Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning fair contracts for workers, tax cuts for working families, and lower insulin costs for all Americans.

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

First things first. Both More Perfect Union and Patriotic Millionaires help you tell your Congressfolk to strike a fairer deal with railway workers, i.e., a deal that gives them more paid time off like all workers deserve. Railway workers are always on call and get one day off a month – one! – so we shouldn’t be forcing a bad contract down their throats. No use arguing that “these workers are too important” to give them more paid time off, because bosses have been using that argument against workers forever. Hospital workers are too important! Teachers are too important! Jesus Mary and Joseph if they’re that important, shouldn’t we make sure we take care of them?

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 permanent. That expansion put $250 or $300 checks per child every month in working families’ bank accounts, and it sure helped them weather skyrocketing inflation in 2021, but Republicans and Joe Manchin let it expire. If Democrats had run on their vote for (and, ah, their opponents’ vote against) the Child Tax Credit expansion in 2021, I think they’d have kept their House majority and expanded their Senate majority. Still, good works are good works, and bringing back that expansion now would help keep children out of poverty now.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the Medicare $35/month insulin cap to all Americans. Because all Americans deserve it! Don’t let your friends be like Herschel Walker, telling everyone they “gotta eat right” and imagining that’s the answer to diabetics (including the many who’ve had it since birth!) risking death by rationing their insulin! And don’t brook Republican attempts to overturn the protections we got in the Inflation Reduction Act, either! These Republicans are objectively anti-health, objectively pro-sickness, and objectively pro-inflation. And you thought being objectively pro-big donor was bad enough!

8 thoughts about the midterms.

1. Again, I wanted humiliation for Republicans – I wanted them to lose a lot of seats in our House and Senate. Still, Democrats will hold the Senate, meaning they’ll get two more years of judges, and by my reckoning they’ll finish with at least 213 House seats (adding in Alaska, Maine’s 2nd, Oregon’s 6th, Colorado’s 8th, New Mexico’s 2nd, and California’s 9th, 21st, 47th, and 49th), with 218 still possible, though unlikely (the best remaining path being through California’s 3rd, 13th, 22nd, and 41st and then Colorado’s 3rd in a recount). The last election like this? 1982, the election that cemented the Reagan Revolution! Democrats picked up over two dozen House seats that year, but with Boll Weevil Southern Democrats pretty much voting with Reagan all the time, Republicans had a working majority in the House then, if not an actual one, and Democrats netted only one Senate seat, reducing the Republicans' actual Senate majority from 54 to 53.

Heartening, in that context, but not for long – Republicans may act humbled now that they didn’t get the electoral sturm und drang they counted on, but if/when they win our House, they’ll promptly forget their humility and act like the fascists they wish they were. Incessant investigations into Hunter Biden, ugly and shameful though that’ll be, might be the best result we can expect from a Republican House. I doubt they’ll successfully defy our will to use the debt limit to force Social Security and Medicare cuts – though they’ll try, and, again, it’ll be ugly and shameful – but they might succeed in defunding our FTC and our SEC and our CFPB and our DOJ’s Antitrust Department; in fact, I bet that’s their real endgame, because the longer Biden Administration actually enforces antitrust law, the worse shape Republicans will be in every election after this one. We’ll be getting on Joe Biden about that! And you know our “liberal” media will pump out ten thousand think-pieces about how the so-called Freedom Caucus “holds Speaker McCarthy hostage.” News flash: Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are who the Republican Party is now. Kevin McCarthy is their beard. And he likes it that way.

On the other hand, if Democrats do manage to hold our House, we’ll have a lot less drama. And if leadership would read people like Josh Gottheimer the riot act, that sure would be nice.

2. Ballot questions, again, generally made democracy look good – put a question directly to voters and they usually make much better choices than politicians do. Three states enshrined abortion rights in their state constitutions, while a fourth (Kentucky) rejected an effort to make abortion unconstitutional there and a fifth (Montana) rejected an effort to create a massive loophole in abortion rights. Nebraska and Nevada voters raised state minimum wages to $15/hour and $12/hour, respectively; Connecticut and Nevada voters expanded voting rights, while Arizona voters rejected stricter Voter ID requirements; and California overwhelmingly rejected ballot initiatives that would legalize online sports betting and sports betting on tribal lands (and they say people don’t have morals out there!). Pot legalization was a mixed bag – Maryland and Missouri voters said yes, while Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota voters said no – but that’s two more states legalizing pot (and thus lightening police officers’ burdens), and I’m old enough to remember when zero states legalized pot.

3. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez – whom the pundits said wouldn’t win Washington’s 3rd, but what do they know? – has provided the blueprint for how Democrats should win back rural and rust belt areas, much more so than Tim Ryan, it turns out. Unlike the right-wingers who hide behind “small businesses” when they try to cut their corporate paymasters’ taxes, Ms. Perez can tell you how the catalytic converter shortage exposed real supply chain problems (i.e., that big dealerships can muscle small car repair shops out of parts with impunity). She also talks about police reform in a way working folks would relate – stop buying night vision goggles and start paying cops more, she says. And no use saying well, she only beat a Trumphole, because, hey, did Tim Ryan beat his Trumphole opponent? No, he did not.

4. A lot of bad people got re-elected – though if Ron Johnson really sold his soul to the devil for another term as a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, he paid too much – but at least Paul LePage got absolutely buried in his attempt to reclaim the Governor’s mansion in Maine, where (thanks to ranked-choice voting) independent candidates can no longer take enough sane people’s votes away from Democrats. To think Mr. LePage had the cojones to say that folks on the left and the right have just got to start talking to each other again! That’s like Donald Trump saying people in America are too angry! (Actually, Mr. Trump did say Greta Thunberg, who’s a billion times the person he’ll ever be, was “too angry.”)

5. So how did incessant Republican whining about “rising crime rates” resonate with voters? Now it can be told: not very well! It worked especially poorly in Pennsylvania, where state legislators tried to make impeaching Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (for not doing enough about crime, or something) their October Surprise; that effort fell flat at month’s end, likely because it was always noxious and offensive drama, but if “rising crime” were such a winning issue generally, then how did Pennsylvania Democrats get in position to flip the state legislature’s lower house after entering Election Day 23 seats down?

6. Looks like I’m getting a dozen emails a day from Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia for another few weeks, now that he’ll face Republican Herschel Walker in a runoff. Maybe Republican voters will stay home merely because the race won’t decide Senate control anymore, but maybe they won’t, and if Republicans take our House before then, Democratic voters will be rather more demoralized than they know now. Still, I’d be pleased to see Democrats take this race seriously and win it, not just because Mr. Warnock is a good Senator who deserves to win, but because with 51 seats the party can marginalize Kyrsten Sinema even further. Yes, as we’ve already seen with the Inflation Reduction Act, we’re much better off dealing with Joe Manchin’s old-school corruption than Ms. Sinema’s post-modern corruption. Let her go work for a hedge fund in two years, where she can sell her relationships, no, not with other Democratic Senators, but with Republican ones. You ever see her in a photo with other Democrats? No, you have not – but you’ve seen plenty of photos of her with Republicans. Such a maverick!

7. So whom are we going to war with first – Russia or Florida? Republicans clearly have an even bigger stranglehold over that state than we realized in 2020. Calling Marco Rubio an empty suit would represent a profound insult to empty suits, yet he beat Val Demings by 16 points. And Val Demings was a good candidate! Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis beat Charlie Crist by 20, which should remind us that you don’t run a nice guy against an asshole. Mr. DeSantis’s redistricting antics netted Republicans three more House districts, though even in that he was outpaced by the incompetence of New York Democrats, who netted Republicans four.

8. John Fetterman flipped the only Senate seat to change hands by beating Mehmet Oz 51-47, while Josh Shapiro trounced Doug Mastriano by 16 points in that state’s gubernatorial election; Mr. Oz wasn’t as execrable a candidate as Mr. Mastriano – we’re talking about the difference between a clown and an arsonist here – but I must conclude that Mr. Fetterman’s stroke and subsequent shaky debate performance moved the needle in Mr. Oz’s direction. If we’d gotten to see John Fetterman at his best in this campaign, he might have won by 20 points, and then the pundits, who know nothing about anything of consequence, would have mystified him by saying he’s a “unique” candidate. It’s true that Democrats don’t often run a guy who’s that funny, that smart, that social media-savvy, and that able to relate to working folks, but truth is there are people like John Fetterman all over America, and a lot of them even want to serve the public. Will Democrat consultants notice them now? I kid, of course – if you’re paid to be blind, you’ll stay blind.

Around the table: starring bad people and William Shatner.

Sonali Kolhatkar writes that if Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (a.k.a. Lula) wins the Brazilian Presidency, “he must not only rebuild the social investments that Bolsonaro destroyed, but also restore trust in a nation damaged by fascism’s sophisticated propaganda machine.” Like fellow irredeemable asshole Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro has wreaked a lot of havoc on the good citizens of Brazil, and if paragraph 5 seems a little extreme to you, recall all the times American media celebrated the prospect of a Bolsonaro presidency because it’d be “good for business.” Also recall that the “orchestrated effort to attack democracy in Brazil” included the Car Wash “corruption” probe that toppled a liberal President and briefly put Lula in jail. And finally, recall that the main difference between a foreign dictator and an American corporate executive is that an executive has the luxury to act civilized.

“The CIA Thought Putin Would Quickly Conquer Ukraine,” writes James Risen and Ken Klippenstein at The Intercept. “Why Did They Get It So Wrong?” Long story short: “U.S. intelligence missed the impact of corrupt insider dealing and deceit among Putin loyalists in Moscow’s defense establishment, which has left the Russian army a brittle and hollow shell,” and they missed it because they relied more on high-tech surveillance observing things like troop movements than, you know, people on the ground who might have told them the Russian government is totally corrupt. Machines failing to do the work of people: where have we heard that story before?

You might not expect to hear from William Shatner that going up into space actually caused him “overwhelming sadness,” but while he’s not the only person who ever went up into space and experienced the void as, well, a void, we should remember that most the times we’ve “seen” space we’ve seen it in sci-fi films and TV shows, which their creators construct to excite and entice us. The first group of people who cross the void to another place will be profoundly lonely, and we won’t even know how they fared in our lifetimes. Read the whole thing, though – Mr. Shatner implores us to be aware “not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant” – the grandeur of being on Earth, that is.

I expect exactly zero right-wingers to care that J.D. Vance’s anti-opioid non-profit completely fizzled after five years, two op-eds, and two Twitterings – as we’ve just been reminded with Herschel Walker, right-wingers care about nothing except winning, and they tend to think showing up equals winning – but making a big show of caring about a problem and then doing nothing about it seems absolutely toxic to me! And if one guy's absence could really capsize the whole effort, as Mr. Vance claims, then it wasn’t much of an effort. I will say the ads Tim Ryan is running about this feel rather odd to me – regular folks don’t sound this scripted in real life; maybe Mr. Ryan’s not as good a candidate as I thought. But Mr. Vance is such an absurdly bad candidate that maybe he doesn’t have to be.

When I hear that Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI), the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name, actually suggested we ought to repeal the federal minimum wage, all I can say is: what will it take to send this man home for good? I actually take some comfort in his relatively good polls recently, not just because attacking Mandela Barnes in late September and early October ain’t as good as attacking him in late October and early November, but because maybe this time Wisconsin Democrats aren’t leaving Mr. Johnson for dead. Also, Russ Feingold, the man who couldn’t campaign without tying at least one hand behind his back in 2010 and did victory laps for months in 2016, isn’t running.

Finally, I don’t know if Sen. Tommy Tuberville (E-AL) thought he was killing two birds with one stone by saying that Democrats “want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that,”but I do know that calling Democrats “pro-crime” is quite desperate, particularly from a guy who has reportedly violated the STOCK Act at least 130 times since assuming office not even two years ago. Republicans really have nothing of consequence to offer anyone, do they? Just remember, folks: no matter how stupid Tommy Tuberville looks or sounds, he’s not stupid. He’s evil.

Around the table: from OPEC+ shenanigans to Presidential pardons.

Sen. Schumer (D-NY) excoriates OPEC+ for deciding to ratchet back oil production, which has already helped drive American gas prices up, and though he concentrates most of his fire on how this move affects Russia’s war on Ukraine – which is not going so well for Russia, you may have noticed! – I can’t help but notice that we’re less than a month out from midterms here, and higher gas prices won’t help Democrats hold either House or Senate. Republicans could help out, I suppose, by excoriating President Biden for failing to get better behavior out of Saudi Arabia when he went there over the summer, which sets up the easy retort: so you’re saying we’re not appeasing Saudi Arabia enough?

I wish it were more of a surprise that celebrity chef/philanthropist José Andrés has tried to block an initiative that would raise wages for tipped workers in Washington, D.C., his base of operations, but I’ve seen nominally liberal restauranteurs do similar things before, and a lot nominally liberal bosses in any field clench when their own employees demand better from them. But this is one reason we live in communities – so that we have folks who can grab us by the scruff and tell us we’re going wrong. (Don’t believe the hype that Mr. Andrés et al are “just trying to preserve jobs in the wake of the pandemic.” First off, it’s rubbish, and second off, if they didn’t say that, they’d just say something else.)

Once again, from the “I Shouldn’t Have to Spend Any Time on This Shit” file: per Factcheck.org, “(t)here is no evidence that babies are harmed by drinking breast milk from mothers who have received a COVID-19 vaccine.” You may have heard differently on social media – that, for example, a study found that “7 out of 11 women had mRNA in their breast milk.” Generally you don’t hear that a) it was actually 5 women out of 11 and b) it was an infinitesimal amount of mRNA that disappeared in less than 48 hours. Also too, 11 women ain’t exactly a big sample, and if you’re a mom, do you really want to put yourself at risk of dying from COVID by not getting vaccinated? Thus we are reminded, once again, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and also that clichés often endure for good reason.

Many have wondered just why Mehmet Oz gave a speech at a Florida fundraiser not very far from one of Adolf Hitler's cars, and I suppose right-wingers will shrug and say “it was a museum,” I think Mr. Oz once again is actually looking to appeal to fascists in Pennsylvania, just like he did when he criticized John Fetterman for being too anti-authority. But I’m not sure that’ll work – only a few American fascists really like Hitler, and those can easily make a show of hating him. Remember what Richard Spencer was talking about right before he got punched in the face that time? He was talking about how much actual Nazis hated him. Fake “independence” continues to disgust me.

Uh oh: New Hampshire Senate Republican candidate Don Bolduc unfurled this gem about “who should decide abortion rights”: “It belongs to the state. It belongs to these gentlemen right here, who are state legislators representing you.” While New Hampshire doesn’t allow state-level ballot referenda, legislators don’t “decide for you” so much as do your will, or at least that’s how it’ll work when we all insist that’s how it should work. And if you’re running for office, the last thing you want say is any variation of these men decide abortion for you. Between this and his flip-flip-flopping on the 2020 election being “stolen,” Mr. Bolduc’s not having a good month, and this is not a good time to have a bad month.

When I hear that well over half of all Republican nominees for House, Senate, and the four top state offices think Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election he actually won by seven million votes, I think Democrats should absolutely run ads about all of them, so that independent voters know who the whiner is and who the adult in the room is. That way we can prevent a good chunk of them – perhaps even those running in “safely Republican seats,” since we all know that can turn in a minute since we’ve all seen it happen in our lifetimes – from ever holding office. I still have my doubts that Democrats really want to win races, though – I mean, why take on actual responsibilities when you can raise lots of money either way?

Finally, President Biden issues pardons for all Americans convicted of simple marijuana possession since that became a crime in 1971, and orders a study on descheduling marijuana, adding that keeping pot on Schedule I along with drugs like heroin “makes no sense.” Only around 10,000 Americans will get pardons – if your state rung you up for pot possession, you’d need to go to your Governor for a pardon – but this is all more than I expected from President Biden, even though he said he’d do that and more, so I applaud it. I feel compelled to point out, though, that (like his student loan forgiveness program) it’s also exactly the kind of good first step that shouldn’t attract a lot of Republican anger but does anyway, because Republicans only do anger these days. Plus they’re all running on TEH CRIMEZ!!!!, because what else can they run on, their great ideas? The good news: most Americans want to legalize pot, and they don’t automatically associate toking with murder.

Around the table: of dictatorships and monopolies, and the good folks who fight them.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept assesses “The Dark Odds Facing Iran’s Brave Protestors.” Protests have followed the state’s murder of a woman for not wearing her hijab in strict accordance with new right-wing government laws, and though we want better for good Iranians, Egyptians and Syrians have failed to capitalize on the Arab Spring because “life under dictatorship had not allowed any alternative institutions to grow that could easily replace the tyrannies now in place”; Iran’s police state has similarly suppressed such institutions. That’s a cautionary tale for those Americans who think crime is the number one issue facing them because they’ve watched the same four or five clips on the TV news for two years now.

Matt Stoller assesses our progress in our fight against monopolies. Long story short: yes, our government loses antitrust cases in court, but has also made progress on right-to-repair, wage-fixing, and price-fixing. Still, “(i)n a highly concentrated economy, losing merger challenges simply shouldn’t happen,” but he also reminds us that we lose before very, very bad judging. Mr. Stoller remains hopeful that lawyers will figure out how to win cases even against bad judges, and that judges aren’t evil per se but “just operating on autopilot with antitrust. And he also reminds us that the “narrative of powerlessness is perhaps the most powerful weapon in the monopolists’ arsenal, because it causes us to give up on self-government itself.” We definitely need to hear that more often! The “phony war” metaphor at the beginning is a bonus.

When I hear that 80% of Americans want a federally-funded paid family/medical leave program, I recall that Newt Gingrich used to say if 70 percent of Americans want something, they should get it, though I bet he would just mouth a bunch of BS about it now and our “liberal” media wouldn’t challenge him on it. I’ll bet most of Joe Manchin’s constituents want a paid family/medical leave program, too, and if he’s scared that his approvals in West Virginia are upside down now that he’s helped bring the Inflation Reduction Act to fruition, I would remind him that his job ain’t just to do his constituents’ will, but to convince them when he’s actually done it.

Ho hum, Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State candidate wants to end mail-in voting because of alleged/nonexistent “voter fraud,” but not only has he voted by mail numerous times, he’s also done it while living in a different state from the one in which he was voting. In a sane, moral, and decent civilization, this news would finish his campaign; in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, he needs only hope he’s worshiped enough at the altar of His Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump to please the big man’s votaries. Having claimed to be a “victim of election fraud” as the Republican nominee for Nevada’s 4th U.S. House district in 2020 – he lost that race by over 16,000 votes and nearly five percentage points – he may be well on his way toward this goal.

When I hear that Republicans actually plan to campaign on repealing drug-pricing caps passed entirely with Democratic votes – and that they’re using the same horsedoodle arguments about “stifling innovation” and “drug takeover schemes” and “price controls,” phrases that anger far-right partisans and literally no one else – all I can say is that I guess they’re counting on gerrymandering to deliver them the House, because they sure ain’t counting on making winning arguments. The shame of it is that it might work, especially given our well-founded suspicion that Democrats don’t want to win elections as much as they want to raise campaign money.

