Thieves in the Temple.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to support the Iran nuclear deal, lower gas prices, and pass the MAT Act, the Judiciary Act, and the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit, lower prescription drug prices, reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits, let most Americans file their taxes for free, pass the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, and confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets App, tax the windfall profits of big oil corporations, pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow campaign finance law again, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, reject any bill that would force President Biden to reinstate Title 42, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices, pass a Billionaire's Income Tax, allow Congressional staffers to organize, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, let working families file with the IRS for free, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: from electric cars to nuclear fears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: election workers and banned book clubs good, corporate tax avoidance and stoking rage bad.

Who are the "Trio Who May Have Figured Out How to Save American Democracy," according to Steven Rosenfeld at The New Republic? The three retired election officials in Arizona who thwarted the Cyber Ninja's "fraudit" of Maricopa County votes by simply correlating voting data with widely-available public records, that's who. And they showed that tens of thousands of folks did not vote from beyond the grave or the land of fiction and yes, tens of thousands of solidly Republican voters in the Phoenix suburbs did vote for Joe Biden in 2020. I'd like very much for folks like Benny White to be right that their work could have forestalled the proliferation of the Big Lie if they'd gotten there earlier, though I doubt they are. But we could get ahead of the next Big Lie, thanks to good folks like these.

Ho hum, Netflix made a record $5.3 billion in profits in 2021, but paid a hair over one percent of that in taxes. In each of the four years since the Trump tax "reform" lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, Netflix has paid between 0 and 1 percent in taxes, though right-wingers always say we lower tax rates to increase compliance! The Build Back Better Act would have at least instituted a 15% minimum corporate tax on corporations with profits over $1 billion, but our One True Great and Real Lord President Joe Manchin killed that, though he apparently supports it. You know, just like with his own voting rights bill! It ain't just the Pearly Gates that'll be unkind to his works -- history won't be kind, either. I mean, this crap just doesn't read well.

Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut informs us that good Americans are forming banned book clubs in the wake of right-wing book-banning efforts -- with at least one started by a 14-year-old student, and pretty much anyone who remembers being that age knows that such students are the last people you want to tell what they can't read. You hate to see a school board's oversight function devolve into right-wing political correctness, but that's what happened, in too many areas of our great country, and you can tell these groups know they're full of soup by how easily they switch from decrying critical race theory to decrying pornography, as if they know they can't win the argument on the merits unless they keep moving the goalposts. I'll bet Louise A. Spilsbury's anti-bullying book is worth a read, regardless of what various school boards think.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon argues that Donald Trump has "seized control" of the narrative surrounding the January 6 attempted coup, as Democrats take their time with their January 6 Commission and our "liberal" media has "fail(ed) to treat Trump's downright criminal aggression on this front with the gravity it deserves." But though I agree that our media's fallen down on the job again, and no one's ever lost money betting on Democrat weakness, I'm not sure Mr. Trump has actually "seized control" here. We all saw it on TV, after all, and every time he or some Trumphole tries to gaslight us about it, all we need do is recall the Confederate flag flying through the Capitol halls or the Capitol Police officers getting beaten with Blue Lives Matter flags or, well, all the yelling. But yeah, our DOJ should have arrested Mark Meadows already. We can't be nice to him just because he used to be a Congressman.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, as much as I'd love to believe that Donald Trump was at a rally over the weekend acting "Like a Man Who Knows He’s About to Be Held Accountable for the First Time in His Life," I rather suspect he doesn't really think he's about to go to jail -- he's just playacting for the crowd, pretending he sympathizes with all of their reversals in life. And once you start playing this game, you can't really stop -- in fact, you have to keep upping the rage. Most Republicans already know this, and approve of it; they would just prefer to keep upping the rage a little more slowly.

Around the table: good news at Starbucks, bad news in Poland (and elsewhere in America).

