr. Trump "hears," President Biden's approvals have fallen since COVID cases spiked, but we don't even need to speculate on what would have happened "if" this had happened while he was President, because every single day between November 10 and the end of Mr. Trump's Presidency saw more COVID cases than the 132,000-plus we saw on Friday, and Mr. Trump spent that whole time filing frivolous lawsuits against the election he lost by seven million votes and inciting an attempted coup. In a sane, moral, and decent society, we'd all be serving Mr. Trump a big glass of STFU; in this insane, immoral, and decadent society, our media will broadcast his less-than-worthless utterances again and again.

Action: concerning the filibuster, service shutoffs, banksters, and law-and-order policy.

Long story short: tell President Biden to actively oppose the Senate filibuster, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, end hedge fund predatory behavior, and pass the Break the Cycle of Violence Act and the MEAL Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Public Citizen and The Juggernaut Project help you tell President Biden to lead on filibuster reform. He's used his bully pulpit to argue for the For the People Act -- said he'd "fight like heck" to get it done, in fact -- but if he's not willing to endorse getting rid of the filibuster, it'll all be for nothing. Republicans use the filibuster to stop everything, which not only means no gerrymandering reform, no campaign finance reform, and no end to racist vote suppression practices, it also means Democrats look like they do nothing all day, which guarantees they'll be in the minority in Congress again. People like it when you do stuff, and they hate it when you don't. It's pretty simple, much simpler than the 13-dimensional chess Democrats seem to play most of the time.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4979/S. 1783, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, which would prevent utility corporations from shutting off your electricity and water and the like. I can already hear the right-wingers yell WHEN DOEZ IT ENDZ!!!!! Maybe it ends when they get the boards out of their asses and get vaccinated so we can end this pandemic! After all, a person without essential services is a person rather more at risk of getting COVID, and therefore at risk of keeping the pandemic going. There are times -- many times, in fact -- when the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do. This is one of those times. And remember how the Joe Louis Arena didn't get its water shut off in 2014 even after falling over $82,000 behind on its water bill. And I think people are actually more important than sports arenas.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would rein in hedge funds' predatory behavior. Hedge funds love to swoop in, buy corporations, and then suck the wealth out of them like the vampires they are, and as a result, good Americans lose their jobs. How do we put a stop to that? We tell Congress to make hedge funds (and their executives) legally liable for the evil they do, ban the practices that allow banksters to loot other corporations, protect the workers who'd otherwise lose their jobs and pensions (that last part's important!), and close the corporate tax loopholes that make hedge funds absurdly overpaid. No, they don't "rein in bad actors" in our economy. We've got laws and regulations for that, and if we don't, we make the laws and regulations better. Big corporations make very bad cops.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4118/S. 2275, the Break the Cycle of Violence Act. Which would do what? Fund community-based violence prevention programs, that's what. Which would be a whole lot better than calling the police every time folks can't solve problems with their family, friends, and neighbors. If you're tempted to call this "defunding the police," consider that a police officer should not be the solution to every conceivable problem -- not just for our sake, but for theirs. And if you're temped to call it a "slush fund" for Black folks, remember that no one will get rich of these government grants. Really, if it were all about grift, they'd be banksters. In fact, you really ought to look to the financial sector first if you're looking for grift.

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2837, the Making Essentials Affordable and Lawful (or MEAL) Act. The MEAL Act would repeal the law that bans Americans with drug convictions from ever getting food stamps or other forms of public assistance -- which sure sounds like the kind of thing politicians do to look tough, and thus should be opposed on that basis alone. But, seriously, if we actually do believe in rehabilitation, then lifetime bans for drug convictions is the precise opposite of logic as well as the precise opposite of mercy. And as for the folks who don't believe in rehabilitation, well, maybe there's a police state that'll take them in. I hear things are a lot simpler in police states.

Action: concerning taxes, Medicare, familiy care, and climate change.

Long story short: tell our Senate to raise taxes on rich folks, expand Medicare, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, enact the centerpieces of the American Families Plan, and ensure climate change action makes it into the upcoming reconciliation bill. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

You can let Sign for Good help you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the super-rich already -- they need to hear the general message just as much as they need to hear the specific ones! -- or you can make a phone call to your Congressfolk and tell them to raise corporate taxes, tax capital gains and dividend income at regular income rates, tax financial transactions, pass a Wealth Tax, and bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income (or pass a Millionaire's Surtax, which would only bring it up to 47%, but that'd be the highest it's been in, like, 36 years). Or you can do both! All of these actions would do this nation a great deal of good -- we'd not only have money to build an America that gives its people the services we deserve, but we'd restrain the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us, as they've been doing since approximately 1980. It's not often you can do unqualified good in this world, so seize the opportunity.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices already, and Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare. Our Senators are mulling both expanding Medicare (both eligibility and services) and letting it negotiate its own drug prices in the upcoming reconciliation bill -- no, not the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" they're still working on now, but the next bill, the one that might actually do some good and which they probably don't really want to pass anyway. You just know some idiot in the Democratic caucus will object to the "cost" of letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices when doing so would actually save the taxpayer some $80 billion annually! But we have a lot to say about whether they pass that bill or not. If we say it, that is.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. Hey, there's another thing that could fit into that reconciliation bill -- along with all those tax-hikes-on-the-rich we discussed in the first paragraph. The Child Tax Credit expansion, which delivers $250 or $300 checks into people's bank accounts every month, is such great policy and great politics I can't quite believe Democrats did it, but they did, in the American Rescue Plan Act, the first reconciliation bill of 2021. They're about to blow it with all their talk about "bipartisanship" and "how do we pay for stuff," of course, but, again, we have a lot to say about all of that -- if we say it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the reconciliation bill includes funding for home- and community-based care and paid family/medical leave. These items were the nominal centerpieces of the American Families Plan; now all we have to do is remind how-do-we-pay-for-it Democrats that a) they know damn well how to pay for it and they just have to have the guts to do it and b) if they fail at this, they're all toast in the 2022 midterms anyway. Seriously, you have Congressional Democrats who are all I can't raise taxes before an election. Because cutting taxes sure worked for the Democrats in the 2010 midterms and the Republicans in the 2018 midterms! No use saying we'd be better off without that kind of Democrat in Congress -- I mean of course we would, but we're stuck with them now, so better to communicate our will in numbers they can't ignore or deny.

Finally, both the League of Conservation Voters and the Union of Concerned Scientists help you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the reconciliation bill includes climate change action. I know, climate change, paid family leave, home care, the Child Tax Credit, taxing the rich -- it's all so much! And we've dispensed with it all in five paragraphs, and you can dispense with it all in three phone calls and/or a few minutes with the above links. We're not in maintenance mode with America; we're in pull-the-baby-out-the-damn-fire-now mode, particularly as concerns pollution. All the Millionaire's Surtaxes in the world won't amount to much if we don't have a planet to live on, and we're not getting out of climate change hell without investing in renewable energy technologies, so let's remind our Congressfolks of that, as many times as we need to.

Around the table: fight the real enemy, part 985.

Ho hum, three big banks that "partner" with WalMart made literally all of their 2019 and 2020 profits from overdraft fees extracted from working families. Nice work if you can get it! Seriously, that's not work, and every time a right-winger defends the "free" market, that's what they defend. As an aside, while I don't expect the acting Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to tip his hand in an investigation, his vow to use "the full range" of "our supervisory toolkit" doesn't exactly inspire confidence, either.

When I hear that "the biggest labor rally in Alabama history" last week was also the most racially diverse, I'm reminded that racial diversity hasn't always been a given in the labor movement -- all too often, labor has sided against non-white folks, particularly immigrants. The rally was also politically diverse, with "Trump guy(s)" peacefully coexisting with BLM supporters, reminding us of what we can accomplish together -- as long as the other side doesn't stage coups, try to overturn elections, or keep the pandemic going with their refusal to vaccinate.

The Senate's "debate" on the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" grinds on, briefly interrupted by a desperate right-wing attempt to root out "politically correct virtue-signaling" in the bill, in the words of Sen. Toomey (E-PA). Sen. Toomey's lame joke about "racist escalators" reminds us that he's no "moderate" merely because he doesn't scream at everyone like Donald Trump does. Right-wingers should also know that we hardly use the term "woke" anymore -- basically, we only use it to describe people who make a show of being "woke" without actually doing anything useful about racism, sexism, and fascism.

Did Nancy Pelosi's yammering about how nobody can just cancel student loan debt seem to come out of the blue to you? Well, Ken Klippenstein and Ryan Grim at The Intercept suggest it may have had something to do with a couple of billionaire constituents bending her ear. Just because people think the Bay Area is full of rich tech bros doesn't mean middle-class working people don't live there, and a lot of those folks have massive student loan debt, but their will means little or nothing to Ms. Pelosi, apparently. And thus we are reminded, yet again, that House Democratic leadership really needs to get out of the young bucks' way.

They're calling the results in the Ohio 11th House district Democratic primary a lesson in how Democrat voters want "stability," but Natalie Shure at In These Times sees other lessons to learn. One of them you already know from the last paragraph -- the Democratic House leadership might hate Republicans, but they definitely hate fierce liberals who might actually do some good with the power they have. Another lesson you already know is the power of dark money. But a third lesson? AOC and Cori Bush won by emphasizing the need to make Democrats "live up to their full potential." People would rather be inspired than angered, after all.

Finally, color me unimpressed that Dick Cheney has apparently professed to be "deeply troubled" about the state of the Republican Party, because he played a big role in bringing all of this about! Stupid wars, lawless government spying, collapsed economies, attacking the patriotism of folks who disagree with you, not to mention the accelerated decimation of our manufacturing base -- what part of this does he not recognize? What part of this has he not enabled? And if Bernie Sanders had won the 2020 election, would he have leaped to defend the "peaceful transition of power"?

Around the table: more notes on pollution, racism, and health care.

Sharon Lerner at The Intercept explains how big corporations and weak regulators get dangerous chemicals approved by our government. If a corporation demands that our EPA declare their chemical is safe right-fucking-now, aren't they telling us that it's really not safe? And when more and more chemical approval cases suddenly become high-priority "hair on fire" cases, doesn't that make the word "priority" pretty close to meaningless? If your workplace worked like that, you'd call bullshit. (As an aside, some corporate hacks even threaten EPA workers with lawsuits. Do I dare I call them frivolous lawsuits? Yes, I do dare!)

