Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning the debt limit, non-profits, and federal judges.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise the debt limit without drama, tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, and tell Democratic Senators to confirm as many judicial nominees as possible. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

We hit the debt ceiling again on January 2, so today is a good day to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to lift the debt ceiling before then without any poison pill drama. Why? Because, as Dave Troy reported in the Washington Spectator back in July, the incoming Administration might allow a government default to happen, simply because it might financially benefit one of the Vice President-elect's pals, the notorious Peter Thiel. You'd hate to think the incoming Administration would simply ignore the calls of literally every corporate executive in America that a default would lead to depression, millions of lost jobs, and trillions of dollars of wealth disappearing. But you would also be a fool to count on the incoming Administration to be rational! Best to count on ourselves and our good works.

We thought the so-called Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act died an ignominious death last week, but now Republicans (and way too many Democrats!) want to bring it back — because what zombie don’t they want to bring back? Thus Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the "non-profit killer" bill. Our President-elect just spent an entire election cycle telling everyone that he would get revenge on anyone who had ever wronged him; why would we give him more power to do that, specifically by letting him revoke tax-free status from certain non-profits he would designate as "terrorist-supporting"? And anyway, what the hell is "terrorist-supporting"? What a mealy-mouthed term! And one we certainly shouldn't leave up to TFG to define.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell Senate Democrats to confirm as many judicial nominees as possible before TFG takes over. Because you don't want him filling judicial vacancies! And it's not like Senate Democrats have anything else to do, and I would want to distract them from all the navel-gazing they're doing about what went wrong with the election. Here's what went wrong: 77 million Americans voted for selfishness, venality, and drama because that's what gets them hard, and at least six million other Americans wouldn't vote for the Black woman because she's a Black woman. How do you make all that meaningless? Oh, I've only been telling everyone how to do that for almost 20 years now – you pass policies that actually help working families and that keep rich sociopaths from hurting them. Democrats won't be able to do any of that for at least two years, so they ought to give us some judges who will at least consider the inevitable lawsuits over the evil TFG is about to do.

A few thoughts about the election.

First, we have some good news.

Missouri voters enacted Proposition A, which raises the state minimum wage to $15/hour and guarantees five to seven paid sick days annually from most private employers. Workers can get five days at employers with 15 or fewer employees; I'm pleased that Prop A didn't simply give big corporations the opportunity to pretend they're small businesses because they might have fewer than 15 employees at a particular location. Nebraska voters also voted to mandate private employers to provide paid sick leave; voters here mandated five days at employers with 20 employees or fewer and seven at larger employers. And while the tally isn't final yet, Alaska voters have apparently voted to mandate paid sick leave, raise the minimum wage to $15/hour by 2027 and a prohibit captive audience meetings at workplaces, so that your employer can't force you to sit through political or religious meetings if they don't actually relate to your job.

Massachusetts voters approved a law allowing "transportation network drivers" (i.e., Uber/Lyft drivers) the right to bargain collectively for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. And Nebraska voters weren't done, as they also repealed a state law using taxpayer money on private school scholarships by a 15-point margin. They weren't the only ones, either! Kentucky voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have permitted taxpayer money to flow to private schools. I am heartened that, even in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, good citizens like those in Nebraska and Kentucky agree with the common-sense notion that we ought to use public money on public schools (and certainly we should stop pretending that charter schools are somehow a way out of whatever problems we have in public schools, problems that do not result from CRT or whatever but from our refusal to fund them properly in the first place).

This year's pro-abortion initiatives met with some success, as voters in seven states expanded abortion rights at the ballot box, while voters in three others did not. The Missouri initiative, which guarantees a right to an abortion up until fetal viability in that state's constitution, will get most of the ink, largely because Missouri was the first state to ban abortion in the wake of the Dobbs ruling, but don't sleep on Montana voters, either – a 1999 state Supreme Court ruling locates the right to an abortion within the right to privacy, but precedents never change until they do, so enshrining abortion in the state constitution was a smart move on their part. I suspect initiatives like the ones that failed in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota might succeed in future years when some other Republican candidate is at the top of the ticket. (The one in Florida only failed because Florida required a 60% threshold for passage; clearly Florida politicians don't like it when good Floridians tell them what to do.)

Not every good ballot initiative succeeded, unfortunately, as Ohio voters rejected an amendment that would have created a bipartisan redistricting commission to start undoing decades of right-wing gerrymandering of that state's Congressional seats. Don't be too quick to blame Ohio voters for that – Secretary of State Frank LaRose wrote the amendment misleadingly in an obvious attempt to make it fail, and in any case Ohio Republicans have simply ignored previous directions from the electorate that would have compelled them to draw maps more fairly. What could they be afraid of? (Do go ahead and blame Ohio voters for replacing one of our Senate's finest human beings, Sherrod Brown, with Bernie Moreno, who clearly aims to threaten Tommy Tuberville for the title of "America's Stupidest Senator.")

I have little else to say about the national election. Somehow the whiny, traitorous asshole is back, so those Americans who want to threaten immigrants, beat up transgender folk, sling racial slurs, grab a woman's breasts in public, taunt Muslims on trains, and whine about all their clearly deserved rejections once again have a guardian angel who'll bless their every noxious urge. I pray that America survives another four years of this disgusting drama.

Action: concerning health care and right-wing drama.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Global HER Act and expel Rep. Higgins from our House. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (or Global HER) Act, which would kill the notorious Global Gag Rule dead forever. The Global Gag Rule – generally imposed by Republican Presidents and rescinded by Democratic ones on their first days in office – prevents taxpayer money from going to any foreign organization providing health care in a foreign land if they dare to mention "abortion" or provide abortion-related services; the Global HER Act would allow foreign organizations to receive such money if they abide by U.S. federal law and the laws of other host nations. The Global Gag Rule is just one of many right-wing dramas I want to end, and if we pass this bill, we can end it.

Speaking of right-wing dramas, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to expel Rep. Clay Higgins (E-LA) from our House of Representatives. Most people were disgusted by the Trump/Vance ticket's promotion of completely false and racist stories about Haitian immigrants eating other people's pets – but not Rep. Higgins! He doubled down on the drama, repeating the false stories and further saying they should "get their mind right and their ass (they only have one ass? No wonder they’re a menace!) out of our country." He's said stupid, hateful crap like this his whole life, even as a police officer, and it's about time he paid for it. No, our First Amendment doesn't guarantee you a House seat if you say stupid, hateful crap.

Light posting notice plus warning.

Hello, good peoples! Posting will be light or nonexistent this week, so be happy and safe out there. Also, read Greg Palast’s report describing how December 11 could be the new January 6. Better to know two months ahead!

UPDATE. However! A Fulton County, GA judge has ruled that Georgia’s election board must certify election results, writing that “(i)f election superintendents were, as Plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so—because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud—refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced. Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.” This ruling might throw a wrench into right-wing plans to keep state Governors from sending slates of electors to the National Archives (which would essentially throw the election to the House of Representatives, which would be bad). Of course, whiners will whine and drama hounds will drama, so I expect there’ll still be riots in swing state capitals in early December.

Around the table: half of what you see, none of what you hear, part 982.

When we contemplate the fact that in many Republican-dominated states, folks can spy on/rat out their friends and neighbors on abortion-, gender-, and race-related matters without ever being held accountable for their intrusions, we would be right to wonder how right-wingers imagine that these acts adhere to conservative principles. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when conservatives could be proud live-and-let-live types. Of course, right-wingers would also need to explain why abusive assholes deserve so much power to make other people's lives miserable. And none of them should ever get to whine about "cancel culture" again, since they support a Cancel State.

Matt Stoller sees Michael Jordan's antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR as evidence that "(w)hatever happens in the next election, the antitrust revolution is unstoppable." I hope he's right, but he highlights the Jordan lawsuit because it's a private lawsuit – one neither Lina Khan nor Jonathan Kanter has anything to do with – and Mr. Jordan has filed it after decades of folks rarely filing such suits because of bad court decisions that make them hard to win. Now, with even Google losing an antitrust lawsuit, the climate may be significantly better. Anyway, Mr. Jordan's lawsuit alleges a lot of bad behavior from NASCAR that can't be explained away by blithely presuming that sports leagues "should" have monopolies.

Ho hum, "liberal" media articles about the recent port strike quoted more investment banks, big ag lobbyists, and wine importers than union leaders. I would be ashamed of having such priorities! But I suspect our "liberal" media are, er, not ashamed, as they are so thoroughly captured by the corporate world; only people who make lots of money matter, their editorial decisions say to us. Maybe that's why the port workers accepted a short-term settlement that didn't address automation; in a less toxic business-reporting environment, they might have held out for everything they wanted, and if they had, they'd have won a big victory for all workers. (Also too: are union leaders ever as "rich, corrupt, and incompetent" as a bankster? Reader, the answer is no.)

In the middle of this article about how two right-wing billionaire pastors are turning Texas into a haven for Christian nationalism you will find this nugget about one of them describing how he "discover(ed)" his "charitable side": "part of our reward will be being invited into people’s homes (i.e., in heaven) to reciprocate for things we did for them in this life, and we’re supposed to make that part of our investment calculation." In other words, you give to others so that they give back to you! His weird phrasing (charity as an "investment calculation"? Seriously?) is a dead giveaway, but what happened to doing good works because good works help people?

Ho hum, the LAPD raids a medical lab after "deducing" that its "higher-than-usual energy use" must have meant it was hiding "unlicensed" marijuana – and a cop loses his rifle to a highly-magnetized MRI machine. No use saying "not all cops" or whatever, because the character flaws that led to this debacle – mistaking a stupid idea for a clever one, needing to prove a point or justify a budget, making up excuses to soothe one's conscience – plague all of us. Granted, not all of us would have gotten our rifle stuck in an MRI machine (after he emptied it! At what we may never know!), but we all still need to be better than our flaws – particularly if we're armed officers of law enforcement.

When I hear that Melania Trump has apparently offered a fairly emphatic defense of abortion rights, writing that "(i)t is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government," I still think that's all just right-wingers foisting more drama upon us. Republicans are objectively suffering at the ballot box because of their decades-long opposition to abortion – opposition that's had real-world consequences, including death, since our Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade – so they have to win contestable elections by conning people into thinking they're somehow nuanced on the topic. See, Mrs. Trump is pro-choice! Republicans aren't as bad as you think! I want to believe her advocacy is sincere, and I know it won't be useless even if it's not, but we all know how right-wingers operate by now.

You've been hearing that the President has been "using FEMA money" on "illegal immigrants"? Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post reminds us that the President who actually did that was Donald Trump! But wait, there's more! Mr. Trump did that in defiance of Congress's will as expressed in spending legislation, whereas the Biden Administration spent FEMA money (including money for FEMA's Shelter and Services program, which occupies a sliver of FEMA's budget) as directed by legislation — legislation the Republican House blessed. None of this will ever convince a Trump votary, of course, because rage is a hell of a drug.

Finally, another day, another scientific study demonstrating that social media content moderation actually has a “bias" against stupid and obnoxious content and not a “bias" against conservative content. Of course, if right-wingers don't seem to know the difference, perhaps that's because they purvey most of the stupid and obnoxious content! You know, I remember being younger and complaining about censorship all the time, but then I became a man and put away childish things, while too many of today's right-wingers prefer to whine about rejections they deserve. People who spew noxious crap and act like an asshole deserve rejection! It ain't that deep!

Around the table: in which “law and order” means something other than whatever Republicans say it means.

Springfield, OH Haitian nonprofit files six charges under state law against Donald Trump and JD Vance for their role in spreading vicious lies about the Haitian community there, and I suspect at least five of them will stand up in court – pinning domestic terror bomb threats committed by others on Messrs. Trump and Vance would be difficult, but these two clowns sure did "knowingly causing alarm in the Springfield community by continuing to repeat lies that state and local officials have said were false," and they repeated those lies on TV whenever they could, and they caused others to think Haitians would threaten them, and if threatening to deport Haitians to Venezuela isn't an intimidating threat, I'm not sure what is. I wish the Haitian Bridge Alliance the best of luck in getting justice for law-abiding Haitians.

Ho hum, the Florida Department of Education has banned any instruction on consent and contraception in their sex ed classes, instead insisting on an emphasis on abstinence, which, yeah, I remember being a hormone-addled teen myself, so that won't work! And refusing to teach kids about consent? Either they're trying to convince the world that they're objectively pro-child molestation or they just assume they're raising a generation of kids that'll do what they're told, which always becomes problematic when they're older and everyone who told them what to do is dead. Jesus Mary and Joseph they've even banned the word "fluids" from sex ed classes so that kids won't know how HIV gets transmitted – in a state with more HIV diagnoses than any other! Sooner or later, good conservatives who actually want to grapple with the world as it is are going to jump off this train, and then what will the Ron DeSantises of the world do? Lose elections, that's what. Yes, even in Florida.

When I hear that good Americans spammed a Texas anti-trans hotline (one looking for "tips" on folks trying to break draconian anti-trans laws) with such things as the entire Bee Movie script, I remember that while trolling bigots is fun, useful, and honorable, Texas's anti-trans hate train still rolls on, with at least one woman actually de-transitioning back into manhood thanks to Texas law – and yet unable to be a man on their drivers' license, because that would violate the law! For about a quarter of the American population – and a rather larger proportion of the Republican Party – it really is all about the cruelty.

Rick Perlstein informs us that Presidential polling has just about always been laughably wrong, and though sometimes pollsters make honest mistakes (the future is the hardest thing to predict, correcting mistakes by fighting the last war, etc.), they're also pretty insular and arrogant, and ultimately you may decide (as I have!) that the only polling you ever want to see again is polling about issues, because horserace polling about candidates makes us all into bystanders, when we're not bystanders in a democracy. When you read about all those folks in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s going why do we even have an election when we know what's going to happen ha ha ha, that'll be reinforced for you.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court tosses the Pennsylvania state House's impeachment case against Philadelphia D.A. Larry Krasner, which makes sense – no legislative body takes up bills from last session (they reintroduce them!), and an impeachment is no different. So, you think PA Republicans knew this would happen when they filed their impeachment as a big-drama October Surprise, meant to rile up the voters about crime right before Election Day? I'd be a schmuck if I didn't wonder! In any case, it didn't work; one might even say (after Democrats scored numerous statewide wins, including the lower House) that it backfired. Meanwhile, nobody gives Larry Krasner any credit for that 17% reduction in the city's murder rate after blaming him when it went up.

In a peripherally-related note, Popular Information talks with Jeff Asher about why Donald Trump's complaints about FBI crime data are hogwash. Highlights: the National Crime Victimization Survey apparently has such large margins of error that you can't draw many useful conclusions about its findings, the FBI always doesn't get data from a few cities so complaining about it now is silly, "I don't think a secret like" the Biden Administration manipulating data "could be kept," and as far as people not reporting crimes because they think no one will do anything about them, "I doubt many prosecutors are refusing to prosecute murder." Remember: they whine about crime (and immigration, for that matter) because they have nothing to offer but hate.

Finally, New York City Mayor Eric Adams – once mooted by "liberal" media pundits as the Democratic Party's Future! – now faces five federal indictments for wire fraud, bribery, and campaign finance offenses. To think that some fool actually once suggested a "Manchin-Adams Democratic Party" as a Way Forward! And, just like all overrated center-right politicians, Mr. Adams, a Democratic Mayor indicted by a Democratic Administration, claims his indictment is political. Where are the Republicans who will squeal about the politicization of justice? I kid, of course – Eric Adams was always a tool of Our Glorious Elites, a tool to be discarded as soon as it stopped working, and if he doesn't know that now, he will soon. Will such a recognition scene spark good works, or more desperate chasing after power at some right-wing think tank? I think I know the answer, though I'd be happy to be wrong.

Around the table: “truly the most oppressed minority."