In case you'd lost track, upwards of 54 Starbucks stores have now begun the process of unionizing, including 15 just this past Monday. Only the first two stores in Buffalo have actually begun collective bargaining for better pay and working conditions, but this is good news. Sadly, woke-ass Starbucks management haven't stopped the mandatory anti-union propaganda meetings, replete with whining that unions will divide workers from management, though you might think management has done a pretty good job of that already, and anyway no one wants "unity" with someone who'll hurt you so they can redistribute your income upwards to themselves. Really, the similarity with how domestic abusers talk is more than a little upsetting.

From Mikhal Dehel at Boston Review we learn that "Poland's Current Memory Politics Are Rewriting History" in a way you'll find eerily similar to what Americans like Glenn Youngkin aspire to do. Last year a Warsaw District Court convicted two historians of "violating the honor" of a former mayor of Warsaw during World War II, all due to a single footnote in which one Jewish woman testified that this man had robbed her and ratted out other Jews to the Nazis. Because, apparently, Polish law (rammed through by a right-wing government, imagine that) only allows you to blame the Nazis for what happened in Poland, even though we all know the Nazis had collaborators everywhere. End result: historians won't want to do research anymore if someone's descendant has a sad. People need to grow the fuck up, particularly about their past.

When I hear that Nancy Pelosi's going back to being a Republican "bogeyman" now that she's running for re-election, I must ask: do Republicans not remember Abigail Spanberger turning that against David Brat in 2018? Of course, to demolish this sad attempt at relevance, you have to count on Democrats to actually do what Ms. Spanberger did, which is remind their Republican opponents that they're not actually running against Nancy Pelosi and that using the current House Speaker as a crutch for your own bad ideas is just a bad look. David Brat might even give them similar advice, to the degree that they'd listen, and to the degree that he's capable of self-knowledge.

Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick says he never outsourced jobs, though he's on record having done just that (and using it to get a job with Tha Bush Mobb) two decades ago. Trumpholes hate outsourcing, which recommends them, though I still think it's more about the foreigner-hate with them, and not so much about the whole "let's not pay foreign workers in dung pellets just so we can avoid paying American workers decently" thing. Between that and Mehmet Oz's difficulties, I'm even more convinced that Jeff Bartos will be the Republican Senate nominee -- and that Trumpholes, at that point, will judge him to be a fellow traveler, regardless of what he's ever done or said.

Finally, when I hear that Democrats in Congress still think they can get Joe "the Penguin" Manchin to agree to some part of the Build Back Better Act, all I can say is: fools! He's going to keep playing Lucy to your Charlie Brown for the next 10 months, because he wants Republican majorities in both Houses after the 2022 elections, all so he can make himself "essential" going into his 2024 re-election bid. I mean, who's going to lift a finger to help him get re-elected in 2022 if Democrats wind up with, say, 56 Senators? Anyway, we're still going to have a lot to say about all that, but it'd be easier if we were already out in the streets protesting Democrat weakness and inaction. I'd have already willed those protests into existence, if I could.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: blows against monopoly power! And other developments.

It's a pretty crap moment for good Americans right now, but Matt Stoller sees hope in eight developments against monopoly power in America. Maybe you won't think it's all that impressive that a judge failed to dismiss an antitrust case against Facebook or that a judge found an individual (the hated Martin Shkreli) guilty of violating antitrust laws or that the Biden Administration has made more progress against hated pharmacy benefit managers than any other Administration, but these are all big deals, and not just because we've been banging our heads against a wall for so long. (If you ask me, not that you would, big corporations have been stoking the flames of inflation as a retaliation against the Biden Administration's anti-monopoly push. I can't prove that, of course, but I'd feel like a schmuck if I didn't at least think it probable.)

Surprise, surprise, many nurses tell us that hospitals are so short on staff these days because for-profit health care corporations deliberately keep their staffing levels low, so as to redistribute more worker income upward to executives. Strangely, they do not typically report that staffing levels are low because of TEH VACCINEZ MANDATEZ!!!!, like Tucker Carlson said many months ago. But then, right-wingers only listen to nurses when they tell them what they want to hear. (As for California's single-payer health insurance push: no one would be happier than I to see that happen, but they've done this dance before. Perhaps the good folks of California can help rectify that situation.)

