Thieves in the Temple.

Biden won. Now what?

So the worst human being ever to be President is no longer President – and Joe Biden has replaced him. President Biden’s enjoying a bit of goodwill right now, but it’s early, and we must remember that he spent half a century capitulating to Republicans in the name of “bipartisanship.” I feared his election would be a nightmare scenario, a way for Our Glorious Elites to pretend to care about what the people think by getting rid of Mr. Trump but replacing him with a weakling. But, in truth, none of that matters – the best citizenship makes the politicians irrelevant, and we must aim to do that. In that spirit, I offer some advice.

Our ministry takes as sacred the fact that while voting is important, it’s also one day out of the year; what of the other 364 or 365 days? We need to communicate with our representatives about our concerns daily; Thieves in the Temple will help you do that, as it does now. But we also need to know what we’ll be up against. Donald Trump won’t go away quietly; he may not have his Twitterphone at present, but he’s got plenty of right-wing “news” outlets he can dominate, and our “liberal” media will cover whatever he does as if he’s not the outcast he should be. And you may be more sanguine about our media than you were in 2016, but make no mistake: under a President Biden, they’ll ramp up the horserace coverage, they’ll attack Social Security and Medicare, they’ll demand “bipartisanship” with actively evil Republicans, and they’ll air every far-right fever dream as if it’s a mainstream concern. Speaking of which, you’ve seen people embrace ever-stupider conspiracy theories online, and you’ve also seen emboldened Nazi wannabes stir up violence at otherwise peaceful protests; you’ve even seen Trump supporters actually try to take over our government. Now imagine all those clowns with millions of dollars of right-wing corporate and special interest group money behind them. I guarantee it’ll happen, and it’ll make the Tea Party look quaint.

And, last but certainly not least, you’ll also be up against a Democratic Party constantly yammering on about the art of the possible, and fearmongering you about all the seats Democrats will lose in 2022 if we actually speak our minds and hold them accountable – this, even though Democrats get routed in midterms precisely because they don’t do enough for the voters! And as I’ve said, future Republican Congressional majorities will be the worst we’ve ever seen. To think, that in 1994 and 2010, we said, “gosh, I’ve never seen Republicans worse than these clowns!” What will we say in 2022, if Democrats spend two years pretending their hands are tied? We’ll say, “gosh, I didn’t think people who actually called themselves fascists could win elections in America!” But when leaders don’t heed the will of the people – and this is a nasty habit Democratic politicians have! – that’s the kind of thing that happens.

So we need to do the same things we did (and which worked) in 2017: we need to flood our Congressfolks’ phone lines and we need to bird-dog the hell out of them, even though publicly confronting your elected leaders has a bad name right now, because of those assholes who tried to take over our Capitol. But for what will we fight? Will we fight, merely, to keep Republicans from setting more of our house on fire? No. We have to think bigger than that, and we have to change the conversation Our Glorious Elites would want us to have. I know that’s a big thing to ask of people, particularly people who have been waiting four years to simply draw a sigh of relief. But we’re Americans. We do big things. And here are some of the big things we have to do.

We have to get this pandemic under control. 12,000 Americans died from the swine flu pandemic of 2009 and 2010, so we already know that we can do a lot better than 12,000 deaths every couple of days. We need to do a lot more COVID-19 testing, tracing, and vaccination, and we also need to pass real pandemic relief for working families, not just “relief” that funnels taxpayer money to big bankster cronies. And you know what else? We all need to wear a damn mask when we go out! Right-wingers have had too many don’t-tread-on-me tantrums about this, and we need to stop coddling them. It just so happens that President Biden has proposed a new COVID relief bill that would do most of these things; now we just have to remind our Congressfolk that they work for us.

We have to secure voting rights. Voting is the beginning of our duty as citizens, not the end, but vote suppression did more than any other factor to bring us President Donald Trump in 2016, and we’ve had four years to watch what sophisticated vote suppression has wrought. The For the People Act and the Voting Rights Advancement Act would fix that. The For the People Act would (among other things) keep states from deregistering voters whenever they want, curtail the use of felony convictions to disenfranchise good Americans, and require states to use voter-verifiable paper ballots. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would make the Voting Rights Act whole again, at which point states and localities will find it a lot harder to, for example, deregister voters of color simply because they have the same name as someone from another state. I talk a lot about the cowardice of Democratic politicians, but fact is folks would vote even for a cowardly Democrat over an insane Republican – if they’re allowed to vote!

We need real campaign finance reform – that includes disclosure and limits on contributions. Passing the For the People Act would give us disclosure, but we would need to amend our Constitution to get the latter, thanks to our Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United v. FEC ruling. The pro-big corporate campaign spending crowd (it’s not a big crowd, but it does exist!) say we can’t limit campaign contributions because campaigns cost money. But why should that fact compel us to let folks with millions of dollars drown out the real free speech, and real grievances, of working families? Our First Amendment has to work for all of us. H.J.Res. 1, introduced in early January, would amend our Constitution so we can regulate campaign finance again.

We have to make taxes fair again. This President did what all the big “tax cutters” do – he cut taxes a little for you, but cut taxes a lot for his rich cronies, particularly for corporations. We can leave most income tax brackets where they are, but we need to tax income over a million dollars at 91%, and we need to tax corporate profits at 55% – because these are the tax rates that built the greatest middle class the world has ever seen. If you don’t tax the rich, they hoard their windfalls, but if you do tax them, they spend the money paying people to make things, and then we build great economies. We also need to tax investment income equally, so that working families don’t pay more taxes out of their paychecks than hedge fund managers do out of theirs. We need to cap the mortgage interest deduction, so that most homeowners can still get relief, but corporate raiders and slumlords can't game the system. We need to stop corporations “paying” their executives in stock options – income is income, after all, and should be counted as such. Finally, we need to stop cold any attempts to enact a national sales tax. The last thing working families need is a new tax that always hits working people harder than wealthy people. Congressfolk rarely introduce bills that would do these things – so we should tell them to do that!

We need to tackle household debt. The biggest drag on American freedom isn’t taxes or regulations or “political correctness.” It’s debt, whether it’s mortgage debt, credit card debt, or student loan debt. We need to cap revolving loans at 6%, installment loans at 4%, and student loans and mortgages at 2%. And if that winds up outlawing payday lenders, too bad! Forcing people into 300% death-spiral loans ain’t exactly “helping a brother out.” Once we cap loan rates, we need to forgive a lot of the debt people accrued before the caps go into effect; that would only be fair, after all. Don’t worry about the banksters; they’ll still be able to make money, they just won’t be able to buy as many legislators as they used to. More importantly, all the good Americans who will be able live without so damn much debt on their backs will be freer to do good works, as is our birthright. The Loan Shark Prevention Act, from the last Congress, would come closest to doing some of things I’ve outlined above.

We need to expand Medicare to include everyone. The second-biggest drag on our freedom is health care costs, especially now that increased hedge fund involvement in health care corporations just so happens to coincide with surprise medical bills being worse than ever. In the middle of a pandemic, no less! It seems invisible because we pay for it indirectly, through our employers and through our taxes, but we spend around $10,000 annually per person on health insurance in America; folks in Canada, which has a single-payer system, pay less than half of that, and folks in the United Kingdom, which has an entirely socialized health care system, pay a little more than a third of that. But we can expand Medicare to include everyone and cover everyone’s health care needs. How? By implementing Sen. Warren’s plan to tax big corporations almost all the money they already pay for private health insurance. We spend more than any other nation on health care, and still leave over 20 million Americans out in the cold; with Medicare-for-All capturing all that money, and with the drop in administrative costs that will result, we’ll be able to cover everyone’s needs. Medicare-for-All bills get introduced every year; this year, we need to tell them to include the funding mechanism.

We need to redefine “law and order,” so that when we say those words, people think “catching polluters and financial predators” rather than “shooting unarmed black folks in the street.” First, we need to stop using our police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization. Police officers should be making arrests and serving warrants, not answering every conceivable request for assistance a citizen makes, and certainly not doing the job of social workers. Second, we need to stop treating drug addicts as criminals and start treating them as patients. Finally, our regulations need to punish polluters and financial predators with jail time, not fines they can simply deduct from their taxes, and not settlements in which no one admits doing anything wrong. If we do these things, we might lay claim to being a “law and order” nation again. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and the MORE Act, from the last Congress, would comprise a good start toward this end.

We need to invest in renewable energy. I don’t mean just with tax credits for solarizing your house – our government needs to get back into the utility business and create 100% renewable energy utilities that’ll compete with the private utilities that overcharge you and won’t change with the times. And we need to retrain coal workers to build out this renewable energy infrastructure, which will be a hell of a lot easier than retraining them to write software, as Democrats too often think we’re going to do. Right-wingers will call all that “socialism,” but I’ll call it “job creation.” You know what else I’ll call it? If I may paraphrase William Lloyd Garrison, I’ll call it “pulling a baby right out of the damn fire,” since our planet is on fire and renewable energy isn’t a “lifestyle choice” so much as a necessity. The Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future (or OFF) Act, from the 115th Congress, remains a good model for achieving these ends.

We need to reclaim boundaries on media, including social media. Our media remain addicted to sensationalism and drama, and this addiction pushes us away from those values, like patience and temperance, that sustain us as a civilization. So we need to demand the right to purchase cable channels a la carte, so we’re not paying for media outlets (like cable news channels and reality channels) that make us sicker, more immoral, and more decadent. We also need to stop media consolidation, so that we don’t have so many cookie-cutter TV channels with so few owners to begin with. We need to restore net neutrality, so that we, not some corporate gatekeeper, determine where we want to go on the internet. We need to keep pressuring corporate advertisers, so that we can cut off bad media outlets’ other flow of money. And we need to treat social media websites less like “information services” (i.e., your ISP is an "information service") and more like the publishing houses they actually are. If Random House publishes an author who says something libelous, we hold them liable; if Facebook lets a user do the same thing, we flail around wondering what to do about it. Here’s what we do about it: we change the law so we can hold them accountable. Again, our Congressfolk don’t routinely address these matters through legislation, but we can tell them to do that!

That’s a long list (and not an all-inclusive one!), and a lot of folks would call it idealistic or naive. But folks have always said that about big changes. And, frankly, it’s not the attitude that abolished slavery, it’s not the attitude that got women the vote, it’s not the attitude that got us clean water and food safety, it’s not the attitude that created Social Security and Medicare, it’s not the attitude that enacted minimum wage and worker safety laws, and it’s not the attitude that passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. And you know what? It’s also not the attitude that stopped this right-wing Congress and right-wing President from repealing the Affordable Care Act in 2017. The people, alone, stopped that from happening, and we didn’t say it was idealistic or naive to do so.

Still, many of your Democratic Congressfolk, when pressed about solutions like the ones we've advanced here, will throw cold water on them and talk about how "politics is the art of the possible." But we don't fight for what's "possible" – we fight for what's right, and in doing so we widen the palette of the possible. And we do that by calling our reps, emailing our reps, writing our reps, demonstrating at their offices, and bird-dogging them at public events – and we never back down. Republicans never back down, after all, and Democrats seem to treat them a lot better than they treat us. And whenever Democrats fail us, never shrug and say “well, at least they’re better than the alternative.” If we do that, we’ll never get the better alternatives we deserve as Americans. But if we stay on them, they'll come around to our way of thinking, because their jobs will depend on it. So let's get to it.

Around the table: Nothing Ever Ends, part 322.

British farmer Martin Crawford describes (in a short NatGeo video running less than three and a half minutes) how agroforestry could help save the world from starvation and drought brought on by climate change. "What we think of as normal in terms of food production is actually not normal at all," he says, and he ain't lying -- the way big ag corporations do it (one crop on one slab of land, lots of pesticides) suits them more than it suits human beings. Mr. Crawford's also written a book, Creating a Forest Garden: Working With Nature to Grow Edible Crops, though you'll have to hunt around for it a bit.

Former Health and Human Services advisor, if you can call him that, advocated creating "herd immunity" by infecting "Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc.," adding "(w)e want them infected," in case you missed it the first time. Admit it -- you thought this was A Modest Proposal for a minute, didn't you? Except I don't think Mr. Swift would have used the word "fastly" even as a wink to his audience. This Administration was quick to say this fellow's ramblings had no sway over their policies, although our soon-to-be-ex-President wouldn't STFU about "herd immunity" all freaking year.

Nathan Bernard at Mainer describes "How Sara Gideon Lost to (Susan) Collins the Day After She Entered the Race," but I bet you could replace Sara Gideon's name (and Susan Collins's name!) with their counterparts in Iowa, Kentucky, and North Carolina and have more or less the same article. Spoiler alert: Ms. Gideon lost by taking big Democrat money and taking big Democrat advice, resulting in a campaign that was "ugly, uninspiring, obscenely expensive, and out of touch with local concerns." And note well that Jared Golden got re-elected easily in a right-of-center House district "despite" supporting Medicare-for-All while Ms. Gideon lost by seven percentage points statewide after her six-figure consultant advisors all told her not to support it. (But read the whole thing, not least for the damning, and laugh-out-loud, testimony of one Alex Steed.)

What's the worst thing about Republicans' entirely manufactured outrage that Joe Biden's campaign manager referred to them all as "fuckers" in an interview? No, it's not that Republicans have spent four years excusing or pretending not to hear all of our soon-to-be-ex-President's cuss words, but that our "liberal" media will tell us this is the reason Mitch McConnell blocks everything Joe Biden tries to do, which would disregard 14 years of evidence telling us Mitch McConnell blocks everything any Democratic President (or House!) tries to do just because he can. Hey, they called us fuckers! I call them evil; I think that's worse.

Finally, when confronted with the news that our soon-to-be-ex-President's future neighbors in Florida don't want him there and would cite the terms of his own 1993 post-bankruptcy legal maneuvering to keep him out, I couldn't blame you for being quite amused at watching him get some of his own -- after all, hasn't he been clogging up the courts with far more frivolous lawsuits the last few weeks? Sadly, I bet this story ends with him getting some crony in the state legislature to help him out -- with a law aimed at "letting people live where they want" regardless of the legal agreements they've made, perhaps? If so, that sure would be conservative of them.

Around the table: in which the "white supremacy" zombie shows less resilience than "voter fraud" zombies.

I'm not sure why this excellent article from Sonali Konatkar bears the title "How to Cure America's Vaccine Paranoia," since it doesn't really offer a cure, but it does describe pretty thoroughly how we got to be so paranoid about vaccines, and the root causes don't come exclusively from the right -- liberals hate big pharma, "liberal elites" "priz(e) natural remedies over chemical ones" even when doing that doesn't work, and "Black and brown communities" are wary due to "historical government-sanctioned medical abuse." There's hope in that Americans accept the idea of a COVID vaccine more than they did -- but then our soon-to-be-ex-President still has over a month to screw things up even more than he's already done.

From DJ Cashmere at Yes! magazine we learn about Shannon Foley Martinez, a former neo-Nazi who now helps white supremacists get out of the white supremacy gig. Chief insight, if you needed it, is that white supremacists typically have some kind of "unhealed trauma" in their past -- could be rape, could be abuse suffered at the hands of an adult. The article also reminds us how right-wing politicians threw a tantrum about the spectre of right-wing terrorism that helped delay any kind of federal law enforcement response to it for about a decade -- though I'm less willing to imagine that these politicians have any kind of "unhealed trauma" in their past, unless not creating drama counts as "trauma."

Wondering why Mitch McConnell has this jones for a "liability shield" for corporations that injure good Americans through their COVID-related negligence? Sarah Jones at New York magazine tries to explain. There's been no "wave" of COVID-related lawsuits, and they're actually hard to file (let alone win!) in the first place, but you know big corporate lobbyists, always looking for an opportunity to push their preferred policies on the populace, and this pandemic has been one big opportunity, and who loves big corporations more than Mitch McConnell, who has literally spent his entire career trying to make them more powerful? A lawsuit shield is not only unnecessary, but (in its potential deterrent effect) harmful to actual sufferers with actual grievances.

Yes, that was Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert wondering out loud why there were no Republican electors casting votes at Colorado's state capitol building on Monday when Colorado went for Mr. Biden by nine points, but no, she's not stupid -- she's hoping other people are either stupid or too rage-addled to think straight. Hey, it's worked for her so far. Democrats might reasonably counter her by running a candidate who looks like they might actually fight for their constituents, instead of a candidate who "fits the district" by "not supporting radical ideas," many of which, you'll have noticed by now, are popular ideas (and not particularly radical -- certainly nowhere near as radical as QAnon, which Ms. Boebert has both embraced and rather unconvincingly un-embraced).

The Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez finds our soon-to-be-ex-President "looking for fraud in all the wrong places," by which he means "voter fraud." Long story short: swing states have actually updated their voting machines -- and introduced paper trails -- while a lot of other (mostly red!) states still use electronic machines that don't create paper trails, and these are much more vulnerable to actual vote manipulation. "In other words," he writes, "voter anxiety about election security is being stoked in states that have behaved responsibly, while states that have been less responsive to expert advice get a free pass, because highlighting their shortcomings does nothing to advance a partisan narrative." (Also, paragraph 11 does the best job I've seen of debunking Dominion-related "vote switching" rubbish.)

Finally, speaking of stupid "voter fraud" tales, the Center for Media and Democracy spots the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) at the heart of efforts by Pennsylvania state legislators to overturn election results there. So the next time some corporate ALEC member claims they only affiliate with ALEC because of economic issues and not all those controversial issues, you could respond but you support overthrowing a democratically-elected government. If you're feeling ornery, you could also respond you are objectively anti-democracy.

Penny Rants for Sunday, December 13, 2020: special "everyone who sucked last year still sucks" edition!

From the "We Kinda Always Knew This, But It's Good to Have Confessions" file: a lengthy Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting investigation finds that Monsanto and BASF introduced their versions of dicamba knowing it would damage competitors' soybean crops, and they released these products because they wanted to eliminate their competitors. It gets better: Monsanto deliberately undertested their dicamba product (since they couldn't control dicamba's drift onto other farms), and when they did test it, they tested it under conditions that were nothing like what actual farmers face every day. BASF even told folks that their dicamba wouldn't necessarily be safe even by applying it strictly according to the label. In a sane and moral society, Monsanto and BASF would be so broken by lawsuits they'd go out of business. In this sick, immoral, and decadent society, however, Republicans claim these failures require more of the "free" market medicine that enabled them in the first place -- and Democrats remain so hypnotized by the "promise" of "technology" that they sit on their hands.

Another day, another reminder that a crap-ton of full-time workers at fast-food and retail corporations don't make enough money to stay off of federal assistance like food stamps and Medicaid, this time from a Government Accountability Office (or GAO) study. And here you thought if you work full-time, you should be able to provide for your family and guide your children to a better future -- let alone be able to provide for your family without having to rely on government assistance. Which you've already paid into with your taxes, so don't blame yourself or imagine you're some kind of leech; that's what they want you to think -- and right-wingers are so quick to say just get a better job like they're not busy trying to outsource all the good American jobs so that American executives can gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes. Oh, and here's the kicker: our GAO did this study before the pandemic hit; one can only imagine how much worse it is now, with over 14 million more uninsured and our U-1 unemployment rate still close to 7 percent (the more instructive U-6 rate, which counts part-timers who want to work full-time and unemployed folks who've given up, is 12 percent).

Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post lists every single Republican House Rep and state Attorney General who signed on to that ridiculous Texas lawsuit aiming to overturn our election, saying "they are laying the predicate for a contentious new phase of American democracy, if it can continue to be called that, in which election results -- after appropriate recounts and audits and certifications -- are no longer accepted. Instead, they merely open the door for a second phase of legal and political guerrilla warfare in which no tactic, no lie, no baseless claim is off-limits." Note well that these Republicans' loyalty to our soon-to-be-ex-President will most likely go unrewarded, not just because there'll always be a crazier right-winger to swordfight (just ask Scott Tipton!), but also because it only takes one deviation from Dear Leader's Holy Will to become a permanent outcast (just ask Bill Barr!). I did wonder -- because unlike these Republicans I do have the capacity for shame -- if we bore any blame for talking about Voter ID and Interstate Crosscheck, but no, we don't, not just because we always had evidence, but because we always said vote suppression happened before the vote.

