Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning voting rights, defense spending, health care, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, cut defense spending, lower prescription drug prices, and strengthen the food stamps program. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would authorize our Justice Department to pre-clear any voting rights changes from any state or locality with a history of vote suppression – and not just certain Southern states, as the original Voting Rights Act mandated (and which mandate our Supreme Court struck down in 2013). Granted, most of the states and localities suppressing the vote the hardest are still in the South, but this bill would restore the teeth our Supreme Court knocked out of the Voting Rights Act. And we all need that bill to have some more bite again.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the People Over Pentagon Act. We spend as much money on defense as the next eight countries on that list combined, and how did that do for us in Iraq and Afghanistan? I’ll tell you how well it did: it proved the old conservative saw that you can’t just throw money at a problem! But, as any liberal will tell you, you can improve good Americans’ lives by spending tax money wisely, and ensuring that defense contractor CEOs can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home while depriving good Americans of, say, paid family/medical leave or health care funding definitely isn’t wise. But they’ll keep doing it, until we make them stop.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. I guess with Eli Lilly’s announcement that it’ll cap insulin prices, our Congressfolk will say it proves that “only private sector action creates lasting change.” But, ah, insulin is just one drug, other big pharma corporations haven’t capped insulin costs, and without our FTC’s announcement of action against the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (or PBMs) that jack up prices as much as or more than big pharma greed, Eli Lilly might not have capped those costs, either. Of course I mention that FTC action because it proves government can help create lasting change in America – but only if we demand it.

Finally, Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, otherwise known as food stamps. Because weakening it is a stupid idea! Yes, I, too, have heard stories about folks getting food stamps when they’re not supposed to, but that’s a separate issue from ensuring everyone who needs them can get them. No, really, fraud is always a separate issue. You’re supposed to stamp out fraud and bring fraudsters to justice! That’s the law-and-order position! But you’re not supposed to let the mere presence of fraud make you throw up your hands and stop doing the right thing. That’s what bad people want, and why should they get all the say about everything?

Action: concerning immigration, food stamps, college for all, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Texas state legislators to reject an anti-immigrant bill, and tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to cut food stamps and pass the College for All Act and the Social Security Expansion Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: Free and Fair Democracy helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject the notorious SB 147, which would prevent immigrants from owning homes in that state. Always they say we gotta do something about foreigners owning American land, but this bill doesn’t even target Chinese corporations! No, it targets regular folks, who are just trying to make a go of it like the rest of us. SB 147’s sponsor, no doubt reveling in all the attention, says she’ll amend the bill to exempt immigrants who’ve actually gone through the system (including dual citizens). I’ve got another way to protect those good people: strangle this damn bill, and any like it, in its crib.

Republicans want to cut food stamps again, so you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them NFW. With apologies to Bill Maher, I propose a new rule: you don’t get to complain about high inflation and then cut food stamps! That may be even worse than complaining about inflation and then rejecting the Child Tax Credit expansion that put hundreds of dollars in working families’ bank accounts every month in 2021. Food stamps may have a bad name thanks to right-wing propaganda, but any of us might need them someday, and it’s cruel to take away something that helps working families deal with still-too-high prices. So we need to get in their grills about this right away.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act. Don’t think of this as being about TEH FREE STUFFZ FORZ TEH YOUNGZ PEEPULZ!!!!! Think of it as being about restoring the reality of 60 years ago, when state colleges were generally free for state residents; that’s just one thing that helped build the greatest middle class in world history. Of course, right-wingers said the last thing you want is an educated working class, and so Our Glorious Elites have spent the last few decades making higher ed unaffordable. But we need to fix that, so we can, dare I say, make America educated again.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would at long last tax millionaire income into the system and expand benefits for everyone. Our Glorious Elites pretend that cutting Social Security is the “bold” move, but you don’t cut a program that everyone likes and that works well because of large budget deficits caused largely by Republican tax cuts for the rich – you expand that program! Cutting Social Security because blah blah get mandatory spending under control bullshit bullshit – isn’t “bold” so much as it’s stupid. And we have a duty, as Americans, not to tolerate stupidity.

