Thieves in the Temple.

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?"

Around the table: the liberal love for George W. Bush, and other absurdities.

Sen. Bernie Sanders delivers a withering Jeremiad denouncing banksters and the chaos and drama they cause in our economy. He's got good policy prescriptions, and he even backs up his statement that "the business model on Wall Street is fraud" pretty well (i.e., he notes that even banksters believe that's true). But I'd go further: why not a 7% cap on credit card rates, versus a 15% cap? And how about a 2% cap on mortgage rates? Believe me, banks will still make money under these conditions -- they just won't make enough to write the tax laws so they can make even more money doing nothing.

And what are Mr. Sanders' potential Republican opponents up to? Running campaign ads in Iowa and New Hampshire about terrorism and ISIS and who'll "chop" their "head" off and who's "serious" about fighting them, that's what. Well, they say talk about what you know, and these guys know fearmongering. Seriously, we could have made these two paragraphs a Goofus and Gallant strip.

Praise the Lord that Amanda Girard reminds us of "Five Taxpayer Handouts the Bundys Receive While Railing Against Government 'Tyranny.'" Not just in subsidies or "animal damage control" or Small Business Administration loans, either -- grazing on federal land costs ranchers less than seven cents on every dollar that private landowners charge, and ranchers also get a massive Big Gummint discount when they lease federal land directly. But you already got all that information from the "liberal" media when that whole Cliven Bundy thing blew up in 2014, right? I kid, of course.

Senate Republicans mull plan to end pre-debate filibusters on the Senate floor. Always the majority party wants to slash away at the filibuster and the minority party wants to keep it, and it doesn't matter which party is which -- Democratic majorities famously ended the filibuster for budget resolutions in the early '90s and also for Presidential judicial appointments a little over two years ago, that last item after minority Democrats decried Republican attempts to do the same in the mid-2000s. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the Senate needs to get rid of holds (which are the real obstruction) and force Senators to sustain filibusters by actually talking for hours on end, rather than signifying their intent to filibuster and then going out to dinner.

Consistently-ignored Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee says that "a lot" of Christian leaders on the right are "scared to death" that a President Huckabee might actually end abortion, because then they "wouldn’t have the ability to do urgent fundraising because if we slay the dragon, what dragon do they continue to fight?" And you know what? He's likely right about that -- you may recall Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) saying something even harsher about certain Tea Party groups. And I can never shake the feeling that Democrats threw the last two midterm elections so they could fundraise off the crazy things all these newly-elected Republicans would say.

Finally, John C. O'Day, writing at FAIR, finds a lot of liberal commentators suddenly pining away for the good old days of George W. Bush, specifically because Mr. Bush didn't publicly demonize Muslims like a lot of today's Republican Presidential candidates do. This is a grim development, but not a surprising one -- I began many sentences during the Bush years with "at least Reagan didn't." But we have to work against thinking Bush-wasn't-so-bad when what's really happening is that our politicians keep getting worse, and will keep doing so until we a) stop the money-flow to their campaigns and b) force big telecom corporations to offer cable channels a la carte.

Around the table: more observations about the ongoing slow-motion wreck that is American politics.

William Greider, writing at The Nation sees in the ongoing GOP House caucus chaos "the final unraveling of Nixon's 'Southern strategy.'" That is, perhaps, an optimistic assessment. I'm more inclined to think that voters swayed by the Southern strategy don't really want to accomplish anything -- they want to feel rage and then get attention for their rage, which means the business wing of the party can eventually patronize them and then go back to using them to win elections. One can only hope the business wing of the party is as bad at strategy as they now are at business.

In a related note, Francis Wilkinson says that the "Archconservatives' Real Enemy is Democracy." That's true, of course -- a lot of far-right fools will reveal as much with startlingly little prodding -- and I'm glad to see that Mr. Wilkinson also sees no difference between the Freedom Caucus's aims and "mainstream" Republican aims. But could he kick the word "conservative" out of his description of the far right? They don't deserve it. They deserve the word "reactionary."

Mike Huckabee -- he's still running for President, isn't he? -- says "I trust Bernie Sanders with my tax dollars like I trust a North Korean chef with my labrador!" Now that he's had the "courage" to say something that racist, maybe he'll jump to double-digits in the polls! Seriously, though, the sight of grown men jumping up and down to get attention gets downright sickening after a while.