Around the table: in which we, once again, contemplate Democratic cowardice and Republican malice.

Our House passes H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, by a 228-164 margin on Friday, so congratulations to you if you told your Reps to pass this bill. I feel compelled to point out that House Democratic leadership delayed a vote on this bill in October at least partly out of a fear that it would hurt their members' prospects for re-election -- and then Democrats lost 12 incumbents (so far!) anyway, which suggests yet again that maybe avoiding "tough" votes doesn't help Democrats on Election Day. Certainly they'd have done better running on their passage of a real COVID stimulus bill in May.

Vijay Prashad and Carlos Ron provide a better primer on recent Venezuelan politics than you're likely to get from our "liberal" media, which did openly aid and abet a coup against its democratically-elected leader in 2019, after all. Messrs. Prashad and Ron document the right-wing reaction against the popular will in Venezuela since its people elevated Mr. Chavez in 1998; said reaction includes broad swaths of right-wing politicians boycotting elections because they're "rigged," in case you wonder where our soon-to-be-ex-President got that idea (and in case you wonder how our right-wingers would react if someone like Bernie Sanders ever became our President).

You've heard how unlikely it is that a COVID vaccine will get to poorer nations? Well, Olivia Goldhill and Nicholas St. Fleur at STAT describe how, even within a privileged nation such as ours, some folks -- including professional athletes, politicians, banksters, and other wealthy folks -- have more privilege than others. A lot of it turns on the definition of "essential worker"; be ready when the folks who declare banksters "essential workers" say it's really for the bank tellers who meet people face-to-face every day. Also be ready for the numbnuts who wonder WHY DOEZ TEH SMOKURZ GETZ TEH VACCINEZ BEFOREZ MEZ!!!!!, as if smokers don't have bad lungs or fight addiction, and (more importantly) as if reducing the number of people who get COVID doesn't help everyone generally.

Ryan Grim at The Intercept gives us the good news that President-elect Biden "has chosen someone more progressive and less entrenched in Wall Street than the same official under Obama" for nearly every Cabinet position he's announced so far. And you can attribute that directly to the agitation of liberals! Some moderates no doubt say appointing more liberal folks to Cabinet positions just opens us up to Republican attacks, but I must respond: have your eyes been open these last few decades? Republicans attack everyone to their left as a Socialist Communist Nazi Kenyan Anti-Colonialist; the best counterattack is to do good works for the people, advertise those good works, and call the attacks what they are: desperate.

Ho hum, Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin accepted over $300,000 in CARES Act corporate welfare handouts -- and then three months later slammed folks who support "socialized medicine" and other "handouts" for "foster(ing) dependency." Presumably she thinks that in a "truly free market devoid of government lockdowns and other mandates," businesses could stay open, and if (even) more people died, I guess that'd just be the "genius" of the "free" market. But, ah, who pays her salary as Lieutenant Governor? The taxpayers of Idaho, that's who, meaning she's just as much a "socialist" as anyone else.

Finally, Isabelle Morrison at Yes! posits an alternative to the music streaming corporation Spotify, where artists earn less than half a penny for every song streamed: a musician co-op called Resonate, where artists make 45% of profits. The exploitation of popular musicians is, sadly, a very old story, as Charles Shaar Murray's bio of John Lee Hooker has lately reminded me, and the big artists' response to that exploitation (like Jay-Z's Tidal or, really, the Eagles' 2007 label-free album) really only work for other big artists. You want to make music on your own and get paid like you should? Count less on getting Jay-Z's attention and more on Resonate's "stream-to-own" model, which pays artists in nine plays what they'd need at least 150 plays to collect on Spotify.

Action: concerning voting rights, drug policy, and corporate power.

America's last journalist, Greg Palast, reports that the state of Georgia can now block voter registrations for folks who don't also have cars registered in the state. They claim they're just trying to prevent people from driving in from out of state and voting in Georgia, but we all know what they're really trying to do: they're trying to prevent seniors, students, and folks of color from voting, since those groups often vote Democrat. They're calling the rule change a "guidance" so that they don't actually break the law, and they may yet lose in court -- but if they do, it'll be after they deliver a big assist to the two Republicans running in January's Senate runoff races, which could well determine which party controls our Senate. Oh, and when Republicans control it, only bad things happen. You might want to call at least three of the five members of Georgia's state election board; here's where to find their phone numbers. (Click on the "State Election Board members" sidebar to bring up the relevant phone numbers.)

Meanwhile, our House plans a vote on H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act; it's no good arguing that since Mob Boss Mitch would never hold a vote on it that it's no use telling our House Reps to pass it. In fact, it's not only "no good" arguing that, it's bad arguing that -- we're supposed to set the agenda, not him. And the MORE Act would do a lot of good -- it would legalize pot, which at this point would be about as harmful as legalizing booze which we tried once and almost certainly won't try again. The MORE Act would also help good Americans expunge pot convictions from their records and would fund the rebuilding of communities unfairly targeted by the "war on drugs." Our government has always intended the "war on drugs" to be a way of keeping folks of color (among others) down -- but don't take my word for it; take former White House counsel John Ehrlichman's word for it! And then let the ACLU help you tell your Congressfolk to help correct decades of mistakes by passing the MORE act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President-elect Biden to avoid stacking his Administration with corporate cronies, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Remember: when we hear that Mr. Biden should want a cabinet "with diverse viewpoints," that phrase means "without liberals." And when we hear that we should just let Mr. Biden have his center-right cabinet lest we lose both Houses in the 2022 midterms, we should remember that these exact precise center-right moves actually cause Democrats to lose big in midterm elections. And we should also remember that telling Mr. Biden to keep the corporatists out of his cabinet isn't actually something only liberals say -- a lot of folks who voted for our soon-to-be-ex-President feel exactly the same about corporate power, and would like our leaders to do something about it. If Democrats want to appeal to them, then fighting corporate power might be the best way to do it. Not that they ever take my advice.

Around the table: in which we confront the horrible truth about our Supreme Court's idea of "religious" "freedom."

Laurence Tribe and Michael Dorf at USA Today put it best in re our Supreme Court's recent ruling on New York's COVID restrictions: "(f)or the Supreme Court’s new and extremely conservative majority, it seems, failure to sufficiently discriminate in favor of religion counts as discrimination against religion." This ruling -- which Chief Justice Roberts didn't join, at least partly because our Court had already ruled the other way in similar cases from California and Nevada -- signals that the five reactionary Supreme Court justices are ready to roll everything back, regardless of precedent, and certainly regardless of both law and order and the people's will. In other words, they're the judicial activists right-wingers have told us they've always feared. Odd how that happens.

Our soon-to-be-ex-President lost two more court cases in recent days: in one, a Third Circuit panel made up entirely of Republican-appointed judges, who wrote an opinion reading in part: "calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here." In the other, the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit brought by Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), who thinks he'll be Pennsylvania's next Governor or Senator, asking to throw out six million votes and let the reactionary state legislature pick the President. You'll notice, as the Court did, that he didn't bring this lawsuit alleging that Pennsylvania's mail-in balloting procedure was "unconstitutional" until over a year after the state legislature passed the law, which certainly opens Rep. Kelly up to charges of bad faith.

When I hear David Brooks talking about "The Rotting of the Republican Mind," I'm quick to point out that he's contributed to that rotting whether he believes it or not -- I mean, anyone who advocated for the invasion of Iraq, about as fact-free an argument as had been advanced up to that point, shares responsibility for that. But, to be frank, the "epistemological crisis" he describes is absolutely real, as I experience every time some Facebook friend advances some easily-refutable story about "voter fraud" and never stops advancing the story or admitting they're wrong even after being told repeatedly by friends and neighbors they're wrong, and I also agree that the internet isn't the cause and that the urban/rural divide is a real thing that urban smartypantses ain't helping. Of course, Mr. Brooks won't identify the real cause -- a Republican party that cares about nothing but power -- because, again, he'd have to implicate himself.

In a peripherally-related note, Congressional Republicans prepare to strut around about "deficits" now that their President lost re-election. They're so cocky now that they say talk about "getting back to our DNA" like they never abandoned it out of expedience (i.e., with the worst tax "reform" ever passed in America) nor re-embraced it out of expedience (i.e., now a Democrat's President). It'll get worse, of course, as our "liberal" media gets ready to treat their absurd arguments about the deficit with seriousness again. Democrats could neutralize this stratagem by simply answering every question about the deficit with "you didn't care about it when a Republican was President, so shut your yap," but I sure wouldn't lay money on that happening.

Uh oh: Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), still up for re-election in a Georgia runoff in January, has apparently lied at least once (per our Justice Department) that he hasn't acted on insider information while making stock trades. Add in his millions in donations from the bankster sector (how does he need that, being so rich?) and you have Lesson #334 in "Why You Don't Put Rich People in Office." Think Jon Ossoff will start running "so I wasn't lying after all!" ads? Nah -- that wouldn't be civil.

Finally, our soon-to-be-ex-President unfurls this flatugasm at a reporter: "You’re just a lightweight. Don’t talk to me that way. I’m the President of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the President that way." My answer to such remarks is always the same: try earning some damn respect.

Around the table: in which we tabulate a small amount of good news, and battle the bad news with intelligence and honor.

From Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos, here's the best analysis of how our soon-to-be-ex-President got way more votes than pollsters suggested he would. Long story short: folks who don't trust our government because it's actively hurt them (i.e., by enabling the outsourcing of their jobs) and who also feel profoundly isolated in their daily lives not only turn out in big numbers for our soon-to-be-ex-President and only for him, but don't particularly turn out for polls, either. Some of these folks (remember incels? Gosh!) are, as Mr. Moulitsas says, "just assholes in general," but I still think Bernie Sanders could have turned a lot of the others out for him in 2020.

Good news, everybody: our Army Corps of Engineers has denied a permit for the proposed Pebble Mine project in Alaska's Bristol Bay, citing the Clean Water Act. This project is so unpopular that even Scott Pruitt's EPA wouldn't sign off on it, and our soon-to-be-ex-President's elder son twittered against it -- and yet still executives were caught on tape saying they planned an even bigger project than what they put on their permit! Our Glorious Elites can't be trusted to do the right thing -- which is why we make them do the right thing.

Bad news, everybody: our soon-to-be-ex-President is rushing to gut as many clean air/clean water/worker safety protections as he can before we drag him kicking and screaming from office. Also, Democrats likely won't have the numbers in our Senate to pass "resolutions of disapproval" like the ones Republicans passed incessantly in 2017. But still, good news, everybody: given his regulatory changes' track record in court, we might expect that a lot of these changes will die there anyway.

I imagined it would happen but not this quickly: our soon-to-be-ex-President's daughter actually bragged about the drop in carbon emissions this year, hoping you wouldn't notice that a little thing called the COVID-19 pandemic -- you've heard about that, right? -- caused the drop. If she's secretly hoping to trap people into admitting that making crap and controlling climate change are "mutually exclusive propositions," just remember that back in 2015, the IAE found that carbon emissions dropped as world economies expanded, so you already know she's lying.

So, are some of your more right-leaning pals threatening to leave Facebook and Twitter for Parler, which bills itself as a free speech-friendly social network? Well, Rebecca Heilweil at Vox describes how Parler obviously intends to be a "haven" for right-wing speech, but is already taking steps to moderate content, much of which is noxious. Calling yourself a "town square" rather than a "publishing house" doesn't mean you're not a publishing house, and Lawrence Rosenthal's assessment -- that right-wingers have been "creat(ing) an alternate universe" at least since talk radio -- is quite illuminating. So I couldn't blame you for thinking Parler just wants to be a safe space for whiners who can't handle criticism.

Finally, America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, suggests that we thank Native Americans for Joe Biden's victory, since Native American votes may have delivered the electoral votes of Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada. I don't know if it's quite that cut-and-dried, but I'm pretty sure he's right that "(i)f you’re American Native, the chance your ballot will not be counted for some technical reason is approximately 1200% higher than if you’re White," and I do remember Mr. Bush winning New Mexico in 2004 as Native American voters apparently didn't vote for President in any significant number, which reminds me of the multitudinous folks who voted in Michigan but not for President in 2016, despite no other statewide race being on the ballot.

Around the table: in which we are reminded what we must do to "push Biden left."

Kevin A. Young at TruthOut instructs us that "To Push Biden Left, We Must Build Movements to Challenge His Corporate Backers." The article draws from Mr. Young's book, Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It; historical examples include the civil rights movement boycotting local businesses in the '60s (which prompted them to pressure politicians), while more recent examples include all the massive civil disobedience (and pressuring of investors) that have stopped a lot of fossil fuel projects cold. Conclusion: "the best way to get better electoral outcomes is, ironically, to build strong non-electoral movements." Certainly we'll do better better donating to union strike funds than to center-right Democratic candidates like Amy McGrath who'll just light your money on fire while losing big.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Amazon uses Pinkerton operatives to spy on their workers. Which proves, yet again, that giving corporations more money doesn't magically cause them to "create jobs," but it just gives them more money to light on fire desperately trying to keep their workers from organizing for better pay and better working conditions. (Also, too, Pinkerton? Like we're all in an episode of Deadwood or Boardwalk Empire!)

Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker talks with Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, who claims that our soon-to-be-ex-President's "voter fraud" lies are actually good for his channel. This Isaac Chotiner fellow is damn good at his job -- his interrogation of Mr. Ruddy is almost as good as his interrogation of that COVID "contrarian" from March. I can only add that Mr. Ruddy's claim that Newsmax gets "one million people per minute" is a pretty useless statistic if the million people who are watching Newsmax the next minute are, as I suspect, the same damn people. Why, I might even call it a scare number.

Can it possibly be true that our soon-to-be-ex-President really thinks his lawyers arguing so badly before numerous federal courts are "fools" who "are making him look bad"? I mean, that ship has long sailed, has it not? But when you realize that he thinks laws are for us "little people" and he also thinks any fecal argument can be polished into gold if you just inject more money and more red-faced yelling into it, you can sort of see how he can blame everyone but yourself. You may have more trouble seeing how people who call themselves conservative still give their devotion to a man who always chooses chaos over order.

Finally, Carl Bernstein, who helped take down Richard Nixon with his Watergate reporting at the Washington Post, says that no less than 21 Republican Senators have "repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for" our soon-to-be-ex-President, though only a few have expressed that "extreme contempt" publicly. Out of those 21 Senators, I see 12 up for re-election in 2022; I sincerely hope Democrats don't try to ratfuck those races by pointing out these Senators' infidelity to Dear Leader, because that wouldn't be very civil of them, now, would it? (Sadly, I fear I have just explained exactly why Democrats would never do such a thing.)

Around the table: in which liberals did not "almost lose" the election for the 443rd time.

Looks like I spoke too soon: the two Republican Wayne County (MI) officials who certified the vote totals have now changed their minds and want to "rescind" their votes. I should never have underestimated the right wing thirst for drama! And yes, when officials see the same "problems" in suburban districts as in urban ones but only want to certify the results in the suburban ones, that's drama, and it's not good drama, either. And they can sign all the affidavits they want, but they can't "rescind" their votes. Voting is like that.

When I hear that Joe Biden would rather not investigate our soon-to-be-ex-President's many alleged criminal acts, I sympathize to a point -- I do not wish the Biden Administration to be all about our soon-to-be-ex-President; I'd rather it be all about the American people. Still, when you smear feces all over our house, we should hold you accountable for it, through the Administration that replaces you. And I sure hope Mr. Biden isn't thinking of interfering with the state of New York's investigations into our soon-to-be-ex-President.

I was never a big "Green New Deal" fan -- it was a non-binding resolution, and I always preferred bills like the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, which would actually do the things the Green New Deal resolution merely aspired to do -- but turns out 92 out of 93 House Green New Deal co-sponsors won re-election in 2020. That includes three out of four in competitive House districts, with the fourth currently leading his race by almost seven points with about 85% of the vote counted. Who thinks "let's create jobs building renewable energy infrastructure" is a loser? Only the long-time Democratic pols who are used to losing.

A Government Accountability Office (or GAO) report documents how big corporations like Walmart and Amazon pay their employees so little that they require public assistance like food stamps and Medicaid -- as in nearly six million Medicaid enrollees and nearly five million food stamp recipients who worked full time. And there's Sen. Bernie Sanders telling Walmart to "get off welfare," which Democratic politicians still can't see is winning messaging that resonates with broad sectors of the electorate.

Another day, another Republican (this time former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, he sure was a big help winning Ohio, wasn't he?) claiming that "the far-left...almost cost" Joe Biden the 2020 election. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is exactly right in her response, of course (i.e., that the "far left" won Georgia -- Georgia! -- for Mr. Biden), and moderates lose elections not only because they don't excite people, but also because they don't fight for popular things like (hate to beat a dead horse) renewable energy and Medicare-for-All.

Finally, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that we can't "meet Nazis halfway." Yes, her feelings are pretty much my feelings, and I feel compelled to remind folks that you couldn't "meet halfway" with Tha Bush Mobb, either, once they said everyone who disagreed with their palpably stupid case for war with Iraq was a traitor and a weakling. And let's not try too hard to "understand" Nazi wannabes, either, as our "liberal" media outlets are inexplicably still trying to do -- hate doesn't require a whole lot of navel-gazing, and if Nazi wannabes have legitimate grievances, they sure ain't the grievances they're airing.

Action: concerning government staffing, Presidential documents, and the war on Yemen.

Joe Biden will be President on January 20 -- but if Republicans still control our Senate by then, they'll do their damnedest to prevent Mr. Biden from even staffing a functioning government. Hence MoveOn helps you tell President-elect Biden to reject any hostage-taking attempts by The One True and Real and Great American President Mitch McConnell and build a Cabinet that fulfills the mandate the people gave them. (They got a mandate from the people? Yes, they did, and here it is: "don't run the country like that guy did.") How do they fulfill this mandate in the face of Republican obstruction? By making recess appointments and by filling Cabinet positions on an acting basis, a process our soon-to-be-ex-President has abused, surely, but one Mr. Biden can use lawfully. And, really, it's well past time for Democratic politicians to learn that when you can't work with someone, you work around them. And we will do our part, as we have always done, to make our government work for us.

Meanwhile, Open the Government helps you tell our National Archives and Records Administration (or NARA) to make sure our soon-to-be-ex-President preserves all their Presidential records. Shame we have to tell our government to follow the law and do their job, but duty is duty. And you can just imagine this clown car setting records on fire, can't you? Particularly the ones that could expose our soon-to-be-ex-President to legal action? Yes, you can. Bad things happen in this White House! Seriously, though, this may sound a lot like inside baseball, but it's really not -- by taking action, we're not only forcing our government to obey the law, a fine end in itself, but we're also making them preserve our heritage, a heritage of transparency, diligence, and openness, which all remain part of our heritage, even if this particular Administration betrayed it. They act like these records belong to them, but they don't -- they belong to us.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our Administration's plan to sell over $23 billion worth of weapons and weapons systems to the United Arab Emirates for use in their evil war on Yemen, then Win Without War still helps you do that. By law, Congress gets to review such proposed sales for 30 days after our President informs them of the proposal, so we've now got a little over three weeks to tell our Congressfolk to reject it. As an aside, anyone else find it interesting that our soon-to-be-ex-President has proposed making this particular sale to the UAE and not Saudi Arabia? Why, it's almost like he's figured out that selling weapons to Saudi Arabia is unpopular in America or something. But selling these arms to the UAE will result in just as much murder, just as much mayhem, and just as much misery as selling it to the Saudis -- and the UAE will still be acting in complete lockstep with Saudi Arabia's intentions. So let's make this particular stratagem fail with a quickness.