When I hear that a peer-reviewed study has found that upwards of three compounds in the marijuana plant have stopped COVID molecules from entering human cells in the lab, my first thought was that of course we would have known this sooner if it weren't so infernally difficult to research marijuana in the first place! Those of you who are able to toke without going to jail should know that smoking it is about the worst way to get these helpful effects -- the three compounds in question degrade at high temperatures, so better to take them in pills. More study will be needed, and Joe Biden could help that along by removing marijuana from Schedule I, but he won't do that, though I'll be damned if he ever explains why.

Excavations in Peru have suggested that an ancient indigenous people called the Wari actually spiked their beer with hallucinogens in order to make peace with neighboring communities. The Wari appear to have enjoyed several centuries of peace and prosperity while doing this; meanwhile, America has a serious problem with rage-filled right-wingers bollocksing up everything good we try to do, and perhaps these points taken in tandem should compel us to conclude that the "war on drugs" is lousy idea. Also, as Sam Kinison used to say, give us the pot, and we won't want the crack.

When I hear that Mitch McConnell has threatened the Democrats with retaliation if they even try to reform the filibuster so they can pass voting rights legislation, all I can say is waaaaaaaaaah. Republicans will always throw a tantrum about something, and it doesn't matter what it is. But this is what happens, Democrats, when you constantly give in to bullies -- the bullies keep taking and taking and taking, and any action becomes a slight, and thus a reason to keep taking. Meanwhile the American people only get more and more hurt. I do not know what will make Democrats learn. Defeat at the polls certainly doesn't.

Finally, the Penguin says he won't support a Democratic proposal to make the filibuster a "talking filibuster" -- you know, where you'd actually have to hold the floor and read the phone book to keep it going -- to get voting rights bills passed. This may come as a surprise to you if you recall the Penguin himself floating the idea of making the filibuster a "talking filibuster" early last year -- but it will not come as a surprise to you if you've come to regard him as a bad-faith negotiator, whether that's because he's simply a drama hound or because he's a vital part of a Democrat plan to throw the 2022 Congressional elections in the hopes Joe Biden will be re-elected more easily in 2024. Right about now would be a good time for me to say that, in the end, they don't matter, we matter.

Around the table: from climate disasters to media disasters.

Praise the Lord that Bibi van der Zee at The Guardian has compiled a list of all the climate-related disasters we faced in 2021. Surprise: it's not all bad news, and the good news runs the gamut from little victories (dolphins spotted in the East River) to the big (major court decisions in Germany and the Netherlands). The bad news (California drought, Texas power outage, floods in Queensland and Malaysia, et al) can still seem awfully demoralizing, and note well that in several American states you could run over protestors like the Insulate Britain protestors, but then, optimism is really the only sane response to any news, lest you become a Republican, or worse, a cynic.

I'm as hopeful as anyone else that Republicans will pick so many absolutely toxic nominees that they flub their chance to retake Congress, but you have to remember that when they do things like attack Mitch McConnell, all they're doing is creating drama, to distract you from what they really want to do, which is serve their corporate paymasters once they get power. Pretending to hate Mitch McConnell, what a crock. Like we're all stupid! Also remember that the actual number of Republicans who'll withhold their vote from rage-addled assholes is actually very small. The number of independents who might, on the other hand? We'll see.

I'm not sure what to think of Democrats actually taking a (weak 39-37) lead in a USA Today/Suffolk Congressional generic ballot -- Gallup had Republicans up about a dozen in their generic about this time in 2010 (though, weirdly, Rasmussen had the two parties about even at the same time). Anyway, if Dems want to keep this up, they need to do two things: 1) use their power for good, rather than continue to prop up "bipartisan" systems that just hurt us, and 2) remind everyone that the people who threaten the lives of school officials and yell at you for wearing a mask or getting a vaccine are the exact people you will be empowering if you vote Republican. A vote for this is a vote for that! History suggests that Democrats don't have the guts to do these things, but we have the guts to demand that they do.