Finally, how about some good news? Over 270 workers at the Roosevelt Boulevard Home Depot in Philadelphia have filed a petition with our National Labor Relations Board to form a union. Much like Walmart, Home Depot has unusually terrific workers they get to treat like crap because those workers don’t have the opportunity to take their skills somewhere else anymore – which, of course, is because Home Depot has crushed smaller, independent hardware stores everywhere it’s gone. So let’s add “balancing monopoly power” as yet another reason we need more unions.

Around the table: centrists, right-wingers, and liars still suck, part 833.

Factcheck.org issues an expansive report “Correcting Misinformation About Dr. Fauci,” which has unfortunately proven to be an Augean task. Read the whole thing, since he’s going to be a Republican villain in this year’s midterm elections even though he deserves better – and, more importantly, we deserve better. Even when he said (in February 2020) that “right now” COVID infection risk was “low,” he was, strictly speaking, right – and he’s always acted with more honesty and integrity than all his critics who pretend to mishear what he’s saying or cast aspersions upon his motivations with no evidence other than the rage they want to provoke in others.

Had you been thinking that the Sinemanchin axis hasn’t done much to foil President Biden’s appointees in a 50-50 Senate? Turns out they’ve just been picking their spots, with Sen. Sinema, in particular, personally scuttling the appointment of an Elizabeth Warren ally to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sounds like an unimportant office, right? It’s not: it helps federal regulations get written more quickly and efficiently, so I guess this is another reason corporations call Sen. Sinema “heroic.” Now would be a good time to remind everyone that if she goes into lobbying after her Senate term, as some expect, it won’t be because of her relationships with Democratic Senators, since those are all in flames. It’ll be because of her relationships with Republican Senators. Have you seen her photographed with anyone else? No, you have not. There’s a reason for that.

Ho hum, Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters has been scrubbing his campaign website of any claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election, even though he’s trafficked in such claims plenty of times. That’s what you’d have to do, I guess, if you know (and if I know, I’m sure he knows) that election denialism turns off independent voters. Still, he said it, so Mark Kelly should run ads about it. Note well, also, that Mr. Masters will have a much tougher time “scrubbing” his remarks about privatizing Social Security, which exist on tape, and therefore the internet, and therefore forever.

BFD that more Pennsylvania Republican politicians have endorsed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro, because Republican voters don’t listen to their “leaders” anymore, not when Dear Leader Trump (or his Chosen One, Doug Mastriano) speaks. These Republicans know that as surely as I do, and they also know that the more outspoken Republican support Mr. Shapiro gets, the more he’ll feel pressured to move rightward. I don’t even think these Republicans would be unhappy if Mr. Mastriano wins! In any case, I hope Mr. Shapiro understands that his high-profile Republican supporters don’t hold many cards here.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph now right-wingers are harassing children’s hospitals in at least five cities for supposedly performing gender-affirming surgery on trans teens which they’re not even doing. I’d say have they no shame?, but really, that ship sailed when they started calling everyone who opposed the Iraq war a “traitor.” Just imagine the worst thing a human being can do, and in a few short years (or months!) you’ll see a right-winger proudly doing it. I’m not even anxious to blame social media for spreading lies about children's hospitals, because assholes only care about setting other people off, and it doesn’t matter with what.

Finally, did I say just two days ago that maybe Mehmet Oz’s Senate campaign isn’t going as badly as we all think? Well, scratch that: Mr. Oz tells a radio interviewer, in re recent attacks on the health of his opponent, John Fetterman, that “(t)he campaign’s saying lots of things. My position is – I can only speak to what I’m saying.” Few Americans care about the difference between what dark money groups say and what candidates say, so they sure ain’t gonna care about the difference between what candidates say and what their own campaigns say. And if there really is a difference, then the candidate doesn’t know what he’s doing! It’s his own campaign! These Trumpholes always strut around when things go well and then act so powerless when they screw up; I’m sick of it.

Around the table: more truths about pensions, banksters, and the man who gives the "Citizen Legislator" a bad name.

We learn two very important things (at least!) from this anonymous author’s account (at Matt Stoller’s Substack page) of how pension funds got attached to bankster hedge funds: one, that the right-wing assault on (among other things) state budgets led pension funds to, ah, get more adventurous when pension funds really need to invest conservatively, and two, that pension funds now provide most of private equity’s money. That suggests a fix! Anyway, when you hear right-wingers yowl about how bad off pension funds are, as they’ve been doing for approximately the entire time we've had pension funds, remember that right-wing policies have only made the situation worse.

In a related note, Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) says Social Security “was set up improperly” because – wait for it – it didn’t invest directly in the stock market! Ugh, like the word “security” in the name means nothing! Think maybe, just maybe, the architects of Social Security might have remembered a major stock market crash just six years earlier? And less than two years before Ron Johnson first got elected, did we not have another one? And does the current Dow Jones Industrial Average not sit about 2,000 points below where it’s been for the past year? And how does he figure that index funds have increased 360% over the past eight years? Mandela Barnes had better beat Ron Johnson by 20 points.

Think it’s good news that the National Republican Senatorial Committee (or NRSC) is cutting funding to Senate races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin? Think again. The Republican Senate candidates in these races – Blake Masters, Mehmet Oz, and (ahem!) Ron Johnson – can all pour millions of dollars of their own money into their races. I remember virtually all the big money backers pulling out of the 2016 Wisconsin Senate race involving – one more time! – Ron Johnson as national polling had Russ Feingold beating him to a pulp, and you remember how that race went. But do Democrats remember? Or care? It’s a question worth asking!

You’ve heard about how HBO Max is pulling a lot of its children’s programming (including original children’s programming!)? And laying off about one out of every seven workers? It’s a shame our “liberal” media can’t just come out and say a merger has caused this! Also, all this talk about “decluttering” a channel’s offerings is absurd, since there is literally almost no shelf space involved in storing streaming programming. Hate to pile on, but cable TV hasn’t “ballooned in cost” so much as cable TV corporations are gouging their customers – again, because they have monopoly power.

You’ll be pleased to learn that scientists have made some progress in figuring out how to actually break down PFAS chemicals (a.k.a. “forever chemicals”) so that they don’t appear in everyone’s damn bloodstream and cause cancer and chronic disease, but before your right-wing neighbor starts bellowing YOU CAN JUST BREAK IT DOWN WITH LYE!!!!! (which, ah, applies to just one class of PFAS), note well that the methods of destroying PFAS chemicals so far a) use a lot of energy and/or b) don’t scale up well, and that latter item’s important, since PFAS is, you know, everywhere. There’s also the problem of solving one problem only to create another problem, which is how we got ubiquitous PFAS chemicals in the first place.

Finally, did you know that the infamous Rep. Matt Gaetz (E-FL) actually has a primary challenger to his right? And how does that work, you ask? Here’s how: the primary challenger suggests that maybe Mr. Gaetz was the “informant” who got the FBI to go after Donald Trump! And is thus insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump, and to you, of course, but mainly to Donald Trump. If you remember how many teabaggers turned out Clinton impeachment hawks in 2010 Republican primaries, you already know this is the only way right-wingers can keep the drama going: by turning on each other. Still, it might warm my heart to one day conclude that Mr. Gaetz faced a primary challenger because he actually voted against forced arbitration back in March. Hell, Richard Lugar voted against higher bank fees in 2011 and look what happened to him the following year.

Around the table: Rick Scott *is* Max Headroom! And other stories.

Sonali Kolhatkar explains how Alex Jones, in purporting to fight government, actually helped make our government significantly worse. And not by spewing bad ideas to enrage the inattentive, but by turning over his primed-to-believe-whatever audience to Donald Trump, who helped put our government even more in big corporations’ pockets while ranting about the “deep state” (which is a thing, as you know, but not necessarily the thing the Trump/Jones axis yells about). So, to sum: not only is Alex Jones a jerk, he’s a jerk who serves Our Glorious Elites while pretending to oppose them. St. Peter’s really going to dig that at the Pearly Gates.

Naomi Oreskes at Scientific American laments that today’s scientists too often peddle solutions that “depend() on technologies that do not yet exist.” It gets worse: depending on unproven (and likely unviable) technologies like carbon capture is just another way of avoiding scaling up the renewable technologies that do work. And we all know why that’s happening! (I was also displeased to learn that the “bipartisan” infrastructure bill passed last year allocated 20 times as much money to carbon capture as it did to renewables. Getting to yes!)

ProPublica tells us all about “A Uranium Ghost Town in the Making” in New Mexico. Since 1958, a uranium processing corporation has polluted air and water, and federal and state regulators didn’t tell good New Mexicans for over a decade; this all started during the nuclear arms race, so I guess sacrifices had to be made. The mill closed in 1990, but folks still suffer from ill effects, so the corporation’s bright idea now is to buy out all the local homeowners (as cheaply as possible, of course) and force them to absolve the corporation of any liability as a condition of sale! In what’s still a seller’s market, no less!

When I hear that Republican Senate Campaign Committee Chair Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) “br(oke) down like a glitching Furby” when an NBC reporter asked him about the Republicans running for Senate in 2022, I’m tempted to say, “well, in fairness, he is a robot,” but I’ve rarely seen someone have such trouble enunciating. How does one get so unnerved by the question so why do all your candidates suck? And saying the word “Biden” like it’s a cuss word ain’t gonna work no matter how low his approvals go. It doesn’t bode well for any of the Republicans running this year, not just Blake Masters, who really does have a face even a mother could punch.

Mere days after Democrats dared Republicans to remove a $35/month insulin cap from their massive reconciliation bill, both North Carolina Republican Senators face a “vehement backlash” from their own constituents for voting against both the cap and the bill. And that’s how it should be, even when both Senators think they’re immune from accountability – Sen. Burr is retiring, of course, and Sen. Tillis just got re-elected, even though the next time he gets even 49% in a Senate election will be the first. Democratic Senate nominee Cheri Beasley promptly jumped on them for it; maybe she can win her race, if the Democrat consultant class doesn’t make her forget what matters to voters.

Finally, our FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, ostensibly for classified documents wrongfully and/or illegally removed from the White House, but right-wingers still leap to his defense. Here’s the money quotation: “if law-enforcement officials want to murder an unarmed Black man in the street, brutalize protesters against police misconduct, or investigate a Democratic presidential candidate, conservatives will insist that such officers are infallible and that any criticism of their conduct is outrageous. But when the law is used to investigate or restrict the conduct of people deemed by conservatives to be above its prohibitions, that is axiomatically an abuse of power.” Rush Limbaugh being a conservative was harder than being a liberal, but not when being a conservative means you just make up the rules as they fit you. Holding values that don’t always tell you what you want to hear? Now that’s hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 539.

Our Justice Department sues to prevent Meta’s acquisition of a virtual reality app corporation, thus saying not-so-fast to Meta’s mad dash to create the “metaverse” which is totally not Decentraland or Sandbox or Second Life. Naturally Meta’s entire retort to the suit is regulation chills innovation, an offensively absurd argument which persuades very few Americans. Of course, they don’t throw it out there to persuade so much as to give people pause. Don’t pause, good peoples. The famous cliché instructs us that necessity, not “freedom from regulation,” is the mother of invention.

Hoo boy Donald Trump sure has big cojones throwing around phrases like “law and order” like he personally isn’t the most lawless individual most people know, but I’ll grant that calling for the death penalty for drug dealers is probably fairly popular, and it would absolutely be the wedge he uses to do all his other unpopular fascist crap, like sending the National Guard into cities and parking police cars on every corner and “removing” prosecutors who don’t do exactly what he wants. Seriously, cop cars on every block? It’s like they never want a teenager to vote Republican again!

Pema Levy at Mother Jones runs down all the state laws that essentially enable every citizen to be a “snitch” for money, like the odious Texas anti-abortion law. People like thinking of themselves as vigilantes, but that doesn’t mean they like other people to be vigilantes, particularly when they gum up their lives! Our Supreme Court should throw out all these laws, given that they’ve previously ruled that you must be able to prove harm was done to you to have standing to sue about anything. Think this Court will respect that precedent? I’d sooner lay money that the Detroit Lions will win Super Bowl LVII.

Thinking Republican Doug Mastriano has a real uphill battle to win the Pennsylvania Governor’s race? Think again: corporations still love plowing money into the Republican Governors Association, and the RGA’s working hard to elect Mr. Mastriano, even as they’re pretending they’re not. Hilariously, the corporations that have given to the RGA either don’t respond to questions or respond with stupidity. “We give to both sides” is a stupid thing to say when one side literally imitates Nazis in saying a “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” runs the world.

What does it mean that figures such as Christie Todd Whitman and Andrew Wang have come together to form a third party optimistically called the Forward Party? It means someone’s created yet another gravity well to suck in money from the rich and/or inattentive, that’s what! A plurality of Americans call themselves independent, but BFD – I’m an independent, too, and I won’t vote for Republicans even under threat of catheterization with barbed wire. People don’t hate parties so much as they hate politicians who constantly give them the backs of their hands.

Finally, let the record show that Republicans reacted to the possibility that Democrats might actually pass an even more slimmed-down Build Back Better bill by killing popular veterans’ health care legislation, and threatening to derail legislation protecting gay marriage as well. When I say the only way to talk to a Republican is to tell him to stop whining, this is why, because all of this is literal immaturity on Republicans’ part. If Democrats want to win the midterms – and we have ample reason to believe that they don’t! – they should run ads depicting their Republican opponents as tantrum-throwing babies from now through November.

Around the table: some Democrats rise to the challenge, others don't.

The AFL-CIO puts out a report finding that CEO pay went up much, much faster than inflation in 2021, and while normally I’d ask how much CEO wages went up in previous years, when CEO salaries go up more than twice as fast as inflation and nearly three times faster than worker wages, that’s really all you need to know right there. They said income redistribution would wreck this great nation – and they were right! So stop listening to the pundits telling you worker wages drive up inflation.

A Democratic politico comes up with a way to beat Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: feed right-wing news sources with stories about how Mr. DeSantis has been insufficiently right-wing. But, off the top of my head, I can’t think how he’s done that, and though the right-wing capacity for rage seems endless, I can’t imagine right-wing media outlets wanting to conspire with Democrats to oust Mr. DeSantis, since he trafficks in the rage that keeps the cycle of doom going. All of this, of course, supposes Democrats really want to depose him. Too many of them are asking why not keep raising money off him? as we speak, a strategy that has never led to disaster before! I’ve got a better idea: run a candidate who’ll do things with their power.

It “May Surprise You” “What the Bible Actually Says About Abortion” – i.e., nothing directly, and both pro- and anti-choice forces can find Biblical quotations that support their cherished position, plus Jesus’s own feminism continues to impress! – but facts about the Bible won’t impress any right-wing Christians; they don’t read the Bible so much as imagine the Bible already agrees with them. I’d prefer a Bible that didn’t agree with me on everything, just like I prefer to hold and practice values that inconvenience me.

Science puts out a study that instructs us, among other things, that about 20% of Americans think violence in defense of one’s political aims is A-OK, nearly half of Americans think a Civil War is coming, and, dig this, 40% prefer “having a strong leader” to “preserving democracy.” That last one, especially, is a stupid choice – there is no law of physics that says “democracy” and “strong leadership” are incompatible, though you need strong leaders who will let the popular will lead them. So, not Kyrsten Sinema, then.

And not Pete Buttigieg, either: Matt Stoller creates a giant Goofus and Gallant strip about certain Biden Administration officials and their attitudes toward monopolies, and he finds our Treasury Secretary wanting, as he is. Dig how Mr. Buttigieg says his office has concluded “ten separate investigations” on airline refunds! The whole country is talking about how bad airlines are treating them, and he unfurls a typical right-wing trick, hoping you’ll think “concluding an investigation” and “doing something” are the same thing! Anyway, how about we start promoting Jonathan Kanter and Rohit Chopra as Presidential timber? Because those two know what they’re doing. Or is “knowing what you’re doing” not sexy enough?

Finally, ho hum, Trudy Busch Valentine’s family farm has hosted at least two fundraisers for Missouri U.S. Senate Republican candidates, although Ms. Busch Valentine is running for Senate herself, as a Democrat! And her family’s ties to Republicans go considerably deeper than that! In a sane and moral world, this news would finish Ms. Valentine’s campaign – particularly since her main opponent, Lucas Kunce, would be a much better candidate! – but we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society where we can never underestimate Democratic politicos’ ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Around the table: "woke heat maps," "suck on that," and other absurdities.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph now Democratic “moderates” in the House want to pass a reconciliation bill without even the mild tax reforms the Senate appears to have agreed upon. Someone needs to remind Rep. Gottheimer that the only reason, and I do mean *only* reason, he's a House Rep is that many conservatives in his district found former Rep. Scott Garrett too homophobic. He could lose in 2022, and he’ll blame the liberals for it – even though those same liberals, at least in our House, are not making themselves a nuisance by advancing an alternative tax plan that would tax the rich harder. And they should!

Matt Stoller reminds us that even though President Biden’s put antitrust opponents at our FTC and DOJ, he’s put a lot of corporate-friendly folks on the courts. Since these judges will rule on antitrust cases pumped out by our FTC and DOJ, I couldn’t blame you for thinking putting solid people at our FTC and DOJ was part of a plan to mislead us into thinking things were really going to change. And when you realize that some of his other appointments (i.e., Secretaries Buttigieg and Vilsack) haven’t shown the same hunger to confront monopolies, you might feel that more acutely. Mr. Stoller won’t go that far, of course; I hope he’s right to pull his punches.

When I hear that a right-wing group in Missouri has created a “woke heat map” to target “groomers” and folks who actually believe racism is a real thing, all I can say is: assholes ruin everything. That’s before I get to the part about how right-wingers took a map of trans-friendly clinics and turned it into a tool for harassing those clinics. Remember, also, that when they talk about “grooming toddlers with sexually explicit books,” that the only thing “sexually explicit” about those books is that they include gay or trans folks at all. First time I saw that particular stratagem, a certain loofah-loving Fox News “independent” was flogging it.

Ho hum, Steve Bannon gets caught on tape characterizing Mr. Trump’s plans on Election night thusly: “at 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that,'” actual election results be damned. Well, he’s been telling good Americans to “suck on that” for decades now; why should Election Night 2020 have been any different? Given Mr. Bannon’s habits, he won’t bother saying he was taken out of context, but will merely add Mother Jones (which unearthed the tapes) to his ever-lengthening list of enemies he’ll “crush” or “destroy” or whatever.