Around the table: in which we contemplate, again, what "law and order" *should* look like.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy runs down some of the tax-related ballot initiatives from the 2020 election. Successes? Arizona voted to raise taxes on the rich to fund education and Louisiana voted to hike taxes on oil corporations through more realistic tax assessments. Failures? Illinois voters rejected a tax hike on richer folks, and California voters rejected better property tax assessments likely leading to higher property taxes and thus better education funding, both showing us that their reputation as liberal states is somewhat unearned. These results remind us, again, that we need to better persuade more economically-minded voters to vote for their own interests -- an effort mainstream Democrats won't help, with their arrogant belief that "just teaching everyone to write code" will solve all our problems.

Another big pharma corporation, Moderna, reports excellent results on its Phase 3 clinical trials. It's easier to store than Pfizer's vaccine (though that doesn't mean it's easy to store!), but Moderna only plans to offer 20 million doses in the U.S., which means, again, that the poor won't get it. These aren't the only two vaccines in progress, though, and the more corporations come forward with good news about their vaccines, the more like a conspiracy nut our President will sound when he whines that THEYZ DELAYEDZ TEH NEWZES TO PREVENTZ MYZ GLORIOUSEZ VICTORIEZ!!!!! (If you're the winner he claims to be, of course, you should overcome whatever anyone does to you pretty easily.)

Uh oh: Pfizer's CEO apparently dumped over $5 million in stock on the very day his corporation gave us the good news in re its COVID vaccine. I mean, I might have held onto that stock if the vaccine is as good as Pfizer says it is -- unless he knows something we don't! Which, of course, would be information he wouldn't be allowed to trade on! I'm old enough to remember when the appearance of immorality would be enough to stop someone from doing something immoral, but please, right-wingers, tell us again how immorality is all about birth control and gay marriage and transgender folk.

Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito sure did work up a lather in his speech before the Federalist Society last week, and his right-wing defenders can't say well nothing he said should come as a surprise to anyone who's attended his rulings, since they've always said their judges don't impose their worldviews on their rulings! I kid, of course -- right-wingers will say whatever they think will shut you up. Could this rant against gay marriage and mask-wearing and the "right" to trample on other people's rights as long as you invoke God's name be a sign that he's getting tired of it all and might retire? He is 71, after all, and maybe he won't want to wait until 2024.

Here's a surprising announcement: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer revokes a permit allowing Canadian corporation Enbridge's Line 5 fossil fuel pipelines to run underneath the straits connecting two of our Great Lakes, citing "persistent and incurable violations" by Enbridge. Now that's what law and order looks like -- if people think of law and order in terms of "protecting one-fifth of the world's fresh water" rather than "shooting unarmed black folks in the street when they brandish a cellphone," then my work on Earth will be done. And to those who would whine BUTZ WHEREZ WILLZ TEH ENURGEEZ COMEZ FROMZ!!!!, I'd say, hey, this is America, the can-do country, so just do it.

Finally, some other good news: U.S. District Court Judge invalidates our Department of Homeland Security's suspension of new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) applications, on the grounds that current acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf "was not lawfully serving as Acting Secretary of Homeland Security under the HSA (Homeland Security Act) when he issued the Wolf Memorandum." The judge also wrote that "(t)he court wishes the Government well in trying to find its way out of this self-made thicket," which is judgespeak for "how dare you waste my valuable time." (Though this may explain how Mr. Wolf found the "courage" to refuse to fire DHS's cybersecurity chief at our President's behest -- if Mr. Wolf is in his job illegally in the first place, then literally nothing he does means anything anyway.)

Seven thoughts about the election.

1) I wanted him humiliated, sure. But more than that, I wanted his entire philosophy humiliated. When I say "philosophy," I don't just mean the corporatism and the racism and the gluttony and the arrogant incompetence -- I mean the whining and the drama, the sense of having earned something you never came close to earning, the sense that you should nurse your deserved rejections as profound betrayals rather than wake-up calls, and (of course) the sense that your immediate pleasure is the literally the only thing that should matter to anyone and everyone. Thus I also wanted his votaries humiliated, but I suspect a lot of them will move on from our President more quickly than we're inclined to think. Trouble is they'll move on to things like QAnon and the Proud Boys and obsessing over antifa, just like they moved on to him from the "War on Terror" and the Tea Party and "Regulation Nation" and Blue Lives Matter and so many other outrages manufactured by the right.

How did we fail to humiliate this philosophy? Democrats, again, had a chance to nominate Bernie Sanders, with his popular agenda and incorrigible manner, but settled, again, this time for Joe Biden. Democrats aren't entirely to blame, of course -- plenty of Republicans professed displeasure with our President's obnoxiousness, etc., but were happy to reward him with their vote for all those judges and tax cuts. And Republicans still have a very sophisticated vote suppression operation; Democrats' only strategy against it (though, hey, at least this time they had one!) was to turn out every conceivable vote, though a hammer only does so much against a machine. And Republicans have more than one machine: they also have their ancient con of telling folks they must fend for themselves without their government's help and hey wouldn't everything be easier if black folks didn't get all these "goodies"? It's an easy argument to win -- our government is us, and the main "goody" black folks get is the higher likelihood of getting shot by police for brandishing a cellphone -- but a harder argument to kill.

So why do such arguments persist? Folks can't hold everything in their head at once even under ideal conditions, but we don't even have "ideal conditions," including the ability to provide for a family of four on a single income and the expectation that your children will do better than you thanks to inexpensive higher ed. As a friend of mine often says, we don't agree on what the truth is anymore, and we don't even agree on how we find truth anymore. But we've also become a people who don't shame each other for their bad ideas anymore -- people say "everyone has the right to an opinion" as if merely having an opinion also entitles them to respect for that opinion, which it certainly does not. Now, some folks who feel the same way I do about shaming blame "tolerance" and "political correctness" for that, but they're wrong -- we shouldn't shame people for being transgender or for calling out racism, but we should shame them for lying, for stealing, for arrogance, for ignorance, for cowardice, for gluttony, for unreliability, for all manner of corruption both earthly and spiritual. Before we can reconcile with our wayward countryfolk, they have to be ashamed of what they've done, so we better re-learn the art of shaming, not least because shame is one of the ways civilized people take care of problems so that they don't shoot each other over them.

2) Democrats will likely lose about a dozen House seats, though they'll still retain their majority, so of course center-right Democrats have been whining that all these liberal demands drove away moderate voters and cost them seats! In a land where Medicare-for-All polls about as well in rural areas as it does anywhere else, they might consider whether that all that talk about Medicare-for-All (just as a for-example) might have driven turnout up for Democrats, even in their districts! Naturally they overlook all the real reasons they lost seats: that our President was pretty much the opposite of the "drag" on down-ballot races pollsters said he'd be, and that when a political party wins back seats, they tend to win them back from the other party's more moderate members. Also, too, they're completely wrong about "liberal demands." The six Democratic House Reps who represent Republican-majority districts and who have also co-sponsored Medicare-for-All legislation in the House? They all won on Election Day. There's a solution in there, somewhere.

3) Theresa Greenfield, despite her against-the-odds success in the business world, lost the Iowa Senate race to incumbent Joni Ernst rather decisively. Cal Cunningham proved that infidelity still matters in elections (admittedly a comforting thought!) by losing to Thom Tillis in North Carolina, whose next 50% showing in a Senate race will be his first. Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell by 20 points in Kentucky despite being a soldier once and you know Republicans like soldiers, right?, while Mary Hegar lost by over 10 to John Cornyn in Texas, same notation. Want to know what else all these folks have in common? They've all been unsuccessful candidates before! Amy McGrath and Mary Hegar lost House races in 2018, Ms. Greenfield couldn't get into the Iowa 3rd district primary that year after her campaign manager forged signatures, and Mr. Cunningham lost a Senate primary in 2010, which, admittedly, was 823 years ago. Your star recruits, ladies and gentlemen!

No use complaining that Democrats didn't have better options, because of course they did. Charles Booker, who damn near upset Ms. McGrath in the primary, would have been the better candidate against Mitch McConnell; maybe in 2022, when Rand Paul is up, we can run the experiment my way and see if fighting racial injustice plays well in the state where Breonna Taylor died. North Carolina state Sen. Erica Smith would have been vastly preferable to Mr. Cunningham, and guess what? An open seat looms there in 2022 as well. Royce West (among others!) might have better denied Mr. Cornyn re-election than the woman who made a good three-minute ad once. And you can't tell me there are no liberal economic populists in Iowa, though you can tell me that Democratic pols don't bother looking for them. Meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Cori Bush have, over the last two cycles, knocked off well-established Democrats to win their primaries. Democratic leadership should ask them how to win, maybe?

4) Barring a pair of victories in the two January runoffs in Georgia, Mitch McConnell will lead a Republican majority in the Senate which will be able to block Joe Biden's Cabinet nominees pretty much at will. This is a given, even if Mr. Biden thinks his bipartisan mojo is better than everyone else's (spoiler alert: it's not). Our President-elect has, as far as I can see, three options: 1) cut deals with Mr. McConnell, which, like, no, because you don't cut deals with evil; 2) run to Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney to make deals, which, like, also no, because they'll be tools of Mr. McConnell; or 3) nominate the best people for the various Cabinet jobs, watch them get rejected, and then take a page from our current President's playbook and name them acting Cabinet secretaries. By law, Mr. Biden will have to replace all of them within a few months, but nobody should care about the names; everyone should care if they do good works.

5) I gave $200 to Doug Jones's re-election campaign. This is my first campaign donation in eight years, and I'm proud of it. Now, Doug Jones was no liberal as a Senator, but he was the guy who put two of the Birmingham bombers in jail, and if you do that, you're a damn superhero and of course you should be Senator. Naturally, Alabama voters turned Mr. Jones out in favor of a college football coach who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. If that frees up Mr. Jones for Attorney General in a Biden Administration, I suppose I'll deal.

6) Races generally seemed off two or three points from polls in 2016, but this year they seemed five or six points off -- partly because, as I've said, our current President actually boosted turnout down-ballot rather than trampled it -- so now Frank Luntz has said that polling is dead, and all I can say is: not a moment too soon! Of course Mr. Luntz doesn't study public opinion so much as try to shape it in his preferred direction, but that's not even the best reason the Death of the Poll would be a good thing -- all that polling about candidates just induces us to be spectators in our democracy, not actors. Best we help shape public opinion by, you know, communicating with each other and persuading each other, rather than looking around to see which egghead might best have their finger to the wind.

7) Joe Biden has repeatedly said that our current President, and the shit he's stirred up, doesn't represent "who we are." But has the unexpected closeness of this election told us that this is, in fact, who we are? I sympathize with folks who say so. But I won't. I've seen folks at their best and at their worst, and I remain convinced that, as Dr. King said, the arc of history bends toward justice, even though it doesn't look like an arc from underneath so much as a flat plank. And ultimately, in America, "who we are" is aspiration as well as description, and though I don't have the gifts to help about a quarter of this electorate, we certainly don't meet our aspirations in America by assuming we're innately corrupt and irredeemable as a people. So though so many folks I love will drink from that cup, I won't.

Around the table: from corporate welfare to right-wing drama.

Remember that big LED manufacturing plant Foxconn was supposed to build in Wisconsin after securing $3 billion in corporate welfare? Well, three years later, there's no factory and no jobs, and it sure doesn't seem likely there ever will be. The folks who did work there for a time expressed confusion (and worse!) about exactly what they were doing there; the answer, of course, is that they were all props for a big corporation to suck out billions in taxpayer money. Thus another reminder that former Gov. Scott Walker was always about the corporate welfare and nothing else.

We learn "Why These Voters Rejected Hillary Clinton but Are Backing Joe Biden": because he has a penis! I mean, voters who made those choices won't say that, and I wouldn't even posit that they're so sexist they'd notice it in other people, but yeah, pretty much -- ZOMG TEH 20 YEARZ OFZ TEH ATTACKZ!!!! I don't buy, because Republicans act like all their opponents are the anti-Christ anymore. I've heard some of our President's ads attacking Hillary Clinton, and all I can say is you just can't get her name out your mouth, can you?

Our President is going on a regulation-killing spree just in case he loses in November. A lot of these regulatory rollbacks will die in court, like most of his other ones, since he's doing them even faster than usual, but you can't necessarily tell when that'll be (or which ones). And if Democrats sweep back into power in the Senate and the White House, will they use the "resolution of disapproval" process to repeal these regulatory abuses -- or will they prize "civility" over fighting for the American people? We know what the pattern's been.

Upon learning that Steve Bannon told an Australian newspaper that if our President loses in 2020, he'll be back in 2024, my immediate response is well, no shit, Sherlock. But I wouldn't retort to this statement with sure, he will, if he's not in jail! People like our President generally don't wind up in jail, not even when they punch a cop. (As an aside, Mr. Bannon is sure working this our-President-can't-lose angle pretty vigorously, which may explain why no one asked his opinion about anything before 2016.)

Finally, when we hear that the writer of that "smoking gun" New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop didn't want his byline on it and also that Fox News passed on the story first apparently because they didn't quite believe it, we must remember that the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation owns both the Post and Fox News, so more likely Mr. Murdoch or someone else high-up decided which news organ would take the hit, so as to perpetuate the absurd notion that Republicans disagree with each other a lot about important stuff. Remember, folks: it's not just drama, it's bad drama.

Around the table: in which politics continues to bring out the worst in some people.

Scientists from Georgetown University and the University of Warwick find the cost of climate change is actually considerably higher than previously thought. Models accounting for average rising temperatures count the cost in the many trillions of dollars over the next few centuries, but a model accounting for fluctuations in temperatures adds to that cost. I will say that even spending $50 trillion over the next 200 years is not something our politicians should be afraid to do, and not just because the alternative may well be annihilation.

Peter Montague at TruthOut reminds us that our President is "trying to scare (us) with the socialism boogeyman." People call you a "socialist" when they can't win the argument on the merits, but they also must hide from themselves all the socialism they take part in. Socialism isn't merely about shopping at Ace Hardware instead of Home Depot or dumping your bankster for a credit union -- when you drive a road, put out the trash, call the fire department, or head out to the local park, you're practicing socialism yourself.

Taliban leader says he hopes our President wins re-election so that he'll withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, though that's an aim we can accomplish without this particular President's involvement. Remember when right-wingers read Osama bin Laden's remarks right before the 2004 election as an "endorsement" of John Kerry even though the plain text said they weren't? Right now all those idiots are either silent or sounding like even bigger idiots trying to explain how "we hope he will win the election" somehow means the opposite of what it says.

Speaking of right-wing idiots, QAnon-supporting U.S. House candidate Marjorie Greene gave her own campaign nearly half a million bucks after getting a loan through the CARES Act's notorious Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP). And though of course she's not the only one -- Darrell Issa, who used to be the richest man in Congress, got a PPP loan himself! -- she is the only one whose nominal Democratic opponent dropped out of the race a few months ago because he decided to move out of the district, an administrative failure that makes you wonder how Democrats ever win races at all.

Commerce Township (MI) employee needs 13 stitches on his fingers after trying to remove a yard sign supporting our President with razor blades on its edges. The sign was too close to the road, thus violating a town ordinance, The homeowner said she had several yard signs "stolen" (did she put the others too close to the road, too?) but of course knew nothing about the razor blades! That just means it can get worse: one day soon a Presidential votary will happily confess that he electrified his yard sign, and not too long from now someone will confess to something similar after it harms a child or a pet.

Finally, Barron County (MI) sheriff says the recent kidnapping plot against Gov. Whitmer could well have been an attempt at a citizen's arrest. For what crime? For "treason," per the would-be kidnappers, but more likely for making them wear face masks or being a Democrat or not making them feel like they're the only people in the world who mean a damn. We have to stop coddling these diaper-loaded brats even if they're armed and even if some of our police officers seem awfully sympathetic to them. Shame still works in America, if we have the guts to do it.

Action: concerning redistricting, clean water, and saner drug policy.

First, some good news for Pennsylvania residents: SB 1242, the Legislative and Congressional Redistricting Act (or LACRA), passed out of the Senate State Government Committee last week, and while Pennsylvania's state legislators have managed to get rid of the independent citizens' commission that characterized the previous redistricting bills we've championed here, LACRA still accomplishes a lot of what those bills would have done: Sec. 504, for example, would prevent redistricting plans from favoring particular incumbents, candidates, or political parties, while Sec. 703 (a) would make it substantially harder for any redrawn districts to divide towns and counties up in the Rorschach blot-districts that blighted our state for so long. Sadly, the House version of LACRA, HB 2638, hasn't even received a committee vote yet. Hence Fair Districts PA helps you tell Senate Majority Leader Corman to schedule a full Senate vote on LACRA, tell House State Government Committee Chair Everett to hold a committee vote on HB 2638, and tell House Speaker Cutler to hold a full House vote on HB 2638. Each of those links contains the officials' phone numbers, so feel free to call them, too.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund lead pipe replacement. Getting rid of the lead service pipes that still plague over nine million American homes would do a lot of good things -- like getting the lead out of our drinking water so that children don't suffer brain damage, or like creating jobs for the workers who would change out those lead pipes, or like making it easier to accomplish all the other necessary infrastructure improvements we'll need to make over the next few years. I know, I know, doing it with tax money is "communism" or something, except, of course, that it's not -- it's good Americans chipping in for a better future for all of us. The pipes will pay for themselves in time, not just from reduced health care costs associated with lead in our drinking water, but also in the healthier, more accomplished human beings we'll have doing great things in America once they're no longer saddled with brain damage through no fault of their own. And not for nothing, but folks in low-income areas deserve clean water just as much as the rest of us. If we didn't believe that, how could we look ourselves in the mirror?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. Our House was all set to vote on this bill -- which would essentially legalize pot and fund help for communities ravaged by war-on-drugs policing -- and then decided not to vote on it. Why? Because they were afraid that Republicans would go all nyah-nyah on them for passing that instead of, say, a COVID-19 relief bill. Republicans will go all nyah-nyah on you for anything, of course -- because what else can you do when you can't win arguments on the merits? -- and the House did pass a COVID-19 relief bill over four months ago, so there comes a time when you have to, you know, adult up. And if House Democrats won't do it, we will have to do it for them, by reminding them that the time to do the right thing is always now and the MORE Act is actually rather popular. So, yeah, let's do that.

Around the table: in which we confront yet another (admittedly narrow) path to re-election for our President.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passes at the age of 87. I'm not sure I'd describe her as a "cautious" or "moderate" judge (though The Guardian ain't the only ones doing so), not just because judges aren't firebrands by temperament or job description, but also because she fought sexism and discrimination wherever she saw it long before it was popular, founding the ACLU's Women's Rights Project over 30 years before becoming the dean of our Supreme Court's liberal wing. May her memory be a blessing.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, warns that our President could "win" re-election -- in the event of massive violent right-wing "protests" that prevent states from counting all the votes -- by invoking the 12th Amendment and throwing the election to the House. The House would vote for President by state under the 12th Amendment, and since Republicans hold majorities in 26 states even though Democrats have a 40-seat majority overall, our President would win. Mr. Palast's solution? Massive in-person day-of-election voting no matter how many Proud Boys show up, so as to make the results unmistakeable.

House Democrats have apparently decided to delay a vote on the MORE Act, a bill that would essentially legalize pot, until after the election -- supposedly to concentrate on a COVID-19 relief bill, even though they passed one of those (and a good one) in May and you have to wonder why haven't shouted that from the rooftops nearly enough, let alone slam Mob Boss Mitch for trying to pass a really crappy relief bill instead. This delay is cowardice, and stupid cowardice at that, since polls tell us pot legalization is actually popular. Democrats: so smart, they're stupid.