Various Republicans declare they're disgusted with the Senate filibuster and would like to get rid of it. They shouldn't -- they should make Senators earn it by actually talking. Both parties have been absolutely ridiculous about this matter in recent years, each one declaring it an evil when they're in the majority and a necessity when they're in the minority with no apparent recollection of having ever felt differently. But Republicans should consider that if they get rid of the filibuster, and Democrats win the Presidency and retake the House and the Senate in 2016 (not outside the realm of possibility, this!), and actually do some good things for the American people, Republicans might lose their low-turnout midterm advantage in 2018.

Finally, "sources" say that Sen. McConnell (E-KY) wants "significant changes" to Social Security and Medicare, along with a rollback of clean water regulations, in exchange for getting a budget passed and raising the debt limit. Never mind "negotiation" -- in a sane and healthy society, supporting these policy initiatives (let alone holding our government's funding and credit hostage to them!) would destroy political careers, for who besides an ideologue supports dirty water or a weakened Medicare or Social Security? But I guess that just means we have a lot more work to do.

Around the table: three more Supreme Court decisions and lots more right-wing gasbaggery.

U.S. Supreme Court rules that the EPA did not "lawfully" consider cost to polluting corporations when writing its air toxics rule, meaning they should've considered that cost much earlier in the rule-making process than they did. But Justice Scalia should not suggest that the health benefits of clean air amount to "a few dollars," since that's inaccurate and it's his job to know better.

However, Justice Scalia also authored a Supreme Court ruling striking down the federal "three strikes" law, writing that the law's definition of "violent felony" is too "shapeless a provision to condemn someone to prison for 15 years to life." That's stirring -- of course I was tempted to say he has a lot of compassion for white supremacists (like the plaintiff in the case that prompted this ruling), but he's been against the "violent felony" provision for years.

The Supreme Court also upheld Arizona's independent commission for redrawing Congressional districts, ruling that, while Article One of the U.S. Constitution specifically states that state legislatures determine "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives," when the people vote on a ballot initiative (such as the one that created the commission), they essentially become a legislature. This is no small victory -- if the Court had interpreted "legislature" more literally, they could have wound up hampering ballot initiatives all over America.

Texas's Attorney General says county clerks can refuse marriage licenses to gay couples based on their "religious objections." Again, I'm not seeing how that's different from refusing to issue licenses to interracial couples based on "religious objections." It's enough to make a man wish President Obama would send in the National Guard to enforce the ruling. (Yes, I'm well aware of the difficulties in doing so; that's why I said "wish.")

Obama Administration lifts requirement that marijuana research protocols receive a "Public Health Service review" before proceeding. No other Schedule I drug (which pot shouldn't even be) needs this kind of review before research on it can proceed, and politicians on both sides of the political spectrum (including some who oppose legalization!) have advocated lifting that review process. So we have another instance of small government working.

Finally, Jeb Bush said he'd consider getting rid of the Senate filibuster in the context of repealing the Affordable Care Act. Senate Republicans have abused the filibuster mightily and cried like brats when Democrats (inadvisedly!) ended the filibuster for Presidential nominations in 2013 -- which Republicans had just tried to do in 2005! -- but whatever; this is just more right-wing swordfighting. We should just bring back the actual filibuster, and get rid of this absurd and cowardly version where Senators signal a filibuster and then go out for martinis.

Around the table: more good news from Election Day...and more "liberal" media "advice" after Election Day.

Scott Baker at Op-Ed News lists a few more victories from our recent Election Day debacle. Key finding: politicians constantly whine about spending money on public projects, but voters don't often feel the same way, approving massive infrastructure spending projects in no less than 11 states. People actually do want their politicians to spend money on worthwhile projects, and complaining about "corruption" in that context is pointless noise if one can produce no actual evidence of corruption.

Ho hum, another bad day for Democrats, another slew of "liberal" media outlets arguing that the lesson is for Democrats to move to the right. Exit polls find economic populism to be, well, popular, but who cares, when there's bipartisanship to be had? After you read the "liberal" media's counsel and you hear Mitch McConnell suddenly talk about the value of "bipartisanship" after all these years, you may be reminded that "bipartisanship," for the "liberal" media, seems to mean Democrats and Republicans coming together to do whatever Republicans want.