When I hear that Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) wonders "(w)hy...we think that we can create something better than God in terms of combating disease," I feel compelled to respond that, well, God also created viruses that kill people, and also created people who created vaccines to save them. People like Ron Johnson think they can just drop the word "God" into a sentence and end all conversations, but they're as wrong about that as they are about everything else.

When I hear that some Democratic Senators are actually having trouble figuring out how the "talking filibuster" would work, all I can say is gosh, how did they ever do it for the first 130-plus years they did it? And Joe Manchin can't possibly think Republicans would adopt a rule change they've previously favored while Democrats control the Senate. Actually, I'm sure he doesn't -- he's just hoping you do. He's sure going to have a lot of good works to bring to the Pearly Gates.

Finally, those irredeemable assholes at Fox News are telling working Americans to "get tough" and go to work and school amidst a million omicron cases a day all from inside their little remote Zoom boxes. Plus they're still telling you lies about vaccines while they're all vaccinated. "Go to work," "(l)ive with it" -- these clowns will never do one tenth the work I do, but they'll get away with pretending they're the toughest people on Earth as long as we have to pay for Fox News as part of a basic cable package. Hey, maybe we can do something about that.

Oh, I almost forgot: happy Insurrection Day, right-wingers! Don't stay out too late celebrating; some of you have to work tomorrow.

Around the table: the real source of American rage, and other topics.

As Joe Manchin wields excuse after excuse for killing the Build Better Act, David Dayen reminds us that President Biden can write a lot of Executive Orders that would do a lot of good. (Indeed, The American Prospect has made a list!) I sure hope President Biden isn't afraid that right-wingers will call him a dictator, since a) our laws already give our President the authority to issue these orders, b) right-wingers will say anything, no matter how stupid, and c) uh, have they met their Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump?

When I read that rural America faces an eviction crisis because American Rescue Plan Act funding for folks facing eviction has, ah, had a hard time getting to the good Americans who need it, I remind myself that this is why rural Americans vote for Republicans so much -- because Democrats don't do anything good for them when they have the power. I'm sure the information gap between what rural folks think they can get and what they can get is real, but again, shouldn't our federal government make damn sure everyone knows what they need to know?

Ho hum, a Gizmodo/Markup investigation finds that "predictive policing algorithms" tend to ignore white neighborhoods while "predicting" more crime in Black/Brown neighborhoods, meaning that "residents in over-policed areas are confronted, detained, or rung up on bullshit charges with alarming frequency" and then "this data gets fed back into the software to generate more of the same abuse." If you're still thinking but that's where more crime is har har har, all you need ask is whether every conceivable criminal gets punished. Difficulty: if you've ever committed a crime, no matter how small, and not served time for it, then the answer is "no." You did your crime out of sight, you say? Why do you suppose law enforcement didn't see you?

Noami S. Baron at The Conversation comes up with an unexpected answer to the age-old question of " Why We Remember More by Reading -- Especially Print -- Than From Audio or Video" -- that people approach audio, video, and social media with more of "an entertainment mindset," and thus don't devote their full attention to it. That's illuminating -- and mind-boggling, to me at least, since I try to devote my full attention to a TV program or an album just as I do to a book, but again, that's probably just me. All the other reasons you do better reading in print than any other thing -- because you touch paper, you remember the "physical geography" of a page, you remember what you read based on how far into the book you were, because you're more likely "multitasking" when you're on social media -- still operate, of course. Plus, I'd argue, you can re-read something in print far more easily and effectively than you can "re-read" a song or video (which occur in time and usually without accompanying written text) or even read a news article online (which could change when you read it again).

When I hear that the January 6 attempted coup has made the House of Representatives "a deeply unpleasant place to work," I'm tempted to call that a no-shit-Sherlock moment. After all, some of them helped plan the January 6 attack, while roughly a third of them enabled it by voting against certifying the 2020 election that same day for no damn good reason. When folks give you the impression they want you to die, it's hard to break bread with them. Or even drink martinis with them at D.C. watering holes. (The Wall Street Journal article referenced at the link sits behind a paywall, so I don't know how much it bought into all that both-sides-are-to-blame rubbish. Then again, maybe I do.)