Upon learning that our Administration has threatened to defund Connecticut schools for participating in a trans-friendly athletic conference, I wonder how they would expect to win a lawsuit against such a thing, since such funding deprivation would affect all Connecticut students, but then I remember that a) his votaries think merely making the threat is "doing something" and b) folks can't sue them for every criminal act they perpetrate. About a) they're likely correct; about b) they're likely wrong, though all the bad judges they're putting in our federal courts might eventually change that.

In a peripherally-related note, our President says a COVID-19 vaccine will go out "immediately" to the public not because he really thinks that, but so people will say he "did something." A lot of his votaries won't even notice if they don't see a vaccine three days before Election Day -- which, given that it does actually take time to ensure a potential vaccine doesn't actually just shoot poison, seems far more likely than not. No matter, though -- if a vaccine doesn't come out "quickly enough," our President will just whine about how this is just more evidence that everyone's out to get him, which, strangely, doesn't seem offend all the "tough guys" who love him.

Finally, our President relates an MSNBC anchor getting shot by police at a protest thusly: "He got hit in the knee with a canister of tear gas and he went down. He was down. 'My knee, my knee.' Nobody cared, these guys didn’t care, they moved him aside. And they just walked right through...It was the most beautiful thing. No, because after we take all that crap for weeks and weeks, and you finally see men get up there and go right through them, wasn’t it really a beautiful sight? It’s called law and order." Ugh, first off: other people's suffering is not "beautiful"! Second, what "crap" did you take? Protesting police brutality hurts your fee-fees? Third, what a childish notion of "law and order" this is, one that merely worships raw power, and one our President would never, ever imagine includes putting polluters or banksters in jail.

Action: concerning corporate immunity, Democrat weakness, and abortion.

We've talked about what a good COVID-19 relief bill should and shouldn't have, but one item on the Republican wish list requires more scrutiny: immunity for corporations from lawsuits after they force their workers back to work before it's safe or otherwise expose them and their customers to COVID-19. Because when Mitch McConnell contemplates this pandemic, his first thought, apparently, isn't "help the people" but HELPZ TEH CORPORASHUNZ!!!!!! Seriously, the proposal they've unveiled looks calculated to crash and burn in negotiations with Democrats -- except these are Democrats we're talking about, who think "bipartisanship" is all about giving in to Republicans. If we raise our voices, though, they won't have any choice but to follow us -- see how our President's pet payroll tax cuts are already off the table? We did that. Hence a group of good government groups helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject corporate immunity in any future COVID-19 relief bill.

Speaking of weakling Democrats pre-emptively conceding to Republicans, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said earlier this week that his party could be flexible on the exact amount of the unemployment benefit extension, saying "it's not $600 or bust." And they wonder why they keep getting rolled! Look, here's Negotiation 101: ask for more than you want, and you increase the chances of getting what you want. Republicans understand this well enough; it's one reason they've been able to push the center ever further right in America. Really, everyone understands this -- except for Democrats. Unless, of course, they're merely pretending to be stupid so we don't think they're evil. In any case, one thing they do understand is a complete inability to call their big donors because we've tied up their phone lines telling them to work for us on this issue. Toward that end, you can find Rep. Hoyer's contact numbers here. Hell, I'd demand $1,000 a month in extra benefits for the unemployed just because I'm so damn sick of Democrat weakness.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. You no doubt recall the multitudinous anti-abortion laws states have passed over the last decade, ranging from forcing women to get ultrasounds before getting abortions to closing down abortion clinics that don't meet absurd health "standards." Our Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's clinic closure law, but not with any particular enthusiasm for women's rights -- Chief Justice Roberts all but said the decision came down to precedent and little else. But abortion is a right, and laws seeking to derail women from exercising that right are simply wrong. And I'd err on the side of caution when considering when and whether a fetus is a person -- but I don't get to dictate to others how they ought to feel about that, and frankly I feel even worse about turning women into breeders, which outlawing abortion will do.

Action: concerning COVID-19 relief legislation.

We begin this week by calling our Senators and telling them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. All our media's been talking about lately was Republicans trying (and failing) to put together a new COVID-19 stimulus/relief bill, but the House has already passed one -- one that would fund our Post Office, fund testing and tracing, fund states and localities, expand working family tax cuts, repeal a tax-cut-for-the-rich, and issue another round of bigger stimulus checks -- so all that needs to happen, really, is for our Senate to pass the HEROES Act and our President to sign it. Really, there is no need for all this drama about giving lawsuit immunity to corporations that make people sick, or exactly which tool they'll use to destroy Social Security under the pandemic's cover. The HEROES Act already does a lot of good, and the only reason the Senate hasn't passed it is because, in Mob Boss Mitch's immortal words, "I get to decide what we vote on." I'm old enough to remember when Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and still allowed votes on dumb Republican ideas. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

Speaking of Social Security: while you have your Senators on the phone, make sure you tell them that Mitt Romney's notorious TRUST Act -- which would allow Congress to cut your Social Security benefits without all that pesky debate, or, as Sen. Ernst put it, "behind closed doors" -- should not be in any COVID-19 relief bill. (The Alliance for Retired Americans also provides a petition to sign.) Yes, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) has lately said the TRUST Act will be in the Republican relief proposal, and why? Because cutting Social Security benefits is hugely unpopular and can only be done in an "emergency" -- and any emergency, including a pandemic, will do. Can we assume Democrats will say no to the inclusion of the TRUST Act in any relief bill? We can trust that they'll make noise about it, certainly -- but we cannot trust that they won't cave to the "pressure" of "doing something." Not unless we make it impossible for them to cave, that is. I'm pretty sure that's all that's kept Democrats from caving so far.

Of course, passing the HEROES Act doesn't obligate us to shut up about even better ideas, and so Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to provide $2,000 a month to every adult and $1,000 to every child, per month, until the pandemic is over. Most civilized nations are doing more than we are -- basically, we've given Americans single $1,200 checks and funneled hundreds of billions of dollars into corporate coffers. This proposal resembles proposals from Sen. Sanders and Rep. Waters; this one would cost roughly $3.25 trillion over four months, and how will the haters respond? By saying it would increase the deficit? Boy, has that ship sailed! Certainly no one can claim "concern" about the deficit if they supported the 2017 tax "reform," not to mention the $3 trillion-plus CARES Act that just passed in March -- and such folks should support a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, a billionaire wealth tax, and an expanded Estate Tax. You very likely already know why they don't.

And besides his evil payroll tax cut, what has our President insisted upon for the next COVID-19 relief bill? That it zero out federal funding for COVID-19 testing, of course! Gosh, it's like he's trying to make everything worse, which (regardless of our President's stated admiration for Richard Nixon) is straight out of the George W. Bush playbook: when you've screwed up, divert attention from it by doing something even more horrible. Admittedly this President has taken that stratagem to a whole new level, but I remember how Tha Bush Mobb operated, even if today's right-wingers pretend they don't. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to include COVID-19 testing and tracing in the next coronavirus relief bill. Yes, the HEROES Act already has it, but a lot of time we need to tell them the same thing over and over again in a slightly different manner before they finally get it. And as I've already suggested, those who want to do the right thing but lack courage need the cover of massive public outcry.

Action: concerning the coronavirus pandemic.

So how do we start fighting the good fight this week? We start by calling our Reps and Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and telling them that job one for them in these times is containing the damn coronavirus pandemic. Seriously, if they can't stop pandemics from killing us, then why are they even there? More specifically, we should demand that this Administration make tests widely available to all Americans now -- not six weeks from now because things like that are hard to do, but now because now is what we need. Then we demand that this Administration help our health care system withstand the onslaught of cases we expect it's going to get; if our government can't help build enough ventilators to help coronavirus victims breathe, then, again, why is it even there? Then we demand (and this is important) that our government assist people with their purported "stimulus" bill, not corporations -- as currently constructed, the McConnell "stimulus" plan is little more than a bailout bill. Sen. Sanders's proposal of paying $2,000 per household per month during the crisis would be a much better starting point for negotiations than the McConnell bailout bill -- people, as you know, will spend money to keep ur economy going, while corporations will just hoard whatever they get.

A lot of folks on both the left and right think the coronavirus pandemic means the end of this Presidency. But I wouldn't lay money on that if I were you. It's true that, as many have said, our President can't just insult the coronavirus into submission on Twitter, but we should consider a few other things about this situation -- that our President thrives on chaos, that our "social distancing" response to the pandemic threatens to harden into an America divided physically as well as politically, and that our President's likely opponent this November is a man the punditry have dubbed "electable" apparently because he's been deeply complicit in virtually all the things Our Glorious Elites have done wrong over the last half-century. For Our Glorious Elites, as you know, every crisis is an opportunity -- not an opportunity to make a better world out of the shell of the old, of course, but merely an opportunity to further entrench themselves in power. They want you to think you can't count on anyone but them to get us through tough times. And if we're not careful, they might actually succeed in convincing us of that this time.

So, in the face of a pandemic like most of us have never experienced, and the almost certain economic Armageddon that'll result, what has our President done in the last week? Well, he's lied about all the stupid things he said and did to put us in this position, plus he's told Congress to "go big" on the "stimulus" bill about to emerge, and what do you know? His poll numbers have dramatically improved -- per a ABC News/Ipsos poll, well over half of Americans now think he's doing a good job managing the crisis, up some 10 points from the previous week. Also, our President has been pumping the old Nobody Could Have Predicted meme from Tha Bush Mobb years, and since the man lies so much that his lies (and the truth) become that much harder to track, we could go into an election not only with our economy in a recession, but a recession people don't blame him for causing. As a politician, how could you do better than that -- to have people pulling for you to get us all through the catastrophe you created? And to think George W. Bush and Scott Walker thought they had that act down!

Of course, in times like these, we would turn to each other for sustenance and strength. But what is the message we're hearing from everyone, even folks we trust? That we should be apart from each other in these times so we don't kill each other! I don't think Our Glorious Elites planned it this way -- too many folks would need to keep quiet about a conspiracy that big -- but it sure works this way. Now I don't mean to assert that you should ignore the six-feet rule or go shake 10,000 hands in a puerile act of defiance. But note well that over a dozen states have already postponed their Democratic Presidential primaries; why wouldn't our government try to postpone the national election, particularly if our President thinks he might lose? And it goes beyond voting -- folks won't be able to take to the streets in protest of some egregious action by our government, out of fear of dying, or fear of transgressing a local government edict. Even as we speak, our Justice Department is trying to back-door its way into getting indefinite detention powers using the fact that courts won't be open (or open as much). When we can't take to the streets, that's when we should fear our government the most.

But then, perhaps you are hoping we can all get through this thing and then just elect a Democrat President in November. I have repeatedly cautioned against hopes such as these, and not merely because they'd be beside the point in a properly-functioning democracy, but it looks like our President's opponent will be former Vice President Joe Biden, who has nothing to recommend him other than an occasionally coarse way of speaking that has fooled many folks into thinking he's a straight-talker. In properly assessing his role in screwing our world up, we don't have to go back as far as his sucking up to segregationists in the '70s or his tough-on-crime posturing all through the following decades -- we need only remember that as Vice President he signed on to giving our economy back to the banksters after the banksters nearly destroyed it, and that as President he's already spelled out his made-up reasons for not signing a Medicare-for-All bill if it should pass. Many folks would tell you our President won in 2016 because he blew his opponent's faults way out of proportion. But how can such a stratagem even succeed in the first place? Only when said opponent gives you no reason to vote for them other than the hope that they'll be less of an ogre. And that's going to be Joe Biden's pitch just as it was Hillary Clinton's pitch, and in a country where too many Americans can't make their bills every month, where surprise medical bills and ballooning college costs cripple our future for no damn good reason, where nearly half of us can't even cough up $400 in an emergency, why should that pitch work this time?

Right about now I feel compelled to say that I hope I'm wrong about most of what I've said in the previous four paragraphs, and that I don't say these things to demoralize you, but so you'll be ready for all the future battles we'll have to fight. And we need to be able to imagine a world where this President's still here a year from now -- but, more importantly, we need to be able to imagine a world where that doesn't matter. If we speak out today about how our government should handle this pandemic, in more or less the manner I prescribed in the first paragraph, we'll be that much closer to being able to imagine a world in which we matter more than Our Glorious Elites do. If we can imagine that world, we can make that world -- but if we let Our Glorious Elites divide us, and if we let ourselves caught up in the drama and the horserace, then we can't even imagine that world, let alone make a new one.

Good luck, and God bless.

Around the table: this time with the good news at the end!

Our Administration proposes rolling back "burdensome" regulation mandating that all nursing homes have at least one infection control specialist on staff. Instead, nursing homes would be allowed to have such specialists on-site for a "sufficient" time, whatever that is. Naturally, nursing home CEOs have pressed for this rule change, meaning, I presume, that they could use contract employees instead of actually hiring someone who would require health insurance and other benefits. But this sure is a hell of a corporate welfare handout to contemplate in the middle of a pandemic. Infections claim some 380,000 lives at nursing homes annually, and one nursing home in Washington state has lately lost 13 residents to the coronavirus. So, hella great timing, Administration! (And no, New York Times business page, the regulatory changes won't save the "industry" money; it'll save executives money. It's 2020; learn the damn difference.)

Half a dozen witnesses claim that our President bribed (via middlemen) New York City tax assessors to cut his buildings' taxes during the '80s and '90s. And a spokeshack for our President's businesses even says, out loud, that our President's businesses were "a victim of the scandal"! You see, self-pity is bad for you and me, but it's OK for our betters. Don't hold out hope that Mr. Biden will run campaign ads about this particular corruption, though our President will not STFU about Mr. Biden's brother or son for the next eight months. At least Mr. Biden will have time to polish his civility trophy when he loses.

Speaking of the Democrats' next losing Presidential candidate, Mr. Biden now won't commit to signing a Medicare-for-All bill if it gets through Congress -- because it might "delay() providing the security and the certainty of healthcare being available now." But if he'd read the bill currently before Congress -- reading being, as we know, a good way of understanding issues as they actually exist -- he'd know that Medicare would take four years to cover everyone, giving all those supposedly best-and-brightest health insurance CEOs ample time to wind things down, and giving our government ample time to ensure no one suffers a lapse in insurance. Once that's pointed out to him, I guess he'll pivot back to TEH MEDICAREZ FOR ALLZ WILL BUSTZ ALL TEH BUDGETZ!!!!, although, of course, that's also a load of horsedoodle. (Personal to those who would tell me "don't criticize Joe Biden or you'll cause him to lose": if he wanted to win this election, he shouldn't have spent the last 50 years sucking up to right-wingers.)

Lee Fang at The Intercept notes that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has taken paid sick leave from his job as he self-quarantines from possible coronavirus infection -- but of course championed legislation in Florida's legislature that would have prevented counties and municipalities from enacting their own paid sick leave legislation! I guess he figures he "earned" it and you haven't, but, really, anyone can win an election -- the ability to be the biggest asshole in the room not actually being a particularly useful skill -- and anyway it's not so much about whether you can "earn" it as about whether the rest of America deserves to catch what you've got because you couldn't take a day off from work.

Finally, because we deserve some good news, U.S. District Court judge issues an injunction against our President's food stamp rollback, which would prevent the rollback from taking effect until various other lawsuits against the rollback make their way through our courts. The ruling is getting a lot of ink for citing the coronavirus pandemic as a bad time to cut food stamps, which it is, but the meat of the ruling is (get your surprised face ready) that the USDA violated the Administrative Procedures Act by failing to take heed of public comments opposing the rollback, which is, as you know, a line of reasoning Chief Justice Roberts has already accepted in his ruling striking down the Census's proposed citizenship question. I would like to put it past him to simply ignore evidence.

Around the table: Democrats charge headlong into oblivion! And other horrible truths.

From the "Even More Appalling Than I Thought" file: Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs discourse at considerable length about why a Joe Biden nomination would be absolutely disastrous for the Democratic party and for America. Long story short: Mr. Biden has spent almost a half century capitulating to Republicans, and once our President pretends to be a populist again and points out all the times Mr. Biden has disappointed us, then what, exactly, will Mr. Biden do? Also, too, Bernie Sanders is totally electable, for the 219th time. If we all "get behind" Mr. Biden because the alternative is a dramatic bully, what do we get? Another eight or 16 or 24 years of malicious Republicans kicking spineless Democrats in the teeth, and as I've said many times, we need to break that wheel.

Greg Palast at The Guardian notes that California has been making independent voters jump through hoops just to vote for their choice in the Democratic Presidential primary, which could have cost Sen. Sanders over half a million votes (by Mr. Palast's count). Yes, you can vote in a party's primary if you're a California independent, but you actually had to tell them you intended to do so by responding to a postcard that looks pretty much like a piece of junk mail. Ask all those disenfranchised Ohio voters about that! Also, too, two-hour wait times at USC and three-hour wait times at UCLA? If you're wondering why young folks and independents "aren't turning out" for Mr. Sanders, you may want to consider the possibility that governments are preventing them from voting.

New Zealander visits social justice movements in 14 cities and describes "four things that struck me" about them: social welfare programs encourage folks to take risks, racist subjugation in America has virtually obliterated any shared memory of how things used to be different and better for black folks, shutting your mouth to avoid causing harm might seem like a good idea at the time but that's now way to practice really being there for other folks, and you're better off working through your misery when you confront injustice than you are just rolling up your sleeves and pretending you weren't moved. I hope that summary does this article justice; if not, I'll point you to the satirical cartoon shows a left-wing activist cutting down folks and a Nazi wannabe activist actually being more nurturing, and remind you that it ain't good satire if it ain't true.

Ho hum, some Administration officials say Iraq is dangerous for Christians when it suits them politically and then others claim it's not so dangerous when it tries to deport Iraqi Christians, and here we have yet more proof of what I've been saying for years, that different forces within our Administration will appear to be at odds with each other to give the appearance of "vigorous debate," when we know that a) they march together jackboot-lockstep when it matters and b) the "vigorous debate" doesn't even necessarily mean they don't know what they're doing -- when you suck at running things, you create chaos, because chaos creates drama, and drama distracts people. Particularly when the opposition party is doing its damnedest yet-again to present no alternative to the drama.

I'm sure some knucklehead will say that this article explaining how one of the major reasons "Artificial Intelligence is Biased Against Women" is because our whole civilization is biased against women is water-is-wet territory, but the fact is we go to great lengths to hide how sexist (and racist) we are, and then we relentlessly gaslight the folks who figure it out. And when AI workers are overwhelmingly white and male, then the folks who would change things for the better (like Olga Russakovsky's team at Princeton) face an even more uphill battle. Usually I say that while the arc of history bends toward justice, that arc looks awful flat when you're underneath; let me reassure you that there are times that doesn't make me feel better, and this is one of them.

Finally, Masha Gessen at The New Yorker reminds us that the New York Times's reporting about Bernie Sanders's 1988 trip to Russia wrenches that event out of virtually every possible useful context. One could shout ZOMG TEH SOVIETZ TRIEDZ TO PROPAGANDAZ TEH BERNEEZ!!!!! all one wants, but we still wouldn't learn whether that "propaganda" (a word the Soviets used a lot more broadly than we do!) actually worked on Mr. Sanders. Furthermore, President Reagan was encouraging these cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, but I guess Mr. Reagan isn't conservative enough for today's world.

Action: concerning statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C., energy investment, and child care.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to grant statehood to Puerto Rico, and Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to grant statehood to Washington, D.C.. Not because they'll then elect Democrats to Congress! You know how I feel about a lot of the Democrats who serve in Congress, and besides, Republicans might well one day convince enough Puerto Rico and D.C. residents to elect them to represent them. Hey, stranger things have happened -- Hawaii sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate for three terms at the beginning of its tenure as an American state! No, Puerto Rico and D.C. should be states because their citizens have no representation in the Senate and only token representation in the House even though Puerto Rico has over 3.5 million residents and D.C. has over 700,000 residents, that latter figure being about the size of the average House district. Congress also typically strong-arms both Puerto Rico and D.C. -- Puerto Rico far more egregiously in recent years! -- and no Americans have to tolerate that.