Mike Konczal advocates "shrinking" the financial sector to promote more equitable economic growth. You already know the financial sector's too big because banksters go to some length to obscure its workings, and also because you've suspected that "finance has increased inequality by convincing corporate executives and asset managers that corporations must be judged not by the quality of their products and workforce but by one thing only: immediate income paid to shareholders." Conservatives are supposed to be about the long haul, but modern-day "conservatives" are only about getting money now, rather than providing services to people, as even 1990s conservatives believed.

The New Republic thinks that Senate Democrats should use the filibuster as "ruthlessly" as Republicans did. I disagree: of course you should filibuster awful legislation whenever it rears its ugly head, but bad behavior is bad behavior no matter who does it, and I still favor filibuster reform that makes Senators actually stand up and talk for 24 or 48 hours, rather than merely block legislation painlessly and go home. Even the "liberal" media can't put lipstick on a pig that actually stands up for 48 hours stopping a minimum wage hike or campaign finance disclosure.

Julia Angwin at ProPublica discusses the best encryption tools for internet communications. I invite those folks who still think big corporations create innovative products to list the major corporations creating the more highly-regarded products Ms. Angwin discusses. Spoiler alert: there's one, and it's Apple, and it's still well down the list. Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook are rather further down. Most of your innovation, here as elsewhere, comes from small businesses.

Finally, another study finds that shift work actually impairs thinking and remembering. Every 10 years on shift work ages you about 6.5 years, as far as your cognitive abilities, and n.b. that "shift work" includes second-shift work, because you probably don't get to bed before midnight. The good news? Once out of shift work for five years, your abilities recover. Still, the lead doctor suggests "design(ing) work schedules...that minimize the disruption of the body clock," a schedule which could include "not working very many nights in a row." I'm all for that, and somewhere, someone running a hospital is probably all for that, too.

Around the table: blows against sanity!

After multitudinous Republican filibusters against President Obama's Executive branch appointees, Senate Democrats vote to bar filibusters against all such appointees except Supreme Court Justice nominees. I still think that's a big mistake -- don't Democrats remember that Republicans wanted to do exactly this in 2005? I opposed it then, and I oppose it now. Still, hearing Mitch McConnell say Republicans have been very fair to Mr. Obama's nominees doesn't exactly garner my sympathy. You may recall that Mr. McConnell is the man who filibustered his own bill late last year.

Oklahoma's state-owned National Guard facilities will no longer offer benefits to any married couples, rather than give spousal benefits to same-sex couples. Pro-family policies at work! Those same-sex couples can get spousal benefits at one of five federal National Guard facilities, but that might be a long drive, since Oklahoma ain't a small place; I'd be interested to see if the Supreme Court calls that an "undue burden" upon same-sex couples. But isn't this a long way to go, Oklahoma, just to appease bigots?

David Dayen instructs us that we shouldn't be jumping for joy over the $13 billion settlement JP Morgan Chase made with our government. Apparently the reported $13 billion includes other costs from another settlement, but the bigger deal is that the principal reductions might actually hurt homeowners, as their reductions get counted as income and thus subject to unexpected tax hits.

In a peripherally-related note, Jesse Eisenstein at ProPublica notes that Mr. Obama's nominee for Commodity Futures Trading Commission, one Thomas Massad, is a bit of a blank slate. He could be the fellow who supposedly pushed back against Bank of America while running the bailout, or he could be the fellow who frequently clashed with bailout special inspector general Neil Barofsky, a man who should be a hero to Americans. I'm leaning toward the latter, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

Finally, Monica Potts at The American Prospect describes a fairly successful program that helps poor New Yorkers save money by diverting some of their tax refunds into a savings account, and then matching the money they save (at about 50 cents on the dollar) over the course of a year . Such programs just so happen to have a lot of conservative support -- building as they do on the Earned Income Tax Credit, a Reagan-era achievement -- but guess how eager today's "conservatives" are to take such programs national.

President Obama plans to urge Congress to gradually shut down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, "seeking to buffer taxpayers from future housing market downturns." But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, one more time, didn't cause the housing bubble to burst -- banksters and their hifalutin financial "instruments" did that. I guess Mr. Obama figures that because he got Dodd-Frank passed, he can do something for the right wing. Wrong again. He can do the people's will, because that's his job.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post. I suppose I should applaud any business icon who espouses "long-term thinking," since the major problem with today's economy is that big corporations want all the goodies right now, but he's against folks like himself paying more in taxes, though a 91% tax bracket would force all those CEOs to think about the future. And note well how paragraph 6 blames "the epochal change from print to digital technology," and not the Post's shilling for an ever-more unpopular class of American elites, for the Post's problems. Also note well that Mr. Bezos is one of those elites.