Surprise, surprise, states that ended enhanced unemployment benefits didn't prompt very many people to get jobs. And you don't live like a king on unemployment benefits, enhanced or not, so gosh, maybe folks really just don't want to go back to bad jobs so they can be paid in dung pellets and suffer endless abuse from bosses and customers. Sure, fear of COVID and caring for relatives with COVID might be factors, but I doubt they're deal-breakers. Wouldn't a free marketeer look at this data and suggest that employers make their jobs more attractive if they want to fill more positions? I kid, of course -- no "free" marketeer ever blames a corporation for not doing enough.

When I read that African asylum seekers have an even tougher time at American concentration camps than other folks do -- and Frances Madeson's report is truly horrifying -- I am reminded that we have a long history of truly awful immigration policy. Remember when we used to give gasoline baths to poor (not well-off) Mexican immigrants at the border? The Nazis picked up on that! I guess right-wingers will call me a purveyor of critical race theory for even noting any of this. And I'll call them a bunch of whiny diaper-loaded brats who are too weak to handle the hard work of maintaining a civilization, so I guess that's at least a draw.

Hey, speaking of critical race theory, Olivia Riggio at FAIR notes that right-wingers have "manufactured" all kinds of meanings of the term. I guess they're not quite as embarrassing as that Alabama lawmaker, but why do we bother telling the difference between the mound of dung the flies have found and the mound of dung they haven't found yet? Even the right-wingers who try harder still basically insist that one counter-example destroys all trends, which is still pretty damn stupid. No, one college professor fantasizing about shooting white people doesn't obliterate the fact of police exterminating Black folks for centuries. No, one Black man getting two doctorates doesn't obliterate the racism that means other Black folks get none. And no, you're certainly not "the real racist" for pointing out the real racism. Gosh, no matter how many head shots you give these zombies, they keep getting back up. It's almost like Our Glorious Elites benefit from that or something.

Did Florida Governor Ron DeSantis really say that his state's "hospitals are open for business"? Yes, he really did say that. Politicians constantly use the phrase "open for business" as if it's an amulet that'll keep them out of trouble; is it too much to ask that Mr. DeSantis has finally put a stake through that phrase's heart? As we speak, Florida routinely leads the nation in daily new cases, and Charlie Crist just led Ron DeSantis in a poll. If Mr. Crist deploys the phrase "our hospitals are open for business" in his ads, he might just win. I hope Mr. Crist isn't too "nice" for that. Perhaps he should ask John Bel Edwards how well being nasty to people who deserve it can work for you.

Finally, New York Attorney General Letitia James issues report finding that Gov. Andrew Cuomo has sexually harassed "multiple" women. Please, please, don't take Andrew Cuomo away from us! said no liberal ever.

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, human rights, chemical safety, national monuments, and lead poisoning.

Long story short: tell Democrats to raise taxes on the rich, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Lower Drug Prices Now Act and stop selling weapons to Egypt, tell your Senators to pass the PFAS Action Act and reject the so-called Protect Utah’s Rural Economy Act, and tell our EPA to get the lead out of our water pipes. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to tax the rich big-time in their upcoming budget reconciliation bill. Because you can talk about the Wealth Tax and the Millionaire Surtax and the like, but sometimes you just have to say tax the rich already! Now some Democrats are already like I can't raise taxes going into an election year! They're wrong: you can raise taxes on rich people who aren't paying enough in taxes whenever you like, because people actually like that -- as long as you defend what you're doing with some fierceness. Some of these Democrats don't know from fierceness, but that's why we're here -- where they lack it, we must give it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices already. Somehow they couldn't get this done along as part of the Affordable Care Act, but letting Medicare negotiate its own prices was popular then, and it's popular now. Plus it's a revenue raiser! Which is not only common sense -- forcing Medicare to pay higher prices for drugs costs more money, after all -- but is also supported by research. By right-wing research! The Koch-funded Mercatus Center infamously said it would save Medicare over $80 billion annually -- and remember, Mercatus wants Medicare dead.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop selling arms to Egypt, as well as to other countries with notorious human rights records. Just this past February, the Biden Administration approved a $197 million missile sale to Egypt only days after Egypt raided the homes of six relatives of an Egyptian-American activist. Imagine your government raiding the homes of your parents, your brother, your sister, your nephew, your aunt and uncle, and your grandmother! And then imagine some even larger country selling our government $200 million in guns the next day. Seem like a good idea? No, it does not. So let's stop enabling that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act. The House passed H.R. 2467 last week with 23 Republicans voting for it, some you already know (Brian Fitzpatrick) and some you'd never expect (Matt Gaetz); the bill would direct our EPA to designate PFAS chemicals -- also known as "forever chemicals" because they never seem to break down like other chemicals do! -- as the hazardous substances they clearly are, and would task our EPA with determining whether PFAS chemicals are also toxic pollutants, because that would require regulation under the Clean Water Act, and thus require our EPA to limit their discharge into our water, particularly our drinking water. There had damn well better be 10 Republicans who'll vote for this bill, and I don't want to hear any whining about "nanny states" from any of them.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject S. 31, the so-called Protect Utah’s Rural Economy Act. How would S. 31 "protect Utah's rural economy"? By freezing the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments at the size to which Donald Trump shrunk them as President. Really, that's all the bill does. If you remember that Mr. Trump shrunk these monuments only so that mining corporations could dig up those lands, then you'll probably be just as puzzled as I am that anyone could call this "protecting Utah's rural economy." It's rather like letting foxes have free reign over the henhouse and calling that "protecting our chickens." So let's kill this particular slab of stupid.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to get the lead out of our water pipes. Specifically, you'd ask our EPA to update its Lead and Copper Rule so that it gets lead pipes out of our water systems, since any amount of lead in your water can cause brain damage, particularly to children. Some Republicans probably want that, since it's their best show at ensuring future generations vote for them, but, luckily, they get literally no say in this matter. Well, they could pass a resolution of disapproval later on, but how would that make them look? It'd make them look objectively pro-dirty water and objectively pro-brain damage, and those aren't good looks. This should be a layup for our EPA, but we still have to tell them to go to the rim.

Around the table: lies, damn lies, and Democrat establishment theories about winning elections.

They're all saying that Jake Ellzey's six-point win over Trump-endorsed Susan Wright in the U.S. House special in Texas's 6th demonstrates the "limits" of a Trump endorsement, but I say it demonstrates nothing of the kind. Both candidates are cut from the same pro-Trump cloth, and Mr. Trump's endorsement of Ms. Wright always seemed half-hearted. And this election was still All About Trump, as Mr. Ellzey proved by reaching out to the district's Democrats at the last minute. My advice? Jana Sanchez has repeatedly proven she can't win that district, so the establishment should get behind Shawn Lassiter in 2022. But establishment Democrats never learn -- you don't win tough races with the "electable"; you win with the fierce.

House Minority Leader/Speaker wannabe Kevin McCarthy says that "(t)he threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state." And once again, this is complete projection! Republicans want a "permanent pandemic state," as they've already shown us by a) trashing vaccines and b) not getting them when it would have made a difference, and Republicans can only win when they foment chaos and drama. Welcome to another exciting edition of "I Never Thought I'd Hate a Republican House Leader More Than That Last One."

Ho hum, our "liberal" media can't get enough of bashing ice cream corporation Ben & Jerry's for refusing to sell their wares on the West Bank. A lot of folks are very pro-boycotting when folks boycott something they hate, but when folks boycott things they like, they're suddenly all WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH FREEDUMZ!!!!!! Which is, naturally, what they say when folks boycott Ben & Jerry's. And, you know, boycotting actually has an honorable history; these idiots probably would have been tut-tutting the Montgomery bus boycott back in the day. And as we learned from Colin Kaepernick, some folks' attraction to non-violence seems very issue-specific. Now please excuse me while I go get some Peanut Butter Fudge Core.

I laughed out loud when I heard that some Missourians are actually wearing disguises when they go to the doctor to get their COVID vaccine! After all, I've got a reputation as an asshole to uphold! All I can say to folks wearing Groucho Marx glasses to their COVID appointments is that if you want to get the vaccine and your friends don't want you to get it, maybe you need new friends. And chances are somebody will want to be your friend! Not everyone is as fed up with Teh Stupid as I am, and plenty of people have more compassion than I do.

George P. Bush, after all that sucking up he did to Donald Trump, has failed to secure the coveted Trump endorsement in the Texas Attorney General race; the winner, such as he is, is incumbent Ken Paxton. One supposes there's only so much sucking up you can do to the Bigly Man before even he gets grossed out by it, as Josh Mandel will find out in Ohio. I'm a little surprised that he's puffed up Mr. Paxton, though, since Mr. Paxton failed to get the election overturned, and you know how well the Bigly Man takes failure. Possibly he finds Mr. Paxton, who's been under federal indictment on securities fraud charges almost since he's been in office, a kindred spirit.

Finally, what did we learn from the first day of the January 6 hearings? "What We Already Know," says William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut, "It Was a GOP Riot." Trigger warning: paragraphs six through 11 describe some of the Capitol police's testimony, which will, among other things, remind us that right-wingers' support of police is very, very issue-specific: they support them when they execute Black folks without even charging them with a crime, but not so much when they oppose Capitol rioters. And they accuse liberals of similar issue-specificity without evidence. For example, anyone who reads my writings on the issue and says "he wants to abolish the police" can't read worth a damn.

Around the table: stupid *is* evil, part 342.

I'd been wondering how jobs legislation would end badly, and now I know: Joe Manchin says he'll basically kill the reconciliation bill by himself if the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" "falls apart." "When one falls apart, how do you move the other one?" he asks, perhaps hoping we won't answer take everything Republicans said "no" to in one and put it in the other one. Surprise, our leaders have been playing us again; Democrats will do nothing with the power they have -- they'll even squander that massive political victory, the monthly CTC expansion check -- and in a year and a half Republicans will take back Congress, this time with candidates who come right out and say they're fascists. All because Democrats are more afraid of losing big corporate campaign donations than losing elections. (I guess you can call Joe Manchin, especially if you're a constituent. And say I know your secret, perhaps.)

Hoo boy, Ohio Republican Senate candidate/bankster/"flip-flop-flipper" J.D. Vance says maybe parents should get more votes than childless adults. And, of course, they would actually get to vote on their children's behalf! I'm actually not convinced that right-wingers are popping out more children than liberals -- everyone ain't the Duggars, after all, and naming several famous Democrats who don't have children doesn't exactly make a strong argument -- but this is the kind of thing desperate people come up with when they know they can't win arguments on the merits, or, perhaps more precisely, when they can't win vote tallies on the merits. I'm old enough to remember hearing "maybe we should only let property owners vote just like in the old days," so I don't want to hear about this bullshit again. One person, one vote, period, end of, done talking.