David Corn reminds us that Donald Trump badly mishandled the COVID pandemic while he was President. Well, he also talks to memory experts to explain how Americans might actually have forgotten that (long story short: the pandemic sucked, why would you want to remember it?), but the better public service is reminding good Americans that a President less interested in creating drama at every turn and more interested in leading us through and out of the pandemic might have saved many more lives. And putting this guy in charge again would just mean more drama, more hysteria, and more assholes threatening to kill people who actually know how to do things, which is all pretty much the opposite of the future I signed up for.

Ho hum, right-wing "journalist" discovers that libel is actually a thing and not just a weapon to brandish at anyone you don't like. Specifically, a Scranton Times reporter reminded everyone that said "patriot reporter," who makes a living claiming that "certain high-ranking elected and public officials are satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles sexually abusing children and drinking their blood to ingest the life-extending chemical adrenochrome," has, in his own past, a Corruption of Minors conviction. The "patriot reporter"'s libel lawsuit, predictably, failed. Nice to know Scranton, PA still has a local daily, though will they still have one after a few more frivolous libel suits?

Portage County, OH Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski advises his Facebook followers that, if Kamala Harris wins the Presidency in November, they should "write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards! Sooo...when the Illegal human 'Locust' (which she supports!) Need places to live...We'll already have the addresses of the their New families...who supported their arrival!" (Odd capitalization and use of ellipses in the original.) When he feels like responding to press inquiries, he'll no doubt say that of course he didn't mean to intimidate anyone, but was just "trying to make a point," but I'm pretty sure most folks just read "write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards" and reacted accordingly, and that's almost certainly just as he intended. In case you were wondering, I think folks so obsessed with "illegal immigration" that they'd upend law and order are racists.

With the news that the Florida ACLU has sued a state health care agency for using taxpayer money to spread lies about the abortion-related ballot initiative up before Florida voters in November, we will gain some insight into what right-wingers plan to do if they lose this fall. They'll do what they did with their book banning and masking-related attacks in 2021 – attack where liberals are strong, and with clear majorities supporting the liberal position on abortion, they'll dig in with their "abortion always hurts women's health" rubbish and their LIBRULZ AREZ TEH REALZ FEARMONGERURZ!!!!! rubbish. In the meantime, someone should go to jail for misuse of taxpayer funds. And whoever ordered police to interrogate petition-signers at their homes maybe should go to Hell – in addition to jail or in place of it, whichever.

I'm old enough to remember when saying you "create stories," as Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance did on CNN when confronted with the fact that he repeated lies about Haitian immigrants eating cats, would finish your campaign, but in the Donald Trump era, you can get away with saying pretty much anything anymore – if you're a Republican, anyway. Those who would respond "well, fiction writers create stories to get you to pay attention to other people suffering" should note that Vice Presidential candidates are not fiction writers. We should expect political candidates to tell the truth; if we don't hold them to that, we're not "superior" because we're more cynical, we're just not doing our job as citizens. (At the risk of piling on, Mr. Vance sure is one to claim that "the left needs to tone down the rhetoric," since his running mate is the one who says 99% of all the obnoxious shit we hear.)

New Hampshire Libertarian Party opines on X/Twitter that anyone who would "murder()" Kamala Harris would be "an American hero" – and then deletes the tweet, saying they only did so because the tweet violated X/Twitter's terms of service, laments that "(i)t's a shame that even on a 'free speech' website that libertarians cannot speak freely," and further adds – and you may want to sit down for this – that "Libertarians are truly the most oppressed minority." Yeah, I remember when our government enslaved Libertarians and marched them off to detention centers and gas chambers and threw them out of helicopters! I kid, of course. I fucking hate whiners.

Finally, an internal Department of Homeland Security report reveals that under former President Trump, DHS tried its damnedest to link Portland, OR protestors to an "imaginary terrorist plot." Just as anyone who had even one working brain cell could have predicted when Tha Bush Mobb created the Department of Homeland Security after 9.11! The good news? Some DHS rank-and-file pushed back, because no one could prove the antifa "terrorist organization" even existed. But don't worry, folks! If we put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office this November, he'll make damn sure this time that nobody who ever stood between him and his evil fantasies will ever work for our government again! I wish I were kidding, but Project 2025 has essentially said the same thing.

Around the table: with more dire warnings about mistakes good people still make.

Matt Stoller tells us "How Joe Biden Engineered Apple's New Air Pods," which can, with a software update, also be used as actual hearing aids. The hate-blind will guffaw with joyless laughter at that statement, but the Biden Administration did in fact force our Food and Drug Administration, via Executive Order, to approve over-the-counter hearing aids for folks with moderate hearing loss after our FDA spent years dragging their feet (and defying our laws) on that matter. Getting hearing aids without prescriptions also breaks up the collusion between health insurance corporations, hearing aid manufacturing corporations, and hearing specialists, since most folks can adjust their hearing aids with their smartphones these days. They say the politicians don't do good things for people any more, but Joe Biden does. So of course our "liberal" media ran him out.

I am not actually sure that the Trump tax "reform" "led to a $20 billion reduction in charitable giving within a year." The evidence: that "Americans who stopped itemizing their tax deductions gave less to charity in 2018 than they otherwise would have," but if only 30% of Americans itemized their deductions before that, what of the 70% of taxpayers who weren't itemizing their deductions in the first place? We don't learn. Also, charitable giving has gone up and down over the last six years, and ended up $35 billion higher in 2023 than in 2017. The expanded standard deduction is one of the few good things about the Trump tax "reform," and though we ought to allow more working families to deduct their charitable deductions more easily, the "finding" described above isn't a reason for that. So file this under "The Flesh is Willing, But…"

Some red states – namely Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska – will put paid family/medical leave before the voters in 2024. I suspect that voters in all three states will handily approve paid family/medical leave, since voters are generally better human beings than their representatives – but those representatives, in at least two of those states, will try their damnedest to overturn the express will of the people, and may even succeed. (I give Alaska politicians more credit than those of Nebraska and Missouri. Especially Missouri. What a political cesspool! They should all be turned out of office!)

So now we hear that the individual who first posted about "immigrants eating pets" on Facebook "was simply repeating a story she had heard from a neighbor," "who’d heard it themselves from a friend, who’d heard it from someone else" Jesus Mary and Joseph I can't even. This rumor enabled domestic terror threats against the government of Springfield, OH, which, last I looked, was composed of people, despite what right-wingers want you to think. And while I'm tempted to say people should just STFU until they know what they're talking about, I don't even believe the rumor-spreader's story. I think she knew full well what she was doing, because Trumpholes don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore. How can they, after all these years?

When I hear that Democrat politicos are salivating at all the attack ads they can run against Donald Trump just using clips from his disastrous recent debate, all I can say is: have these fuckers learned nothing from 2016? Because I remember watching negative ad after negative ad in 2016 and thinking too many independents were going to throw up their hands and stay home because "everyone's so negative," and that's what happened, and Donald Trump got elected. Democrats have lately been running ads that focus on issues and solutions; they've even run some funny ads. They need to keep doing that, so people see the difference between them and Republicans, whose ads will all be shouting at the top of their lungs about crime and immigration because what else have they got?

Finally, I feel compelled to warn you, yet again, about stories of right-wingers fighting each other over that immigrants-eating-pets fake news: just like with the recent Marjorie Taylor Greene/Laura Loomer "fight," remember that right-wingers occasionally disagree with other right-wingers just to look "sane" or "independent" every so often, so they can bring it up next time you accurately call them insane or a jackboot lockstep marcher. So don't ever get sucked in by the drama! And don't start a lot of sentences with "even so-and-so thinks." That's how they get you to normalize them, and we should never, ever, ever normalize these awful people.

Action: concerning government spying, corporate taxes, and debt limit dramas.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect journalists from government spying, raise corporate taxes, and end all debt limit dramas forever. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell Sen. Schumer to bring the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (or PRESS) Act up for a vote. The PRESS Act already passed our House; it would forestall Project 2025's efforts to force journalists to disclose sources. Is there nowhere Project 2025 doesn't leave a trail of slime? And the PRESS Act would also protect ISPs and social media outlets; no matter how stupid or sensationalist our media seems to be, they still need protection from government spying, just as we do.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut corporate taxes. But we can also demand that they hike the corporate tax rate to 55%, as it was in the New Deal era, because that high tax rate forced corporations to spend money creating jobs and products. (Expenses aren't taxable profits, after all.) These days we pretend that handing out corporate welfare tax breaks does that, which is like giving kids cookies before they do their homework! If it doesn't work at home, why would it work in our economy?

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Debt Ceiling Reform Act, which would not only end the debt limit "crises" that right-wingers in Congress constantly manufacture, but would protect Social Security and Medicare from such crises. Sadly, we have to do that, because our House Speaker has called Social Security and Medicare "the greatest threat to our national security" (and not right-wing domestic terrorists? Interesting!). But really, enough hostage-taking! Enough drama!

Around the table: the drama, it still burns!

Some 500 psychologists told ProPublica why they left health insurance networks; you won't hear from all 500 here, but the feeling you get – that good Americans can't get good mental health care because the big health insurance corporations can't make stupid money from it – will be no less oppressive. God forbid you or I find ourselves holding broken glass to our wrists while our therapists' health insurer cuts us off because our therapy's gone past whatever arbitrary deadline they demanded. Big corporations made efficiency their god and made the rest of us pay for it; what a work to take to the Pearly Gates!

Ho hum, our "liberal" media cares little that French President Macron is throwing a giant tantrum and refusing to form a new government respecting the fact that more French voters voted for leftist officials than for centrist or far-right ones. Of course you'll also recall that our "liberal" media also lost interest after right-wingers scored early polling leads that turned out to be completely illusory! But, you know, stability centrism sensibility compromise business-friendly. Remember that unreasonable people make things better.

Surprise surprise, car buyers surveyed by JD Power say that too much "advanced technology" in their cars doesn't do anything useful. People do like their rear cameras and blind spot monitors, but not their automated parking or their passenger screens, and certainly not their facial recognition systems (what, keys suck all of a sudden?) and their "gesture controls,” which I imagine good Italian Catholics like myself would find especially frustrating. Wait until JD Power gets to ask car buyers about their subscription-based brakes service!

No, Donald Trump will not vote for Florida's pro-choice constitutional amendment no matter what he says. He knows that some seven out of 10 Floridians will likely vote for it, but he also knows that his stated preferred position ("six weeks isn't enough") isn't actually on the ballot, so this is all noise, drama, misdirection, fodder for Trumpholes to gaslight people by saying Trump isn't as bad as you say he is, you know the deal.

In a related note, I can't decide whether that two-time Trump voters MSNBC talked to who now says she's actually "afraid" of him getting elected again has reached an unusually high level of wisdom or is just playing us. No, wait, I've decided; she's playing us. I mean, I try to believe the best about people, but I don't let that turn me into a schmuck, especially if Trump voters want to shoot up my house for having a “Love Wins" sign on my lawn.

Steve Benen asks why "Republicans keep forgetting who was in the White House in 2020," when the White House supposedly suppressed an anti-Hunter Biden report. Of course, Republicans pretend to forget – one might even say they perform a drama of forgetting – because they want you to forget. Remember all those Republicans who blamed Mr. Obama for the 2008 bankster Armageddon when George W. Bush was President? Remember all those Republicans who extolled Mr. Bush's record "protecting this country" after 9.11 happened on his watch? They hope you don't. But we do.

Finally, Rick Perlstein interviews David Neiwert about "the election story nobody talks about," that "a substantial bloc of American politics is talking about committing acts of violence and bringing down the government." Mr. Neiwert paints a very unpretty picture – vigilantes "helping" the Border Patrol, counterprotestors shooting at protestors if Mr. Trump wins, bad people trying to obstruct the vote-counting again, more domestic terrorism if Ms. Harris wins. Two things we need to do, then: one, vote Donald Trump into oblivion, and two, shame and ostracize his supporters until they remember they're not the only people who have ever mattered.

Action: concerning rich tax evasion, corrupt judges, and vote suppression.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the OLIGARCH Act and the High Court Gift Ban Act and reject the SAVE Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the OLIGARCH Act, which would create a four-bracket wealth tax (the brackets would be 2%, 4%, 6%, and 8%) on homes with at least 1,000 times the median wealth in America. So brook no silliness about how this would be a "100% tax" (like Donald Trump said in 2020), because the four brackets are right there, and none of them would even come close to breaking a billionaire. Why, Elon Musk could still spend $45 million a month trying to elect Donald Trump President! That's a hell of a lot of money to piss away, by the way. If I had $45,000< I could do a hell of a lot more good than he's doing with all his money!

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the High Court Gift Ban Act, which would ban gifts over $50 to our Supreme Court Justices (and limit aggregate gifts to $100 annually). After all the luxury vacations our Justices have gotten from billionaires over the years (which we've only learned about lately!), you'd think they'd know better than to say how dare you say we can't be impartial! You may remember that all it took to get Bank of Amerikkka clerks to foreclose on more homes were $25 cash gifts and Bed, Bath, and Beyond gift cards. So we've got to put some guardrails on our Supreme Court Justices.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject the so-called SAVE Act, which purports to be a bill protecting us from the scourge of undocumented immigrants voting – for the record, that's been illegal since anyone can remember, and no one can even prove it's happening – but would also turbocharge right-wing efforts to throw people off the voting rolls for the heinous crime of being Black or Brown (and therefore, in their minds, a Democrat voter). Look, if Republicans want people to vote for them, then maybe they should offer something other than hysteria and drama. It ain't that damn deep.

Around the table: the “free state of Florida,” and other absurdities.

How bad are union-busting campaigns these days? Compass Coffee baristas allege that their employers have hired nearly 125 new “employees” at seven locations to dilute unionization votes there. These “employees” include CEOs at other corporations – including one forced to pay $25,000 in back wages to five organizers they illegally fired – as well as friends and family of Compass’s CEO. Compass virtually stamped out previous organization efforts by, well, firing virtually all of their workers during the pandemic, but union organizers are back, because you can’t keep good people down. Hear that, Supreme Court? (As an aside, one Uber lobbyist’s suggestion that she was somehow misled into being hired is absurd. How do you know? By the phrase “Uber lobbyist,” which describes a class of person who typically does not need a barista job on the side.)

Shipt workers, frustrated by smaller paychecks, band together to prove their employers use algorithms to shaft them. The amount of work these folks had to do – along with a non-profit and a Ph.D. student – to prove their point is staggering, and I can’t help but point out that if, you know, these workers were organized they wouldn’t have to work as hard to protect themselves. I know, a lot of folks fall into this line of work, for some it’s not a primary source of income, and some even prefer what bosses like to call “flexible” work schedules, but Jesus Mary and Joseph do we really think corporatists don’t know all of this and exploit it? And should we really let them keep exploiting it?

Ari Paul rues that our “liberal” media – so concerned about the alleged anti-Semitism of opposing anything Israel does these days – has by and large missed (or, perhaps, “missed”) the story of anti-Semitism within the youth movement backing Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Could that be because our “liberal” media presents Ms. Meloni as a “pragmatist”? Yes, it could be. All of this is peculiar, since actual video of young morons sieg-heiling and celebrating Mussolini would be sensational in the manner of sensationalism our “liberal” media adores. Why, one might start to think our “liberal” media only likes sensationalism that makes right-wingers look better!

Washoe County, Nevada election commissioners refuse to certify a recount, presumably because it didn’t go the way they wanted it to go. After all, they didn’t exactly present a vast trove of evidence proving wrongdoing or incompetence! Although a “local activist,” with the unfortunate name of Robert Beadles, says “an artificial intelligence supercomputer” told him the election couldn’t possibly have gone the way it did. Mr. Beadles has been whining about nonexistent election fraud for years, and another name for “artificial intelligence supercomputer” would be Bullshit Machine.

Independent Presidential candidate/brain worm puppet Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says he “won’t take sides” on various 9.11 conspiracy theories, but I will! No, Tha Bush Mobb didn’t plan and execute 9.11 – seriously? Him? Plan a thing like that? It is to laugh! Besides, that’s not how power works anymore – the powerful see nothing but opportunity in failure, and they never see opportunity in success, plus they break everything, point out how broken everything is, and then posit themselves as the only people who can fix it, as if they weren’t the ones who broke it! Also, if Saudi Arabia did the deed, I think we’d know it by now; it’s hard to keep secrets like that, even in totalitarian states – and also in states like ours, where we’re all so damn proud of what we know.

