Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns!

Good news, everyone! President Biden signs executive order raising the minimum wage to $15/hour for around 70,000 federal workers. This should be an easy sell for President Biden; the workers affected include firefighters and Veterans Administration housekeepers and food service workers. Then again, giving tens of millions more good Americans $15/hour should have been an easy sell for Congressional Democrats; instead, the enduring image we'll have of that effort is that of the Joker's giddy thumbs-down.

The Biden Administration has also put out an unexpectedly strong rule clamping down on surprise medical bills -- but Democrats and Republicans are joining together to try to undermine it. Bipartisanship! It still sucks! They're acting like the Biden Administration overstepped its legal authority in mandating that insurance corporations and health care providers use median in-network rates for procedures to settle billing disputes, but really they're just mad that TEH GUBMINT IZ SETTINGZ TEH PRICEZ!!!!! Some people say the words "price controls" like they're cuss words, but I bet a lot of Americans would be perfectly happy with our government forcing big corporations to lower health care prices.

Students have been walking out of their abjectly unsafe schools all over America the past few weeks, and I applaud these kids' courage, but I wish it weren't necessary. It's one thing to justify President Biden's relative inaction by pointing to "American individualism" or even the tantrums right-wingers have thrown about masks and vaccine mandates, but fact is he hasn't used all the tools the law already grants him -- you'd think he'd at least use the Defense Production Act to make masks and tests, and while I know Joe Manchin killed both expanded unemployment benefits and paid sick leave, Joe Biden could have argued for them as part of a real pandemic response. He'll wind up having done better at this than Donald Trump, but that sure ain't worth writing home about.

When I hear that the big car corporations are trying to delay Massachusetts' new right-to-repair law for a few years -- a law which would, among other things, keep the big automakers from essentially dictating to you where you can get your car fixed -- all I can say is the law already gave the big automakers two years to start complying with it, and I have to assume that the problem isn't that it's so hard to comply with the law (this is America, the can-do country, after all), but that the big corporations sat on their asses for two years and didn't even try to get ready to comply with the law, and that's something no law-and-order adherent should abide.

Senate Republicans filibustered voting rights legislation last week -- with the critical assistance of the Penguin and the Joker, who wouldn't even force Republicans to earn their filibuster by talking through it like they did in the old days -- but you wouldn't know it from all the passive voice our "liberal" media uses in its headlines. But I'll be honest: when I see our "liberal" media deciding to focus on "Democratic infighting" as if literally half of our Senate didn't block the bill, I realize that I need this reminder, too. Yeah, Manchinema is a persistent annoyance, and their careers as Senators will suffer for it, but I'll try to do a better job not simply ignoring the obstruction of Republicans, since, you know, they could just do their constituents' will and vote for the damn bills.

Finally, of course Mitch McConnell knew exactly what he was saying when he said we don't need voting rights reforms because "African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans." He meant for Trumpholes to hear him say Black folks aren't "real" Americans, and he also knew a lot of folks would defend him on the basis of what he obviously "meant." At some point, though, you can really only trust what folks actually say. And not for nothing, but his subsequent defenses have been lame -- anyone can say they've got Black friends, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning voting rights, tax cuts for working families, saving our Post Office, worker safety, and gouging prisoners.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass voting rights legislation and extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Postal Service Reform Act, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, and the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice 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.

Today's as good a day as any to call your Senators and tell them to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Yeah, we know how they're going to vote -- the Penguin and the Joker won't let Democrats modify the filibuster so Republicans can't just stamp their feet and say no, and then Republicans will filibuster the bills -- even though they'll actually vote to keep debate going and then promptly end debate, because that's how the filibuster has worked for over 40 years -- but duty is duty, and putting them on the record as opposing the people's will multiple times has utility. If you can reach a live person at your Senators' offices, you can ask how many calls they've gotten about this matter and how they break down. The results may be interesting!

Citizens for Tax Justice helps you tell your Senators to extend the Child Tax Credit expansion. This'll be a phone call, so you can piggyback this alert onto the back of the voting rights alert above. January 15 just went by with no $250 or $300 checks for working families for the first time in six months, and I can't imagine working families all over America didn't notice. We've got the Penguin to blame for this one -- he didn't want to extend it in the Build Back Better Act, because, according to him -- or, more likely, his CEO pals -- people use those checks to buy drugs. Drugs! Not, you know, food or clothing or back to school supplies. Anyway, what happened to conservatives trusting people? You might conclude that when right-wingers say they "trust people," they actually mean they only trust rich bosses.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. You recall how virtually all of our Postal Service's financial troubles stem from a 2006 Congressional mandate to pre-fund its retiree benefits 80 years in advance? When you consider literally no other private or public entity has to follow such a mandate, you might almost think Congress sabotaged our Postal Service -- which meant it was just a matter of time someone like Louis DeJoy came along and said emergency! We have to cut services and raise prices just to stay alive! The Postal Service Reform Act would repeal this mandate, and therefore also the rationale for making our Postal Service run badly. Hey, it's our Postal Service, so we deserve better.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2193/S. 1068, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act. This bill -- named for a farmworker who died after working 10 hours in 105-degree heat -- would mandate that our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) create a worker safety standard that would protect our workers from heat-related illnesses and injuries, meaning folks who work outside would get access to rest and shade. Don't brook any nonsense about how we don't have to care because it's only Those People who work in conditions like that, not just because that would be cruel, but also because in a few short years it won't even be true if climate change keeps working its will. Welcome to Chapter 244 of "Compassion Is Pragmatic."

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. As you know, big telecoms charge prisoners and their families a lot of money just so they can stay in contact, which means a lot of folks just give up because of the expense, which also means these prisoners are more likely to go back to jail. The Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act would authorize our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to cap phone rates for prisoners (more than they're currently doing, surely!) and would also outlaw "site commissions," which are basically kickbacks big telecoms pay to prisons (and which some states actually mandate by law, if you can believe it). And remember: civilized people aren't cruel to the weak, and we certainly don't gouge prisoners.

Around the table: in which we contemplate the *real* Dr. King, among other matters.

On this, the day after we celebrate the birth of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., we should consider, as Michael Harriot does at The Guardian, how the real Dr. King would be received by today's America. Of course, Dr. King's approval ratings with whites were underwater every day of his life, and a lot of folks who venerate him today would have claimed the Fair Housing Act "went too far" in the '60s, but Dr. King also vocally fought police brutality whereas too many of today's Americans respond to yet another police killing of a Black man for brandishing a cellphone with I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! He also railed against poverty and the Vietnam War, to which too many folks back then responded we gave them the vote; what more do they want? And they'd respond the same way today.

And now perhaps the best headline of 2022 so far, from Janine Jackson at FAIR: "Elite Media Remember Lani Guinier as 'Embattled' — and Forget How They Battled Her." You may remember Ms. Guinier, who passed on January 8, as the Clinton nominee who voiced "extreme" opinions about voting, redistricting, and affirmative action; if you do not remember her as the first Black woman to get tenure at Harvard, for example, that may be because our "liberal" media repeated all the right-wing whining about her 1993 nomination to head our Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, only evaluating her writings more honestly after the drama prompted President Clinton to withdraw the nomination. (And I suspect he nominated her more to help create all that drama than solve problems in America, but Ms. Guinier would probably disagree with me.)

I've blamed the unvaccinated in America for most of the problems we're facing today, but Sarah Lazare at In These Times suggests that blaming the unvaccinated may be a way of failing to blame the Biden Administration for its leadership failures, such as failing to overcome intellectual property barriers in getting vaccines out to the rest of the world, which will allow new COVID variants to flourish, and failing to extend safety net programs (like hazard pay for those we all call "essential" workers!) that help a civilization endure a pandemic. And yet I can't stop blaming those folks who remain unvaccinated because they're still throwing their tantrums about Joe Biden winning the 2020 election. I remember how many vaccine slots were open in red states this past summer, and while I wouldn't expect poor folks from blue states to be able to scarf those up, I still think we should expend some effort blaming and shaming those close to us who have failed us.

Good news: DirecTV will stop carrying the so-called One America News (or OAN) network when their contract expires in April. AT&T is still OAN's sugar daddy, and Verizon FIOS still carries OAN, and all the cable corporations still carry the Fox News Channel, so we have more work to do to Make America Less Toxic Again (hey, that spells an actual word! Ring my promoter!), but we should celebrate our successes as we achieve them, and even though we hear that DirecTV wants to provide fewer offerings as a way to offer lower prices and compete with streaming services, this success definitely belongs to us.

Did Mike Pence really compare Democratic efforts to end the filibuster with the January 6 attempted coup? Yes, Virginia, he did, in that they are both "tragic." For Mr. Pence, of course, voter fraud is a real thing, and not just a slab of racist booga-booga Republicans always trot out because they don't have any ideas worth sharing. Even worse, state efforts to curb mail-in ballots are, for Mr. Pence, "common sense" reforms, even if they're not the "common sense" reforms he'll actually enumerate -- or, indeed, are not actually "common sense" in a world where Colorado has run its elections entirely through the mail for years.

Finally, swing-district Democrats want to break up the Build Back Better Act into elements that might pass because they're so popular, and that's not a bad strategy! They mention "curbing prescription drug costs and extending the child tax credit," and though they didn't say "let Medicare negotiate drug prices" and "extend the CTC expansion that was plopping $250 checks in millions of bank accounts every month," I would find it profoundly useful to force votes on these individual initiatives -- plus paid family medical leave, though the swingsters didn't mention that, apparently. And even though all of these bills will die in our Senate (unless they decide to pass them under reconciliation rules), at least then we can all see, once again, exactly which Senators are creating all the drama. Put these folks on the spot again and again and again until they yield, that's what I say.

Action: concerning solar power, voting rights, protecting democracy, corruption, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell Florida's legislators to reject an anti-solar power bill, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Protecting Our Democracy Act, tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress, and tell your Senators to confirm nominees to our MSPB and our FCC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. The Florida state legislature is mulling a bill that would cut rebates by utility corporations to solar power users, which would slow solar development in Florida, almost like that's the whole idea. And apparently it is, in fact, the idea of Florida Power and Light, which stands with state legislators against just about the entire rest of the state in favor of this absurd policy. Seriously, when only one corporation benefits from a bill, isn't that enough reason to oppose it? Let's help put a stake through this bill's heart, by calling House Speaker Chris Sprowls at (850) 717-5065, Senate President Wilton Simpson at (850) 487-5010, and Gov. Ron DeSantis at (850) 717-9337. Yeah, I know, he doesn't care what you think. Tell him anyway.

Hazmat America helps you tell your Senators to end the filibuster and pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Why? Because they'd deal body-blows to gerrymandering, campaign finance bribery, and racist vote suppression, that's why. And yeah, I know the Penguin and the Joker said they wouldn't kill the filibuster in order to pass bills they supposedly both support very fervently, but Common Cause helps you call voters in West Virginia and Arizona and urge them to call Sens. Manchin and Sinema to tell them to kill the filibuster in order to pass these bills. Yeah, I know Sen. Sinema gave this big, long speech on the Senate floor that professed her deep and abiding love for these bills she won't nix the filibuster to pass, but as a famous philosopher once said, everything before the "but" is bullshit. If we can't move them, we have to humiliate them.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. The bill would, as you know, keep future Presidents from profiting from their office, abusing their pardon power, declaring "national emergencies" whenever they feel a sad, and firing Inspectors General for actually stopping corruption, and if this all seems a little like closing the barn door after the horses have run out, it's not, because the guy who did all those things stands a good chance of running again and winning in 2024, and if he does he'll do all of this again, and worse. If Republicans are shouting in your ear that this is a "Democrat bill," read that list of things the bill would do again. Those aren't "Democrat things," they're American things.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading. The bill currently before Congress -- H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act -- would mostly prohibit stock trading by members of Congress, but Sen. Ossoff (D-GA) plans to introduce a bill that would prohibit stock trading by members of Congress and their spouses, since a lot of Congressfolk just so happen to have husbands and wives who make a lot of money trading stock. Think these couples never discuss Congressional oversight? Don't be like Nancy Pelosi and retort that this is a free market, because Congressfolk oversee big corporations as part of their job, and should avoid not just corruption, but the appearance of corruption. And so should their spouses! Hey, no one put a gun to their heads and told them to get married.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Senators to confirm three qualified nominees to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which helps protect federal employees from retaliation by their bosses. Or it would, if it had any members! That's right, the Trump Administration let the MSPB function without a quorum during its entire tenure, virtually guaranteeing that any federal employee who, say, dimed out corruption by their higher-ups would have virtually no recourse against retaliation by those higher-ups. Like, say, President Trump himself! Remember that when the Steve Bannon-types talk about "dismantling the administrative state," they mean to dismantle that part of the administrative state that fights corruption and protects good Americans from being stomped on by powerful people.

Finally, upon hearing that big telecom corporations are actively trying to sink the Gigi Sohn nomination to our FCC -- couldn't be because she fights for net neutrality, could it? -- Free Press suggests we call Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA) at 202.224.3441 and tell her to call a vote on Ms. Sohn's nomination before the end of the month. Free Press also helps you tell your Senators to support the Sohn nomination. Sadly, the reason that vote hasn't happened yet may well be Kyrsten Sinema, who has come out against net neutrality in the past, because bipartisanship maverick independent streak getting to yes. Of course the whole point of democracy isn't getting Republican bullies to yes, but getting Americans to yes, which Ms. Sohn -- through her support of internet freedom for you, not for big corporations -- has already done. Odd how politicians burnish their "bipartisan" bona fides by opposing things Americans actually want -- things that actually prove that real bipartisanship is possible in America. And when I say "odd" I mean "so stupid it's boring."

Action: concerning January 6, voting rights, crypto, wastewater, glyphosate, and conservation.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expel those members who helped plan the January 6 attempted coup, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, tell our SEC to start regulating crypto, tell Pennsylvania to stop using oil and gas wastewater to tamp down dust on state roads, tell the President of France to keep his promise to fight glyphosate’s EU licence, and tell our USDA to reinstate Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass National Forest. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

GOP Coup helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.Res. 25, which would investigate whether certain members of Congress should be expelled for their role in the January 6 attempted coup. Not just Paul Gosar or Andy Biggs, either -- also Lauren Boebert, who gave that suspicious tour of the Capitol the day before the attempted coup, and Lindsey Graham, who suggested right after the election that Georgia's Secretary of State toss legal ballots (per said Secretary of State's own testimony). If you were trying to nullify the will of the American voters -- and, to review, 81 million of us voted for Joe Biden, while 74 million of us voted for Donald Trump -- then you don't deserve a seat in Congress. I hate it when politicians tell 81 million people they should just fuck off and die, and that's what the above-named politicians have told us. So get 'em out.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act -- and kill the filibuster to do it if they have to. Which they do, because Republicans all oppose gerrymandering reform, campaign finance reform, and racist vote suppression, for some reason. (Spoiler alert: the reason is that they can't win without gerrymandering, big corporate donors, and keeping Black and Brown folks away from the polls.) And when they tell you voting reform has to be "bipartisan," remind them (as Rep. Clyburn did the other day) that amending the Constitution to end slavery and give ex-slaves the right to vote were not bipartisan. We don't care about "bipartisanship" -- we care about our government doing right by us.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to start regulating crypto. No, I'm not going to call it "cryptocurrency," because it is not currency -- it is a speculative investment, and our SEC's job is to protect investors from criminals, and boy oh boy does crypto look like an area rife for criminal activity; after all, if they call something money but can't explain how it works in terms regular folks can understand, it's BS. And a "currency" that seeks to bypass banks and governments ain't a good idea -- if you get screwed over in a crypto scheme, you're going to need a gun to get relief, and civilization's whole purpose is to stop you from doing that. I don't want banks and governments off the planet; I want them to be civilized.

MoveOn helps you tell the state of Pennsylvania to stop using oil and gas drilling wastewater to tamp down dust on state roads. Yeah, they still appear to be doing that, even though that stuff is full of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals, and even though our state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) put a moratorium on this practice four years ago. Apparently fossil fuel corporations found a loophole in the moratorium allowing wastewater use on unpaved roads, and you'd hate to think the state put out that moratorium knowing they weren't going to effectively enforce it! The best part? A Penn State study found last summer that fracking wastewater does a bad job keeping down the dust; why, doing nothing at all was better than using wastewater in some cases! So, yeah, let's stop doing that.

Sum of Us helps you tell French Presiden Macron to oppose any re-approval for glyphosate in Europe. Mr. Macron had pledged to phase out French use of glyphosate by the end of 2021, but he failed in that; soon France will take over the Presidency of the European Union this month, and glyphosate's license expires this year, so with a lot of popular prodding, perhaps he'll keep his promise then. He can't be thinking he's got a tough re-election campaign coming and he needs to be nice to the big carcinogen producers, can he? He's dumb as a bag of hammers if so: Europe has always had a much less corporate attitude toward agriculture than the U.S., and cancer-causing chemicals aren't actually popular anywhere. So we may need to lend the steel in his spine in this matter.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Forest Service to restore Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass National Forest. I've told this story a hundred times, not just of thousand year-old trees capturing almost half of all the carbon our national forests capture, but of greedy logging corporations and their Enabler-in-Chief, whose Forest Service took away Roadless Rule protections late in 2020 even though over 95% of us left public comments supporting keeping those protections in place. After all, it's not like we're the boss of government or anything. The Biden Administration is working to restore this rule as we speak, but they've gotten cold feet about doing the right thing before (cough keeping military weapons away from police cough), so we gotta remind them.

Action: concerning January 6, tax cuts for working families, raising taxes on the rich, voting rights, and abortion.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump for the January 6 attempted coup, and tell your Congressfolk to extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, tax billionaire wealth, protect our voting rights, and pass the Women's Health Protection 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.

First things first. The first anniversary of Trump supporters attempting a coup against our government was yesterday, and Attorney General Merrick Garland made a point of addressing the nation about the investigation the day before, but if you're thinking the investigation will ensnare a lot of the folks who paraded through our Capitol with their Confederate flags while letting the coup's planners off, well, I wouldn't blame you. Hence Public Citizen helps you remind our Justice Department to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 attempted coup. He's the top dog, after all, no matter how much he avoids taking any responsibility for his many mistakes. And our House's January 6 committee has been uncovering a whole lot of probable cause for that investigation.