Wondering how Israeli corporation NSO managed to create such a nefarious slab of spyware like Pegasus? Look first to Israel's occupation of Palestine, as Yousef Munayyer at Jewish Currents does: "(w)ith an occupied and stateless population of Palestinians under its rule, to which it has granted no citizenship rights or civil liberties, Israel is free to develop, test, and perfect its surveillance technology on millions of unwilling subjects." American corporations would have different constraints, obviously -- though, ironically enough, one probable reason NSO's done so well is not only the nearly $4 billion in American taxpayer money Israel gets from our military, but the fact that Israel gets to spend more of that money on its own manufacturers than any other nation receiving American taxpayer assistance.

As Daniel Hale is about to be sentenced to up to 11 years in prison for blowing the whistle on the drone assassination program, I find myself shaking my head at our government's case against him -- he did it out of "vanity"? Seriously? Knowing his government would hunt him down and that more Americans would hate him than admire him? And hilariously, our government claims the leaks "helped ISIS" even though a former CIA official who reviewed the leaked documents said that, actually, they didn't. Mr. Hale's own words chronicle his shame at having participated in drone strikes, and all I can say is thank the Lord someone in America can still feel shame, and would repent of his sins and attempt to repair the harm they caused and continue to cause.

When I heard that Sen. Tommy Tuberville (S-AL) totally broke the law by failing to report over $1 million in stock trades, some involving corporations with business before the committees he serves on, within 45 days, I actually thought for a moment that the answer to the "stupid or evil?" question might actually have been stupid here, since this is Tommy Tuberville, after all. But then I remembered that stupid is how evil people cover themselves. Besides, even if it was stupid, it's also evil -- evil deeds don't require evil intent. Also, too, stupid is evil.

Finally, Tucker Carlson got an earful from a local resident in a Montana fishing shop, but I was most intrigued by Fox News's reaction: "Ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family is totally inexcusable — no public figure should be accosted regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs simply due to the intolerance of another point of view." We'll set aside the idea that we should "tolerate" lies and drama and hatred, let alone consider them just "another point of view" -- Fox News used to send Jesse Watters out to accost public figures repeatedly back in the day, and it never bothered them then. They don't like being held accountable now? What a surprise! Hey, kids: don't be like Fox News.

Around the table: what they need's a damn good whacking!

Our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) has produced a very interesting chart mapping the relationship between infection rates and vaccination rates, by county! Spoiler alert: the Republican areas of America have the most correlation between infections and (lack of) vaccines. Ohio is a conspicuous exception, but Republicans there will likely primary Gov. DeWine out of office as a reward for his relative competence. But do you think right-wingers will be pumping the results in Teton County, Wyoming -- where both vaccination and infection rates are high -- as if they're indicative of the entire nation? You betcha!

Democratic politicos fear that Republican voting laws across the country will doom them in 2022. In the meantime, here's what Democrats can do about that: a) do good works with the power they have wherever they have it and b) organize like our lives depend on it, which they kinda do. Seriously, no Republicans should hold office, anywhere -- they just hurt people. I don't know if Democratic candidates will do well or not in 2022, but I do know this: if they don't do well, they might blame the voting laws, but they'll definitely blame the liberals!

Idaho Lieutenant Governor, who's challenging the sitting Governor in the upcoming Republican primary, has paid over $25,000 to an "analyst" who has advocated shooting police officers. Not because they shoot Black folks, but because they arrest people, since, in his book, arrest equals kidnapping. I guess I won't be asking him how he feels about taxation. Attention, Chris Wallace! Maybe Republicans are really the ones who want to shoot the cops!

Donald Trump advises Congressional Republicans to ditch the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" until they take back Congress and thus have more "leverage," and for once I can't tell if he's giving them marching orders or not. After all, the man had two years with Republican majorities to pass an infrastructure bill, and he never came close to producing one, which suggests to me it's not really that important to him. His votaries will protest, but on what evidence? The "evidence" of their own rage, of course.

Matt Lewis at the Daily Beast examines "How Trumpists Prey on Loneliness, and Loneliness Preys on Trumpists," and when you confront the notion that "(p)eople who find purpose and meaning in their religious faith, connection with family, hobbies, and their vocation are less susceptible to finding meaning and community in a cult of personality," you may be reminded that scientists have said the same thing about drug addiction -- and have prescribed more profound interpersonal connections as the solution. I feel compelled to add that this isn't a new problem -- a lot of Trumpholes were Bushholes after 9.11.

Finally, Los Angeles man who gained some notoriety by mocking the COVID vaccine has, guess what, died of COVID. And he said he still wouldn't get vaccinated as he was being intubated -- admittedly, that ship had long sailed -- because his "faith" would "protect" him. And at the Pearly Gates, St. Peter will say to him let me guess: you didn't take the vaccine we sent you. Should we be sad at his death? Yes. But we should be sadder about the deaths his attitude will cause, because that sure didn't die with him.

Around the table: welcome to part 878 of "insane Republicans, spineless Democrats."

John Culhane at Slate instructs us that "Fox News Could Be Sued if Its Anti-Vax Statements Caused People to Die." I accept that his entire argument is valid; the hard part, I'd think, would be finding enough unvaccinated folks who get sick from COVID and who would say "I relied on Fox News to tell me the truth." It's true that at least one Trumphole facing prison for his role in the January 6 coup attempt has said, via his lawyer, that TEH TRUMPZ MADEZ MEZ DO TEH THINGZ!!!!, and that's similar enough. But a lot of these folks, when pressed, will simply deny they were relying on Fox News to tell them the truth, because, well, some folks think it's OK to say just anything when they're cornered.

Lost in all the gags about how his rocketship looked like a giant cock is the fact that "Poverty Wages and Tax Dodges" funded Jeff Bezos's trip to the very edge of space. When you contemplate that, in fact, you might begin to think that the penis-shaped rocketship was a deliberate distraction. No, I wouldn't put it past folks like Jeff Bezos to think of that. And, hate to beat on a dead horse, but our government got us to the moon and back six times, whereas a guy with $200 billion couldn't even get himself out of our atmosphere. And, yeah, I'm as much against the privatization of space as the next guy.

Joe Biden may be a relatively new President, but he sure has taken to drone strikes pretty quickly, most recently in Somalia. And yes, "collective self-defense" sure looks like the kind of legal doctrine that Presidents can use to subvert our Constitutional requirement that they get permission from Congress before conducting military operations. Donald Trump probably faced more pushback from Congress on this matter than any President of the last 70 years, and it still wasn't enough. (Also, in my experience, Mike Lee's protest against the drone strikes signals that our Congress will do nothing. I can't recall Mr. Lee ever taking a stand on principle that he's actually had to follow through on.)

Karen Hao at the MIT Technology Review discusses why reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang think "Facebook Can Never Fix Itself." "Facebook’s problems today are not the product of a company that lost its way," she writes, but are "part of its very design," and surely it doesn't help that, as far as Facebook's decision-making, "growth and revenue trump everything else." And when you have gazillions of dollars, you tend to think you know everything and everyone else knows nothing, when all you really know anything about is redistributing everyone else's income upward to you. I hope I live to see an America that shames and shuns such people.

1,500 union workers stand to lose their jobs at the Morgantown, WV plant owned by big pharmaceutical corporation Viatris, and despite the "prime opportunity for the Democratic-controlled federal government to score points in a red state," our Administration has done bupkus. You'll note that Joe Manchin is also the senior Senator from West Virginia, "the Senate's single most powerful member" by virtue of being the Democratic caucus's 50th vote. His relative inaction couldn't be because his own daughter used to run one of the corporations that merged into Viatris, could it? (Hopefully, when you read Viatris's statement about its job-cutting, you'll be offended by all the big words they use. Optimize this, ass-clowns.)

Finally, Sean Hannity, mere days after saying "it absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated," now says (after all that positive attention he got from liberals) that "I never told anyone to get a vaccine." Calling those two remarks "completely different" would be the height of pedantry, and though I bet some of his votaries would advance that claim, I also bet most of them don't care -- as William S. Burroughs used to say, junkies only want junk. No, I think he ginned up this whole controversy just to create drama, because what else can you do when you can't win arguments on the merits?

Around the table: welcome to part 488 of "Irredeemable Trumpholes."

"I Tried to Make Claims About Election Fraud So Preposterous Trump Fans Wouldn’t Believe Me," reports Jon Schwarz at The Intercept. "It Was Impossible." Specifically, he "confessed" to destroying Trump ballots, got a lot of angry responses on Twitter, and then made even more absurd assertions (destroying Trump ballots is in the Constitution, then in the Bible, then in Buddhist teachings, etc.) that induced even more angry responses, with no one apparently figuring out it was all a gag. I'll admit I could hardly catch my breath by the point where he says Twitter responses will automatically enroll their authors in a blockchain scam. I'd hoped he might reference the fictional nation of Freedonia or the fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick, but then Trumpholes would probably just tell us that Duck Soup and The Mouse That Roared (released in 1933 and 1955, respectively) were actually instruction manuals created by the Elders of Zion.

In a peripherally-related note, a Bloomberg investigation unearthed around 200 prosecutions for voter fraud since November 2018, and, though I hate to sound like a broken record, that's not nearly enough to justify all the right-wing hysteria about "voter fraud." Note well, also, that prosecutions aren't convictions! For your reference, at least 155 million votes were cast in the 2020 elections and at least 115 million in 2018. I don't like to accuse everyone and everything of racism, but I feel it's pretty safe to say that "voter fraud" is code for "too many of Those People voted."

Amanda Marcotte reminds us not to put any stock in some Republicans' sudden willingness to get everyone to take the vaccine, and not just because most right-wing media types are still hawking vaccine "skepticism." (Even Mr. Hannity couched his plea to get vaccinated among stories about "vaccine overreach.") I'm glad to be reminded not just that right-wingers don't really care what Mob Boss Mitch says, but also that a lot of these right-wingers fancy themselves as "politically independent," even though they just so happen to independently eat up whatever right-wing slop makes them angriest.

In a related note, Republican politicos don't think the party's apparent desire to "have it both ways" on the vaccine will hurt them in the midterms. And that could be true -- if Democrats spend the next six months doing nothing and/or if some other catastrophe happens in the meantime. One thing that won't be true, though: their Janus face on the vaccine won't impress independent voters (you know, the ones whose votes are actually up for grabs every cycle!), because you don't impress them by trying to "have it both ways." I'd go so far as to say you do the opposite. Democrats could tell you all about that, were they so inclined.