Surprise, surprise, Amazon has handed over data from its ubiquitous/notorious Ring doorbell camera 11 times to law enforcement this year, without requiring a warrant or getting consent from Ring owners. Amazon of course says it only does so in “emergencies,” without defining what exact emergencies prompted these 11 incidents, but we all know that, as Josephine Gattuso Hendin once said, “once you cross a line, you keep crossing.” You can enable end-to-end encryption on your Ring device, though really end-to-end encryption should be the default setting, not something you have to turn on. It’s almost like they know you’re too busy to consider this issue carefully or something.

Finally, John “The Mustache of Evil” Bolton went on CNN and, as part of an attempt to prove that Mr. Trump’s January 6 actions were not part of “a carefully-planned coup d’état,” actually claimed that he personally “has helped plan coups d’état, not here, but, you know, other places.” We all knew that, of course, but still, nice to have a confession. I’m actually a little more annoyed that Mr. Bolton apparently thinks incompetence at planning a coup means you didn’t really do it (he did insist on saying “carefully-planned,” after all), and I’m tired of right-wingers pretending that stupidity mitigates or excuses evil.

Around the table: concerning abortion and conspiracy theories.

Surprise, surprise, Republicans getting everything they want out of the end of Roe v. Wade “complicate(s)” their efforts to take back Congress in the midterms. As I’ve said, people hate it when politicians take away the things they rely on, and legal abortion is one of those, more so, I think, than the Affordable Care Act was in 2017 and 2018, and when Republicans threatened that they lost the House. And if Republicans are worried now, just wait until inflation comes down! There’s a lot in this article worth commenting on, but I’ll just cite abortion clinics all closing in Wisconsin after Ron Johnson said things wouldn’t change that much. That’s a winning campaign ad if there ever was one – and, you know, if Democrats just have the guts to run it.

Uh oh: a right-wing evangelical gets caught on tape claiming that she prays with sitting Supreme Court Justices – who just so happened to have cited her organization’s amicus brief in their ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. I’m going to guess that this isn’t against the law per se, but only because we don’t hold Supreme Court Justices to the same ethical standards we hold all other federal judges. In any case, it sure looks like an obvious conflict of interest, and if your currency is objectivity, you would reasonably avoid even the appearance of such a conflict. Unless, of course, you don’t care because you’re just going to take everyone’s freedoms away ha ha.

Speaking of which, Maurizio Valsania at The Conversation reminds us that Justice Alito’s ruling in Dobbs “cherry-picks” American history in claiming that abortion rights aren’t “deeply-rooted” in American culture. I’m old enough to recall a time when “Blackstone condoned abortion” (let alone Ben Franklin’s abortion recipe!) would end all arguments on the matter, but fact is women had more autonomy over their bodies in the 18th century than they did in the 19th, and last I checked, America did exist during the 18th century. So add “originalism” and “textualism” to the pile of words so tortured by their utterers that they tell them exactly what they want to hear.

Martha Crawford writes about the uncertainty wrought by our Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade – and her own experiences navigating sexuality even with the support of Roe. “Roe meant my body could never be ultimately controlled by such men” as the funny uncle who looked up her skirt at the shoe store, yet her Ms.-reading mother still called her a slut after finding out she was on the pill, and her Christian teen group-running father told her she was “a spirited filly that needs to be broken,” preferably by “a man with a good set of spurs.” And if our Supreme Court gets the last word, women won’t even have the modicum of bodily control Dr. Crawford did.

Finally, Donovan Schaefer at The Conversation explains why folks like conspiracy theories. Long story short: “confronting conspiracy theories requires understanding the feelings that make them so appealing,” namely that conspiracy theories “let() you feel like you’re smarter than everyone” and allows you to see yourself as a “critical thinker.” There’s no small joy to knowing an “obscure” source, I’ll admit, and knowing something “no one else knows,” though you should also, you know, become an adult and put away childish things. And Q-holes’ ability to make any datum fit their conclusion should raise red flags for actual critical thinkers.

Around the table: featuring weak executives, hypocritical corporations, and other losers.

Ever the optimist and I say that as a compliment, Matt Stoller sees a chance at undoing the T-Mobile/Sprint merger through suits by private plaintiffs, including all those independent franchises T-Mobile promptly shut down after it went through. Still, we live in a transitional moment (at best!) in re mergers and monopolies, which is why even folks like Mr. Stoller still write sentences like “(a)fter AT&T was blocked from buying T-Mobile, and prices dropped, executives across the industry became increasingly agitated about competition in the market.” Aren't executives always saying they like competition? Sadly, they do not really like competition. That's because they’re weak.

You knew this was coming: most of the corporations making the biggest deal about paying for their employees’ abortions just so happen to have made big donations to the Republican Attorneys General Association (or RAGA), which “by its own admission, played a central role” in getting Roe v. Wade overturned. And besides, only around 5% of all corporations have even pledged to pay for employee abortions, plus they’re leaving out contractors and students, and besides, what if you don’t have a job? But yeah, all that great PR JP Morgan Chase hoped to get from its pledge should dissipate now that we know they gave $25,000 to RAGA just this past March. The putatively pro-abortion corporation that's lately cut off welfare payments to RAGA? Yelp, if you can believe it. GoPuff has been a major offender, and I bet you can more easily believe that.

Yahoo! News/YouGov poll finds an eye-popping 68% of Fox News viewers actually think the perps of the January 6 attempted coup were liberals trying to make Donald Trump look bad – which, like, Tucker Carlson was saying that that damn night, using a source that even the Washington Examiner soon repudiated – but the poll contains even more interesting results. A third of CNN viewers and a quarter of MSNBC viewers agreed, and more than a third of non-cable viewers (that’d be my category!) also agree, and that’s too damn many. Also, only 11% of Americans blamed the Trump votaries at the Capitol first and foremost. And that would have been my choice! Donald Trump incited a riot, but good Americans are supposed to take good enough care of themselves that they don’t get incited. Seriously! You're supposed to understand that being full of rage all the time is bad for you in at least two ways.

Michigan Republicans want to pass a bill that would allow parents to file frivolous lawsuits against public schools for exposing children to drag queen shows, though no one can cite a single example of this ever happening. I mean, how many of today’s teachers have even seen The Kids in the Hall? It’s not enough to say “well, the lawsuit will fail without evidence,” because the state government will have to pay to defend the suit, and, well, they’ll be using taxpayer money to do that. Bunch of damn drama hounds, right-wingers are, alleging horrors where they don’t exist and thinking it means nothing they can’t defend their position. Can Michigan Democrats run against this stupid crap, maybe? Because I think they'd win, even in the more gerrymandered areas of the state.

Mitch McConnell actually threatens that Republicans will tank a bipartisan semiconductor bill if Democrats take up any version of Build Back Better in the next month or so. And here’s how the fuck you’d deal with that: take the semiconductor bill, add it to the Build Back Better-ish bill, and pass it through budget reconciliation – which means Republicans would get no credit for reviving the American semiconductor industry. Oh, wait, is that uncivil? We’ll never get civility back in American politics until we stop playing pattycake with assholes. Too often Democrats act like they've never heard of boundaries. And seriously, what's Mitch McConnell's problem with lower drug prices? We need to ask that every time he makes a threat like this.

Finally, Bush Mobb Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says our Justice Department could well prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 coup but before we begin a bunch of sentences with “Even Alberto Gonzales,” remember that Alberto Gonzales comes from an entirely successful fascist regime, and what most likely bugs him about the Trump regime is how stupidly they went about it. I do wonder if “there’s a lot there” is a sly wink to the major complaint about George W. Bush before he became President, which, as you may recall, was “there’s no there there.” Of course, “there’s no there there” is exactly what competent fascists try to make you think.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: the plain truth about evil.

When I hear that a truck-driving prick in Iowa went well out of his way to hit pro-choice protestors, injuring one, and then got released without charge after questioning by police, I feel compelled to ask how police would have responded to a liberal aiming his car at pro-life protestors. Because I think they would have moved heaven and earth to detain and charge that liberal. I hope I’m wrong, and I also hope my supposition forever remains a thought experiment.

Ho hum, the New York Times runs an article about trans health care that talks only to doctors and not to actual trans people. And it also gives far too much voice to those poor, beleaguered “reasonable” people who think “both sides” are too “extreme,” when only one side passes bathroom laws and examining-children's-genitals laws. And Jesus Mary and Joseph the number of kids who yearn to join an oppressed group so badly they mistakenly think they’re one of them is a grain of sand next to the mountain of kids who say nothing about their trans nature because they’re afraid of being bullied or killed. Sometimes I wish we weren’t so hard-wired for stories.

Whoever runs against Ron DeSantis for Florida Governor had damn well better run ads about his administration’s successful efforts to reduce care at nursing homes. Seriously, the phrase Ron DeSantis will kill your grandma would not be untoward! But Democrats would rather keep pretending they’re impotent as a fund-raising tactic. Of course, going for the throat wins races, and it even raises campaign funds, but most importantly, it stops evil. All we have to do is stand up to evil, and evil will fold. You know why? Because evil is a fucking coward, that’s why.

When I hear corporate executives say they’ll pay for their employees to get abortions, I think they're just trying to get the good PR they can't earn any other way. I'd be happy to be wrong, but when Amazon said it, I said it might be a way to fire employees who don’t get their paperwork exactly right, but it could even be worse – do you really want your boss to know you’ve had an abortion, when a new, more hostile boss could come in at any moment and make your life hell whether it’s legal to do that or not?

Department of Education agrees to cancel $6 billion in student loan debts of 200,000 folks who had sued the department alleging that their institutions of higher learning had misled them. This comes on the heels of our DOE’s decision to cancel all student loan debt for students who had attended the now-defunct-and-for-good-reason Corinthian Colleges – you remember, the for-profit college chain Marco Rubio called a “constituent” as if nobody Corinthian screwed over could have been his constituent? I can say little more, except that this is why we fight!

Finally, Arizona Republican Senate candidate/Trump endorsee Blake Masters has said we need to privatize Social Security, and the comment exists on video. Again, Sen. Kelly would be guilty of political malpractice if he didn’t run ten thousand ads about this. And between this and the fact that Mr. Masters has a face even a mother would punch, can the good citizens of Arizona please declare this guy’s chances of getting elected nil?

Around the table: more thoughts about how bad people kill good ideas.

Researchers in Liberia find that offering a small amount of cash and eight weeks of behavioral therapy to folks at risk of committing crimes actually reduces crime, and now that experiment is coming to Chicago. Although the Chicago program offers job training in place of cash, this is still exactly the kind of thing right-wingers will easily lie about — as opposed to all the things they labor absurdly to lie about now, of course — because we can all imagine a lot of Americans saying well-where’s-mine, as well as what’s-next-giving-them-drugs? and of course so-we’re-giving-crooks-therapy-now? Here’s the thing, though: you can always respond "well, more cops and more guns sure ain’t doing the job, so how about we try something that works?"

When I hear that some 44% of Republicans think mass shootings are just the price of freedom in America, I find that maps pretty well onto my supposition that about a quarter of the American electorate is batshit crazy. These Republicans are just doing what their thought leaders tell them, but it’s still a sad statement, and dare I say an un-American one. I mean, what kind of can-do American just gives up at the thought of mass murders of children? Also, the 56% who don’t believe mass shootings are "just the price of freedom" will still almost certainly vote for insane Republicans just because they're not Democrats, and then guess what? Nothing will get done.

Ever wonder why you don’t remember your own birth or all the milestones (first words, learning to walk) your parents never shut up about? Vanessa LoBue at The Conversation explores the nature of infant memories. Long story short: babies do form memories from the start — they recognize their mother almost right away and remember more faces as the months go on — but they don’t form (or can’t retrieve) autobiographical memories, or stories about themselves, until they’re 2 or 3, possibly because they don’t use language until about that time, or possibly because the hippocampus isn’t fully developed yet.

Again we hear that Social Security will pay all of its planned benefits through 2035, and again our "liberal" media covers this as a catastrophic event, with no apparent memory of the time they said Social Security would be tapped out in 2016, for example. I say "apparent" memory because I actually doubt they really don’t remember; I think they just gin up hysteria about Social Security because it grabs eyeballs and makes them money. I’ll give our "liberal" media some credit for admitting that raising the payroll cap is a way of strengthening Social Security (though I’ll give liberal blogger Atrios more credit for that!), but all these sky-is-falling predictions about pension plans never take into account that the economy grows most of the time.

Starbucks closes an Ithaca, NY store that had unionized, leading the newly-unemployed workers to call for a boycott. I've wondered why Starbucks hadn’t done this already — remember how quickly Walmart closed the Quebec store that unionized in 2007? — but with over 100 stores unionizing, I think Starbucks actually might have acted too late. And anyway, the bigger story here is that the workers at this Ithaca Starbucks went on strike in April after discovering a clogged, maggot-ridden grease trap one morning that management wouldn’t do anything about when informed. Now management is "doing something" by closing the store! That’s not very can-do of them, though, is it? After all, maggots and grease aren’t forever.

Finally, Dan Pfeiffer confronts the question "Why Do Democrats Suck at Messaging?" If you’re like me, though, you already know the answer: as with the song "Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96," it's the money — as in "big campaign donors pay people to suck at messaging and keep Republicans in office which keeps campaign donations coming, rinse, repeat." Thus the sight of Dan Pfeiffer talking to people with money about this question is truly absurd — I mean, he’s a smart dude, so I don’t get why he doesn’t get how he comes off there. He makes a few good points, but if you don’t start with how big campaign donors infect both parties, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Action: concerning pollution, labor, corruption, conservation, and education.

Long story short: tell our EPA to enact vigorous cross-state pollution rules, tell Dollar General bosses to treat their workers fairly, tell New York’s Governor to keep the Manhattan D.A.’s moribund Trump investigation going, and tell our government to protect the Castner Mountain Range and move more vigorously against predatory for-profit colleges. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous cross-state air pollution rule possible. I did not know they call this rule the "Good Neighbor Plan"! That’s actually pretty good messaging — which means, of course, that Democratic politicians just about never describe it that way! Nothing prevents us from describing it that way, of course — of describing states that limit the pollution that travels with the wind to other states as "good neighbors." And the politicians who would fight that rule, and doom kids in downwind states to higher levels of asthma and cancer? OK, I’d call them a lot of things, but "bad neighbors" would do.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Dollar General bosses to start paying their workers fairly and ensure they have safe workplaces. It’s not so damn much to ask! Especially since Dollar General’s CEO makes 934 times what the average Dollar General worker makes! And to those who'd say but what will happen to the low prices we all love at Dollar General? I would respond refer, again, to the CEO making 934 times what the average worker makes! Too many working folks worry about other working folks making "too much" money at their favorite shopping spots. They gotta fight the real enemy.

Daily Kos helps you tell New York Governor Hochul to transfer the now-dormant Manhattan D.A. office’s investigation into the Trump Organization either to the state Attorney General’s office or to another District Attorney within New York state. If the Trump axis pressured Alvin Bragg into abandoning the investigation, then the people need another weapon to hold the powerful accountable. Besides, state courts have already established that she has the legal authority to do it, so she ought to do it. It might help bring law and order back to our great nation.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to designate the Castner Mountain Range around the El Paso area as a National Monument. The Castner Range has been a pretty good flood control tool over the years — what’s that? You haven’t heard of much flooding in that area? Well, now you know why! — and its proximity to the Franklin Mountains State Park means we’ll be able to protect a much larger area from pollution. And not for nothing, but the Castner Range is home to numerous sites of archaeological and religious significance to Native American folks; a big part of being conservative, it would seem to me, is conserving areas of historical importance, not rubber-stamping any and all development.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Biden Administration to move vigorously against predatory for-profits colleges. The Biden Administration has lately forgiven a few billion dollars in outstanding federally-banked loans used at Corinthian Colleges, and that’s a big deal, but there are other predatory for-profit colleges using federal loans to bilk college students, so our Administration has more work to do. Our government’s record on this hasn’t been good for over a decade now: the Obama Administration enabled too much of this crap, and the Trump Administration enabled far more of it; now we need justice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning mass murders, reconciliation, "forever chemicals," law and order, and antibiotics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop mass murders, pass a Build Back Better-style reconciliation bill, and pass the PFAS Firefighter Protection Act, the EQUAL Act, and the PASTEUR 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.

On the occasion of yet another mass school shooting, I present Thom Hartmann's two-pronged solution to the mass shooting issue: make it as hard to get semi-automatics as it is to get automatics, and regulate guns the same way we regulate cars. You may want to call your Congressfolk with some version of this plan. Right-wingers will say they don't want to get their guns registered because TEH FREEDUMZ!!!!!, but ignore them. Liberals will say there wouldn't be enough background checks, but ignore them, too, because the registration process does that job. As for fewer semis meaning less "freedom," remember that mass murder isn't a "freedom."

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a reconciliation bill that attacks climate change, raises taxes on the rich and on corporations, and extends the Child Tax Credit expansion. Yeah, the Build Back Better Act failed last year, because Joe Manchin finally said "I just can't get there," but if we turn out in force to demand the things BBB would have done, we'll increase the possibility of him "getting there." And don't believe the Manchinean hype that the Child Tax Credit expansion drove inflation. First off, you'd think it would have come down by now, since the CTC expansion expired almost five months ago. Second, we all know there's a relationship between high prices and high corporate profits.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7597/S. 4076, the PFAS Firefighter Protection Act, which would keep PFAS chemicals out of firefighting foam. They don't call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for nothing -- they leach into our drinking water and then our bodies and they don't break down, and firefighting foam is one of the main sources of PFAS chemicals. And if we really care so much about our first responders, then why do we expose them to chemicals that could give them cancer, thyroid problems, or reproductive issues? Don't believe the hype that PFAS-laden firefighting foam is the only or best option; at this writing at least 100 PFAS-free foams exist, and it seems unlikely they all suck.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1693/S. 79, the EQUAL Act, which would equalize sentences for crack and powder cocaine and allow resentencing of past crack-related offenses. Over a decade ago, Congress reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, and I guess that was progress, but we should go all the way to 1 to 1. Now some Democrats are afraid of doing anything daring about crime before the midterms, a strategy that very recent experience has taught us completely assures defeat at the polls. A lot of times you have to wonder if that's the idea. If so, history will treat them badly -- if any historians remain!

Finally, speaking of apocalyptic settings, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act, which will fund research and development of new antibiotics. As you know, seven out of every 10 antibiotics don't go to sick people or animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, ostensibly so as to make them meatier. But thanks to antibiotic abuse, we face a future of superbugs that can't be killed by antibiotics; you don't want to live to see folks sit around the campfire and say sure, the next cut can kill you now, but at least we had cheap chicken for a while! One way to ensure we don't is to keep researching, and finding, new and better antibiotics. So maybe do that instead of more corporate tax cuts?

Action: concerning Iran, gas prices, drug addiction, our Supreme Court, and our past mistreatment of Native Americans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to support the Iran nuclear deal, lower gas prices, and pass the MAT Act, the Judiciary Act, and the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies 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.