Finally, as the year draws to a close, Kevin Drum's analysis of "The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage" is worth revisiting. Spoiler alert: basically, the "real source" of "our national temper tantrum" is the rise and primacy of Fox News over the last two decades -- yeah, talk radio and social media have done some damage, but not the damage Fox News has done. I feel compelled to mention, again, that what it offers its viewers -- rage -- is a very potent drug; it gives its users the illusion of control over chaos. And it's a damn shame that these very same people would never regard immigration or critical race theory as "chaos" unless some slick snake-oil salesfolk told them so, over and over again.

Action: Monday, Build Back Better, etc.

Long story short: tell your Senators to fight climate change, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, invest in the care economy, enact paid family/medical leave, let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and expand Medicare. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to ensure the Build Back Better Act makes historic investments in fighting climate change. It's simple: if we don't fight climate change, we won't have a planet to live on. Why, even those who live in gated communities won't have a planet to live on! And certainly don't believe Republican hype that President Biden's climate change agenda is driving up gas prices. Gas ain't the only energy in the world, after all, and big corporations are driving up gas prices because they can. And the Build Back Better Act ain't even passed yet! Yikes, they think we're all so stupid. And "I pretended everyone was stupid so I could gaslight people into doing things they didn't want to do" is a hell of a thing to take to the Pearly Gates.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. As I said last week, Sen. Sinema complained about the price tag of the Build Back Better Act, but then crippled the bill's ability to pay for itself! And she could still stamp her feet at the 15% corporate minimum tax and the 5% and 8% surtaxes on income over $10 million and $25 million respectively; tall we can do is keep communicating our will to our Senators until they do it. It has an effect -- Sen. Sinema's office, I've heard, ain't anyone's favorite place to work partly because of all the good Arizonans giving her what-for about what she's doing. If we keep that up, we'll have more of an effect.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to ensure that the Build Back Better Act funds the "care economy," i.e., things like child care and home care. Too many Democrats act like doing something for their bosses, the American people, will result in massive losses in the midterms, but does that make sense to you? Sure seems like doing something for the people makes them want to keep you in office! And just as expanding the Child Tax Credit seems like an easy thing to run on -- and not just because of all those $250 and $300 checks arriving in working families' bank accounts! -- cutting child care costs in half, as the Build Back Better Act would do, should also be an easy thing to run on! If Democrats are going to pretend doing this stuff is hard, then of course they deserve to lose. But let's make it hard for them to pretend.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Senators to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Paid family/medical leave is yet another popular initiative that has thus far fallen victim to One Holdout Democrat, this time Joe Manchin, who apparently prefers working with Republicans and paying for it with payroll tax hikes. That won't pass President Biden's no-tax-hikes-on-folks-making-less-than-$400,000 demand, and it also won't pass a Senate with more than 39 Republicans in it, like this one. Because they block everything! But how did we even get paid/family medical leave in the bill to begin with? Through our activism. And how did we get our House to put it back in the bill after Sen. Manchin wanted it out? Through our activism. It's the only thing that works, so we have to keep doing it.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, Penn PIRG, and More Perfect Union all help you demand that your Senators put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. And who demanded the exclusion of Medicare drug price negotiation from the Build Back Better Act? Kyrsten Sinema, of course, who now says she thinks the bill won't get done until after Christmas! As if she isn't one of the two main reasons this bill isn't done now! Yikes, she's worse than a cartoon supervillain. And they usually don't do their evil in plain sight. Hell, even Joe Manchin will tell you he'd prefer to finish it up next year; he doesn't act like it's some law of physics preventing it from getting done. But folks like Kyrsten Sinema are the reason we have to keep doing what we do.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Joe Manchin has expressed his "reservations" about this as well, due to Medicare "insolvency" or something, and that's why Democrats have been either the minority party or a timid majority party for the last 40-plus years -- like a football team going into the Prevent defense with two minutes left and a five-point lead, Democrats don't play to win, they play not to lose. Instead of worrying about TOO MUCHZ OFZ TEH SPENDINGZ!!!!, they ought to focus on doing the most good for the most Americans. If they did that, good Americans would actually be excited about voting for them! And getting dental/vision/hearing care for seniors sure would be "doing the most good."