Action: concerning Social Security, Medicare, food assistance, and taxing the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect Social Security and Medicare, approve additional food assistance spending, and pass a Billionaires’ Mininum Income Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Social Security and Medicare. From whom? From Republicans, of course, who have actually come out and said that if they take either or both houses of Congress next week, they’ll take the debt limit hostage again so they can force benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare. You know, as opposed to the Medicare cost cuts Democrats passed in the Inflation Reduction Act, the same cost cuts Republicans are trying to portray as benefit cuts! They really do live in an up-is-down world, but if they take either or both houses of Congress, they’ll try to force us to live in that world, too. And that’s why we communicate our will early and often.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to approve the $100 million they’ve already authorized for the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which, as its name suggests, helps working families who can’t get enough food from our “free” market. Don’t fall prey to “this program only helps Those People” horsedoodle, because you could be one of “those people” at any time if you lose your job. Politicians keep acting like programs taxpayers pay for could never help them. Gosh, I wonder why that is. And by “I wonder why that is” I mean “they mean to keep voters in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage as they pick their pockets.”

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax. From spring 2020 to spring 2022, billionaires’ net worth increased 70% – did your net worth increase 70% during that time? No, it more likely went down, since you were more likely out of work at the beginning of that time! And sadly, while all that extra money doesn’t buy happiness, it sure does buy politicians (cough Kyrsten Sinema cough) who’ll let them pay less in taxes than working families do. You want to know what else it could buy? Programs we all benefit from even if we don’t actually fall on hard times.

Action: concerning baby formula, Medicare for All, paid leave, drug prices, and price-gouging.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fix the baby formula crisis, expand Medicare to include all Americans, pass paid family/sick leave, lower drug prices and expand home health care, and pass a windfall profits tax on oil and gas corporations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. You've heard of the national baby formula shortage, which is a matter of life and death for a lot of babies? Matt Stoller explains why it's happening -- short answer: monopolies -- and prescribes solutions, which you may call your Congressfolk about. These solutions include: temporarily allowing baby formula imports, particularly from nations with good (or better) food safety regulations; restructuring food stamp markets so they don't create baby formula monopolies; and breaking up our FDA so that one agency doesn't regulate both food and drugs. We may not get the change we need right away, but if we keep at it, it will. And if we do nothing, we'll get nothing.

National Nurses United helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare to include all Americans. Medicare for All will cover more folks for less money, end of story. Don't believe me? Believe the right-wing Mercatus Center, which tabulated the cost of Medicare for All at $32 trillion over 10 years -- or some $17 trillion less than the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid's forecast of all health care spending over the next decade. How do you pay for it, then? Simple: assess an employer-side payroll tax (meaning workers don't pay it!) amounting to what big corporations already pay for the private health insurance that rejects your claims for no good reason and doesn't cover everyone.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family and sick leave for all Americans. Since right-wingers constantly squeal WHEREZ WILLZ YOUZ FINDZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!!, I'll note that Sen. Gillibrand's original bill would have funded it with a 0.4% payroll tax (half paid by the employer, half by the worker), which, for someone making $50,000 annually, would amount to a little over $8 a month. $8! So everyone can take time off to take care of their kids, or their parents, or their grandparents, or themselves when they need to. And I'd fund it by bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and the 55% tax on corporate profits, which wouldn't be "socialism" so much as "what we did in the 1950s."

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices and expand at-home health care services. Most people want these things, so why can't Congress do it? Because Republicans won't do it! And also because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema won't do it, because they think they're so much smarter than everyone else! In 2 1/2 years if not sooner, these fools will be shown the error of their ways; wouldn't it be nice if a massive popular outcry helped them see the error of their ways sooner? That goes for your Republican Reps and Senators, too. If enough of us speak out, then doing nothing will actually get them fired for once.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. Because sky-high prices shouldn't lead to sky-high profits! I'm old enough to remember when corporations didn't raise prices solely because of increased costs. Why? Partly because shame still meant something back then, and also partly because we had fewer monopolies then, so we had a higher chance of finding a corporation that wouldn't rob you merely because it had the opportunity. Now they just gouge us because they can. If we pass a windfall profits tax on them, then they can't.

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

Long story short: tell President Biden to actively oppose the Senate filibuster, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, end hedge fund predatory behavior, and pass the Break the Cycle of Violence Act and the MEAL Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: of "labor shortages" and "trust issues."

