Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning the coronavirus pandemic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck, and God bless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning impeachment, government spying, and discrimination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: no one here gets out alive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning corruption and more corruption.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: concerning some of the difficulties we face in pushing the Overton Window leftward.

I sympathize with Alan MacLeod's frustration that "To Media, No Democrat Can Possibly Be Right-Wing" -- after all, it wasn't that long ago that Georgia Democratic Sen. Richard Russell helped found the Conservative Coalition, and that the American Conservative Union ranked the late Georgia Democratic Rep. Larry McDonald behind only Ron Paul as the most conservative House Rep. But I will say it's nice to finally hear our media call folks like Nancy Pelosi "center-left" instead of pretend (as they did for almost two decades!) that no one in America could possibly be further left than she. This is yet another reason I'm glad Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib are in Congress -- and in America.

In a peripherally-related note, the incomparable Duncan Black, a.k.a. Atrios, answers the vexing question "Why Don't Democratic Senate Candidates in Purple States Support Popular Things" (like a higher minimum wage), and he answers it better than anyone else I've heard. Races in purple states, he says, "are generally going to be tough/close races, but the calculation is not 'boy if I support a higher minimum wage then the voters will get mad.' The calculation is 'boy if I support a higher minimum wage then the voters will like that, BUT the Chamber of Commerce types will dump a bunch of money into the race to oppose me and run ads calling me a child molester (or highlighting something else that might be unpopular about me).'" All of that is true, but it also demands a counterpunch from the candidate like "how about that -- I support a minimum wage hike and suddenly my opponents are lying about me! Don't let them take you hostage!"

Dino Grandoni at the Washington Post explains, with the help of a perhaps too-understated headline, how our "EPA's New 'No Surprises' Inspection Policy Has Some Critics Worried." You remember from school how all your surprise quizzes didn't really count if you didn't do well on them? You don't? Of course you don't! It boggles the mind how Republicans can claim to be the "party of personal responsibility" but also ensure that polluters won't have to put up with surprise inspections which is often the only way to catch polluters. Of course, for our President's votaries, "personal responsibility" is only for black people -- "belonging to the club" is what matters to them, and that's what no-surprise-inspections signifies to them. If Democrats had any courage, they'd run attack ads on this basis, and make the moral argument I've described, but you already know what the chances of that are.

In a peripherally-related note, our President opines that wind power "doesn't work" without taxpayer help. Given the price parity wind has achieved with fossil fuels in many parts of our nation, I rather suspect it would work without subsidies, but gauging whether wind power would work without subsidies now really isn't the point -- we're supposed to subsidize good technologies that need more research and more time to develop. Also, too, oil and gas get about the same amount of subsidies annually as wind power, so if our President "(doesn't) want to be subsidizing things that don't need to be subsidized," where's his enthusiasm for ending that slab of corporate welfare? And if he's so hot to stop handing out taxpayer money to energy sources that "don't work," where's his enthusiasm for ending handouts for nuclear power, which has lost money for a much longer period of time? (I notice he didn't tell other heads of state about the "piles and piles of dead birds" no one finds at the base of windmills. Clearly he saves those stories for us rubes.)

Defense contractor apparently leaves voice mail message threatening Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) over her introduction of a bill that would force public schools to ensure all their students are properly-vaccinated. Read the transcript of this phone call in its entirety, and you'll marvel at the continued existence of folks who have clearly never contemplated the benefits of deep breathing. And remember, folks: "I’m gonna kill your ass if you do that bill, I swear" is a terroristic threat, and therefore not protected by our First Amendment! I hope Rep. Wilson responds to this threat by fighting harder for this bill.

Finally, the New York Times reminds us that "Using Race for Gain" is an "Old Tactic" for our President. Yes, his settlement of that 1970s investigation into his apparent refusal to rent to black folks and his emptiest-wagon trumpeting of the "guilt" of the Central Park Five leapt to mind even before I got to paragraph nine. If you accept that race-baiting is a pattern with our President, as I do, then of course you regard reports that he "didn't...fully underst(and) what he was doing when he unleashed last week's racist tweetstorm as utter bullshit. And worse, as drama.

Action: concerning Senate obstruction, our President's tax returns, and protections for working families.