Both Daily Kos and Moms Rising help you demand that our Congress pass the Build Back Better Act and thus extend the Child Tax Credit expansion that has kept millions of kids out of poverty. Yeah, the pundits say the Build Back Better Act is dead, but it ain't dead until we say it's dead. Also, fuck the pundits! And seriously, if Joe Manchin wants to be The Man Who Took Your $300 Checks Away because his CEO buddies told him people just use their CTC expansion on drugs, should we allow that argument to win the day? No, we should not, and that's why we need to tell our Congressfolk to act. Yeah, we've told them a hundred times already. And we may have to tell them a hundred more! Might as well get to it, then. Nobody said democracy was easy. Nobody worth listening to, anyway.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to include a billionaire wealth tax in the Build Back Better Act. Because billionaires are making money hand over fist during this pandemic while you're just scraping by, that's why! They're not more talented than you, and they don't work harder than you, a matter in which I have received a 30-plus-year education. Now, both Joe "the Penguin" Manchin and Kyrsten "the Joker" Sinema have made positive noises lately about taxing billionaire wealth! But don't believe it -- they have thoroughly enjoyed pulling the football back at the last second (OK, that's a lot of childhood comics metaphors in one paragraph), and they'll do it again and again and again, unless we make our will unmistakable.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to do whatever it takes to protect our voting rights, including ditching the filibuster. Because with these Republicans it'll come to that! And when Joe Manchin says changes to the filibuster should be "bipartisan," remind him that you have communicated your will to him and that his entire job is doing the will of his constituents, none of whom give one rat's hind-quarter about whether rules changes are "bipartisan." And when Kyrsten Sinema talks about "changing behavior" rather than "changing rules," remind her that you have communicated your will to her and that her job is doing the will of her constituents, who won't care about her hair-splitting when they get turned away at the voting booth for no good reason.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. Let's list some of the things states have done in recent years: they've forced women to undergo ultrasounds and state reasons for getting an abortion before getting one, they've allowed entities to disperse lies about abortions to prevent women from getting them, they've held abortion facilities to higher standards than other hospitals for no health-related reason, and they've prevented doctors from giving abortions when the woman's health or life is threatened. The Women's Health Protection Act would sweep all of that (and more) away. Most, if not all, women would appreciate that. Those who get off on telling women what to do won't appreciate, but that's their fault.

Around the table: from climate disasters to media disasters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning supply chains, taxes, postal banking, voting rights, and corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, expand Postal banking pilot programs, and pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the Ban Conflicted Trading 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.

Our House passed H.R. 4996, the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, earlier this month, by an astounding (and actual bipartisan) margin of 360-64; Matt Stoller explains why the bill is a good one, and the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) help you call your Senators and tell them to pass it. The Ocean Shipping Reform Act essentially re-regulates the shipping industry, an industry in which the big corporate players have, as Mr. Stoller explains, too many financial incentives to gum up the works. Now that the works have been pretty gummed up for several months now -- and you see how gummed up they are in just about every American port! -- our House decided to do something about it. Now we must tell our Senate to follow suit, lest they think we'll forget.

You'll also want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent. Who's the biggest opponent of this enormously popular initiative? Sigh, it's Joe Manchin, who has apparently told his fellow Senators that parents will just waste those $250 and $300 checks every month on drugs. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) reports somewhat differently: "The stories I hear the most, if you put it in categories, are child care, school supplies, college fund, phone bills." That sounds like a Senator who actually listens to his constituents -- versus Joe Manchin, who clearly listens only to made-up anecdotes from his corporate executive pals. And again, the people who invent such crappy stories, and spread them, should not get all the say about everything in America.

Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand postal banking pilot programs in the year-end appropriations bill. Since that's apparently the only thing we're going to pass this year! Seriously, our Post Offices offered basic banking services until half a century ago; now the big banksters won't go into poor rural or urban neighborhoods, leaving those good citizens at the mercy of pawn shops and payday lenders. Expanding postal banking would go a long way toward helping those good Americans make a better life for themselves and their children. (Fun fact: Louis DeJoy deserves no credit for supporting postal banking services, because the USPS labor contract actually mandates the pilot programs! So you can also tell that to your anti-union friends.)

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. It's a good bill, even though it's Joe Manchin's bill -- it doesn't have the ethics provisions of the For the People Act, but it does almost all of the other things the For the People Act does, plus it cracks down on states trying to subvert the voters' will, which has been a problem in a lot of states this year. Of course, you'll also ask your Senators to ditch the filibuster, at least as it relates to voting rights bills, in order to pass this bill this year. Kyrsten Sinema has already said, once again, that no she will not do that, presumably because we should only "get to yes" by capitulating to Republicans on every conceivable demand no matter how absurd. We should still get ourselves, and our Senators, on the record.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. The news hook, of course, is the Business Insider report alleging that almost one out of every 10 members of Congress have broken insider trading and conflicts of interest laws, while over 180 Congressional staffers have failed to meet disclosure rules required by law. It's no use saying if you had that insider info, you'd try to profit from it, too, because it's wrong, and trading in corporations you will oversee as part of your job in Congress is also wrong. Thus the Ban Conflicted Trading Act would mostly prohibit Congressfolk from trading in stocks at all. Hey, if you know you can't control yourself, then you need to submit to the control of our laws.

Action: concerning government spying, war on Yemen, voting rights, whistleblowers, Social Security, and our FCC.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act, end our military support for the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Whistleblower Program Improvement Act, and the Social Security 2100 Act, and tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's two FCC nominees. 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 repeal the USA PATRIOT Act. 20 damn years old, the PATRIOT Act is, and what has it done? Nothing, except make us less free. How do I know? Because we already had tools to prevent 9.11; Tha Bush Mobb just failed to do it, and when someone fails to use the tools they've got, you don't just give them more tools. Particularly tools that let our government spy on us without a warrant and without probable cause, in defiance of our Constitution! And those who say the PATRIOT Act has stopped terrorist attacks won't name them, because of "national security." You can say you did anything but can't prove it because of "national security"! It's stupid, and we need to stop it.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to end our military involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. President Biden's taken a few steps in this direction, but not enough, and previous bills didn't get a vote, hence we resort to the "attach amendment to defense authorization bill" method, since Congress has to pass a defense authorization bill. And this bill relates to defense, so brook no IRRELEVANTZ AMENDMENTZ!!!! arguments from haters. That amendment Rep. Russell (E-OK) tried to attach to the 2016 defense bill, which would have established a "religious" "conscience" exception so any employer can discriminate against anyone who might give them gay cooties? That's an irrelevant amendment, right there. Make sure you spell out the difference. Haters don't care, but other, more reasonable folks will.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Also, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster in order to get them passed, since a Republican filibuster is literally all that stands between these bills and their passage. I'm old enough to remember when Voting Rights Act reauthorization sailed through Congress with almost no opposition -- actually, so are you, since it was 2006! Now, no Republicans will support the fight against gerrymandering, dark money, and other forms of vote suppression, while only one (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) will support the fight to put some teeth back into the Voting Rights Act. Luckily, America has us to fight these battles, so let's fight them.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4107/S. 2055, the IRS Whistleblower Program Improvement Act. Currently the dysfunction of the whole IRS whistleblower process is so bad that it takes our IRS a decade to process individual cases, and on quite a few occasions whistleblowers have died before that could happen. The IRS Whistleblower Program Improvement Act would give whistleblowers more protections under the law and make sure they get paid more quickly -- there's nothing wrong with getting paid for the corruption you dime out, particularly since you stand a good chance of being unemployable after you blow the whistle. And you want the IRS Whistleblower program to work, because you want to bring tax cheats to justice. Tax cheats hurt everyone, after all.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act. The Social Security 2100 Act would increase benefits for seniors and better fund Social Security's trust fund. It would increase benefits by, well, paying out more, but also by calculating inflation in a way that reflects seniors' real lives (i.e., by conceding that seniors face enough fixed costs that they can't just switch to a cheaper option whenever they feel like it). And it would better fund the trust fund by imposing the payroll tax to income over $400,000. Don't brook all the hand-wringing of "moderates" who want a "grand bargain" that increases revenue but cuts benefits. We deserve better than that, and the Social Security 2100 Act would do better.

Finally, Battle for the Net helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's two FCC nominees. It's about time he nominated them, because our FCC has a lot of important work to do, especially since the internet has been more essential to our civilization during this pandemic than ever before (and more than we'd like, I would think). I hate to have to say it, but we're actually lucky that Democrats hold the Senate, because a McConnell Senate wouldn't even hold hearings on these nominees right now. That leads me to my next worry: that a Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema would try to burnish their "independent" credentials by stymying a critical Biden nominee! Paranoid? Perhaps. But that's why we communicate our will, though -- to forestall at least some of the ridiculous dramas that hurt good Americans and injure our civilization.

Action: concerning government spying, voting rights, Social Security, Presidential power, and data privacy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act; pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and get rid of the filibuster do accomplish these things; and to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale 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.

Both Daily Kos and Win Without War help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act already. The nefarious Section 215 -- which authorized our National Security Agency (or NSA) to collect metadata on good Americans without a warrant -- may be no more, but our work ain't done, because the entire USA PATRIOT Act is a mistake. And it's a mistake built to repel good-faith attempts to prove it's a mistake -- it allows our government to claim "national security" in court challenges and in response to calls to prove it's worked -- which is the worst kind of mistake. And I won't lie to you: I hated what the "war on terror" did to America and so I want the head of the PATRIOT Act on my mantle. Or is that not bleeding-heart enough of me?

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Also, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster in order to get them passed, since a Republican filibuster is literally all that stands between these bills and their passage. And we deserve to have them passed -- they'd take campaign financing, gerrymandering, and state efforts to rig their elections all to the mat, and it might not kill them, but it'll leave them bloodied enough for more good Americans to express their will, which is what elections are all about. Elections ain't where the work ends, but it's where the work begins. And all Americans deserve to at least begin that work.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act. Anyone who bleats about TEH SOSHUL SECURITIEZ RUNNINGZ OUTZ OFZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!! should attend that the Social Security 2100 Act would increase both benefits and revenues -- the former by increasing the size of checks and by calculating inflation in a way that reflects seniors' real costs, the latter by taxing income over $400,000 into the system for the first time. Why the bill puts a "donut hole" between the current cap ($142,800 in annual income) and $400,000 I couldn't say, but this bill will put Social Security on a stronger footing. Not that it's on a bad footing now! That's just something right-wingers say. But all victories need to be maintained, and Social Security is no exception.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5314/S. 2921, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. Perhaps not surprisingly, this bill aims to prevent someone like Donald Trump from putting our democracy through the woodchipper again, as it would explicitly prohibit self-pardons, limit the President's power to declare emergencies like Mr. Trump's sham "national emergency" he used to fund his vanity border wall, and protect our Justice Department from a President's political interference. People still think if the President appoints an Attorney General then that Attorney General should just do his bidding! But people who believe that are cynical, and the cynical shouldn't get very much say about anything in America.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Internet service-providing corporations can't just hand over your private data to law enforcement without a warrant secured from a judge who believes the information secured by the warrant has a better than 50-50 chance of securing a conviction -- but third-party data brokers can hand over your private data to law enforcement, and they do, for, like, money. Which, since it's law enforcement paying the money, is actually your money, since your taxpayer money funds law enforcement! So when your friends and neighbors shrug and say if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear, just remind them that law enforcement misuses their money. Unlawfully and unconstitutionally, I might add.

Action: concerning voting rights, abortion, defense spending, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Women's Health Protection Act, cut defense spending, and end the filibuster. 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 legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. The Freedom to Vote Act would authorize early voting for 15 days in all states, enact same-day voter registration, make Election Day a national holiday, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering, restore ex-felons' voting rights, and restrict dark money campaign contributions, plus it would prevent states from interfering in elections so that a particularly party (cough Republicans cough) can "win" elections when their candidates get fewer votes. You know, like Donald Trump tried to do after he lost the 2020 Presidential election by seven million votes. Pass the Freedom to Vote Act, and we can better keep the unworthy from office. We just had a four-year seminar in what the unworthy are like, and I ain't going back.

Both Daily Kos and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would restore our Justice Department's ability to block state or locality voting rights law changes, in those states and localities that have demonstrated a pattern of vote suppression. That means (among other things) fewer state laws making it impossible to mail in or drop off a ballot, and fewer closed polling places in Black and brown neighborhoods. Yeah, states do this all the time, and though we saw as early as the 2020 Georgia Presidential primary that folks will wait in line all day to vote, why make them? Right-wingers love saying "voting should be hard." What they mean is winning should be easy -- for them. But they should earn victory like the rest of us do.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. Our Supreme Court refused once again to stop Texas's notorious SB 8 -- which gives literally anyone the right to sue over an abortion, since determining "injury in fact" per our Courts' ruling in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife is, apparently, something only "losers" do -- so that means we have to pass legislation at the federal level. We can't count on our Supreme Court keeping Roe v. Wade around, either; I still think they'll strike down Texas's law, for the reason I described above, but other, more direct challenges may give them the opportunity they obviously desire. Unless, of course, we pass the Women's Health Protection Act first.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending in the upcoming defense appropriations bill. President Biden is the umpteenth President in a row to propose increasing defense spending; has that made any right-wingers like him better? I kid, of course -- being a right-winger, today, is all about masturbatory rage, not about assessing situations as they are. But I feel compelled to mention, once again, that we spend more money on "defense" than the next eight nations on that list combined, and yet politicians still tell us WE'RE NOT TEH SAFEZ!!!!!! You have to wonder, also, when we can't turn Afghanistan around in 20 years, whether we're spending "defense" money on the right things. Maybe we're just spending it on expensive things.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to end the filibuster. Mitch McConnell actually has the gall to say if you don't like the filibuster you should win arguments, when the filibuster is a crutch for people who can't win arguments. And Republicans now use it, or the threat of it, against anything that might help the American people, and annoying as Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have been, the only reason they matter right now is that Republicans say no to everything -- why, they've even filibustered taking tax breaks away from corporations that outsource jobs! How do you filibuster that? And when you abuse a tool, we have to take that tool away, or else we just become hostages.

Action: concerning Medicare drug price negotiation, climate change, Medicaid, the filibuster, and federal corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, fight climate change, plug gaps in Medicaid coverage, end the Senate filibuster, and protect Inspectors General as they expose government corruption. 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 legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Daily Kos and Drug Prices Are Too High help you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. The latter action alert starts off saying "Shame on you, Senators Menendez and Sinema!" And that's entirely appropriate -- Sen. Menendez botches the art of argument in trying to avoid saying big pharma corporations control his actions, and Sen. Sinema creates chaos by opposing something 80% of Americans want. Newt Gingrich used to say if 70% of Americans want something, they should get it. I'm sure he has excuses ready for why Americans shouldn't get this thing they want, but doing their constituents' will is a Congressional representative's job. So let's do our job, and communicate our will to those representatives, as often as we need to.

Daily Kos helps you demand that the Build Back Better Act make the historic climate change-fighting investments we need to make. Because as much as we need health care and higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, we also need a planet to live on, and pretty much everyone who doesn't imbibe rage-addled masturbatoria from right-wing news channels wants solar power and wind power to be a big part of our future. And don't fear Joe Manchin suggesting he'll leave the Democratic Party if he doesn't get his way (which is no climate change-fighting legislation). If he leaves the party over this, he becomes the villain -- not to our "liberal" media, which loves drama more than truth, but to anyone who's actually watching. And that's more people than it used to be.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to plug the "Medicaid gap" between states that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and states that haven't. No reason why poor folks in 12 American states should be left out, after all, except that the Affordable Care Act left that loophole open for our Supreme Court to notice, which is a stupid reason to let people get sick and die. Thanks to certain drama- and chaos-addicted Senators, the Build Back Better Act stands poised to do a whole lot less about health care than we have demanded (which is, now that I think of it, the reason Democrats haven't been pushing what's in it -- they'd rather run on what they pass than what they promise!). But plugging the Medicaid gap would help a lot of good Americans in states with reactionary legislatures who don't listen to them.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster in order to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Republicans filibustered that bill yesterday, because chaos, but we still must do our duty to communicate our will to our Senators, and, if need be, tell them how to do our will. Making the filibuster a talking filibuster -- i.e., one that Senators would have to keep going by actually talking for 12 or 24 or 48 hours straight, rather than just signaling that they don't want to end debate and then going out to the dinner or the theatre, which action ends debate -- remains my preference. But you know what? If Senators don't want to work for their chaos and obstruction, then I say take their toys away from them. Because I think I speak for most of America when I say we're done.

Finally, the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Senators to do more to fight federal corruption. You go to swing states and you don't find millions of people committed to "bipartisanship" or "right-sizing regulations" or whatever -- you find people who hate government corruption and hate that politicians don't do enough about it. But if we give our Inspectors General the tools they need to investigate and expose government corruption, then they'll be able to expose a lot more of it. Hey, it's not for nothing Donald Trump tried to replace them all when he became President! If they were bad at exposing corruption, after all, he would have let them hang around. And indeed, in 2020, he did replace a bunch of them with "acting" IGs he hoped would do his will, and not the American people's. So let's put a stop to all of that.

Action: concerning monopolies, voting rights, data privacy, law and order, and fossil fuel subsidies.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strike a blow against meat packer monopolies, pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis voting Rights Advancement Act, pass data privacy legislation and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and end fossil fuel subsidies. 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 legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First off, this'll seem a bit inside-baseball, but Matt Stoller writes about monopoly meat-packers causing higher meat prices, and notes that Sens. Grassley (R-IA) and Tester (D-MT) have written a bill with actual bipartisan support, called the 50-14 or "spot market" bill. This bill would require big meat packing corporations to buy half of their meat on the open market -- rather than force all cattle ranchers into contracts that may give ranchers assurance they'll be able to sell their cattle, but also makes it far too easy for meat packers to fix prices. It won't actually break up the monopolies, but it'll give ranchers a lot more breathing space. This bill merits a supportive call to your Congressfolk, and don't be swayed by the arguments against the bill -- as Mr. Stoller demonstrates, they rely on bad arguments and manipulated data.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Never mind that Joe Manchin prefers this bill to the For the People Act, because it's not so different that it doesn't deserve our support. The Freedom to Vote Act would expand your access to the voting booth, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering and dark money, restore voting rights to ex-felons, provide 15 days of early voting across America, enact same-day voter registration, and make Election Day a national holiday, plus it'll clamp down on states' recent attempts to gain the power to overrule the will of the voters in their elections. All of this would better secure voting rights in America, and thus merits our work on its behalf. (Also, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you write a letter to the editor supporting the Freedom to Vote Act.)

Both Daily Kos and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would amend the Voting Rights Act so that our Justice Department could clamp down on voting law changes from states and localities that have demonstrated a clear record of vote suppression -- and not just states and localities from the South, which was our Supreme Court's objection in Shelby County v. Holder. And since a lot of the states that have changed their voting laws lately just so happen to have a vote suppression record, one would think our Justice Department could and would do something about them. We'll likely have to nix the filibuster to get any voting rights bills passed -- but first, let's demonstrate, unmistakably, that the people want voting rights reform in America.

How to Stop Facebook helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real data privacy legislation in America. Our Federal Communications Commission enacted pretty good regulations protecting data privacy, but that was back in 2016 -- and our Congress promptly repealed them, via the notorious resolution of disapproval process. But now, with approximately zero Americans left who think data breaches and targeted ads and enabling Nazi wannabes is just the price you pay for staying in touch with those people you had a few laughs with freshman year, Congress should be more amenable to protecting your data, and protecting you from corporate surveillance. But we still have to tell them. (Oh, and don't fall for the calls for a new bureaucracy just to regulate Facebook; that'll just have our government rubber-stamping what Facebook does, and we've already got that.)