Finally, an Alabama doctor writes at length about dealing with so many dying COVID patients who didn't get vaccinated when they had the chance. "I may walk into the room thinking, 'Okay, this is your fault, you did this to yourself,'" she writes. "When I leave the room, I just see a person that’s really suffering, and that is so regretful for the choice that they made." She has a lot more compassion than I would have, which I suppose is just one reason she's a doctor and I'm not. I'm grateful that we still have good doctors providing health care in America, and I suppose we will until right-wingers start sending them death threats and they decide it's not worth all the aggravation. Hey, that's how it's working with election officials.

Action: concerning the Amazon indigenous, taxes, jobs spending, privatization, chemical safety, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell Brazil's government to protect the rights of indigenous folks from corporate land-rapers, tell your Congressfolk to fund our IRS, fund home and community care, reject the privatization of public assets, and protect us from PFAS chemicals, and tell your Senators to pass the Equality Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: Sum of Us helps you tell Brazil's Congress to reject a bill that would allow the Brazilian government to force indigenous peoples from their lands in the Amazon rain forest so that big corporations can develop it. It's not just that the Amazon rain forest is the greatest carbon capture machine the world has ever seen, it's that people live there, and people are more important than profits, more important than development, and more important than some politician's "legacy." Besides, the indigenous people of the Amazon have been a thorn in Jair Bolsonaro's side since day one of his ignominous reign, and any enemy of Jair Bolsonaro is a friend of mine. And yours.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our IRS so it can catch more tax cheats. People who avoid their taxes cheat all of us, after all -- they cheat all of us out of roads, bridges, schools, police officers, firefighters, and libraries. Naturally Republicans have balked at more funding for the IRS as a way of helping to pay for the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" they're continuing to hash out, plus the ProPublica reporting about rich folks' tax evasion has made Republicans more defensive of rich folks than of the rest of us, whom they have cheated. I guess they're objectively pro-crime, then! Why do Democrats not paint them this way every day? Because it would be "uncivil"?

The National Domestic Workers Alliance helps you tell Democratic Senate Majority Leader Schumer to ensure the $400 billion proposal for care infrastructure makes it into the big reconciliation bill Democrats are planning later on this year. Presumably Democrats will pass that without Republican help, so all we need to do now is ensure that Democrats don't eject it from the bill because, oh, gosh, I don't know? Because they like shooting themselves in the foot? Because "bipartisanship"? Because debt and spending and I'M SCARRRREEEEDDDDD!!!!!! OK, maybe I'm being a bit harsh, this time -- our government has never invested this much in home and community care before, prospect of creating a million jobs or not. But if you want to make progress, you have to take big steps. Bigger than Democrats are accustomed to taking, to be sure, but we need to be the spine in their back. At least then they'll have a spine.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk not to let the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" privatize public assets in order to pay for other public assets. President Biden wanted to fund it with higher corporate taxes, but Republicans, being the party of "fiscal responsibility," prefer smoke and mirrors, like "user fees" and selling off some bridges and roads and suchlike in order to pay for others. But we need only look to Chicago's privatized parking meters and Bayonne's privatized water system to see what that bodes for America -- higher prices and worse service. You know, like they're trying to do with our Postal Service. Who voted for that? I don't think even Trump voters voted for that.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3990/S. 2047, the No PFAS in Cosmetics Act. PFAS chemicals, as you may know, are the "forever chemicals" you find in carpeting, cookware, food packaging -- and, eventually, in our drinking water and our bodies, where it might well help give you and/or your loved ones cancer, a weakened immune system, or a learning disability. You also find it in cosmetics, and though you may not wear makeup, someone else does, and they wash it off their face at night, and then guess where it goes? Into your drinking water, and into your body. (Consumer Reports also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, which would do more about PFAS chemicals generally; the former bill has a better chance of passing, but there's no reason you can't say you support both.)

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The other side has their people calling their Senators going WAAAAAAAAAAH WHATZ ABOUTZ MY RELIGUZ BELIEFZ!!!!!! and WAAAAAAAAAAAH TEH BOYZ WILLZ BEATZ TEH GURLZ ATZ TEH FIELD HOCKEYZ!!!!!!, so we need to be on the horn with our Senators talking about stopping banks and bosses and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folks, which is what the Equality Act is actually about. Republican Senators, in particular, pretend the hysterical opinions count more than yours. But we civilized people must make our will unmistakable.

Around the table: they call themselves leaders, but they don't lead, part 377.

It ain't just governments using facial recognition software to spy on you, it's also big chain stores like Macy's and Albertson's. And they're not just spying on customers so they can better target them with ads, they're also spying on workers so they can make sure they're working, like they have no faith in the supervisors and managers they hire. Oh, and remember, the technology sucks, a matter to which at least one New York student wrongly accused of theft can attest. Would it be asking too much for our state and local governments to regulate this crap? No, it would not.

Missouri starts offering vaccine incentives -- but only 900 of them, worth $10,000 each. Basically that's a lottery, and lotteries haven't been working that well, as Mike DeWine can tell you. Best to spend $50 per head (as Matthew Yglesias has suggested) and give a lot more people the incentive; Missouri has more than 2,000 new COVID cases some days, so 900 prizes probably ain't gonna cut it. (And Gov. Parson is only the latest right-winger to do an abrupt about-face about taking COVID seriously. The families of the dead no doubt appreciate his little Damascus moment very much.)

Mob Boss Mitch says there'll be no Republican votes to raise the debt limit, but surely he remembers how Barack Obama turned his back on Republicans when they made similar threats in 2013 (after he caved to similar threats in 2011, of course). Chances are he already knew what the CBO announced later on in the day -- that our government won't actually have to raise the debt limit until October or November -- but I still think there's a chance Democrats fumble the big reconciliation bill and wind up having to use it to raise the debt limit. Gosh, that would absolutely demoralize the base and send them to ruin in the 2022 midterms, wouldn't it? With Democrats, you always have to wonder if that's the end game. I want to think the best of people, but they make it hard.

David L. Wilson at TruthOut advises that we "Call the 'Border Crisis' What It Is -- Another Big Lie From the Right," and hallelujah that someone else is saying so. We're over one million border apprehensions for the first time since 2006! -- except that, well, we went over a million almost every year between 1983 and 2006, and this year's spike might well be COVID-related. But please, right-wing windbags, keep crying INVASHUN!!!!! on your little border tours like you know what an actual invasion is like.

Finally, did Jeff Bezos, fresh off his 11-minute jaunt to the edge of space, really say in an interview afterward "I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this"? Yes, he really did say that. Perhaps he thinks he's being funny, perhaps he thinks he's being candid, or perhaps he simply doesn't talk to regular folks who anymore who might tell him how he really comes off, but he's another walking advertisement for the 91% tax bracket. And, ah, our government sent people to the moon.

Around the table: Missouri gets crushed by COVID, and other tragedies.

It ain't just Florida and Texas: the even-more-contagious Delta variant of COVID-19 is hitting some parts of Missouri hard -- particularly the unvaccinated parts. Hospital workers report seeing more young people in ICUs now than before, and they're sicker than the folks who got hospitalized last year. The nurse who said "(i)t feels worse this time because I've seen it before" broke my heart, but I can't help but feel angry at the COVID patients who let bad people tell them lies about "the science." Particularly the ones who spit in your eye when you tell them they have COVID.

David Eichenthal, until lately mulling a run in Tennessee's very red 3rd House district, suggests that Democrats could win in places like Tennessee's 3rd if they explicitly woo the "pro-democracy Republicans." Like James Carville, I have been wondering why Democrats don't tie Republicans to the January 6 travesty every day. Mr. Eichenthal indulges in some "no liberal could win here" pablum (to which Matthew Hildreth's report from November of 2018 might provide a corrective), but he also says Democrats have to connect with rural voters (which, like, yeah) and that "poverty is tragically one issue that bridges the urban-rural divide," which sure sounds liberal. I'm also pleased to hear him toss around phrases like "standard 10-point plans" with the vitriol they deserve.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says he would "go to war for the principles Chick Fil-A stands for." Let me be the first to say: no, he most certainly would not. A man who says "I'll go to war over (insert name of absurd drama)" is a peacock among hawks, and you'll never hear a real warrior brag about his hunger for war. Particularly a war over Chick Fil-A! Everyone does chicken nuggets and waffle fries now, and I can make my own sweet iced tea.

Ho hum, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who lives under threat of impeachment for corruption in awarding vaccine contracts, says he doesn't have faith in the same voting system Brazilians have used for over a quarter century (and which delivered his 2017 victory!) and now says he might not even let that election happen. And in some dank room at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump says why couldn't I do that? I sure hope good Brazilians get rid of this cancer on their soul, and soon.

Abortion providers file suit in federal court to block Texas's new abortion law -- you know, the one that actually empowers anyone to sue anyone who might have helped an abortion happen! -- and I wish them the best of luck. Texas legislators, such as they are, imagined that a million frivolous lawsuits would help them dodge constitutional questions, but they neglected to deal with the issue of standing, as in "how can any of these morons prove they've personally been harmed by an abortion they didn't have?" Even our Supreme Court would agree with me about that, I think.

Finally, a January 6 seditionist whom we will not name unfurls this gem to the Washington Post: "We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government." In her relatively-unventilated mind, "overthrow(ing) the government" is somehow less odious than burglary or property damage, but then, she probably thinks of those latter two things as something Black people do. Perhaps not coincidentally, I usually think of whining and refusing to face the truth as something white people do.

Action: concerning taxes, Medicare, home care, weatherizing, defense spending, and inspectors general.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the rich and corporations pay more taxes, expand Medicare, increase funding for home- and community-based care, fund weatherizing for low-income homes, end funding for the notorious F-35 plane, and pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk that you want corporations and the rich to pay at least $4 trillion more in taxes over the next 10 years. Their machinations, their dramas, don't matter -- the message they need to hear right now is that we need to tax the rich a lot harder than we're doing, or we won't have clean water, we won't have a livable planet, and we won't have jobs. Taxing the rich and corporations more is actually quite popular in every poll that asks about it, so don't let insane Republicans and "moderate" Democrats kill all progress -- particularly when they're all just going to blame us liberals for their failures later!

Strengthen Medicare Now helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare -- which is to say, expand what Medicare covers (include dental/vision/eye care) and whom Medicare covers (people 60 and older, versus 65 and older). Again, these are all popular things, and frankly, lowering the Medicare age to zero is also pretty popular, so we're not asking for "too much" here. And frankly, let's make the Party of Sedition defend its position that "more people shouldn't get Medicare," or that "folks who get Medicare shouldn't get more out of it." If they say it'll kill Medicare, tell them to explain how. They can't. Of course, if they start yammering on about inflation, feel free to walk away. "Inflation" is the new "socialism."