Today's another good day to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. (You can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page -- or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page.) Why is Mob Boss Mitch blocking them from a Senate vote? Because he doesn't want his members to go on record opposing voting rights, internet freedom, tools for workers to rectify pay gaps, and civil rights for gay and transgender folk. He also doesn't want our President to go on record as opposing these things, once he vetoes the bills. If this all sounds like the opposite of courage to you, well, you're not alone. And if House Democrats don't run thousands of ads in 2020 touting their votes in favor of these bills, that'll be the opposite of courage, too.

Meanwhile, now that the state of New York has passed a bill mandating that the state comply with Congressional requests to turn over tax returns on state residents, CREDO helps you tell House Democrats to actually request our President's tax returns. House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) has been strangely slow in making that request, but that's why we're here: to remind our Congressfolk of our will. And though our President's apologists call this "Presidential harassment" -- a phrase that sure does sound like whining! -- fact is we have plenty of probable cause to start an investigation into his tax returns, beginning with his own refusal to release them and continuing on through New York Times reporting on our President's massive alleged tax fraud. And if we nail him for tax fraud, what will his apologists say? That it's OK for our President to cheat on his taxes? Well, perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate with these fools.

Finally, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (or PRO Act), would, as its title suggests, give workers tools with which to organize and collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. Specifically, the PRO Act would stiffen penalties for employers who interfere with employee organizing efforts (including votes!), and close a lot of current loopholes in our labor laws, which corporations have been driving Mack trucks through lately. You remember how our Supreme Court ruled that Kentucky nurses could be classified as "supervisors" on hysterically flimsy pretexts? Well, the PRO Act would fix that. You remember how FedEx classified all its drivers as "independent contractors" just so they could avoid paying health insurance and also so they could make their drivers pay for their own trucks? The PRO Act would fix that, too. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the PRO Act.

Around the table: tabulating yet more Presidential drama and Democrat weakness.

Factcheck.org reviews our President's recent speech trumpeting his alleged environmental accomplishments, and finds it wanting. I'd almost hoped to report that our President was as clever a liar as George W. Bush, but some of what Factcheck tabulates are just flat-out lies easily refuted, and naturally our President regurgitates the $100 trillion Green New Deal number when even its originator has admitted he doesn't really know how to measure the cost (like, by, you know, tabulating how much we'd save in health care costs, disaster relief costs, and the like). Also, too, we still have clean air and clean water to a large degree because our federal courts have slapped down almost every Administration attempt to gut clean air and clean water regulations.

Our President twitters that certain liberal Congresswomen who emigrated here should stop "loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run" and instead "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." If you heard the ghost of go back to Africa!, I wouldn't blame you, and I doubt he really hears them as "loud" and "vicious" merely because they fight his evil -- rather, he hopes you do, so you'll live vicariously through him. Of course, people come here from "totally broken" places all the time -- often to avoid being murdered themselves! -- and then our First Amendment protects them when they opine, as we all do, about how we'd like to make a more perfect union. That's America, folks. And those who agree with our President really ought to consider, as always, whether constant enragement is really good for their health.

From Kaiser Health News we learn that despite federal laws that are supposed to prevent this sort of thing, rape victims still get billed for forensic exams they undergo afterward. Think of how you'd feel if you kept getting slammed with bills after you got raped! We need better, more precise laws -- the yet-to-be-reauthorized Violence Against Women Act cuts off certain federal grants to states that don't cover these costs, and maybe that was all that would pass in 1994, but a better idea would be to simply make it illegal to charge rape victims for rape kits. Sadly, that's the kind of thing politicians tend not to push on their own, but as part of larger legislative efforts. The next politician who does that might find it better to prioritize good works above "not stepping on other legislators' toes."

Please please please do not attend the "conservative" "reaction" to our President's apparent "cave" on his Census citizenship question, because like everything else with this President it's drama, and bad drama at that. His "conservative allies" can whine all they want about "whether they should support this guy if he's not going to fight," but rest assured they will all turn out for him in 2020, and they'll probably cite some unrelated, whipped-up drama about the Democratic nominee as being more important than whatever betrayal they've lately experienced.