In a peripherally-related matter, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would close a Mack truck-sized loophole in the law, which currently prevents your internet service-providing corporation from selling your personal data to law enforcement -- but which does not prevent the third-party data gobblers that buy your data from your ISPs from re-selling it to law enforcement! And you deserve better than that, even if you have committed a crime that law enforcement should be able to discover. We don't have a Fourth Amendment for nothing, after all -- we have it so that we don't send innocent people to jail by accident, and so we don't create a police state that sends its enemies to jail at will. And we're not as far from that as we'd like to think.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to end fossil fuel subsidies forever. That'll be tough, since the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" includes even more fossil fuel subsidies, but we should still communicate our will. And though the recent California oil spill instructs us as to why we might not want to funnel taxpayer money toward corporations that pollute, you can of course make a more conservative argument against fossil fuel subsidies. Not ALL GUBMINT SPENDINGZ BADZ!!!!!, because that's a reactionary argument -- you can merely argue that the fossil fuels are an entrenched technology and hardly need taxpayer help to survive. Yes, they talk about "facing crises" all the time, but they're BSing you. They don't need your money.

Action: concerning Medicare, child care, women's health, saving our Post Office, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, pass a robust Build Back Better Act, protect women's health, save our Postal Service, and end the Senate filibuster. 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 let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Close to 90% of Americans want it, but just enough "moderate" Democrats don't that the whole thing could fall apart, but if Democrats can't do something 90% of Americans want them to do, they don't deserve their power or our support. Seriously, I've been beside myself over this. Scott Peters and Kurt Schrader tell a bunch of lies about Medicare drug negotiation and that's it? Kyrsten Sinema says she won't support it because I've-got-a-ring-that-says-fuck-off and that's it? We should be out in the streets over this, and if I get any news about rallies for Medicare drug price negotiation, I'll pass them along. But at least we can clog up their phone lines so they can't mistake our will.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a robust Build Back Better Act, one that invests in home and community care and permanently expands the Child Tax Credit, among other things, while Moms Rising helps you demand that the Build Back Better Act invests in child care. In a society where most families either have both parents working or only one parent to begin with, child care is becoming essential -- and child care corporations know that, and are charging an arm and a leg for it just because they can, but good Americans deserve better than that. "Moderate" Democrats are trying to kill this bill dead as we speak (and surely Republicans are grabbing the popcorn), but they need to know that they're not exactly representing their constituents right now. They'll ignore us if we keep silent, of course -- so we've got to be loud.

Both the National Women's Law Center and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. Right-wing state legislatures have been screwing around with abortion for the last decade-plus, with their "heartbeat" bills and their ultrasound bills and their outlawing of abortion clinics that don't meet impossible standards and, with Texas's SB 8, a bill that lets literally anyone sue an abortion provider or patient and collect a $10,000 bounty -- never mind if you're having an abortion because your fetus doesn't have any organs, or because it's threatening your own life! Well, the Women's Health Protection Act would put an end to all of that, and if we want a world where women have the freedom they deserve as citizens, we need to put an end to all of that. When men can give birth, I'll be happy to revisit this issue.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. What's the reason our Postal Service suffers? Is it Big, Bad Gummint? Is it that workers get paid too much and get away with too much? Is it bad management? Is it that "stamps cost too little"? Dear reader, it is none of these things -- it is the crushing mandate Congress imposed upon our Postal Service nearly 15 years ago, which makes our Postal Service pre-fund retiree benefits 85 years in advance. No wonder our Postal Service has to borrow money to make ends meet! Get rid of that onerous mandate, one under which literally no other corporation or government entity suffers, and we'll go a long way toward saving our Post Office. Which its quite excellent workers deserve, by the way, just as much as the rest of us do.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster. Seems like every day we get more reasons to get rid of the filibuster, and here's another one: Republicans won't vote to lift the debt limit, even though that's a drama they only create when Democrats hold the power. Democrats can do it on their own (and they should, if for no other reason than to prove they're the Adults in the Room), but Republicans have filibustered, or threatened to filibuster, every damn other thing, too. Why, even putatively pro-choice Susan Collins won't vote for the Women's Health Protection Act! Republicans say no to everything, and Americans can't have nice things as a result. We deserve better; it's well past time Democrats did better, and stopped masturbating over the "sanctity" of the institution.

Action: concerning the filibuster, service shutoffs, banksters, and law-and-order policy.

Long story short: tell President Biden to actively oppose the Senate filibuster, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, end hedge fund predatory behavior, and pass the Break the Cycle of Violence Act and the MEAL 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, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Public Citizen and The Juggernaut Project help you tell President Biden to lead on filibuster reform. He's used his bully pulpit to argue for the For the People Act -- said he'd "fight like heck" to get it done, in fact -- but if he's not willing to endorse getting rid of the filibuster, it'll all be for nothing. Republicans use the filibuster to stop everything, which not only means no gerrymandering reform, no campaign finance reform, and no end to racist vote suppression practices, it also means Democrats look like they do nothing all day, which guarantees they'll be in the minority in Congress again. People like it when you do stuff, and they hate it when you don't. It's pretty simple, much simpler than the 13-dimensional chess Democrats seem to play most of the time.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4979/S. 1783, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, which would prevent utility corporations from shutting off your electricity and water and the like. I can already hear the right-wingers yell WHEN DOEZ IT ENDZ!!!!! Maybe it ends when they get the boards out of their asses and get vaccinated so we can end this pandemic! After all, a person without essential services is a person rather more at risk of getting COVID, and therefore at risk of keeping the pandemic going. There are times -- many times, in fact -- when the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do. This is one of those times. And remember how the Joe Louis Arena didn't get its water shut off in 2014 even after falling over $82,000 behind on its water bill. And I think people are actually more important than sports arenas.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would rein in hedge funds' predatory behavior. Hedge funds love to swoop in, buy corporations, and then suck the wealth out of them like the vampires they are, and as a result, good Americans lose their jobs. How do we put a stop to that? We tell Congress to make hedge funds (and their executives) legally liable for the evil they do, ban the practices that allow banksters to loot other corporations, protect the workers who'd otherwise lose their jobs and pensions (that last part's important!), and close the corporate tax loopholes that make hedge funds absurdly overpaid. No, they don't "rein in bad actors" in our economy. We've got laws and regulations for that, and if we don't, we make the laws and regulations better. Big corporations make very bad cops.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4118/S. 2275, the Break the Cycle of Violence Act. Which would do what? Fund community-based violence prevention programs, that's what. Which would be a whole lot better than calling the police every time folks can't solve problems with their family, friends, and neighbors. If you're tempted to call this "defunding the police," consider that a police officer should not be the solution to every conceivable problem -- not just for our sake, but for theirs. And if you're temped to call it a "slush fund" for Black folks, remember that no one will get rich of these government grants. Really, if it were all about grift, they'd be banksters. In fact, you really ought to look to the financial sector first if you're looking for grift.

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2837, the Making Essentials Affordable and Lawful (or MEAL) Act. The MEAL Act would repeal the law that bans Americans with drug convictions from ever getting food stamps or other forms of public assistance -- which sure sounds like the kind of thing politicians do to look tough, and thus should be opposed on that basis alone. But, seriously, if we actually do believe in rehabilitation, then lifetime bans for drug convictions is the precise opposite of logic as well as the precise opposite of mercy. And as for the folks who don't believe in rehabilitation, well, maybe there's a police state that'll take them in. I hear things are a lot simpler in police states.

Around the table: once more into the breach.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times proposes a national strike fund, like the various GoFundMes that pop up for groups of striking workers. As Gomez Addams would say, capital idea! That fund would have a big target on its back from Day One -- from state and corporate hackers and from frivolous lawsuits -- but anything worth doing is hard. And, as Mr. Nolan says, "If the Frito-Lay workers in Kansas had had a little more money to carry them through, perhaps they could have won something better than, basically, the working conditions of a factory worker a century ago."

Amanda Marcotte says the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" "is likely the last nail in the coffin of any hope that Manchin or Sinema would seriously consider filibuster reform," which would prevent Congress from passing the For the People Act and thus likely doom America to rule by Republicans for the foreseeable future. But I don't imagine Sens. Manchin and Sinema are really "thinking" about whether or not to reform the filibuster; I think they've made up their minds, and the only thing that'll change their minds is relentless public pressure, since even a U.S. Senator will go to great lengths to avoid becoming the most unpopular person in America.

Establishment Democrats start using the Republicans' vote against the American Rescue Plan -- which increased funding to local police departments -- against them in midterms, essentially saying Republicans are the party that actually "defunded the police." Good to see Democrats have some smarts after all! And good, also, to see them tying Republicans to the January 6 attempted coup in this manner! I guess I'd still prefer they use that vote against the American Rescue Plan to run Republicans want to take your Child Tax Credit checks away ads, but hey, if Democrats actually look fierce about something for once, I'll take it.

In case you were actually wondering, Republicans who blame Nancy Pelosi for January 6 are legitimately full of crap. Basically, Republicans have alleged that Ms. Pelosi, as House Speaker, has all kinds of powers she doesn't actually have, or did things they have no evidence she actually did. Even the one person Ms. Pelosi did appoint to his job, the House Sergeant at Arms, was first appointed by John Boehner, then by Paul Ryan. Also, too, you first blame the people who attacked the Capitol for attacking the Capitol! This whole accountability thing seems to trip up nominal conservatives an awful lot.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) praises Medicare and Medicaid on Medicare's birthday, then promptly calls for Americans to "reject Socialist health care schemes." Elise Stefanik would kill Medicaid and Medicare with her bare hands if she could, but in the meantime wants you to think that programs everyone pays into so that seniors and poor folks can go to the doctor are not at all socialist. ("But I said Socialist, not socialist! See? Big difference! Another libtard owned!") But remember, if you drive roads, call police, visit the local library, or draw a Social Security check, congratulations! You are a socialist.

Finally, Donald Trump has reportedly called the police officers who testified before Congress "pussies" in numerous private conversations over the last few months. Thus continues his upside-down world, not just one in which actual courage is "weakness" and snake oil salesmen are "the best people," but one in which folks who have actually been through hell are "weak" just for admitting it. He must be chomping at the bit to slam Simone Biles -- or complain about how it's not "politically correct" anymore to do so. May a million people poop in his funeral casket.

Around the table: quick, short, sharp shocks.

Thom Hartmann reminds us that our Senate has changed the filibuster before at least three times. Thus you can answer the numbnuts who declare that any change to the filibuster now that Republicans use it as routinely as they draw breath would be "unprecedented." I swear, the older I get, the more I think people just torture the word "unprecedented" until it tells them exactly what they want to hear. Sometimes I think people torture that word even more than they torture the word "conservative."

Michael Pollan wonders if maybe we all ought to give up caffeine. Caffeine does have its good points -- apparently it can help you fight cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and depression, among other maladies -- but at least one scientist says you might be giving all that back in lost sleep! Also, too, maybe we're not really wired to do this work-work-work thing all our lives. Certainly our labor seems to benefit our bosses more than it benefits us, and really, is that what caffeine drives us toward? (Full disclosure: I kicked it once, but I like the taste of black tea with sugar too much.)

As I contemplate Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance's statement that "I’m not just a flip-flopper, I’m a flip-flop-flipper on Trump," I think Democrats had better use "flip-flop-flipper" in a hundred attack ads if he gets the nomination, and if they don't, they deserve to lose. And if they lose with Tim Ryan as their standard-bearer, then they deserve to lose all the seats. (Also, "most of the people there" on January 6 were "actually super peaceful," Mr. Vance? In other news, most of the air molecules COVID patients breathed in the moment they got infected were super-harmless.)

I'm not surprised to learn that "Just Say We Won" was Rudy Giuliani's entire strategy for convincing people that his client, and not Joe Biden, won the Presidency in 2020. But I'm pleased to see more reporting about our judges reckoning with the absurd weakness of their case. Months after the Big Man himself complained that judges wouldn't let the lawyers see all the affidavits his campaign had collected, we hear that at least one Michigan judge found that "the affidavits filed to support (claims of voter fraud) included obvious errors, speculation and basic misunderstandings of how elections are generally conducted in the state." People do have eyes to see that.

When I hear that Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) tried to intimidate House Democrats into opposing big tech-focused antitrust legislation by reminding them how much of the big tech money she's gotten over the years has found its way to their campaigns, I wondered how many Trump supporters will disrupt any of her town halls like they did Katie Porter's earlier this week. Approximately zero, I suspect, even though Ms. Lofgren is much, much closer to their version of the corrupt, out-of-touch Democrat than Ms. Porter is. Like I said, they're intellectually dishonest.

Finally, just in case I'm not making myself absolutely clear, Dr. Fauci said it was "horrifying" to hear CPAC attendees actually cheer news that we haven't met President Biden's 70-percent vaccination goal, but I didn't react that way. Here's how I reacted: they're assholes, what do you expect? I sometimes fancy myself a fisher of souls, but the older I get, the less I want to cast my line into cesspools.

Action: concerning voting rights, the filibuster, communications policy, and chemical plant safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and get rid of the filibuster, tell President Biden to nominate a fifth FCC Commissioner already, and tell our EPA to enact vigorous chemical plant safety regulations. 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, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Plus Daily Kos helps you sign up to call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator, the notorious Joe Manchin, to vote for the For the People Act. Nearly four out of five West Virginians support the For the People Act, so we really ought to help them communicate their will to the man who should be doing their will, rather than sacrificing their will to the Golden Idol of Bipartisanship. Particularly "bipartisanship" with a party that only wants to obstruct the people's will, but which tried to overturn the 2020 election results! Why do we keep having to say this? Why do politicians keep "working with" people who do not work? (I know the answers, of course, but that doesn't make it any less absurd.)

Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill does one thing the For the People Act does not do: it restores our government's ability to reject voting rights changes at the state level by rewriting the Voting Rights Act's pre-clearance formula so that any state or locality with a record of vote suppression (not just certain Southern ones, per the Voting Rights Act) must submit its voting law changes for federal Justice Department pre-clearance. I would have put that with the For the People Act and thus made it even harder for its opponents to lie about it -- really, from Joe Manchin to Lindsey Graham, they're doing a bad job of it! -- but while they're two bills, we should tell our Congressfolk to support both.

Pursuant to these goals, both Public Citizen and NETWORK help you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I've been telling people for 12 years or so that we need to make the filibuster a talking filibuster, so that you at least have to earn your obstruction -- like Strom Thurmond did, not even drinking water for 72 hours so he could filibuster civil rights legislation -- but these Senators don't seem to understand what earning is like, so we have to treat them like the three-year-olds they seem to be too much of the time, and take away the toy they're using to lay waste to the country we love. Seriously, I've tried to be nurturing, but I don't have infinite patience, either.

Demand Progress helps you tell President Biden to nominate a fifth FCC Commissioner. I know he's had a lot to do, but it's been almost six months, and we need a fifth FCC Commissioner to get anything done. Currently our FCC has a 2-2 split between Democrat and Republican appointees; Joe Biden won the Presidency, so he gets to appoint the fifth. And yet he hasn't done it. We don't just need our FCC to reinstate net neutrality; chances are Congress will also approve a massive broadband buildout, and our FCC will need to oversee that -- and you can just imagine the two Republican Commissioners just saying no to everything, in the style of their Personal Lord and Savior, Mitch McConnell? Yes, you can. Get on President Biden's case and we can avert this catastrophe, too.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous chemical plant safety regulations possible. America suffers an accident at a chemical plant more than once every four days, and these accidents can not only kill and injure good Americans, but poison the air and water where good Americans live. And not for nothing, but chemical plants seem to cluster in poor and Black areas of the country and I wonder why? Because folks with means can get all NIMBY and get results, perhaps? Frankly, it's cruel to do that to poor and Black folks. We're all Americans, after all. You wouldn't want a poor Black kid to get asthma he never would have gotten if he'd lived in your neighborhood.

Around the table: congratulations, you're a socialist! Part 383.

Sonali Kohatkar assures us that "Socialism Has a PR Problem, and It Can Be Solved." She doesn't really say how, though, except to remind Americans that right-wing authoritarian regimes are more prevalent in Latin America than socialist ones, and also to remind us (as India Walton does) that right-wingers are fine with "socialism for the rich." From my perspective, all Americans are socialists already -- unless, you know, they don't pay taxes and don't drive roads and don't call cops and I could go on -- and socialist policy prescriptions (hello, Medicare for All!) are actually quite popular. The PR, I guess, is you tell people that, and you don't back down -- in fact, the more fierce you are, the better. Definitely don't sound like an egghead.

Here's an interesting poll result in Arizona: not only do more Arizonans disapprove of the Cyber Ninjas' "fraudit" than approve, but the "strongly disapprove" numbers are rather higher than the "strongly approves," and independent voters disapprove by an 18-point margin. I used to say you can't win elections just by pointing out how big an ogre your opponent is, but maybe I was wrong -- maybe it just took time for most other liberals to get as angry about right-wing shenanigans as I've been for close to 20 years now. Or maybe it took the biggest ogre of them all.

In a related note, more partisan media outlets are seeing their online traffic numbers circle the toilet now that Donald Trump's out of office. "Left-leaning" outlets are actually suffering a bit less than "mainstream" outlets, and "right-leaning" and "far-right" outlets are tanking harder than "left-leaning" and "far-left" outlets. I'd quarrel with the placement of Fox News as "right-leaning" (they're "far-right," duh) just as I wouldn't call Mother Jones "far left" (have they never heard of Counterpunch or Jacobin?), but basically this is good news to everyone who hates our media's addiction to sensationalism and drama. Or it could be: right-wing podcasts are, unfortunately, picking up steam.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) eviscerates Sen. Sinema's case for keeping the filibuster, calling it "essentially an argument of saying, 'Well, why do anything at all, in case something in the future may change it?'" Specifically addressing Ms. Sinema's putative fear of "radical policy shifts" every time one party or the other retakes the majority, she adds, "(w)ouldn't it be better to get people health care and voting rights for three years instead of zero years?" As usual, she said it better than I did, which is, I imagine, why she's in Congress.

Justice Thomas criticizes federal marijuana policy, calling it a "piecemeal approach" and a "half-in, half-out regime that simultaneously tolerates and forbids local use of marijuana," and frankly he's got a point. Granted, I think I know which way he'd go -- two decades ago, he managed to mess up an opinion on behalf of a unanimous court in re federal marijuana law by opining that pot had no medicinal value, a statement irrelevant to the facts of the case (which hinged entirely a matter where federal law superseded local law) and one certainly unsupported by the research of the time, since that research would have been largely illegal.