Meanwhile, Mitsubishi wants to build a coal plant in the middle of the Ha Tinh province of Vietnam, a community still recovering from the pollution of its coastline by the Formosa Ha Tin Steel plant, which virtually wiped out the local fishing industry. If George W. Bush still ran the world, we'd be hearing about what a wonderful opportunity this disaster would be for another corporation to swoop in, poison a little more of the local air and water, and enrich some executives! But even if Orange George Bush runs the world now, we shouldn't tolerate that state of affairs, hence Sum of Us helps you tell Mitsubishi to abandon its plans to put another coal plant in Ha Tinh province. Mitsubishi might be vulnerable to the Big Stick of Bad PR, not just because several of its financial partners have pulled out of the project, but because the good folks of Ha Tin have fought back other proposed projects, too. Gosh, if they'd just embrace solar and wind, maybe they'd be more amenable to big corporations coming into their backyard. Anyway, let's help them out, and let Mitsubishi know we're watching.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1364/S. 568, the Child Care for Working Families Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Child care costs are one of those costs -- like college, health care, and car loans -- where corporations can pretty much charge whatever they like because, hey, we can't just "choose" not to have these things, not anymore! It'd be nice to live in a world where only one parent in each family has to work, but we don't live in that world anymore, and child care corporations take advantage of that fact by charging out the wazoo. If your Tea Party uncle wonders whether we're going to make government pay for everything in the future, just remind him that a) "government paying for everything" is actually we the people paying for everything and b) we should not measure the effectiveness of a "free market" by how much unnecessary pain it causes working families. You may also remind him that child care almost certainly wasn't an issue for him, either as a child or as a parent, largely because of aggressive government taxation. Hey, truth doesn't have to tickle.

Around the table: more lessons about political courage and cowardice.

While you're reminding your Tea Party uncle that if he collects Social Security, uses Medicare, or drives on a road paid for with his taxes that he is also a socialist, you can also remind him, as Ralph Nader reminds us, that those who rail against "socialism" are too often the biggest practitioners of socialism-for-corporations. And it never helps to forget that our government followed the 2008 bankster crash by handing out "trillions of taxpayer dollars" to "reckless bankers and speculators." Maybe your Tea Party uncle was against that, too -- but it's awful hard to overcome decades of political propaganda about how you can only ever succeed on your own, without help from anyone, ever.

From the "It's a Shame We Even Have to Say It" file: no, Mr. President, it's not at all true that "nobody can even define" what Roger Stone did, not when our own Justice Department summed up the whole affair thusly: "Stone was found guilty of obstruction of a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and tampering with a witness." You'll hear people say that everything that's been going on with Russia is so complex, as a way of saying there's really nothing there, but, ah, it is easier to catch people who commit crimes more straightforwardly, is it not? And do we really think criminals haven't figured that out? Certainly our President has -- the more feces he dramatically flings against the wall, the more likely we are to throw up our hands and walk away.

I can't help but read that our President plans to deploy heavily-armed border patrol agents in so-called "sanctuary cities" and think that I guess this is how he gets his Reichstag Fire. Let us recall why they call them "sanctuary cities" -- not because they actively shield undocumented immigrants, but merely because they will not co-operate with federal immigration authorities without a court order. All these law-and-order types should be able to respect that, but in my experience, the only thing "law-and-order" types really respect is unquenchable rage.

Widely-respected medical journal Lancet says Medicare-for-All health insurance will save Americans $450 billion annually, and that figure might actually be a little low -- taking the cost estimate from the right-wing Mercatus Institute ($32 trillion over 10 years) and the Center for Medicare Services' projected 10-year cost ($47 trillion), I'd say the Lancet figure might be less than a third of the actual figure. Still, it's good PR, as is their finding that struggling hospitals will also benefit from all the stability Medicare-for-All would bring. That's struggling rural hospitals as well as urban ones, of course. Maybe someone should take that message to Middle America?

Joe Biden says Bernie Sanders should "take accountability" for his supporters' egregious actions, and here you have the reason why Democrats constantly lose: they're always blaming the wrong people. Shouldn't Mr. Sanders's supporters take accountability for their own actions? Aren't threats criminal acts subject to punishment by our government? I'm on record as saying you can't bring our President into criminal proceedings against white nationalists just because he's made racists feel good about themselves again, so I don't feel any differently about this. When Mr. Biden talks about "accountability" like this, of course, you can tell he's made a career out of capitulating to the other side. (Sadly, Elizabeth Warren piled on about this matter later -- also to NBC -- and even said "we are all responsible for what our supporters do," which, ah, no.)

Don't look now, but a member of Barack Obama's braintrust has written a very good article suggesting that Democrats shouldn't look to 2016 for lessons so much as 2012, for three main reasons: one, Mitt Romney basically made that election about Mr. Obama rather than himself; two, Mr. Obama completely reframed the economic issues of the time that made Mr. Romney's attacks on him moot; and three, Mr. Romney seemed to lock himself into the right-wing news bubble. I wonder if the third matters as much as the first two, especially given that we have an incumbent President who amplifies the worst aspects of that bubble, but this largely is a trenchant analysis -- particularly given that the eventual Democratic nominee will run against a man who's desperate to make everything about him, and that most of the possible Democratic nominees won't talk enough about the folks this economy has left behind.

Finally, now that Bernie Sanders is kind of the front runner for the Democratic nomination, we confront the notion that the "liberal" media will try to take him down by comparing him to Great Losers from the Past. Chris Hedges's trenchant analysis says that Our Glorious Elites "will do to Sanders what they did to George McGovern" if he becomes the nominee, and I know they will try, but I also know that George McGovern shot himself in the foot plenty in 1972 after he got the nomination, starting with taking Sen. Eagleton as his running mate and then ditching him not even three weeks later (after saying he was behind him "1,000 percent," no less). Meanwhile, Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian speculates that Mr. Sanders could be the next Jeremy Corbyn, but Labour didn't lose the recent national election because they were "too liberal" -- they lost because they weren't pro-Brexit enough! And for no other reason! Plebescites have consequences, after all, and Labour pursued "constructive ambiguity" about Brexit while Boris Johnson pretended to be Super Awesome Pro-Brexit Man, so it's no surprise who won. Ambiguity may be the special sauce of literature, but it's poison to political campaigns. The most analogous situation in America is trade, and guess what? Mr. Sanders is just as anti-"free" trade as our President, if not more so, and all the other remaining candidates save Ms. Warren are as wishy-washy about trade as Mr. Corbyn was about Brexit. I trust the pattern, and the lesson, are unmistakable.

Around the table: in which we contemplate many forms of insanity.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) says his Republican counterparts in the Senate acquitted our President of the impeachment charges because they're afraid of losing their jobs. That's right, they're more afraid of getting a bad nickname from our President or getting attacked by his flunkies on Fox News and talk radio than they are of the people's will turning them out of office. Part of the reason they're more afraid of our President and/or his flunkies is that they know they're more likely to run against some weak let's-all-get-along Democrat than someone much better like Sherrod Brown. But all that means is we have to work harder to make them afraid of us.

And on cue: our President fires two government officials who testified against him during his impeachment trial -- Gordon Sondland, lately Ambassador to the EU, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, late of our National Security Council. They're casting Mr. Vindman's dismissal, in particular, as part of a broader "reorganization" of the NSC, but we're not schmucks. And I guess right-wingers will respond to Mr. Sondland's firing by saying he wanted to leave anyway, but that sure seems like a slim reed. That's all they'll get supporting this President: ever-slimmer reeds to hold onto. And the economy is going to be one of those ever-slimmer reeds sooner or later.

David Dayen at The American Prospect draws a straight line from the "Bullshit Economy" -- the one we've been complaining about for years, the one that never rewards hard work but only rewards speculation and who-you-know -- to the Iowa electoral disaster, where Democrats used an app to get caucus results faster in a state that doesn't have a problem getting its caucus results in a timely manner. In other words, Shadow is a solution in search of a problem, not unlike a lot of tech corporation "disruption." Plus, they didn't test the app properly or train anyone on how to use it properly. (He also suggests that we don't necessarily need to think this whole thing was a "conspiracy," but before that he did mention Mr. Buttigieg's ties to the corporation that made the app.)

Ho hum, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration finds that tax-prep corporations charged at least 14 million Americans for tax returns they could have had done for free. The IG found pretty much what we expected from ProPublica's reporting last year: that the corporations who "offer" free tax-filing make it hard for you to actually use the service, and our IRS doesn't oversee the whole effort very well. The good news? Our government has largely removed legal barriers to free tax-prep. The bad news? Our IRS hardly has any money to enforce the law, since successive Congresses have gutted IRS funding in a decade-long tantrum.

I try to avoid personal attacks, but before we take James Carville's advice to avoid "mile-high fantasies" like, you know, policies that would actually make America a more perfect union for a long time and not just until the next maniac becomes President, we should consider his two great successes in political campaigns: helping a Democrat win the Pennsylvania gubernatorial election in a Democrat wave year by poking fun at his Republican opponent's decades-old dabbling in transcendental meditation, and helping a Democrat win the 1992 Presidential election when the economy was in the toilet. Neither of these, frankly, were heavy lifts. And we should also consider what happened after he realized his vision of "majoritarian politics" in 1992: the voters rejected it in 1994 by giving Republicans control of both House and Senate for the first time in 40 years, and returned an insane Republican to the Presidency in 2000. The voters acted similarly in 2010 and 2016 after a similar "majoritarian" candidate won election in 2008. What's the definition of insanity again?

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Jonathan Chait says that Sen. Bernie Sanders, now widely-regarded as the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination despite the establishment's recent efforts to deprive him of that standing, brings a "historically unique set of liabilities" to his effort. And then Mr. Chait lists them all, one by one! I kid, of course -- he literally lists zero of these liabilities, unless he thinks "the kind of intense organization Sanders has mastered" is a liability. And you know which candidate actually had a "historically unique suite of liabilities"? The guy who won in 2016 and is running for re-election in 2020! If our President has done one good thing for America, he's reminded us that anything is possible.

Around the table: in which we introduce, and then banish, a new character.

Looks like the government of China is reacting to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak by, sigh, arresting folks for criticizing government responses to the outbreak. The charge, of course, is "false information without verification," which sure does sound like something a snowflake government would concoct to arrest its critics. Thank God that doesn't happen here! Er, except that our President wants to change the libel laws and calls everything he doesn't like "fake news."

Who leads all Presidential candidates in fund-raising among soldiers? Why, Bernie Sanders, of course! What, you were expecting our President? I said it before and I'll say it again: our President doesn't get support from the military so much as he gets support from people who constantly preen about their own love for the military, and these are not the same thing. But, gosh, many of our soldiers seem to like a guy who has actually worked against all the stupid wars these soldiers have to fight. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

Two Cato Institute analysts remind us that maybe selling weapons to the countries on our President's Muslim ban isn't such a hot idea. You won't be heartened to learn that more American weapons get stolen during this Administration than previous ones, but the real question for our Administration is: if you think these countries are so dangerous, why are you selling them guns and bombs? Particularly since these countries will most likely use these guns and bombs on their own people and thus drive more of them to try to leave? Then again, I guess that question answers itself -- you can't expect to keep a "war on terror" going if you actually try to solve the problems that cause or exacerbate terrorism.

Montana state legislator says the Constitution gives him permission to jail or shoot socialists, then points out exactly where in our Constitution ha ha I kid of course he didn't. Seriously, though, a little over a year ago he introduced a bill which would have mandated the state of Montana to buy a flailing power plant, which would have made him what, class? That's right, a socialist! This Rodney Garcia represents Montana's 52nd legislative district, but hopefully not for much longer; how about, in the meantime, we never speak of him again?

Finally, the Iowa caucus meltdown demonstrates, to me at least, everything wrong with the Democratic Party -- the next time some Democratic politico tells a group of coal miners they should Learn to Code, they can retort well, I guess we couldn't do worse than Shadow! But you may recall that we didn't know the name of the real winner of the Republican Iowa caucus in 2012 for several weeks, and given that Ron Paul had a legit shot at winning that caucus, I can't help but wonder if the Democrats screwed this up on purpose to deprive Sen. Sanders (who had been leading in late polls, and who was leading the popular vote, albeit narrowly, in the first set of returns released yesterday) of any possible bounce. I know, these are Democrats we're talking about, but how often over the years have we seen malice pretend to be mere incompetence?

Around the table: more myths exploded, more bad people exposed.

From Good Jobs First comes the "Putting Pension Costs in Context" report, which instructs us that corporate welfare handouts outstrip state worker pension obligations in five out of five states studied -- and in the cases of Arizona and Oklahoma, corporate welfare handouts more than double pension obligations. So, yeah, remember that when the politicians ask where the money's coming from to meet "pension shortfalls" that are 40 years in the future and never take into account everyone's interest in growing an economy. Good Jobs First will release results from more states soon; I bet the findings won't be that much different.

Julie Hollar at FAIR instructs us that our "liberal" media love pretending that Bernie Sanders is like our President -- "Because, for Them, Sanders is the Bigger Threat." The idea that Mr. Sanders is "like" our President is so absurd it really deserves no further comment, but Ms. Hollar tabulates all the differences, and you'll be better for having read about them. Next from the Washington Post: Goofus and Gallant are exactly alike.

"Clinton Says Sanders Achieved Nothing," writes Mike Ludwig at TruthOut. "My Community Clinic Shows She's Wrong." Of course he leads with a broader argument about Mr. Sanders's achievements, which include passing more amendments than any other House member from 1992 to 2006. Also, too, what has Hillary Clinton achieved, exactly, besides party-wide Democratic capitulation to Republicans on issues and messaging? Still, Mr. Sanders got $11 billion in funding for community clinics in poorer areas attached to what bill again? The Affordable Care Act -- which means he's not the my-way-or-the-highway jerk people say he is, either.

Administration Treasury Secretary/man who wears glasses so people don't punch him in the face Steven Mnuchin says climate change activist Greta Thunberg should go "stud(y) economics" before having the temerity to tell the rest of us to stop burning the planet down. And my immediate reaction was: the freaking Foreclosure King said that? Any moron, and I mean any moron, can start out with a pile of money and turn it into a much bigger pile of money by foreclosing on grandmothers who owe 27 cents on their mortgage; you don't need to "study economics" to do that. Jesus Mary and Joseph the proud ignorance of these clowns -- it's like Tha Bush Mobb never left office.

Finally, former House Speaker John Boehner says his party isn't the Republican Party anymore, but our President's party, but who cares what he thinks? Mr. Boehner spent his entire Speakership moving the party further right than ever before, and the fact that he made it look like he was "forced" to do that only testifies to his cunning, so he certainly has no standing to call Ted Cruz "Lucifer in the Flesh."

Around the table: concerning health care policy, Presidential folly, and the Best Death Ever.

Second-largest physicians group in America calls for Medicare-for-All health insurance. And even though the American College of Physicians ain't the American Medical Association, their endorsement should give pause to right-wingers who might start bellowing WHY WON'T THEYZ LISTENZ TO TEH DOCTURZ!!!!!! You know, now that their Personal Lord and Savior has called our generals "dopes and babies" and rendered their criticisms of Barack Obama for "not listening to the generals" null and void? I kid, of course -- nothing gives right-wingers any pause. Sadly, it's one of the main reasons they win.

And here's the other reason right-wingers win: because right-wing Democrats like Hillary Clinton can't stay out of the spotlight. "Nobody likes him" may be the single most absurd thing she's ever said about anyone, let alone Bernie Sanders -- and we can't discount the possibility that she's jealous of all the big crowds he's drawn at his rallies over the years, or the formidable amount of money he's raised without having to cater to rich donors -- but it may indeed be her attempt to put yet another wedge between the liberals and the moderates in the Democratic party, so they come crawling to her later. You know, I criticize our current President a lot, but I praise him for this: he's given us the opportunity to break the wheel that churns out malicious Republicans and weak Democrats, and running to Hillary Clinton to save us would not be the best use of that opportunity.

Facing a crisis of its own making over its unsafe 737 MAX plane, Boeing looks to borrow at least $10 billion. And I suppose if they can't get a bank loan they'll come to the taxpayer, and our President will of course acquiesce, since he's so "tough" on corporations. And if he should give Boeing whatever it wants because of the jobs that'll otherwise go away, will he ask Boeing why it's spending $4 billion trying to buy another aircraft manufacturing corporation? I kid, of course -- no Glorious Elite will ever ask that of another Glorious Elite.

Once upon a time it would have meant something that our President called someone "one of our great geniuses" and compared him to Thomas Edison, but both our President and the "genius" in question, Elon Musk, are such assholes it doesn't mean very much anymore. Note well that our President praised him for creating a rocket that lands! Without wings! Our Glorious Elites always seem to grade each other on a curve. No truth to the rumor that our President then added "and he does good at self-driving cars, too. Why, they've only killed two people, and I heard they were not very nice people who said very bad things about me."

Finally, singer-songwriter David Olney dies onstage in the middle of performing a song at the 30A Songwriters Festival in Florida last Saturday night. He didn't "collapse" as some reports said; he actually seemed to nod off in the middle of a song, immediately after pausing and saying "I'm sorry" to his audience. I have no knowledge of his canon, but I have to say that dying mid-song is so the way to go. R.I.P.

Around the table: with more horrible truths about American politics.

The incomparable Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs advises us on "How to Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda." I hope by now it'll all be reminder more than revelation, but reminders sure ain't useless, and I'm glad we're getting this particular reminder before we get too engrossed in yet another Middle East quagmire. I can't resist highlighting the part where Ben Shapiro says TEH OBAMA DRONED TEH TERRURIZTZ TOO!!!! and Mr. Robinson reminds us that such statements "prove() exactly nothing about whether (our President)’s actions were legitimate." Always they talk about what great debaters they are, and then they resort to personal attacks when they're on their heels, which means they're not great debaters.

The incomparable Dean Baker tells us -- because apparently our "liberal" media, at least, needs telling! -- that maybe "College Presidents Aren’t Who We Should Consult About Free Higher Education," since, you know, they all stand to lose money from taxpayer-funded higher ed. They may not have been (as Mr. Baker says) the worst people to ask about it, though -- I bet the worst people to ask about it would be the Vice-Presidents and Deans and Vice-Deans who don't do any useful work and whose mere existence is a major driver of the high cost of education.

Ho hum, another provocative act against a foreign power by our government, another litany of TV and radio "pundits" who all work for defense contractors without proper disclosure of their conflicts of interest. You can contact NPR's public editor about Mr. Keane's appearance on Morning Edition without disclosing his past defense contractor employment here, but as for the rest of them, this is yet another reason we need, and deserve, a la carte cable packaging -- we may not watch this rubbish, but we still pay for it if we have cable, which most of us do. (Don't believe the excuse that disclosure would scare "knowledgeable people" off of television and there'd be dead air all the time -- I mean, this is America we're talking about, full of folks who actually have something to say and hungry to get it heard.)

At last, someone (namely Noah Feldman at Bloomberg) shows skepticism that John Bolton's statement expressing willingness to testify at our President's impeachment trial means a damn thing. Why is saying you'll testify if subpoenaed some gift to America? And if Senate Republicans don't even want witnesses, why would they subpoena him? And have no Congressional Democrats considered the possibility that the Mustache of Evil is running a con game on them? And why can't Democratic politicians stop hoping for some Great Republican Savior? (Also, too, as Mr. Feldman points out, Mr. Bolton's reasoning is not exactly cogent.)