Finally, dig this bit of moderate, centrist pandering emanating from Young Fresh Fellow Pete Buttigieg, who says (in re Medicare-for-All and student loan debt) that "we should be realistic about what’s going to work" and that "just flipping a switch and saying we’re instantly going to have everybody on Medicare just like that — isn’t realistic." If he'd read the Medicare-for-All bill, he'd already know that the bill won't get everyone on Medicare for four years, so discussing how we're "instantly going to have everybody on Medicare" is typical straw-man arguing. And of course saying Medicare-for-All is "pretty far out...from where Americans are" isn't borne out by polling consistently showing majority or supermajority support. The good news? The No-We-Can't caucus -- of which Mr. Buttigieg aspires to be leader, though his big-donor fundraising hasn't yet translated into better polling numbers -- ain't that big in America. The bad news? It sure does seem concentrated among Our Glorious Elites.

Around the table: here, have some more of the red pill!

Federal immigration officials are using "gang databases" to conduct their nefarious family-separation-at-the-border activities. You remember "gang databases," right? The databases you might find yourself in for no reason, particularly if you're a person of color? The ones you can't challenge if you somehow discover your inclusion therein, in violation of your habeus corpus rights? So, to sum, our government is using bad information to conduct bad policies. Of course, we as Americans deserve better, and I'll brook no rubbish about ZOMG TEH MS-13 GANGZ ARE COMINZ FORZ TEH YOUZ!!!!! Being afraid of MS-13 is a lot like being afraid of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in 2002. And if Democrats don't run a Presidential candidate who actually tells the truth, our current President will use the BS-13 to fearmonger his way to victory.

Speaking of fearmongering, our Department of Defense does not actually have any evidence that Iran killed over 600 American troops during the Iraq war. As of late June of 2016, we've lost 4,424 troops in that nefarious war, so 600 sure does sound like a lot, doesn't it? And dig how they said "608," because an exact number is always true! Read the whole thing, because the pro-war arguments don't get any better -- they're easily refutable with mainstream media reporting, in fact, and this from a media that loves war. All of this does beg the question: if you're worried about Shiite Muslims having too much power in the Middle East, why topple Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, in the first place? And why should we as Americans allow the past to hold is hostage in the present and the future? Yeah, waging war on Iran sure does look like piling shit on top of shit and hoping it magically turns into a house.

And speaking of the forked tongue of certain Democratic Presidential candidates, Marjorie Cohn at TruthOut reminds us that "Kamala Harris Has a Distinguished Career of Serving Injustice." As soon as you realized that her position on federally-mandated busing is the same as the former Vice President whom she attacked in that debate, you probably already suspected that, but it's nice to have the full story of how she ran interference for jail trusties who illegally elicited confessions, how she wouldn't allow DNA testing on a death row inmate who was probably innocent, and how she opposed a bill requiring her office to investigate police shootings while she was California's Attorney General. And she didn't investigate the "foreclosure king," now-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, when she had the chance! Also, too, where's she been on cash bail reform? Far behind Philadelphia's Larry Krasner, that's where.

Dave Zirin at The Nation explains "Why No One Watches Baseball Anymore," and I'd say the problem may be even worse than Mr. Zirin describes: the sheer length of the game turns people off, but even that is a symptom of the real problem -- that the game's gotten so damn thinky-think that players and managers hardly play anymore. Now they grow every pitcher to throw hard and strike people out, and every team carries 12 or 13 of them for every conceivable situation, so pitchers don't know what to do anymore when they get tattooed, as happens to all of them in time. And these days they grow every hitter to "be patient" and hit home runs, so now hitters can't execute a simple hit-and-run or a sacrifice bunt, which speeds up the game as much as it spices it up. You'll recognize baseball's other problems from, well, everything else in our civilization -- the Commissioner tinkers with "limiting mound visits" and "shortening time between innings" with all the imagination of an accountant, and cable TV deals and public stadium-financing make baseball owners rich without having to do very much actual work. Thus, between baseball's boredom and football's head trauma, basketball stands poised to become our national pastime.

Finally, former Air Force Colonel/failed House candidate Amy McGrath raised a boatload of cash on her first day challenging Mob Boss Mitch in Kentucky's 2020 Senate race, but then she took two distinct and opposite positions on the 2018 nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court in a matter of hours. Folks, this is why Democrats lose elections -- not because they don't relate to racists enough, not because they're not pro-life enough, and certainly not because they're not "pro-business" enough, but because everyone can tell they don't mean what they say. Calling Matt Jones!

Around the table: describing the continuing follies of Our Glorious Elites.