Finally, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us not to underestimate Donald Trump, as coverage of his recent Ohio rally has tended to do. Key finding: "Trump is popular mainly because his followers believe that, due to his shamelessness and unending aggression, he's their best vehicle for establishing the authoritarian rule that is their only real hope of retaining control over a changing nation," and though "(m)ost of them may not show up at rallies to listen to Trump complain about nonsense for an hour and a half," "they definitely vote." I once said, about Jeb Bush, that you should "never count a bastard out"; maybe "never count an asshole out" should be Donald Trump's 2024 campaign slogan.

Action: concerning jobs, drug prices, endless war, broadband access, payday loans, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Biden/Republican infrastructure "deal," tell our President to put the brakes on a rule preventing our government from forcibly lowering drug prices, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, expand broadband, clamp down on payday lenders, and end the filibuster. 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, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs; for the Biden-related alert, see the second paragraph below.

First things first: tell your Congressfolk to reject the "bipartisan" "infrastructure"/"jobs" "deal" negotiated between 20 Senators and President Biden last week -- either call them or let Food and Water Watch help you email them. No one in America should care if this is something our President wants, or moderates want, or Republicans want; all we should care about is if it's what we want, and I would assert that it's not. And that's not just because Republicans are pretending that the separate reconciliation bill even Joe Manchin wants to do is some kind of "betrayal." It's also because the "deal" would privatize public assets to build other public assets -- that's called "asset recycling," which is just a 10-dollar way of saying "privatization." And if Democrats agree not to do a separate reconciliation bill in order to "keep their word" or appease Republicans, then they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. Of course, we don't deserve the fascist storm that'll follow, so let's try to head all that off by communicating our will to our Congressfolk in an unmistakable manner.

President Biden plans to move forward with a rule that would prevent our government, for the first time in over 40 years, from seizing drug patents when big pharma corporations charge usurious prices. If you remember Mylan charging hundreds of dollars for EpiPens and numerous corporations charging so much for insulin that diabetics now risk death in rationing the drug, you will scratch your head at the idea that our government should not step in and stop that shit cold, but, sadly, when Joe Biden was a Senator, he worked very, very hard to keep our government from "interfering" in absurdly-high drug prices. Maybe he needs a phone call about this matter! 1.202.456.1111 is the number, and here's the White House contact page. (If I get a separate action alert about this matter -- which seems likely, now! -- I'll share it.)

Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 256, which would repeal the nefarious authorization to use military force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Our House passed this bill, and not only that, 49 Republicans voted in its favor! Maybe I shouldn't make too much of that -- a lot of our Best and Brightest didn't do the right thing in 2002 when it really, really mattered, and a lot of the folks who just voted yea on H.R. 256 (Boebert, Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar, Greene, Issa, Jordan, McClintock, Schweikert) are still clowns, but at least now people like Mob Boss Mitch will have much less room to say well, this isn't bipartisan enough for me to permit to get to a vote. Oh, and if you're upset because "they're doing this to a Democratic President," please step away from this blog, because it ain't for you. And your values ain't shit if they don't inconvenience you once in a while.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. And don't brook any nonsense from your Congressfolk about it, either! Broadband internet is an essential service, or does Congress forget how many votes it took or hearings it held over the internet this past year? Certainly you don't forget how much work you did, or how much school your kids did, over the internet this past year! Note well, also, that H.R. 1783/S. 745 would prevent states from pre-empting localities within states from offering their own public broadband! After all, preventing localities from such matters of self-determination has always seemed not particularly conservative to me.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called "Fake Lender" rule promulgated by the Trump Administration. The Senate has already passed a resolution repealing the rule; now the House must follow suit. So what does the "Fake Lender" rule do? It lets payday lenders avoid state caps on interest by letting them essentially launder their loans through out-of-state banks! Woe unto the young buck who came up with that idea! That dude will find himself (do I need to gender-equivocate here? I suspect not!) at the Pearly Gates describing how he helped payday lenders trap even more good Americans in 300% revolving debt, and I think St. Peter's going to give him quite the side-eye. You know what you can take to the Pearly Gates? That you told your Congressfolk to stamp out this idea like the cockroach it is!

Finally, NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby and boy how I have missed saying that! helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster into the trash heap of history already. Yes, I supported keeping the filibuster around and making Senators talk through it all the way to the beginning of this year, but I'm done -- our Senators will never do the necessary work of a civilized society until we make them. And they just filibustered the beginning of debate on the For the People Act last week! The beginning of debate! No, I don't want to hear about lessening procedural "choke points" as a "compromise," because the Senate will not do it. If I may borrow a metaphor from Better Call Saul: if a chimp has a machine gun, you don't just hope he'll learn how to use it -- you take it from him.

Around the table: Republicans filibuster the For the People Act! And other total non-surprises.

Senate Republicans refuse to even begin debate on the For the People Act, as all 50 of them filibuster a procedural motion to do so. Let the record show, then, that Republicans refused to debate on ending gerrymandering, instituting early voting, automatic voter registration, and same-day voting registration nationwide, mandating disclosure for big campaign donors, and ending the use of racist caging practices by the states. We can go ahead and assume they refused to even begin debate on these matters because they can't win debate on these matters.

Felipe da la Hoz at The Intercept describes how our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) exacerbated the pandemic in detention centers. COVID cases went up sixfold in these camps from March to May of this year, and no it wasn't because Joe Biden "let too many refugees in," but because ICE insisted on transferring a boatload of refugees to the very Mississippi detention center where cases were exploding. You thought we'd just vaccinate them? We should, if only because they're just going to keep the pandemic going if we don't, but, yeah, ICE ain't feeling that. (To be fair, a lot of refugees aren't feeling it, either, but that's because they don't trust ICE. I wonder how that could have happened?)

Jesus Mary and Joseph another fool wants to do an "audit" of the 2020 election in a state that has already done two audits, and this time it'll be in Pennsylvania. Sen. David Argall (R-29), who chairs the State Governing Committee, now says he wants to do a fraudit because too many people have "concerns" about the election, though he doesn't know why. Here's why: their "concerns" are completely manufactured by Donald Trump and his enablers! Yikes, if I had no soul and a cadre of dunces willing to parrot my lies ad nauseam, I could cause a lot of trouble, too. Does Mr. Argall listen to those constituents of his who worry more about right-wingers killing them, I wonder? Or has gerrymandering insured he doesn't have any?

A Harvard study asks why folks are so much worse at guessing prices on The Price is Right than they were in the 1970s -- and concludes that a) inflation was much worse back then (both higher and less stable), so people paid more attention to prices, b) online commerce has desensitized us to price over the last few decades, and c) there are so, so many more products now and products can only compete so much on price. Weren't we just contemplating how Republican messaging about inflation could work? This study makes me wonder; we complain about prices going up like we've always done, but now that I think about it, we complain more when we hit unexpected expenses, which are always unwelcome, but not the slow, relentless torture of '70s inflation. I know inflation has gone up since 2011, by my sense of food prices really hasn't since then. About bedroom sets and ski trips and A NEW CAR!!!!! I have no idea.

I was impressed with Michael Gerson's piece, "I'm a Conservative Who Believes Systemic Racism is Real." "We live in an imperfect world we did not create and have duties that flow from our story" is both true and a reminder that he used to write speeches for George W. Bush, and though we don't learn much about how Mr. Gerson came to his epiphany, that's kinda the point: folks don't very often see the structures of privilege that lift them up and hold others down, and he surely went through a good chunk of his life not seeing it. I also appreciate the note that "shame culture" can be "cruel and misdirected," because I suspect too many of Mr. Gerson's ideological brethren would say shaming is always cruel, though "shame culture" is an important tool in the civilized person's toolkit. We use it so we don't use our fists or our guns.

Finally, give filibuster supporter Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) a small amount of credit for writing a fairly thorough op-ed echoing some arguments I made years ago, but she's still wrong. Are we that worried about "the minority" being heard in Congress? 50 Republican Senators currently represent less than 20% of Americans, so, frankly, "the minority" already have enough representation, and that's built into the Senate no matter which party holds the majority. And rather than tell campfire tales about Republicans simply nullifying Democrat bills whenever they get Congress back, Sen. Sinema should remember how hard it is to undo legislation once it's passed, otherwise George W. Bush could have claimed the head of Social Security in 2005 and the Trump Train would have rolled over the Affordable Care Act 12 years later. (Who stopped that from happening, by the way? Not the filibuster, but the people.) And I might more likely agree that bipartisanship is the best way to create "lasting" results, except that, ah, the other party tried to overturn the election, with violence, and it's been decades since they cared about policy anyway.

Action: concerning jobs, racism, debt, clean water, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk what you want from the infrastructure/jobs bill, and tell your Congressfolk to support Black history, get relief for folks from their utility bills, keep lead out of our drinking water, and end the filibuster. 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, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Regarding that American Jobs Plan: the Environmental Defense Fund helps you demand that Congress pass a bill that addresses pollution and renewable energy, since Republicans don't think lead-free pipes and solar panels can be "infrastructure." Happy to let oil and gas corporations suck at the corporate welfare teat, they are, but not to do anything about it, even though God only gives you one life. Meanwhile, Progress America helps you tell Democrats, explicitly, "no climate, no deal" -- as in, if the American Jobs Plan doesn't address the issues I've already discussed in the first sentence of this paragraph (among other issues!), then it should die. Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that whatever they come up with had better not gut the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion. That's part of what "using unspent COVID money" means, since the monthly CTC expansion checks haven't started coming yet. The good news? Those first checks go out July 15, and good Americans with children will get used to them right quick, so if Republicans start talking about the "urgency" of "getting something done," know that they're sweating, and that we can wait them out. (If any of them say we're "weaponizing" the CTC checks, I will smack a pimp. Republicans weaponize everything, so they don't get to whine about "weaponizing" monthly checks they didn't vote for. You'd think they'd have some damn pride. I mean, some of them are going to meet their Maker sooner than I am.)

The Daily Kos Liberation League does some freaking alchemy with this action alert, which helps you tell your Congressfolk to, and I quote, "support Black history education in our K-12 schools and denounce the racist attacks by Republican leaders. That's what all the right-wing attacks on "critical race theory" are really about: preventing our children from learning any decent Black history in our schools. No, it's not about "banning white people" or "sending whites to reeducation camps" or "cancel culture" or whatever swill they're peddling; it's about trying to make sure you don't learn enough about Jim Crow that you can't tell that Jim Crow still operates in America -- more subtly, yes, but that's what evil does when you beat it the first time. And you have to beat it every day of your life.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1783, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act. As I'm sure you know, good Americans have been having trouble meeting their utility bills during this pandemic; S. 1783 would provide $30 billion to cancel water bill debt, electric bill debt, and broadband bill debt. All of these are essential services -- yes, broadband, too, or have we already forgotten how much work and school we had to do online this year? -- and you know what's far, far worse than the "moral hazard" of government forgiving people's bills? The actual moral hazard of cutting off their services so they can't stay healthy and contribute to society! Look, we can't all be hedge fund managers -- most of us have to do real jobs, and real jobs, as we have been reminded over and over again, don't always pay enough, particularly when we don't have them. The Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act can help more good Americans better endure these horrible truths, and thus better fight another day.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1376, the GET THE LEAD OUT Act, which, despite its name, has nothing to do with local Led Zeppelin-related radio programming. What "moral hazard" will Republicans identify in a bill aiming to (as the title says) get lead out of lead pipes all over America, since literally any amount of lead in your drinking water can cause brain damage? Will they decry all the Big Gummint spending, as if private corporations will ever solve lead-pipe issues on their own? Will they lament all the regulatory bureaucracy supposedly inherent in forcing more lead-pipe disclosure in housing contracts? Will they claim that the bill's funding mechanisms (subjecting more large estates to the Estate Tax and closing the "carried interest" loophole that lets hedge fund managers evade taxes) will "kill jobs"? Yes, that all sounds incredibly absurd, and even if they were valid arguments, they still couldn't hope to meet the real moral hazard of exposing our children to brain damage.

Finally, pursuant to most of our goals this year, Public Citizen still helps you tell your Democratic Senators to end the filibuster. Do we care that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema say they won't support an effort to end the filibuster? Of course we don't! All we care about is that we express our will, and if we tell our Senators enough times, they'll start to look bad for not doing it. And, you know, I spent over a decade defending the filibuster, and arguing that we ought to make Senators actually talk their way through the filibuster like they did in the old days. But, honestly, I've fucking had enough.

Around the table: featuring the usual gang of tax avoiders, bad leaders, and empty suits.

I don't have much to say about the ProPublica report revealing tax evasion by famous high-income folk. We learn that Jeff Bezos paid zero dollars in income tax in 2007 and 2011, and that Warren Buffett, despite talking a good game about taxing the rich harder, hardly pays any income tax generally. Right-wingers will no doubt have a circle jerk over George Soros's tax-avoiding ways, though right-wingers talk about George Soros much, much more than we liberals ever do. And to those who'd say well, they pay themselves in property that doesn't get taxed until they sell it, what did you expect, we can only say that doesn't make it right. And, you know, imagining a better world is a worthwhile endeavor, even if it's hard.

We learn from Sharon Zhang at TruthOut that the nefarious Koch network and the nefarious Heritage Foundation have been influencing putative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, mainly by organizing his more right-wing constituents. We all breathed a sigh of relief when Republicans seemed unable to articulate a reason to oppose the American Rescue Plan, but that's apparently because they were organizing around influencing Mr. Manchin better than we were. Some liberals are starting to organize around influencing Mr. Manchin, as in yesterday's rally in D.C. supporting the For the People Act and the Common Cause effort to rally his constituents around same, and that's a good thing, because in America, having the better argument only takes you so far.

Republicans filibuster the Paycheck Fairness Act, and, as usual, their counterarguments are weak. I've given "frivolous lawsuits" so many headshots already I'm annoyed it's still coming, and you could also have predicted "a boon to trial lawyers," though it's telling that Mob Boss Mitch had to utter it, rather than farm it out to some eager young'un in his caucus. And "we've got three laws on the books, why do we need four?" is profoundly illogical; the number of laws doesn't matter so much as their quality, or, more specifically, how well they anticipate the ways corporations will try to work around them. Why don't they just admit that they'd rather have bosses fire workers for talking about their pay with their co-workers?

Siyanda Mohutsiwa at FAIR writes about the New York Times's reflexively grim coverage of COVID in Africa even though infection rates are actually fairly low there. We Westerners have, for decades, reflexively thought of African nations as "corrupt" and "miserable," perhaps even "ungovernable," and even when we assume 150 years of Western interference has made it so, we still fail to imagine Africans as the protagonists of their own nations -- in this case, we fail to imagine them as "epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists," "academics," or "journalists" -- and that failure is also pretty racist. Read the entire article, though, because I can't list all the persuasive (and damning!) arguments in one paragraph, and also because it'll lead you to Binyavanga Wainaina's "How to Write About Africa," one of the most devastating satires ever written.

Georgia's state Board of Education not only approves a measure aiming to restrict teaching of American racism in public schools, but shuts off comments on the live YouTube feed of the meeting in which they did that nefarious deed, and that sure ain't a good look. Right-wingers have been strutting about their "toughness" for decades, but can't even hear an opposing argument? Why can't such basic failures of leadership be a Democrat attack point? I mean, we just got a four-year seminar in Why Republicans Can't Lead, not too long after George W. Bush's double seminar in that same subject. Maybe Democratic politicians don't do that because they're evil. "Gosh, win an argument, instead of stand around while Republicans lose them? Then we'll have to do things with our power!"

Finally, as Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) declares her candidacy to oppose Sen. Marco Rubio in 2022, Mr. Rubio himself opines that "(n)one of them (i.e., Democratic politicians) will admit to being a socialist. She probably won’t. But she certainly has voted for socialist things." So, Sen. Rubio, ever driven a car on a road? Ever taken out a book from the public library? Ever called a cop? If your answer to any of these questions is "yes," then congratulations, Sen. Rubio! You're a socialist, too.

Action: concerning jobs, voting rights, net neutrality, the filibuster, arms sales to Israel, and vaccine waivers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Biden/Manchin capitulation on the American Jobs Plan, tell PA state legislators to reject another absurd election "audit," tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules, tell President Biden to support ending the Senate filibuster, tell our government to stop funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and tell President Biden to support COVID vaccine waivers at the WTO. 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 and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

In light of the Senate parliamentarian's ruling that Democrats can use reconciliation once more this year, not twice, and Joe Biden's utter capitulation to Republicans on corporate taxes, and Joe Manchin's announcement that he won't support a jobs bill done through reconciliation, and general Democratic "anxiety" about raising taxes, it's time, once again, to call your Congressfolk and make demands for a real jobs plan. These demands would include: a 55% corporate tax bracket on profits over $1 million, the creation of a public broadband network, the creation of public electricity utilities that run entirely on renewable energy, and every last lead pipe and tottering bridge and broken road in America fixed. Seriously, we must not be held hostage to "the best they could do." Democrats deserve to lose their majorities after this debacle, but I suppose there's time to change their minds, if we do it loudly enough. But we'd better step up, because we're not going to have a country anymore if we don't.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to reject any effort at a 2020 election "audit," particularly one spurred by Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-33). It's not enough to say "you want another stupid "audit" by people who can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground?" It's not even enough to say "You lost! Get over it! Accept the results!" It's not even enough to point out that Sen. Mastriano was there on January 6. No, these "audits" are part of an attempted coup by Donald Trump, who swears he'll be "reinstated" as President in or around August. So you can go ahead and tell your PA legislators they will be accessories to this attempted coup if they allow this "audit" to happen. Only weak people think Donald Trump won that election. And weak people shouldn't get all the damn say about every damn thing.

In the wake of the news that nearly four out of every five comments filed on our FCC's net neutrality repeal in 2017 were faked by big telecom corporations, Daily Kos helps you tell our FCC to reverse said repeal and reinstate the 2016 Open Internet Order that made net neutrality the law of the land. Net neutrality, as you know, forces internet service providing corporations to serve up all files with the same urgency, which means you, not some corporation, get to determine what your internet experience is like. We don't have a fifth FCC Commissioner yet, and that doesn't help us get net neutrality back, but if we establish our will now, our FCC will have a harder time defying it later.

Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to support ending the filibuster. Earlier he said he'd support making Senators work a lot harder for it, and that's far from worthless, but our Senators pooh-poohed that, since it involved doing actual work for your obstruction, so it's time for President Biden to put the squeeze on them. Maybe he thinks calling out Sens. Manchin and Sinema while commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre was squeeze enough -- and, again, that was no small thing -- but they didn't seem to get the message. And if they won't listen to him, we should make them pay the price of not listening to us.