Local media find Florida’s new “Welcome to the Free State of Florida” signs generating “mixed reactions” among the locals, but sadly we don’t learn as much about that as we deserve – just reactions from one liberal citing book-banning and one right-winger who almost certainly calls himself an “independent” talking about “people stuffing stuff down our throats,” and I’d lay money that “stuff” is deserved shame over his neanderthal opinions. Meanwhile, enjoy your freedoms, Florida – the freedom to die from COVID, the freedom to get run over by right-wingers, the freedom to lose your home to climate change, the freedom to get bullied if you’re gay and/or trans, the freedom to throw tantrums just to keep other people from reading books, and the freedom to die in mass shootings perpetrated by whiny young men, all because your government prefers the drama of a “Free State of Florida” sign to providing the services you pay for with your taxes.

Finally, a Republican strategist thinks Joe Biden – still being put through the ringer over a two-week-old debate performance – is actually in a “commanding position politically” against Mr. Trump, and though I wouldn’t blame you for thinking this is a false flag, it also rather resembles the truth. Incumbents are hard to dislodge anymore – why, you’d have to badly mismanage a pandemic to lose re-election these days! – and, as better minds than I have pointed out, the alleged “dementia” of Joe Biden (I’ve had family members with dementia, and he ain’t like that, period, end of, full stop) sure hasn’t manifested as chaotic governing. Economy still adding over 200,000 jobs a month, inflation down and wages still outpacing it, antitrust enforcement still vigorous and effective, wars in Palestine and Ukraine managed about as well as possible without American bloodshed – yeah, that’s some “dementia,” there.

Around the table: enough with the drama and hysteria already! Part 992.

Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge partially blocks our FTC’s ban on non-compete clauses in worker contracts — clauses that prevent workers from getting new and better jobs! — and will probably strike it down not long before it goes into effect at the end of August. Saying our FTC “lacks the power” to make and enforce such a rule seems to me a conveniently narrow view of our FTC’s legal mandate to fight “unfair methods of competition,” and dig the right-wing view of this decision summarized in paragraph 12: “(b)usiness groups and many Republicans say that noncompetes are a crucial tool for businesses to protect trade secrets, confidential information and their investments in recruiting and training workers.” Horseshit! Laws prohibiting the revelation of trade secrets and confidential information protect those things, which right-wingers must know, or else they wouldn’t blunder on to whining about how hard it is to “invest” in and “recruit” and “train” workers. Look, either our corporate overlords are TEH GREATESTZ AMURIKANZ EVAHZ!!!! or they have trouble training and retaining workers; it can’t be both. Of course investing in workers costs money, money executives could use to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Another day, another reminder that right-wingers don’t “fear” a dictator so much as they want one. And that’s what folks do once they give in to masturbatory rage – though of course they deny wanting a dictator, or they say this time is different, as if no one in human history has ever said that before. Anyway, our Supreme Court, with its noxious ruling on Presidential immunity, has essentially declared the American Experiment over. But we will have something to say about that, and not just on Election Day.

Another day, another corporation hoping to gum up debate over its useless products with heart-tugging and ultimately meaningless statistics. This time it’s SoundThinking, which used to be known as ShotSpotter, until a bunch of cities who had invested heavily in its technology found it didn’t spot gunshots very well. Apparently no one’s tracking the data ShotSpotter, er, SoundThinking offers, and actually you can spot the lie, so to speak, in the grammar – “(f)rom 2022 to 2023, more than 380 lives were saved because of this technology,” not this technology saved 380 lives, which is the way folks would phrase it if they were sure of themselves. Again: always suspect the passive voice.

Want another reason to despise Project 2025? The Heritage Foundation’s proposed radical restructuring of our federal government would also steal earned benefits from our soldiers and convert that money into corporate welfare. They’re calling these benefits “extra compensation,” though if you had your leg blown off fighting for our country you’d probably see it a little differently. Project 2025 would also privatize our Veterans Administration, which is the only Medicare-for-All-style health insurance program our government offers. How many times must I tell these pimps! Privatizing always leads to higher costs in the long run! Our government couldn’t possibly do health insurance worse than private corporations do! The heavily-privatized system we’ve got, after all, causes the repossession of soldiers' prosthetic limbs.

In a sign that wielding the Big Stick of PR is working, Donald Trump has “disavowed” Project 2025. I never said the man was dumb – I’ve specifically said that he plays dumb just like every other right-winger does – but I’d be dumb to believe him, and again, you can tell he’s lying just by reading intelligently: “I know nothing about Project 2025,” yet also “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” and yet also “(a)nything they do, I wish them luck.” You don’t wish someone “luck” if they’re “ridiculous and abysmal.” If Donald Trump were King Solomon, he’d not only have cut the baby in half, he’d have enjoyed it.

Finally, I’ve avoided looking at political news this week because I know it’s all hysteria about Joe Biden’s age, but ex-Republican Stuart Stevens at The Atlantic provides exactly the right corrective. Long story short: Joe Biden’s done a good job, so Democrats should “(s)how a little swagger, not timidity” and “seize the day.” At least one Biden campaign ad demonstrates a clue on how to do this, contrasting Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions with Biden accomplishments like raising corporate taxes and lowering prescription drug prices. These could be better accomplishments, but they are accomplishments, and the only path to getting better accomplishments doesn’t run through replacing Joe Biden – or through voting for the fascist whose followers will throw bricks through your windows if you put a “Love Wins” sign on your lawn.

Around the table: this week with maybe half good news? Or more?

I don’t know what fresh hell our Supreme Court plans to unleash upon us next week, but on Friday they ruled 8-1 that our government can keep domestic abusers from owning guns. I’ve never liked using law-breaking as a pretext to take rights away, but then I’m no longer sure having a gun should be a right per se, and when right-wingers throw a tantrum over our Court saying “the Second Amendment is not absolute” (that’s Justice Barrett, from her concurrent opinion), they’ll show us their ass yet again, and I guess that’s useful. Of course Justice Thomas dissented, saying that since governments have barely ever prosecuted domestic violence victims then of course there’s no “historical precedent” to follow! I bet he likes bitcoin, too.

Our Supreme Court, in Moore v. United States, also rejected (at least in this case’s context!) right-wing arguments that our government can only tax “realized” income. Had our Court sanctified that pile of dung, our government would never be able to tax the kind of wealth rich people accumulate these days – capital gains, accumulated interest, stock options, and the like. Rich folks pay themselves like this so they can avoid taxes! Let’s see you and I try that! And now for the bad news: four out of nine Justices on our Supreme Court explicitly blessed the “realized income” argument; two of these merely differed on whether these particular plaintiffs had a case regarding their income.

Clearview AI – a player in the facial recognition software game, a game that should shame for all eternity anyone who plays it – is now so broke after all the lawsuits against it that it’s actually offering promises of future earnings in its settlement. Like they’re ever going to make money again! I mean, they’re not a name your grandmother knows, like Home Depot or Microsoft or DuPont. Well, at least a lot of idiots lost a lot of money boosting an absurd corporation (Clearview) as well as an absurd notion (that facial recognition software doesn’t completely suck). And, you know, it scraped all those photos off the internet without the consent of the photographed; turns out you don’t surrender all your rights just because the cynical say so.

The Tampa Bay Times profiles Rich Logis, who used to be a Trumphole but now runs a group aiming to help other ex-Trumpholes escape. I don’t believe anyone as emotionally-invested in Republican electoral fortunes as Mr. Logis was in 2015 could be an “independent” – no, not even if they voted for Ralph Nader four times! – and I never said losing friends and communities was easy, either, but the work of being yourself is the most important work you can do, and I’m pleased he’s now doing it, even if he never wants to tax the rich like I do. I’m also pleased January 6 and Gov. DeSantis’s mishandling of the COVID Delta wave pushed him away, because these should have pushed away every reasonable person. And while I’ve long said the work of redeeming Trumpholes is God’s work, not ours, maybe Rich Logis is doing God’s work.

When I hear that our government has designated a Swedish neo-Nazi group as terrorists, I’m more than a bit conflicted: I’ve never been thrilled that our government designates anyone a terrorist, and this is also a pretty obscure, faraway group; why, it’s almost as if they don’t have the guts to designate some American hate group a “terrorist” organization! Or, our government thinks Americans will more readily accept a “terrorist” designation of a domestic American hate group one day if they get one of an obscure foreign one first, but that’s also quite the double-edged sword. Still and all, fuck neo-Nazis with a broomstick sideways.

When I hear that Democratic strategists have expressed alarm over Joe Biden’s re-election strategy, I’m very, very tempted to say: these are same people who consistently snatch defeat from the jaws of victory! Your strategy can get no better endorsement! Now I could criticize Mr. Biden’s strategy – he’s not telling us that America is fighting monopolies again, for example – but of course none of these strategists seem to have that complaint. Actually, it’s hard to tabulate the complaints they do have, what with all the behind-the-scenes who’s-in-who’s-out drama the article describes. Why, it’s almost like the whole article was a bait-and-switch!

Finally, a megachurch pastor’s “confession” of a “moral failure” involving an underage girl – a failure that, of course, went on for many years – is an amazing document mainly for the utter lack of confessing that goes on in it! “Young lady”? Uh, ladies aren’t 12! “It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong”? Try it was wrong – nobody likes confessions that tabulate the sins one could have committed but didn’t. But best of all? “In March of 1987, this situation was brought to light, and it was confessed and repented of.” Not “I confessed” and “I repented”? Why, that sounds like someone who’s done neither! Remember: the passive voice hides evil.

Around the table: this week with 50% good news!

Good news, everyone! The state of Minnesota just killed a community broadband ban, joining the 34 American states that don’t ban community broadband networks just because big telecom corporations throw tantrums about it. Minnesota’s ban was especially offensive, in that big telecoms could claim it wasn’t an outright ban, but “just” a ban in areas where big telecoms operated, or pretended to operate, or “might one day” operate, which means, like, everywhere. Consider that another blow against monopoly power in America.

Speaking of which: our FBI raids a landlord corporation Cortland Management, which has allegedly schemed with national rent-fixers to keep rents absurdly high in at least two thirds of our nation’s apartments. You’ll recognize the national rent-fixers (RealPage) from an October 2022 ProPublica article, you remember, the one where a RealPage employee said landlords didn’t raise prices fast/high enough because they had “too much empathy”? That is to laugh! Also too, RealPage’s owner is a hedge fund firm, a.k.a. a bankster.

Baristas at coffee chain corporation Blank Street Coffee win a union contract for workers at 19 NYC locations, with hopes of winning over workers at the other 21. Of course banksters started Blank Street, of course they understaffed the locations and didn’t fix safety issues, and of course they hired a notorious union-busting firm once they got wind of how dissatisfied their workers were, but the baristas overcame all of that – plus the inevitable losses within their ranks – to get a contract negotiated in a relatively short period of time (nine months, versus the 15-month average per a 2022 Bloomberg analysis). Given how much everyone wants coffee these days, it made a lot of sense for union organizers to look baristas’ way long, long ago; glad to see that’s finally become obvious (albeit largely due to the baristas’ own efforts).

Because we need the reminders, Robert Reich runs down all the “nothingburgers” Republicans try to make big dramas about these days. Like “illegals” voting (it’s already illegal!) and crime that’s half of what it was 30 years ago and, of course, “wokeness,” the whine of people who think they should be exempt from change or accountability. And yes, the border counts as a nothingburger! And anyone that obsessed about it needs to start with the man in the mirror! It’s all drama, all hysteria, all the time from Republicans, and forget about Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene – the vast majority of this drama and hysteria comes from men, including the Republican Presidential nominee, the Shouter-in-Chief.

When I hear that a Texas woman almost died miscarrying because of that state’s draconian anti-abortion laws, I think maybe our sensation-hungry “liberal" media might run with it. I suspect I will be disappointed – our “liberal” media lives in mortal fear of right-wing nutjobs, and to the degree that’s justified (I’m not saying it isn’t), the correct response must be to defy the nutjobs, lest you remain hostage to their drama and hysteria for the rest of your life. Otherwise folks will think our “liberal” media only cares about stoking right-wing rage with their sensationalism, and “I didn’t tell the truth because assholes threatened me” is not a work you want to bring to the Pearly Gates.

From the “this is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD!” file: more Republicans now think it’s not so bad for a felon to be President than before their candidate got convicted of 34 felonies. What we don’t say enough about this case is that it’s a campaign finance issue – Mr. Trump thought, once upon a time, that fewer people would vote for him if they knew he had sex with a porn star, so he tried to hush it up. Apparently the “law and order” voters of his party no longer think that’s true. Anyway, we leave these people to God – the folks who more likely have a problem with all of Donald Trump’s legal problems are independent voters, and they’ll more likely decide Mr. Trump’s fate at the ballot box than all his shouty dittoheads.

In a related note, legal scholars think Donald Trump “has an opening” to appeal his 34 felony convictions to our Supreme Court, and that opening could involve federal campaign finance laws. Rick Hasen, as good a source of legal wisdom as exists in America, says that Mr. Trump could “argue that the New York election law that he was prosecuted under to turn the false business records misdemeanors into felonies improperly relied upon alleged federal election law violations,” since the judge specifically mentioned the Federal Election Campaign Act in his instructions. I can easily imagine at least four of nine Justices crying “injustice” at that, and they’ll probably whine about the “harm” done to his Presidential campaign like anyone should give a hoot about that – after all, our Constitution hamstrings the Executive branch for a reason.

Finally, the publisher of the notorious 2000 Mules film has announced it’ll stop distributing the film – because they face a defamation lawsuit from Mark Andrews, whom the film depicts as a “mule” but who was, as it turns out, legally dropping off ballots from his family. Let’s not let it pass that Mr. Andrews faced death threats from right-wingers after they saw him in the film. Anyway, though this is good news for Mr. Andrews and for America, the truly-devoted will continue to hawk “voter fraud” nonsense and keep whining about how everything’s stacked against them. If you’re wrong, everything should be stacked against you!

Action: concerning health care, law and order, and homelessness.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act, outlaw judge-shopping, and enact housing policy that actually helps homeless folks. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act, which would make it easier for states to start their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems. Canada’s Medicare-for-All-style system started in Saskatchewan, after all, and the enterprising American Governor would relish the possibility at attracting big corporate headquarters to their state, since even CEOs prefer cost certainty to insane premium hikes. Of course, it’d also be better because folks wouldn’t have to stay in a bad job or marriage just so they don’t die, and because banksters wouldn’t make money from hurting you like they do now.

Demand Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing judge-shopping. You should get the judge in the area where you were allegedly harmed, not in some district in Texas headed up by right-wing judges who love certain kinds of frivolous lawsuits! It ain’t that deep! Now you may have heard Trumpholes lamenting the “unfairness” of their Personal Lord and Savior having to go before a jury of (gasp!) New Yorkers. Psst: that’s where he committed the crimes. They have nothing to say about his classified documents case being heard in Florida since the alleged crime happened there. So let us have wisdom, not Trumphole hysteria, guide us.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that really addresses homelessness, instead of pretending that jail time and massive fines are the solution. Who thinks some kind of punishment is the answer to every problem? Someone who needs to be ejected from your life, that’s who. And who fines someone who doesn’t have any money? Someone who wants to bring back debt slavery, that’s who. I’m not exaggerating about that. But Congress could invest more in housing assistance and end discrimination against renters, which would speak much better of us as a civilization than putting spikes on public benches.

Around the table: in which airline corporations get a comeuppance.