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to jack up funding for home- and community-based care services. This is a main feature of President Biden's American Families Plan, and this'll be the part of the legislation Democrats will have to pass via budget reconciliation, so hostile is the Party of Sedition toward the kind of services we're all going to need a lot more of as we get older. And a civilization that progresses should make those kinds of services -- for children, for seniors, for folks with disabilities -- part of its, dare I say, infrastructure. And, ah, not for nothing, but the COVID pandemic which ain't over and is getting worse, heckuva job, anti-vaxxers! has, I think, impressed upon us the need for home-based services.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund weatherizing for low-income homes. Remember how much fun Fox News used to make of "Cash for Caulkers"? Well, they were wrong about that, too, and not just because weatherizing homes for working families will save a lot in heating bills, but because, well, we just saw in Texas this past winter what happens when the big utility corporations don't prepare for rough weather -- people die, Senators flee to Cancun and blame their daughters for it, and Governors blame solar and wind power for the problems caused by unregulated utilities. Don't forget the "people die" part, though. There's a reason I put that first.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to build the F-35 fighter jet. Roll call! It flies badly! It puts its pilots at risk of injury and/or death! The Navy doesn't want it and the Marines almost certainly don't want it either! We've thrown billions of dollars away on this plane for the last 20 years! A boondoggle this big, you have to wonder why it happens. It happens for a lot of reasons -- watchdogs have a lot to watch, individual Congressfolk have cronies who benefit from it, Congress generally doesn't have a whole lot of courage when confronting defense spending either in general or in its many particulars. Well, I didn't say they were good reasons. The only good reason they need to stop building them is that we tell them. So let's tell them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2662, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. "IG" stands for "inspector general," as in the kind of person who exposes Executive branch waste and fraud -- and, also, the kind of person Donald Trump constantly tried to replace with a crony. H.R. 2662 would make it harder for the next rogue President to do that, plus it would give Inspectors General more power to actually do their job. And I wouldn't declare this one dead on arrival in the Senate as long as Charles Grassley's there. I just worry about the price Mob Boss Mitch would extract in exchange.

Around the table: awww, no one wants to cuddle with a Trumphole! And other cautionary tales.

Surprise, surprise, about half the Republican Senators who signed on to the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" announced by President Biden a few weeks back now have, ah, reservations. Now imagine them having "reservations" -- maybe each week a new Senator comes up with a new one! -- long enough that the deal falls apart, and then Sens. Manchin and Sinema refuse to sign onto the reconciliation bill that would work around Republican intransigence because of the failure of the "bipartisan" bill. Hey, if I thought of it, you know they have. I don't say this to depress you -- I say it to prepare you for the fight.

Dean Baker helps you "com(e) to grips" with the fear-mongering about runaway inflation coming from right-wingers. Long story short: the price hikes we're seeing mostly look like temporary price hikes, versus ones that reveal deeper structural issues (though if oil prices were to surge, that could change), and the bond market, where a lot of rich folks have a lot of money, is presently acting nothing like it would if runaway inflation were coming. Of course, if you were already inclined to see the pandemic as a temporary thing (even though it has gone on for almost a year and a half now), you were probably already immune to the fear-mongering.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media would really, really prefer it if we kept fighting the 20-years-and-counting Afghanistan War we're pulling back from now and really never should have fought in the first place. And they keep thinking war-mongers (whose number has included President Biden for a long time!) are "smarter" than everyone else, or "bolder" than everyone else, when fact is they're actually stupider and more cowardly. Jesus Mary and Joseph it doesn't take "courage" or "brains" to send a bunch of other people's children to die for the benefit of your corporate cronies.

"Protestors" cause violence at a town hall hosted by Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), with Ms. Porter at one point putting her arms around an elderly constituent to keep her from getting hurt. The only person police arrested was a Porter supporter, which is not at all suspicious. And note well that Trumpholes seem to be protesting the Democrats who actually fight the corruption they always say they hate, and not, say, the Democrats who actually worship big tech and consort with banksters. It's like Trumpholes aren't really honest actors or something.

Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin has already pulled out of a debate, because the moderator once gave $250 to the Clinton Foundation for earthquake relief in Haiti! And here you thought "helping people survive an earthquake" was a relatively apolitical cause! Of course Mr. Youngkin, merely by creating a big drama using the word "Clinton," has dog-whistled the hell out of the Trumpholes, but it also looks like he can't actually win an argument. If Virginia Democrats don't run a million ads depicting Mr. Youngkin whining in crap-loaded diapers, they deserve to lose this race.

Finally, in a peripherally-related matter, Andi Zeisler writes about "(t)he question keeping Trump-loving men up at night: Why won't women date us?" Of course, this is how civilized society is supposed to work! If you earn shame and shunning, you get shamed and shunned! And yet some right-wing "thinkers" actually argue that the state might best be put to service getting these men partners, which sure is a hifalutin way of saying you don't give a fuck what women want. Seriously, this is an extraordinary article, one that uses the tenets of conservatism itself against the men who whine that no one wants to cuddle with them.

Around the table: do not give corporations taxpayer money as an "incentive," and other lessons that bear repeating.

Headline of the year so far from Vox: "Robots Were Supposed to Take Our Jobs. Instead, They're Making Them Worse." After you read about all the Amazon warehouse workers getting fired for not moving fast enough and the gig workers who get offered $2 delivery jobs, you may come away thinking, as I did, that the "drive for efficiency" at work too often turns into a need for controlling workers and redistributing their hard-earned income upward. Plus delivery drivers no longer get incentives, like more pay, to work harder -- now they get disciplined if they don't work harder. The future, ladies and gentlemen! (As an aside, I am of course quite glad to read that someone else hates automated supermarket checkouts as much as I do.)

The Associated Press assures us, in an excellent report, that Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin's "private equity résumé draws scrutiny in Virginia," as it should -- putting seniors out on the street after your bankster firm buys their mobile home park is an ad that should write itself, and the Carlyle Group's rather intimate involvement in the Iraq war should finish Mr. Youngkin with independents. But, alas, Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe also invested in the Carlyle Group! Literally, that is! To the tune of at least $690,000! Again, this is why Democrats lose -- you catch their fingers in the same cookie jar and people just throw up their hands. Not to say Mr. McAuliffe will lose, but I'd lay money the 2021 election will be as close as the 2013 election, when he barely beat Ken Cuccinelli, arguably the furthest-right individual holding statewide office at the time.

When I heard about the seven House Democrats in Trump-won districts "balking" at the upcoming reconciliation bill, I said to myself, so this is how it begins! But then I read Axios's actual report about the matter, and I think they're dramatically overstating the case. Your first clue is Rep. Cindy Axne (D-IA) saying that broadband and child care actually are infrastructure, and by the end, you may conclude, as I did, that five of these seven House Democrats will vote for the reconciliation bill, whether they can make it more to their liking or not. You may or may not conclude, as I have, that the other two (who didn't say) are probably toast in 2022 anyway.

Ho hum, ProPublica finds that too many corporations took Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) money in 2020 but still laid off workers. Also, our government opened too many loopholes allowing big corporations and foreign corporations to pretend they were small businesses and get PPP money, and our government made it too easy to get the loans "forgiven," meaning they all essentially became corporate welfare. The lesson, once again: you don't give a corporation taxpayer money as an "incentive" not to fire people, you make them not fire people. The corollary lesson: never let Republicans manage a crisis, because they only take care of bosses.

Ho hum, Paul LePage will run for Governor again in Maine in 2022, despite having actually carried out his threat to move to Florida after Democrats recaptured the Governor's mansion in 2018. Were you just thinking "gosh, I've really missed all his whining about instant runoff voting"? Then you're in luck! Though he's not exactly in luck, not now -- 37% and 48% (his share of the vote in 2010 and 2014, you'd think these facts would have induced more humility) ain't gonna win it now. And hey, speaking of Florida, he's still a registered voter there, which means he'd be exactly the sort of fellow right-wingers whine about when they whine about voter fraud, except, of course, that he's one of them. Plus he may also have broken Florida law by failing to deregister himself when he moved back to Maine. Law and order!

Finally, Texas's Lieutenant Governor orders the cancellation of an event in an Austin history museum where the authors of Forget the Alamo -- a book critically reviewing the facts and myths of Texas's founding -- planned to give a talk. Once again, right-wingers indulge in literal "cancel culture" while decrying it! I don't mean to assert that the Bullock Texas State History Museum had a legal obligation to host the talk, but I do mean to assert that the people who cancelled it are cowards and hypocrites, and that our First Amendment doesn't protect them from me saying so.

Around the table: Republicans can't quit the drama, part 648.

And now, from the "We Have All Been Here Before" file: Gillian Frank and Adam Laats at Slate tell us about the long, long history of right-wing freakouts over schools teaching our kids unpleasant things about race in America. From Harold Rugg's 1930s textbooks to the 1950s American Nationalist to violent right-wing protestors in 1970s West Virginia to contemporary clowns like the one Kyle Whitmire skewers so well here, a pattern emerges: right-wing critics haven't read any of the books or engaged with any of the theories! Republicans truly are the Party of Drama. I mean, seriously, how many stand up to the drama now?

Damn-near-successful 2020 U.S. House candidate may have used campaign funds to bankroll his trip to the January 6 attempted coup. Seems to me Derrick Van Orden couldn't have been campaigning on January 6, having already lost his election and having not declared for the next one. But this guy damn near beat Ron Kind (D-WI), who's no great shakes; if Mr. Van Orden makes the general election again -- which seems likely, since Trumpholes won't like any "reasonable" Republican candidate in the primary -- we'll know all we need to know about how sick, immoral, and decadent we've become as a society. One would hope Democrats would do something beneficial with their power in the meantime; late returns haven't boded well for that hope.

Fox News's Chris Wallace levels a devastating question at Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN): given his vote against the American Rescue Plan, which provided billions of dollars for local police departments, "(c)an't you make the argument that it's you and the Republicans who defunded the police?" Mr. Banks says no, of course not, because of things Ilhan Omar and Nancy Pelosi said, which, again, is very teenage drama of him. Democrats should have the guts to run ads against their Republican opponents saying that Republicans voted against funding the police, but no one ever went broke betting on Democrat weakness.

When I hear that Bill Barr, Donald Trump's former Attorney General, said that Mr. Trump's assertions that fraud cost him the 2020 election were "bullshit," I remember the time a liberal could say something like Trump's own Attorney General says the notion that Biden stole the election is bullshit, but Trumpholes feed off nothing other than their own self-pity these days. "Why does everyone keep betraying us?" they wonder, and none will answer by saying "well, maybe the problem is me," though you'd think it'd be conservative to pose the question.