Both Freedom Forward and Daily Kos help you tell your government to stop funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can get bogged down in all the who-started-it if you like, but you cannot deny these two things: 1) Israel has way, way, way more firepower than Palestine and with great firepower comes great responsibility, and 2) all those nations that supposedly want Israel "wiped off the map" or whatever ain't exactly rushing to Palestine's aid. We don't need to give Israel any more weapons; they seem to have plenty of ability to defend themselves - and do indefensible things to others. It's not for nothing that I hear, unprompted, from co-workers, that Israel is becoming what they most hate.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to follow through on his support for a World Trade Organization (or WTO)-sanctioned COVID-19 vaccine waiver, which (contrary to the absurd proclamations of big pharma corporations) would help more folks all over the world get the vaccines they need. Don't get complacent about the dropping infection and death numbers in the United States (which are still only a little lower than they were this time last year!), because the rest of the world needs help, too, and every day we prioritize intellectual property rights over human life, not only do people die, but the COVID virus gets a little more time to mutate into something that'll bite us in the ass again. Once again, the compassionate is also the pragmatic.

Around the table: the politicians deserve defeat! And other truisms.

Lake Highlands High School (TX) valedictorian replaces her school-approved graduation speech with one slamming Texas's new anti-abortion law. And Paxton Smith thus reminds us that the only alternative to legal abortion is the state turning women into breeders. Her immediate future, unfortunately, consists of death threats from cowards who can't do anything about the problems in their own lives, brainless mockery from right-wing punditoids, and a conspicuous silence from people who should know better. If she asked me for advice, I'd say she should just remember that her opponents are wrong, and that they will prove their wrong with their words and deeds. It's not always easy to remember, but it can be quite sustaining in times of doubt.

Alice Speri at The Intercept describes how Charlotte, NC police trapped peaceful protestors and then tear-gassed them during the George Floyd protests a year ago. Oh, and if you tried to break through the trap, you got the pepper bullet treatment, and if you stayed put, you also got the pepper bullet treatment. Apparently they call this "kettling," "corralling," or "bottlenecking," and my guess is nobody saw reports about this on Fox News -- not when they Fox can just show the same footage of the same violence over and over again without any context and without even having anything to do with whatever perceived outrage the Fox News prettyheads are screaming about that day.

Gov. Steve Sisolak (D-NV) says he'll sign a "public option" health care bill, but the bill in question, SB 420, doesn't really offer good Nevadans a "public" health care option so much as it offers yet another layer of privatized health care that'll supposedly offer comparable plans for a little less money, and that sure as hell ain't getting us any closer to Medicare for All. My 30-years-younger self might have said that at least the politicians know what people really want and are at least selling their swill accordingly, but really, there's more to the world than just words.

When I hear that folks watching the "audit" of Maricopa County (AZ) ballots find that the folks doing the audit are doing a lot of things wrong, all I can say is of course they are, because the whole point of this clown car "audit" is to come up with a different result than the state did -- a result the state came up with three times, I feel compelled to add -- so that Republicans can say AHA!, and the easiest way to come up with a different result is to screw up. And since most folks won't easily parse all the inside-baseball about blue pens and ballot security, they could get away with it, just as they've been getting away with deliberately crashing-and-burning our government so they can then say see? Government doesn't work!

Ho hum, now Rep. John Katko (R-NY) wants $50 billion more in assistance for restaurants after voting against the restaurant assistance offered by the American Rescue Plan. My guess is he'll find a reason not to vote for that, too. Those nasty Democrats wouldn't talk to us, he'll say again, in a world where no one should be talking to Republicans. Actually, his list of excuses for not voting for the American Rescue Plan (I count five in this article) is pretty wide-ranging, making it more likely he's just full of soup. I don't care if he's supposedly one of the "good ones" -- for his hypocrisy, he deserves defeat.

Finally, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) says she still doesn't support filibuster reform or repeal, opining thusly: "The reality is that when you have a system that is not working effectively — and I would think that most would agree that the Senate is not a particularly well-oiled machine, right? The way to fix that is to fix your behavior, not to eliminate the rules or change the rules, but to change the behavior." Actually, that's utter horsedoodle. When you have a "system" that doesn't work, you change the system -- you certainly don't keep haranguing the workers who have to work within the system about their "behavior." Only bad bosses do that, which makes me wonder how her staff feels about working for her. Besides which, all the "behavior" that actually does need changing comes from Republicans, and you just know she didn't mean they had to change their behavior.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, unemployment, our Post Office, immigration, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to divert the Child Tax Credit expansion to fund the American Jobs Plan and to prevent state Governors from prematurely ending extended unemployment benefits, tell our Post Office to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's plan to cut services and raise prices, tell President Biden to end yet another racist Trump-era immigration practice, and tell Senate Democrats, again, to end the filibuster. 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. Good hunting!

You know the latest Republican "counter-proposal" on the American Jobs Plan aims to repurpose unspent American Rescue Plan money -- but what you may not have realized is that "including unspent funds from the American Rescue Plan in the American Jobs Plan would repeal the Child Tax Credit Expansion that delivers $250 or $300 checks to working families every month for the next year. The fact they even proposed that shows how tone-deaf they are -- and how much confidence they have that it'll ultimately mean nothing in 2022. They might be right about 2022; these are Democrats we're talking about, after all, the same ones who are strangely not bringing up Republican involvement in January 6 every single day. So, yeah, repealing the CTC expansion should be an easy campaign ad for Democrats -- just show one hand passing a $250 check to another hand twelve times, and then show a Republican politician intercepting them all -- but, again, these are Democrats we're talking about. Which is why we need to get on the phone with our Reps and Senators and tell them no to repealing the CTC expansion. If Democrats allow that to happen, they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. And the American democratic experiment will likely be dead at that point.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop Governors in nearly half of American states from ending expanded unemployment benefits prematurely. Those expanded benefits expire at the end of September anyway; what's the hurry? Especially considering we still have over 6% official unemployment (the more telling U6 figure, which counts folks who've given up looking for work and folks who want to work more hours, stands at 9.9%)? The "hurry" is that Republican politicians want to look like they're "doing something," and as we should know from decades of watching this happen, politicians who look like they're "doing something," even something abominable, always have the political advantage. This is why we constantly tell Democrats to actually do something. Will they listen? If enough of us speak out, they'll have to.

Progress America helps you tell our Postal Regulatory Commission to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's proposal to raise prices and cut services. I keep putting it like that because it should be obvious what a bad idea that is. Do you remember being dissatisfied with our Post Office's performance before the pandemic? I don't, and I used it all the time! They did extremely well considering all the pressure our government puts on them -- taxes haven't funded our Post Office since the early '80s, and our laws mandate that our Post Office prefund its employee benefit plans over 80 years in advance, which no other entity has to do. But, sure, let's believe the Trumphole who came in and said he had to "get tough." "We have to raise prices and cut services"? How un-American is that?

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to end the Trump-era policy that used COVID as a pretext to expel asylum seekers without due process. "Always the wrong solution for the wrong reason" should have been Donald Trump's campaign slogan. Why is it wrong to kick asylum seekers out because they might have COVID? Because you can treat COVID, that's why! At least, you can if you have the slightest amount of competence; of course, when Mike "Let's Start an HIV Mini-epidemic in Rural Indiana Counties" Pence as your COVID policy leader, you don't have competence. It's also wrong because if someone really has COVID, you're sending them back to a country that probably can't treat COVID as well as we can, where they'll infect a lot more of their fellow citizens -- which also makes it more likely COVID will survive and mutate into versions that'll infect us again. Of course, for Stephen Miller, all that was probably a feature, not a bug. But if racism and bad leadership makes all your policy for you, then you're doing policy wrong.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Democratic Senators, once again, to end the Senate filibuster. Because they say it actually impedes bipartisanship, and they're right! Back when the Senate filibuster wasn't so easily invoked -- Senators used to have to talk for 48 or 72 hours to stop a bill, but now Senators just say they're not going to end debate, and then they go off to dinner or the theater or wherever, which actually ends debate! -- Senators would more likely support bills, knowing that'd give them a chance to shape it more like they wanted it. Now Senators filibuster bills that require campaign finance disclosure and prevent big corporations from taking tax breaks after they outsource jobs. You'd think, given how popular both those things are, Senators would risk losing elections doing that. But they don't, because the filibuster is too painless and too easy to use, so much so that Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) won't consider ending it even though his friends on the other side of the aisle just humiliated him by filibustering the January 6 commission bill. But that's why we remind them of our will.

Around the table: how *not* to treat Republicans, part 438.

Big pharma corporations have started running ads blasting efforts to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, and boy oh boy are they stinking pieces of dung. Letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would "stifle innovation," "keep you from getting the COVID vaccine," "kill jobs," and "institute government price controls." The first three are just stupid, but the fourth is old stupid -- think anyone under 30 seriously gets wigged out by "price controls"? Actually, when people hear "government price controls" today, particularly in the context of absurdly expensive drugs, they're more likely to say at last!

From the "So Much for the Tolerant Left" file: the New York Times scolds gay pride activists for refusing to let police officers march with them this year, by and large ignoring the fact that police have a long history of beating up gay folks. They don't seem to understand that the abused have had enough of being told to reach out to their abusers. And gay folks aren't the only ones who feel that way these days. January 6 broke a lot of us.

Study finds strong correlation between stimulus payments over the last year and a sharp rise in business start-ups -- particularly in the Black community. And the fact is you could cover most business startup costs with any one of these three stimulus checks and still have a lot of cash left over. Enhanced unemployment benefits no doubt also played a role. But at least one economist cautions against thinking the sharp rise in Black start-ups is a good thing, finding that businesses started up out of necessity (i.e., strictly because of lost employment) rose sharply in the Black community in 2020.

This has been a slow-motion train wreck for a while now: Kansas state Rep. Mark Samsel got caught on video preaching to students about (among other topics) God, masturbation, and suicide while substitute teaching, on the same day police say he physically abused at least one student. We've all had bad days at work, I suppose, but maybe not so bad we shoved one kid against the wall and kicked another one in the crotch, all while threatening "the wrath of God." Your Republican party, ladies and gentlemen! The party of patience, prudence, civility, and order!

When I hear that Sens. Manchin (D?-WV) and Sinema (D?-AZ) actually "pleaded" with Republicans to drop their opposition to the January 6 commission bill in which they got almost every silly thing they asked for in negotiations with Democrats, I can't help but hope they've decided to do this so visibly in order to give them cover for getting rid of the filibuster later. See? We tried to work with these guys, but you just can't!. But then Mr. Manchin said later he wouldn't get rid of the filibuster over the January 6 commission, and anyway, "pleading" with the Party of Sedition is always a bad look.

Finally, speaking of January 6, Gladys Sicknick -- mother of Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, who died in the line of duty during the January 6 attempted coup -- wants to meet with all 50 Republican Senators to convince them to support the aforementioned commission bill, though so far only 14 have expressed interest in meeting with her (or have met with her). I doubt even she will convince them to do the right thing -- and I also think that in the coming months she will be the target of right-wing hatred she never dreamed of before -- but she might shame them in the eyes of even more Americans, and we should all be shaming Republicans as much as possible.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, voting rights, the filibuster, public lands, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell our government to do the right thing about the Israel/Palestine conflict, tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, write a letter to the editor advocating that we end the Senate filibuster, and tell President Biden to reverse Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments and forgive student loan debt. You can 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 Congressfolks' phone numbers and/or use the links in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

First things first. MoveOn helps you tell President Biden to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict and an end to Israeli evictions of Palestinians, while Demand Progress helps you tell our government to stop funding Israeli occupation of Palestine and Avaaz helps you tell world governments to sanction Israel for its actions. You don't need to know "who started it" to support these petitions; you only need to know how it is -- one nation is way more powerful than another, and brutalizes the other. And of course you should also be suspicious when you notice that the violence has buoyed the electoral fortunes of the Israeli Prime Minister who can't win an election outright but somehow stays in power.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. You've no doubt heard that New Great and Bounteous One True American President Joe Manchin likes the latter bill but not the former, but who cares? We want both! We want both the bill that would help us end partisan gerrymandering and force big campaign donors out into the light and the bill that would restore the Voting Rights Act! Why should we have to settle just because Joe Manchin's the 50th vote?

Speaking of all of that, Common Cause helps you write a letter to the editor of your local paper advocating that we end the Senate filibuster. I used to advocate for fixing the filibuster, so that the Senators who would use it would actually have to work for it by explaining, at considerable length, why they oppose campaign finance disclosure or ending tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs overseas (to name just two popular initiatives they've filibustered over the years), but fuck that: Senators have abused this power, so they get nothing from now on, and Mitch McConnell's threats to slow down Senate business to a crawl if they get rid of the filibuster are irrelevant. Remember when Sen. Bunning (R-KY) singlehandedly stopped any further unemployment insurance considerations in 2010? Yeah, he wasn't running for re-election. Anyone who stops a popular bill because he wants a proper quorum to turn on the lights in the Senate building won't get re-elected, either. If we have anything to say about it, that is.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to roll back Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. When Trump votaries contemplated the phrase "drain the swamp," do you think the phrase "by chipping away at national monuments so that gas and oil drillers could pollute it" followed naturally in their minds? I would say not! Folks love their national monuments a lot more than Our Glorious Elites would like you to think, and they're actually not all that emotionally invested in big corporate CEOs making even more money from gas and oil drilling. Tell them "it's for the jobs" and you may get most of them to pause -- but tell them "that's what they want you to think," and then explaining exactly why that's what they want you to think that (i.e., as in the previous sentence above), will win most of them right back. Too bad our "liberal" media never thinks to do that. Hey, we can't do everything. That's why we live in a civilization.

Finally, both the ACLU and Daily Kos help you tell President Biden to cancel at least $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower. You've heard folks say they can't retire because they still have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt? Well, it's not actually the kind of thing that deserves the response well you should have thought of that before taking on all that debt ha ha ha snort, because our society has been telling everyone for years they have to get a college degree if they want to survive, and when you go telling people that, you either have to deliver on that or make it right if you don't. And forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt will make that right for a lot of people. Personal to those who'd be jealous: go gripe with God about when you were born, and God will you the same thing I will, that every damn thing in the world ain't about you.

Action: concerning "bipartisanship," voting rights, discrimination, paycheck fairness, and Muslim bans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to injure infrastructure/jobs legislation just to attract a few Republican votes and look more "bipartisan," and tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and the NO BAN Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

The Washington Post reports that both President Biden and Congressional Democrats might make significant concessions on the coming infrastructure/jobs bill to attract a few Republican votes and look more "bipartisan," so it's time to get on the phone with your Reps and Senators and tell them, again, that you don't care about "bipartisanship"; you only care about good legislation. And the Biden jobs plan is already a compromise! Most folks would want higher corporate taxes and more public investment! And, again, why on Earth are we valuing "bipartisanship" with the party that tried to overturn the election? You should never "work with" people who tell we-the-people to go fuck ourselves like they did on January 6. So get on the horn with your Reps and Senators and tell them to wake up already.

Bold Progressives helps you tell your Senators to pass both the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act -- even if it means ending the filibuster to do it. The former bill would end partisan gerrymandering, guarantee 15 days of early voting in every state, automatic registration, and same-day voter registration all across America, end racist vote suppression practices including the notorious Interstate Crosscheck, and mandate disclosure of anyone who donates more than $10,000 to campaigns. The latter bill would restore the Voting Rights Act's legal protections against states continuing to suppress the vote. And don't listen to Joe Manchin's foolish ramblings about how even forcing Senators to earn their filibuster by talking through it would "weaken" the filibuster. Right now weak people use the filibuster stop any kind of progress from happening anywhere in America. And I call that un-American.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Don't be dissuaded by right-wingers' hysterical fantasies of boys playing girls' sports, or ridiculous claims of the bill being an "assault" on religious freedom. Instead ask yourself: why does a bill that would prevent bosses, banks, and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folk constitute an assault on religious freedom? And ask yourself what teenage boy would undergo a sex change just to dominate girls' sports! Not just because professional women athletes make a pittance compared to men, but also because you don't just become a girl and then try to hang out with your buddies and talk about girls! Yikes, it's like they don't understand people.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act would make penalties for gender-related pay gaps more costly, expand the Fair Labor Standards Act's sex discrimination proscriptions to include pregnancy and gay and transgender statuses, and prevent employers from instituting rules preventing workers from talking about their pay with their co-workers, since that, sadly, is how most women find out they're getting discriminated against. The bill would also narrow, but not eliminate, the employer's ability to claim that any pay differences are due to bona fide factors such as experience and qualifications, as H.R. 7 says: "Such defense shall not apply where the employee demonstrates that an alternative employment practice exists that would serve the same business purpose without producing such differential and that the employer has refused to adopt such alternative practice." This all sounds like common sense to me.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1333, the NO BAN Act. The NO BAN Act would prevent future Presidents from issuing anything like Donald Trump's infamous Muslim ban, partly by explicitly preventing religious discrimination in such travel bans, and partly by making the Executive branch report to the Legislative branch within 48 hours after imposing any travel bans. The NO BAN Act passed the House with exactly one Republican vote in favor -- of course it was Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania's 1st; think the state legislature will try to gerrymander him out? -- but that does not prove that "the bill isn't good enough" because it "isn't bipartisan," but rather proves that trying to attract Republican votes, in this day and age, is a fool's errand. I mean, at the risk of beating a dead horse, this is the party that tried to overthrow the government because it didn't like the 2020 election results; why wouldn't you feel tainted if any of them voted for your bill?

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, paycheck fairness, Muslim bans, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, the NO BAN Act, and the D.C. Admission 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 contact your Senators -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. I've heard little from right-wingers about the For the People Act lately, but I doubt that's shame -- it's more likely the complacency of knowing Republicans will filibuster it and Joe Manchin won't let the Democrats overcome such a filibuster. So what would we be missing out on, so Joe Manchin can preserve the "sanctity" of Senate "process"? An end to partisan gerrymandering, 15 days of early voting in every state, automatic and same-day voter registration all over America, and an end to certain racist caging practices including the notorious Interstate Crosscheck. So that's what we'll lose by keeping the filibuster as a tool of wanton obstruction.

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As you know, our Justice Department can't stop Southern states from passing restricting voting laws, thanks to our Supreme Court's ruling in Shelby County v. Holder -- that would be biased against the South, they said, but they explicitly said that our Justice Department could have that power if it applied to all states and localities. Well, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would enact that very thing, and then we could stop any state or locality with a demonstrated pattern of vote suppression from passing more vote suppression laws. I'm looking at you, Ohio!