Action: concerning Social Security, abortion, data privacy, law and order, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, the People's Response Act, and the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act. The Social Security 2100 Act would increase both benefits and revenues, the latter by, as they say, scrapping the cap on the income that can be taxed into Social Security, at least for income over $400,000. Why there should be a donut hole on income between $142,800 (the current cap) and $400,000 annually I couldn't tell you, but taxing income over $400,000 represents progress, and we shouldn't let the perfect murder the good. Let's not let Democratic cowardice ("there's an election coming up -- scary, kids!") murder the good, either, but improving Social Security would be both good and popular, and really, everyone should get behind it. Even Republicans!

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act, which would essentially codify the protections of Roe v. Wade into federal law. And with our Supreme Court apparently willing to bless Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, putting Roe v. Wade into law would be a good and necessary thing! One thing I rarely hear about this topic is that outlawing abortion wouldn't be like outlawing burglary -- anyone can commit a burglary, while only a woman can have an abortion, and ain't no right-wing legislators willing to penalize men for the ill-considered sex that prompted the abortion. I suspect they would enshrine ill-considered sex a Constitutional right, at least for men. But they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Big data mining corporations are harvesting your internet surfing habits as we speak! And worse than that, those same big data mining corporations will eagerly sell your internet surfing habits to law enforcement! And law enforcement should only be able to get that information with a warrant, which means they think they have a better than 50-50 chance of convicting you of something. The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would prevent big data corporations from selling your personal info willy-nilly to law enforcement. Your internet service-providing corporations can't do it under the law, and neither should these data harvesters. Also, they should get a real job doing real work.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act. I could be wrong about this, but I've long thought "defund the police" a bad slogan describing good ideas -- that we shouldn't turn to our police to solve every conceivable problem, nor should we blithely assume we can simply retrain police to be every other kind of worker we need (the way some folks blithely assume that "just learn to code" is a solution to every economic problem). The People's Response Act would fund better solutions to community problems at the state and local level, so that we don't send in a guy with a gun whenever someone has a problem, because sooner or later, as we have long known, that's going to get someone killed. And whatever else you want from your government, it shouldn't kill you.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2238/S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which would, among other things, make big corporations more responsible for their plastic waste, start a national refund program for beverage containers, and set minimum recycled-content standards for products. When all the haters respond by saying but we need plastic for things you stupid liberal ha ha ha snort high five!, you can take comfort in knowing that "breaking free from plastic pollution" is not actually the same thing as "never make anything with plastic again." You might even point it out to them! It won't change their minds, because they're haters, but it might change the minds of other folks who might be listening.

Around the table: featuring *entirely unexpected Republican hypocrisy*.

The Conversation talks to three scholars about "Three Ways Congress Could Hold Facebook Accountable for Its Actions." I think good old-fashioned trust-busting is the best way to hold them accountable, but at least two of the three suggestions -- giving users more control over how Facebook uses their data in algorithms, and mandating transparency about Facebook's problems -- are good ideas. Making Facebook pay up for the broadband funding gap as a sort of win-win proposition ain't my favorite, though. I approve of win-win negotiations among good-faith negotiators, but the rest need to be brought to heel by our laws.

Dean Baker also warns against blaming Trump/Biden spending policies for inflation. Why? Because countries that actually spent more (like France and Japan) aren't seeing the same inflation, because the pandemic and the resulting supply chain issues (again) are the major causes of inflation, because proposals like universal pre-K and subsidized child care will actually alleviate inflation in numerous ways, and because higher wages and the expanded Child Tax Credit are actually helping families deal with inflation much better. We'll know more in the spring, I suppose -- if the diaper-loaded brats refusing to get vaccinated would be gracious enough to help us get out of this pandemic, that is.