Biden Administration withdraws Trumphole "public charge" proposal that could have prevented three million good Americans from getting food stamps. Not a big lift, admittedly, since a federal judge first blocked the rule and then tossed it completely, but perhaps the Biden Administration thought it might be a good time to remind everyone that the American Rescue Plan (for which exactly zero Republicans voted) expanded food stamps for families of four by $100 a month. That's the kind of thing people remember come election time -- versus, you know, the 2009 Making Work Pay tax cut that was literally designed not to be noticed.

The Economic Policy Institute's Heidi Shierholz urges Republicans not to "Ignore the Evidence on 'Labor Shortages,'" and while such urging might seem like a waste of time, the rest of us, at least, can parse the evidence she offers and be reminded that a) if unemployment insurance were really "killing jobs," you wouldn't see faster job growth in low-wage professions than you do in higher-wage professions, b) wage increases in the leisure/hospitality sector come in a sector that's still so poorly-paid you couldn't reasonably expect it to drive wages sky-high anywhere else, and c) they told a similar story in the Obama era, that workers just didn't have the skills employers were looking for, but the unemployment rate ultimately went down to 3.5% before the pandemic without a national job-training program, so we know that's bunkum. Also d) why do we listen to Republicans about anything, ever?

Republicans have used the ProPublica report on wealthy folks' tax evasion -- a report buttressed by personal info apparently leaked by someone within our IRS -- to claim, just like they did in 2013, that the American people should have "trust issues" with our IRS. I guess that's one way of trying to make chicken shit into chicken salad, but even in a nation of "temporarily-embarrassed millionaires," as Will Rogers put it, most Americans have been not-rich for far too long to think our IRS is really going to leak their personal info. Republicans are either being absurdly optimistic or are gaslighting everyone -- oh, why am I bothering, of course they're gaslighting, because when you're wrong all the time and you won't fix your wrongness with better policy proposals, what else can you do?

Upon hearing, in considerably more detail than before, that "Trump-Inspired Death Threats Are Terrorizing Election Workers," all I can say is we should throw all these people making these threats in jail! No matter what their "feelings" are about the 2020 election! Wouldn't that be law and order of us? After all, it's a lot less than what they'd want to do to us, merely for speaking our minds. And I'm sick of folks in their "Fuck Your Feelings" T-shirts suddenly demanding that we attend their "feelings." The chickens really are coming home to roost in America. (Go ahead and read the whole thing, if you're in the mood to be profoundly disgusted with right-wing weaklings.)

The Kaiser Family Foundation gives us some of the reasons folks are still "vaccine-hesitant," and though some of them don't seem hard to overcome (maybe we could do something about vaccines being unavailable where some folks get their health care?), some of them also seem rather piddling (if airlines require it, you'll get it? Well, your hesitancy is clearly based on deep consideration of the issues, then!). And surprise, surprise! The "definitely not" groups consists mostly of white Republicans, though most of them are between 30 and 49, which doesn't bode well for our future.

Finally, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich declares his candidacy for 2022 U.S. Senate race for the seat currently held by Democrat Mark Kelly. As recently as late December, this would have been a major get for Republicans -- he's already won statewide twice, he toes the party line on immigration, and he's enthusiastically joined in all those useless fights over the Affordable Care Act and "religious" "freedom." But now, having been judged by Donald Trump to be not enthusiastic enough about the Arizona "fraudit," I doubt he makes it to the general election. In fact, it's entirely possible Arizona Republicans will nominate a rabid raccoon to face Sen. Kelly.

Action: concerning drug prices, voting rights, public investment, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to let election officials count early-arriving votes before Election Day, and tell your Congressfolk to fund overdue public transportation repairs and pass the MEAL Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your PA state legislators' and Congressfolk's phone numbers (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices. Which virtually everyone supports! Except big pharma CEOs, of course, and we shouldn't let them have all the say about everything. The news hook, here, of course, is Rep. Porter (D-CA) embarrassing yet another CEO who deserved it, in unleashing her whiteboard to show how AbbVie has jacked up the price of Humira (the world's best-selling drug presently, treating arthritis and psoriasis, among other illnesses) 144% over the last nine years. You'd think high demand would result in lower prices! But you'd be wrong; if you really, really need a medicine, you're less likely to haggle over the price. Which is why we should let Medicare use the power of a 60-million-plus pool to bring drug prices down for everyone.