Peace Action helps you tell your House Reps to support re-entry into the Iran nuclear deal. Congressfolk on both sides have shown a disquieting unwillingness to re-enter that deal, and for what? To appease Trumpholes? To "put distance" between them and President Biden? To gain imaginary and irrelevant leverage over Iran's Republican Guard? Gosh, how about doing the right thing for the right reason for once? The Iran nuclear deal was keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but because Donald Trump decided to shit all over anything Barack Obama did that actually helped Americans, he took it away from us. And now Congress wants to make it harder to get it back? Tell them no.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to "protect Americans and keep gas prices low," because sometimes you gotta be simple and direct. And also sometimes because your Congressfolk are thick-headed because they only talk to each other and Beltway consultants! Recall Katie Porter telling us that her Democratic colleagues didn't talk about inflation because they didn't see anything about it in polling? The stupid is strong with some of our Reps and Senators! Anyway, if you want to deliver a more specific message -- like "pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, which would tax excessive oil corporation profits at 95%," you can add that to your signature.

People's Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 445, the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (or MAT) Act. All this locking people up for using and abusing drugs, tell me: has that worked? No, it has not, by the evidence that far too many Americans are still addicted to drugs. The MAT Act would remove certain bureaucratic obstacles to prescribing certain narcotic drugs that treat addiction. "Removing certain bureaucratic obstacles" may be the argument that seems to have attracted a stunning 46 House Republican co-sponsors! But only three in the Senate, meaning the Mitch McConnell Obstruction Machine may yet roll over it. Unless we speak out in numbers they can't deny, of course.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2584, the Judiciary Act, which would increase the number of Supreme Court Justices from 9 to 13. I've been saying we need four more Justices to keep up with 13 federal Appeals Courts, but recent events have made the necessity of getting better Justices up there more urgent to me. And I'm sure it's even more urgent for the women and gays and transgender folks who would be directly affected by Sam Alito's made-up "deeply-rooted" doctrine. I'm able to imagine such a thing because I possess the quality of empathy, a quality today's Supreme Court Justices seem to suppress. Surely Joe Biden can find four more Justices who get what it's like to be human.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5444/S. 2908, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Federal boarding schools aimed to "civilize" the Native American, but they separated families and abused students, which ain't exactly civilized behavior. Some folks will refer to this bill as an "apology tour" or "cancel culture" or whatnot, but admitting you've done wrong, and then righting that wrong, is about as American as America can be. Note well that the Quakers put out this action alert and the Quakers admit their own past wrongdoing in running more than two dozen boarding schools! That's how you do it.

Around the table: in which we identify the *real* extremists.

Surprise, surprise, an Anti-Defamation League study of 450 murders committed by domestic extremists in America (like the Buffalo murders earlier this week) concludes that right-wingers commit about 75% of them. (By their tabulation, Muslim extremists commit 20% and left-wing extremists commit a mere 4%.) "(T)he American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left," the article says, but that only means right-wingers will simply redefine "murder" until it includes things like not inviting right-wingers to your barbecues or shaming your right-wing father-in-law for watching Tucker Carlson. I've even heard right-wingers call such things "a kind of death"! You know what's "a kind of death"? Death.

Researchers at Brown University and Microsoft AI Health inform us that if every American adult had gotten vaccinated, we could have saved well over 300,000 lives. Against over 1 million dead, that's a sizable amount. An earlier Kaiser study put that number at 234,000 -- by not counting folks who'd died while vaccinated-but-not-boosted -- and I put more persuasive power in that figure, since not getting boosted was more likely not a matter of ideology. Still, that's more than one out of every five deaths. And the other side's argument is all waaaaaaah personal choice you can't tell me what to do stop the steal!

When I hear that "Online data could be used against people seeking abortions if Roe v. Wade falls" -- a perfectly explicable outcome, since most folks turn to the internet for information about reproductive health care! -- I am reminded that the FCC passed pretty good data privacy rules in 2016, but Congressional Republicans nullified them in 2017 with a quickness, because if it's an instance of government helping you, then Republicans must shit on it. Also too, law enforcement can search your cellphones without even getting a warrant because legislators either don't understand technology or go out of their way not to understand it because big campaign donors don't want them to.

Ho hum, Mississippi, the state that aims to end Roe v. Wade via its 15-week anti-abortion law, also just so happens to be the worst state in the Deep South for providing health insurance coverage to low-income women. Medicaid recipients get only 60 days' worth of post-partum care in Mississippi (though the Affordable Care Act allows expansion of that care to one year), though at least one study found that over 80% of post-partum health care costs come after 60 dats. Why, it's like that was the whole idea! I'd look for big corporations to pressure to pull out of Mississippi, but there ain't hardly any there to begin with; Republicans really are going to run that state into the ground, which will hurt all the good folks who live there.

Buried deep in this excellent Steven Rosenfeld piece about Pennsylvania's Republican nominee for Governor, Doug Mastriano is a description of the first Josh Shapiro attack ad against him, and it's like the ad's makers rolled up as much Democrat weakness as humanly possible into one ad, which you don't even know is an anti-Mastriano ad until the end! Look, here's how to attack Doug Mastriano: call him weak for refusing to accept the 2020 election results and doing his damnedest to overturn them. Republicans love wearing Democrat epithets, from "deplorable" all the way to "ultra-MAGA," as badges of honor; let's see Mr. Mastriano work that alchemy with the word "weak." I'd say I hope it makes him melt down in public, except that public melt-downs aren't the career-enders they used to be. Just ask our former screamer-in-chief, Donald Trump.

Finally, maybe the Buffalo shooter could evade any plagiarism charges Tucker Carlson might level against him, but the part of their collaborative work I can't stand is this anti-diversity argument from Mr. Carlson: "Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?" Ahem: civilization is not a marriage or a military unit; these two institutions are parts of civilization, and insisting that the whole of civilization be exactly like any of its parts is small-minded. Even 15 years ago I thought Tucker Carlson was doing the best he could as a conservative; now I think he was just fronting, and his current fascist-worship was the endgame all along.

Around the table: special "Pennsylvania primary drama" edition!

So Donald Trump endorsed state Sen./January 6 attendee Doug Mastriano for Pennsylvania's Republican nomination for Governor mere days before the Tuesday primary, and one feels compelled to ask: what took him so long? Mr. Trump sure does like to get behind a winner, and Mr. Mastriano has had a pretty hefty lead in most polls for a few weeks now; that probably explains it. State Republicans say he can't win, but surely they understand things better than that! Republican wave or no, Mr. Mastriano has a decent shot against state Attorney General/presumptive Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro, particularly if Mr. Shapiro does the Democrat thing and act like he's got it in the bag.

Meanwhile, does the Trump camp seriously expect us to believe, in re Kathy Barnette's late surge in the PA Republican Senate nomination race, that "no one saw this coming"? I saw this coming, and I get paid by the hour! Of course, I mistakenly thought Jeff Bartos would benefit from "not being one of the two rich out-of-state guys in the race," but apparently his role in this drama has only been to take front-runners out, first Sean Parnell (he leaked the news of Mr. Parnell's divorce proceedings, you may recall), and then Messrs. Oz and McCormick (if I saw the ad he ran on that topic once I saw it a hundred times). Still, anyone could have seen this coming, particularly students of Deb Fischer's 2012 Senate campaign in Nebraska.

Much has been said about Ms. Barnette's loose tongue on Twitter since she's become a thing, but I take particular exception to her claim that "homosexuals LEAD with their sexual preference" (shouty caps in original). No, Ms. Barnette, you "lead with their sexual preference" by only talking about gays in terms of sex, which is but one aspect of anyone's life. I don't know how many more ways I can put this. Fun fact: Ms. Barnette lost in Pennsylvania's 4th House district in 2020 by 19 points -- and not only wouldn't concede defeat, but launched at least one frivolous lawsuit to stop it from happening!

And yet Republican efforts to stop Ms. Barnette's candidacy reek of desperation, as would any last-minute effort to stop a candidate whose surge you didn't see until it was far too late. I can't get away from that "Crazy Kathy Barnette" ad on TV (and if she were a man, think they'd call her "crazy"?). The ad not only takes alleged "praise" for Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter way, way out of context, but repeats phrases like "white racism" and "structural racism" with a sneer, as if that alone makes them "crazy" things to say! I could never vote for Ms. Barnette in the general election, but I hope she beats her opponents' asses beet-red in the primary, because the "Crazy" ad is exactly the kind of thing that should bring shame and shunning upon anyone who creates it.

Finally, the New York Times wonders why Rep. Conor Lamb, despite "Ha(ving) All the Makings of a Front-Runner," is not actually the front-runner in the race for the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nomination. I wouldn't blame you if you shot out because liberals are sick of this shit, that's why, but at least the Times did cite that (not in those precise words) as one of the two reasons, the other being the Lamb campaign's own "missteps." What were these "missteps"? Taking front-running status for granted, trying to appear "above the fray," calling yourself the "most electable" candidate -- in short, all of the things Democratic consultants always tell their candidates to do! If folks like John Fetterman and Lucas Kunce and Gary Chambers and Charles Booker can win their Senate elections this year, maybe folks will stop listening to the defeatist pablum of Democratic consultants. Why, folks might even realize that they're the reason Democrats went from (in Paul Begala's words) "the party of the factory floor to the party of the faculty lounge."

Around the table: in which we contemplate various legal matters.

Elon Musk says he'd reverse the Twitter ban on Donald Trump, calling the ban "a morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme," and if I can think of an even clumsier way of putting that I'll let you know. His point is that the ban didn't silence Mr. Trump, though, actually, it kinda did -- not totally, but we don't let the perfect murder the good, do we? And none of Mr. Musk's nattering on about "free speech" changes the fact that Twitter is a publishing house -- whether he likes it or not, whether our laws recognize it as such or not -- and no belief in "free speech" requires that Twitter publish Donald Trump's ramblings any more than it requires that Random House publish mine.

Normally we turn to Patrick Cockburn for incisive analysis of foreign policy, but here he writes about "Mistakes I Made in Response to My Son's Mental Illness." Mr. Cockburn quit his job in order to "devote all efforts to helping Henry recover," not realizing that "I could not do much more than I was already doing and being jobless simply added to the strains on the family." He also didn't realize his son wasn't taking his meds for several years, which matters because "few therapies help until a person is stable on medication." The good news: coming together as a family or community helps "frequently a lot more than (people) think." And Henry has "done far better than most" in his predicament.

Folks are whining way too much about protestors holding vigils outside Brett Kavanaugh's house and the like; while I object to directly petitioning courts to rule the way I want them to; I certainly don't object to good folks taking to the street. Not too many months ago right-wingers waxed rhapsodic about a bunch of obnoxious truckers honking their horns all day and night because they didn't want to wear masks or get vaccines. (Naturally Susan Collins called the cops after someone wrote a chalk message outside of her house. Those poor, oppressed politicians! Sure, it's brightly-colored sidewalk chalk today, but what about tomorrow?)

Mob Boss Mitch suggests that Republicans will pursue a federal abortion ban if our Supreme Court overturns Roe as expected, and we say "suggests," of course, because he's trying to say it without actually saying it. And for good reason -- polling has lately told us that Democrats are doing better on the generic Congressional ballot, and do even better than that once voters figure out whicn one's the pro-choice candidate. In the meantime, Mitch ain't fooling anyone -- there's a reason he is literally the most unpopular Senator in America. Sadly, there is also a reason Democrats haven't given him the humiliating retirement he deserves. More than one reason, actually.

So why does Tucker Carlson say Disney's "behavior" "sounds like the behavior of a sex offender"? Easy -- because he knows actually coming out and calling them a sex offender might erase his family fortune in a lawsuit. The guy with the ZZ Top beard who calls you a "groomer" may not be so careful. Seriously, "grooming" is actually a thing, and if someone accuses you of "grooming" because you're not a complete asshole to gay and trans kids, get their name and sue them for slander. Right-wingers would call that a "frivolous lawsuit," even after you win it, so ain't nothing you can do about that. (What behavior was Mr. Carlson talking about, anyway? Your guess is as good as mine!)

Finally, speaking of the relationship between truth and lawsuits, One America News airs a 30-second statement stating, in part, that "Georgia officials have concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020" -- including, of course, the two workers who filed defamation lawsuits against the network. A settlement between the two parties forced that statement, and though the plaintiffs had the right idea there, I would have demanded a stronger statement -- "Georgia officials have concluded" gives OAN too much wiggle room -- and I'd make them read that statement on-air once every three or four hours every day for the rest of their lives. Hey, I've had enough.

Around the table: everyone's a terrorist! And other absurdities.

A now-former VP at Kelloggs, referring to the 10-week strike this past fall, told a meeting of lawyers and union-busters last week that "the union leadership" at his corporation "were behaving more like terrorists than partners." I said they'd call us all "terrorist" one day and I was right, but I feel compelled to note that "terrorists" and "partners" is one hell of a dichotomy to present when discussing labor negotiations, and not just because the other, truer word for "partners" is subordinates. Labor negotiators should of course be civilized, but being "civilized" may not even require civility, depending on the situation. And what are the specific "terrorist" tactics of Kelloggs workers? You won't learn that from Mr. Hurley's audio remarks, but you'll hear a lot about Joe Biden making an "inappropriate" statement and certain social media outlets being too powerful for arguably the biggest name in breakfast cereal and, of course, George Soros, because apparently right-wingers can't perform a whining rant without bringing him up.

You've heard of folks going north of the border for affordable prescription drugs? Now meet the family that went south of the border, to Mexico, to avoid yet another several-thousand-dollar health care bill. The kicker, of course, is that the Fierro family of Arizona has health insurance! Which costs them $1,000 every month! So you can see the attraction of spending $5 to get a doctor to pop your son's dislocated shoulder back in place. Recall that almost half of Americans don't have the money saved to cover a several hundred-dollar expense, and none of them are saving their way to health care happiness by skipping coffee and avocados.

Now Texas Gov. Greg Abbott thinks he can "invoke war powers" by declaring the migration of refugee-seekers from other lands an "invasion," which supposedly would comply with Article I, Section 10 of our Constitution. But words mean things, and folks running from oppression to seek sanctuary don't constitute an "invasion" unless you can prove they're all fronting, which he can't. So this looks to me like just another Greg Abbott drama, one where he flexes his muscles and accomplishes nothing, like his mass inspection of trucks coming through the border that (per Texas's own Agriculture Commissioner!) caught exactly zero would-be immigrants and produced exactly zero drug seizures.

Laura Ingraham opposes student loan debt forgiveness by saying her mother worked as a waitress until she was 73 to pay off her kids' college bills so why can't yours? Other Twitter users dunked on her in ways you might easily expect ("You let your mom work until she was 73 to pay your debts?"), though not too many pointed out the most pertinent fact -- that college cost a lot less when Ms. Ingraham went to Dartmouth. Which gives the lie to "(l)oan forgiveness just another insult to those who play by the rules." Ah, folks who took out loans to go to college whose tuition went up 600% in 35 years also "played by the rules," and a lot of them took out loans that actually cost more to pay off after 10 years, even after you "play by the rules" by making all your payments on time. By charging this much for college, and charging this much for loans, we have profoundly betrayed all those who played by the rules. Loan forgiveness would right that wrong. And if we can't right wrongs, what's the point of America?

Hoo boy now Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) says it "may be true" that COVID vaccines cause AIDS. That should be weapons-grade PR against the Senator, no matter how many ads he runs in which he plays catch badly with his grandson, but that man has been spewing out filth for decades now, and Democrats keep underestimating him. Well, by "Democrats" I really mean Russ Feingold, and he's not running this time, thank God, so maybe now they have a shot, so to speak, at defeating him. (How do vaccines "induce AIDS," you ask? Google it and you'll find a line of "reasoning" that rivals QAnon for sheer stupidity, plus is full of big scare words. Naturally "America's Frontline Doctors" also figure in the drama.)

Finally, anyone else think the "leak" of a draft of a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade was an inside job? An "attack" by the "radical left" my ass -- any liberal in a position to leak the draft not only knows it would have intimidated exactly zero of the five (or six!) right-wing Justices prepared to endorse it, but also knows that even though more Americans support abortion rights than oppose them, the other side has more folks who'd run through a wall for their position. Right-wingers would totally leak the draft for three reasons: one, to keep the base ginned up; two, to give independents six months to forget all about it before Election Day, and three, and most importantly, to remind the base that they've actually done something for them. People like it when you do something for them; it's well past time for Democrats to commit to that lesson, rather than whine about how they "just can't get to yes" on things 80% of Americans want. (As an aside, Alexander Cockburn used to say that the day our Supreme Court actually overturns Roe v. Wade, Republicans will wander in the wilderness for decades. I sure hope he's right.)

Action: concerning the Child Tax Credit, drug prices, Social Security, tax filing, animal cruelty, and our FCC.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit, lower prescription drug prices, reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits, let most Americans file their taxes for free, pass the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, and confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC. 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.

NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit that delivered $250 and $300 checks into working families' bank accounts through most of 2021. Inflation was 8.5% last month; think those checks would have come in handy as working families bought groceries and clothes and school supplies? Yes, I think they would have. But Republicans don't want working families to have them -- every last one of them voted against the CTC expansion in the first place, we must remember. I repeat for the benefit of angry independent voters: every last Republican voted against the CTC expansion. In the meantime, your Reps and Senators need to know that working families need the expanded CTC, and rich folks have to pay more in taxes to fund it, well, we're all in this together, right?

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. What's the news hook this time? Rep. Kurt Schrader (D?-OR) saying in a TV ad that he's fought for Medicare drug price negotiation when he actually did his damnedest to water down Medicare drug price negotiation proposals -- then also claiming that lowering drug prices would "stifle innovation"! I've said it before and I'll say it again: no rich corporation innovates on a damn thing; innovation comes only from necessity, and a corporation that's gamed the system so that all of its decisions result in it getting richer never faces necessity. That's just one reason we need to communicate our will to our Congressfolk, again and again and again until they do our will.

National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits, including efforts like the notorious TRUST Act, which would allow Congress to fast-track Social Security cuts without debate. Does that sound like democracy to you? Or does it sound like a way to steal what belongs to the people without having to account to the people? I kid, of course; it sounds exactly like the latter, and though of course Republicans love anything that lets them bypass democracy, you'd hate to think that Democrats would be so cowardly that they'd support a system that lets them do unpopular things without facing the anger of the people. Again I kid! Of course that's right in their wheelhouse. And that's why we fight their efforts to the death.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to let most Americans file their taxes for free. This is already legal! Our IRS already has all the info on your W-2, and can autofill the blanks on your tax form without the assistance of any third party! And yet we still trundle off to joints like H&R Block to "get our taxes done." Why? Because of a "deal" our IRS cut with tax prep corporations years ago that allows them to (among other things) offer "free" tax filing at the end of a bureaucratic labyrinth you won't likely have the patience to get through. I say if you have leverage -- and if you have the law behind you, you have leverage -- you use it for more than getting next-to-nothing out of big corporations. So let's tell our government to do that.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7398, the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, which would, as its title suggests, ban most wildlife killing contests; the only exceptions would be certain kinds of birds and invasive species. I guess some folks will tell you wildlife killing contests help keep down populations of predators, but not only do scientists find that's not true, they also find that the animals who feed on the bullet-ridden carcasses get poisoned and/or killed as well. And certainly don't brook any silly allegations that this bill is "anti-hunting." It's not "anti-hunting," it's anti-sadism, it's anti-cruelty, it's anti-uncivilized behavior. Killing animals is a desultory job if you have to do it; celebrating it as a "game" just cheapens your soul. And don't we have enough of that?