Outstanding news for good Americans: big airline corporations tried to defeat a Biden Administration rule that would have mandated automatic refunds when airlines screw up – and not only lost, but lost big, when Congressfolk actually wrote the Biden mandate into law. “In other words,” Matt Stoller writes, “Airlines for America tried to use their clout in Congress to undercut a popular rule put forward by Pete Buttigieg, a rule designed to fix a problem they caused by screwing people during the pandemic after they got bailed out. But their plan backfired, because politicians, journalists, and policymakers were actually paying attention. So now instead of repealing a rule they don’t like, they got that rule written into law.” Ain’t that great? And if you’re one of those Americans who called your Congressfolk post-haste when you heard about it, you’re part of the reason it’s great. So go buy yourself a Buffalo chicken cheese-steak, of whatever it is you love.

Judd Legum, in “Elon Musk’s Piggy Bank,” explains in considerable detail exactly why Elon Musk doesn’t deserve the $50 billion compensation package a Delaware court invalidated this past January. They’re putting the compensation package – which they claim is necessary so that Mr. Musk “will continue to be driven to innovate and drive growth at Tesla,” how’s that for a hostage situation! – before the shareholders in June, and yes, virtually every argument every board member makes sits on a bed of corrupt self-interest. Aside from the litany of examples of how Tesla’s failing these days, I feel compelled to add that a working family still can’t afford a Model X after a dozen years. Toyota Priuses went from luxury car to working family car in half that time.

Factcheck.org gives us the lowdown on the H5N1 bird flu officials have found in our milk supply. Long story short: the chance of a bird flu pandemic is low right now, since pasteurization does a pretty good job killing it and H5N1 would have to change a lot more to reach humans – but that could always change. Not just because more folks drink raw milk now, but also because researchers have hardly looked at bovine flu – there hasn’t been that much of it, which is a bit ominous, given that H5N1 figuring out how to get to cows might make it easier to figure out how to get to people – and our FDA has apparently found more bird flu genetic material in milk than our USDA has. In the meantime, don’t drink raw milk, cook your meat and eggs well, and stay away from wild birds.

“Who Believes the Most ‘Taboo’ Conspiracy Theories?” asks Paul Rosenberg at Salon. “It Might Not Be Who You Think.” Spoiler alert: it’s white dudes with graduate-level degrees! They’re more likely to believe Sandy Hook was a “false flag” operation or that folks exaggerate Holocaust deaths “on purpose,” and while you may reasonably conclude that the experience of studying an area deeply makes some folks a bit arrogant about areas they haven’t studied very deeply, you still have to wonder why things like Holocaust/Sandy Hook denialism attract them particularly. They said a little knowledge is a dangerous thing – and they were right!

I doubt very much that Donald Trump is “disgusted” by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s story about how she put her dog down, especially since the story mainly describes Mr. Trump being “disgusted” with Ms. Noem’s poor grasp of “public relations.” Only one time does the article depict him asking why she put the dog down, and even that is still a bit of a walk to grasping that the dog was almost certainly failed by her humans – and I still suspect he only thought to ask in the first place because he observed the PR backlash against her. With this guy, it’s never about humanity; it’s always about the drama.

Come on, Politico, is crypto really “Trump’s New Weapon Against Biden”? There are two types of Americans: Americans who think crypto is a scam, and Americans who don’t think crypto is a scam yet, and unlike anti-vaxxers, the ones in the latter group don’t need to look only to crypto to salve their desperation, since they can run plenty of other garden-variety economic scams. If anything, this gives Joe Biden another opportunity to be The Real Law and Order President, though admittedly he’s flinched from discussing such matters (particularly with regard to monopolies). If I were him, I’d always wear hats saying I put corporate criminals in jail! But Democrats have never taken my advice, to their general detriment, I’d say.

Upon hearing that the Georgia state Republican committee has voted to remove one of its vice chairs, nine-time-illegal voter and convicted felon Brian K. Pritchard, I once again feel compelled to assert that Mr. Pritchard, even though he forged checks, should never have lost his voting rights, and thus shouldn’t be facing the setbacks he’s faced lately. And that’s true no matter how much I despise his politics! Rights aren’t rights if they’re so easily lost – and values aren’t values if they’re so easily amended just to stick it to people you despise.

Finally, New Hampshire’s state legislature raises the legal marriage age to 18, but the process is not without speed bumps, as at least one Republican state legislator defends his support for underage marriage thusly: “(w)hen we do this to people who are of ripe, fertile age and may have a pregnancy and a baby involved, are we not in fact, making abortion a much more desirable alternative when marriage might be the right solution for some freedom-loving couples?” Setting aside that he uses the word “freedom” as an amulet like the rest of them, or how much he sounds exactly like the person QAnon votaries profess to hate: he frames his support as an anti-abortion stance, a less popular stance now that it’s not as theoretical, but the only reason anyone will remember him will be for describing underage girls as “ripe” and “fertile.” We’d be better off remembering the state legislator who said this: “A lot of (Republicans) say oh, we were married at 16 and we turned out great, and my marriage was great, and I always say that’s really great, but all those child marriages don’t end in a happy ending. They end with someone having bruises and cuts and being pushed down stairs and losing their kids.” As a friend of mine once said, never let the living do all the testifying.

Action: concerning paid family/medical leave and postal banking.

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to pass paid family/medical leave legislation, and tell your Congressfolk to enact postal banking legislation. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Moms Rising helps you tell your state legislators to enact paid family leave for all good Pennsylvanians. The Family Care Act would provide between 12 and 20 paid weeks of family/medical leave, and would levy a payroll tax of no more than 1% to pay for the program – and that payroll tax would probably be rather less than 1%, given that everyone’s not going to be on paid leave at the same time. Right-wingers would probably cite that hysterical hypothetical, but doing so would betray a rather low opinion of Americans – 30-plus years of experience in the workforce have taught me that most of us would rather work than pretend to be sick. Hence I bank on our goodness, so to speak.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow our Postal Service to offer basic banking services, like checking accounts, savings accounts, and small loans. Right-wingers who would guffaw at this idea, as if the mere act of snickering constitutes an argument, would do well to admit that our Postal Service did offer basic banking services until the late 1960s, and they would also do well to admit that a lot of big banksters don’t even want to serve certain rural and urban areas and our Postal Service can certainly fill that gap better than payday lenders and check-cashing joints can. If they’re willing to admit any reality, that is. They seem much more comfortable with big-drama fever dreams. Barry Goldwater would hardly recognize them.

Action: concerning government shutdowns, price-gouging, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end government shutdowns, fight corporate price-gouging, and protect voting rights. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to end government shutdowns forever, by passing laws eliminating the debt ceiling and authorizing spending to continue at current levels whenever Congress can’t agree on continuing resolutions. Seriously, the only people in America who want government shutdowns are people who worship chaos and drama, and they shouldn’t get all the say about everything, or very much of anything, frankly. And stamping feet and preening about “runaway government debt” in order to cut Social Security and Medicare? Folks who do that should have their own circle of hell.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act, while Inequality Media helps you tell them to pass the Price Gouging Prevention Act. What’s the main cause of inflation? Not supply chain issues, not stimulus checks, not higher wages for workers – it’s corporate greed simple and plain, and these bills would make it harder for corporations to be greedy, as far as giving you less for your buck (the former bill) or raising prices higher than inflation or using inflation as a cover to raise prices when no other cost pressures would cause that (the latter bill). Ignore free market votaries; people matter more than ideology.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former bill would advance a slew of reforms nationally, including same-day voter registration and fairer redistricting, while the latter bill would allow our Justice Department to strike down new vote restriction laws from any state or locality that has demonstrated a history of vote suppression. These bills would help more good Americans vote; that may not be the Republicans’ goal, but so what? Duty is duty, right is right, and wrong is wrong.

Action: concerning right-wing drama, worker safety, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Missouri state House leadership to kill an anti-trans bill, tell Florida’s Governor to veto legislation that would hurt worker safety, and tell your Congressfolk to tax millionaire and billionaire income into Social Security. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

In Missouri, HB 2885 would make teachers register as sex offenders if they support a trans kid’s transition in any way – which would end their career as school teachers, of course. However you feel about transgender folks, supporting a trans kid is not in the same class as soliciting a minor for sex or using child porn. Gosh, what if terms like “sex offender” actually meant something again? Missouri House Speaker Dean Plocher’s phone number is 573.751.1544; Missouri Republican House Floor Leader Jonathan Patterson’s number is 573.751.0907. You know what you gotta do: tell them to end this manufactured drama before they embarrass themselves.

Meanwhile, the Florida state legislature actually wants to prevent localities from protecting workers from extreme heat. How conservative of them! The smallest unit of government knows best, they say – until those smallest units of government defy the will of big corporations that don’t care about workers dying from heatstroke, because worshiping mammon is more important than taking care of other people. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Gov. DeSantis to veto this legislation when it gets to his desk. Yeah, it’s a long shot, but with his Presidential run lying in the deep grave, perhaps we can get him to do the right thing. For once!

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to make millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes into our Social Security system. You know that income over $168,600 doesn’t get taxed into the system, but you may not know that several already-introduced bills would address this issue – the Social Security Expansion Act and the Social Security 2100 Act would tax income over $250,000 and $400,000, respectively. Better to point our Congressfolk to good bills that already exist than let them come up with some BS bill that doesn’t do what they say it does!

Around the table: with jewels of good news struggling to rise above the muck of bad news.

Big coffee corporation Starbucks and Starbucks Workers United announce a “foundational framework” for contract negotiations, with Starbucks finally extending credit card tipping to unionized stores (as it had for non-union stores, which I’m pretty sure is illegal). Could this framework be a PR ploy on Starbucks’ part? Perhaps. But it would never have happened without workers’ agitation for fair collective bargaining, and it also wouldn’t have happened without consumer boycotts and Starbucks’ losing almost 2% of its value on one December day alone. And unionized Starbucks stores might be the thing that breaks the dam for the rest of America’s working families.

Ho hum, Donald Trump keeps talking about a “migrant crime wave” that doesn’t actually exist, as actual data affirms what common sense already tells us – that immigrants without papers commit less crime, because they have an obvious incentive not to have a run-in with police! Naturally a Trump campaign spokeshack alleges that “Democrat cities purposefully do not document when crimes are committed by illegal immigrants,” and, well, that’s a defamation lawsuit waiting to happen! Of course, Mr. Trump has a lot of experience being sued for that.

Study confirms that reported COVID-19 vaccine side effects exist and are rare, but social media drama hounds tend to leave out the part that they’re rare. The vaccine that had more pronounced side effects – the J&J vaccine, associated with neurological problems and blood clotting disorders – you can’t even get in America anymore, and that sure does resemble how civilization is supposed to work. Anyway, I’ll take a one in 1.75 million chance of acute brain or spinal inflammation over the considerably higher possibility that COVID would kill me painfully. Also, ignore people who write entire phrases in capital letters.

Gallup poll finds that Americans think “immigration” is the top problem facing them right now, and I guess it’s good that it’s not inflation, but note well that Gallup didn’t offer extremism as one of the choices, and behold! A Reuters/Ipsos poll ranks extremism at the top, above immigration. Anyway, if 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane, the results of both polls on immigration (28% and 18%, respectively) suggest that all Republicans' yammering about the border isn’t working so well, even if our “liberal” media, which doesn’t talk to regular Americans, seems to think it is. Yet fools like Rep. Suozzi (D?-NY) say crap like this: “The best politician is the politician who says what the people are thinking already. If the number one thing on people’s minds is the border crisis, you’ve got to talk about the border crisis, and you’ve got to talk about how to solve it.” Sure, people just happen to be thinking about the “border crisis,” and Republican hysteria over it, and credulous “liberal” media coverage of it, have nothing to do with it.

Ho hum, Rep. Maria Salazar (E-FL) takes credit for children’s hospital funding in a bill she voted against. I doubt her explanation – she "made sure" the goodies got in the bill, but she voted against it because it was “fiscally irresponsible” – will resonate very broadly with the electorate in her toss-up district, and her real calculation (I got the funding and I also got the attention for voting against it! I’m such a player!) will only appeal to the cynical, who are not as numerous as our “liberal” media want us to think — I mean, cynicism requires deep commitment, and most of us are just trying to get through the day with a little bit of dignity. I’d run an ad depicting a voter falling asleep as someone describes Ms. Salazar's labyrinthine scheme, and then add a voice-over saying can you believe how politicians are these days?

Finally, “Mob Boss” Mitch McConnell (E-KY) will step down as Republican Senate leader at the end of 2024, and will leave the Senate when his term is up in 2026. I want to say don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya, but that doesn't take his evil seriously enough – all he ever did as Senate Republican leader was kill good ideas dead, and in so doing hurt good Americans, all so Republicans could have more power to do even more harm to good Americans; I doubt St. Peter smiles upon any of these works at the Pearly Gates. And while I hesitate to quarrel with folks when they say the nearness of death informs their decisions, I know why he’s really retiring: because January 6 showed him that the world had left him behind. Republicans are all about naked brutality from now on; they have no use for Mitch McConnell’s brand of evil anymore.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 983.

The incomparable Rick Perlstein describes the literal fascist origins of the right-wing Revisionist movement that now controls Israel. Read the whole thing; it’ll be as illuminating as it is heartbreaking, and Mr. Perlstein has received a lot of hate mail for this article – from liberals, one would think, though one always has to wonder these days how many are really right-wing agents provocateur. I presume that after fascism led to, you know, the Holocaust, Revisionists learned to mask their fascism a little better. And when you reaad about the, ah, memorabilia some folks have in their houses, you might even think the Revisionists’ post-Holocaust methods vaguely resemble sports teams’ methods of inducing loyalty among the locals.

Ho hum, Google will soon lay off thousands of workers even though its parent corporation, Alphabet, made record profits last month. The shills will say that Alphabet is making all that money, not Google, and while they’re circle-jerking over that, I’ll retort that people often think other people’s jobs are less essential than their own, and I’ll also retort that corporations own other corporations mostly to avoid accountability for their evil and that corporations owning other corporations should be illegal. Corporations want to be “people” but still want to own other “people”? The stupid, it burns!

When I hear Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI) say that our Supreme Court “manipulate(s) facts in cases that benefit Republican special interests” and “the justices deliberately ignore() facts gathered by Congress and insert() their own conclusions,” you may be reminded of our Court’s ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, in which the web-designer plaintiff filed suit against Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws before she’d ever designed a website and that the “request from a same-sex couple to design a website” very likely never even existed. Did our Court fail to find out these facts before ruling – or did they simply not care? I kid, of course; it’s that they don’t care.

How does one interpret Gov. DeSantis’s sudden concern that maybe book-banning has gone too far in his state? He wants you to think he really does weigh all the facts before making decisions or whatever, but he really doesn’t care about that – he got attention being a book banning supporter and a critic, and getting attention coming and going is a right-wing politician’s sole reason for existing. Remember, he is also the guy who “refuted” criticisms of his state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law by saying it only applied to young children – and then he expanded it to include all students. Maybe don’t listen to anything Ron DeSantis says?

Ho hum, anti-vaxxers publish putatively peer-reviewed article claiming that COVID vaccines kill way more people than they save, etc., but the online medical journal that published it has now retracted it. So when someone comes at you with this was peer-reviewed!, you come back with the journal that published it retracted it. Of course, anti-vaxxers don’t really care about all of that; all they care about is repeating the lie and hoping to catch folks unawares. In the meantime, if someone bold-faces entire sentences and uses more than one exclamation point at a time, maybe don’t listen to them. Also, maybe don’t listen to tech bros, ever, about anything.

In a peripherally-related note, I should be happier that a CNN reporter “cornered” Rep. Jim Jordan (E-OH) over the now-discredited FBI informant whose testimony, such as it is, has powered the Biden impeachment effort, but Jim Jordan doesn’t care; he was just trying to repeat the same “four fundamental facts” about the Biden impeachment effort over and over again. Know what those four facts are? No? Well, maybe you can’t just repeat any old thing, then! And as much as I want reporters to stand up to folks like Jim Jordan, I still wonder if the CNN reporter just played a role in a drama here. Our “liberal” media have sucked for a very long time, you know.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (E-AL) supports both the Alabama state Supreme Court’s ruling that embryos are people and the in vitro fertilization the ruling now essentially outlaws (since IVF creates many more embryos than babies). His rhetorical contortions are even worse than the first three paragraphs suggest, but unlike the aforementioned anti-vaxxers or Jim Jordan, his game isn’t repetition – claiming he supports IVF but also supports the most-extreme-pseudo-anti-abortion-position-this-week that just so happens to make IVF illegal is just his way of hoping people hear what they want to hear. In a hyper-saturated media environment, this isn’t a bad bet – and when you have literally nothing else to offer as a public servant, it may be your only bet.