Common Cause helps you tell Pennsylvania's state legislature to let vote-counters actually count the votes they receive early before Election Day, instead of forcing them to wait until Election Day proper. Why did they do that? So they could make it seem like Donald Trump won the morning after the election, of course, and thus plant the seed of all his WAAAAAAH THEYZ STOLEZ TEH ELEKSHUNZ!!!! lies thereafter! No, I'm pretty sure that's the reason. It's not like we're asking election officials to put themselves out; ensuring a correct vote count is their job, after all. And we make that job harder by creating the illusion that the votes cast on Election Day somehow count more than the votes cast beforehand. (No, I'll not brook any hard-guys-vote-in-person silliness. Aren't we all too old to be swinging our penises around?)

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund long-overdue repairs to public transit. How long overdue? The NCTJ estimates that dedicating $20 billion annually for the next 12 years would eliminate the backlog. And that's not something we need to do instead of the American Jobs Plan, either, $240 billion over a dozen years not being a very large slice of the federal spending pie. No, I think calling attention to the public trans repair backlog -- and to the many, many jobs attacking that backlog would create! -- only brings more positive attention to the American Jobs Plan. Maybe the backlog will get incorporated into it! And billionaires made over a trillion bucks since the pandemic's start, so it's not like we just can't find the money.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2387, the Making Essentials Affordable and Lawful (or MEAL) Act. The MEAL Act would end the nefarious practice of keeping felony drug convicts from getting food stamps and other federal assistance, a practice which, if you think about it, defies all logic and common sense. Do convicts not need food if they can't get a job (which, thanks to the notorious "box" on most job applications, they often can't)? And how does denying them the federal assistance they need help them reintegrate into society? Again, too many politicians (including, sadly, our current President!) have made too much of a name for themselves calling cruelty and stupidity "tough love." This country is still young, but it shouldn't be that immature.

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. Because it'll fight gerrymandering, absurdly expensive campaigns, and all kinds of (frequently racist) vote suppression, of course! Also, if you've got a few hours, Daily Kos and Common Cause have teamed up to help you call West Virginia residents and ask them to call their state's senior U.S. Senator, Joe Manchin, and tell him to change his mind about supporting the For the People Act. The For the People Act enjoys supermajority support in polls there, just like everywhere else, and we at least need to deny him the excuse that his own constituents didn't call him. (He'll likely ignore us if we call from out of state -- a truism I've long heard but admittedly found hard to accept.)

Common Cause, People for the American Way, the Daily Kos Liberation League, and the League of Conservation Voters all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore that part of the Voting Rights Act that our Supreme Court killed in Shelby County v. Holder -- the part that allows our government to pre-approve voting rights changes in states and localities that have historically suppressed the vote. After this year, that's going to be a lot of states and localities! So we'd better get that done, and done quickly -- with or without the Republicans' blessing (though Lisa Murkowski has signaled her support for the bill; now we only need nine more to avoid a filibuster! Or, you know, fewer, if we just get rid of the filibuster).

Action: concerning COVID relief, endangered species, paycheck fairness, and corruption investigations.

Our House may vote on the Senate-passed COVID relief bill as early as today, so now's the best time to call your House Reps and tell them to pass it. (The Senate amended the bill somewhat, and stripped out the $15/hour minimum wage at our Senate Parliamentarian's direction, so our House has to vote on it again.) Now it's not quite the bill our House passed the first time, and even without our Senate Parliamentarian's ruling, I'm pretty sure Sens. Manchin and Sinema would still have acted like they got 81 million votes for President and Vice-President and shot it down. But the bill still does a lot of good works, and I don't just mean stimulus checks, an unemployment benefit expansion running for most of the rest of the year, and actual assistance for states, localities, and folks who can't pay their rent and utilities. I also mean expanded food stamps and expanded EITC and CTC tax credits, which latter item will result (per the Coalition on Human Needs) in the equivalent of a 29% raise for the bottom 20% of working families. And I also mean help for multiemployer pension plans and tax-free student loan relief through 2025. These are all good works, and worth your support; now's not the time to let the perfect murder the good.