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm pro-internet freedom warrior Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission. How do you know she'd do a good job at our FCC? Not just because she helped get strong net neutrality rules enacted during Mr. Obama's second term, but because big media lobbyists have fought her nomination to the death! Currently our FCC only has four Commissioners, which means they can't bring back net neutrality or ensure that rural and urban areas get their fair share of infrastructure money because every vote will end 2-2. Ms. Sohn will break those ties, and she'll break those ties in the direction of the people's will. Seriously, no one opposes net neutrality except big corporations and their lackeys. And they shouldn't get all the say around here.

Around the table: water is a human right! And other truths.

When I read about indigenous water rights activists traveling all over Mexico to protest corporate "looting" of good Mexicans' water, I feel a little ashamed that I'd never considered that hydroelectric projects could steal water from farmers. I mean, gas fracking corporations stealing water I knew about, but hydro still retains a green sheen that deflects criticism. I'm also reminded that Mexico's constitution literally guarantees the right to water to its citizens, and that corporate use of public water (which all water should be!) violates that right. I wish the water protectors in Mexico luck, especially since Mexico is one of those places where they'll shoot you in front of everyone for defying the will of corporations.

USC report finds that "what the safety net promises" low-income working families "and what it delivers are vastly different." And gives reasons! Some programs simply don't offer help to all those who need it, while others are so riddled with bureaucracy and complicated rules that eligible families simply give up applying, and that's before we get to language barriers, the absence of "a single go-to source of information that clearly and easily communicates what programs a family is eligible for," and, of course, the stigma of being a "welfare queen," which, as we recall, only existed in the darkest imaginations of Ronald Reagan. The good news? Even the Biden Administration seems to get there's a problem, and has taken steps to fix it, though we'll need to take more steps.

When I heard that many good Americans who oppose abortion would still help a friend of family member get one, I wondered if that meant those folks aren't very anti-abortion at all, but just fronting about it. But I should have known better! Not just because anti-abortion folks do set boundaries (only a few would pay for it, but more would help pay for it, almost half would help plan it, and three-quarters would offer "emotional support"), but because we all know from the gay marriage debates that the most rabid anti-gay marriage votary can easily crumble once it's his or her son or daughter who's gay.

I find myself far less impressed than many observers that Joe Manchin's approval rating in West Virginia has shot up over the last year-plus, despite his nefarious trashing of a popular legislative agenda, because the spike in his approvals comes almost entirely from Republicans. And those who would say he's really "got his finger on the pulse of West Virginia" should consider a) whether very many Republicans who approve of him now will vote for him in 2024 if a real Trumphole runs against him or b) whether someone who actually led on Build Back Better, and explained to his right-wing constituents why it'd be good for them instead of constantly cutting it down, could have achieved the same results. Seriously, when they say Joe Manchin "really understands his people," they're kind of cutting down "his people."

When I hear that Elon Musk's proposed purchase of Twitter might well "forc(e) us off a platform that we otherwise find just too hard to quit," I say we can only hope! I used to love my Twitter feed back in the day -- the old 140-character limit sure helped me say more with less! -- but it's always been a damn swamp where you could only stand out by being a prick. And I fear the mass exodus from Twitter won't be big enough, since (as Ms. Marcotte says) too many people think they need it to stay "plugged in" to current events. On one hand, I get that; I get most of my news through email, but I sure haven't left Facebook. On the other hand, anything worth doing is hard, and when do we start punishing trolls with shame and shunning?

Finally, when I hear that Democrats have yet to commit to a unified strategy for the midterm elections, I find I'm more than happy to help! What has unified Democratic government gotten us? an ad could say. The end of the pandemic. Seven million more jobs. The deficit cut by $1 trillion. Wages going up faster than they have in decades. Not a single American soldier lost in Ukraine. And the monopolies that cause inflation getting challenged in court for the first time in decades. And what have Republicans been doing all that time? Burning books. Defending dictators. Making it harder for you to vote. Whining about masks and vaccines. Oh, and this: (cut to January 6 footage). Vote Democrat on November 8. You're welcome again, Democrats.

Action: concerning monopolies, drug prices, gas prices, campaign finance, forced arbitration, immigration, and internet policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets App, tax the windfall profits of big oil corporations, pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow campaign finance law again, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, reject any bill that would force President Biden to reinstate Title 42, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. 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.

With the news that both H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act, and H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee by large bipartisan margins, it's time to tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer (whose contact information you may find here) to put the bills on the floor, not wait for "commitments" from 60 Senators. Because that's a stalling tactic! Both of these bills would strike blows against big tech monopolists, so our Senate should pass them. While you've got him on the line, tell him to put H.R. 6833, the Affordable Insulin Now Act, up for a vote as well. The bill would cap insulin prices, and "waiting to see how the broader reconciliation bill goes" is another stalling tactic! We already know how it'll go: Joe Manchin will string us along for six months and then say he just can't get there. Enough already.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits. Right-wingers will say that's "taxing success," but it's actually taxing greed, or taxing price-gouging, either one will do. Every time they call something like that "taxing success," they murder a part of our world, because they help condition folks into thinking corruption equals success. We've got to get back to the society that equates corruption with evil. Anyway, just four big oil corporations made over $70 billion in profits last year, and brook no silliness about how that's only six cents per gallon or whatever, because hello! $70 billion! You can't just slice $70 billion into ladyfingers. Next up on the right-wing noise machine: CEOs are underpaid because they only make 12 cents for every breath they draw!

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 80, which would amend our Constitution to allow governments to regulate campaign finance like sane people again. Let me be clear: nobody but a troll gets up in the morning and says praise the Lord corporations can spend as much money as they want on stupid campaign ads that put us all in a crappy mood! We actually live in a world where two-thirds of Republican voters want the kind of campaign finance laws that our Supreme Court outlawed in their notorious Citizens United v. FEC ruling, so we should pass H.J.Res. 80. Brook no slippery-slope arguments from right-wingers! A Constitutional amendment will not open the floodgates for all kinds of free speech restrictions, not least because money is not speech.

Daily Kos, Public Justice, and Public Citizen all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Why do so many good government groups want us to pass this bill? Because forced arbitration is awful! It forces people to redress grievances with corporations through arbitration rather than court, and guess what? You're far more likely to lose in arbitration -- it doesn't matter that oh, but the average award is bigger in arbitration if you lose. And not for nothing, but forced arbitration is yet another one of those monopolistic practices by which corporations fix wages. And since wages are the price an employer pays for your labor, wage fixing is also price fixing, and price fixing, as we know, is illegal. Judges don't call it that enough, but we're working on that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would preserve the notorious Title 42 immigration policy. Title 42 supposedly aimed to keep immigrants from making the COVID pandemic worse, and guess what? It didn't work -- with their whining about masks and vaccines, right-wing Americans kept that pandemic going quite well by themselves, thank you very much. No, the Trump Administration came up with the Title 42 program just to give them another reason to keep immigrants out of America, and too many Democratic politicians are going all Henny Penny at the prospect of even more immigrants, and the Republican attacks that will come with them. But failing to do the right thing on immigration because Republicans will attack us for it is cowardice. Which, again, Democratic politicians are good at.

Finally, FAIR helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. All you need know about her nomination? That the Wall Street Journal doesn't want her on it, out of a "fear" that she'll "silence conservative voices." Oddly, both the One America News Network and Newsmax have supported her nomination! If the Wall Street Journal thinks net neutrality (which Ms. Sohn would help restore) amounts to "censorship" of "conservative voices," that's their problem, because net neutrality -- which would prevent internet service providing corporations from delivering some files faster than others -- is not censorship. Like "conservative" and "socialist," "censorship" has become a word its users torture until it tells them what they want to hear. But we don't do any kind of torture here.

Around the table: featuring some of the unexamined assumptions that make us miserable.

Matt Stoller finds the failure of three recent DOJ antitrust cases to be a good sign for our efforts to break free from monopolies, partly because, well, you don't make good law if you don't risk losing cases, but also because two of those cases will get new trials thanks to hung juries, and also because our DOJ demonstrated that wage-fixing violates antitrust law (even if they couldn't convict on particular price-fixing accusations). Mr. Stoller wonders if juries won't convict because "cheating has become normalized in American culture, so people have a tough time viewing stealing from your employees as crime." That could be, but it could also be that we've all conditioned ourselves to value winning above all else -- as Mr. Stoller suggests, folks don't want to lose, even if losing would prepare the ground for future victory -- and thus juries "pick winners" when they should be doing justice.

Ho hum, prime time TV news programming goes on and on about how rising wages, not corporate greed, causes inflation. Again, folks have just accepted profits-über-alles as a feature of the landscape -- as it most certainly was not when corporate taxes and taxes on executive salaries were much higher and stock buybacks were illegal -- and erasing corporate profits from the discussion pits worker against consumer, meaning it pits American against American, just like they want it. When we fight each other, of course, we don't fight the real enemy. And yet even as our "liberal" media would blame your year-old $1400 checks for inflation more than they'd blame corporate profiteering, not even three in 10 Americans think corporations have "no choice" but to raise prices in the absurd manner they've been doing.

Oh look, now Amtrak wants to use our TSA's notorious "no-fly" list to stop good Americans from using our national train system. As Paul Craig Roberts has said, if a "no-fly" list has a million people on it, why aren't we having terrorist attacks involving planes every day? I'd also point to the notorious "Interstate Crosscheck" database, which deregistered voters for the heinous crime of having the same name as a citizen of another state, thus depriving them of their right to vote before charging them with any kind of "voter fraud." Thus it's not a "risk" that "limited information provided by Amtrak will result in inaccurate watchlist match results," but a certainty. And then, I guess, our government will squeal NASHUNAL SECURITEEZ!!!! so that anyone wronged by the "no-fly" list can't redress their grievance in court. Funny how that works.

Here's some good news: an Atlanta, GA Apple Store becomes the first one to file for a union, with Apple employees in at least six others looking to do same. If you're thinking that maybe $20/hour is already good enough for "those workers," you might want to try making it in Atlanta on $20/hour! Apple has 272 stores in the United States, so Apple workers have a long way to go to reach the levels of Starbucks organization, even, but I wish them the best. And I suspect that Apple's anti-union arguments will be even stupider than Starbucks's have been -- and, speaking as a long time Mac user, I also suspect they'll be a lot more condescending.

And now for another exciting edition of "The Headline Says It All": "McConnell and McCarthy Talked a Big Game About Dumping Trump After January 6, Then Did Nothing Like the Cowards They Are." Mr. McConnell, in particular, might like to more closely study the example of fellow Kentucky Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper (served 1946-49, 1952-55, and 1956-73), who famously told Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, after Mr. Taft suggested he should vote the way the party wanted him to vote, that he represented the people of Kentucky, not the party. I kid, of course -- Mitch McConnell is as empty and soulless a human being as has ever lived, and would never do anything for any reason other than power. (Later, Mr. McCarthy denied ever having said he'd dump Mr. Trump, even after the world learned his comments existed on tape. What a great Speaker he'll be!)

Finally, I can't say I'm against the Florida law that dismantles the "special district" basically run by the Walt Disney Corporation, but I notice the law wouldn't dismantle the district until June of 2023, or nearly eight months after the election in which the bill's biggest booster, Gov. Ron DeSantis, is running! Since the district's disappearance means over $150 million in higher taxes annually for Orange and Osceola counties starting next year, I'd say that's not exactly a profile in political courage. Maybe a campaign ad from his eventual opponent can frame it as such! Or an ad could talk about forcing those two counties to raise taxes next year in the larger context of the drama Mr. DeSantis constantly foments. There's a winning argument here, if Democrats would but make it.

Around the table: full of helpful reminders and helpful warnings.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) says Democrats will lose midterm elections if they don't do "big big things" "that are both badly needed and very popular with all Americans." You know, like we've been saying for a while, but still, it's good to hear a Democratic Senator say it. It's also good to hear a Democratic Senator say "Democrats cannot bow to the wisdom of out-of-touch consultants who recommend we simply tout our accomplishments." This is the woman who won re-election in 2018 by 30 points without running a single campaign ad on TV! Which at least one out-of-touch consultant then said was a big mistake if she wanted to run for President. Sexism sucks.

Alex Pareene provides yet another helpful reminder that right-wingers fully understand how journalism works, but simply don't want anyone to actually do it. "This new right fundamentally doesn’t want 'newsgathering' to happen," he writes. "They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda." As late as 2006 you couldn't get away from right-wingers who insisted, in America, that a journalist's only job was to write down what the President said and report it. I didn't think it could get any worse than that; as usual, I was far too optimistic.

When you confront the headline "Southwest Missouri high school teacher accused of using critical race theory loses job," I wouldn't blame you for thinking you mean she wasn't even "convicted"? But then, using a worksheet called "How Racially Privileged Are You?" isn't a crime, even if it makes some parents sad, and boy does the school come off as a bunch of cowards! Ms. Morrison refuted all their arguments and still heard but I'm hearing you're teaching CRT. Too many people value what they're "hearing" over what is. And some parents need to grow up.

If you needed more evidence of how cool Prince was, now you can watch the Purple One defend striking public school teachers as an 11-year-old boy in 1970. The Minneapolis public school system had a world-famous music program, which not only produced Prince and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and (of course) Morris Day but also Hüsker Dü and Alexander O'Neal who could sing a phone book. (Seriously! First time I heard "Saturday Love" I said is that Howard Hewitt?)

When I hear that "anti-woke" "warrior" David McCormick not only condemned "structural bigotry" right after the George Floyd shooting but went out of his way to make transgender folk more welcome at his hedge fund than anywhere else, all I can say is, well, buh-bye, David McCormick. Such are the wages of trying to con knuckle-draggers into voting for you. Now Pennsylvania Republicans can either have the Trump-certified candidate (Mehmet Oz) or one of the candidates Mr. Trump will happily certify if they win the primary (Jeff Bartos or Kathy Barnette).

Finally, I know Ted Cruz thinks he's funny when he says that Disney's (recent) opposition to Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law will lead one day to "Mickey and Pluto going at it," but he's not funny just like he wasn't funny when he was bashing Lisa Simpson, and Jesus Mary and Joseph one does get tired of slippery slope arguments. It's bad enough that folks still think homosexuality somehow leads to bestiality somehow, like a dog could conceivably consent to have sex with a human, but to assert that a rare corporate stand against bigotry will lead to the depiction of animal sex in a cartoon is ludicrous. I'd call it surreal, but surrealism has more rules than this.

Action: concerning drug prices, billionaire taxes, labor, forced arbitration, free tax filing, and pollution in public lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices, pass a Billionaire's Income Tax, allow Congressional staffers to organize, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, let working families file with the IRS for free, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks 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.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices using the reconciliation process. Since Republicans aren't going to help! Republicans think they're a lock for getting our House and Senate back, so they're just going to prevent anything good from happening, like that doesn't hurt people! You know who else needs to hear this message, though? Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Bob Menendez of New Jersey, that's who! They're not going to listen to anyone but their own constituents -- or, if they can get away with it, just their big donors! -- but if enough of their colleagues hear it, that might help light a fire under their asses. People like that don't do the right thing until they have to.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire's Income Tax and start taxing wealth the way we tax regular income. Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) will leap forward to tell you that we've never taxed that way, but of course there is a little thing called the Estate Tax, and anyway we need to start taxing these people that way, because they run roughshod over the rest of us. And these billionaires don't ever have to sell the property that makes them wealthy because banks will give them cheap loans to live on! Nice work if you can get it! Now, don't brook any nonsense from House Reps that "it's not worth doing because it won't pass the Senate." Even if it doesn't, it's still worth it to put our Senators on the spot.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation allowing Congressional staffers to organize for better pay and working conditions, specifically by repealing Congress's exemption from our labor laws. Congressional staffers get paid $30,000 to $40,000 annually in one of America's most expensive cities to work 60 to 80-hour weeks -- plus many of them have second jobs! -- and this means that most of the folks who work as staffers are folks who come from wealthy families, and don't we have enough wealth being slung around in Congress? If Congressional staffers can organize for higher pay and shorter work weeks, then more folks from all walks of life will be able to work there, and that would do us a lot better than having Congressional staffers who don't really understand how hard most Americans have it.

Public Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Public Justice's email missive puts the whole case pretty succinctly: "(f)orced arbitration is rigged...it basically allows big companies to avoid accountability when they do something wrong. And you have no say! If you make a claim, you can’t go to court. You can’t get a fair hearing. And 9 times out of 10, you will lose. And there is nothing you can do about it." Unless you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, that is! Don't believe the hype that "the average arbitration award is x thousand dollars," because if you lose (and you very likely will), your "average award" will be zero dollars. Plus the corporation can sue you back and win! And that's no way to get justice in America.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make tax preparation easy and free for all Americans with relatively simple tax needs. If you work for a living, our government should send you a pre-filled tax form (since they know, from employer-provided W-2 and 1099 forms, how much you make), and indeed our government has the legal authority to do that! So why don't they? Bet you can't guess -- because big tax-filing corporations don't want them to! And as you know from the news, the "deal" they made with our government "mandates" that these corporations provide free tax filing to low-income earners, but good luck finding it, not least because these corporations do their damnedest to steer you away from it! If you don't have investments so complex they look like corruption, you should be able to file your taxes for free.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5533/S. 2960, the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act. Keeping single-use plastics out of our national parks? You mean, we don't do that already? Indeed, we do not. And thus our National Park Service must deal with some 70 million pounds of trash every year, and you can bet that plastic bags and plastic wrap and plastic water bottles make up a sizable chunk of that; a review of Yellowstone National Park nearly a decade ago found that plastic bottles comprised half that park's waste stream. And we didn't know this when we embraced the shatterproof bottle, but plastics have become so ubiquitous that we now ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic some way or other every single week. Talk about unintended consequences!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: featuring rich folks' tax avoidance and Democrat weakness.

And now ProPublica lists America's 400 highest earners from 2013-18 and the tax rates they paid. How do they get away with paying so little? Well, thanks to Tha Bush Mobb's 2003 tax "reform," we tax investment income at much lower rate than the rest of income, even though it's all, you know, income. And a lot of rich folks donate stocks, which means they get to deduct the stocks' value from their taxes without even selling it and paying taxes on it. Nice work if you can get it! The 400 highest earners pay an average of 22%, which rate is higher than most other folks -- but most other folks pay more in payroll taxes, and 22% of a small pile ain't the same as 22% of a hundred-times-higher pile, particularly when having 100 times more than the next guy doesn't mean you need 100 times the food and shelter. I'll keep explaining that until all the haters shut up like they should.