Finally, we’ve reached that point in our history where the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual convention features a speaker who says out loud “Welcome to the end of democracy! We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it” and replace it, of course, with a theocracy. Tell your Republican friends, if you still have any, that this is what they’re voting for, whether they think so or not. They’ll need to hear that more than once, because even though Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo rightly finds it significant that 40% of South Carolina Republicans still went out of their way to tell Donald Trump they don’t want him to be the nominee, almost all of them will still “hold their nose” and vote for him in November – unless we can get to them first.

Around the table: good news about gerrymandering, bad news about corporate spying.

State legislative elections are about to be a little fairer in Wisconsin, as the Republican-dominated legislature voted to adopt Democratic Gov. Evers’s proposed district map, one which nominally gives Republicans a slight edge in holding both chambers, but not with near- or actual supermajorities, as they have now despite generally getting fewer votes than Democrats in the aggregate. Other proposed maps might have given Democrats a greater advantage (and, more to the point, been fairer), but with the end of Roe v. Wade I wonder if Republicans even have the edge observers think they have in the Evers map. I also wonder if a Trump ticket will boost downballot races (as it did in 2020) or be a drag on them.

Kate Wagner at The Nation tells us that the camera that yells at you after you trigger a motion sensor – I’ve experienced the “Hi! You are being recorded!” in my own neighborhood while bicycling, how obnoxious – “is an escalation of an already omnipresent aggression.” “It intrudes into our consciousness, induces paranoia and anger, makes us feel unwelcome in public life, furthers the idea that one’s private property extends beyond the stoop, and suggests that by owning property one has earned the right to curtail the rights of others.” And that prompts another reminder that both property crime and violent crime are half what they were 30 years ago, even if some folks obsess about it even more than they did then.

In a related note, private data-collecting corporation tracked visits to Planned Parenthood and helped anti-abortion groups do ad targeting with the location information – but the corporation apparently told investors it obtained that location information with user consent, which at least one highly-placed officer says isn’t true. Would have been nice to have all that information in the lede! Our SEC might sanction the now-bankrupt corporation for lying to investors – our SEC, you may recall, exists to protect investors from bad actors – while our FTC might sue to keep the now-bankrupt data-collecting corporation from selling off its location data without users’ consent. Note well that a second Trump Administration would pack our SEC and FTC with drama hounds who would “look for ways to partner” with bad actors.

Right-wing Congressdolt tries to get a zinger off on Joe Biden’s immigration policy, but winds up tripping over his own genitalia twice. First he tried to illustrate said immigration policy with a photo of an immigration “caravan” from 2018 – remember who was President in 2018? -- and then tried to pass off a photo of an immigration “caravan” in Mexico as a “caravan” in America. Of course, Rep. Edwards doesn’t care that he got called out for being stupid twice; he only cares that he “got the message out,” no matter how stupid the message was. You may not win converts that way, but you might intimidate the tending-toward-cowardly into submission.

A special election took place in George Santos’s old House district – and despite all the hand-wringing and horserace polling showing the race close, the Democrat won by eight points. I remain tired of hearing how “moderates always win races against crazy people” because, hello, 2016! But look at all the things Republicans and our “liberal” media insisted might propel Ms. Pilip to victory – immigration, crime, Israel, Joe Biden – that didn’t. Eight points is not a close race, abortion still matters, and, perhaps most importantly, Republican politicians all appear to be rage-filled drama hounds. I say “appear to be” because I think they’re all playing. Imagine living a life in which you decide that pretending to be an asshole is the road to power and glory!

Finally, folks are making a big deal about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Joe Biden; she also said she’d vote for him in July, so I’m not sure why it’s big news again in February. I will say that her assessment of Joe Biden as “one of the most successful Presidents in modern American history” is entirely accurate, even though that’s not a high bar to clear. I just hope enough good Americans prefer Mr. Biden over an objectively bad human being who pretends to be a rage-addled drama hound because that’s how you get attention in America these days. Yes, I’m saying a vote for Joe Biden is, among other things, a vote against the drama and sensationalism we should all have had enough of by now.

Action: concerning taxes, public transportation, and asylum rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop cutting IRS funding, better fund public transportation, and establish asylum-seeking as a human right. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Patriotic Millionaires and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to stop with the cutting IRS funding drama. When you hear that every dollar our IRS invests in auditing taxpayers above the 90th percentile brings in twelve dollars of revenue, you understand that cutting IRS funding doesn’t actually save money, but costs money, and you also understand that efforts to defund our IRS (which we might also call defunding the police) are really efforts to give the rich more tax cuts. Shame these “fiscal hawks” Republicans pretend not to understand any of that. But then, we’re better than they are, and it’s well past time for that to actually mean something.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act, which would, as its title suggests, invest $80 billion into our public transportation systems over the next four years. That would be $80 billion out of a projected $20 trillion in total federal spending, so don’t let anyone get all where-you-gonna-find-the-money about this. Better bus and rail transportation not only means less pollution, fewer carbon emissions, and cleaner air and water, it also means fewer temporarily insane people driving cars on our roadways. Your children and your children’s children will thank you for both.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to affirm seeking asylum as a fundamental human right. It’s a shame we have to tell Congressfolk to exercise basic compassion and mercy! But we have far too many drama hounds running around acting like asylees are all drug-runners, terrorists, and job-takers, when asylees are actually running from terror in their home countries. You’d like a place to go if you had no place to go, wouldn’t you? And the thing about rights is they occasionally interfere with your desire to do whatever diddles your rage gland. But that’s what they’re supposed to do! They’re supposed to outlast the fevers of the day!

Action: concerning sex for water, internet security, and health care.

Long story short: tell world governments to stop letting bad actors extract sex from girls in exchange for water, tell Apple to stop interfering with Beeper Mini’s works, and tell states to stop funding anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers.” Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell world leaders to make it illegal to force girls to have sex in exchange for clean water. This one’s easy! How shameful this still happens, and no use saying it only happens in “developing” nations, because a) no one on Earth should have to sacrifice their virtue to, you know, survive and b) the corporate drama kings who run things in America absolutely will inflict such “mutually-beneficial relationships” on us if we let them, likely after some crisis they let happen but could have avoided. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the rights we’ve fought for and won can disappear in an instant. And that’s why we fight.

Accountable Tech helps you tell Apple to stop interfering with the Beeper Mini app, which enables Android users to send secure text messages to Apple phones and vice versa. This one’s not as repugnant as the last one, but it is also easy! A big corporation prevents some of its customers from using their product in a secure manner, and then a small corporation comes along and solves that problem – only to see that big corporation try to crush that small corporation. Apple wasn’t a great corporation to begin with, but it’s really lost its way since Steve Jobs died. Happily we can help put them on the right path.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell states to stop using taxpayer money – i.e., your money – to fund anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers.” Maybe I can’t stop folks from going to one of these “clinics” and learning all kinds of wrong shit, but why should we fund them with our hard-earned money? Should governments force taxpayers to fund any other kind of health clinic that hands out wrong information? Imagine taxpayers funding “clinics” telling diabetics to drink all the Pepsi they want! If Pepsi donates enough money to the right politicians, that’ll happen in a New York minute. Hence another dystopia we must help prevent.

Around the table: corporate sickness, immorality, and decadence, part 492.

Wondering how a Boeing plane’s window could blow out in mid-air seven minutes into a flight? The Lever tells us how. Long story short: Boeing gave so much money to Congress that Congressfolk let them do whatever they wanted. Better they spent that money building a plane with windows that didn’t fly off in mid-air! Long story somewhat longer comes via Matt Stoller, who reminds us of many important details, not least of which is that Boeing is already essentially a government-backed corporation, meaning that folks who’d cry SOSHULIZM!!!! if we nationalized Boeing and then broke it up (as Mr. Stoller recommends) are hypocrites, not that they really care about anything but brandishing scare words so we do the bidding of their corporate paymasters.

Sara Van Horn at In These Times writes about an “Emerging Green Technology” in New York state that “Could Decarbonize Buildings and Provide Good Union Jobs.” Basically it’s a “networked” geothermal system, which allows one to dig one hundred-foot hole to serve several buildings, and it relies on a steady source of ground heat. But of course you know what right-wingers will say: socialism ethanol dead batteries wind turbine syndrome electric car graveyards you can’t use solar in wintertime stupid.

Speaking of electric cars, I bet right-wingers are dancing a jig over Hertz’s decision to dump 20,000 electric cars from its fleet, but as usual they need to take their chill pills. In a few years we’ll have more charging stations all across America, and the parts for these cars won’t be as hard to come by and thus the repair costs will come down. Anyway, I think Hertz is right to dump Tesla cars, since as we’ve lately learned, Tesla, like George W. Bush, doesn’t know what it’s doing and is arrogant about it.

Ho hum, right-wing state legislator from Michigan announces that “(h)onestly, I work for God and not for man. And so at the end of the day, I answer to one person, and that’s Jesus Christ.” Hey, Mr. Schriver: you work for your constituents. And he should count yourself lucky that he represents a gerrymandered district where the Republican typically gets about two-thirds of the votes, but then again he’d probably call himself blessed instead. In which case I’d say I’m glad someone’s blessed by his service!

What’s the funniest thing about Chris Rufo, the “architect” of right-wing drama over critical race theory, misrepresenting his “degree from Harvard” at the same time he was nitpicking Claudia Gay’s research? That Harvard apparently created the Harvard Extension School (from which he received a Master’s degree, and even I know people who have the real thing!) to give more people access to Harvard – meaning that Mr. Rufo has benefited from affirmative action at least as much as anyone he criticizes. Remember: good people have a sense of shame, but evil people don’t.

Finally, here’s some good news: our FDA has approved a Florida program aiming to important cheaper Canadian drugs for certain Floridians with certain medical conditions. It’s a good start, and if it lets Ron DeSantis whine about how slow the wheels of our FDA turn – or oppose a Big Pharma PR machine no one likes – well, I guess I’ll put up with it. Of course, if he did the latter with any consistency, he wouldn’t be wondering what to do about his disastrous showing in yesterday’s Iowa caucus.

Action: concerning immigration, clean water, and social media.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate Gov. Abbott’s anti-immigrant dramas, tell our EPA to get rid of all lead pipes in America, and tell social media corporations to better protect their users from political campaign lies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for human rights abuses. Like what, you ask? Like busing asylum-seekers to liberal cities, which may be juicy drama to right-wingers but is cruel to folks fleeing oppression in other lands; why, he even bussed asylum-seekers to Los Angeles as a tropical storm approached. Oh, and he also put razor wire in the Rio Grande and then literally pushed asylum-seekers back into the river. Anyone who uses people as pawns to prove a “point” is evil, especially like this. So let’s do something about it.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to switch out all the lead pipes in America. Because lead pipes leach lead into our drinking water and cause brain damage in our children! Most reasonable people would agree with that; some less reasonable people would try to convince you that we should leave it to the “free” market, which ha ha ha what a crock. But after Donald Trump told Iowa ralliers that we have to “get over” school shootings, how long before some other prick says we have to “get over” pollution? Hey, if I thought of it, I know they have.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell big social media corporations to better protect their users from election lies, while Eko helps you helps you tell Meta, specifically, to stop allowing ads claiming that elections in the U.S., Brazil, and Italy were “stolen.” Literally none of this should be controversial! It’s only “controversial” to folks who want to lie to you because otherwise you won’t vote for knuckle-draggers! And for “stolen” election lies, I have literally zero patience. Some folks whine like diaper-loaded brats whenever they don’t get their way; right-wingers have had us convinced for years that we call those people “liberals.” But no: they’re right-wingers.

Action: concerning health care, drama, and housing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to lower health care costs, stop their big-drama impeachments, and stop cutting funding for affordable housing. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass legislation lowering health care costs and making them more transparent. Specifically, you’ll ask them to make hospitals disclose costs in dollars and cents – yeah, we have to actually tell them to do that – and mandate “site-neutral payments,” where a service costs the same whether it happened in a hospital or doctor’s office. How would folks argue against that? By saying the “free” market knows best and we must bend the knee to it? The “free” market sure doesn’t seem very free for good Americans, does it? One might even call it costly.

Daily Kos helps you tell House Republicans to stop their big-drama impeachments, while Civic Shout helps you tell House Republicans specifically to stop impeaching our DHS Secretary. Why are they impeaching Joe Biden? For drama, of course! And some of them have the gall to say they have to impeach him in order to find out why they’re impeaching him, which sure sounds like a fishing expedition, and don’t they have a government to fund past this month? They want to impeach Secretary Mayorkas over the border. I guess they find Brown folks really threatening!

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase, not cut, investment in housing assistance. These guys, I tell you – they don’t want any immigrants to come in unless their presence cuts wages for everyone, and they don’t want to help anyone stay out of the damn cold; it’s all pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps with them, as if landlords aren’t raising rents absurdly high because they can, as if homelessness ain’t up 12% over the last year, as if redlining still doesn’t keep Black and Brown folks from living where they want. But if we don’t speak out, the cruel and heartless will win. And the cruel and the heartless should never win.

Around the table: more trials and tribulations of Teh Stupid Party.

Good news: a road in Detroit now has about a mile of wireless-charging infrastructure, which in a few years will be able to charge adequately-equipped electric cars. Since it’s not fully-realized technology (at least in the United States), Joe Biden probably won’t run on it, though you just know Donald Trump would pretend he gave everyone a free electric car if this had happened on his watch. And not for nothing, but this happened in one of those cities in which Republicans now say you’re never ever ever going to be safe again, even though both violent and property crime levels are half what they were 30 years ago.

UCal-Berkeley researchers find what you probably already intuited: that Artificial Intelligence (or AI) systems “Excel at Imitation, but Not Innovation.” I mean, yeah, AI can bullshit a college-level essay, but not particularly well, because insight demands a higher level intelligence than repetition, or even synthesis. Thus, “(i)nstead of viewing these AI systems as intelligent agents like ourselves, we can think of them as a new form of library or search engine.” Even I’ve noticed AI searches for information pretty well, but corporate CEOs will pretend that means replacing workers with AI is a good idea. At least they'll goose up their stock prices in the short term, which is all Our Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurs really care about anyway.

It sure looks like Rep. Mike Garcia (E-CA) sold a boatload of shares in Boeing right before his committee (run by Democrats that year, BTW) issued a pretty scathing report about Boeing’s negligence in 737 airline crashes, and then didn't report the sale as required by law. In a sane and moral world, his next re-election effort would be toast, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, where we all agree to the fiction that Donald Trump could be President again even if he’s in jail, I can’t say for sure what’ll happen. But the good voters of California's 27th Congressional district could say for sure what'll happen!

Ho hum, Rep. Don Bacon (E-NE) says there’s “probably not” very much evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors on the part of President Biden, but voted in favor of launching an impeachment investigation anyway. No use arguing that voting to start an impeachment investigation isn’t the same as actually voting to impeach, and certainly no use arguing that “we can’t find out if he’s done anything unless we launch an impeachment investigation" – I mean, if I started an impeachment investigation, that'd mean I already have enough information to impeach. This has been yet another installment of The Uselessness of “Moderates.”

Kellyanne Conway tells Republicans that they’d better embrace contraception if they want to blunt the effect of their own abortion extremism in 2024, and she’s probably right, but the far right-wing voters who hate any freedom for women won’t tolerate such a thing, and anyway Republicans (with a few exceptions, like Rep. Cole) have been banging the saucepan about the supposed evils of birth control for a few decades now, and nobody's memory's that short. I mean, folks don’t think that Hobby Lobby ruling – the one that said a “closely-held” corporation didn’t have to cover birth control in its health insurance planning, thus allowing people of means to inflict their “religious” “beliefs” on their employees – came about by accident, do they?