HuffPost/YouGov poll finds that while a mere 43% of Americans supported our President's decision to kill Gen. Soleimani, 30% of Americans "strongly supported" the decision, and this finding, for once, does not map that well onto my long-held belief that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane -- and suggests that maybe poking Iran more will get our President more votes on Election Day. It is all about the margins with this guy, after all. I suppose it's possible the poll came out too quickly after the assassination to tell us very much of anything, but I guess time will tell, or at least suggest.

Action: concerning impeachment, government spying, and discrimination.

The full House votes on impeaching our President today or tomorrow, so call your House Reps and tell them to vote yea to send formal impeachment charges to the Senate. The charges are abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and Senate Republicans are eager to receive these charges so they can carefully and thoroughly refute them! I kid, of course -- Messrs. McConnell and Graham have both said they want to get this over with as soon as possible, truth and duty be damned. But don't be swayed by them -- if Republicans ever had a case in defense of our President, we'd have heard it by now, instead of endless whining about "process" and "politics." Don't be swayed by the long odds of ever getting a conviction, either. And certainly don't be swayed by reports suggesting that our President is really sweating the indignity of getting impeached. How likely is it that he's ever sweated any indignity? No, the man loves drama, and he loves playing the victim, too, so a short Senate trial ending in "vindication" won't necessarily be a boon to him.

Meanwhile, the Democratic House, in a fit of year-end budgetary capitulation that you'd think they'd know how to prevent by now, extended the notorious Section 215 of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act through March, so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to curtail government spying by repealing Section 215. I've been promoting the "even our NSA says it doesn't need Section 215" line for a while now, and it is significant that even our big spying agency doesn't want that particular spying power, but we also must remember that a) we have a President who openly tries to use our government to spy on his political enemies, like we should care about his problems or something, and b) we also have a President who loves calling people traitors and encouraging his votaries to call for the deportation of some of his political enemies, and surely we don't think a man like that deserves the power to collect email and phone data without a warrant. And certainly not in the name of "national security"! I keep saying he is not America, and maybe he'll never hear it, but mainly I say it so you do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to scuttle its own proposal to allow "religious" organizations to take part in government grants and still discriminate against people in violation of the law, then the ACLU still helps you do that. The ACLU sure does give some good examples of what might happen if our Administration gets its way: "Meals on Wheels and other HHS-funded community meal programs designed to support older adults could refuse to deliver food to older Americans who are LGBTQ. Federally funded foster care agencies could refuse to place children with families because of the prospective families' sexual orientation or religion, regardless of the children's needs. Head Start grant recipients and other federally funded childcare facilities could refuse to serve children with same-sex parents. They could also refuse to provide services to transgender youth." Ain't none of that ish cool, so let's make sure our Administration knows that -- because even if they defy us, we might help them lose in court.

Around the table: why our media ignores the Afghanistan papers, and other hard truths.

Alex Shephard at The New Republic wonders "Why the Media Is Ignoring the Afghanistan Papers." Short answer: "everyone is to blame, which means no one has much of an interest in keeping the story alive." Somewhat longer answer: our media's thirst for partisan conflict makes coverage of "bipartisan failure" harder. Also, too, our President spews forth so much drama that "more complex stories, like the situation in Afghanistan, are often buried in favor of the political equivalent of sports sideline reporting." Mr. Shephard may be too nice to spell it out, but I also think we've become so cynical, all of us, that when we hear evidence that our government knew it was bollocksing up Afghanistan, we're proud of saying "and you're surprised?" As Americans, we deserve a better government than that, meaning we deserve actual surprise at such things.

This is really good news: the ACLU of Kansas has managed to shut down that state's notorious Interstate Crosscheck program, meaning it won't operate in the 2020 elections. That doesn't mean the ACLU has killed it dead, since it used a rather arcane argument to do so (that Interstate Crosscheck didn't keep voter data secure, of all things), and a lot of states still have previous Interstate Crosscheck databases and might use them to purge more voters. And the notorious Kris Kobach might create new purge lists himself -- though he's also running for Senate in 2020, and running a vote suppression operation while running for Senate might actually make him lose. Yes, even to a Democrat! Hell, he did it a year ago.

Ho hum, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy studies corporate tax avoidance during the first year after the 2017 tax "reform" that dramatically cut the corporate tax rate, and finds over 350 Fortune 500 corporations paying, on average, a little over half the new 21% rate. That tax "reform" cut the tax rate (from 35% to 21%) without closing corporate tax loopholes, but that shouldn't surprise us when our nominally "liberal" politicians' position is "cut the tax rate, but close the loopholes." An actual liberal position would be "tax the corporations harder and stop giving them welfare handouts." And then you might have actual compromise in America again. Maybe even actual bipartisanship!

Scientists point to another driver of climate change: inefficient energy grids. These energy losses -- caused by (among other things) bad wiring, poor and/or corrupt management, or natural disasters -- emit almost as much carbon as heavy trucks do, which is saying something. Getting energy corporations to upgrade their infrastructure, of course, is like pulling teeth -- they always want a welfare handout or six just to do the thing they should already be doing, the thing we would simply make them do if our lawmakers didn't all have spines of jelly.

Finally, Republicans are jumping up and down about New Jersey House Rep. Jeff Van Drew's announcement that he'll switch to the Republican party shortly, but the part of America not responding to that news with "Jeff Van Who?" is probably responding "he was a Democrat?" And how precious he is, complaining that impeachment isn't "bipartisan" enough -- has he been awake the last couple of decades? I suspect he'll lose the 2020 Republican primary in New Jersey's 2nd -- he may not even come in second! -- and then a year or two later he'll imagine the Democrats are desperate enough to take him back, and he'll be wrong, all of which will make him (as Mario Cuomo might say) just another walnut in the batter of eternity.

Around the table: important lessons from the week, including yet another lesson from our President in How Not to Be.

Bad news: as we feared, and despite our best efforts, the House passed a defense authorization bill without any of the amendments limiting our involvement in the war on Yemen, preventing unilateral war with Iran, or stopping defense spending on our President's vanity border wall. The bill would grant federal employees parental leave, and it would curtail our military's use of PFAS chemicals, but the bill also doesn't go far enough in keeping them out of our drinking water, and doesn't even have an amendment (which had actual bipartisan support) helping military families on food stamps. In the words of one antiwar activist, Democrats got "completely rolled" on this bill. The good news is that we don't trust them to do the right thing; we trust ourselves to do the right thing, and if we don't get the results we deserve, we work harder.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY) tells Fox News (sic) that he and our President's counsel will be in "total coordination" during his impeachment trial. As Rep. Jeffries keenly points out, imagine a jury saying it will be in "total coordination" with a defendant during a criminal case and you'll understand how utterly corrupt that statement is. In past years, a politician would never have said this out loud, and yet the fact that Mr. McConnell said it on Fox News (which, ah, has a rather selective viewership) rather than, say, your local nightly newscast (which will more likely attract a broader cross-section of your community) hints at how corrupt our politicians might yet become.

I would caution against viewing the Conservative Party's resounding victory in this week's British elections as a 2020 harbinger, except that the Tories, at least, could convincingly identify themselves with one side or the other in the Brexit debate, while Labour seemed to be try to have it both ways -- and, how about that, our Republican incumbent will most assuredly campaign against "free" trade in 2020, while most of his possible Democratic challengers will most assuredly try to have it both ways. As for the sheer size of the loss, I suppose it's possible Labour just threw it, in the belief that the Tories will likely bollocks up Brexit again either by exiting wrong or just failing to exit, but we all know by now the dangers of assuming a nominally liberal party is playing 13-dimensional chess. (However, for those who think the elections are a resounding rebuke of "socialism": how well, exactly, did those center-right Labour leaders do in 2010 and 2015?)

Our "liberal" media is still trying to puff up the Pete Buttigieg candidacy, hastening, even, to (in Joshua Cho's words) "portray() a lack of voter support as an obstacle to their preferred centrists’ ascent, rather than evidence of a problem with the centrists for not supporting a progressive political agenda representative of most voters." In other words, Pete Buttigieg could be President, if not for those pesky voters! But I don't think Bernie Sanders would get "liberal" media plaudits for flip-flopping on Medicare for All, as Mr. Buttigieg has done, because the rules for moderates and right-wingers are always different for actual liberals. And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we'll fight the way we need to, and the sooner we'll win.

Hate to pile on the Buttigieg Boom -- OK, I don't -- but former health care executive Wendell Potter tells us that Mr. Buttigieg's work at McKinsey entailed, in part (and in Mr. Buttigieg's words), "performing analytical work...identifying savings in administration and overhead costs," which Mr. Potter suggests is code for "laying off workers, offshoring, and hiking rates." I guess Mr. Potter would know, and since I take the Parable of the Prodigal Son seriously, I also think he's courageous for saying so. You'll want to remember that if Mr. Buttigieg were the nominee, our President would never shut up about "why Pete Buttigieg wants to keep his work at McKinsey so secret," as if he himself hasn't spent the last couple of years trying to keep everyone away from his tax returns, but that hypocrisy won't elect Mr. Buttigieg, since he has nothing to offer voters except elite fever dreams about his "electability." I'd call all that ironic, but I demand more from irony than yet another stomach ache.

Finally, I try to avoid discussing the Drama-King-in-Chief as often as possible, but him telling Time's new Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg, that she has "anger management" issues is beyond disgusting. The man who shouts at everyone all the time doesn't get to lecture anyone about "anger management" -- particularly not, you know, folks angry that the adults are going to make their planet uninhabitable. This may be a cue to our "liberal" media that it shouldn't assume that if the President says it, it must be news -- and that if this President says it, it's more likely a lesson for America in How Not to Be.

Around the table: concerning our economy, our public lands and water, and several far more trifling matters.

Your right-wing uncle telling you about wages going up under our President? Well, Dean Baker reminds us that state minimum wage hikes and our Federal Reserve's low interest rates are actually driving recent wage increases. You know that high minimum wages cause wage hikes at the low end, but you may not know that low interest rates have helped drive unemployment down -- and Mr. Baker says that "low rates of unemployment give workers the bargaining power necessary to secure real wage gains." Naturally our President says minimum wages should be lower, though, admittedly, he also thinks interest rates should be lower. But low interest rates have been Fed orthodoxy since 2008, so we can safety say he deserves very little (if any!) of the credit for what gains we're making in this economy.

If you've been following Nestlé's attempts to gobble up as much public water as it can and then sell it as bottled water at an absurdly high profit, you'll be interested to hear that the Michigan state court of appeals has ruled that Osceola Township can block Nestlé from expanding its bottled-water operation within town limits, because bottled water is most emphatically not an "essential public service" or a "public water supply." I was a little surprised that any legal eagles at Nestlé would make such ludicrous claims -- even as part of a see-what-sticks effort -- until I learned that a lower Michigan court had approved them, and I note that the court of appeals also said that a bottled water operation might be "essential" in a place with no water, which I'm pretty sure could be stretched by some judicial activist to mean any of the many areas of desert in America.

Big pharma executives tell OHSU researchers that prices for MS drugs go up so damn much go up purely for profit-making reasons. Also, you can only gouge patients in America, since (to quote one exec) "(i)n the rest of the world, prices decline with duration in the marketplace," and prices never go down because then people would think "we're less effective, (that) we think less of our product." You do hear the quiet part out loud more than you used to even 10 years ago, when it seemed (to me, at least!) we heard the quiet part out loud all the time. Maybe big pharma execs are tired of pretending they're anything but thieves, not that I expect their behavior to change.

From the "How Do They Always Find Someone Even Worse?" file: Interior Secretary David Bernhardt wants to reduce fees oil and gas drilling corporations pay to drill in shallow Gulf of Mexico waters. It's not just the stench of an Interior Secretary lowering fees on corporations for which he used to lobby, or the horror that we could have another Spillageddon in the Gulf like we had in 2010 -- it's the fact that these are our waters and we, the public, deserve to make more money if our government is going to be so foolish as to allow more drilling in the Gulf. It's like they have literally no idea that they're supposed to serve the American people.

U.S. House Rep. Steve Watkins (R-KS) apparently listed a UPS store as his official residence, which just so happens to have had the effect of allowing him to vote in a different Topeka City Council district than the one in which he otherwise would have voted. Has the Fox News Channel "accidentally" identified him as a Democrat yet? After all, ONLY TEH LIBRULZ COMMITZ TEH VOTER FRAUDZ!!!!!

Finally, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has suspended her campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, citing a lack of money to keep campaigning. I don't actually think it's correct to say that "she struggled to define a clear rationale for her candidacy" -- actually, I think she was completely successful in "defin(ing) a clear rationale for her candidacy," since that rationale was "I'm here to trick the liberals into thinking I'm going to run this country the way they'd want me to when I'm really going to run it however my big donors tell me to." If I'm right, then it's heartening that Democratic voters have rejected that rationale, at least as far it manifested in her -- and almost two months before the Iowa caucuses, no less!

UPDATE. An alert reader pointed out that I'd gotten our President's position on interest rate cuts entirely wrong; I've corrected the first paragraph above as a result.

Around the table: no one here gets out alive.

Steven Rosenfeld at Salon wonders if the briefly-contested Kentucky gubernatorial election reveals a Republican electoral strategy for 2020 -- i.e., they'll hope it's a close race and then simply throw bogus claims of voter fraud against the wall until Republican-dominated state legislatures take over and re-elect our President. Of course Mr. Bevin did eventually concede the race after his allegations proved, ah, extremely unlikely, but if Democrats really want to beat this nefarious Republican stratagem (and it's not a certainty that they do!), they'd nominate a candidate who doesn't spend all his time kowtowing to rich donors and telling us why we can't fix any of our problems. This is going to come up again.

Surprise, surprise, another one of our President's "opportunity zone" tax cuts went to a superyacht marina in Florida. Superyachts aren't just regular yachts, as they can cost $100 million or more, and "opportunity zones" are supposed to help poor people, not folks who can buy 300-foot yachts. Naturally former Governor/now Senator Rick Scott seems to have hand-picked a lot of areas owned by some of his biggest donors for his "opportunity zones," and he's mute about the matter now. Why? Because fuck you I won, that's why.

Democratic leadership apparently abandons efforts to include amendment in defense spending bill that would force contractors to stop using ubiquitous and carcinogenic PFAS chemicals. Or, to put it another way, they stand ready to sacrifice the health of our soldiers and their families to the whining of defense contractors, all of which either knew or should have known about PFAS's deleterious health effects. Again: if you don't do good works with the power you have, you don't deserve power at all. If that's true for Republicans, why wouldn't it be true for Democrats?

Our Administration begins the process of using its fake national emergency to take control of privately-owned lands in Texas so it can build its vanity border wall. I bet some Texas landowners are rethinking their support for our President because now it's going to hurt them, but I don't blame people very much for only coming to the light when they're affected; after all, people don't learn everything via thought experiment.

Federal budget deficit hits $134 billion for the month of October, which projects out to over $1.6 trillion for fiscal 2020, for no particularly good reason. And the same people who squealed over similarly-sized deficits during those rough first years of the Obama Administration won't complain about it now, and only because Their Personal Lord and Savior is President. Worse, they'll tell lies about it -- probably not that the 2017 tax "reform" stimulated the economy, because no one believes that, but I'm sure they'll talk about all the secret stimulus bills their President passed once he starts talking about them on his magical Twitterphone.

Finally, Barack Obama tells rich liberal donors that we shouldn't move "too far left" in taking on Republicans, though surely he intended for everyone to overhear what he was saying. When he says we should avoid thinking that "the resistance to certain approaches to things is simply because voters haven’t heard a bold enough proposal and if they hear something as bold as possible then immediately that’s going to activate them," he's indulging in straw-man reasoning -- voters abandon the party because Democrats don't do anything for the people when they get power, and if solutions need to be "bold," that's because Democrats didn't solve problems before they became bigger problems. And it's only true that "(t)he average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it" when you put the question exactly like that -- when you ask said average American about individual fixes like Medicare-for-All, taxing the rich and corporations harder, and keeping banksters from preying upon us, the average American gets on board, and these fixes comprise much of the "big, structural change" that Our Glorious Elites keep warning us will "destroy the system." Of course, if we remember 2008, we already know that Our Glorious Elites can destroy the system very well on their own -- which is precisely why we need "bold enough proposals" and "big, structural change" in the first place.

Around the table: time for another exciting installment of "who's the real snowflake?"

From Carol Anderson at The Guardian we learn about "Five Ways the Republicans Will Crack Down on Voting Rights in 2020," and though I'm annoyed again to hear not one mention of the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database of people with similar names, which I would argue delivered Michigan's electoral votes to our President in 2016, it's good to be reminded of the crap Texas tried to pull earlier this year (ZOMG WE HAVE TEH 95,000 NON-CITIZUNZ WHO ARE TEH REGISTURD TO VOTEZ!!!!), because they (and other states) will certainly try to pull it again. I'd be happier if they made such outlandish allegations after the voters turned them out of office.

We are reminded by Alan McLeod at FAIR that for our "liberal" media, "The Bolivian Coup Is Not a Coup -- Because US Wanted It to Happen." Generally when the military forces you out, that's a coup, but as you recall from our "liberal" media's absurdly horrible coverage of the Venezuelan "coup" that actually failed to force out Mr. Maduro, a "coup" only happens to folks we like; if protestors manage to bring down Chile's President Piñera, they'll call that a coup. It brings back memories of the Obama Administration pondering, Hamlet-like, over the definition of the word "coup" back when the Honduran military orchestrated a coup against President Zelaya in 2009.

As amusing as it is to hear right-wingers wonder why anyone would think Administration Senior Advisor Stephen Miller is a white nationalist merely because he wouldn't shut up about being a white nationalist in hundreds of emails to Breitbart, it's even more amusing to hear Breitbart try to gaslight everyone into thinking this is all about politicos pitching ideas to journalists. It happens all the time, they say -- but I bet not very many politicos go on about their deep appreciation of Mein Kampf. (Seriously, ever try reading that? It's almost absurdly turgid -- get from one end of a sentence to the other without re-reading and you'll be halfway to Catholic sainthood.)

After alleging vague "irregularities" in Election Day voting that he said were "corroborated" (though he didn't say by whom), Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin finally concedes his Election Day loss to his opponent, Attorney General Andy Beshear. Kentucky state law doesn't allow gubernatorial candidates to call for a recount, but does allow them to call for a recanvass (or a recount of the vote total); the recanvass conducted by the state yesterday found exactly one additional vote, which is kind of hilarious. And thus we are reminded that you can't just be an asshole to everyone forever and never suffer any consequences. One hopes we are reminded of this lesson again this time next year.

However, about that: former two-term Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has changed his mind and has decided he wants to run for President in 2020 after all. Oh, splendid, another Democrat who'd lose. I said this before, but it bears repeating: Mr. Patrick imagines his background as a prosecutor and a businessman insulates him from Republican criticism, but nothing insulates you from Republican criticism. If Jesus H. Christ himself ran for President, today's Republicans would call him a dirty hippie and a swarthy foreigner.

Finally, from the "Somehow Not a 'Kids in the Hall' sketch" file: our President's like-named son writes a book called Triggered about how liberals are supposedly triggered by everything, then won't answer questions about it at a California book-signing event, and winds up running away from right-wing hecklers who want to ask him questions about immigration. All together now: what a snowflake. And, you know, if you're afraid to take questions because "the left" will "twist your words," why not, oh, I don't know, articulate your points well enough to be plainly understood by anyone who will listen honestly?

Around the table: now with even more rich people whining!

Ari Paul wonders if Deadspin "Can Live Again as a Worker-Owned Website." Long story short: of course it can! Long story somewhat longer: "(t)he cost of paying writers a living wage, never mind hosting a major website and retaining a media attorney (a must if you’re going to be doing daring journalism), isn’t pocket change," and "anyone interested in this will have to pound the pavement looking for funders, people or groups with money that want, deep within their hearts, for independent media to survive." And the money might not be there, because how do folks get rich these days? By sucking up to the already-powerful! This theme's going to come up again shortly.