Per Politico, Democratic politicians are adopting "firmer postures on law and order." Does this mean Democrats are, at long last, demanding that polluters and banksters get their just desserts when they inflict massive injury on our civilization? I kid, of course -- for too many Democratic politicians, as for too many "liberal" media hacks, "law and order" only ever means "putting more Black folks in jail and then doing the helicopter dance about it." (Also, could it be that we're seeing an "uptick" in crime in 2021 over 2020 because we were in lockdown in 2020? Again, I kid: of course that's the reason. Can't do too much burgling when you're sheltering in place because you're afraid you'll die if you don't.)

Gallup puts six separate climate change solutions to Americans, and found that they approve of all of them by large margins!. More than 70% of Americans approve of tax credits for home installation of clean energy systems, tax breaks for businesses that do same, and higher fuel efficiency standards for autos; as Newt Gingrich would say, if 70% of the people want something, they should get it. Of course, as we know, none of this matters nothing to the crowd that intones about lasting change and the importance of bipartisanship. But that just means we have to get in their grills more. (Even strict methane limits gets 62% approval; remind folks that methane leakage deprives good Americans of both energy and royalties -- when corporations drill for gas on public lands, that is -- and I suspect that number goes way up.)

I wouldn't get too down about polling in Nevada showing Democratic incumbents (including Sen. Cortez-Masto, whom I've always liked) running behind their Republican challengers, not just because it's only April and not just because they still might get actually unelectable challengers, but also because what one observer identifies as a handicap to those incumbents -- that "it is very difficult to convince undecideds to vote for you when they remain undecided despite telling us that they are very interested in voting in this election" -- is, frankly, just as much a handicap to the challengers. The undecideds who are "very interested in voting in this election" have also thus far looked at Adam Laxalt and remained undecided.

Our Justice Department puts a former Republican staffer in jail for 12 years for running a child porn ring; I have a tough stomach for evil, but I found some of the details here nauseating. So why don't we ever hear about liberals getting jail time for child porn? I won't indulge in any further sarcasm about this, lest some stray ragehead pretend such sarcasm confirms his rage.

Finally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) lashes out at a reporter asking her about the January 6 attempted coup by saying it only happened "one time"! In other news, we only dropped one H-bomb on Hiroshima. Later she lashed out at coverage of her initial lashing out, accusing our media of fomenting "drama" like she's not a wholesale dealer in drama herself! Between this and her police report on Jimmy Kimmel, I'm sure she thinks she's had a good week. But if her eventual Democratic opponent (who will likely be absurdly well-funded) gets even 35% in her heavily-gerrymandered district in 2022, I'd start putting that district on my watch list.

Around the table: featuring a lot of evil right-wing rich folks and their evil enablers.

Studies say book banning at schools is worse than ever; the American Library Association study finds more attempts to ban books in 2021 than in any of the past 20 years. Naturally, most of these books feature Black, Brown, gay, or trans folks, and the PEN America report found that in literally 98 percent of book bans, school administrators didn't follow established procedures for challenging books -- yes, there are procedures for that! -- which means they're either unusually cowardly or unusually unscrupulous, neither of which is a good look in a civilized society. In a sick, immoral, and decadent society, I guess, it's totally acceptable. Dear Democrats: run against book banning in the midterms.

I can't imagine that "paid relational organizing," which pays folks to talk politics with their friends and neighbors, is a "novel" strategy in electoral politics; I can't tell you how many times I've suspected that the right-wing friends on my Facebook feed are all paid trolls for the Republican Party. The strategy's creators may be right that folks talking to each other means more than the phone calls most of us don't even answer anymore or (even) traditional door-knocking, but they might also be letting their love of technology override their judgment. Boy, it's a good thing that's never bitten Democrats in the ass before! I kid, of course. Even more important than "relational organizing": establishing a record and then running on it. Democrats have established a record, and if it ain't even the record they tried to establish, they can still run on it.

Jesus Mary and Joseph I'm so tired of right-wingers using stupid math not just to assert that TEH RICHEZ PAYZ MOSTZ OFZ TEH TAXEZ!!!!!, but that "the middle class is not really paying any kind of a fair share" of taxes. Setting aside that Ohio Republican Senatorial candidate Mike Gibbons, last seen losing an argument with Josh Mandel, thinks "the top 20%" are all in the same club; setting aside, also, that folks who "pay no taxes" on April 15 still pay plenty of sales taxes, payroll taxes, and state income taxes; setting aside, even, how rich folks shield most of their wealth from taxation by simply never selling stocks and properties and the like: rich folks are supposed to pay most of the taxes; it's how we keep them from taking everything away from us! Saying "the middle class is not really paying any kind of a fair share" of taxes is uniquely stupid, though, and if Democrats have any guts -- again, I kid.

When you hear that Peter Thiel has called Warren Buffet a "sociopathic grandpa" for failing to worship at the altar of crypto, you may be compelled to wonder: why "sociopathic"? Sociopaths have trouble telling the truth, respecting other people's feelings, and telling the difference between right and wrong, plus they also display a tendency toward impulsiveness and risk-taking; how does Mr. Buffet's stated opposition to crypto display any of those things? We never learn, but hey, they're just words, it's not like they mean things. Or is Mr. Thiel merely unable to avoid projecting his faults onto others?

I would not have wished for Will Smith to come along and slap Marjorie Taylor Greene, as Jimmy Kimmel did on his live show the other night, but Ms. Greene should know better than to file a police report about the matter, since a wish for violence isn't the same as a threat of violence -- which she should especially know since she herself has wished, out loud, for "a bullet" to magically make its way "to the head" of Nancy Pelosi. Now at least four individuals need to file libel charges against Ms. Greene for calling them "pro-pedophile," and then we can restore a semblance of law and order to this great land

Finally, when you hear Kyrsten Sinema tell a gaggle of Koch-affiliated "business" interests that "extreme rhetoric" interferes with her efforts to create "lasting results" for Americans, remember what she has really opposed: she has opposed raising taxes on the rich and on corporations back to where they were a mere six years ago, and she has opposed letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, and polls typically tell us that more than 60% of Americans want higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, and that 80% of Americans want Medicare drug price negotiation. Remember, also, that when she says Build Back Better "did not have the support to move forward," remember that the bill didn't move forward because she withheld her support on the above-named matters, matters that did, as I've said, have the support of the American people. So her battle, then, ain't between Kyrsten Sinema and "extremists," but between Kyrsten Sinema and America. (Also too, all her unctuous intonations about "small businesses" are right out of Paul Ryan's playbook from 10 years ago. That's how forward-thinking she is.)

Around the table: from student loan holidays to the next Manchin drama.

President Biden extends the student loan payment holiday through the end of August. Presumably he could order another one in late August as a midterm-booster -- recall that time Republicans called a vote on war with Iraq before a midterm! -- or he could decide to forgive a mere $10,000 in student loans per person and count the money unpaid during the payment holiday toward that amount. That would seem awfully anticlimactic, but it would have served as a pretty good 30-month stimulus. Personal to those who find this debt holiday "inflationary": you still think corporations aren't inflating prices on purpose?

Eric Blanc at Jacobin talks to Amazon Labor Union organizer/night shift worker Angelika Maldonado about "How We Beat Amazon." I'll admit I was a little stunned to see how many Amazon workers told organizers you don't even work here (although they did!) just because Amazon bosses told them that! I guess you don't know everyone in a large warehouse -- recall that almost 5,000 workers voted in the union election. The winning formulae, apparently, include a) talking to everyone you can on their breaks and b) coming in on your off-time and talking to everyone you can on their breaks (which our laws allow, as long as you're not actually on the clock).

Hard to believe, Harry, but Republican-run states and cities generally have higher murder rates than those run by Democrats, and if you're suspicious that the Third Way study tabulates murder from 2020, which was not exactly a typical year, note well that similar studies have found the same results in Southern (and thus almost exclusively Republican-run) states for at least a decade. I think "crime waves" are largely a right-wing invention, but I'd rather have data in hand about other crimes before declaring victory over Republican crime hysteria. I'd also, you know, like to see things like pollution and bankster predation routinely included in crime data.

I don't like to merely tabulate Republican hypocrisy, but even I was astounded at the level of chutzpah Donald Trump's sons evince by complaining that Hunter Biden is "mak(ing) millions off (his) father's presidency." The Trump family took, on average, five trips requiring Secret Service protection per day, and mostly to "promote Trump Organization businesses," per Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. At the risk of violating Godwin's Law, the Trump kids accusing Hunter Biden of profiting off his father's presidency is like Adolf Hitler complaining about other people's anti-Semitism.

When I hear that accusations of pedophilia and "grooming" are "the new Red Scare," I think that's about right -- nothing puts the chill in someone like the thought that their child could be sexually molested. But will right-wingers be smart enough this time to avoid libel or slander charges? Because that would chill this particular stratagem right quick. I'm not sure Rep. Greene could escape those charges in calling Sens. Romney, Murkowski, and Collins "pro-pedophile," and I sure as hell would like to see Mitt Romney, for example, get all Jack Palance on her and say prove it.

Finally, Democrats now say they'll meet Joe Manchin wherever he is on a massive reconciliation bill, and they'll do it by Memorial Day. At last they're calling his bluff! Are they finally learning? Or will they be caught flat-footed, again, when he says but I want this to go through committees? My money is on Joe Manchin dragging this out precisely so that it'll fail and doom Democrats' hopes of surviving the midterms, all so his absurd notion of "bipartisanship" will survive. One thing's for sure, though: one way or another, his tenure as One True Great and Real American President will be over the day after Election Day.

Around the table: from electric cars to nuclear fears.

Electric cars can't charge houses yet, but Seth Blumsack at The Conversation tells us it's just a matter of time. There are logistic obstacles -- car batteries have to be able to run electricity in both directions, and metering equipment would have to be able to shut off electricity from the grid when folks want to run the house on their cars (which they'd do in a blackout, of course, but also during more expensive peak hours) -- but they're not insurmountable. The bigger obstacle might be keeping the folks who don't have cars from paying more for electricity.

Hard to believe, Harry, but our IRS's privatized debt collection program isn't just bringing in only about half the revenue it expected, it's also underreporting its costs. But wait, there's more! About one in every five targets of this program lives below the poverty line; I don't know about you, but I'd go where the money actually is! This is the third go-round for privatized tax collection, and it didn't work the first two times, either; I'd understand if you said how many more times until they learn? Problem is they already know. P.J. O'Rourke, God rest him, used to say that Republicans aimed to prove government didn't work by running it into the ground.

Ralph Nader, writing at Counterpunch, points out that no Senators asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson any questions about corporate power. That includes very, very important questions a Justice will eventually have to rule upon, such as trade agreements' power to nullify American laws (via the notorious investor-state dispute settlement system). But while Republican Senators soiled themselves in public trying to "trap" Judge Jackson somehow, Democrats slip by without asking any really tough questions about the real threat to American freedom: untrammeled corporate power.

Former actual journalist Lara Logan has sunk to the point where she says, out loud, that Darwinism comes from the Jews. "I'm not saying none of it is true," she strains to point out as if we should be grateful for such generosity, "I'm just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory -- based on evidence, OK, fine." And by "someone" she means the Rothchilds, who also (according to Rep. Greene) facilitated the creation of a space laser to cause California wildfires. I'm not sure we should call this an anti-Semitic "dog whistle," since everyone can hear it!

Oh crap "St. Louis beer heiress" Trudy Busch Valentine is running for the Democratic nomination in the Missouri U.S. Senate race. They must be thrilled that they can make people think about beer whenever they think about Democrats, but they're still clueless about the fact that people don't want heirs running things! Lucas Kunce merits only one mention in this article, which is better than the other nine ("at least"!) Democrats running for the seat who go nameless, but let's be clear: Lucas Kunce is the Democrat the establishment fears most -- because he's got the best shot at doing good works if he wins.

Finally, how absurd have the pro-Putin arguments gotten? Tucker Carlson suggests we need Vlad the Bad to stand between his nation's Muslim extremists and the nuclear weapons they might steal and fire on America! After all, there'll be "no one running the country" if he's not there! After all, when has a Russian leader ever succeeded another? This is a real Rube Goldberg contraption of an argument, but worse than that, it's hostage-taking -- don't wish for dictators to be powerless, he's saying, or America could die! It's the same kind of reasoning that puts "strongmen" in power in the first place! But we're not hostages -- we're free people.

Around the table: from gerrymandering to "cancel culture" to crypto.

Our Supreme Court tosses Wisconsin's state legislative district maps apparently because they believed that map applied the Voting Rights Act too stridently in delivering an additional Black-majority district. Possibly Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn, who wrote the opinion supporting the map, spoke too precisely in saying "(w)e cannot say for certain on this record that seven majority-Black assembly districts are required" by the Voting Rights Act; you know John Roberts is an incurable literalist, and I guess the other five right-wing Justices are more than happy to indulge that if it suits their purposes. But I thought they were against stepping in this close to Election Day! Also too, why should Wisconsin's new maps resemble the previous ones as much as possible, as the state Supreme Court mandated? Those maps are terrible!

One veteran organizer calls Starbucks's anti-union efforts "the most intense (anti-union) campaign in modern U.S. history, and there’s really nothing in second place." Aside from the usual -- firing organizers, hiring dozens of new employees at a pro-union store to dilute the vote, disciplining workers for things no one had ever disciplined them for before, flying in managers to spy on workers, and calling "listening sessions" they dominate with anti-union talking points -- Starbucks stalls votes with endless appeals for district-wide (versus store-wide) votes, appeals they know will lose. They're also losing most of the votes, over 100 so far. I'm not sure bringing in former CEO Howard Schultz will help much; last we heard from him, he said so much stupid crap he killed his own Presidential campaign.

When I hear that "'Parental Bills of Rights' Are a Right-Wing Siege on Public Education,", all I can say is that right-wingers better watch their asses, lest these "bills of rights" get turned on them. Do they think Black and Brown parents won't say right-wingers are abridging their rights by forcibly effacing their history? Do they think the parents of trans kids will tolerate right-wing efforts to abridge their actual rights? Or do they imagine that only "the right" parents have "rights"? Remember, they're not rights if only some people have them. Great metaphor from Martha Kempner: "Every time (right-wingers) start to lose, they shake the snow globe and look at ways to generate outrage among their base."

Ari Paul at FAIR reminds us that when our "liberal" media organs decry "cancel culture" and "wokeness," they're really upset that we now live in a world where readers have more power to respond to stories than they ever did before. Used to be you had "letters to the editor" that the editor himself curated; now anyone can just write a comment on a webpage, and no I never heard our "liberal" media wring their hands about shame and shunning in the old days. Shaming and shunning aren't "oppression" but merely the churn of civilization, and First Amendment protections don't run in only one direction at a time. (Hate to pile on, but I presume that Bari Weiss, who resigned saying Twitter had become the Times's "ultimate editor," had nothing to say about Matt Drudge being the Times's "ultimate editor" for about a decade.)

Marjorie Kohn at TruthOut says that Republican Senators acted the fool at the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings in order to "agitate their base" before the midterms, but I wonder how well that will work -- Republicans took a lot of anti-gay marriage and anti-flag burning votes in 2006, and you know how well that went for them in November. It'd be nice, though, if Democrats would, you know, offer something of value to voters before then, if for no other reason that the Republicans' hysterical arguments wouldn't be the only ones anyone made to the voters. Voters will choose "he said something" over "he said nothing" every time.

Finally, at least a dozen enterprising writers take a red pen to a New York Times article purporting to "explain" crypto, with hilarious results. Seriously, this article provides a good primer on the bad arguments propping up crypto, and note well, also, how often the Times writer resorts to the passive voice and the excessive prepositional phrase: "there are things of actual substance being built," he writes, never mind who's building them, and he could have said substantial things, too. And he might have said "crypto wealth and ideology is going to be a transformative force in our society in the coming years" better by saying crypto wealth and ideology will transform our society. By the time he begins a paragraph with "What I'm saying, I guess," he doesn't sound modest or colloquial; he sounds like a man worried that speaking plainly would expose him.

Around the table: "cancel culture" is drama, part 775.

Alex Pareene suspects that right-wingers "might start trying to do voter fraud on a mass scale." And if you're tempted to respond that they kind of already have -- the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database helped right-wing politicians de-register Black and Brown voters for years, after all -- we're talking actual voter fraud here, the kind of which former Republican House Rep./Trump Administration hack Mark Meadows now stands accused after all the accusations of "voter fraud" he's leveled. Add in all the stories of actual voter fraud you've heard, which all seem to come from the right (Mr. Pareene tabulates only a few of them!), and you can see where one might be concerned.

Carl Beijer at Jacobin reminds us that "Critical Race Theory Is the Right’s Latest Obsession" but "They’ll Have a New One Soon." Seriously, it's like right-wingers have this Lazy Susan of outrages and just as even other right-wingers tell them to STFU about it, they just give it a spin and see where it stops. But Mr. Beijer also reminds us that right-wingers love telling us about "a relatively obscure text or theory that, we are told, lays out the secret governing plans and doctrines of the anarchomarxistliberaldemocrat conspiracy." Eventually, you have to explain why you keep losing to the anarchomarxistliberaldemocrat conspiracy, so you have to keep "discovering" new "secret texts." How long before they get to these books?

The Biden Administration sacks the two members of our President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition -- Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz -- who are running for Senate. Mr. Oz wrote a bunch of stupid crap about it, neglecting to mention that the Hatch Act actually prevents government employees from using their position to campaign for public office. Maybe the aforementioned two individuals can prove in court that no one cares about the Council and therefore couldn't possibly have used it to promote their campaigns! And I'm sure they'll try, but in the meantime, they'll just whine about being "canceled."

Uh oh: Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) might have a primary challenger this year, and someone apparently using a computer in the Missouri capitol building has repeatedly scrubbed any mention of sexual assault allegations from this challenger's Wikipedia page. Mainstream media organs reported on both these accusations, in case you thought maybe some liberal rando added them to his page to begin with. Then the challenger's spokeshack called Wikipedia "an unregulated, unedited, largely unsourced mass of information that is often inaccurate because anyone can post almost anything," which smells of desperation, as any ad hominem attack does. Sadly, Ms. Bush has two other primary challengers, though perhaps they'll split the Anyone But Bush vote.

Paul Krugman says high inflation will come down, perhaps not for the "soft landing" our Federal Reserve envisions, but still a soft enough landing that won't result in near-11% unemployment. Why? Because the inflation that finally died in the early '80s was "self-perpetuating inflation" -- "(e)veryone was raising prices in anticipation of everyone else raising prices," and wages were going up a lot faster back then, too, for the same reason; today folks simply don't anticipate inflation will just go up and up and up, and they plan accordingly, and if enough powerful people plan accordingly, inflation will come down. Probably not in time for Democrats to brag about it in midterm ads, if they're even so inclined, but I'll take the word of the Nobel Prize-winning economist over any self-interested cable news pundit or social media "influencer" you can name.