Finally, Republicans may have hit upon a "blueprint" to take back Congress in 2022, and you won't be surprised by any of its elements: "Biden Democrats are soft on crime, soft and ineffective on illegal immigration, and reckless and wrong with government spending." The platform doesn't "move beyond Trump" very well, since the Trump platform, such as it is, maps so well onto the first two items at least, and the three items comprise, respectively, something that didn't work in 2020, something that didn't work in 2018, and something that did in 2010. More importantly, they're three saucepans they've been banging for decades now; how hard would it be to run ads talking about Republicans saying the same old thing because they have no idea how to govern? Nah, Democrats will say that's too "uncivil." And then the party that tried to overturn a national election will get back in power.

Action: concerning jobs, drug prices, endless war, broadband access, payday loans, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Biden/Republican infrastructure "deal," tell our President to put the brakes on a rule preventing our government from forcibly lowering drug prices, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, expand broadband, clamp down on payday lenders, and end the filibuster. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs; for the Biden-related alert, see the second paragraph below.

First things first: tell your Congressfolk to reject the "bipartisan" "infrastructure"/"jobs" "deal" negotiated between 20 Senators and President Biden last week -- either call them or let Food and Water Watch help you email them. No one in America should care if this is something our President wants, or moderates want, or Republicans want; all we should care about is if it's what we want, and I would assert that it's not. And that's not just because Republicans are pretending that the separate reconciliation bill even Joe Manchin wants to do is some kind of "betrayal." It's also because the "deal" would privatize public assets to build other public assets -- that's called "asset recycling," which is just a 10-dollar way of saying "privatization." And if Democrats agree not to do a separate reconciliation bill in order to "keep their word" or appease Republicans, then they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. Of course, we don't deserve the fascist storm that'll follow, so let's try to head all that off by communicating our will to our Congressfolk in an unmistakable manner.

President Biden plans to move forward with a rule that would prevent our government, for the first time in over 40 years, from seizing drug patents when big pharma corporations charge usurious prices. If you remember Mylan charging hundreds of dollars for EpiPens and numerous corporations charging so much for insulin that diabetics now risk death in rationing the drug, you will scratch your head at the idea that our government should not step in and stop that shit cold, but, sadly, when Joe Biden was a Senator, he worked very, very hard to keep our government from "interfering" in absurdly-high drug prices. Maybe he needs a phone call about this matter! 1.202.456.1111 is the number, and here's the White House contact page. (If I get a separate action alert about this matter -- which seems likely, now! -- I'll share it.)

Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 256, which would repeal the nefarious authorization to use military force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Our House passed this bill, and not only that, 49 Republicans voted in its favor! Maybe I shouldn't make too much of that -- a lot of our Best and Brightest didn't do the right thing in 2002 when it really, really mattered, and a lot of the folks who just voted yea on H.R. 256 (Boebert, Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar, Greene, Issa, Jordan, McClintock, Schweikert) are still clowns, but at least now people like Mob Boss Mitch will have much less room to say well, this isn't bipartisan enough for me to permit to get to a vote. Oh, and if you're upset because "they're doing this to a Democratic President," please step away from this blog, because it ain't for you. And your values ain't shit if they don't inconvenience you once in a while.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. And don't brook any nonsense from your Congressfolk about it, either! Broadband internet is an essential service, or does Congress forget how many votes it took or hearings it held over the internet this past year? Certainly you don't forget how much work you did, or how much school your kids did, over the internet this past year! Note well, also, that H.R. 1783/S. 745 would prevent states from pre-empting localities within states from offering their own public broadband! After all, preventing localities from such matters of self-determination has always seemed not particularly conservative to me.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called "Fake Lender" rule promulgated by the Trump Administration. The Senate has already passed a resolution repealing the rule; now the House must follow suit. So what does the "Fake Lender" rule do? It lets payday lenders avoid state caps on interest by letting them essentially launder their loans through out-of-state banks! Woe unto the young buck who came up with that idea! That dude will find himself (do I need to gender-equivocate here? I suspect not!) at the Pearly Gates describing how he helped payday lenders trap even more good Americans in 300% revolving debt, and I think St. Peter's going to give him quite the side-eye. You know what you can take to the Pearly Gates? That you told your Congressfolk to stamp out this idea like the cockroach it is!

Finally, NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby and boy how I have missed saying that! helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster into the trash heap of history already. Yes, I supported keeping the filibuster around and making Senators talk through it all the way to the beginning of this year, but I'm done -- our Senators will never do the necessary work of a civilized society until we make them. And they just filibustered the beginning of debate on the For the People Act last week! The beginning of debate! No, I don't want to hear about lessening procedural "choke points" as a "compromise," because the Senate will not do it. If I may borrow a metaphor from Better Call Saul: if a chimp has a machine gun, you don't just hope he'll learn how to use it -- you take it from him.

Around the table: featuring the usual assortment of whiners and sore losers.

Richard Wolff at Counterpunch says "The Neoliberal Drive to Privatize Everything is Running Out of Gas," but what if Republicans are just waiting until they regain the keys to Congress, be that this election or next? Not that we should ever allow them behind the wheel again, but I always fear that Americans have short memories, even when one party tries to nullify the people's will in an election, and I hate to beat a dead horse, but if Democrats actually accomplish something worth accomplishing with the power they have, they can head off Republicans getting control again, at least in the short term. And yet, as Mr. Wolff says, Mr. Biden ain't taking advantage of this situation the way he could, even if he seems to be doing more with the opportunity than Mr. Obama did. There's a solution in there, somewhere.

Jesus Mary and Joseph another sore loser cries "fraud" after losing an election, this time in Peru. And where a coup attempt failed in this country because a) our institutions have somehow survived 40 years of right-wing assaults and b) the coup ringleaders were awful leaders, I don't see Peru doing as well, not just because it's a closer race than Biden-Trump was, but also because right-wing racism is even more out in the open than it is here. (By the way, the leftist candidate who won enjoys the support of the rural poor. See, Democrats? That could be you, too.)

Ada Rajkovic at FAIR notices something missing from TV coverage of border issues: the words and stories of actual refugees! You'd think their voices would count for something, after all! And even when they do talk to a refugee, it seems like it's only for a few seconds. Maybe they don't know any refugees! I mean, it is possible, since media personalities tend only to talk to powerful people and each other these days. (And remember: when they call it a "crisis," they lie. And when they call it an "invasion," they insult the memory of everyone who ever had to endure an actual invasion. Words do mean things, after all.)

Sen. Sanders (I-VT) makes a list of things he won't support in an infrastructure bill, like gas taxes and electric vehicle fees. I wouldn't support any of these things, either, but this will be an interesting test -- does the right think it can make the nation's most popular Senator into an "enemy of bipartisanship"? If they think that, they have their work cut out for them -- after all, Bernie Sanders is the fellow who got applause for supporting Medicare-for-All at a Fox News town hall. (Seriously, though, electric vehicle fees? It's like Republicans just hate any kind of progress.)

Finally, when I hear that anti-vaxxers kept out of a Foo Fighters concert say their plight is like "segregation,"all I can say is waaaaaaaah. What was segregation like again? Being forced to walk and talk and eat and drink and live and work and play and get jobs and health care separately from your fellow human beings because of something you couldn't control, i.e., the color of your skin; you have considerably more control over whether you get a COVID vaccine. Segregation also involved getting the crap kicked out of you by police on a fairly routine basis. I keep having to explain this to people, and I think they're not listening because they know I'm right but don't have the guts to admit it.

Around the table: featuring more Republican stratagems that *should* fail.

This Jesse Frederik article from August reminds us that blockchain technology is "The Amazing Solution for Almost Nothing." If you're able to see through the "promise" of automating every conceivable job, or AI doing the job of people, then you're able to see through blockchain, no matter how much its defenders try to spin your head about it. And though I guess it's tempting that bitcoin can move money "without banks," the problem I have with banks isn't that they exist, it's that they hurt us if we don't regulate them properly. Also, too, "(d)ata should reflect reality, but sometimes reality changes and the data stays the same. That’s why we have notaries, supervisors, lawyers -- actually, all those boring people that blockchain thinks it can do without."

When I hear that three American states -- Nevada, Colorado, and Washington -- now have public health insurance options, I hasted to interject that they're not really "public options" in the sense of a government-run health insurance plan -- they're "public-private partnerships," in which states contract to private insurers to provide the service, and I'm scratching my head trying to figure out how that's substantially different from Obamacare. So let's not call these plans "public options," particularly since opponents will use them to tar all publicly-administered health insurance when they don't deliver better care at lower prices.

Factcheck.org evaluates a "viral video" suggesting the nasal swabs they use to test for COVID could cause cancer and even "change the DNA in your cells." I bet the truth doesn't surprise you: while ethylene oxide (or EO, used to sterilize most disposable medical supplies in America) is carcinogenic and mutagenic, the EO sterilizer disperses almost all of the EO from the supplies during the cycle's aeration period (which can last several hours), and thus leaves almost no EO on your nasal swabs and wound dressings and such, so it can't hurt you. So when folks say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, believe them.

When I hear that Republicans plan to use inflation against Democrats in the 2022 midterms, I can think of three reasons that might work: a) prices always go up and that frustrates people, b) Democrats won't use their power to accomplish anything, and c) Democrats won't run ads tying their Republicans opponents to the January 6 attempted coup. I mean, on the merits, the Republicans' case should fail -- if prices are up 5% from this time last year, could that be because there've been a lot of shortages of vital goods? -- but no one has ever gone broke underestimating the Democrats.

Am I surprised to hear that Trump Administration Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told fellow Administration higher-ups that "nobody is going to care" about the George Floyd killing? I mean, a cellphone video captured the whole thing, and his boss was quite adept at social media. But then, rising to the top of the Trump Administration food chain isn't exactly a dead-on indicator of talent or competence -- why, Mr. Meadows couldn't even win that House seat until the North Carolina legislature redrew the district so it ejected most of Asheville, so I couldn't say he's some kind of seer.

Finally, Benjamin Wallace Wells at The New Yorker profiles right-wing activist Christopher Cufo, who almost single-handedly started the right-wing tantrum over "critical race theory." Admittedly he's right that "politically correct" and "cancel culture" pale, as tantrum-inciting phrases, before "critical race theory," but his approach is a tired one: play up a bunch of isolated incidents from around the country and convince everyone it's all part of a "war on whiteness" or whatever. How well did that "War on Christmas" do for Republicans in the 2006 midterms? I mean, Christmas is a lot more popular than whiteness.