Another day, another liberal who sees nothing wrong with getting rid of the filibuster, because of demographic trends and because Republicans suck so bad they won't elect many Presidents in the foreseeable future. It's like some people have no recollection of the filibuster saving the Estate Tax in 2006, or of how 9.11 rescued a walking-dead Presidency. It's also like they can't type out the words "talking filibuster" without their hands seizing up. And Scott Walker can win in 2016, especially if the economy's still bad. And Brian Sandoval can win even if it's not.

Want to read one of the worst arguments ever? I don't care if she raised Temple Grandin, Eustacia Cutler argues like a right-winger, one who'd make Jonah Goldberg seem lucid, no less -- she seems to think autism equals masculinity equals lack of empathy equals obsessive logicality equals computer fixation equals pornography equals child porn, plus maybe fathers should go to more autism conferences. Nary a fact nor piece of research sullies this free-associative trip (and the "80 to 90% divorce rate" in autistic families is crap-with-crap-sauce, by the way). And what's with all the sentence fragments?

Ted Nugent instructs us that Trayvon Martin "got" justice, because, you know, he was a troublemaker, and Ted doesn't need to actually prove that, because he can spot trouble a mile away. I bet I know how he can spot it, too. You know what? Ted Nugent just wants attention now. He's done getting it from this space.

With Senate Democrats and Republicans reaching an agreement to avoid changing filibuster rules -- Senate Republicans will graciously allow a vote on several Obama Administration nominees in exchange -- Daily Kos helps you tell the Senate to make the filibuster into a talking filibuster. Senators should actually have to talk to maintain a filibuster, as Rand Paul did for 13 hours not long ago; now they just "signal their intent" to filibuster and then go home, and that makes too many cowards far too powerful. I've received a few dozen action alerts over the past week calling for an end to the Senate filibuster entirely, but I didn't pass any of them along; I'm fully aware that calling for the filibuster's end was, for some, a negotiating tactic, but I'm a citizen, not a politico, and we citizens must advocate for what we believe to be right. They call it "honest counsel" for a reason, after all.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has begun investigating collusion on the part of BP, Shell, and Statoil, going back to 2002. The EC suggests that the three corporations might have violated European Union antitrust rules against reporting distorted prices and shutting other actors out of the price-reporting process. Sounds pretty arcane, doesn't it? But I'll bet the resulting inflated prices at the pump don't seem arcane. And you have to wonder why the United States doesn't investigate -- after all, BP and Shell are household names here, too. You have to wonder even more when you recall that Mr. Obama told Mr. Holder to monitor oil and gas prices back in 2011, and Mr. Holder launched the Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group in order to do just that. I guess they ain't been doing very much working, so Public Citizen helps you tell the Justice Department to stop fraud in the oil sector.

In other news, Facebook still mulls letting children under 12 join up. What's the big deal? Children can't deal with sophisticated advertising, that's the big deal -- I was a relatively intelligent child and I was positively helpless in the face of TV ads. Praise the Lord that my parents and grandparents kept me on the straight and narrow! And TV advertising in the '70s was nowhere near as sophisticated as social media advertising is today -- even parents have little understanding of how facebook turns every photo and comment and click into a dossier that corporations can use to target you. And hello? Adults don't always grasp the ins and outs of relating to people and sharing information with them online; how much more difficult must that be for children? Thus the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood still helps you tell Facebook to avoid flinging ads at kids. I don't claim that parents should get a break from being parents. But I don't think corporations need to make parenting so much harder, either.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to require corporations to disclose all the chemicals they use when fracking on federal lands, then the Center for Effective Government still helps you do that. The BLM's current proposal lets corporations keep a few of their chemicals secret, and allows "disclosure" to a website funded by the gas drilling industry, and there is just no possibility for a conflict of interest there, no sir! Gas drillers often cite the need for "trade secrets." I've said it before and I'll say it again: no "right" to keep information secret from competitors trumps the people's right to know what the hell corporations are pumping into their water table. And if gas drillers want to use public lands, they have to play by public rules -- the people's rules, that is. It's a shame the BLM doesn't quite seem to grasp that. We'll have to tell them until they do.