Speaking of supply chain issues, the heroic Matt Stoller dives into the problems we're having with shipping. Corporations built bigger and bigger ships -- in the name of efficiency, I suppose -- but bigger ships carrying more stuff and arriving less frequently snarl trucking and railroad traffic by making them wait around for-freaking-ever, and these "too big to sail" ships also kill the smaller ports that can't handle the amount of stuff they're bringing. And that's just the beginning. Naturally, Congress's decision to stop regulating ocean shipping as a public utility in 1998 figures heavily in this story. (As an aside, trucker Ryan Johnson is really astute about supply chain problems, but I fear he'll never get the traction he deserves, not just because he says quite rightly that truck drivers should make more money, but because he's obviously not an asshole.)

Uh oh: an Iowa state audit finds that Gov. Kim Reynolds appears to have misused nearly half a million dollars in COVID relief funds to pay the salaries of office workers for three months in 2020. Hey, you know what's even more interesting? Apparently those salaries weren't in the budget Gov. Reynolds submitted before the pandemic, and the Governor's office has now said they'll provide documentation to our federal government after previously saying no such documentation existed. It ain't the barrel Kristi Noem will be turning in next fall, but what fun it would be to see a Democrat topple Ms. Reynolds in 2022, not two years after Iowa Democrats were given up for dead.

When you hear that "neoliberal Democrats are struggling to connect with working-class voters whose communities have lost manufacturing jobs," you might be tempted to say well of course they are! They're the same people who reject every actual attempt at helping to fix working class voters' problems! And then these voters turn to Republicans, who are worse but at least are willing to ape their anger, and then stoke it further. Author Joel Bleifuss says the Democrats' actual liberal wing, not its "moderate" corporatist wing, needs to stage an "intervention." Ever feel like that's what you've been doing your whole life?

Finally, Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL) touts the funding the infrastructure bill will deliver to his district -- without mentioning that he voted against that bill. Not only did he vote against the bill, he called it "a Green New Deal wish list" (if only!) that will "expand government control of our lives." As with the American Rescue Plan Act, where numerous Republicans tried to take credit for things they liked about the law without mentioning that they voted against it, this is a golden opportunity for Democrats to run campaign ads excoriating Republican hypocrisy. Sadly, Gary Palmer's district (Alabama's 6th) is one of the most Republican in the nation; a Democrat has crested 30% there once in the last quarter-century. I'd call that an opportunity myself, but Democrats ain't known for their bravery.

Action: in the shadow of the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enact paid family/medical leave, let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and expand Medicare. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. Kyrsten Sinema said no to this in the Build Back Better Act -- for what reason, we'll never know, since she values negotiating with Republicans more than her real job, which is negotiating with her constituents -- but President Biden's revised Build Back Better framework includes a 5% surtax on income over $10 million, a surtax that goes up to 8% on income over $25 million. (This would essentially create two new 42% and 45% tax brackets.) The framework also includes a 1% tax on stock buybacks and a 15% minimum corporate tax. Maybe Ms. Sinema says no to all of that, too, because chaos. But not before we've had our say, which is, after all, the most important say.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Joe Manchin said no to this in the Build Back Better Act, because, and I quote, "to expand social programs, when you have trust funds that aren’t solvent — they’re going insolvent — I can’t explain that...It doesn’t make sense to me...I just can’t do it." In other words, because Social Security's trust fund is "going insolvent" (which it's not, and you didn't know any of this was about Social Security, did you?), nobody gets paid family/medical leave, even though that would have been paid for by the bill's revenue hikes, most of which Kyrsten Sinema nixed. Got it? Me, I don't think this needs to be that damn deep -- the American people want it, and it ain't that hard to pay for, so we should have it.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. Kyrsten Sinema nixed this, too, even though H.R. 3, which would have let Medicare negotiate the price of some-but-not-all drugs, would have saved (per our Congressional Budget Office) over $450 billion over the next decade; if we let Medicare negotiate the price of all drugs, that would have saved $840 billion, per the right-wing Mercatus Center, of all entities. As I said, the American people want it, and it would actually save us money, so we should have it. Even if the big pharma corporations have a tantrum about it. Like they'd make it without taxpayer handouts anyway!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Again, Joe Manchin complains about Medicare's "stability" as his excuse to deny expanding coverage for health care seniors need, like the expansion wasn't going to be paid for or something! His "government should be a partner, not a provider" shtick is bunk -- we-the-people pay our taxes, so we provide for each other, not "the" government. The Biden framework includes Medicare coverage of hearing care, but not dental or vision care; while that's an improvement, seniors are still going to have dental and vision problems in the meantime. And our job right now is same as it ever was: communicate our will, as many times as we need to, until we get the results we deserve.