Meanwhile, President Biden's rolled back a lot of former President Trump's noxious Executive Orders, but he hasn't rolled back endangered species-related orders yet, so WildEarth Guardians helps you tell our President to use his power to protect endangered species. Specifically, you'd ask President Biden to roll back Trumpian orders allowing developers to injure more endangered species' habitats, tell federal agencies to take climate change into account when listing endangered species and protecting habitats, and instruct our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to be more proactive in evaluating endangered species generally. I'm not sure what objections reasonable folks could have to any of these, unless "I want big fossil fuel CEOs to make more money" counts as a "reasonable objection." (Spoiler alert: it does not.) You'll also advocate that Mr. Biden work to pass the PAW and FIN Act into law, once Congress re-introduces that bill; the PAW and FIN Act, as you may remember, would prohibit our government from considering "economic factors" of endangered-species regulations, since, as you know, when an endangered species dies, it's gone forever, and squeezing money out of a species' death is an offense before God. I mean, doesn't it sound like one?

In other news, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7/S. 205, the Paycheck Fairness Act. As you know, the Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools to fight the pay inequities that have, sadly, become their lot in life -- Census data from 2018 tell us that women still make 82 cents for every dollar a man makes, and that number should be one dollar for every dollar a man makes. No use complaining that qualifications and experience account for the gap, not when bosses go out of their way to deny women the chance to demonstrate those qualifications and accumulate that experience in the first place! Seriously, don't describe the world as if it's the only world that could possibly exist. And don't believe the hype that the bill would make it illegal to pay women differently for having fewer qualifications, because Sec. 3(a) of the bill directly refutes that claim. Certainly don't believe the hype that the bill would be a "boon for trial lawyers," as if the phrase "trial lawyer" is some kind of epithet, like "big corporate CEO." If big corporations would just do the right thing in the first place, as our parents all taught us to do, then we wouldn't need so many trial lawyers, would we?

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate allegations that former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao abused her office for private gain. Is this a mere attempt at political retaliation against Mitch McConnell's wife? No, it is not, or else we wouldn't have a 44-page report from a federal Inspector General detailing allegations that Ms. Chao used her office to promote her father's shipping corporation, the Foremost Group. Certainly they were Foremost on her mind! The IG report alleges that she used the Transportation Department to update her father's Wikipedia page, promote his public appearances, and even arrange a trip for him and her sister to China. Possibly we'll find that she did nothing wrong (or, more likely, that she was clever about not actually breaking the law), but the previous Administration (which, ah, employed her as Treasury Secretary) didn't even try to investigate the IG's findings. Also, you know, let things like these go and they'll keep happening. Personal to those morons who'd retort THENZ LETZ INVESTIGATEZ TEH HUNTERZ BIDENZ!!!!!!: uh, that's already happening. Most of us have found that paying attention to the world is the best way to learn about it.

Penny Rants for Sunday, December 13, 2020: special "everyone who sucked last year still sucks" edition!

From the "We Kinda Always Knew This, But It's Good to Have Confessions" file: a lengthy Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting investigation finds that Monsanto and BASF introduced their versions of dicamba knowing it would damage competitors' soybean crops, and they released these products because they wanted to eliminate their competitors. It gets better: Monsanto deliberately undertested their dicamba product (since they couldn't control dicamba's drift onto other farms), and when they did test it, they tested it under conditions that were nothing like what actual farmers face every day. BASF even told folks that their dicamba wouldn't necessarily be safe even by applying it strictly according to the label. In a sane and moral society, Monsanto and BASF would be so broken by lawsuits they'd go out of business. In this sick, immoral, and decadent society, however, Republicans claim these failures require more of the "free" market medicine that enabled them in the first place -- and Democrats remain so hypnotized by the "promise" of "technology" that they sit on their hands.

Another day, another reminder that a crap-ton of full-time workers at fast-food and retail corporations don't make enough money to stay off of federal assistance like food stamps and Medicaid, this time from a Government Accountability Office (or GAO) study. And here you thought if you work full-time, you should be able to provide for your family and guide your children to a better future -- let alone be able to provide for your family without having to rely on government assistance. Which you've already paid into with your taxes, so don't blame yourself or imagine you're some kind of leech; that's what they want you to think -- and right-wingers are so quick to say just get a better job like they're not busy trying to outsource all the good American jobs so that American executives can gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes. Oh, and here's the kicker: our GAO did this study before the pandemic hit; one can only imagine how much worse it is now, with over 14 million more uninsured and our U-1 unemployment rate still close to 7 percent (the more instructive U-6 rate, which counts part-timers who want to work full-time and unemployed folks who've given up, is 12 percent).

Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post lists every single Republican House Rep and state Attorney General who signed on to that ridiculous Texas lawsuit aiming to overturn our election, saying "they are laying the predicate for a contentious new phase of American democracy, if it can continue to be called that, in which election results -- after appropriate recounts and audits and certifications -- are no longer accepted. Instead, they merely open the door for a second phase of legal and political guerrilla warfare in which no tactic, no lie, no baseless claim is off-limits." Note well that these Republicans' loyalty to our soon-to-be-ex-President will most likely go unrewarded, not just because there'll always be a crazier right-winger to swordfight (just ask Scott Tipton!), but also because it only takes one deviation from Dear Leader's Holy Will to become a permanent outcast (just ask Bill Barr!). I did wonder -- because unlike these Republicans I do have the capacity for shame -- if we bore any blame for talking about Voter ID and Interstate Crosscheck, but no, we don't, not just because we always had evidence, but because we always said vote suppression happened before the vote.

Around the table: in which liberals did not "almost lose" the election for the 443rd time.

Looks like I spoke too soon: the two Republican Wayne County (MI) officials who certified the vote totals have now changed their minds and want to "rescind" their votes. I should never have underestimated the right wing thirst for drama! And yes, when officials see the same "problems" in suburban districts as in urban ones but only want to certify the results in the suburban ones, that's drama, and it's not good drama, either. And they can sign all the affidavits they want, but they can't "rescind" their votes. Voting is like that.

When I hear that Joe Biden would rather not investigate our soon-to-be-ex-President's many alleged criminal acts, I sympathize to a point -- I do not wish the Biden Administration to be all about our soon-to-be-ex-President; I'd rather it be all about the American people. Still, when you smear feces all over our house, we should hold you accountable for it, through the Administration that replaces you. And I sure hope Mr. Biden isn't thinking of interfering with the state of New York's investigations into our soon-to-be-ex-President.

I was never a big "Green New Deal" fan -- it was a non-binding resolution, and I always preferred bills like the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, which would actually do the things the Green New Deal resolution merely aspired to do -- but turns out 92 out of 93 House Green New Deal co-sponsors won re-election in 2020. That includes three out of four in competitive House districts, with the fourth currently leading his race by almost seven points with about 85% of the vote counted. Who thinks "let's create jobs building renewable energy infrastructure" is a loser? Only the long-time Democratic pols who are used to losing.

A Government Accountability Office (or GAO) report documents how big corporations like Walmart and Amazon pay their employees so little that they require public assistance like food stamps and Medicaid -- as in nearly six million Medicaid enrollees and nearly five million food stamp recipients who worked full time. And there's Sen. Bernie Sanders telling Walmart to "get off welfare," which Democratic politicians still can't see is winning messaging that resonates with broad sectors of the electorate.

Another day, another Republican (this time former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, he sure was a big help winning Ohio, wasn't he?) claiming that "the far-left...almost cost" Joe Biden the 2020 election. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is exactly right in her response, of course (i.e., that the "far left" won Georgia -- Georgia! -- for Mr. Biden), and moderates lose elections not only because they don't excite people, but also because they don't fight for popular things like (hate to beat a dead horse) renewable energy and Medicare-for-All.

Finally, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that we can't "meet Nazis halfway." Yes, her feelings are pretty much my feelings, and I feel compelled to remind folks that you couldn't "meet halfway" with Tha Bush Mobb, either, once they said everyone who disagreed with their palpably stupid case for war with Iraq was a traitor and a weakling. And let's not try too hard to "understand" Nazi wannabes, either, as our "liberal" media outlets are inexplicably still trying to do -- hate doesn't require a whole lot of navel-gazing, and if Nazi wannabes have legitimate grievances, they sure ain't the grievances they're airing.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, COVID-19 testing, police brutality, and food stamps.

First things first. In less than a week, Israel plans to annex parts of the West Bank, virtually ending Palestine's prospects for realistic statehood; it's bad enough that some 25 miles separate the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but to turn the West Bank into a kind of Swiss cheese makes it considerably worse. Hence Avaaz helps you tell European leaders use their power to stop this annexation, while Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop military funding for Israel. If you think all of that is "not being a friend to Israel," then navigate away from this page right now, because being an actual friend, in real life, means standing up to your friend when you think they're doing wrong, and Israel is doing wrong here, and not even insuring its own security. When you occupy someone else's land, after all, you make a lot more problems for yourself, not least in the people of that land retaliating against your rule after you've demolished their homes and moved your own citizens in. Then again, for some "thinkers," keeping chaos going is a feature, not a bug. We need to move past that as a civilization.