Finally, when I hear that 31% of Republican voters say they wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump if he gets convicted of a felony, I’m tempted to say that’s a telling result, since he can’t win without Republicans who would be holding their nose to vote for him (or making you think they're holding their nose to vote for him!), but it’s still almost a year out, and another year of wall-to-wall coverage of Mr. Trump’s various and well-earned trials might induce a lot of these folks to pretend they’re disgusted with all the drama and vote for Mr. Trump to “end” it. Granted, “ending the drama” would be a peculiar reason to vote for the biggest drama hound ever to be President, to be sure, but party loyalty leads to all sorts of peculiar arguments.

Around the table: and it's *bad* drama, part 989.

Biden Administration asserts that it does, in fact, have the lawful authority to seize patents for drugs developed at least partially with taxpayer money, if big pharma corporations are charging too much for said drugs. Of course asserting authority isn’t the same as using that authority, but this is a good first step. Now watch as the big pharma corporations threaten to sue the Biden Administration into oblivion, as if anyone’s rooting for them to keep demanding so much money for these drugs that folks can’t get healthy anymore. Watch, also, as right-wingers whine about how Mr. Biden is “abusing his power,” though they seem to prefer a President who’s already vowed to abuse his power if elected in 2024.

Surprise, surprise, CNN poll finds about half of Republican voters support Biden Administration policies aiming to halve carbon emissions by 2030, though given that pollution is actually quite unpopular, that number really ought to be much higher. Naturally, fewer than half of Americans approve of Mr. Biden’s handling of environmental issues, but even there you see good news – they may not approve because nearly three out of five Americans think the Administration isn’t doing enough, regardless of whether they approve of the things the Administration is doing. Also too, broad questions aren’t particularly useful. Remember when Mr. Obama’s approvals were low in 2012? How’d that work out for Mitt Romney?.

Texas Supreme Court blocks woman from getting an abortion at state Attorney General’s request, though her child would almost certainly be born dead and the birth would probably injure her badly enough that she wouldn’t be able to have children again. Next time someone tells you their health insurance shouldn’t have to pay for someone else’s abortion because of their “conscience,” ask them about this one, or about any ectopic pregnancies, or any other thing you can think of, and maybe also ask them if their conscience should get between an American and their doctor. Also too, Texas’s draconian anti-abortion law does allow women to get abortions if their lives are in danger or to “prevent substantial impairment of a major bodily function,” which begs the question: does Texas’s government really think childbirth isn’t a “major bodily function”?

Hoo boy Republicans think that pretending to be not such woman-haters about abortion will actually trick significant numbers of people into voting for them, but people won’t forget Republicans spending half a century making themselves into the woman-hating party just because individual Republicans claim “but I’m different.” And the masturbatory-rage crowd won’t be thrilled with their standard-bearers trying to nuance their positions, either. Republicans have to hope Democrats won’t hit them too hard on their “evolving” positions, and though they used to be able to count on Democrats to hit back soft or not at all, recent electoral returns suggest that day is done, particularly where abortion is concerned.

Finally, with Kevin McCarthy announcing his departure from our House of Representatives at the end of this year, Rachel Hadas at The Conversation looks over some classical dramas like Antigone, Ajax, and Julius Caesar and finds Mr. McCarthy a “slight unmeritable man” (in Mr. Shakespeare’s words) who was “not a hero.” “McCarthy does not qualify as a hero,” she writes. “To be humiliated, to fall, you have to have attained some height to begin with.” I keep saying that all Republicans do these days is drama and it’s never even good drama, and the “fall” of Kevin McCarthy seems to exemplify that trend.

Around the table: brought to you by the word "drama."

You’ve been hearing that Americans just don’t “get” how well our economy’s doing? And you’re not particularly inclined to blame them, even though wage growth is actually outpacing inflation for the first time in decades? Well, Paul Waldman reminds us that the vast majority of folks who tell pollsters that the economy’s doing badly are Republicans, which totally tracks! Particularly since Republican poll respondents seem to think our economy’s worse than it was in 2009 or 2010 – which, like, we’re not stupid, OK? – and also since Americans generally act like this is a good economy, i.e., by starting businesses or spending more money.

At least one California corporation thinks that electric car batteries can be used for solar power storage systems even if they’re so depleted that the cars can’t use them anymore, so I guess that’s for your right-wing friends who can’t stop whining BUT WHEREZ WILLZ WEZ PUTZ TEHZ EXPIRUDZ BATTERIEZ HA HA HA HA STUPIDZ LIBRULZ!!!!!! If you still have right-wing friends, of course. (Oh, and if they whine that TEH ELECTRICZ BATTUREEZ CAUSEZ MOREZ OFZ TEH FIURZ!!!!!, well, they’re full of soup about that, too.)

Good West Virginians could be paying more to clean up coal corporation pollution, and let us note that state legislators of both parties have failed to fund the state’s abandoned mine clean-up program (and way before coal corporations started going belly up), while West Virginia’s Republican Governor just fired a critical clean-up fund advisor, and President Biden has somehow failed to even nominate a new Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement administrator (who could force West Virginia’s government to act). The story even features the gnarled hand of Tha Bush Mobb promising to issue new, stronger regulations and then, stop me if you’ve heard this before, never getting around to it or explaining why. Of course Tha Bush Mobb was never the place to learn to clean up your mess.

In case you were wondering, yes our “liberal” media gave a lot more coverage to Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark than they’ve given to Donald Trump’s “vermin” remark, and it’s no use objecting that people are so numb to what Donald Trump says now that of course our media didn’t say much about it, or that maybe we shouldn’t respond to everything he says with more coverage, or, even, that Mr. Trump may not have meant you or I per se when he said “vermin.” Because guess what? No one murdered a “deplorable,” but someone will absolutely murder a “vermin.” (Of course, when he then tries to say it’s all Mr. Trump’s fault, I’ll remind everyone that murder is absolutely something for which one needs to take personal responsibility.)

When I hear that drama hound Jesse Watters at Fox News found a clip of President Biden drinking a milkshake through a straw and thought that was unmanly or something, all I can say is gosh, Mr. Watters, hate yourself much? And though we could tabulate all the layers of this hypocritical onion (Mr. Watters didn’t get upset that time His Personal Lord and Savior himself used a straw on a smoothie!), better to tell all your friends and neighbors to vote against drama in 2024, and fight drama every day until Election Day 2024.

David E. Clemenston at The Conversation reminds us that folks judge people like now-expelled Rep. George Santos (E-NY) as “trustworthy” “almost entirely from perceptions of their demeanor, not the words they utter,” and though he talks about Mr. Santos as someone who “speaks with certitude” and “has a charming, friendly, and interactive manner,” his point maps on to something I’ve been thinking for a long time. The advantage Republicans have today is tone, not better arguments – they sound like go-getters and problem-solvers, where too many Democrats sound like they’re just trying not to anger anyone (particularly their big donors!), and whether people articulate it or not, they hate politicians who sound like that.

Finally, staying with the George Santos Experience, Steve Bannon’s so full of rage about his expulsion – because rage is, apparently, all he can feel – that he says if “They want a civil war, they got one!” Seriously, a “civil war” over the expulsion of George Santos? Just as junkies only care about junk, dramatic people only care about drama, and if Donald Trump wins in 2024, dramatic people like Steve Bannon will be running this country into the ground again. So let’s do everything we can to prevent that from happening. Yes, even if it means re-electing a boring old Democratic President who’s actually doing a good job.

Action: concerning child labor, campaign finance, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop child labor violations, amend our Constitution to regulate campaign finance again, and enact automatic voter registration nationwide. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act, since a lot of corporations have been breaking child labor laws lately and a lot of (red) states have tried to loosen their own child labor laws so that more underage kids can do more dangerous work. You know how right-wingers used to say you should oppose abortion because you might abort the next great concert pianist or the next creator of the polio vaccine? Strange how they don’t say that when kids fall off roofs or get run over by forklifts or cut off their hands with circular saws at jobs that are too dangerous for them. Of course, others have described the Republican view of life as sacred right up until birth, but that doesn’t mean they should get all the say about child labor.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment that would overturn our Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision, which has helped flood the airwaves with horrible political campaign ads. Did you see those Citizens for Sanity ads in Pennsylvania in 2022? Imagine Monty Python writing satirical campaign ads; now imagine them discarding those ads because they weren’t funny enough, and that's what a Citizens for Sanity ad was like. Seriously, approximately no one in America likes watching political campaign ads, and more than two-thirds of Republican voters think our Supreme Court messed up Citizens United. Our opponents will only respond with hysterical and nonsensical hypotheticals, so it’s OK to tell your Congressfolk to do the right thing.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact nationwide automatic voter registration, where good Americans can be automatically registered to vote whenever they go get drivers’ licenses and suchlike. Right-wingers say automatic voter registration causes more “voter fraud,” so what do they say about Gov. Shapiro’s automatic voter registration program in Pennsylvania leading to a massive jump in Republican voter registrations? I’ll tell you what they have to say: THREE MILLYUNZ ILLEGALZ HILLARYZ TRADEZ THEIRZ VOTEZ FOR TEH DRUGZ!!!!! No, that’s literally what arguing about this with a right-winger is like. So let’s just do the right thing without worrying about other folks’ stupid opinions.

Penny rants for November 16, 2023.

Lee Hepner describes Our Glorious Elites’ recent efforts fighting the Biden Administration’s anti-monopoly thrust with bad legislative proposals. One proposal would have specifically let car dealers slap on hidden fees – everyone trusts car dealers, right? – while another would have prevented our Transportation department from stopping mergers, leading one to wonder if JetBlue just handed out a couple stacks of bills for that one. None of these proposals have passed – this is the Drama Caucus running our House, after all – but once you realize that some Congressfolk are objectively pro-high airline ticket prices and objectively pro-junk fees, you may see potential for Democrat attack ads, except for all the Democrats who don’t seem to get it, either. But any “liberal” media questioning of pro-monopoly candidates should begin like this: “over 70% of Americans – including almost 80% of Biden supporters and 70% of Trump supporters – think monopolies are bad. So why do you oppose the will of the American people?” The answers will be hilarious.

Another day, another study finding that liberal cities are actually not inundated by crime – this one finding that retail crime has returned to pre-pandemic levels, even if all you remember is that hysterical “liberal” media coverage of the crime spike from 2021 and 2022. Also, too, when you hear that Target has blamed closure of nine stores on retail crime, check to see if they offer any proof of that claim (they don’t!), or if maybe other factors like consumers changing their spending habits might have more to do with the closures (they do!). Also, generally, don’t trust any “liberal” media reporting about crime, since they care about sensationalism more than anything else. After all, federal figures indicate that both violent crime and property crime are about half what they were 30 years ago. The good news: banging the saucepan about crime doesn’t seem to work as well for political campaigns as it used to, or else Pennsylvania voters would have elected a lot more Republicans these last two election cycles.

Finally, when I heard that a sitting U.S. Senator almost fought a union leader on the Senate floor, I wasn’t at all surprised to learn it was Oklahoma’s Markwayne Mullin, whom you may recall as the House Rep who told his constituents in 2018 that it’s “bullcrap” that they paid his salary – he was trying to make a broader point about how he’s all “self-made” and stuff, but he was still wrong, and anyway his broader point was also wrong. And now he’s Peter-Principled his way to our Senate, in a state where Democrats can’t even get two candidates with different last names to compete in two simultaneous Senate races. But between this and Matt Gaetz actually filing an ethics complaint against Kevin McCarthy for allegedly elbowing another House Rep, we’ve got at least the beginnings of a montage for every Democrat attack ad in 2024. Of course, Democrats have to have the guts to run those ads.

Action: concerning government shutdown dramas.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean government-funding bill without drama, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion without using it to keep handing out corporate welfare, and reject any attempt to slash IRS funding. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

It’s government shutdown week again, so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject cuts to programs good Americans actually need and fund our government without hysteria or drama. This is typical right-wing garbage: wail about TEH DEFICITZ!!!!! and then punch working families in the face while leaving cutting corporate welfare intact. But any one of us, at any time, might need food stamps or Head Start or, you know, affordable housing that doesn’t have lead paint in it – yes, this is what our Best and Brightest Leaders Ever have proposed to do! But cut tax breaks for corporations that outsource our jobs overseas? Republicans would never! And that’s why we fight them 24-7.

It gets worse! The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021, the one that put $250 or $300 checks per child every month in working families’ bank accounts – but Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk not to extend corporate welfare handouts. Rumor has it Republicans might support the former to get the latter, but we don’t have to have both to get one done! There’s negotiation, and then there’s hostage-taking; holding CTC expansion to corporate welfare is hostage-taking, and the parties can talk about their numbers in our House and Senate all they want, but they’re supposed to negotiate with us, not each other. No law on Earth compels us to accept a side dish of shit with our steak.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any Republican attempt to slash IRS funding. Don’t believe any BS that added IRS funding “gives them the ability to come after little people,” because hello! Our IRS was so underfunded they could only go after us “little people,” because we can’t hire million-dollar lawyers to get us off the way rich folks and corporations can! Strange that Republicans have stopped saying even that; it’s like they looked at the 2022 election results and found out that it didn’t get them enough votes! Most of us Americans, once we clear out all the distractions Our Glorious Elites force down our throats, understand that taxes pay for things we all use and rich people and corporations need to pay a lot more in taxes than working families do.

Around the table: why we shouldn't sleep on a second Trump term as a "lame duck" term, and other lessons.

Thom Hartmann describes, in considerable detail, Republicans’ rightward march to fascism over the last 40-plus years, and I can only add two things: one, that Democrats could very easily link Mr. Trump calling our soldiers “losers” and “suckers” with Tommy Tuberville’s 80 million military holds in campaign ads, and two, it’s not enough to say Donald Trump will be a lame duck if he wins in 2024 (which will be how many Republican voters rationalize voting for him again), because if he can get his votaries to shoot enough people, he’ll be much closer to an America where folks like him can do what they like and no one else can. Which is, of course, the essence of the fascist impulse.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett has, on at least three occasions, sold millions of dollars in stock shares in which his corporation was trading, which would not only strike virtually anyone as a conflict of interest, but which Mr. Buffett has said out loud would be a conflict of interest. OK, I guess he’ll say that he said he shouldn’t be buying stocks Berkshire buys and he merely sold stocks Berkshire bought, but once you confront that time he boosted Wells Fargo stock on TV right after selling millions of dollars of Wells Fargo stock (or the fact that he’s called for higher income taxes on the rich but not higher investment taxes), that’d seem like hair-splitting. Anyway, so much for “the one billionaire we like”!

The good folks of the Pennridge School District in Bucks County, PA, managed to boot all five Moms for Liberty members from their school board on Election Day, and when I read that “Moms for Liberty, in the end, was a very expensive trap that the Republicans built for themselves,” I can’t help but respond that this trap is merely emblematic of the much larger trap Republicans have built for themselves – all they can do now is create hysterical dramas to win elections in the short term (which doesn’t always work; see “crime, hysteria about”), because once they have power, they either use it to directly hurt people (as the Moms for Liberty-dominated school board did) or create even more hysterical dramas. People hate book banning, after all, and people only “hate” Black/Brown/gay/trans folks because right-wingers want to distract them from the fact that their economic policies have taken their livelihoods and happiness away.

When I hear that “You Have a Right to Know Why a Health Insurer Denied Your Claim,” but “Some Insurers Still Won’t Tell You,” I’m reminded that a big reason we don’t let corporations get so big in the first place is so they can’t break the law with impunity like this. I mean, if the law tells a corporation to stop hurting people, and that corporation simply refuses to stop hurting people, that corporation is injuring our civilization, and deserves to die for it. (I mean, a corporation is a thing, not a person, so calling for its death isn’t “uncivil.” And don’t listen to folks who cry out “if you kill a corporation you’ll kill all the jobs!” Why, corporations spend virtually all their time killing jobs already! Think how many small businesses can start in their absence, doing work that actually helps people, and employing people they can’t regard as mere marks on a ledger the way corporations do.)