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. My state's junior Senator writes that H.R. 5 "would eviscerate religious liberty protections." Guess what? That's complete rubbish! In H.R. 5 amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that it includes gays and transgender folks in its protected classes, but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already gives fairly broad exemptions to religious organizations, and H.R. 5 doesn't change that! So, either they know they're lying, or they don't know when it's their damn job to know. I don't know which is worse; I'm not sure finding out matters.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Congress passed an Equal Pay Act in 1965, which nominally makes it illegal to pay women less than men for the same work, but the pay disparity still exists, because (for example) employers still get to threaten employees with termination if they discuss their pay with each other, even though that's often the only way workers figure out they're getting screwed over. The Paycheck Fairness Act would prevent employers from doing that, among other good works. Do not admit any objections with the words "trial laywers" in it. If employers didn't try to get away with so much shadiness, we wouldn't need so many trial lawyers.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1333, the NO BAN Act, which our House passed last week. The NO BAN Act would prevent future Presidents from passing Trumpian travel bans obviously aimed at Muslims, even if our Supreme Court ignored Mr. Trump's words to that effect (he wanted to enact "a Muslim ban, but legal," according to his wingman, Mr. Giuliani). The bill would not "open the floodgates to terrorists" or whatever right-wingers say it's about, since our President would still have the ability to keep folks from entering, but our President would have to restrict folks based more on facts and laws than on the need to keep rageheads raging. The less say rageheads have over American policy, the better, that's what I say.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act, and thus make Washington, D.C. a state. D.C.'s netherland status continues to hurt its citizens -- over 700,000 American citizens have no voting representation in Congress, while they pay more taxes than the citizens of at least a dozen American states while facing more direct Congressional meddling in their affairs. Plus, of course, we just had an attempted coup on January 6; think a Washington, D.C. National Guard unit might have helped deter that? I think so, and the good citizens of our nation's capitol deserve so. And to those who whine that Democrats will get two more Senators: try persuading people to vote for you!

Action: concerning "bipartisanship," the filibuster, whistleblowing, public broadband, methane emissions, and corporate spying.

Long story short: tell Joe Manchin to stop Joe Manchining; write a letter-to-the-editor favoring filibuster abolition; tell your Congressfolk to pass the Peace Corps Reauthorization Act, the Broadband Justice Act, and a resolution of disapproval overturning weak Trump-era methane emissions rules; and tell Spotify to give up its creepy surveillance scheme. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Congressfolks' phone numbers -- or use the email/petition/letter-to-the-editor tools in the links below. And good hunting.

Well, Joe Manchin's really done it this time, not only announcing he'll support no effort to "eliminate or weaken" the filibuster, but that "the time has come" "to usher a new era of bipartisanship." "Bipartisanship" with the party that opposes any and all good proposals and tries to overthrow governments and rewrite voting rules when election results don't go their way? How about "no"? Future historians will point to this moment as the moment Republicans captured the House and Senate in 2022 -- unless we act! Mr. Manchin's phone number, as you likely know by now, is 202.224.3954. Now that he's provoked two action alerts in one week, I'm starting to think he wants to be Donald Trump. No one on Earth should want to be Donald Trump. Even Donald Trump should look in the mirror and say, "wow, I don't want to be that guy."

In a related development, Common Cause helps you write a letter-to-the-editor about the need to get rid of the Senate filibuster. You enter your zip code and see a list of local newspapers to which you might write, and then Common Cause provides a set of talking points you might use to write your letter. Don't fret that Republicans will one day get to impose their will on Americans, because guess what? They do that now, precisely because they exploit the filibuster. Next they'll put holds on bills and demand a physical quorum to turn the lights on and off, but they'll look like little whiny-ass babies when they do that. It would help if Democrats would point to them and say see, they don't want to pass automatic voter registration, that's why they're acting like little babies. But we'll continue to do that if they don't.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Peace Corps Reauthorization Act, not merely because the Peace Corps is generally a good thing, but because the bill would create protections against discrimination and retaliation for whistleblowers. That would have helped Sara Thompson in 2010 after the Peace Corps gave her the anti-malaria drug mefloquine, which our own military won't use because it's too dangerous; Ms. Thompson had no recourse, because our Peace Corps would have simply fired her, and now she suffers from mefloquine toxicity. And remember: whistleblowers ain't out for an easy buck, because after they've suffered through years of harassment and unemployment after they blow the whistle on wrongdoing, ain't no easy bucks ever coming again.

BroadbandJusticeAct.com helps you, as you might guess, tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1904, the Broadband Justice Act. The bill would essentially subsidize broadband as a public utility in public housing -- a thing poorer working families might well need, given that so many folks work and go to school over the internet during a pandemic -- and it might be a good first step toward a national broadband service. If you're worried that Big Gummint would oppress you with a broadband service, just remember that plenty of big private corporations already do that (and for an example of that, see the last paragraph below). And if you're worried that your taxes would subsidize someone else's broadband, don't worry, because our tax money subsidizes plenty of things you use, too.

Here, at last, a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act that would roll back a Trump-era regulation! EDF Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to roll back the Trump EPA's methane regulation, which actually increased the amount of red tape our government would have to hurtle to regulate methane. They said Donald Trump wasn't a conservative -- and they were right! I mean, don't conservatives think more bureaucracy is a bad thing? In any case, methane pollutes our air and packs a bigger climate-change punch than coal -- and not for nothing, but the methane emissions that big drilling corporations vent into the atmosphere represent energy we can't use and (on public lands) royalties our government can't collect. So, what's good about more methane leakage? No, CEOs getting lazier and fatter isn't a "good."

Finally, Stop Spotify Surveillance helps you tell Spotify to abandon its plan to spy on your conservations in order to "better" target music and ads. And here you thought the future would be full of solar panels and cures for intractable diseases and peoples of the world getting along! No, it's full of big corporations trying to get you to buy more stuff, and with Spotify's filing for a patent using voice recognition software, it's also about spying on you to do it. All that fear of government spying we had in the '60s seems so quaint now! It isn't, of course, and we must still fight government spying wherever we see it, but we must also fight corporate spying, too, particularly if our government isn't going to control corporate power on our behalf.

Action: now more action-packed than ever!

Summary: tell Georgia legislative leaders to stop suppressing the vote; tell your U.S. Senators to protect stimulus checks from debt collectors, pass the For the People Act, pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act, pass the Equality Act, and get rid of the legislative filibuster. Use the tools in the upper-right corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Congressfolk; phone numbers for Georgia legislative leaders will be provided below. Also, I will provide (when I have them) links for petitions and/or email tools below, if you prefer these to making phone calls.

First things first: in Georgia, SB 202 somehow ballooned from a two-page bill concerned with a minor point about absentee ballots into a 93-page bill a mere hour before the state House met to consider it! SB 202 now aims to limit early voting, make folks produce more ID, and prevent people from giving you a glass of water when you've been in line to vote for eight hours, among other nefarious works. Thus the Georgia legislature signals they know they've lost the argument and they're just trying to jam their will down your throat while they can. Georgia House Speaker David Ralston's phone number is 404.656.5020, while Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan's phone number is 404.656.7872; call them and tell them to stop suppressing the vote in Georgia.

Late last week, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey scuttled legislation protecting our stimulus checks from debt collectors. So why didn't this happen with the last two stimulus checks? Because Sen. Toomey and most other Republicans voted to protect those checks! I wonder what changed between now and then. Sen. Toomey intones that debt collectors have "valid legal claims" (which, like, they didn't the last two times?) and anyway Democrats should have tried to work with Republicans (which, like, waaaaaaaah). You get a stimulus check so you can stimulate the economy, hence the name, and you can't stimulate the economy with it if someone's already taken it from you. So call your Senators and tell them to fix this.

Also up for consideration: H.R. 1, the For the People Act, which you know is a good bill because Republicans tell the most hysterical lies about it! Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, as you know, suggested that H.R. 1 would lead to people giving out cocaine to voters as a bribe! For your reference, cocaine remains a Schedule II drug, meaning it's illegal, meaning that, no, H.R. 1 won't permit people to hand it out to voters in line. And Sen. Ted Cruz (E-TX) said the bill would let child molestors vote, though good luck finding that in the bill! So while you have your Senators on the phone, you can tell them to pass H.R. 1, too. (Also, People for the American Way provides a petition supporting the For the People Act.)

The John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is, somehow, not part of the For the People Act, which could mean Democrats think they'll pass it more easily, but they haven't re-introduced it in this Congress, either. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would make the Voting Rights Act whole again by subjecting, to Justice Department scrutiny, voting rights changes from any state or locality with a record of vote suppression, not just Southern ones (which formed the core of our Supreme Court's objection in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling). So add that to your phone call with your Senators. (Public Citizen also provides a petition supporting the Voting Rights Advancement Act.)

You can also tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Word on the street is that right-wingers are calling their Senators en masse, no doubt with fever dreams of men changing gender just to make far less money playing women's sports and transgender folks raping kids in bathrooms when kids are far more likely to be raped by a relative and not in a bathroom. It'd be nice to counter right-wing hysteria with a more sober recounting of things the Equality Act would end, things like banks refusing to lend to gays and landlords refusing to rent to gays, actual things that actually happen, and which shouldn't happen, even if banks and landlords believe in Jesus very, very hard. (People for the American Way also provides a petition supporting the Equality Act.)

Finally, pursuant to all of the goals described above, you can tell your Senators (this won't be that long a phone call, really!) to end the legislative filibuster. (People for the American Way provides a petition for that, too.) Yes, I can list things the filibuster has saved (the Estate Tax, for one) just as well as anyone else, but the filibuster isn't a break-glass thing anymore, but a tool Republicans flat-out abuse -- except when they want to get something done, like the Gorsuch Supreme Court nomination in 2017! Last week President Biden said he thinks the filibuster should be a talking filibuster, so we're moving our leaders in our direction; that only means we have to keep up the pressure.

OK, so I'm getting more good action alerts these days than ever before, hence I'm packing more action alerts into shorter paragraphs. The summary bit at the beginning wasn't part of that thought process, but I'm glad to come up with it anyway; I think it'll make these action posts a bit more digestible, even as there'll be more to digest.

Around the table: featuring the usual Republican insanity and Democratic weakness.

Spain will trial a four-day, 32-hour work week, possibly as soon as this fall, where workers would make the same amount of money and the government would cover all costs during the first year (though less in the years thereafter). It's safe to say that no one's tried it on this scale, though individual employers report that it works pretty well; recall that John Maynard Keynes thought our ever-rising standards of living would be enabling 15-hour work weeks by now, though he didn't predict the massive income-redistribution-upward scheme of the last 40-plus years, which is what leaves us running to stand still. So of course I wish the Spanish the best in their endeavors.

Alan McLeod at FAIR catches the financial media doing all manner of pearl-clutching at the news that potential Brazilian Presidential candidate Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva has been released from jail. Who would say, out loud, that a politician getting cleared of trumped-up charges is "bad for the markets"? You'd only say something like that if you were an irredeemable asshole, and in this article, they say a lot worse -- plus, they might actually mean Lula will be bad for "US imperial ambitions in Latin America and beyond." Seriously, this may be the most triggering thing I've read in a while -- and I read a lot of triggering stuff.

Ryan Grim at The Intercept describes the formation of the "Woman's Equality Party" (or WEP) in New York state -- a party that seems to exist more to burnish Gov. Andrew Cuomo's (ever-more) suspect feminist credentials than to actually help women win office in New York. I couldn't help but notice, long before paragraph 13, that the WEP is also only one letter off from the Working Families Party (or WFP), and since the WFP is often a thorn in Gov. Cuomo's side -- endorsing Cynthia Nixon in the 2018 Democratic primary after getting seriously burned by Mr. Cuomo in 2014 -- I can't imagine that's an accident.

The COVID relief bill faces its first legal hurdle, if you can call it that, as the state of Ohio sued to block the provision preventing local governments from using federal aid to cut state taxes. I would be surprised to learn states have a constitutional "right" to use federal funds to cut state taxes, but I doubt Ohio politicians filed this suit to make a point or advance a philosophy; rather, I suspect they did it either to beat their chests about how Republican they are or to get ahead of the bill one day becoming unpopular. If it's the latter item, they may be waiting a very long time.

Tennessee historical commission votes to remove bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from state capitol -- and state Republicans promptly propose a law removing all 29 members and replacing them with 12 new ones. Republicans run everything in Tennessee -- which, again, is the natural result of Democrats being weak -- but all any Democrat has to do is ask: why do you fight for the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest? Dude made his fortune in the slave trade and then was the Klan's first Grand Wizard! They sure didn't put his bust in the Capitol because he might have had doubts about his life's work at the end.

Finally, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says he would "talk until I fell over" to prevent the passage of the For the People Act and the Equality Act, though he seems to have some confusion about what those bills would actually do. Anyway, I doubt he'd keep a real filibuster going, and not just because talking until you "fall over" about popular legislation would make you look bad. I doubt it because I think he's soft, just like I think they're all soft. They won't give up their three-martini lunches and big donor dinners to keep a filibuster going; in fact, I think the mere thought of hard work will make them wilt.

Action: concerning right-wing drama, the filibuster, sanctions, and food safety.

So Colorado Gov. Jared Polis issued a proclamation urging good Coloradans to avoid meat for one day out of the week, but Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts declared his own "Meat on the Menu Day," which I might take as a good-natured rib from a beef-producing state, except that he then said that Colorado's "MeatOut Day" was a "direct attack on our way of life." Gosh, don't anyone tell him what Catholics do on Fridays during Lent! Seriously, abstaining from meat for one day a week represents a "direct attack on our way of life"? Jesus Mary and Joseph will right-wingers ever stop their incessant whining? You may call Gov. Ricketts at 402.471.2244 and tell him to cut the drama, because statements like "direct attack on our way of life" is how people convince other people that having a veggie burger makes you a "terrorist." I do not exaggerate -- it isn't that long a walk from "animal rights protestors are terrorists" to "people who don't eat meat terrorize the meat industry." I love steak myself, but I won't buy it from Nebraska producers as long as their Governor is a whiner.

Speaking of people who really shouldn't open their mouths ever, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) literally promised a "scorched-Earth Senate" if Democrats follow through on nixing the filibuster. How do we respond to threats? We still do the right thing, that's how! Hence you may call your Democratic Senators and tell them to ignore Mr. McConnell's threat and get rid of the legislative filibuster. Yeah, I already knew that Mr. McConnell could unearth many more layers of obstruction. But if Democrats cower before this threat, then they do not deserve to win another election again, ever. Besides which, Mitch McConnell himself ended the use of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees not even four years ago! And he has also said, far more recently, that folks should try winning arguments before they try getting rid of the filibuster; does demanding a physical quorum merely to turn on the lights in the Senate chamber resemble a "winning argument"? Imagine the spectacle of a group of grown men reduced to doing such things, and you'll help end Mr. McConnell's manufactured hostage crisis post-haste.

Also, as you know, America uses economic sanctions as a weapon against a lot of nations, including Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and Syria, but all of that comes with a cost: the good citizens of those nations can't get food, medicine, electricity, or medical supplies, all of which becomes more acute during a pandemic. You may now know, however, that our Treasury Department has the authority under our laws to allow these nations to import essential products (including food and medicine) during a pandemic. A truly great nation wouldn't need to be told to do this, of course, but we are that nation, so we must tell our government what to do. Toward that end, Roots Action helps you tell our government to stop letting sanctions actually hurt the innocent, especially during a pandemic. Anyone who tells you letting humanitarian supplies through is just a way of letting weapons through -- as if there's literally no such thing as a port inspector! -- has revealed themselves as one of two kinds of people: 1) someone proud of their cynicism, or 2) someone irredeemably cruel. I'm not sure which kind of person is worse.

Finally, our government has long had a jones to speed up processing lines at chicken plants -- a program even Bush the Lesser rejected! -- such that chicken inspectors get hurt more and pus and bile and blood shows up in your chicken casserole more frequently. Also, too, don't they know there's a pandemic on? But along comes H.R. 1815/S. 713, the Safe Line Speeds During COVID-19 Act, which would suspend all waivers our Department of Agriculture has granted allowing big food processing corporations to shoot their chickens by at 175 per minute, plus it'd stop Agriculture from extending those absurdly-high line speeds to pork processors. Further, the bill would defund any Agriculture efforts to speed up lines in the future, and direct our Government Accountability Office (or GAO) to investigate the harm these high line speeds have done to our food processing workers. These are all good works, and just remember that work accidents and food poisoning are still very unpopular in America. Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support food and worker safety by passing the Safe Line Speeds During COVID-19 Act.

Action: concerning the right to protest, voting rights, and the filibuster.

First things first: the Oklahoma state House passed a bill late last week, HB 1674, that would immunize drivers who run over protestors. And they passed it at 12.30 in the morning, after meeting for 14 hours already! Because if you try to pass that bill in the light of day, people would be pissed off about it. And you know, not everyone actually accepts that "blocking the road" is completely unacceptable behavior! If you're constantly late getting everywhere or you're feeling like you have too much to do, you might feel that way, but rights don't disappear just because you're stressed or pressed for time, and I would say everyone has a right not to be run over while protesting. Now HB 1674 goes to the Oklahoma state Senate; Senate President Pro Tempore Greg Treat's phone number is 405.521.5632, while Senate Majority Floor Leader Kim David's phone number is 405.521.5590. Give them both a call and tell them HB 1674 is an absolute monstrosity and they should ensure its failure in the state Senate.

Meanwhile, our House passed H.R. 1, the For the People Act, the most significant voting rights bill of the last few decades; now our Senate must act on it, hence People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to support voting rights in America by passing the For the People Act. The For the People Act would do a great many good works: it'd force disclosure of big campaign donors; it'd require states to use paper ballots; it'd make same-day and automatic voter registration the law of the land, it'd mandate 15 days of early voting in every state in America; it'd stop state legislators from redrawing Congressional districts to their party's liking; it'd stop states from using "Interstate Crosscheck"-type databases to deregister voters before proving they've done anything wrong; and it'd stop states from using "address-verification forms" to deregister voters who just so happen to live in communities of color. And what is the Republican response to this? That it's "evil" and a "Democrat power grab." And that's it. Don't take their crap anymore.

In other news, though no one's formally introduced the John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act yet, it still merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators demanding its passage. As you know, our Supreme Court blew open a gaping hole in the Voting Rights Act with their Shelby County v. Holder ruling, by saying that singling out a few Southern states, as the Voting Rights Act does in Sec. 4(b), for extra scrutiny whenever they changed their voting rights laws was, well, unfair to those states. And now a lot of those Southern states are trying to curtail voting rights as we speak! The John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would replace the formula our Supreme Court found faulty with a new one, one which would single out any state or locality that's demonstrated a habit of suppressing votes. Republicans retort that "the South has changed," but that's rubbish -- the South has gotten cleverer at hiding its sins, that's all. Pass this bill, and we won't have to put up with that any longer.

Finally, pursuant to our goal in the previous paragraph, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to abolish the filibuster. Republicans will filibuster both the For the People Act and the John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act when they come before the Senate, and recent history suggests they won't suffer for it at the ballot box -- because Democrats only win elections when a) Republicans look incompetent as well as evil and b) when Democrats do good works. Seems to me Democratic politicians spend all their time waiting for a) when they should be doing b), because when they don't do good works, their most devoted voters stay home next election, and Republicans sweep back into power. Certainly ain't no one going into the ballot box in 2022 saying Democrats didn't do anything, but at least they preserved the sanctity of the Senate filibuster! Yeah, I'd prefer a talking filibuster, too, but they won't do that, so let's make them do the more painful thing instead.