Finally, Vlad the Bad has finally come out and said that everyone wants to "cancel" him, just like everyone wants to cancel Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling! (Ms. Rowling, for her part, distanced herself from Mr. Putin's remarks right quick.) The article reminds us that being worth over $1 billion, as Ms. Rowling is, isn't exactly like being "canceled," nor is being the dictator of one of the most powerful nations on the planet. Good Russian citizens might "cancel" Mr. Putin eventually, but in the meantime, remember what all this is: drama, which is what right-wingers do best.

UPDATE. A reader has convinced me that "hater of transgender folk" is a bridge too far when describing J.K. Rowling, and though I still suspect her, I've excised the phrase from the above paragraph.

Around the table: of despots, oligarchs, and unwanted comebacks.

Remember how we were saying Vlad the Bad's oligarchs don't mess with his political dealings because he leaves them alone in their financial dealings? Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, goes deeper into that story, revealing how the billionaires picked Mr. Putin in the first place back in the 1990s. Incredibly, the Russian oligarchs actually went looking for a "Russian Pinochet" (this, while the actual Pinochet faced murder charges related to his nefarious rule!) to replace Boris Yeltsin, not just with Mr. Yeltsin's acquiescence, but with the actual help of Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, last seen telling America to fight inflation not by fighting monopolies (as the Biden Administration would do) but by pressing down even harder on the throats of working families.

Homeless folks and their advocates have begun an Occupy-style protest in none other than Boise, ID. Since the Ninth Circuit rules that Boise couldn't just criminalize homelessness, particularly if they weren't going to give homeless folks a place to stay, Boise police appear to be shaking down the homeless, often under the guise of "welfare checks" (which don't require warrants), hence the occupation of the state Capitol Mall. I wish them luck in persuading a state (and a nation) that they do matter and that our treatment of them matters, if we want to call ourselves civilized. Hell, Utah's as right-wing as Idaho is, and they do much better by their homeless.

Richard C. Gross at Counterpunch summarizes the right-wing stratagem in America about as succinctly as I've seen it done: "suppressing voting rights, restricting abortions, curbing teaching about race and identity, banning books in schools and libraries and picking on one of the most vulnerable in society – LGBTQ youths." After all, as he suggests, right-wingers not only can't win elections with superior ideas, they can't win arguments on the merits. Democrats would do well to use a similar summary in political ads -- in conjunction with their own accomplishments, which I expect to be more apparent by mid-summer -- though I doubt they have the guts. The Jesse Jackson epigraph -- "In politics, an organized minority is a political majority" -- is as stark as it is instructive.

Ho hum, Wisconsin Elections Commission won't do anything to the 10 Republicans who tried to pass themselves off as Presidential electors in 2020. I shudder to think the real reason they laid off was that one of the 10 was also one of the Commissioners, but you know what would be worse? If they actually believed the 10 fake electors' claim that they were just "keeping their options open" in case Mr. Trump won any of the 60-odd frivolous lawsuits he lost. And the Commission says Wisconsin state law doesn't prevent "alternative" electors from "meeting"; does it prevent them from pretending they're the real electors in a race their man obviously lost? Law and order!

When I hear that the Alaska legislature is contemplating a bill that would outlaw state IDs that comply with the national REAL ID system, all I can say is at last, the vaunted Alaska libertarian streak returns! The bill, HB 389, would give good Alaskans the option of using a driver's license photo that can't be read by facial recognition software, plus it would force Alaskan state government (namely the DMV; we'll get to them) to destroy all of its current drivers' license photos and prohibit "bulk sharing" of any of said photos -- a big deal since the Alaska DMV decided all by itself and in defiance of state law to upload all of its REAL-ID-compatible photos to the national database in 2017. I don't know if I've said this here, but folks who obsess over other people's papers are pretty much telling the world they don't know how to do anything about anything important.

Finally, recently-disgraced Andrew Cuomo says he not only might run for a fourth term as Governor of New York, but might create his own political party to do so. To which I must ask: why does he think people love him so much that he could create his own party? That man has always needed Democrats more than they have ever needed him. And boy do I wish he'd STFU about "cancel culture" already. He didn't "say" stuff so much as he did stuff, the First Amendment doesn't protect you from your employer, and we've accepted sexual harassment in the workplace is wrong for over three decades now. Hate to pile on, but I'm tired of hearing that "we have to reduce the anger in politics" from the people who stoke the anger with their wrongdoing.

Around the table: exposing bad judges, bad Senators, bad science, and bad media analysis.

Matt Stoller's been telling us that judges don't get antitrust law right anymore, and he describes a perfect example, a Third Circuit panel's 2017 ruling in Valspar Corp. v. E.I. Du Pont De Nemours & Co. Confronted with a fairly obvious case of corporate collusion on price-fixing, the panel voted 2-1 to dismiss the case before it even went to a jury, all because economists created "models" showing that "in a concentrated industry," corporations can "raise prices in concert due to a conspiracy...or just because it was easy for them to tacitly collude by watching each other change pricing and announce things publicly." And the Ninth Circuit protected chip-makers (remember them?) from a similar lawsuit in a similar manner this week. The good news? Lax judging has prompted big corporate executives to be even more open about their price-fixing, and sooner or later one of them's going to run into a federal judge who's had enough of this shit.

When I hear that President Biden just doesn't "get" Kyrsten Sinema, my first impulse is to say maybe there's nothing there to get! The short answer to "why does she say/do the things she says/does?" is "power." The longer answer is "she's sabotaging everything she can now so Democrats lose Congress and cling to her more desperately when she's up again in 2024." I know this because I saw George W. Bush employ this stratagem for eight years, which fact, admittedly, doesn't explain why Joe Biden doesn't get it. In any case, Sen. Sinema has no galaxy brain scheme to somehow lower drug prices without letting Medicare negotiate for lower drug prices; she has a "plan" to make herself "indispensable," though her planning is actually still rooted in the late 2000s. Meanwhile, here in 2022, even our "liberal" media don't rub the belly of "bipartisanship" like they did back then.

Herschel Walker, currently the front-runner for the Georgia Senate nomination, questions the explanatory power of evolution: "At one time, science said man came from apes. Did it not?" THEN WHY DO I STILL SEEZ TEH APEZ HA HA HA! We can answer his question simply: no, science did not say that! It said chimpanzees and humans have a common ancestor. I watched Herschel Walker a lot toward the end of his playing career, and I never saw a football player work harder -- I still tell people the story of how he helped a Giants teammate return a kickoff for a TD in 1995 by throwing two crushing blocks 80 yards apart. Needless to say, he's pissing away all that good will now. (Oh, and by the way, after this ad from primary rival Gary Black, he may not be the front-runner anymore. If Mr. Black trims a minute and a half from that ad, he'll have weapons-grade PR.)

Again our "liberal" media think that Donald Trump is "staring at resounding rejection in GOP primaries" this spring! Or, since he's not stupid, he's fomenting this endorsement drama, because he knows that endorsement matters most after the primary anyway, just like it did in Virginia. Why, he's contemplating pulling his endorsement of Rep. Mo Brooks in the Alabama Senate race, not because Mr. Brooks has "changed," as he says, but because Mr. Brooks might not even make a runoff! Now, could it be that since Mr. Trump has already endorsed in five high-profile races in May and June, that he'll look bad if they all lose? Not to his votaries he won't! They'll just accept whatever swill he peddles next -- Pat McCrory and Nancy Mace may be his enemies today, but for Donald Trump, tomorrow is always another country.

Speaking of Republican primaries, current Ohio Senate front-runner (really?) Mike Gibbons has said a bunch of stupid racist crap about Asians, even going so far as to cite The Bell Curve, the Bible of late 20th century "scientific" racism! And yet I'm not sure this will be a problem for Mr. Gibbons, either in the primary or the general. I mean, I'd prefer that it was, and if it weren't, it would be quite the reversal from the 2016 Senate race, when Democratic Senate candidate Ted Strickland distributed fortune cookies saying something about Rob Portman being China's best Senator, and then Mr. Portman buried him by over 20 points. Something else happened that day, a thing that made obnoxious racism acceptable again; I wish I could remember what it was.

Finally, Sen. Joe "the Penguin" Manchin (D?-WV) says electric cars would be a bad idea, because, and I quote, "I’m old enough to remember standing in line in 1974 trying to buy gas...I don’t want to have to be standing in line waiting for a battery for my vehicle, because we’re now dependent on a foreign supply chain, mostly China." Those of us who do not routinely wait in line for a car battery may not be able to relate, and I almost skipped over the fact that he uses an anecdote about waiting in line to fill a car with fossil fuels as if that's a reason to favor filling a car with fossil fuels. And while I have long argued against "free" trade, I do get sick of hearing "China" brandished as a scare word. Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph forget it, it's Joe Manchin.

Around the table: monopolies crush wages, and other horrible truths.

Matt Stoller reminds us that monopoly power means lower wages for workers, and by "monopoly power," he doesn't just mean corporations forbidding you to work for any of their competitors; he also means typical corporate practices, like forced arbitration, non-compete clauses, and outsourcing, which give them, essentially, price-fixing power over wages. Price-fixing, of course, is quite illegal. Thus our Treasury Department reports that monopolies cost workers 15 to 25 cents on the dollar, and other academic studies tell us that workers make 20% less in this market than they would in a fully-competitive market. I think, with enough repetition, that "monopolies take food out of your mouth" would supersede "if you don't like your paycheck, just get a better job!" as an argument. Particularly in fields where you can't "just get another job" (let alone a better one).

If you've heard that most Americans favor a no-fly zone over Ukraine, David Moore at FAIR tells us why you may not want to trust such polling. When pollsters ask what a no-fly zone would actually entail -- i.e., shooting down Russian plans in Ukraine -- then the numbers look quite different (46% say no, and that answer actually beat "yes" and "I don't know"). Thus you have about one in six respondents both approving of a no-fly zone and disapproving of shooting down Russian planes in Ukraine, with almost as many respondents saying no to a no-fly zone but yes to shooting down Russian planes. Also, never trust a poll that doesn't let you say "I don't know" or "not sure" or "give me another choice because both these choices suck." Hey, a lot of people would give you any of those answers, to many difficult questions.

If you were comforting yourself with the notion that the Florida "don't say gay" bill only applies to third graders and younger, Brandon Wolf of Equality Florida will set you straight, as it were. To start with, the bill's language is of course vague enough to intimidate pretty much any teacher into silence on the matter -- even if the class does a family tree assignment and someone has two mommies on it, basically they can't discuss it in class, for fear it'll run afoul of the law. Plus, just like the Texas law that our Supreme Court should have struck down already, parent lawsuits will enforce the law, and schools can't recoup costs even if they win. And yeah, the bill also "equat(e) the existence of LGBTQ people to conversations about what happens in someone's bedroom." You'd hate to be known only for what you do in the bedroom, right? Well, gay folks still face that all the time, and they shouldn't.

Why has Attorney General Garland not indicted former President Donald Trump, according to Mark Stern at the New York Daily News? Because 98 percent of all indictments lead to plea bargaining, but Mr. Trump will most certainly not go that route, but will instead throw a massive public fit and drag the whole process through the mud, at the end of which he'll get off, because you're not likely to find a 12-person jury that doesn't have at least one Trump votary on it. All of which is likely true! And all of which is damn frustrating for those of us who have an actual love of law and order, and not just a relationship of convenience with the concept.

Sharon Zhang at TruthOut reminds us that Sen. Rick Scott's Get Skinned by the Game plan would raise taxes for working families in the bottom 40 percent income-wise by over $1,000. If you are or ever have been in that group (ahem!), then you know a thousand dollars ain't just something you can poop out, like Rick Scott can. (Hey, if he poops out tax plans, why can't he poop out money?) And, again, Democrats can run a million attack ads showing Republicans snatching thousand-dollar checks out of your hand, checks you count on getting when you do your taxes. Will they, though? Or will they wring their hands, again, over what they haven't done? (And one more time: the people who "don't owe federal income tax" still pay state income taxes, sales taxes, payroll taxes, and Medicare taxes, and that's not an exhaustive list.)

Finally, this may have gotten by a lot of folks, but Donald Trump announced at a "Save America" rally in Florence, SC over the weekend that, if Republicans regain the White House in 2024, "(w)e will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States." Ha ha "reforms"! After all, it's not like our laws keep our President from firing people at will for good reasons. I mean, just suppose the President is a diaper-loaded brat who throws tantrums in public every single day in his life and cares only about himself and uses his office to make himself richer and hurts even his most fervent supporters. Executive branch Inspectors General, for example, could stop a lot of that, which is why he tried to fire all of them on his first or second day in office.

Around the table: fake news purveyors produce "fact-checks," and other absurdities.

Good news, everyone (no, really!): our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) has restored the state of California's ability to set auto emissions standards that are stronger than our federal standards. That means, of course, that the auto industry will very likely just meet California's standards, since California is one of America's largest states; many auto industry insiders didn't think the Trump Administration's revocation of the waiver would have survived federal court challenges anyway, and given the Trump Administration's record in the federal courts, that sure was a winning bet. Sad to see Republicans calling the decades-old waiver "radical," as if that's the only word left in their vocabulary. And when they use that word, of course, they're projecting.

ProPublica reports on "fake fact-checks" spreading on social media and on Russian state TV, which purport to refute faked Ukrainian videos, but which seem to manufacture those videos just to "debunk" them! One analyst calls it a "disinformation false-flag operation" that's "like Russians actually pretending to be Ukrainians spreading disinformation." How do we know? Because the metadata of the uploaded "fact check" videos reveals both the "debunked" video and the "debunking" video have the exact same file name. It's rather like spreading a playground rumor about yourself and just to "refute" it and get unearned sympathy for yourself. In other words, it's drama -- and, sadly, it's drama that makes good folks think there's no such thing as truth anymore. Truth does exist, of course, and we have to fight for it every day.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) notes that big real estate corporations, often backed by bankster money, are buying up houses all over America -- mainly in low-income areas -- and thus are making America's housing shortage even more acute. Before you call that "the churn of civilization," note well that real estate corporations often flip the properties for inflated prices or charge exorbitant rent. Rent control would help the second part of that formulation, and restricting house sales to local buyers would, at least, force bankster-backed real estate corporations to launder their money through those local buyers, and the more complicated a scheme gets, the more likely it'll fail. In the meantime, bigness continues to ruin everything in America.

Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) says he did not reveal Ukrainian President Zelenskyy's whereabouts by twittering about the Zoom call they were both on, and that anyone who says he did is just "a partisan seeking clicks." Well, not exactly -- as the post instructs us, even if Mr. Zelenskyy was using a VPN, one could figure out where he was by following the trail left by the sudden surge in uploaded traffic, and I doubt Mr. Rubio, the Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, doesn't know that. You can boil Mr. Rubio's mistake down into just a few words -- "when he's not putting the Ukrainian President at risk with stupid tweets," one Val Demings ad could begin. I'd like to think she's the sort of person who thought of that before I did. Getting the same robotic response from Mr. Rubio about it during a debate sure ain't gonna help him, either.

Speaking of Republicans Senators up for re-election shooting themselves in the foot, Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) says Republicans should repeal the Affordable Care Act if they regain power, then walks it back rather unconvincingly. He does remember that Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act pretty much cost them the House in 2018, doesn't he? Yeah, I'm running this attack ad all day if I'm Tom Nelson or Mandela Barnes. Even though Ron Johnson's won two Senate elections already despite being a useful idiot for American corporatists, I question his tactics here -- like the trucker caravan that couldn't compete with Beltway traffic earlier this week, he may be trying to rally his votaries to a war they've already lost. A better tactician would fight, or create, the next war.

Finally, our Senate has passed H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act, by a substantial, bipartisan margin (79-19), which will end the onerous pre-payment mandate and thus give our Postal Service some breathing room. This is a major legislative achievement, so kudos to you if you called or wrote your Senators and told them to make it happen -- kudos to you, also, if you helped prevent the Toomey amendment (which would have banned postal banking forever) from making it into the final bill, for the bill passed our Senate without amendment. Dig Sen. Rick Scott's sore-loser whining near the end, and recall that his original objection was that it would harm Medicare though four out of five Postal Service retirees already enroll in Medicare.

Around the table: from a small victory on Title 42 deportations to a larger victory on plastic recycling.

And now for another exciting chapter of "Partly Good News": the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that President Biden can't deport undocumented families "to places where they will be persecuted or tortured," though our President can still use Title 42 to deport single adults and families that don't face such horrors in their birthplace. The ruling also questions whether Title 42 -- which allows our President to deport folks during a public health emergency -- should be discarded, saying it "looks in certain respects like a relic from an era with no vaccines, scarce testing, few therapeutics and little certainty." Right-wingers will interpret this ruling as a mandate to "let everyone in," but that's lazy. Or do I mean because that's lazy?

I'm linking to this one because of the headline: "Florida Just Passed The ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill, Another Prong In Agenda-less Republicans’ Faux Outrage Machine." Folks need to remember that all the Republicans' posturing about flag-burning and gay marriage in 2006 didn't help them keep their House and Senate majorities; I don't know that it hurt them that year, since Democrats by and large didn't mention it in their attack ads, but if Democrats run ads about it this year -- in the context of "Democrats ended the pandemic and kick-started the economy while Republicans went after gay kids" -- I believe it will hurt Republicans. We had better not be so sick, immoral, and decadent a society that bad people can continue to be bad without facing any consequences.

Ho hum, idiot Republican says gas prices were lower under Donald Trump in 2020, smart Democrat slams her for saying so. Doing a victory lap over low gas prices in the middle of a pandemic when no one wanted to spend any more money than they absolutely had to would be a little like if Democrats had done victory laps over low gas prices during Barack Obama's first year in office -- they didn't, because those low gas prices were entirely due to the bankster Armageddon of 2008, when, again, nobody wanted to buy anything. Naturally Republicans slammed Mr. Obama when gas prices went back up, citing the entirely useless gas prices of 2009! (The article also reminds us that building Keystone XL would not, in fact, help keep gas prices down, since it wouldn't even be done by now. We know what's causing high gas prices: big oil corporations price-gouging us.)

Also ho hum, Olivia Riggio at FAIR informs us that "Murdoch-Owned Outlets Ignore Their Own Role in Hate Crime Surge." More specifically, Fox News/the New York Post/the Wall Street Journal et al "often spread anti-Asian and antisemitic tropes, while taking no responsibility for the xenophobia that fuels these hate crimes in the first place." Like when Jesse Watters, whose apparent goal in life is to be as big an asshole as his mentor, asked "funny questions" to Chinatown residents or demanded an apology from China over COVID. Or when Dennis Prager, founder of a "university," tells us liberal anti-Zionists, and not white supremacists, cause anti-semitism against Israel. Or when Tucker Carlson drew breath.