Our President is still trying to think of a way to ask your citizenship status on the 2020 census. Whatever he tries (executive order, addendum to the form) will no doubt die a brutal death in court, and the sooner the better, but with this guy you always have to consider whether success is really his goal, and not just because he's made so much money off his own failures. He may aim to show his votaries that he's "trying," or put the scare back into immigrants filling out census forms. He already has Republicans thinking he's actually cut regulations, when courts have mostly stymied his efforts.

From Fox 5 in San Francisco we learn that housing prices have gotten so high in some places (like, ah, San Francisco) that some folks are willing to pay $1200 a month just to have a bunk. Just in case you didn't get enough of dorm living in college! Meanwhile, the absurdly rich still own dozens of homes they leave empty and don't even rent out to people because, really, they're just places to park money so it doesn't get taxed by The Man. I'm starting to think J.G. Ballard may not have known the half of it.

And now Joe Biden complains, after that rough first debate, that "(w)e're supposed to be talking about and competing about what we’re going to do about the future," not "go(ing) back and pick(ing) something about somebody’s past, out of context," which of course you'd say if you've established a nearly-50-year record of capitulation to power. Remember, "most qualified Presidential candidate ever" wound up being a liability for Hillary Clinton in 2016. All that being said, he's right about Sen. Harris essentially having the same position as him on busing. Get used to that from her.

From the "Things We Shouldn't Waste Our Time With But (Sigh) Have To" file: no, that meme about Democratic Presidential candidates saying bad words three bazillion times and not saying "America" enough times during the debates is ridiculously wrong. What a shame Factcheck.org even had to go through it! If I may misquote a proverb, stupid seems to get halfway around the world before smart can get its pants on. Are we lucky that stupid never even wears pants and constantly swings its balls in your face? I'm not sure.

Finally, one more time, no one has any business praising our President for making his much-feared July 4th speech relatively drama-free. Yet again he becomes President! But if a man spreads feces all over your walls 23 hours a day, you don't heap praise upon him for taking it easy that other hour. Also, my fellow liberals should really stop making fun of that part of his speech where our President appeared to suppose that George Washington's army defended airports. We should all know by now that our President acts stupid not only to distract liberals from his more nefarious doings, but to provoke liberals to act in such a way that it in turn inflames his votaries against our "arrogance." That's how it worked with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, so we really ought to be wise to it by now.

Around the table: more lessons in the abject folly of bipartisanship-above-all.

House votes down Amash/Lofgren amendment that would have curtailed warrantless spying on Americans by a 175-253 vote. Which means, of course, that a crapload of Democrats opposed both law and order and your right to privacy. Yay bipartisanship! That's why "electing more Democrats," which you can do once a year, is nowhere near as effective as pressuring your Reps and Senators to do the right thing, which you can do every day.

It's not particularly surprising that a group of billionaires has written an open letter all but begging our government to tax them more for the good of all Americans. If anything, it's more surprising that our irony-addicted media hardly notices when these things occur. Why, it's almost like their jobs depend on them not noticing it!

Fox News talking head tries to get job with our Justice Department, is rebuffed by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then calls Mr. Sessions America's most "dangerous person" because of his recusal from the Russia probe. Gosh, corrupt much? And cable news is notorious for asserting that they don't need to do conflict-of-interest disclosures about their hosts and guests because how dare you imply we're dishonest! Trying to get informed by watching cable news is like trying to get healthy by eating M&Ms.

From the "It's Not Only Inhumane, It's Fiscally Irresponsible!" file: Department of Health and Human Services official says it'd cost less money to keep immigrant children with their parents than separate them and put the kids in tents. Now guess which one our Administration is so proud of itself for doing! Remember: this is also the guy who puts his golf trips on the public dime and then turns around and says we can't afford health care for transgender soldiers.

Finally, Cenk Uygur tells us that Joe Biden isn't the "most electable" candidate but, in fact, the least electable candidate. Long story short: a candidate who overtly promises no change -- which is worse than merely "not promising change"! -- is profoundly misreading an electorate which is fed to the up. Also, too, as Mr. Uygur says, there's nothing actually "likable" about the Iraq war, mass incarceration, bankster deregulation, or bankruptcy "reform," but that's almost all of Joe Biden's Senate career right there. Recall, of course, that he didn't just "deal" with segregationists when he got to the Senate in 1972, but collaborated with them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: featuring a series of unsurprising developments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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