Around the table: when is an audit not an audit? And other urgent questions.

Steven Rosenfeld reports on Arizona Republicans' efforts to "audit" the 2020 Presidential race, and if I put "audit" in quotation marks it's because -- and stop me if you've heard this before! -- it sure seems like Republicans want unqualified people to perform this task so they'll "find" more "suspicious" activity. If by some miracle they do the audit right and don't get the result they want -- which is exactly what'll happen if they do it right! -- they'll promptly forget they even did it, and demand another one like they never did one in the first place. Hey, I thought of it, and I'm not very good at being evil.

Michelle Nijhuis writes about being "On the Frontlines of the Battle to Preserve the American West." It's a good introduction to land conservation policy in America, and it also recounts her brief 1990 encounter with the scion of the Bundy family (no, not that one), who thought keeping his cattle away from endangered tortoises was just too big a cross for him to bear. The Bundys' career since then has veered rather past "this land is my land" and more toward "if I can't have it, nobody can."

Surprise, surprise, Stockton, CA finds that giving relatively low-income folks an extra $500 a month actually prompts them to get more work. You will not have difficulty explaining this finding: if you get a little breathing room, you're more likely to consider your situation a bit more lucidly, and take calculated risks to make yourself happier, whereas if you're running to stand still, you're more likely to stay in a bad situation because you feel you have no choice. In any case, a basic income sure does sound like a better use of taxpayer money than corporate welfare.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) "Decided Pandemic Was Perfect Time to Buy and Not Disclose Stocks," to the tune of $120,000 or less, and while Kelly Loeffler might call that chump change, it's likely more than you or I have at our disposal. Next time someone tells you Dan Crenshaw is a "straight-talker" or something, this will remind you that he's just like all the others.

Here, at last, some polling out of Arizona that might embarrass Kyrsten Sinema, if she's capable of embarrassment: 61% of respondents say it's more important to pass good legislation than to preserve the filibuster -- including 66% of independents and 42% of Republicans -- while only 26% would keep the filibuster at the expense of the legislation. Why, that sounds like actual bipartisanship to me! And, as usual, you only find actual bipartisanship among voters, not politicians. Would it be piling on to note that you can't even sustain a filibuster with 26%? No, it would not.

In a related note, Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg says getting rid of the filibuster would be a "terrible" idea. He says forcing minorities to talk through a filibuster "would be a good way for the minority party to develop new stars and get plenty of TV coverage and the campaign donations that can come from it," but that statement ignores the simple fact that Republicans have no ideas worth hearing and talking for 72 hours in a row would expose that intellectual paucity pretty quickly, particularly in the social media era. And noting that Senators didn't filibuster all that often when they actually did have to talk their way through it actually undercuts his whole argument. I'm beginning to feel like that was a waste of time, and I suspect the good heart of anyone who wastes my time these days.

Finally, at the risk of sounding all inside-baseball, the Democratic National Campaign Committee (or DNCC) will no longer blacklist consultants who work on insurgent campaigns that challenge incumbents in primaries. Wow, this is like something winners would do! Though Rep. Jim Costa (D?-CA) sure sounds less like a winner and more like a whiner in his disagreement. "We're supposed to be a team"? Only when he wins, I guess.

Action: concerning voting rights, the Equality Act, social media, and the filibuster.

Happy Tuesday, good folks! Now it's time to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. (If you're pressed for time, People for the American Way helps you with the For the People Act, while the ACLU helps you with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.) The 2020 elections taught us two things: 1) when people are super-organized, they can win elections even in places like Georgia, and 2) Republicans will use their power to prevent people from voting any way they can. As they're trying to do in states like Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Georgia as we speak! These bills would strengthen the Voting Rights Act, force campaigns to disclose their big donors, enact automatic and same-day voter registration across the land, mandate states to use redistricting commissions instead of self-interested legislators, and prevent states from using "address verification forms" to suppress voters of color -- among many other things! The only folks who'd oppose these things are folks afraid of losing a fair fight, and they certainly shouldn't get all the say about everything in America.

While you've got your Senators on the phone, tell them to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The Equality Act would prohibit discrimination on the basis of "sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity" in public places, as well as in the spheres of education, housing, and credit. You may reasonably ask why we need an Equality Act, given Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch's 2020 opinion ruling that Title VII of our Civil Rights Act covers gay and transgender folks. Well, Title VII only concerns employment discrimination -- Justice Gorsuch would be the first to tell you that, despite appearances, you can't just apply it in another area -- and the Equality Act, as I've suggested, covers just about everything else. If you peruse right-wing objections to the Equality Act, you'll find they don't argue against the idea that we should extend civil rights to gay or transgender folks -- they concoct the most absurd stories they can think of, as if the law can predict every conceivable future event, or as if judges don't rule on precisely those matters. Don't brook any of that silliness. Rights are more important than hysterical what-ifs.

Meanwhile, you know about all that land in the Amazon rain forest currently home to indigenous folks? And you know how the Brazilian government (whose President, Jair Bolsonaro, is now the biggest asshole in any government now that Donald Trump is no longer American President) has been seizing their land illegally to sell it off to developers? Now dig this: you can buy these plots of stolen land on Facebook's Marketplace. Because freedom! Naturally Facebook says it's up to the sellers to comply with the law, though one could certainly argue that Facebook is an accomplice to the crime. Interesting, isn't it, how Facebook is never responsible for the evil that happens on its platform? And please understand that by "interesting" I mean "galling." They have just as much right to keep actual criminal activity from happening on their platform as they do to keep Nazis from recruiting angry high school kids on their platform, but they won't, so it's time to wave the Big Stick of Bad PR in their faces again. Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to get its act together and stop letting criminals sell land they don't own on their platform.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Democratic Senators to end the filibuster, Demand Progress still helps you do that. The best argument for keeping the filibuster is the one I used to deploy: the filibuster also saves us from the worst Republicans can do. But that is becoming less and less true! Did the filibuster save us from Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Comey Barrett? No, it did not, because Republicans got rid of it for that purpose, as they will whenever they want to get something even more extreme done! We might as well get rid of it first, and get some good done in the meantime. Yeah, Republicans will one day take complete control of our government again, and we might wish to have the filibuster back, but you know what beat back health care "reform" in 2017? We did, and if we stay in that frame of mind, then we'll win the battles we're supposed to win. And remember: nobody's getting into the voting booth in 2022 saying thank God the Democrats preserved the sanctity of Senate procedure, no matter what the cost to front-line pandemic workers who should be making more than $7.25/hour!

Action: concerning voting rights, Ted Cruz, our Post Office, and the filibuster.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Today would be a good day to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The For the People Act, as you know, contains a lot of goodies -- campaign finance disclosure, same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration, 15 days of early voting, independent commissions to redraw districts, and an end to those nefarious "address verification forms" that only seem to lead to folks of color getting de-registered. I would be hard-pressed to think of good reasons to oppose any of those things, though I know right-wingers will keep yammering on about them. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would require any state or locality with a record of vote suppression over the last 25 years to get pre-clearance from our Justice Department before changing their laws. This bill still doesn't have a bill number at this writing, but go ahead and say you want it anyway -- the more of us who say we want it, the more likely it'll get introduced, and passed, and become law.

Meanwhile, both Daily Kos and MoveOn (wow, sounds like a fresh breath of 2004!) help you tell Sen. Ted Cruz to resign from our Senate. We don't even need to go back to his enabling of the January 6 attempted coup; all we need do is recount his sins from the past week! As millions of his constituents were left without electricity, water, or heat from an uncharacteristically bad winter storm, he flew with his family to Cancún, only returning several days early once news of his flight became known; he even requested that beleaguered Houston police (big storm, remember?) escort him through the airport before flying to Cancún and upon returning. Would it be piling on to mention that he's taunted other politicians for pulling similar stunts? No, it would not. And don't brook any gaslighting from right-wingers about how little Sen. Cruz could have done. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who does not exactly hail from a neighboring state, has raised close to $5 million for Texas food banks, while Beto O'Rourke, who almost beat Mr. Cruz in 2018, organized nearly a million wellness calls and delivered food and water to good Texans. Seems they're better Senators for Texas than Mr. Cruz is.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to appoint four decent human beings to our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. And make no mistake about the end goal: the end goal is to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, because that's what a decent human being would do. A decent human being would not sit there and let himself be gaslit by Mr. DeJoy's "big plans" for our Post Office. The only big plan he has for our Post Office is to make it run so badly we'll be "forced" to use private (and more expensive) mail carriers for everything. Our Post Office is a jewel, its workers some of the most diligent I've ever seen, and don't let anyone tell you differently. And if we want real reforms for our Post Office, we should stop making it pre-pay decades of benefit funds in advance (the source of most of its money problems) and we should allow it to offer basic banking services again. Like so many other things, this just ain't that damn deep.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to eliminate the filibuster, then Common Cause still helps you do that. I know, I know, I used to say my fellow liberals were dumb for wanting to do that, but you know what? I was wrong; they weren't dumb, and since our Senate hasn't listened to any of my principled calls for making the filibuster an actual talking filibuster, I say take their damn toy away. Republicans filibustered even the mildest reforms proposed by Barack Obama, and they should have suffered for them! I mean, filibustering legislation that would stop tax breaks from going to corporations that outsource their jobs? Everyone who filibustered that should have lost their next election! But it ain't just Democrat weakness (I mean, did they ever run ads about that?) to blame; it's also a system that lets them obstruct in the dark, without their nefarious deeds ever being brought to the light. And if you believe in accountability, you know it's got to stop.

Around the table: Republicans Acting Badly, Part 583.

Ian Millhiser at Vox reminds us that there must be 50 ways to fix the filibuster. (No, I won't keep that going.) He also reminds us that the filibuster gets changed all the time -- a Brookings Institution scholar counts 161 "provisions of law" that protect a bill from a Senate filibuster, and we didn't pass all 161 of them yesterday -- and proposes a number of reforms that would do us a lot of good, although "making Senators actually talk through their filibuster instead of just signaling a filibuster and then going off to dinner or the theatre" comes a little late in the discussion for my taste.

After Sen. Ron Johnson (A-WI) says that January 6 "didn't seem like an armed insurrection," the normally fair-to-middling fact-checking website Politifact takes the time to remind us that, yes, January 6 was, in point of fact, an armed insurrection. I guess I could be generous and say that Mr. Johnson hasn't been through too many armed insurrections and thus wouldn't know ha ha ha ha ha I kid of course -- Ron Johnson is gaslighting, and "only one shot fired" hides all the other weapons the seditionists brought, or, in the case of the one who attacked a police officer with an American flag, repurposed.

When you confront an article entitled "How to Live With Authoritarians," you may be tempted to respond "rule number one is don't coddle them." But authors Karen Stenner and Jessica Stern have a profound insight (or ten) to share. For example, "(a)uthoritarians’ fundamental aversion to diversity -- complexity and variety -- is distinct from traditional conservatives’ aversion to change -- which is more about novelty and uncertainty," and "those who are predisposed to favor freedom and diversity over authority and conformity must recognize that the authoritarian preference for oneness and sameness is largely innate and unlikely to change." Hence "(t)he new U.S. administration should promote equity and justice while avoiding a loud and provocative display of stances and messaging that unnecessarily aggravates authoritarians," which sure sounds like typical Democrat weakness, but really isn't, if you attend closely the word "unnecessarily" and if you're the kind of person who prefers getting things done to creating big dramas about them (which is to say, if you're the opposite of the kind of person Donald Trump is).

Folks are concentrating on the Washington County (PA) GOP Chair criticizing Sen. Toomey's vote to convict Donald Trump on impeachment charges because "we did not send him there to do the right thing," but of course it's far worse than that. Silly little Washington County GOP Chair, trying to convince us that Pat Toomey really only represents the Washington County GOP in the Senate -- or even Pennsylvania's Republicans -- and not all Pennsylvanians! I do get tired of right-wingers whining that they're not "represented" on those rare occasions Republican politicians don't march in jackboot lockstep with their urges. I've never agreed very much with our state's junior Senator, but I'm pretty sure this kind of thing is why Mr. Toomey decided to retire in 2022.

Finally, when I note that Rep. Jim Jordan (A-OH) thinks "cancel culture" is "the most dangerous thing happening in the country today," all I really hear is WAAAAAAAAH TEH LIBRULZ AREZ MEANZ TO MEZ!!!!! But you know, the whining isn't the worst thing about what he said. The slippery slope argument isn't the worst thing about what he said. Even calling "cancel culture" the "most dangerous thing" in America while a pandemic slashes its scythe through America isn't the worst thing about that. You know what's the worst thing about that? Jim Jordan literally enabled child molestation at a high school before getting elected to the House, but because he represents a deformed Tetris piece of a district, the voters can't cancel his sorry ass.

Action: concerning voting rights, Guantánamo Bay, and voting security.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! Let's call our Reps and Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, and the Voting Rights Advancement Act (no bill number at this writing). H.R. 1 would enact sweeping voting rights reforms, including campaign finance disclosure, same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration, 15 days of early voting, independent commissions to redraw districts, and an end to those nefarious "address verification forms" that only seem to lead to folks of color getting de-registered. Meanwhile, the Voting Rights Advancement Act would require any state or locality with a record of vote suppression to get pre-clearance from our Justice Department before changing their laws. Neither of these bills are budget-related, so Republicans will be able to filibuster them (unless Senate Democrats get rid of the filibuster, or force Republicans to talk through a filibuster), but I say let them say they're against helping more people vote. That won't go down too well with folks of color, and I dare say it won't go down too well with independents, either.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to close our detention center at the Guantánamo Bay once and for all. You'll remember that President Obama tried to close it, only to hear a bunch of not-in-my-backyard whining from Congressfolk of both parties (ain't bipartisanship grand?). ZOMG what if one of those terrorists had to be detained in my state? Those would be the "terrorists" our government literally couldn't charge with a crime after 10 years; if you can't charge someone with a crime after detaining them for 10 years, you're either incompetent or a fascist -- or, more likely, a fascist pretending to be incompetent. And don't brook any stupidity about folks we can't even call "terrorists" "returning" to terrorism, for Guantánamo Bay remains a stain on our collective soul as Americans, and we should scrub that stain right out. But remember: we don't locate America's greatness in our "infallibility," for only a coward or a fascist does that. We locate America's greatness in our struggle to right our wrongs. This is more our heritage than whatever OANN teaches is our heritage.

Meanwhile, our U.S. Election Assistance Commission (or EAC) plans to vote soon on the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0, which would ostensibly enhance election security -- if it didn't plan on allowing voting machines to have wireless devices in them! The standard actually says a voting machine can have a wireless device in it if the voting machine doesn't actually use it, but then why have it? So hackers can exploit the very presence of a wireless device and manipulate elections from afar? Somebody didn't think this through -- or, possibly, someone did. And funny thing, we actually convinced the EAC to include a strong wireless ban in its standards last year -- but now they want to water that standard down so that it's useless! I wonder who got to them. In any event, Public Citizen helps you tell our EAC to reject voting machines with wireless devices in them. Remember: if you don't trust wireless systems to handle your banking (and you shouldn't!), then you certainly can't trust wireless systems with your vote. And yes, elections were pretty secure in 2020, but that doesn't mean we sit back, it means we keep working.

Action: concerning COVID relief, impeachment, the filibuster, and keeping big tech out of our government.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Let's call our Reps and Senators and tell them, once again, to pass a vigorous COVID relief bill. Ignore the pablum from the chattering class about how the Biden plan isn't "bipartisan" enough! As far as I'm concerned, Republicans sacrificed their "right" to "bipartisan" consideration once they spent two months trying to overturn an election and then enabled a coup, and in any case they should listen more closely to their actual constituents, who support a $15/hour minimum wage and $2,000 monthly checks and funding for states and localities more than those who "represent" them want us to think. And if you're anxious about funding the bill, we could tax millionaire income at 91%, tax capital gains and corporate profits over $1 million at 55%, and tax million-dollar estates at 55%. We could also tax billionaire wealth, as Sen. Warren (D-MA) proposed even before billionaires made out like bandits in this pandemic! (Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax, regardless of whether it's part of a pandemic package or not.)

While you've got your Senators on the phone, tell them to convict Donald Trump of his impeachment charge, and prevent him from ever running for or holding office in America again. We all saw what happened on TV in real time, but nonetheless I'd like to note that two far-right former Congressfolk have made an excellent case for Mr. Trump's conviction. In a Roll Call op-ed provocatively titled "Republicans, If This Isn't Impeachable, What Is?", former Reps. Barbara Comstock of Virginia and Charles Boustany of Louisiana cite (among other things) the numerous actual threats Mr. Trump, his son, and his supporters made on January 6, plus they directly address the cowardly argument that it'd be "divisive" to convict him: "Some say we must move on. But it is clear that Trump and his mob still aren’t moving on. Trump, his family and supporters continue to threaten political revenge and have shown no remorse for their actions. Angry Trump supporters continue to make dangerous threats." See, it can't just be us who act civilized all the time -- it's a burden all civilized folks must bear.

Hate to make this phone call to your Senators extra long, but go ahead and tell them to end the filibuster, too. I know, I'd also prefer to make the filibuster an actual talking filibuster, and if that's what Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema really have in mind I'll give them all the credit in the world, but I doubt they're that slick, and I've been advocating the talking filibuster for over a decade now, and I know I'm not the only one, and I know all the alleged parliamentary geniuses in Congress can see the problem just as well as I can, and yet they do nothing about it, so we might as well speak the language that they understand. Don't brook any silliness about the "sanctity of the institution." What, exactly, is sacred about the filibuster? Sorry, Russell Kirk acolytes, but just because we've been doing it a certain way forever doesn't make it "sacred." The best the filibuster does for us is make it easy for Democrats to oppose bad bills when they're in the minority. That's not playing to win, though -- that's playing not to lose. And you don't value "the sanctity of the institution" over, you know, justice.

Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), No Big Tech helps you tell President Biden to reject putting big tech corporation lobbyists into positions in our government. Folks all over America are done worshiping CEOs, and even the politicians are starting to catch on, yet big tech CEOs still seem to wow politicians with their alleged smarts. But what have these Big Brains at Big Tech have gotten us? Easier ways to consume more art, and what else? Do we have a cure for cancer? No. Do we have a renewable energy grid? No. Do we have research bases on the moon and Mars? No -- though we do have "space tourism" for the wealthy. Do we have a cure for poverty? No -- though we do have big tech CEOs claiming we can retrain coal miners to write code like people can be so easily contorted. Even Tesla's electric cars sure are taking their sweet time coming down to the price a working family can afford. So how we get people in government who know what they're doing?

Action: concerning COVID relief, impeachment, the filibuster, and another polluting pipeline.