Like, now: JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says Sen. Warren "uses some pretty harsh words" that "vilif(y) "successful people," presumably people like himself. And all over our great land good Americans say why, he should hear the words I use! And, seriously, he calls people like himself "successful people" because he can't just say "we shouldn't vilify people who redistribute income from people who work to executives who don't." Or "we shouldn't vilify people who prey financially on other people." You know?

In a peripherally-related note, Microsoft founder Bill Gates says of Ms. Warren's proposed wealth tax that "(i)f I had to pay $20 billion in taxes, it's fine" but "when you say I should pay $100 billion, O.K., then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over." Ms. Warren's proposed 3% rate on Mr. Gates's estimated fortune of $106 billion would, of course, not result in a "$100 billion tax bill," but a $3.18 billion tax bill. Also, Mr. Gates added $16 billion to his net worth last year, and, seriously, is there a worse sound on Earth than the sound of the ultra-rich whining?

Billionaire, ahem, successful person Michael Bloomberg has begun to take steps to run for the Democratic Presidential nomination, having apparently identified a shortage of candidates anxious to tell the American people why we shouldn't get anything we want from our government. Kudos to the University of Iowa professor who sees Mr. Bloomberg as someone who would further divide the "center" currently occupied by Messrs. Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. I mean, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have the left to themselves; I suppose it's still possible they'll split the left enough that one of the other four aforementioned candidates can break through, but, frankly, the math favors the left here. You know what else favors the left? So many of us are so out of fucks to give.

Finally, former Administration Attorney General/long-time former Senator Jeff Sessions has declared that he'll try again for his old seat in 2020, where the punditocracy considers incumbent Democrat Doug Jones the party's most endangered Democrat. This could certainly be a unique opportunity -- Alabama voters might be able to choose the racist who said the NAACP were Communists, or the guy who put two of the Birmingham bombers in jail. I wouldn't worry too much about our President's supposed hatred of Mr. Sessions hampering his campaign, though, because our President revises history like George Orwell never predicted. (Also, too, "I was there to serve his agenda, not mine" -- uh, you weren't our Attorney General to serve our agenda?)

Action: concerning health care, worker safety, and defense spending.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384, the Medicare for All Act, now's as good a time as any to call your House Reps and Senators. H.R. 1384 doesn't tell you how it's going to fund Medicare for All, a matter our "liberal" media have been doing a lot of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching about, but Sen. Warren (D-MA) -- you may have heard of her, she's running for President -- has described how she'd fund it, and her plan would do what needs to be done: it would capture the money employers are already spending on private health insurers and redirect it toward funding Medicare for All. She would tax employers (except for small businesses with fewer than 50 employees who aren't providing health insurance) at 98% of the average rate they've been paying private health insurers for employee insurance over several previous years, which would make it useless for big corporations to suddenly convert themselves into franchises or convert their employees into independent contractors. So now we have a weapon against all the how-will-you-pay-for-it hysteria.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Amazon warehouse worker Billy Foister's death -- he had a heart attack at work, but lay on the ground for 20 minutes before anyone noticed, and once the ambulance took him away, his bosses told his co-workers to get back to work -- Demand Progress helps you tell Amazon to stop putting its work quotas above human life. Six Amazon workers have died in the last year, with many more injured, and it ain't for nothing that the National Council for Occupational Health and Safety lists Amazon as one of the 12 worst places to work, because Amazon puts productivity ahead of people, such that folks pee in a bottle lest they get a demerit, and some folks even try to kill themselves. Like this is Foxconn or something! Seriously, bosses don't just redistribute wealth upward to their bosses, they redistribute health -- folks push themselves to the brink trying to meet quotas while Jeff Bezos gets plenty of decompression time as he looks for a new mountain to buy. As they say, next-day shipping might be free, but it comes at a price.

Finally, Joe Biden has apparently told reporters it would be "outrageous" if our government were to attach any conditions to the military aid we give to Israel -- conditions that might include not expanding more settlements into Palestine. So he's beating his chest about being more pro-Israel than anyone else, and we could reasonably question whether it's actually "pro-Israel" to enable their uncivilized behavior, but the more interesting thing is that many of Mr. Biden's favorite Republican Presidents, including Messrs. Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush the Better, did exactly the same thing! You'd think a man who yammers on about "bipartisanship" all the time would know it when he sees it -- or that a man who boasts about his "relationships" with Republicans would find some actual common ground with them. Anyway, Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell Mr. Biden that conditioning military aid to Israel is not "outrageous". He doesn't care what we think, but we still tell him, because it's our duty.

Around the table: concerning Democrat weakness, Presidential misbehavior, and rich folks whining.

Oh, look at this BS: super-rich folks in England whine about how they'll leave the country if Labour wins the national elections next month. And over some piddling changes proposed by the Labour leader Mr. Corbyn, which include raising the top 45% marginal tax rate all the way to (drumroll, please) 50%. Boy, it sure is a good thing for these super-rich that they're all completely indispensable and there are literally no hungry people in all of England looking to take their place.

Speaker Pelosi thinks "Medicare for All" doesn't play well in the Midwest, and issues a general warning that taking up too many "far-left" proposals will doom Democrats with the Great American Center. Strange that running as far right as possible never seems to bite Republicans in their collective backside! Also, she's wrong -- Medicare for All does actually play well in the Midwest, particularly with the rural voters Democrats constantly write off as unreachable. Of course, if you don't actually try to do the right thing, it's a lot easier to convince yourself that doing the right thing never works.

In a related note, Colorado Senator/somehow-still-running Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Bennet says, of Ms. Warren's now fully- and realistically-funded Medicare-for-All plan, that "(r)egardless of whether it's $21 trillion or $31 trillion, this isn't going to happen, and the American people need health care." Yeah, that'll move the needle on his Presidential bid, since history shows that if there's one rallying cry voters can't resist, it's it can't be done! Also, too, we're going to spend $47 trillion over the next decade on health care, so if Ms. Warren can capture that money, as her plan would, then "the American people need health care" is an utterly nonsensical statement. I know, that's a surprise.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) -- the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name -- demands that our National Archives produce email correspondence between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and not at all because he, of all Senators, is uniquely enmeshed in this whole sordid business with the Ukraine. Mr. Johnson's letter doesn't really explain why he needs to look at the emails, except that the law says he can and that Peter Strozk says they exist. I guess BUT HER EMAILS!!!! is all the reason he needs.

Our President, at a Mississippi rally, not only declares that the Democrats' impeachment vote is "an attack on democracy itself" but also an effort to "nullify the votes of 63 million Americans," i.e., those of his supporters. How he feels about the over 73 million Americans who voted against him he did not say, so we are not only compelled to note, once again, that the President is not America, but also that the President's supporters are not the only participants in a democracy. (He also told his audience that he "can't believe" the Mississippi gubernatorial race is "competitive." Does he not think he might have something to do with that?)

Finally, our President says, out loud, in a fundraising email, that his supporters should contribute bigly to the campaigns of three Republican Senators who have supported a resolution condemning the impeachment inquiry. Perhaps not coincidentally, these three Senators are members of the very same body who will be trying this impeachment inquiry in the Senate. When a Bush Mobb ethics chief calls such a thing "criminal" and "a bribe," well, I'm not sure what else one has to say about the matter.

Around the table: more notes about various kinds of corruption.

Independent media outlet unmasks a senior Twitter editor as a British psyops agent -- but our "liberal" media largely ignore the story. You'd think our media would be more interested that a government spy, whose specialty is influencing how people think, was that deeply embedded in a social media corporation that influences how people think, but no, and I doubt it's because some media organ no one ever heard of (which hopefully will change!) broke the story. More likely it's because our "liberal" media do not take their duties seriously, and are just looking to fill space between adverts and move up the corporate ladder. Hey, I like to think the best of people, but some people make it awfully hard.

Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliot at ProPublica describe how Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert managed to get "opportunity zone" tax breaks for his properties in Detroit even though they're not in particularly distressed areas of the city. You'll be depressed to learn that getting these tax breaks is mostly about who you know, and even if Mr. Gilbert or his cronies didn't actually break any laws, the result -- money intended to spur investment in poorer communities gets diverted to already-wealthy developers -- is unmistakably corrupt and evil. And of course the way the 2017 tax "reform" sets up these "opportunity zones" is remarkably free of oversight and disclosure, and therefore accountability. Don't right-wingers say they're all about accountability? Oh, they mean accountability for you, not for them.

U.S. Magistrate Judge holds Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt of court for "show(ing) only minimal efforts to comply" with a court order preventing it from collecting more Corinthian College loans. Which is worse: the DOE spokeshack who plays the but-we-didn't-mean-any-harm card, or the one who said, probably rolling his eyes, that "(w)e acknowledged that servicers made unacceptable mistakes," never mind the unacceptable mistakes committed by DOE? Your law and order Administration, ladies and gentlemen!

You may have heard that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been having dinner with a lot of right-wing blowhards lately, but The Intercept checks around and finds that, despite a stated desire to "meet() new people and hear() from a wide range of viewpoints" that Mr. Zuckerberg says drives his dinners with the likes of Tucker Carlson and L. Brent Bozell III, , he hasn't actually broken bread with any liberals. Dig the it's called learning! BS at the end of his twittergasm! I gotta say, these days, when I read about someone rich or famous, normally my first response is gosh, what a fucking asshole.

Bobby Lewis at The Guardian watches 44 months of the Fox News Channel so you don't have to. And also so that you can fully understand that Fox News "poisons" people, which, like, I've seen happen. I've long said that Fox and Friends is the worst program on Fox News, not just because it's so baldly stupid, but because the hosts all pretend to be regular folks. You can take comfort in knowing that most of the regular folks you know are better informed than this. No, really. Don't judge by the guy eating 10 eggs at the Wisconsin diner, who'll blame his next heart attack on socialism.

Another day, another Bernie-can't-win-Iowa article in which voters act like they're trying to predict the winner, not be the winner. Seriously, when you say you're "unsure" how Medicare-for-All "plays in small-town Iowa" (set aside that it actually plays pretty well!) and you wonder if the things he proposes are "achievable things," you're doing democracy wrong -- gosh, if you're a small town voter and you like Medicare-for-All, you can actually make Medicare-for-All seem less impossible by supporting candidates who might actually pass it! This horserace mentality too many voters still have is going to get us all killed one day.

Finally, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) tells reporters that "(i)f Turkey was planning on coming into northern Syria and trying to ethnically cleanse the Kurds, and U.S. troops were caught in the middle, I am not completely convinced that it was a bad idea to get them out of harm's way." I guess that sounded better in his head, though seriously, America afraid of a big bad Turkish invasion? He acts like we're up against Suleiman the Magnificent instead of some two-bit dictator/Presidential man-crush. As an aside, maybe Beto O'Rourke could run ads about this in a 2020 Senate race.

Around the table: law and order! And other things this Administration only pretends to care about.

Joshua Cho at FAIR finds our "liberal" media more than willing to link California utility shutdowns to wildfires but not to what's driving the increase in wildfires, i.e., climate change. Because newspapers and TV shows wouldn't dare offend the ignoramuses who think climate change is a Chinese hoax! Seriously, there comes a time when you must dare to offend stupid people.

Surprise, surprise, an Environmental Working Group study of EPA data reveals that folks in low-income areas are far more likely to drink polluted water. Don't necessarily think it's just urban areas, either -- a lot of low-income folks live in rural areas, too. If the urban poor and the rural poor ever get together, Our Glorious Elites will have to change their underwear several times a day.

Ho hum, HUD officials admit to Congress that they "knowingly" missed a deadline to release hurricane reconstruction funding to Puerto Rico, and further admit that they had "no statutory authority" to do so. They went on to say, however, that HUD didn't release the funding because of all the "corruption" in Puerto Rico; of course these people know corruption when they see it. Because they all look in the mirror, amirite?

Also ho hum, our Department of Education gave out almost $11 million in student aid to for-profit colleges they knew didn't have the accreditation required to receive federal student aid. A DOE spokeshack apparently didn't feel like trying very hard to respond, citing a supposed lack of "context," just like all right-wingers do when they can't win the argument on the merits. Law and order!

CNN's Jeffrey Toobin regrets "blowing" the Hillary Clinton but-her-emails story "out of proportion." Would it make him feel better to know that she didn't lose because of the email story? She lost because she's another center-right Democrat, and history tells us center-right Democrats only win the Presidency when the economy is in the crapper. Maybe that wouldn't make him feel better, now that I think about it.

Finally, buried in this wide-ranging PRRI poll is the finding (scroll down to Fig. 9) that 26% of Americans approve of our President to the point where nothing he could do could earn their disapproval. The poll finds our President with a 39% approval rating generally, meaning 13% of Americans approve of him but could change their mind. In any case, the 26% figure maps well onto my oft-repeated saw that 25% of our electorate is bat-guano insane.

Action: concerning civil rights, impeachment, and law and order.

First things first: use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Yeah, I know, there's an impeachment effort going on, and we'll get to that, but our House has already worked to pass good legislation supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, and your Senators should work to pass this legislation, too. And if our President vetoes all of it, as I'm sure he would, then let him be accountable for it. It comes with the job, after all. Too often we excuse the inaction, or the bad actions, of our leaders. Let's stop doing that.

Meanwhile, you can use the aforementioned tools on this page to find phone numbers for your House Reps, too, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President for his wrongdoing. Don't call your Senators, though. They're supposed to try the impeachment. It's annoying to hear some of our Senators currently running for President call for impeachment, because that's rather like a judge demanding an indictment. But other Senators get their role wrong, too: Sen. Alexander said last week that though what our President did was "inappropriate," an impeachment proceeding would "only divide the country further." At least Mr. Alexander wasn't Administration crony Roger Stone, who said that impeachment would bring about "a spasm of violence and insurrection in this country like you’ve never seen" and that "a politician who votes for it will be endangering their own life." I don't know about you, but when evil people try to scare me into doing the wrong thing, that only makes me twice as resolved to do the right thing. Which is to call my Rep and tell them to impeach this arrogant, ignorant, unprincipled, sorry excuse for a President.

In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to hold Administration officials who ignore their subpoenas in contempt. Like me, you probably thought the law-and-order issues were pretty cut-and-dried, but apparently not! Apparently if our 46% President believes he can't be touched while in office, or that the impeachment proceeding against him is somehow "illegitimate," he can direct his underlings to defy legal writs to show up in court and testify! Actually, he can't do that, or else anyone could simply refuse to comply with the law, but Democrats in the House seem to be answering his defiance with a shrug, and though you might argue that we could interpret this collective shrug as a shrug of confidence, well, come on, these are Democrats we're talking about -- they're either weak, or they're actively collaborating with evil while merely appearing weak. But that's why we're here: to provide the steel in their spine so they can do the right thing.

Around the table: concerning public banking, internet freedom, our IRS's priorities, our President's options, and small farmers.

State of California enacts public banking legislation. If I were the author of this article, I might not have run from noting that the only other public bank in America is in North Dakota right to TEH CRITICZ SAYZ!!!! in paragraph six, at least not without noting that North Dakota survived the end of the fracking bubble mostly because it has a public bank which even that state's Republican-dominated government has made no move to dismantle. And dig the fool comparing public banking to the DMV (dude, 1985 just called, it wants its right-wing propaganda back) and saying public banking "just doesn't work," as if he's oblivious to the fact that private banks nearly destroyed this economy not that long ago.

In case you were wondering why the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the FCC's nefarious net neutrality repeal: the judges agreed that the FCC had "broad authority" to reclassify (or, perhaps, re-reclassify) broadband services as "information services" as long as they could come up with a convincing argument to do so. But I still suspect a lawsuit challenging the FCC's process in soliciting public comments would succeed, and this Buzzfeed report, in part describing efforts to jam the FCC's inboxes with fake anti-net neutrality comments, could provide plenty of ammo toward that effort.

ProPublica finally hears back from the IRS on why it targets poor folks disproportionately vis a vis rich folks, and you won't like the answer: it's too expensive to target rich folks. On one hand, thanks, Republicans who gin up BS scandals to justify cutting IRS funding, and thanks also, Democrats, for going along with Republican drama! On the other hand, the IRS should know that great reward only follows great risk. And Democrats who run campaign ads on how the IRS goes after poor people oh never mind these are Democrats we're talking about.

Austin Sarat at The Conversation asks the horrifying question: "Could President Trump be impeached and convicted – but also reelected?" His answer: yes, since our Constitution is silent on the matter of what a man removed from office could do afterward -- specifically deferring that question to the Senate, in the course of its trial of the House's impeachment. My answer: yes, if Democrats spend 2020 doing victory laps and don't stand for anything regular Americans want. You know, kinda like they did in 2016.

Finally, I'm as displeased as anyone else that our Agriculture Secretary told Wisconsin dairy farmers that small dairy farms may not be able to survive in a world dominated by factory farms -- seriously, a dairy farmer about to cut his own wrists doesn't want to hear that our economy doesn't guarantee him a livelihood! -- but I am puzzled that Secretary Perdue seems to think the rise of big ag corporations is a relatively recent development, as if Hollywood didn't make half a dozen films about this very subject all at once in the mid-'80s. I feel compelled to note, of course, that his pessimism about small farmers is a bit odd, coming as it does from a public servant who has some power to protect small farmers from oblivion. Such pessimism certainly isn't part of the American can-do spirit.

Around the table: impeachment is too good for this clown! And other lessons.

Remember when our President said he wouldn't cut Medicare? Well, apparently he's planning an executive order that would expand privatized "Medicare Advantage" health insurance plans -- which would likely result in Medicare benefit cuts for everyone else. Remember when Republicans used to whine about President Obama's executive orders? AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!!!, they squealed. Good times! The idea that our President will save a socialist government program from "socialism" is laughable, and should only remind you that the whole idea of Medicare for All is that everyone gets the "advantage."

Justice Department Inspector General's report on a week-long power outage at a Brooklyn jail in the middle of winter "seems more preoccupied with the episode as a public relations blunder than as a humanitarian disaster," says Nick Pinto at The Intercept. And that's exactly why we're a sick, immoral, and decadent society: we constantly grope at the "optics" of something evil, rather than just getting up and calling that thing evil. Also too, we don't think of America as a place where "humanitarian disasters" occur, though we should, since they do.

Former Bush Mobb advisor opined back in January that our President won't be impeached and removed from office, but will resign in exchange for immunity for himself and his family. I'd rather let him twist in office than cut that deal -- a deal that'll likely never happen anyway simply because of the number of people, at state and federal levels, you'd have to get on board with it. And if the economy is going to be as bad in 2020 as Mr. Steinberg says (and I'm far from convinced it will be that bad), what leverage would our President have to cut a deal? Why, even the damn Democrats might not take that deal!

We learn from Connor Sheets at ProPublica that sheriffs in Alabama are releasing prisoners on "medical bond" when they get sick so the state won't have to pay any of their medical bills. Naturally at least one Alabama DA is worried that prisoners who get out on medical bond will break into your house, and one sheriff also seems to think prisoners can get "a dozen honey buns" on commissary. Are we sure it's the inmates who are sick? And note well that if we a) get rid of cash bail and b) expanded Medicare to include everyone, we wouldn't be faced with decisions like this in the first place.

Finally, the incomparable Dean Baker calls our Administration's attempt to drill for oil in ANWR "a gratuitous act of environmental destruction." Further, "people in power" are "taking actions that show they don’t give a damn about the world they pass on to future generations" and "spitting in the face of people who value the environment to show they can wreak destruction for no good reason whatsoever." These are all completely accurate statements, and it is not "uncivil" to say them -- and people who would say so are telling you (guess what?) that they can't win the argument on the merits.