Around the table: from the Buffalo mayoral race to an unwelcome plea to "move on" from January 6.

When I hear from Buffalo Democratic Mayoral candidate India Walton that "Democrats have gotten very comfortable doing nothing," I'm reminded of all the six-figure consultants who've urged caution and moderation to hundreds of losing candidates all over America, and I'm also reminded that the Democratic hold on power in American cities is also a right-wing complaint, though Republicans surely would run our cities far worse. Hopefully you'll read the article and find Ms. Walton a fairly incisive and eclectic analyst of current events, and you'll think more people like that should be running things. Even Chuck Schumer has gotten on the bandwagon (though he might merely have been trying to outpace Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, for whatever reason).

Kyrsten Sinema loses five members of her Veterans Advisory Council, all of whom slam the Arizona Senator for "answering to big donors rather than your own people," which is exactly how we should frame all discussions of all our representatives in Congress. I'm beyond tired of hearing about how Ms. Sinema's been "up front" with her fellow Senators during Build Back Better negotiations, when she obviously hasn't been up front with the good citizens of Arizona who are her bossese. Naturally she responds to her advisors' resignation by implying they should stick to military matters.

Arkansas hospital decides it'll grant religious exemptions to folks who don't want to take the vaccine -- if they also swear off Tylenol, Sudafed, Benadryl, Tums, and a host of other famous medicines! There's a point in there: folks who shun the vaccine because of its testing on decades-old fetal issue (not cells from last week's abortions, as they claim) must also in good conscience reject the aforementioned medicines because testing on fetal tissue figured in their development as well! Not that today's rage will matter to right-wingers after they get a load of tomorrow's rage.

In a related note, James Colgrove at The Conversation takes us through the history of vaccines and vaccine mandates in America -- and sees today's parents as less accepting of such mandates. A lot has happened in recent years, of course -- Andrew Wheeler and Jenny McCarthy made us all scared we'd have autistic kids if we vaccinated them, and then social media let us all pretend we're celebrities and pundits and its algorithms relentlessly amplified the right-wing content that results in more enragement, er, engagement. And not for nothing, but all these ask-your-doctor-about-this-drug ads on TV -- which didn't exist in the '70s -- are also helping to make people a bit too cocksure about their "knowledge." I think some humility about what you don't know is a good thing, though most Americans don't seem to agree anymore.

When I hear that a couple of pro-Josh Mandel super PACs are running ads appearing to slam fellow Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance as insufficiently pro-Trump based on what he said in 2016, I'm reminded that these ads could ultimately help Mr. Vance, if Republican voters become convinced over the next six months that Donald Trump is actually an albatross on their fortunes -- or if Republican poobahs merely decide that they've milked Mr. Trump all they can and are ready to move on. I also wonder why anyone, anywhere, let alone a super PAC, would favor Josh Mandel's election to any office. I hear even Donald Trump finds him a bit of a brown-noser.

Finally, dig the chutzpah from Condoleeza Rice, telling us that though January 6 was "wrong" (like that's some big gift to us!), we need to "move on" as a nation. First off, I read her plea ultimately as a thinly-disguised plea to "move on" from all of her sins as a member of the George W. Bush Administration; she can barely show herself in public after all of that, which is how it should be. Second off, I can't shake the feeling that when she says "what's happening to kids in school," she means we're forcing them to wear masks to keep from spreading COVID, which isn't an injury done to them no matter how many right-wing assholes think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning the Build Back Better Act.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: against weak Democrats and insane Republicans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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