Around the table: welcome to part 877 of "insane Republicans, weak Democrats."

File under "Well, This Sure Didn't Go Well!": when pressed by columnist Kyle Whitmire, Alabama state lawmaker can't describe exactly what it is that bothers him about critical race theory. Oh, they teach white CEOs something about themselves that isn't good, and there are "training sessions" and "reeducation camps" in some indeterminate part of the country, plus he wanted to "start a conversation" (though not participate in one, apparently!) and "(t)his is still the greatest country that's ever, ever been in the history of the world" and also he lost the link he was trying to retrieve that would have explained everything he was thinking and feeling like he's some damn teenage boy or something. Seriously, though, Mr. Whitmire's Columbo act is awe-inspiring; more journalists should imitate him.

In a bit of an anticlimax, our Supreme Court rules (by a 7-2 margin) that plaintiffs in an anti-Obamacare lawsuit don't have standing to bring the suit, since they can't prove injury. This suit aimed to topple the Affordable Care Act by saying that since Congress repealed the penalty for violating the insurance mandate, the whole thing had to go, but the majority ruling didn't get that far. Sadly, Justice Alito's dissent (joined by Justice Gorsuch) suggests that reducing the mandate penalty to $0 apparently wishes it into non-existence and thus should topple the whole law, even though the mandate is still on the books and Congress can, at least in theory, increase the penalty for defying it at any moment.

When I hear that just enough Republican Senators now approve of the "bipartisan" infrastructure plan that does about a tenth of President Biden's original proposal, I'm tempted to say sure-they-do -- once they pressure Messrs. Sanders, Markey, and Merkley to get aboard with it, suddenly one of the 10 Republican "supporters" will have a "problem" with it, and once he's appeased, another Senator will pop up with a "problem," ad nauseam. But it could be even worse than that! If this "bipartisan" bill somehow passes, whittled down to an even smaller nub than it is now, what's to prevent Joe Manchin from suddenly demanding the American Families Plan also be passed with "bipartisan" support? After all, it worked so well the first time! It'd be one thing if Democrats had asked for the sun and the moon and the stars to begin with, but of course they didn't. They deserve to lose their majorities in 2022 -- though we certainly don't deserve all the trouble that'll cause.

Now Sen. Manchin has found a bunch of voting rights initiatives he can support -- like 15 days of early voting nationwide, making Election Day a federal holiday, and automatic voter registration. Hmm, can you think of a bill the House passed that already has all of that? Why, yes, you can -- it's the For the People Act, the very same bill he said he couldn't support because it was too "partisan," and I guess that's why he didn't try to prove his point by describing which parts of the bill he found particularly "partisan"! Passing off a big chunk of the For the People Act as "ideas I could support" is pretty damn dishonest, but it looks like it'll amount to nothing now that Mob Boss Mitch has said he won't support that, either. It's what Joe Manchin deserves, even though we certainly deserve better.

Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS) apparently spent campaign funds to defend himself from charges of misusing campaign funds, so I guess he must be feeling confident about beating that rap! Turns out using campaign funds for your legal bills is not in and of itself against the law, but it also looks like the kind of thing that's so dirty it can topple an incumbent. In some district, anyway -- though a Democrat represented this district as recently as 2010, Republican voters now have a 21-point advantage in Mississippi's 4th, and that district doesn't even look that gerrymandered.

Finally, a bill making Juneteenth a national holiday has passed Congress almost unanimously, but that didn't prevent a dozen or so Republicans from acting like assholes about it. Rep. Massie (R-KY) suggested that good Americans might not be able to tell the difference between "Juneteenth National Independence Day," and "Independence Day," which sure isn't very libertarian of him -- libertarians think people are smart enough to run their own lives, but Mr. Massie thinks they're not smart enough to know the difference between July 4th and the holiday everyone calls "Juneteenth." Of course, he's a piker compared to Sen. Ron Johnson, who said it seemed "strange that having taxpayers provide federal employees paid time off is now required to celebrate the end of slavery." Try replacing "the end of slavery" with "Columbus Day" in that sentence and you might think what really gets Ron Johnson's goat is he won't have very many people to boss around today.

Around the table: Trumpholes run for office, and other sad tales.

David L. Wilson at TruthOut reminds us (and Vice President Harris!) that one can, actually, stem immigration to America: we can end the "war on drugs," stop letting arms flow to bad actors, and cut back on climate change-causing pollution, because all of these things also make lives miserable in Central America. Fun fact: the Obama Administration fiddled as a coup toppled Honduran President Zelaya in 2009, as right-wingers said they were concerned he was trying to make himself a Forever President -- and now Honduras has an actual Forever President who does nothing but oppress his own people. Heckuva job, America! One day we'll be talking about that in the same breath as the CIA-backed 1954 coup in Guatemala and the Nixon-backed 1973 coup in Argentina.

Jef Rouner at the Houston Press lists "5 Signs You're a Soft White Supremacist," but I bet you don't have to worry about whether you're exhibiting these signs. Do you limit your definition of white supremacy to only the most obvious suspects? Do you reflexively look for "middle grounds" because you're afraid of the truth? Do you habitually use isolated incidents to make broad conclusions? Do you think "diversity" has "gone too far" because it makes some folks ashamed boo-hoo? Do you habitually apologize for your Trumphole uncle more often than you fight his stupidity? No, I didn't think that was you, either. So let someone else sweat it, OK?

Ho hum, three Republican House Reps introduce a resolution to censure Reps. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Tlaib (D-MI), and Omar (D-NY) for "defending terrorist organizations and inciting anti-Semitic attacks across the United States." The first charge is gob-smackingly stupid and the second charge is a bit rich, considering how many anti-Semitic attacks followed in the wake of Donald Trump's 2016 election and how few Republicans are willing to say Donald Trump incited a riot on January 6, though the case for his conviction is considerably stronger. (Also, Rep. Omar didn't say anything wrong, and she shouldn't have walked it back even to the degree she did. And I bet sexism operates here even more than racism does -- if a man had said what she said, he could've doubled down and shouted louder and folks would have said he "shoots from the hip," but too many Americans brandish the b-word when a woman does something even remotely similar.)

Uh oh: at least two dozen corporations waving the Pride flag this month have, guess what, donated to virulently anti-gay politicians in just the last two years. You know, in case you thought corporate hypocrisy had boundaries. Even more telling in the linked article above are all the sentences reading "(such-and-such corporation) did not respond to a request for comment," which means they all know they can't point to a pile of dung and tell everyone it's really meatloaf. I imagine I'll get action alerts about this shortly. And when I get them, you'll get them.

When I hear that Republican candidates are falling all over themselves pretending (and, in some cases, outright lying) that they've received Donald Trump's endorsement, I'm tempted to hope that this really does all play out like a Kids in the Hall skit. "I've got a picture with the big man!" "Oh yeah? Well I've got an endorsement on completely authentic letterhead!" And there's also the ratfucking, as apparently happened to Hirsh Singh in New Jersey. Trouble is, none of this will be funny on Election Day, when Trump votaries all vote in jackboot lockstep for whomever has an "R" after their name. Hate to beat a dead horse, but Democrats could make all this drama beside the point if they would just do something with the power they have over the next two years. That would include not giving up those monthly CTC checks in some "bipartisan" infrastructure bill, an "option" I'm sure they've discussed.

Finally, a New Hampshire man facing criminal charges for his role in the January 6 attempted coup wants to run for Congress, and thinks his role in that shameful act can help him win, because "if you’re running for office, any attention is good attention." Granted, he's threatened to run for office before only to utterly fail to do the work that would take, and he only chose to run for Congress after he realized the woman he wanted to run against is a Congressperson and not a state legislator, but Jesus Mary and Joseph I want this dude to lose in the most humiliating fashion possible, because I don't want to live in an America where "any attention is good attention" -- I want to live in an America where we shame and shun people for seeking bad attention. It's not so damn much to ask, really.

Action: concerning jobs, voting rights, net neutrality, the filibuster, arms sales to Israel, and vaccine waivers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Biden/Manchin capitulation on the American Jobs Plan, tell PA state legislators to reject another absurd election "audit," tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules, tell President Biden to support ending the Senate filibuster, tell our government to stop funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and tell President Biden to support COVID vaccine waivers at the WTO. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

In light of the Senate parliamentarian's ruling that Democrats can use reconciliation once more this year, not twice, and Joe Biden's utter capitulation to Republicans on corporate taxes, and Joe Manchin's announcement that he won't support a jobs bill done through reconciliation, and general Democratic "anxiety" about raising taxes, it's time, once again, to call your Congressfolk and make demands for a real jobs plan. These demands would include: a 55% corporate tax bracket on profits over $1 million, the creation of a public broadband network, the creation of public electricity utilities that run entirely on renewable energy, and every last lead pipe and tottering bridge and broken road in America fixed. Seriously, we must not be held hostage to "the best they could do." Democrats deserve to lose their majorities after this debacle, but I suppose there's time to change their minds, if we do it loudly enough. But we'd better step up, because we're not going to have a country anymore if we don't.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to reject any effort at a 2020 election "audit," particularly one spurred by Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-33). It's not enough to say "you want another stupid "audit" by people who can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground?" It's not even enough to say "You lost! Get over it! Accept the results!" It's not even enough to point out that Sen. Mastriano was there on January 6. No, these "audits" are part of an attempted coup by Donald Trump, who swears he'll be "reinstated" as President in or around August. So you can go ahead and tell your PA legislators they will be accessories to this attempted coup if they allow this "audit" to happen. Only weak people think Donald Trump won that election. And weak people shouldn't get all the damn say about every damn thing.

In the wake of the news that nearly four out of every five comments filed on our FCC's net neutrality repeal in 2017 were faked by big telecom corporations, Daily Kos helps you tell our FCC to reverse said repeal and reinstate the 2016 Open Internet Order that made net neutrality the law of the land. Net neutrality, as you know, forces internet service providing corporations to serve up all files with the same urgency, which means you, not some corporation, get to determine what your internet experience is like. We don't have a fifth FCC Commissioner yet, and that doesn't help us get net neutrality back, but if we establish our will now, our FCC will have a harder time defying it later.

Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to support ending the filibuster. Earlier he said he'd support making Senators work a lot harder for it, and that's far from worthless, but our Senators pooh-poohed that, since it involved doing actual work for your obstruction, so it's time for President Biden to put the squeeze on them. Maybe he thinks calling out Sens. Manchin and Sinema while commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre was squeeze enough -- and, again, that was no small thing -- but they didn't seem to get the message. And if they won't listen to him, we should make them pay the price of not listening to us.