You know how Rep. James Comer (E-KY) has been banging his saucepan about a $200,000 loan Jim Biden paid to Joe Biden in between Joe Biden’s terms in the Executive branch? Well, guess what Mr. Comer has in his own past! “According to Kentucky property records, Comer and his own brother have engaged in land swaps related to their family farming business. In one deal — also involving $200,000, as well as a shell company — the more powerful and influential Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing. Other recent land swaps were quickly followed with new applications for special tax breaks, state records show. All of this, perplexingly, related to the dealings of a family company that appears to have never existed on paper.” Republicans have represented Kentucky’s 1st district since the 1994 wave, but the district actually has more registered Democrats; I presume a lot of these Democrats have been voting Republican for decades without bothering to change their affiliation, but I still see an opportunity for Democrats here. If he were to lose his 2024 re-election bid, Mr. Comer would no doubt whine about “the weaponization of the vote.”

Finally, West Virginia Democratic (?) Senator Joe Manchin won’t run for re-election in 2024, and rather than recount his various follies, let’s just say don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya. And no, I don’t care about the excuse that Mr. Manchin “represented a red state,” because Byron Dorgan represented a red state for 18 years, and he kept winning because he fought “free” trade, corporate crime, and bad media policy; everyone, liberal or conservative, approved of him for these good works. Yeah, I first said that over a dozen years ago, and I guess I’ll just have to keep saying it until our leaders finally learn.

Around the table: of price-fixing, product safety, and American "hearts."

Lee Hepner writes about fighting price-fixing when it’s algorithm-driven. Turns out the problem’s even worse than simply arguing that even if everyone’s using the same algorithm, is that really a monopoly? – it’s also judges who, in Mr. Hepner’s words, “create() a Catch-22: plaintiffs need to have more specific evidence of an unlawful conspiracy before they can begin the litigation discovery process to get that same evidence.” And folks who would characterize strong enforcement of the Sherman Act as “judicial activism” might want to consider that judges currently “re-writ(e) the law to provide immunity to price fixing.”

Factcheck.org evaluates “evidence” of corruption in re that payment from Jim Biden to his brother Joe Biden, finds it wanting. Trouble is that Rep. Comer (E-KY), when confronted with the notion that “Joe Biden provided a short-term, no interest loan to his brother, and that six weeks later James Biden paid that money back with money obtained in a business deal that did not involve Joe Biden,” has nothing to say in response but well, I don’t believe it, and if you’re going to prove wrongdoing, you’ve got to have more than that. It must be mere coincidence that their Presidential nominee for 2024 might well be in jail for actual corruption in not too long.

Uh oh: big corporation finds its breathing machines are defective – that, for example, they could “spew dangerous particles and fumes into the lungs of patients,” no lie – but tells its distributors to keep selling machines they have in stock. And these machines were defective to the tune of over 3,500 complaints over more than a decade! Is this what people mean by “CEOs take a lot of big risks you could never understand, so they deserve all that money”? It’s more likely evidence that corporations with subsidiaries in more than half the countries on Earth are too big to safely exist.

We’d best respond to a few Republican House Reps’ efforts to expel fellow Rep. George Santos – facing 23 federal charges as we speak – as drama. Two-thirds of our House Reps, not half-plus-one, would need to vote to expel Mr. Santos, meaning it almost certainly won’t happen, but the endangered House Reps in New York state calling for the expulsion vote will get to shield themselves from claims that they didn’t do enough about their colleague. And in the unlikely event it does happen, the Democrat who runs to replace him won’t have George Santos to kick around as a campaign issue. So, yeah, that’s all very clever, unless you insist, as I do, that cleverness benefit more than a handful of people.

New House Speaker Mike Johnson (E-LA) responds to Maine mass shooting by telling Sean Hannity that “the problem is the human heart, it’s not guns,” but note well the Biden Administration’s response: “We absolutely reject the offensive accusation that gun crime is uniquely high in the United States because of Americans’ ‘hearts.’” I mean, yeah, Mike Johnson, you did kinda say Americans’ “hearts” are worse than the hearts everywhere else on Earth, since "the human heart" doesn't cause nearly as many mass murders anywhere else on Earth. Golly, maybe Joe Biden isn’t as dumb as people think.

Finally, speaking of our new House Speaker, you may not know that Mike Johnson is an acolyte of David Freaking Barton, having said that Mr. Barton’s “work” “has had such a profound influence on me and my work and my life.” Of all the terrible things we’ve heard about Mike Johnson in the last week, this may be my least favorite – he’s an “acolyte” of the man who says the Founders said all kinds of right-wing crap but can’t document any of it? If you’re an acolyte of a snake-oil salesman, you’re either evil or a fool, neither of which recommends you for a leadership position, certainly.

Readings for October 24, 2023.

Why is America “out of ammunition,” according to Matt Stoller? Let’s cut to the chase: it’s monopolies, which our Department of Defense does next-to-nothing to fight, or even discourage. Despite the wars going on in Israel and Ukraine, “today government cash goes increasingly to stock buybacks rather than actual armaments,” which proves, once again, that banksters ruin everything. How bad is the problem? “(T)here are just two people in the Department of Defense who look at mergers in the defense base,” Mr. Stoller writes. “You couldn’t staff the morning shift of a small coffee shop with that, and yet two people are supposed to look at the estimated four hundred mergers plus going on every year among defense contractors and subcontractors.” But hey, it’s not like we won World War II by breaking Alcoa’s aluminum monopoly when they couldn’t produce enough fighter planes. Oh, wait: that is actually a big reason we won World War II.

Wondering how Tha Bush Mobb felt about the current Israel/Palestine war? Inae Oh at Mother Jones reveals that, surprise, surprise, they favor genocide against Palestinians – but now Tha Bush Mobb’s rank-and-file are more prone to turn on their Personal Lord and Savior! After George W. Bush opined that Israel shouldn’t be “consumed by rage” as it obliterates Gaza, his former spokeshack Ari Fleischer – remember when we thought they couldn’t get any worse than Ari Fleischer? What innocence we had! – goes on about how nobody said Americans shouldn’t be “consumed by rage” after 9.11, though I think many Americans have learned a lesson or two about that after all these years. I was about to say Mr. Fleischer forgot that all of Mr. Bush’s “buts” are as meaningless as they ever were, but more likely he was just obeying the fundamental Republican urge of this era: to create drama.

Action: concerning food safety and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make baby food manufacturers get the heavy metals out of their foods and allow our Postal Service to do more than just deliver packages. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation requiring that baby food manufacturing corporations test all their products for heavy metals before they go on the market. The state of California has done just that, and California is a big enough economy – eighth largest in the world if it were its own country, last I heard – that baby food manufacturing corporations will wind up doing a lot more testing, but really, we shouldn’t punish babies in Wyoming and Nebraska just because their Congressfolk wouldn’t think to do this. Too much baby food has arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury in it these days, and it shouldn’t be a tough thing even for a drama-hound Republican to demand better.

Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the law that prevents our Postal Service from offering new services such as postal banking. The Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 allows our Postal Service to offer some licensing services, but our Postal Service could do so much better if we didn’t tie their hands – they could sell public transportation tickets, offer wi-fi in parking lots, host electric vehicle charging stations, and check on seniors, all in addition to the basic banking services that would sure help out those folks in rural and urban areas where banksters don’t even want to go. This vision is a much, much better vision than Postmaster DeJoy’s “vision” of fewer jobs, higher prices, and worse service. It’s the kind of crap vision only a worthless CEO could come up with, and we’re better than CEOs.

Action: concerning Social Security, corruption, and housing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject all efforts to cut Social Security, tell Sen. Menendez to resign already, and tell your Congressfolk to increase housing funding. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject all right-wing efforts to cut Social Security benefits or raise the retirement age. Because people already work long enough for executives who hate them! And when right-wingers say we have to go “behind closed doors” to cut Social Security benefits, they’re really saying I hate democracy. I mean, there was a reason Bush the Lesser couldn’t even get a Republican-dominated House and Senate to vote on privatizing Social Security in 2005 – and that was because the people wouldn’t stand for it. Using a government shutdown as leverage to cut our earned benefits isn’t really any better – it’s still hostage-taking, and it’s still fascist. But these drama hounds will do it if we don’t speak out in numbers they can’t mistake.

Win Without War helps you tell Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to resign his Senate seat. He’s entitled to try to prove his innocence in court, but no law compels us to put up with him as a U.S. Senator any longer, because no one has a “right” to a Senate seat. This is a hard thing to explain to some people, as we were all reminded during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. And the indictments keep coming for Sen. Menendez, the latest one for conspiring to act as a foreign agent for Egypt. But Mr. Menendez acts like his constituents are rallying around him, although at present he’s polling around five percent in the Democratic Senate primary for 2024. So it wouldn’t kill him to actually show some leadership and resign.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase, not cut, housing funding. Perhaps our Congressfolk don’t know this because they live such sheltered lives, but rent is out of control in America now, thanks in part to the corporation with the monopoly on software that "suggests" rental prices, which means that federal housing assistance has to keep going up just to keep pace. I guess that doesn’t matter to the Republicans who can’t even find a new House speaker, since they think any government funding that actually helps people is evil. But they matter a whole lot less than we do, and the more we act like it, the more we’ll get out of our government to begin with.

Action: concerning genocide, government shutdowns, and school lunch debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to prevent genocide against Palestinians, stop this interminable government shutdown drama, and cancel school lunch debt. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to do what they can to stop Israel from committing genocide against Palestinians. Don’t let folks interpret this call as anti-Semitic, or even as dismissive of Israeli losses – I mourn all the dead; every life taken by terrorism represents one fewer chance at a better world. But if we can’t oppose genocide, then what good are we, really? And justifying the genocide of Palestinians by pointing to Hamas’s evil is, logically, rather like justifying a genocide of Americans by pointing to our right-wing domestic terrorists. Indeed, Mr. Putin used similar reasoning to attack Ukraine. Want a good rule for living? Don’t be like Vladimir Putin.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk not to let our government shut down, again. You know what government shutdowns mean – parks close, checks don’t go out, no food stamps for folks who need it, air traffic controllers work for nothing if we’re very lucky – and since our government belongs to us and exists only to do our will, then politicians are defying our will if they let it shut down without funding it properly. I do not give one rat’s hind quarter if Republicans still haven’t elected a House Speaker by then, because work is work, and duty is duty. These preening, drama-loving "representatives" make almost three times what I make, but I earn every cent, unlike them.

Finally, RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act, which would (as its title suggests) cancel the $260-plus million in school lunch debt that somehow encumbers our nation’s children in the richest country on Earth. Seriously, we can’t call ourselves a civilized society if we won’t feed kids because they can’t afford school lunches which our taxes should already pay for. I’m happy to report that in five American states taxes do now make school lunches free for our children, but can we at least alleviate the suffering of those who don’t have that yet? And can we at least stop shaming our kids for something that’s not their fault at all? We don't use shame just because we can, after all.

Action: concerning voting rights, solitary confinement, and our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, end solitary confinement at federal prisons, and protect our CFPB from Republicans who'd defund it. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our voting rights, including passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former bill would, among other good works, force big donors to disclose their campaign contributions and prevent partisan state legislatures from gerrymandering Congressional seats to their own advantage; the latter bill would force any state or locality (even one outside the South!) that routinely suppresses voting rights to submit their election law changes for Justice Department review. Doesn’t matter that big-drama Republicans don’t want to do it, because they will, eventually, pay the price for refusing to listen to us. But only if we’re loud enough.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Solitary Confinement Act. Two centuries ago, Quakers conceived of solitary confinement as a way for a criminal to reflect on his wrongdoing, but in modern hands solitary too often becomes a way of punishing without rehabilitating, plus we use it all the time, and plenty of tools lose effectiveness when overused. The End Solitary Confinement Act would outlaw solitary at federal prisons, except for four-hour periods, and even then only as a way to de-escalate crises; the bill would also expand oversight and due process for prisoners. Don’t listen to anyone who says it sounds like you want every prison to be Club Med! Treating prisoners like human beings and actively helping them rehabilitate themselves ain’t fucking Club Med, and anyone who says so is an asshole. End of.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to subject our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to the Congressional appropriations process. Currently our Federal Reserve funds our CFPB, using fees from banks, and before you think but maybe Congress should always get to appropriate funds for federal agencies, note well that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) and Federal Housing Finance Agency (or FHFA) also get their funding from our Federal Reserve, and ain’t nobody whining about that! If folks only whine about our CFPB getting such funding, maybe our CFPB's doing something right! So let’s keep it that way. And here's three more words that describe those who would zero out CFPB funding: defunding the police.

Around the table: featuring the usual corporate lies and right-wing drama.

Well, how about that, yet more polling telling us that Democratic legislative priorities – including paid family/medical leave, child care, and the expanded Child Tax Credit – are actually popular, garnering over 70% support in each case, and Newt Gingrich said back in 2008 that if 70% of the people want something, they should get it. So maybe people like Kyrsten Sinema and Josh Gottheimer ought to look at this data and ha ha ha ha ha I crack myself up – people like that care about nothing but sucking up to their big donors.

What is driving the huge increase of homelessness among seniors? I bet you just can’t guess – “a series of recessions, high housing costs and a shortage of affordable housing.” Everyone knows landlords are jacking up rent all over the country – why? Because software told them to, or just because they can – and we’d be foolish to think seniors wouldn’t be affected by that. But please, right-wingers, give us some more booga-booga about China when talking about any problem.

So how are the big tax-filing corporations trying to stop our IRS from offering Americans free tax filing? By claiming that free tax-filing would hurt Black folks! Of course you recognize that argument as hostage-taking – don’t let Americans file their taxes for free, or the Black guy gets it! – but you won’t be surprised to learn that a) Intuit has worked hard to plant this argument in Black and Brown newspapers or that b) it cites research that doesn’t support its argument, like, at all.

When you hear that some right-wingers think Speaker McCarthy “set up the Biden impeachment to fail,” remind yourself that this is no more a real thing than the news of Matt Gaetz’s “personal” “spat” with the Speaker. Right-wingers want you to think they’re divided just like they want you to think they’re stupid, so you’ll be off-guard. They also do it to create drama, of course, which is literally the only thing they’re good at anymore. Their drama-loving ways might not result in failure at the ballot box, but St. Peter may treat them differently at the Pearly Gates.

Nate Silver reminds us that the COVID death rate wasn’t any different in red states and blue states – until the vaccines came along, after which COVID death rates shot up in red states. We could reasonably ask whether death rates is the only statistic that shows this disparity, but the difference is nonetheless stark. And, ah, those right-wingers who got the vaccine themselves but said it’s a “personal choice” for everyone else? They may not be off the hook at the Pearly Gates, either. I know, being a good person is so hard – but so is anything worth doing.

Finally, just so happens that at least two Supreme Court Justices – Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito – have invested in corporations that could benefit from a favorable ruling in Moore v. United States, which aims to topple the mandatory repatriation tax in the 2017 tax “reform” law. (They’re the only two Justices who own individual stocks; the others invest in mutual funds and the like.) Note well that even if Chief Justice Roberts rules against corporate power here, he’ll almost certainly be in the minority when he does, meaning he can “clear” his conscience and still make bank. Justice Alito does not seem encumbered by similar concerns.

Action: concerning voting rights and government shutdowns.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and stop all the government shutdown drama. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would expand voting rights for all Americans, by restoring our government’s ability to stop vote suppression at the state or local level. Our Supreme Court ended that in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, by ruling that the Voting Rights Act (which gave our government the power to stop discriminatory voting rights laws) itself discriminated against Southern states – I know! – but the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would empower our government to stop vote suppression in any state or locality with a documented history of vote suppression. That sounds exactly the kind of thing Congress should be doing instead of indulging in shutdown drama.