The Biden Administration apparently wants to get the American Rescue Plan through Congress badly enough that they put Vice President Harris on TV in Arizona and West Virginia (from which recalcitrant "moderate" Senators Sinema and Manchin hail) to plug the plan. Hence you may want to call your Reps and Senators (you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page -- or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone -- to find their phone numbers) and tell them how you feel about the plan. You may want to tell them that you want to keep the American Rescue Plan's $15/hour minimum wage, paid family leave, expanded funding for testing and vaccination, and expanded funding to states and localities, plus you'd add $2,000 checks every month and higher enhanced unemployment benefits, and you'd pay for it by repealing the CARES Act's massive hedge fund tax cut, plus a 55% tax on corporate profits and capital gains over $1 million and a 91% tax on income over $1 million. Hey, they're only supposed to negotiate with us!

While you've got your Senators on the phone, go ahead and tell them to convict Donald Trump of the incitement impeachment charge, and punish him by barring him from ever running for office again. Hey, actions have consequences! Or were conservatives lying every time they ever told us that? We're told we won't get very many Republican votes to convict, but duty is duty, and I don't just mean our duty to express our will, I mean the Senators' duty to do their job! You may be thinking that the failure of President Andrew Johnson's impeachment in the 1860s was "not that big a deal," but nothing could be further from the truth! When the Senate failed (by one vote!) to remove President Johnson, they signaled that America was done working to heal the damage caused by slavery; not long thereafter, Jim Crow flourished in the South, which meant another hundred years of direct damage to black folks in America. Surely our Senators don't want to be on the wrong side of history yet again.

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to end the filibuster now. As you know, I've said for many years that we need to reform the filibuster, by making Senators actually hold the floor and talk for 30 hours like Jimmy Stewart does in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, rather than simply signal their intention not to cut off debate and promptly go out to dinner or the theater. I don't regret saying that -- I was telling the truth as best I understood it at the time. But Republicans have abused the filibuster over the last dozen years or so, such that even the mildest reforms proposed by Barack Obama as President couldn't pass simply because Republicans still had 47 or 45 or 41 Senators, and (this is important!) because Republicans acted as a body in doing so, and because our "liberal" media did such a bad job covering these matters, no Republican Senator ever suffered for their obstruction. Actions have consequences, after all -- but Republican Senators won't suffer them unless we abolish the filibuster.

Finally, President Biden reversed former President Trump's Executive Order allowing further construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which effectively killed it, and no, I will not entertain yowling about TEH NINETIEZ THOUSANDZ OFZ TEH JOBZ LOSTZ!!!!!, because building pipelines that pollute our water table is not the only way to create jobs. Why, building out a national renewable energy grid would create a lot of jobs! But I digress, perhaps. The Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota would, if completed, spur many similar concerns about clean water and pipeline safety -- why, it was a mere 10 years ago that an Enbridge pipeline ruptured and caused the largest inland oil spill ever in America, ensuring that 40 square miles of the Kalamazoo watershed would be, ah, flavored with oil. Hence both Daily Kos and 350 Local Group Network help you tell President Biden to put an end to the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline as well. Hate to pile on, but Native American groups also oppose Line 3; maybe they get a say, too?

Action: concerning the filibuster, impeachment, and Fox News.

In light of the news that Senate Democrats won't get rid of the filibuster right away, you may want to call your Senators and tell them how you feel about that. Leave it to Mob Boss Mitch himself to accidentally tell us why we should get rid of the filibuster, in saying that getting rid of it would "destroy() the Senate as we know it" and turn it into a "scorched-earth Senate." You mean a "scorched-earth Senate" like the ones we had from 2008 to 2020, where no policy initiative that smelled of liberal cooties could pass because Mitch McConnell and Republicans would either filibuster it or refuse to give it a hearing? That sounds like a "Senate as we know it" we must "destroy." Yes, we could keep the filibuster if we made Senators actually speak until they're blue in the face, like we did in the old days. But I've said that a hundred times if I've said it once, and like most Americans, I'm so, so done with politicians who don't listen.

While you've got your Senators on the phone, tell them to convict Donald Trump of our House's impeachment charge and ban him from ever running for office in America again. The trial doesn't start for another week and a half or so, but it's never too early, and for once we've seen all the evidence of our President's criminal behavior we need to see on TV! Many Trumpholes will tell you that the attempted coup of January 6 "wasn't such a big deal," but just because this particular group of seditionists bollocksed it up so badly (taking selfies, posting to social media, etc.), that doesn't mean the next group of seditionists won't do a whole lot better, and frankly we've got to strangle this particular baby in its crib before it grows into an obese, rage-filled manchild. Some of the folks voting on this matter probably remember that fairly acutely -- or would, if they weren't so terrified of a primary challenge. Well, no one said being a Senator was easy. I mean, leadership roles never are, nor should be.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell a bunch of corporations to stop advertising with Fox News already. Fox News's decades-long trail of slime surely requires no summary, but certainly their recent actions -- advertising stupid "election fraud" theories, claiming that the January 6 attempted coup was somehow the work of antifa and not the right-wingers everyone could see doing it -- should spur big corporations to fear the Big Stick of Bad PR, as wielded by their customers. No, big corporations shouldn't "reach out" to the Fox News audience. The name of the game now isn't "reaching out" to right-wingers; the name of the game now is isolating them, until they finally feel the shame they've so richly earned. Then we can be all Parable of the Prodigal Son with them. Until then? Not so much as a Subaru ad on Fox News.

Around the table: how to deal with domestic terrorism, part 298.

"Fears Grow," says this Guardian article, "That Efforts to Combat U.S. Domestic Terrorism Can Hurt Minorities." Yeah, it "can," in a nation that prioritizes going after folks of color even though white supremacists commit most of the domestic terrorism. Rep. Tlaib is right to say the January 6 coup attempt had nothing to do with "not having enough tools," and in any case "use the tools you got" shouldn't just be about laws and law enforcement -- when right-wingers look around and find everyone's stopped talking to them, then they'll start to think twice.

The International Energy Agency (or IEA) says that the best solar power set-ups now offer the "cheapest...electricity in history." So that's the good news. The bad news is we're going to have to work a lot harder to head off the worst effects of climate change than the good news would have us think, since we're still not abandoning coal and oil fast enough. I guess we'll just leave it to our best and brightest entrepreneurs, then? I kid, of course -- if they were really our best and brightest we'd have solar-powered utilities now.

Surprise, surprise, our "liberal" media are starting to cover the whining of deficit peacocks again, now that voters have moved heaven and earth to take control of both Houses of Congress and the Presidency back from Republicans. Now, when one puts it like that, it sure makes all these folks wringing their hands over the deficit and their media enablers sound more like the assholes they actually are. Do they not remember how George W. Bush's bankster bailout ran up the deficit right before Barack Obama took office? Gosh, it's almost like it's a plan with these people.

Well, that sure didn't take long: QAnon votaries who were starting to feel a little used-like-a-wet-dishrag after Inauguration Day have glommed on to a new hope: that Donald Trump will be inaugurated President on March 4 as the "19th President" of the original American republic. I'm afraid I can't illuminate the labyrinthine reasoning that links the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871 with this latest Oncoming Storm because no reasonable person can, but I do know that the "sovereign citizens" who've historically banged this saucepan have never had a healthy relationship with Jews or folks of color.

Finally, Sen. McConnell described why he likes the filibuster this week, and I'll discuss this a little more in today's action post, but I thought I'd illuminate this line of reasoning: "If your legislation can't pass the Senate, you don't scrap the rules or lower the standards. You improve your idea, take your case to the people, or both." Sounds reasonable, right? Trouble is, all this "just make your argument better" stuff doesn't apply when the side that does all the filibustering doesn't have to make an argument at all -- they just say "no" to whatever argument you're making and then go home. Now, if they had to say no and then keep talking, Mr. McConnell would have a leg to stand on here, but they don't, so he doesn't. He knows all that, of course -- he just hopes you don't.

Action: concerning D.C. statehood and the filibuster.

You haven't forgotten about that little attempted coup from almost three weeks ago, have you? Well, as many observers have pointed out, if Washington, D.C. were a state, it'd have its own National Guard and wouldn't have had so much trouble repelling Y'all Qaeda from our Capitol. Republicans despise the idea of D.C. becoming a state, even though it has more residents than Vermont or Wyoming and almost as many as North Dakota or Alaska. Of course, Sen. Cotton (A-AK) thinks D.C. is entirely composed of lobbyists, which will surprise the hundreds of thousands of good citizens who've been living and working there all their lives, and Sen. Daines (R-MT) seems to think they're not "real people." Hate to pile on, but D.C. doesn't just suffer under "taxation without representation," as their license plates say -- they suffer under higher taxation than nearly half our states. Hence Free DC and Demand Progress help you tell your Reps and Senators to make Washington, D.C. our 51st state.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you tell Democratic Senate Majority Leader Schumer to reject Minority Leader McConnell's demand that Democrats preserve the filibuster during this session. I've long been against getting rid of the filibuster, and I could just restate my case again now off the top of my head, but fuck it -- 14 years is a long time to watch Republicans nullify the popular will again and again by stamping their feet and refusing to help pass even the mildest reforms. More than one observer has said that it's be a meaningless pledge anyway, since Democrats could still change the rules mid-session, but Democrats are also exactly the kind of politicians to "take the pledge seriously" so they'll have an excuse for not getting anything done, and then when they get buried by QAnon candidates in the 2022 midterms, they'll blame the liberals again. So lets do our best to deprive them of this stratagem.

UPDATE. Late last night, Sen. McConnell dropped his demand for a Democratic pledge to keep the filibuster -- because Sens. Manchin (D-WV) and Sinema (D-AZ) have publicly expressed their opposition to the idea. In a completely unrelated note, Sen. Manchin's D.C. phone number is 202.224.3954, and Sen. Sinema's is 202.224.4521. If you agreed with them once, as I did, you may want to describe why you changed your mind. You don't have to say "fuck it," like I did above.

Around the table: tabulating an unusually high number of setbacks to civilization, sorry.

Supreme Court stays various injunctions against our Administration's transgender military ban -- meaning the ban is in place until all the legal challenges thereto can be resolved. Seems to me the conservative thing to do would be to leave the injunctions in place and let the lower courts work it out, but apparently that's insufficiently conservative to this Court's "conservative" majority. Dig, also, our Administration Solicitor General whining about how many federal courts are now issuing used-to-be-rare injunctions against "major policy initiatives." That couldn't be because so many of your "major policy initiatives" break our laws, could it? What a snowflake.

Apparently because absurdity just isn't absurd enough, Vice President Pence compares our President to Martin Luther King, Jr., saying that both men have "inspired us to change." I guess he means to equate the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Open Housing Act with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which remains our President's only significant legislative "achievement." The only way our President has "inspired us to change" is that he's inspired so many more good Americans to confront corrupt bigoted assholes like him a lot more forcefully, but I don't praise or thank corrupt bigoted assholes for that, nor do I argue for their continuance in office because some good happens to come of their assholery.

Lo and behold, Senate Majority Leader/Obviously Great and Wonderful Real American Co-President Mitch McConnell, mere days after saying he won't allow a Senate vote on any shutdown-ending bill that wasn't obviously the result of spirited negotiations between Democrats, Republicans, and our President, now plans to bring a shutdown bill that meets precisely none of those criteria to a vote this week. No use lamenting that he has no principles, because folks like Mob Boss Mitch think principles are for us "little people," not their "betters," like him.

Buried in this article buying the Republican fiction that they can't get our President's nominees through quickly enough despite the fact that Democrats literally can't filibuster them anymore is Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) whining about how "(i)t's very difficult for a president to advance his or her agenda if you don’t have the right people in place." I also despise the holds and withdrawals of unanimous consent that comprise Senate Democrats' last tools to stall our President's nominees, but Sen. Young appears completely unconcerned about the people's right to advance their agenda through their representatives in Congress, or about our President's constitutionally-mandated duty to do the people's will. I don't give one rat's hind quarter about a President's "agenda," and that's how our Founders wanted us to be.

Finally, why does our "liberal" media suppose our President has ever been any kind of "deal-maker," like this shutdown mess should be some kind of surprise? It's not just that every "great deal" he's ever made only allowed him to suck out a bankrupt corporation's wealth like the vampire he is -- a good deal benefits everyone, not just the guy who makes it, but our "liberal" media haven't attended that aspect of deal-making in some time, so obsessed are they with "who wins" and "who loses" like everything's a damn horserace.

Around the table: what "free markets" really mean, and other important lessons.

Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gays from discrimination at the workplace. The word "gay" doesn't appear in the Civil Rights Act, but the Court ruled, essentially, that discriminating against gay workers isn't appreciably different from discriminating against workers because of their sex, which latter item is in the Civil Rights Act. An 11th Circuit panel reached the opposite conclusion last month, but don't bet that even a Neil Gorsuch-infused Supreme Court would strike down such a ruling, at least as long as Anthony Kennedy is still around.

One great economist, Paul Craig Roberts, briefly describes the work of another great economist, Michael Hudson. You'll learn how classical economists use the term "rent" (i.e., "an income stream that has no counterpart in cost incurred by the receipient of the income stream," not necessarily what you pay your landlord). Also, "(c)lassical economists, such as Adam Smith, understood a free market to be one in which taxation freed the economy from untaxed economic rents. In neoliberal economics, Hudson explains, 'free market' means freedom for rent extraction free of government taxation and regulation. This is a huge difference." And if you were to suddenly see rents everywhere in this economy, you wouldn't be alone.

Third-party private tax collectors will begin operating soon, and given all the The Consumerist tells you what you need to know. Long story short: the IRS won't outsource just any old tax collection effort, you'll still get written notices from the IRS and the private collector before you get any phone calls, the private collector still can't call you just any old time, you can opt out of working with the private collector, and private collectors will by law direct you to pay the IRS, not them. I'd still prefer the IRS just did all the work they're mandated to do, though of course they can't mainly because Republicans have been starving their budget for years.

From the "Racism is Not Dead" department: a ProPublica analysis of four states finds car insurance corporations charging higher premiums to folks in minority neighborhoods, though these folks don't actually cost car insurers more! This "may amount to a subtler form of redlining," they say, which is quite an understated way of putting it. You'll also find that the article includes many criticisms of its methods -- and refutes just about all of them. (That doesn't stop the trolls in the comment section, because what reason ever stopped a troll?)

Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect thinks "Republicans have made a key miscalculation in their decades-long strategy of attacking social programs," since their white working-class supporters need these programs more and more now. I'm sure the poll figures cited are quite accurate, but I remember saying a long time ago that folks would be more sanguine toward food stamps as they knew more people using them (or had to use them themselves) and I'm just not seeing it. All that seems to happen is that the 25% of this country that's bat-guano crazy (a sector which, sadly, overlaps pretty well with "downwardly-mobile whites") just gets crazier.

Finally, Republicans get rid of filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, clearing the way for the confirmation of Judge Gorsuch to the high court. And Sen. McConnell (E-KY) had this to say: "There cannot be two sets of standards: one for the nominees of the Democratic president and another for the nominee of a Republican president." Of course, the Republican standard for "nominees of the Democratic President" is to completely fail to even hold hearings, which they did in 2016, and were planning to do if Mrs. Clinton won the Presidency, and surely would have done in 2009, too, if they'd had a Senate majority then. Good citizens of Kentucky, could you please turn out this clown in 2020? And Democrats: how about running candidates who might inspire people to vote for them?

Action: fighting government spying on Muslims and Donald Trump's Cabinet of Horrors.

Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to reject any attempt by our government to monitor Muslim-American citizens in violation of our Constitution. Apparently, Rep. King (R-NY) has pushed for just such a program, based on the New York city Police Department's "Demographics Unit," which was so wildly unsuccessful and unpopular (setting up cameras outside Muslim-owned stores and community centers, putting spies in Muslim communities) that they called it a "demographics unit." Monitoring Americans once you get a warrant from a judge is perfectly lawful and constitutional, but monitoring good Americans merely on the basis of their religious beliefs certainly violates the First Amendment, which protects folks from oppression by their government merely for their speech or religious beliefs. Of course, when Republicans bring up their so-called First Amendment Defense Act early next year, we'll have to remind them that the First Amendment only protects your right to speech and belief, not your right to deny other people their rights because of your beliefs. But we'll get there, too.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject all of Donald Trump's reactionary Cabinet nominees, then the appropriately-named Block Trump's Cabinet still helps you do that. You remember Barack Obama's first slate of appointees? Some of them were pretty good (though Lisa Jackson at EPA is the only one that springs to mind presently) while some others (Timothy Geithner, Tom Vilsack, and Tom Daschle are, sadly, easier to remember!) were pretty awful. Not so with Donald Trump's first slate of appointees, who are all awful -- the objectively pro-racist Attorney General nominee, the objectively pro-pollution Secretary of State and EPA Administrator nominees, the objectively pro-bankster Commerce and Treasury nominees, and the objectively pro-government spying CIA nominee (you remember, the one who thinks people who use encryption are probably guilty of something?). Please remember that, thanks to short-sighted Democrats in the Senate majority back in 2013, that Presidential appointees (outside of the Supreme Court) can no longer be filibustered -- which means you have to contact your Republican Senators, too.

Around the table: a surprising (and amusing!) announcement from the Trump campaign, and other stories.

From Stephanie Woodard at In These Times, we learn that police kill Native Americans at a higher rate than any other ethnic group -- but the "liberal" media hardly covers these killings. I would caution against using this fact to tell black folks they have nothing to complain about, because they finish second in a race you really don't want to earn a medal in. Still, though tales of mistreatment of Native Americans are every bit as vivid as tales of mistreatment by black folks, we don't talk about it nearly as much, which could be because of Black Lives Matter's mobilization efforts, but could also be because we can only feel guilty about one thing at a time in America.

The Economic Policy Institute offers a lengthy primer about the gender pay gap. You probably already know that adjusting for simliar levels of training, experience, and expertise doesn't make the gender pay gap go away, but you may not know that the gap is actually worse the higher up you go on the pay scale -- because at the low end, minimum wage laws have a more profound leveling effect -- and you may also not know that the gap has narrowed over the last 35 years not necessarily because we're getting so much better at being fairer, but because men's wages have gone down over that period. There may be other things you may not know, but you'll never know unless you read the article.

Outgoing Senate minority leader Harry Reid says Democrats will likely get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees if they retake the Senate this fall. And it's still a bad idea, just like it was when Democrats got rid of the filibuster for almost all Presidential nominees back in 2013. The better solution remains two-fold: get rid of Senate holds on bills and nominations, and make politicians work for their filibuster by actually speaking, instead of signaling their willingness to filibuster and then go off to dinner. I'd certainly be happy to look like a fool to stop, say, Estate Tax repeal, so why aren't Republicans willing to look like fools to stop, say, campaign finance reform? We'll just never understand.

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway suggests that Mr. Trump would like to have another debate with Hillary Clinton between now and Election Day. No truth to the rumor that Hillary Clinton's has campaign responded, "why, yes, that's a great idea! How does November 7 look?"