Both Freedom Forward and Daily Kos help you tell your government to stop funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can get bogged down in all the who-started-it if you like, but you cannot deny these two things: 1) Israel has way, way, way more firepower than Palestine and with great firepower comes great responsibility, and 2) all those nations that supposedly want Israel "wiped off the map" or whatever ain't exactly rushing to Palestine's aid. We don't need to give Israel any more weapons; they seem to have plenty of ability to defend themselves - and do indefensible things to others. It's not for nothing that I hear, unprompted, from co-workers, that Israel is becoming what they most hate.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to follow through on his support for a World Trade Organization (or WTO)-sanctioned COVID-19 vaccine waiver, which (contrary to the absurd proclamations of big pharma corporations) would help more folks all over the world get the vaccines they need. Don't get complacent about the dropping infection and death numbers in the United States (which are still only a little lower than they were this time last year!), because the rest of the world needs help, too, and every day we prioritize intellectual property rights over human life, not only do people die, but the COVID virus gets a little more time to mutate into something that'll bite us in the ass again. Once again, the compassionate is also the pragmatic.

Around the table: concerning right-wingers and how to convert them.

Since our "liberal" media organs don't seem to know what to do when right-wingers practice cancel culture on folks like AP reporter-for-12-minutes Emily Wilder, Dan Froomkin at Salon provides a helpful form letter these news organs can use when confronted by such campaigns. Money paragraph: "When (reporters) join our organization, we make it very clear that they need to adhere to the highest professional standards in journalism. That doesn't mean renouncing their opinions, or never having had any. It means not allowing their opinions to get in the way of fairly gathering, assessing and presenting facts." That doesn't seem hard to understand, but then right-wingers have, for decades, squealed TEH BIASEZ!!!!! whenever a media report disagrees with their strongly-held opinions. Time we stop giving such opinions legitimacy, maybe?

Rebecca Watson at Skepchick tells us about a(nother) study finding it's actually not terribly helpful to directly debunk the obvious rubbish you see on Twitter -- and, in fact, folks who've passed on such rubbish tended to double down on it in the 24 hours immediately thereafter. But Ms. Watson reminds us that "this is only an immediate reaction to correction" that "doesn’t account for the possibility that (the debunking) planted a seed in those subjects’ minds." Toward that end, I'm reminded of this account from an ex-right-winger about how she changed her mind, an article that suggested (among other things) that we tend to change our worldview out of everyone's sight, that conversations we overhear will more likely change us than the pitched battles we're in, and that we more likely change after conversations we have with people who are more or less like us, which in turn suggests that former right-wingers are the best candidates to reach current ones.

The Project on Government Oversight presents "The F-35 in Two Minutes." OK, with intro and outro it's actually two minutes, 37 seconds, but it's still a terrific summary of a "the most expensive weapons program in history," one that's hemorrhaged taxpayer money (which is to say your money) for two decades. Long story short: the F-35 is a fighter jet that can't fight and can't fly, which means, at the very least, that we could have spent that money on something that actually can fight and can fly. How do the fiscal hawks in Congress allow this to continue? I kid, of course -- the "fiscal hawks" only care about the "expense" of programs that actually help good Americans, and then they make up hysterical arguments about "national security" if we don't keep throwing money away on things like the F-35.

In a related note, William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut reminds us, in re yet debt limit threat, that Republicans only care about the debt limit, and debt generally, when a Democrat's President. If you're thinking "this can't work again" -- a reasonable thought, if the debt limit battles of 2011 and 2013 are as fresh in your mind as they are in mine -- consider that every time Republicans foment drama and chaos and Democrats try to reason with them, Republicans win, as in they win the House (in 2010), the Senate (in 2014) and the Presidency (in 2016). I hope President Biden has figured out the same thing, especially considering he had a front-row seat to all of it. If not, we'll just have to remind him.

Look out, midterm wave-riders: Democrat Melanie Stansbury buries her Republican opponent in New Mexico's 1st House district special by over 24 points, larger than now-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland's margins in both 2018 and 2020, and the second-largest margin of victory since Democrats started routinely winning this seat in 2008. (Before that, Republicans had won this seat for 40 years. Things sure have changed.) Note well that Ms. Stansbury supports Medicare-for-All health insurance and the $15/hour minimum wage, when there's not exactly a shortage of Democratic consultants who would have told her to take the opposite position on both those issues so she could "better protect herself against right-wing attacks," attacks that would always come even if Jesus H. Christ himself were the nominee.

Finally, Donald Trump appears to have ended his experiment with blogging, which sure seems premature to me -- I thought his natterings were starting to get him back into the news, where he obviously hungers to be, and I thought reports of his "low" metrics (I should have such "low" metrics!) were largely meaningless. I guess he didn't think those reports were that meaningless, though, or he'd still be spewing his spew.

Around the table: why Republicans suck and why Democrats lose, part 328.

When I hear that a not-insignificant number of Americans aren't getting a COVID vaccine because they're afraid they'll get a surprise bill for it -- even though Congress has actually passed legislation making the vaccines free and few folks have reported getting such bills -- my first thought is why haven't Republicans exploited this fear? I mean, it's one of the more reasonable fears one encounters when trying to get wary folks vaccinated. But the question may answer itself: Republican politicians are a lot more comfortable exploiting completely absurd fears.

Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) mulls enacting a rule (authorized by the Dodd-Frank Act, so why has it taken so long?) that would give banking customers more access to their own financial data -- which could help those customers migrate to smaller, more local banks. Where they still exist, that is, though you've probably got some credit unions near you and their membership requirements probably aren't as onerous as you've heard. Naturally a poll finds that 75% of Americans would support a rule that'd make "switch(ing) between banks and other financial institutions" easier, which of course they do if you put it that way. So why don't Democratic politicians generally put it that way? We know it's not because they're stupid.

When I hear that rural Californians still await access to clean water after almost a decade of promises from the state, all I can say is that this is the reason Republicans continue to win in rural areas. They won't build out clean water infrastructure up better than Democrats do, obviously -- in fact, I'd say it's not at all going out on a limb to say they'll do it much worse -- but at least Republicans offer rage and fear, which always gives them the advantage whenever Democrats offer nothing, which is, sadly, all too often.

Former National Security Advisor/admitted felon Michael Flynn says America should have a coup just like Myanmar did. And you can see why: Myanmar's military is a bunch of diaper-loaded brats with guns, and they deposed the just-democratically-elected government there after claiming "election fraud" with no evidence whatsoever; why, I bet Mr. Flynn's Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump watched that unfold with considerable jealousy. Anyway, Mr. Flynn tried to walk it back in truly comic fashion -- well, it would be comic if I found irredeemable assholes funny.

Speaking of which, a Nashville hat shop has been offering a Star-of-David patch that says "not vaccinated" on it, and all I can say is waaaaaaaaaah. Being persuaded to get a vaccine, or being shamed into getting a vaccine, is nothing like having your home and business burned down, being banned from entire towns, being herded into concentration camps, being executed via gas chamber, or being turned into soap. How disgusting, that I still have to explain that to anyone.

Finally, when I hear that almost two out of every three Americans don't want Donald Trump to run for President in 2024, I feel the need to caution everyone that this means more than one out of every three Americans does, even after all the drama and incompetence he put on display for four years, and that it's far too easy to imagine at least one in eight Americans "holding their nose" and voting for him again, even though they're all perfectly capable of sending a message to their party to fucking do better. So let's file that under "Don't Get Complacent."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: in which we confront even more right-wing and corporate stupidity.

The government of Texas --lately very busy passing bills injuring women, folks of color, and transgender folks -- hopes you've forgotten about their utter incompetence during the February winter storm and resulting power grid failure, so I'm just gonna leave this report alleging that the death toll during that crisis was even worse than Texas said it was right here. Long story short: less like 151 deaths and more like 700 deaths. Long story somewhat longer: right-wingers will claim the state count's accurate because "these people had so many other things wrong with them," to which I'll say the same thing I always say: if you have diabetes and someone shoots you in the head, nobody will say you died of diabetes.

Amazon rolls out a "wellness chamber" (pretentiously called an "AmaZen" booth) for stressed-out employees, a very small, windowless booth in which you can sit and watch mindfulness videos and the like. Corporations always want plaudits for putting band-aids on gaping wounds! Maybe the solution to your employees' stress is, you know, not to stress them out by working them like robots? And I just know people will get fired for not meeting their quotas because they're in the meditation booth. Yes, even after their bosses let them. Did I mention no windows? (And hate to pile on, but we long ago discussed how the whole "mindfulness" movement might well be a distraction to keep workers in jobs they hate, and hate for good reason.)

When I hear that nearly three out of four Republicans think liberals staged the whole January 6 coup just to make Trumpholes look bad, I wonder if I may have to revise my belief that 25% of the electorate is batshit insane. I bet perhaps a third of these Republicans know the truth and are just showing loyalty to their party, but it is insane, frankly, to let your loyalty actually revise the facts for you. And not just facts, but logic: nearly every Republican politician opposes an independent commission to look into January 6; if antifa and BLM really caused it, which is to laugh, you'd think they'd want to prove that.

The incomparable Rebecca Solnit reminds us that centrism itself is a bias, and one that favors "an insidious and unjust status quo." Go ahead and read the whole thing; the onslaught of examples will, I trust, impress you. You know, I tried being a centrist once, and I'm sure I said at the time that it was because I hated extremists on both sides, but I was only doing it because I didn't want to sort out the truth for myself. And then I became a man, and put away childish things. (I also realized, as Ms. Solnit says, that extremism comes exclusively from the right. What, you think Rachel Maddow is comparable to Tucker Carlson? As if.)

When I hear that the Orlando Sentinel has finally given up on Sen. Marco Rubio ever doing the right thing, I'm tempted to respond: they ever had hope? I mean, Marco Rubio is the man who gives empty suits a bad name, the man who, quite recently, supported Amazon workers' fight to unionize only because Amazon refused to sell a few of his favorite right-wing books. And of course he was going to outline what he wanted from an independent January 6 commission and then find a reason not to support whatever came before him. Some of the Sentinel's writing is quite inspired, though.

Finally, in a related note, Senate Republicans filibustered the January 6 commission bill which gave them everything they asked for in negotiations with Democrats. Again: Democrats need to shame and shun Republicans; it's what any civilized person would do to someone who injured their community, as Republicans do every day with every breath. I wouldn't mess with Gladys Sicknick if I were these Republicans, though -- she could be this decade's Cindy Sheehan. And if Democrats don't make "a slap in the faces of all the officers who did their jobs that day" into campaign ads, then they deserve to lose their majorities.