House passes Farm Bill completely devoid of food stamp funding; they say they'll pass a separate food stamps bill later, perhaps at about the moment monkeys fly out of my butt. And they made big corporate agricultural subsidies permanent! It's like they're trying to do everything wrong. You know it's bad when Rod Frickin' Dreher quotes Ross Frickin' Douthat to tell you how monstrous the House Farm Bill is. (That The American Conservative printed it isn't a big surprise, though.)

TPM's Sahil Kapur says that Mr. McConnell may have lost the filibuster battle, but he's winning the war to enshrine a permanent minority obstructive force in the Senate. But that force could be broken by making Senators actually talk their way through filibusters -- when Senators have to make fools of themselves in public, and when good citizens will scratch their heads at our Senators yammering for hours on end about (for example) the "evils" of campaign finance disclosure, we'll see less obstruction, and the world will be a better place.

North Carolina state legislature passes an abomination of a tax "reform" "plan." Long story short: the rich get richer, the poor get shafted, because God and also because jobs. Anyone else want to forcibly eject North Carolina from our Union? We'll airlift the Moral Monday protestors out first. (Citizens for Tax Justice has more.)

Another day, another "liberal" media hack telling us that reinstating Glass-Steagall really isn't a good idea. Mr. Matthews actually tells us that the Warren-McCain bill's definition of "securities entity" is "pretty airtight," which is pretty much what you need to know, but n.b. that he (like others) says diversification is good for banks, as if we should give one rat's hind quarter what's good for banks at the expense of what's good for the American people. And he, like others, tells us that Alan Greenspan's Fed basically eviscerated Glass-Steagall, as if that's Glass-Steagall's fault and not Alan Greenspan's fault.

Now Daily Kos calls on Harry Reid to do away with the filibuster for Presidential appointees and judicial nominees. I reject this call -- rather, I call upon the Senate to make their members sustain a filibuster by actually talking for hours on end about a subject. But this short-sightedness is appalling -- does Daily Kos not remember that a mere eight years ago Republicans wanted to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees? Do they remember what they thought about it then? I do. I hope Mr. Reid merely means to make Mr. McConnell cave on a few nominees, like Messrs. Perez and Cordray.

David Koch thinks getting rid of the minimum wage will help the poor. Because getting fewer dung pellets always helps them! As a side issue: does a putative "avalanche of regulations" create "a culture of dependency"? I think regulation prevents a culture of dependency -- a culture of dependency upon corporations. And it's hard to say you're "dependent on government" when it's your government. One more thing: when Mr. Koch talks about "the mobility of labor" I'm pretty sure he wants to exercise that mobility, not you.

As you know, federally-subsidized student loan rates doubled on July 1, and the Senate, again, couldn't agree on a way to cut it back. Which is to say, only 51 of 100 Senators wanted to keep the old 3.4% rate. I maintain that getting rid of the filibuster is not a solution -- if we made Senators work for their filibusters, they'd make fools of themselves and they'd filibuster less. Speaking of fools, I'm starting to wonder whether we'd all have been better off with another term for a do-nothing moderate in Maine than with Angus King.

From the "This Used to Be the Future" file: CNN wonders why we don't all work 15-hour weeks, like our intelligentsia thought we would by now. And takes 11 paragraphs to get to the obvious answer: because we wouldn't make enough money! And still mainly blames consumerism, which I'll grant doesn't help. Should I give them credit for noting, right off the bat in paragraph 11, that "income gains (in recent decades) have been disproportionately distributed"? Not as much as I'd give them if they'd said "technology has made workers more productive -- and delivered the wealth that production created to their bosses."

Indiana "reforms" its criminal code, with the "unintended" consequence that any same-sex couple filing for a marriage license in Indiana could get 18 months in jail! Also, any state official or clergy member performing a gay marriage could get six months in jail. The Supreme Court would strike down that restriction on Indiana clergy with a quickness. No, I'm not kidding.

Finally, Elizabeth Hasselback, until two days ago the token right-winger on ABC's The View, will join Fox and Friends in the middle of September. And THAT! IS THE MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! HAVE EVER! HEARD!