Oh, yeah, speaking of that: both the National Women’s Law Center and the Coalition on Human Needs help you tell your Congressfolk to oppose brutal, hateful spending cuts and avert a government shutdown. I trust I don’t have to explain why, oh, but I will anyway: the folks who want to shut down government aren’t just evil, they’re also whiny diaper-loaded brats who act the way they do because they can’t win arguments on the merits. Government shutdowns mean no food inspections, no pollution inspections, no workplace safety inspections, and no soldiers’ pay. Anyone who wants any of that to happen just to prove a point about “spending” is an evil bastard whom we must oppose and defeat.

Action: concerning taxes and budgets.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations and pass a clean budget bill without poison-pill dramas. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

While House Republicans stage ever-more absurd and obscene dramas about deficits and debt, we can call our Reps and tell them to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations! Hey, if you care about deficits and debt so much, you’d raise taxes on the very folks who can most easily afford it – not regular folks like us who struggle just to make ends meet. The 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and the 55% tax bracket on corporate profits helped create the greatest middle class ever back in the New Deal era, and if we bring them back, we can bring that middle class back again. Worry not that it’ll kill jobs, because bosses do that anyway when we give them too much freedom! They only create jobs when we force them to, and high taxation is one of the best tools we have to force them to do the right thing. So let’s do it.

In the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell your Reps to pass a clean budget, mercifully free of far right-wing fever dreams and hostage crises. They think they have us over a barrel, because they have to pass something in 12 days or our government shuts down, but that’s never how it is – we have them over a barrel, because a government shutdown sure ain’t gonna reflect well on House Republicans, and neither would a bill larded down with poison pills that would never pass on their own. So let’s exercise our power and make them do the right thing.

Around the table: freedom for me, but not for thee, part 297.

Don’t make too much of the Biden Administration cancelling seven Alaska National Wildlife Refuge-area gas and oil leases handed out by the Trump Administration in its late 2020 death throes. The Willow project is still going forward, after all, and the Administration has also proposed protecting a mere 40 percent of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, and only from new leases. But seriously, Sen. Sullivan, “(t)his war on Alaska”? Dramatic much?

When I hear that an anti-vaxxer lost a lawsuit against YouTube after it took down his channel, I am reminded that our First Amendment protects us from our government, not media corporations, and that our First Amendment only guarantees free speech, not a platform for that speech, let alone a way to reliably monetize that speech. Also, the plaintiff appears not to have read YouTube’s Terms of Service.

In a peripherally-related note, the notorious One America News network (or OAN) and its “star correspondent” Chanel Rion have settled a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion executive Eric Coomer, whom they alleged told an “Antifa conference call” that “Trump (was) not going to win.” This is not the only lawsuit they have to worry about, and that’s quite immensely heartening! What a stupid lie to run with, though – imagine instilling fear in your viewers about this mysterious organization called Antifa, and then alleging that they conduct conference calls. Over Zoom, I’ll bet!

Resist the urge to be giddy at the news that fascist Florida’s expansion of school voucher programs has resulted in parents using taxpayer money to buy such educational items as big-screen TVs and Disney passes. This is taxpayer money, as I’ve said, and enabling corruption in the name of “education choice” (Gov. DeSantis’s words, of course) is nothing to celebrate. Didn’t know “21st century approaches to learning” meant nothing so much as a new air hockey table, did you? Maybe we should fund public schools properly, instead of passing off crooked gimmicks as bright ideas. And maybe we should dare to call "school choice" a massive welfare handout.

Finally, looks like Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has the right idea about how to handle Republican threats of impeaching President Biden: “Go ahead. Do it, I dare you. If you can find the votes, go ahead, because you’re going to lose. It’s a loser.” Really, we should all respond to Republican attempts to create drama this way. We should also call such things “a big circle jerk on the fringe right,” as Mr. Fetterman does. Note well that the case national Republicans have presented for impeaching Joe Biden is even lamer than the case Pennsylvania Republicans presented for impeaching Larry Krasner.

Around the table: the drama, it burns! Part 399.

Here’s some good news: a Leon County circuit judge has struck down Florida’s last gerrymander and told the state legislature it’ll have to do better. Right-wingers will appeal, but they’ll have to come up with something better than “Florida’s state Constitution violates our federal Constitution,” which argument sure doesn’t sound very states’ rights of them, does it?

Don’t get too excited that3M will pay $5.5 billion for selling defective earplugs to our soldiers, because that suit has 300,000 plaintiffs, working out to less than $18,500 each and that’s not counting the lawyers’ cut, and might we say hearing loss (not to mention betrayal!) is worth more than that? Anyway, file that under “Why We Shouldn’t Privatize Shit, Part 2399” and "The Private Sector is So Not Better Than the Public Sector, Part 3884."

It’s heartening to hear that most Americans – even most Republicans – support unions and strikes, but remember that those numbers will go down the minute corporate propagandists go on TV with their they get goodies you don’t get rubbish. The obvious answer to that is well, then organize for more goodies, and also punish bosses who refuse to negotiate.

When I hear that wannabe Nazis marched through a Florida park chanting “we are everywhere,” all I can say is no, you’re not. The article doesn’t note that there were no more than 50 marchers in that “terrifying” video. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to Nazis, of course, but how about we stop giving them the big dramas they want?

Be careful reading stories telling you that TEH EPA IZ REMOVINGZ PROTEKSHUNZ FORZ TEH WETLANDZ!!!!!, because our EPA is literally only complying with our Supreme Court’s will. That information should be in the headline, not just the lede. It’s not in the headline because our “liberal” media are lazy, stupid, or evil. But I repeat myself.

Finally, billionaires are having trouble building a “new green city” in Northern California because they’ve pissed off all the locals. This article is way, way too credulous, so I’ll say it: they want to build a “new green city”? That is to laugh! Billionaires just want to build a city that redlines Black and Brown out of it. They also want to be able to abuse the help with impunity.

Around the table: banksters, billionaires, and other people who ruin everything.

The Lever describes how private equity corporations are ruining health care. Long story short: banksters ruin everything. Long story somewhat longer: no, really, they’re a bunch of damn vampires, seeing every hospital, nursing home, and doctor’s office not as a thing that serves people but as a thing to bleed money from. Long story even longer: I really can’t say enough what evil bastards these folks are; I don’t even feel particularly blasphemous saying they’re going to burn in eternal hellfire. Let me know if I’m not making myself absolutely clear. I have been told I have a propensity to hold back.

Matthew Rosza at Salon reminds us that the heart problems caused by COVID way, way outnumber the heart problems vaccines cause. Remember when that latter item was all over the news a few years ago? Now it’s back, thanks to that fool Elon Musk, who heard about LeBron James’s son having a heart attack in practice and immediately said TEH COVIDZ!!!!! I’m old enough to remember when J.V. Cain dropped dead at an NFL practice due to a heart condition 30-odd years before COVID; in the meantime, COVID causes many more heart problems than vaccines do, and of course some folks exaggerate the problems caused by vaccines by confusing correlation and causation. So maybe some people need to either learn to STFU until they know what they’re talking about or stop running with salacious headlines.

I hate to say it, but I already know how our Supreme Court will rule on whether a disabled woman who has filed over 600 Americans With Disabilities Act lawsuits against various hotels actually has standing to sue -- they’ll rule she doesn’t, even though she’s, you know, disabled. Why? Because they didn’t let alone a First Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that she does have standing, because the hotel chain plaintiff whines incessantly about the “cottage industry” of “self-appointed testers” even though, in the words of her lawyer, “(n)obody complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act until they’re sued,” and because our Justice Department could just step in and enforce the law (although they generally don’t). I also know because they only care about preserving big corporate power – and sadly, that isn’t an exclusively right-wing disease in our federal courts.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (E-CA) now says our House might look into impeachment proceedings against President Biden. I’m not a hundred percent sure there’s nothing there – I do remember thinking Joe Biden’s brother Jim could be an anvil around his neck – but I am certain that all Republican attempts to demonstrate there’s something there have delivered way, way more drama than evidence, and most Americans hate drama, though perhaps not auite as much as I do. Anyway, Republicans always complained that impeaching Donald Trump would result in the opposition party just impeaching Presidents at will – and they were right! They were so right it's like they actually reached back into the past and impeached Bill Clinton!

Because we need the occasional reminder, Laura Clawson at Daily Kos delivers “A Partial List of Things People Screaming About Cancel Culture Want to Cancel.” Mostly it’s about the Barbie movie, which has (among other “sins”) a trans actress playing a doctor, though we could also the cancel-culture crowd wants to cancel the entirety of Black culture and history. I would say the hypocrisy is strong with right-wingers, but of course they don’t care about that, or about making rational arguments, even – slinging shit is their only aim. After all, they don’t have to clean it up – the rest of us do!

Finally, Sen. Tim Scott, running for the Republican nomination for President, confronts the slavery-with-benefits idea coming out of Florida thusly: “There’s no silver lining in slavery. Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives. It was devastating.” And I wish he’d stopped there! Sadly, he also said, of Mr. DeSantis, that “people have bad days,” even though it took more than a bad day day for the Florida State Board of Education to concoct these “standards,” and even though Gov. DeSantis’s “war on woke” has gone on for much, much longer than a bad day, and really, for most politicians a “bad day” is a day they yell at a reporter, not a day they insist we should teach “both sides” of slavery. If Tim Scott had gone all the way, and then ignored the inevitable right-wing whining about it, he’d be the front-runner for the nomination right now, but he didn’t, so he’s not.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and right-wing dramas.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject anti-voting rights bills and pass pro-voting rights bills, tell our Senators to make sure all Americans can get insulin, and tell our Senators to get rid of holds so drama kings like Tommy Tuberville can’t prevent over a hundred military appointments. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called American Confidence in Elections (or ACE) Act and instead pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the teeth our Supreme Court punched out of the Voting Rights Act, while the Freedom to Vote Act would enact universal early voting, clamp down on gerrymandering, restore ex-felons' voting rights, and restrict dark money campaign contributions. But the ACE Act would enact strict Voter ID requirements and open the floodgates for even more billionaire spending on elections. It ain’t hard to tell Goofus from Gallant here.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Senators to make sure everyone who needs insulin in America can get it. It’s a life-saving medicine! If our government can’t prevent big pharma corporations from charging an arm and a leg for it, then what is our government for? Right-wingers would answer that our government has no responsibility to ensure diabetics can get insulin, but would also say our government must ensure that bigots can force their bigotry down our throat, though they don’t put it like that. I would hate for any of them, or any of their loved ones, to get diabetes themselves, but sadly, experience teaches us that such a tragedy is the only thing that ever convinces a right-winger to act human.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell Senate Democrats to break through all of Tommy Tuberville’s super-dramatic holds on military promotions, but how about we do even better and call our Senators to tell them to outlaw holds completely? Democrats have 51 Senators, so they can do this, and if Democratic Senators have put a hold on even two bills or nominations over the last two decades, they’ve completely escaped my attention. Mr. Tuberville, all by himself, and just this year, has put a hold on over 150 military nominations, because abortion or something, but Republicans have done this to plenty of bills over the years, and when one side repeatedly abuses the American people with a tool, we’ve got to take the tool away from them.

Around the table: featuring one-third good news! (Unless IRL's shutting down counts; then it's half.)

When I hear that ”Close to 100,000 Voter Registrations Were Challenged in Georgia – Almost All by Just Six Right-Wing Activists,” I am reminded that citizens participating more in democracy is generally a good thing – but citizens trampling on the rights of other citizens just so their preferred candidates can win is a bad thing. If you’ve struggled with homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, or cancer – or were doing traveling work – you’d be pretty annoyed at some right-winger making you jump through extra hoops just to vote. And if you’ve got time to challenge tens of thousands of voter registrations at once, why aren’t you, I don’t know, feeding the poor?

Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect describes “Biden’s Unheralded War on Poverty,” one in which a few indices of economic inequality have actually reversed themselves by 25 percent. I think the pandemic made a lot of workers think a lot harder about their jobs, but I also agree that spending nearly $2 billion on an actual stimulus bill did a lot of good in just two years, and we’ll find out shortly what the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act were able to accomplish. And remember: when right-wingers complain that “no one wants to work,” they really mean no one wants to work for dung pellets.

The Progress Action Fund runs one of the greatest political ads ever made, in which a man and a woman about to get it on in their bedroom has their condom stolen by a Republican Congressperson who won’t leave. My description surely doesn’t do it justice, so go see the ad, and then wonder, as I often do, why Democrats don’t run ads like this all the time. OK, I know why they don’t run ads like that – because they still listen to the center-right consultants who tell them that “independent voters are turned off by incivility.” You know what really turns off independent voters? Democrat weakness.

Uh oh: event organizing software corporation IRL shuts down after an internal investigation finds that 19 out of every 20 of its users are fake – in that they’re either “automated or from bots.” Of course IRL raised $200 million and valued itself at almost $1.2 billion, lately laying about a quarter of its workforce a mere year after tripling its size, all of which means a big chunk of our financial sector are either unbelievably stupid or simply don’t care about doing the hard work of maintaining a civilization. Considering how much money banksters have thrown around over a company that’s not terribly innovative, I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

Florida veterans allege that the state’s recently-revived state guard is becoming a “personal militia” for Gov. Ron DeSantis. Why does an “emergency-focused, civilian defense force” need to be barked at by R. Lee Ermey wannabes? One of the veterans making the allegations thinks thinks Mr. DeSantis doesn’t know what’s going on or would disapprove of what’s going on, both of which I find highly improbable. Again, even though only a quarter of the electorate is bat-guano insane, that’s not the same all over America; I suspect fascism is what a majority of Floridians want. I hope the rest of them get organized.

Finally, speaking of fascist Florida, a Congressional hopeful tells an adoring crowd that what we really need to do in America is “extinguish the left.” I’ve been saying for a long time that right-wingers want to exterminate us, and now even they’re saying it out loud. This Anthony Sabatini fellow – with his stupid COVID “jokes” and his masturbating over a new civil war – is running in Florida’s deep red 11th district; current Rep. Daniel Webster has gone out of his way to court Donald Trump’s support, and while I would enjoy seeing Mr. Webster finish last in his own primary despite/because of his ass-kissing, that’d likely mean we’ll be getting more and more Sabatini drama over the next few years, and that isn’t a good trade.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, drama, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, stop Tommy Tuberville’s big military hold drama, and start taxing billionaires a lot harder. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would, as its title suggests, start taxing income over $400,000 into Medicare and Social Security and start taxing investment income into the system as well. The bill would also close certain loopholes that benefit hedge fund managers and fossil fuel corporations so they start paying more. I’ll never express any alarmism over these programs, because I’ve been hearing hysterical alarms about their "impending" "insolvency" all my damn life, but doing these things would help Medicare and Social Security be even better for good Americans. I know it’s Friday, but let’s get in our Congressfolk’s grills about this.

Care2 helps you tell your Senators to lean on Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville and tell him to stop blocking military nominations. He’s doing it, supposedly, because of our military’s policy to help soldiers who need abortions and who live in anti-abortion states with travel expenses, but Jesus Mary and Joseph how about just winning the argument and getting legislation passed? Could he be pulling this crap because he knows he can’t do these things? I kid, of course – this is exactly the kind of thing evil people do when they can’t coerce good people into doing what they want. Your Senators need to know this is evil. Your Senators also need to know that if they let this appalling drama go on, they never get to call themselves “pro-military” again.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaires a lot harder than we currently do. Ain’t nobody a billionaire through hard work – after all, you’ve done hard work, and plenty of it I bet, and did it ever get you as far as just sucking up to a bankster? No, it did not. And that’s a sad commentary on our civilization. We can start to fix our civilization by reversing our 60-plus years of cutting rich folks’ taxes and start taxing them again. No, they won’t “move overseas,” because even billionaires don’t just up and move whenever they like. No, they won’t “refuse to create jobs,” because they’re already doing that with all the light taxation they enjoy! Stupidity can’t keep winning in America.