Action: concerning corruption and more corruption.

You may have heard that our House of Representatives has launched a formal impeachment inquiry against our President, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to get our President's tax returns as part of any impeachment effort. Don't brook any silliness from the right about "re-litigating the 2016 election" -- the same election in which 54% of the electorate voted against our President and he only won by getting pluralities in three swing states, but I digress -- because if he's really got nothing to be afraid of, he ought to cough up his tax returns. More likely he does have a lot to be afraid of -- not just of good Americans finding out exactly how compromised he is, which should be the focus of an impeachment investigation, but also of good Americans finding out he's actually dirt-poor in real terms, which would be icing on the cake. But generally, if the President fears it, we ought to do it.

In a related note, Win Without War still helps you tell Speaker Pelosi to ensure that the part of the House defense authorization bill that forbids our Department of Defense from spending taxpayer money at our President's properties makes it through conference. You can almost see her saying well, we don't need this now, because we've got an impeachment going on, can you? You can also see the impeachment effort falling flat, and then we'll be left with neither a justly-disgraced President nor the force of law preventing taxpayer money going right into said President's pockets. Really, it's the right thing to do, keeping taxpayer money from lining our President's pockets; you can imagine our Founders agreeing, right? You can also imagine our Founders spinning in their graves over the continued drama of this President abusing his power and enriching himself off these abuses. But you can't count on Congress to stop it -- unless we make our will unmistakably known to them.

Around the table: from economic blues to voting machine foul-ups.

Dean Baker thinks that though "The Economy Looks Grim for Workers," it "Might Not Bring Recession." Why not? Because very few sectors of the economy (housing construction, auto sales) are big enough to take the economy down by themselves anymore, and I bet banksters tell us this is why we should let them run everything! After all, that time the banksters took down the economy by themselves was so long ago! I still suspect the economy might take a dive merely because it's been in recovery so long (even if, as Mr. Baker suggests, we might better put "recovery" in quotation marks), but Mr. Baker's thesis is certainly more convincing than reading the tea leaves of inverted yield curves on T-bonds.

Nate Silver says Joe Biden doesn't have an enthusiasm problem so much as an "Iowa problem," and though I think we really ought to describe the difference between enthusiasm for beating a hated incumbent from enthusiasm for electing a new one, I do recall John McCain also having a similar problem in 2008 (he finished fourth in the Iowa caucuses that January), and then over the next few months Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney basically split the not-McCain vote so that Mr. McCain won the nomination; I suppose you could see Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren playing the Huckabee/Romney parts in a similar drama. But all that's not a good sign for Joe Biden, either -- John McCain lost the 2008 general, after all, and you probably remember that back in 2000 John McCain was the upstart who made people excited to vote for him, and when has Joe Biden ever been that?

181 CEOs sign a Business Roundtable resolution proclaiming that they can't just worry about delivering more money to shareholders anymore, and that they also have to worry about workers and our climate, among other things, but Tom Conway at OurFuture reminds us that they're just pulling a stunt and that we will need to "force" them to really clean up their act. I've long said that forcing CEOs to pay a 91% tax on income over a million bucks and forcing their corporations to pay a 55% tax rate will bring them back into the fold of civilized people, but the other reforms Mr. Conway cites in paragraphs 25 and 27 will also help. (Note well, also, that these corporations declaring that they have to do more for our communities don't pay a whole lot of taxes to begin with.)

Jesus Mary and Joseph Jon Ossoff is thinking of running for Senate. Mr. Ossoff rode that boatload of funding for the 2017 Georgia 6th House special election all the way to 48%, just as I figured he would -- he was, after all, another center-right Democrat who said an awful lot about right-sizing regulations and bringing high-tech jobs to the region and very little about his major accomplishment in life (his production of an al-Jazeera report exposing ISIS sex slavery). And a Black Lives Matter activist wound up winning Georgia's 6th in 2018, proving, again, that "raising a lot of money" is nowhere near as important as "inspire people to vote for you."

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gets the Queen to close Parliament for most of the two months before the U.K. has to exit the European Union at the end of October, precisely so they can't stop the no-deal Brexit Mr. Johnson seems to desire. They call it "coup-like," but I see this as abject desperation on Mr. Johnson's part, and people do understand that British elections aren't like American Presidential elections, right? Mr. Johnson's position depends on a) his party's electoral fortunes or b) his ability to form a coalition government if the Tories don't get more than half the seats in the House of Commons, so people "liking" Boris Johnson means rather little if they don't also like his party, the same party that can't seem to hammer out a deal to gracefully exit the EU. And if expected food/fuel/medicine shortages materialize, then how does he win after everyone saw him go out of his way to bring them about? He won't be running against Joe Biden, after all.

Finally, Mississippi voters went to the polls earlier this week to vote in primaries for various statewide offices, and voters in upwards of nine counties reported that they tried to vote for one Republican gubernatorial candidate but got their vote switched to another, who just so happens to be the state's sitting Lieutenant Governor. And that's why we need paper ballots -- ballot counters would have to alter them or "lose" them to steal an election, and most of them would pause before doing that, but nobody feels guilty when a "faulty" machine does it for them.

Around the table: featuring the horrible truth about "free" trade.

Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the state of Colorado violated the U.S. Constitution when it replaced three electors who planned not to vote for Hillary Clinton, though she won the state's popular vote. I think they ruled correctly -- and that's why we need to get rid of the Electoral College! I'm a little surprised and ashamed that it hadn't occurred to me until today that our President could win re-election regardless of his share of the popular vote, if enough electors simply buck the will of their state's electorate. If Democrats were more street-smart, they'd make the Electoral College a big campaign issue. They're not, of course, so they won't.

The incomparable Dean Baker reminds us that, contra what our President says, "China Did Not Trick the U.S. -- Trade Negotiators Served Corporate Interests." "Both Republican and Democratic administrations signed trade deals that made it easy to manufacture goods in China and other countries, and then export them back to the United States," he writes, meaning corporations could take advantage of "low-cost labor there" and "low-cost supply chains" so they could destroy their competitors and make a mint. Thus "the trade deficit was the result of their efforts to increase their profits," and American working families "lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007." In other words, the trade deficit with China is a feature of American policy, not a bug. The fact that it gives our President opportunity to grandstand about foreigners "taking advantage" of America is just icing on the cake, and our corporate overlords are nowhere near as upset about such grandstanding as they'd like you to think.

Department of Energy study finds the price of building wind farms lower than the price of building a natural gas plant. And natural gas was the "cheap" fossil fuel! Some caveats apply -- renewable energy tax credits might disappear, for one -- but note well that if our President calls all of this TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!! that his own Department of Energy said it. He does appoint "the best people" to his government, right? (But as much as he rants about "piles of dead birds," I'm sure he'll also tout the fact that three states that now get 30% of their power from wind -- Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma -- all voted for him in 2016. Why? Because while you're trying to make sense of his chaos, he just makes more chaos. And yes, I could have written that sentence about George W. Bush in 2004, too.)

Rutgers University study finds that roughly one out of every thousand black men will die during an encounter with police. Sadly, right-wingers will twist this around to SEE YOU ARE TOO TEH SAFEZ 99.9% DON'T DIEZ!!!!!, without telling you that black men and boys are 2.5 times more likely to die during police contacts than white men and boys. They'll also probably twist this around to say black men and boys are five times more likely to kill themselves than get killed by police, without mentioning, that, hello, nobody should worry about whether the next time they talk to a cop will be their last.

Finally, our President claims that Jews who vote Democrat exhibit "either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty." Presumably he means "disloyalty" to Israel, but suggesting you're disloyal to a foreign country if you oppose our President or his party is no less offensive than suggesting you're disloyal to this one. And, ah, could it be that Jewish voters went harder for Democratic Congressional candidates in 2018 than they did for Hillary Clinton in 2016 at least in part because more of them fear they'll be killed by the very same white supremacists our President has emboldened? Anyway, no President should conflate himself with our country and call his opponents "disloyal." This is a grown man acting like this.

Penny Rants for Monday, August 19, 2019: special "media coverage of Democratic Presidential candidates still sucks!" edition.

Julie Hollar at FAIR catches our "liberal" media reframing attacks on Joe Biden as attacks on Barack Obama. They take their cue from Mr. Biden on this one, of course, just as objective journalists would! Of course, in the real world, where we observe and tabulate behavior more scientifically, we find the Democrats running for President going very far out of their way not to attack the Obama legacy, such as it is, and when your right-wing pals start yelling ZOMG ALL THEY DOEZ IZ ATTACKZ TEH OBAMAZ!!!!!, the bank-shot response will be "you mean like you did for eight years?" Democrats shouldn't take every criticism of policy as an attack on a person, since that's what folks do when they regard politics as a spectator sport, rather than the participatory exercise it actually is. And if I were Mr. Biden, I wouldn't be so confident that "Democratic primary voters" will make the "judgment" he hopes they'll make. After all, if the Obama Administration were that great, we wouldn't have the President we have now.

Sen. Bernie Sanders told ralliers that the Washington Post doesn't exactly like him, and our media protested that couldn't be true because OUR BOSSEZ DO NOTZ TELLZ UZ PRECISELYZ WHATZ TO DOZ!!!!, and then we are reminded that "liberal" media bias against Sen. Sanders is actually a thing that exists and can be measured. You may remember the 16-negative-headlines-in-16-hours spasm in which the Washington Post indulged back in 2016, but you may not remember the litany of Sanders-is-factually-correct-but-understanding-the-world-is-hard-so-he-must-be-wrong "fact checks" the paper has performed on his assertions since then. Calling his policy prescriptions "unrealistic" is just icing on the cake (and, you know, plenty of can't-happen stuff has actually happened), but saying his attacks on our media "echo" our President's is just plain wrong. Sen. Sanders accuses our "media" of bias, while our President calls their accurate reporting on him "fake news"; I wonder why they would want to equate the two.

Naturally it ain't just Bernie Sanders our "liberal" media doesn't like -- the New York Times treats us to a story of Democrats "worrying" about whether Elizabeth Warren has what it takes to defeat the beast, full of the usual anecdotal evidence and "conventional" "wisdom." The article worries about her "professorial style" in paragraph six, but it had already demolished that worry in paragraph two in telling us that "(f)ew candidates inspire as much enthusiasm as she does among party voters" -- after all, folks with "professorial style" don't "inspire" "enthusiasm," do they? Naturally the article also worries about her "uncompromising liberalism," even though at least one candidate stands to her left, and uncompromising centrism is clearly overrated as a winning formula. (Aside to the Democratic voter who says "(i)f it were completely up to me, I’d vote for her": it is completely up to you. Your job is to express your will, not get caught up in the 13-dimensional chess games Our Glorious Elites would rather you play.)

Our New York paper of record went on to cover the Beto O'Rourke campaign "reboot" with horserace analysis over whether Mr. O'Rourke can "break through." And the analysis ain't even that deep: can Beto somehow stand out among all the other candidates "taking the fight" to our President? seems to be the beginning and end of it; we don't even hear from moderate Democratic voters or think-tank punditoids, as we often do with Messrs. Warren and Sanders, respectively. Certainly the Times offers no analysis of whether "taking the fight" to our President doesn't play directly into his hands -- he loves it when you say his name and treat him like he's the center of the universe, and I'm old enough to remember when "taking the fight" to George W. Bush wasn't enough to beat him, either. The more you talk about how you want to make America a more perfect union, the less you talk about our President, but our "liberal" media is content to imagine that by criticizing Messrs. Sanders and Warren over "electability" concerns and Mr. O'Rourke over "visibility" concerns, they're being fair and balanced!

Around the table: Joe Biden revises his career yet again, and other dramas.

Jesus Mary and Joseph now Joe Biden is trying to convince us he opposed the Iraq war and "was as outspoken as much as anyone at all in Congress," including, I presume, Barbara Lee, Bob Graham, and Ron Paul. Sooner or later even deaf, dumb, and blind infants will tire of Mr. Biden's attempts to revise his 40 years of professional capitulation to the right. And this is why he'll lose in 2020.

Alan McLeod at FAIR catches cable news channels suggesting that if you can't afford that vacation, you could just put it on a credit card! Remember when our Administration was telling folks furloughed over our President's vanity border wall tantrum that they could just take out a loan to make ends meet? This is what we get when we enable a bankster class that does no work other than converting other people's debt into their wealth.

Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upholds North Dakota law insisting that voters all have a residential street address in order to have Voter ID (and therefore to vote) -- though around 20 percent of the Native American population actually don't have these street addresses. Which our own Supreme Court will be anxious to overturn citing the "undue burden" standard in Planned Parenthood v. Casey! I kid, of course -- these Justices are very, ah, selective about their precedents.

Former #1 overall NHL draft pick Joe Murphy, who carved out a solid 15-year career as a second-line winger, is now 51, homeless on the streets of Kenora, Ontario, and showing symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE). We know football is bad for the human brain, but I bet one day we find out that hockey is even worse -- the game's effects on its players' brains hidden by the anonymity that's more likely to be their lot once they stop playing and return to their Canadian hinterland hometowns, as they tend to do.

In case you were tempted to argue that recent mass shootings mean we should give our FBI "more tools" to stop them, Chip Gibbons at In These Times reminds us that not only is the FBI more obsessed with "black identity extremists" than white racist terrorists, but it already has "extraordinary tools" that it's just not using against white racists. In other words, our FBI would rather use its vast powers against good Americans than use those powers to protect us. And naturally Joe Biden would pass a "domestic terrorism" law to respond to mass shootings, which surely wouldn't have the same ill effects as all that anti-crime legislation he's enthusiastically pushed over the years.

Finally, why does our President give a thumbs-up for the camera as he's taking a picture with an infant orphaned by the El Paso shooting? To get us to talk about that, and to get embroiled in yet another one of his dramas, that's why -- and, unfortunately, fighting drama means calling attention to the fact that it is drama. Think of it as a periodic vaccination. Also, think of what our President might not want you to find out as you're obsessing over his latest drama -- like, just as a for-example, that he still uses undocumented immigrant labor while he rails against undocumented immigrants.

Around the table: no, every problem is not a Gordian knot! And other insights.

Politico wonders: "How Do You Solve a Problem Like 8chan?" Simple: you do what Dean Baker suggested we do last week -- you hold corporations like Facebook and Twitter accountable for the public postings of their users, in much the same manner you hold book publishers accountable for what they put out. (People who post privately to their friends will have to rely on their friends to tell them when they're full of it.) But you certainly don't throw up your hands and say the First Amendment "protects" hateful speech without specifying exactly how it does that (i.e., that it protects you from your government, and not your publisher).

And now for the WHEREZ TEH DATAZ!!!!!! crowd: researchers using FBI data on 248 active shooter incidents over 17 years, find that semiautomatic weapons "roughly double" victims' chances of getting killed or wounded. My initial reaction: they only double your chances of getting killed or wounded? But the Brigham and Women's Hospital study didn't count incidents with the largest death tolls or with multiple shooters. Headline from the no-gun-control-ever lobby: SEE TEH SEMIZ DON'TZ KILLZ TEH PEEPULZ MORE EFFICIENTLYZ HAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Of course, the more pertinent finding (and the one that aligns with common sense) is that semis do hit more people and thus result in more deaths.

Ben Freeman, Nia Harris, and Cassandra Simpson at TomDispatch explode the myth that military spending creates jobs. You've likely started to suspect that military spending enriches big defense contractor CEOs more than anything else, but it's nice to have some facts behind it. Lockheed's share of taxpayer money went up about 37% between 2012 and 2018, but their total workforce went down almost 13% -- and their CEO's salary went up 32%. Two other big defense contractors also cut jobs over that time, and two more only "gained" jobs because they bought other corporations. Stick that in your Tea Party uncle's hat next time he talks about defense creating jobs -- and then pivot to things that actually create jobs, like infrastructure, renewable energy, and health care spending, and you'll likely find a sympathetic audience. If only Democrats would act on this insight!

Another day, another finding that the 2017 tax "reform" hasn't goosed up capital investment like its supporters said it would, and this finding comes from our Administration's Commerce Department, which you would think would have an interest in saying the exact opposite. Then again, maybe not, as long as our President is willing to say whatever. But cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% did not, in fact, "free" corporations to spend more money on capital projects. Historically, the only thing that does that is a higher tax rate, since corporations will spend more money on capital projects once they realize it's going to get taxed away if they don't. (That's also why corporations don't really need "incentives" to do research and development -- research and development are expenses, and corporate taxes only tax profits.)

Finally, our President voices his apparent belief that his "rhetoric" not only doesn't divide our nation but actually "brings people together." And it is possible that he may be right about that one day -- at that moment where we can all observe his rhetoric bringing people together against him. Sadly, that moment isn't now, because his votaries are still too eager to make excuses for him -- this, even though conservatives always told us conservatism wasn't about making excuses for people!

Around the table: starring Saint Reagan, the racist! And Rand Paul, the bastard!

Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that "Ronald Reagan's Racism" -- as recently exposed on previously-unscrutinized Nixon tapes -- "Should Come as No Surprise." Nor, I might add, should his cleverness about hiding his racism come as a surprise -- as Mr. Goldwater explained his opposition to the Civil Rights Act by saying "(y)ou can't pass a law that will make me like you or you like me," Mr. Reagan framed his opposition to a successful open housing referendum by saying "I have never believed that majority rule has the right to impose on an individual as to what he does with his property," all of which, of course, distracted us from these initiatives' true aim: to prevent people from taking away the rights of other people on the basis of skin color. It almost makes our current President's artless brutality refreshing. I said "almost."

The incomparable Dean Baker asks a question I haven't heard anyone else ask yet: "Why is Facebook, the World's Largest Publisher, Immune to Publishing Laws?" Long story short: people post a lot of false (and damaging in the legal sense) stuff on Facebook, but if our laws treated Facebook as a publisher, which it is, then Facebook would have to a) remove the false/damaging stuff and b) post prominent corrections so that everyone who saw the false/damaging stuff would see the correction. You know, like every other publisher has to do. That might sound like a lot of work, and might actually require Facebook to hire more workers and pay them well, but I've always believed that work builds character, and that adherence to the values of our civilization is the best job-creator.

Ho hum, more than half of our President's trade-aid-to-farmers went to only one-tenth of the farmers in the program. And our USDA claims that this is how the program is supposed to work! No, really, they said, and I quote, "the more acres they farm and bushels per acre they produce, the more assistance they receive." I guess they no longer believe that economies of scale "reduce costs." (As an aside, I'd be wary of suggesting that this is uniquely "a time when the number of mid-sized family farms is declining," because that's been happening for decades, and it's because our government no longer cares about consolidation or monopolies.)

Rand Paul offers to pay Ilhan Omar's way back to Somalia so she can "appreciate America more." Yeah, let's send people running from people trying to kill them back to the people who were trying to kill them, hardy har har. One more time: trying to improve America does not make you "ungrateful," nor does it mean you "don't love America enough." It's like these people think "a more perfect union" is some kind of magic spell, and not a phrase that actually means something.

Finally, let's address the ubiquitous center-right talking point that you shouldn't support an actual liberal for the Democratic Presidential nomination because Democrats wouldn't have the numbers in Congress to pass the legislation they propose. I was about to say this is something only cowards say -- don't support someone you believe in, it'll all end in tears! -- but it's actually worse than that: the No-We-Can't Caucus aren't cowards themselves, but folks who want you to be cowards. And why? Because they fear what we can do and will do when we stop obsessing about them! Our job as citizens, after all is to communicate our will to our representatives in such frequency and in such numbers that they do our will; our job is not to figure out which nominee is the most likely winner so we can be winners too, because that's playing their game. And history is, as usual, also instructive: the day before Election Day 1980, Democrats held 58 seats in the Senate, and you know what happened after that -- an "unelectable" extremist changed everything about politics for the next several decades.