PA House Rep./Senate candidate Conor Lamb used to be BFFs with Joe Manchin, but now he's "distancing himself" from the Penguin, saying in fundraising emails that he supports Build Back Better and the Women's Health Protection Act and would end the filibuster if elected to our Senate. They say a public servant ought to keep his finger to the wind, I suppose, but he's also hung onto his big donors, and supporting Build Back Better is very far from the most liberal thing a legislator could do. Has he changed his mind about Medicare-for-All, which also enjoys near-supermajority support in America? Of course not. Sadly, Mr. Lamb might get the nomination, given that John Fetterman and Malcolm Kenyatta are basically vying for the same voters, almost like that's the whole idea.

Finally, this might actually be unqualified good news: scientists may have developed a way to recycle plastic, at room temperature, in a mere 20 minutes. Currently, recycling outfits melt plastic, which has a sort of Xerox effect on the resulting quality, but University of Bath scientists used a zinc/methanol mix to break down commercial BPA beads, and moreover, were able to isolate the notorious bisphenol-A chemical you don't want in your clean water. The mix also broke down several other kinds of industrial plastic. The Bath scientists have only worked on a small amount of plastic, so we don't yet know if state, local, and federal governments or private recycling corporations (which would have a lot more plastic to break down) can use it yet. Still, we a little more hope today than yesterday.

Around the table: the stench of price-gouging is everywhere! And other sad truths.

Somewhat good news, everyone! Our Supreme Court has rejected pleas from Republicans to overturn state Supreme Court-ordered districting maps in both Pennsylvania and North Carolina. While consistent with Justice Alito's refusal to reconsider Pennsylvania state Supreme Court-drawn Congressional map in 2018, it's not good news that four of the nine Justices (including Mr. Alito, of course!) wanted to take the suits, and may want to limit state courts' jurisdiction over legislative redistricting. Even in states which give the courts a role in redistricting by law? I wouldn't put it past them.

Ho hum, gas prices are going up all over America, ostensibly because of Russia, but turns out we only buy 3% of our oil from Russia to begin with! So why are gas prices so high? The economist interviewed in the article makes fairly unconvincing arguments -- if Russia's imports to the Northeast were already down, why are New Jersey gas stations selling gas a few cents above the national average? We learned in 2005 that a state with major oil refineries (in Paulsboro and Elizabeth) shouldn't have that problem. I smell price-gouging here, just as a lot of us do almost everywhere else.

Read Stanislav Markus's explanation of why Russia's oligarchs -- targeted by Western sanctions over Russia's invasion of the Ukraine -- are "a Group of Men Who Won't Be Toppling Putin Anytime Soon" and you'll likely be quite depressed at all the post-Soviet corruption it describes, a matter about which right-wingers have never seemed terribly concerned. The 1990s and 2000s waves of privatization (first of parts of the Soviet state, then of public services) were so irredeemably corrupt it's heartbreaking; this is the same civilization that produced Tolstoy and Chekhov. Anyway, the oligarchs have a lot of money now but no power, by Mr. Putin's design, and the oligarchs who do speak out (Mr. Markus says there'll be more of them) don't play well together.

Idaho state Senate passes an anti-abortion bill modeled on Texas's notorious S.B. 8, though Idaho's bill narrows who can sue -- it specifically allows women who get abortions, the men who impregnated them, and their immediate family members to sue. That difference clearly represents an attempt to circumvent the obvious issue with the Texas law, which is the standing issue, and while I still don't see how a family can have standing to sue over another family member getting an abortion (particularly if they're not parents of a minor!), I can all too easily see the right-wing supermajority on our Supreme Court deciding this (and not the Mississippi or Texas laws) is the back-door abortion ban they've been looking for all their lives.

As I contemplate the way in which the Manhattan District Attorney's investigation into Donald Trump has, in the New York Times's words, "unraveled," I am reminded that rich folks just don't go to prison very often. I've argued with co-workers many times about this -- they see Donald Trump as someone who's so obviously bad at crime that surely anyone with eyes to see can see it. And they're right! He is pretty brazen and awful! But almost anything that happens during the course of an investigation creates an opportunity, and folks with money can exploit those opportunities better than the rest of us can imagine. Cyrus Vance's departure as Manhattan D.A., and his replacement by Alvin Bragg, created just such an opening. We may not learn what happened here until the historians take up the matter.

Finally, ITEP evaluates how much Rick Scott's Get Skinned by the Game plan will cost poorer working families across America. These folks already have "skin in the game" because they pay payroll taxes and Medicare taxes (not to mention state income taxes, property taxes, city wage taxes, and sales taxes), but ITEP's analysis provides even more fodder for Democrat attack ads, if they have the guts to run them. If Democrats were to air ITEP's finding that Mississippi residents could face 50 percent tax hikes under the Scott plan, they might even win a couple of races there. (Hate to pile on, but people's lives are not a "game." Only an irredeemable asshole like Rick Scott would call it a game.)

Around the table: why Russia will lose the war, and other truths.

Ho hum, states are rushing to cut taxes, using money from the American Rescue Plan Act as an excuse, though that money was a one-time expenditure. They'll use any excuse to cut taxes! And remember: when they cut taxes, usually they cut taxes a lot for their cronies and only a little, if any, for regular folks. At least the Nebraska Senate is currently filibustering one of the more nakedly pro-wealthy tax cuts out there. Some of these states have proposed cutting sales taxes, and I approve of that in a general sense, but most of them have not addressed how they're going to raise the resulting shortfall, and every state but Vermont, you may recall, has passed balanced-budget amendments to their constitutions.

Kamil Galeev argues, convincingly I think, that Vladimir Putin will lose his war with Ukraine. Long story short: Russia's more concerned with strutting its stuff than doing the hard work victory would require. Long story somewhat longer: Mr. Putin wanted to basically blitzkrieg the hell out of Ukraine without planning very much for what would happen if that didn't work -- and his blitzkrieg wasn't going to work, since he didn't even plan that well. There's even more to the story -- Russia made its military more efficient until the mid-2010s, when it turned to making its military look more impressive, and Ukraine basically went in the opposite direction. And hate to sound like a broken record, but a lot of this will sound familiar to those who followed our adventure in Iraq closely.

Samuel L. Boyd at The Conversation discusses "Why Translating 'God's Law' to Government Law Isn't Easy." The answer has nothing to do with woke mobs or deep states, of course, and more to do with the fog of passed time: what we, in retrospect, conceive of as "laws," like the Code of Hammurabi and a lot of laws described in the Torah, weren't actually laws -- Hammurabi issued plenty of decrees at odds with his Code, and how many folks during the time of Deuteronomy stoned their kid to death for drinking and rabble-rousing? Not when there was choring to be done on the farm, I bet! In addition, folks may have come up with the concept of a code of law that comes from God, as in Exodus, in order to fight the Kings who oppressed them with their laws. Folks who insist on punishing transgender folks as often as they draw breath won't be swayed by any of these notions, but the folks who would see Leviticus more as a book about universal precautions will. Note well that the latter crowd is considerably larger than the former crowd.

When I read that "Activists push Biden to Expand Renewables for Energy Independence From Russia" -- and entirely reasonable plan we would already have implemented if not for the intransigence of Joe Manchin -- I'd still be happier to read "Americans push Biden to expand renewables," not just because that's generally true of how Americans feel, but also because I'd like us all to think of ourselves as activists, since that's what defending democracy and defending civilization requires. I'd like us all to think of ourselves as activists even though some Americans only discovered their love of activism because they didn't want to wear masks at Costco. I'd also prefer to read that "big energy corporations push Biden to expand renewables," since they're the biggest obstacle to a more renewable energy grid. The article's still very good, though, namely for its lengthy refutation of the notion that fracked natural gas will solve our energy problems. I mean, gosh, you've got sun and wind everywhere.

Our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) finds, after analyzing over 70,000 blood samples, that over 140 million Americans, including a majority of our nation's children, have had COVID through late January. That's way more than official reports give -- Worldometers.info counts a little over 80 million infections total in the United States, which doesn't even mean 80 million people infected -- and it also maps on to The Lancet's finding from January that official sources have way, way underreported COVID infections.

Finally, President Biden delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday night -- it was a good speech, a little heavy on solutions, if anything -- but Republicans didn't waste any time acting like idiots about it. Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) boycotted it because he'd have to take a COVID test beforehand, and because "I only take a test if I'm sick." Why, it's like he hasn't learned after two years that some 40 percent of all COVID infections come without symptoms! I spy something that's going to wind up in Val Demings's campaign ads; she might even call it "Where's Marco?" Meanwhile, Reps. Boebert (Q-CO) and Greene (Q-GA) heckled Mr. Biden while he was talking with a "build the wall" chant; if Democrats have any brains/guts at all, they'll run at least the photo accompanying the story in campaign ads. Ain't nothing an independent voter likes less than a person shouting on TV.

Around the table: featuring yet another injurious monopoly and a sputtering caravan of whiners.

Matt Stoller relates the evil logic of monopolies to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Long story short: Russia controls so much of the fossil fuel market (gas, oil, even coal) that they can raise prices whenever they want, such that their invasion actually funds itself! Clever, unless you insist, as I do, that cleverness also be useful, and not just to some dictator or other. Do you suppose Facebook will let me say that Russia causes inflation by hiking fuel prices at will? Or is that an even more loaded question than I thought?

The second item in Bess Levin's February 28 news rundown -- to which you should all subscribe if you don't already -- describes Donald Trump taking credit for the fact that Putin's little Ukraine adventure isn't going as well as he'd hoped, because he "insisted" that NATO nations "pay() their dues," although, as Ms. Levin notes, Donald Trump not only didn't do anything worth taking credit for (because he invented the whole dues-paying story to begin with), but did an awful lot of harm to Ukraine, not least in trying to extort its President. You remember, the first thing for which our House impeached him?

Australian scientists, thinking they've developed tracking devices for magpies that are relatively unobtrusive, are surprised to discover the magpies helping each other get the tracking devices off. Thus the magpies not only demonstrate intelligence and problem-solving skills, but altruism, which they previously hadn't demonstrated to researchers, at least not in a way they'd noticed; one wonders what it was about the tracking device that provoked that response. I guess you never do know what'll bring folks together. Right, Vladimir Putin?

U. Aberdeen/U. Cal. Berkeley scientists theorize that our brains smooth out all of the visual noise our eyes receive by, essentially, "perceiv(ing) in a given moment an average of what we saw in the past 15 seconds" as the "illusion" of a "single visual snapshot." Thus whatever we're seeing at a given moment could be up to 15 seconds old. These researchers looked to understand "serial dependence," which describes a phenomenon in which you would "see" an object or person more or less as you've been seeing it for some time, so you don't have to process new information. In any case, I wonder if that's why I occasionally "sense" that a kicker's about to miss a field goal.

If Mitch McConnell is really worried that Rick Scott's "Rescue America" plan "could expose the party to unnecessary attacks this fall," well, I'd have to say that horse has left the barn. And Sen. Scott's walkback is weak: he can't be so cut off from ordinary Americans that he really thinks any of us care about the fine line between Senator-just-saying and Senator-running-party's-campaign-arm, can he? Then again, this is Rick Scott, America's CEO, we're talking about -- last time he talked to regular folk he was probably chewing them out for something that wasn't their fault. Anyway, he's beyond "when you're explaining, you're losing" and well into "when you're in a hole, stop digging." (Of course, Democrats still have to run campaign ads using the information Mr. Scott has so helpfully provided, but that would be like winning, which Democrats generally only do passively. I'd be happy to be wrong!)

Finally, when I hear that the far-right trucking caravan that started in California won't make it to D.C. because it's just not big enough anymore, I must say I'm disappointed. Come on, fellows! Let your freak flag fly! Come and get your humiliation; you've earned it! This couldn't possibly be because our Supreme Court struck down President Biden's vaccine mandate and because our CDC recently recommended that folks in low- or medium-risk areas can go maskless indoors, could it? (Remember: I've said I didn't disagree with the tactics, only with the message, the entirety of which, as far as I can tell, is waaaaaaaaaah.)

Around the table: the plundering of public goods, and other evils.

Paul Rosenberg at Salon talks with Donald Cohen, co-author of The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back." You probably know the story pretty well by now -- how "efficiency" means "less service for you," for example -- so if you want to skip ahead to the "How We Can Fight Back" part: one, "debunk the idea that the private sector is always more efficient"; two, point out "the public things that are all around us," not just roads and streetlights, but also clean water, seat belts, and paint without lead; and three, demand more of our politicians than they're used to. My experience is they've lived so long on Easy Street they'll fold under mild pressure from the public. In the meantime, put the book on your Powell's wish list.

Surprise, surprise, Facebook is turning its "fact-checking" powers on memes and posts saying that corporate greed causes inflation. How long before water-makes-you-wet memes get similarly "fact-checked"? And while Agence France-Presse is the oldest state-owned news organ in the world, and a hell of a lot better than some of Facebook's other fact-checkers (cough The Daily Caller cough!), fact is Facebook didn't "correct" anything, but merely offered a counter-opinion and called it a fact. And now that they've done this, they're only helping to spread the corporate-greed-causes-inflation idea even more! You know, kind of like how Maus vaulted to the top of Amazon's best-seller list after that Tennessee school board banned it.

The expanded Child Tax Credit has been gone for almost two months now, and to no one's surprise, the monthly child poverty rate went from 12.1% in December to 17% in January. That's nearly 3.7 million more kids in poverty; put a face to any of them and then consider that Joe Manchin said (or, more likely, parroted what his big donors said) that people just spent their CTC money on drugs! This is just one more data point demolishing that notion -- I mean, if spending CTC money on drugs was that widespread, you wouldn't see child poverty go up almost five points in one month. When will our leaders get any better at leadership?

I'd love to think that yet another substantive investigation into the shaky ethics of Ryan Zinke while he was Secretary of the Interior could scuttle his chances of winning back a Montana House seat (Montana has two House seats now, so he wouldn't be winning back his old one per se), but Montana's state legislature has gerrymandered those two seats pretty well, and Democrats can always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as they're so good at doing. Still, I'm old enough to remember when the appearance of corruption ended careers; how about we go back to that?

When I hear that Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) is very, very upset that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) didn't tell him he would endorse someone else for the 2022 open Senate seat, I'm compelled to say waaaaaaah. Rep. Long's long list of complaints (and his long list of "liberal" media outlets to which he's airing these complaints) can't be a good look to Republican primary voters. But Mr. Hawley's been shrewd here -- his endorsee, Rep. Vicki Hartzler, is a stealth Trumphole, not like Eric Greitens and Mark McCloskey, who are overt Trumpholes but who also have more formerly-closeted skeletons on the rampage. Lucas Kunce could beat her, but as I've said, Democrats are so good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory they'll jam someone "safer" down the throats of good Missourians.

Finally, Pennington, NJ Starbucks worker Sara Mughal describes "How We Turned the Tables On Starbucks Union-Busters." Long story short: Starbucks workers across the land talk with each other and compare notes, and at their mandatory anti-union propaganda meetings they bring a crap-ton of questions so that even the managers get exasperated with answering after a while. They're finding out what I found out a long time ago: our opponents don't have any good arguments! And once you figure that out, the only way they can beat you is to cheat, by, oh, hypothetically now, firing workers for trumped-up wrongdoings.

Around the table: covering inflation, censorship, right-wingers, vaccines, and bipartisanship.

Apparently Democratic politicians are having a difficult time messaging inflation hikes -- they're "kind of all over the place" when describing the causes of inflation, quite possibly because inflation has several causes, while Republicans just say "Big Gummint spending" like the demonic robots they are. But I am in a position to help! Here's what Democrats should be saying, particularly if they're at all emotionally-invested in our FTC's anti-monopoly efforts: "corporations are causing most of the inflation, by jacking up prices just because they can." You're welcome, Democrats.

Ari Paul at FAIR reminds us that "Defenses of (Joe) Rogan Aren’t About Free Speech; They’re Right-Wing Solidarity," as we would know from right-wingers' ignorance/indifference about Starbucks baristas who get fired for organizing, or the Catholic school teacher fired for twittering about her school memorializing two dead police officers. And no one's actually censoring Mr. Rogan! Censorship is something the state does; it's not something Neil Young does, and no, it's not something activists do, either. And if at-will workers can be fired for pretty much any reason, might that be a reason to support labor unions? I mean, we can't all insulate ourselves from harm by becoming obnoxious podcasters.

I applaud Amanda Marcotte at Salon for saying we ignore/belittle Marjorie Taylor Greene's drama at our own peril, and not just because I think the real Ronald Reagan was more like Phil Hartman's famously energetic and detail-oriented ass-kicker who only acted like a doddering old man for photo shoots. But I think Ms. Greene intended a joke by swapping out "Gestapo" with "gazpacho" (it's harder to say, after all); she wanted you to imagine "Nancy Pelosi's secret police" as such Birkenstock-wearing liberals they must eat gazpacho soup all the time, and switching to "goulash" for the follow-up was just icing on the cake. It's not a transcendent joke -- gazpacho may be "exotic" in America, but folks from all walks of life eat it at its birthplace on the Iberian peninsula. But it's not devoid of actual cleverness, either. Such a thing might give me hope for Ms. Greene's soul, except that I'm too old for that.

Sarah Lazare at In These Times discusses Moderna's refusal to share vaccine info with South African scientists, who have had to reverse-engineer the Moderna COVID vaccine on their own. An impressive achievement, surely, but they shouldn't have had to do it -- not just because it's cruel to let people die of a disease they don't have to die of, and not just because the longer most of the world's people don't have a vaccine the longer we're going to have to deal with COVID, but because our government should have stepped in and told Moderna you couldn't have made that vaccine without our help, so we're going to make you give South Africa the info they need. But that would be too much like, you know, not worshiping mammon. (Also, Ms. Lazare reminds us that it's racist to assume that Those Countries don't have the "resources" to make COVID vaccines. Every country has doctors, engineers, and poets.)

Finally, from the "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" file: Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), quite possibly the most useless of all the useless moderates who plague our political scene today, says of recent relatively bipartisan legislation moving through Congress: "(w)hat the Democratic leaders seem to have finally realized is that in a 50-50 Senate, the only way you’re going to be able to produce any accomplishments that matter to the American people is to work across the aisle." Set aside, for a moment, that the things Democrats tried to pass without Republican help (paid family leave, Medicare drug price negotiation, higher taxes on the rich) actually remain quite popular with Americans, who would consider any of them "accomplishments that matter." Fact is, we may be seeing this burst of non-awful bipartisan legislation only because Republicans have realized that 14 years of absolute obstruction is played out, and it'd help to actually pass some bills for which they could actually take credit. The trouble with that stratagem? Democrats can more easily take credit for a functioning government if they control it. If they have the will, of course.