Meanwhile, you've seen COVID-19 cases spiking over the last few days, right? Listen only to our President and you'll think it's because WE DOEZ TEH MOSTESTZ TESTZ EVAHZ!!!!!!, but though we may be doing more tests than any other country, we also have more people than almost any other country, so bragging about "doing the most tests" -- rather than, say, doing the most tests per million citizens, where we currently rank a bit outside the world's top 20 countries -- is meaningless, since you're not trying to win a race but control a pandemic, a task made easier when you test enough people. And if that's harder because America has a lot of people, well, you don't become the greatest country on Earth by making excuses! Anyway, although our President's votaries are falling all over themselves asserting that he didn't really ask "his people" to "slow down the testing," our President is defunding over a dozen test sites, which is the difference between a mound of dung the flies have found and a mound of dung they haven't found yet. Hence both Demand Progress and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to stop the closure of these testing sites.

In other news, Progress America helps you tell your local politicians to ban police use of tear gas and rubber bullets at peaceful protests. And if you're asking what if protests become violent, remember that the answer is "powerful people want protests to become violent!" And sending police to a protest with riot gear doesn't exactly cut down on violence! We are starting to see, I think, that a lot of our "solutions" to law-and-order issues over the years have created most of our actual problems, the main "solution" being "insisting on solving every single problem in society with a police officer." I bet a lot of police officers are sick of that, and I also bet they're sick of the paradigm that says the only way to deal with protestors is to crack their skulls -- or put their eyes ou, as rubber bullets have been known to do. And let's not fall for the rubbish that the anti-mask protestors armed with assault rifles got on better with the police because they were "more peaceful." Black folks who protest police brutality try to change the system; armed white dudes who whine about having to wear masks are the system.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Senators to increase food stamp and child nutrition funding during this pandemic. Because working families ain't working! And that'll still be true even if our President decides to masturbate in public over our economy adding another few million jobs this month, when he was blaming everyone but himself as it lost over 30 million jobs because he blew off dealing with a coming pandemic. Really, it is a testament to us, the American people, that we're doing as well as we are, and we're doing that well in spite of our President. But I digress. When all these good Americans can't work during a pandemic, that's the time our government has to step in and help folks out. With our money, of course -- I mean, that's what food stamp money is, since we paid into the system designed to help us out during hard times. And if you still think of food stamps as something "those people" get -- rather than something you could get if you fall on hard times! -- well, I guess you don't understand the whole concept of community.

Action: concerning good pandemic policy, the right to repair, and regulatory science.

As you know, Congress is contemplating another pandemic-related relief bill, so we might as well tell them what to do. Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund a more secure voting process, including expanded voting-by-mail, early voting, same-day registration, and voter and poll worker safety. Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to save our U.S. Postal Service from the financial crisis caused by both this pandemic and Congressional malice. Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund internet access for all Americans as the pandemic drags on. The Center for American Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand food stamp programs for all the folks who now aren't working and thus can't buy a whole lot of food. And the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose any more corporate welfare for corporations and rich folks. I've been advocating a lof of these things for a long time now, and folks who oppose it seem to just make up reasons to do it now. Keep that in mind as you go through the world, trying to do the right thing.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell Microsoft to support our "right to repair" by giving us more access to the service diagrams, repair software, spare parts, and tools we need to fix our computers. Microsoft has played whack-a-mole with right-to-repair bills wherever they've come up, but they've made their newest Surface noticeably more repair-friendly, so maybe they're ready for more pressure. I'm old enough to remember when upgrading my RAM and my processor in my laptop in the late '90s, but just a few years later I couldn't even find the screws in my next one, and that's not all about "efficient design"; it's also about mystifying computers so you don't even try to make them better. But we're Americans, dammit, and we ought to be able to fix what we own! It's more self-reliant that way, and we all remember self-reliance as an American virtue, don't we? I'll tell you what ain't an "American virtue": manufacturing computers that become obsolete a few months after you buy them! And the pollution that results ain't an American virtue, either.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to abandon its own "Censored Science" proposal, then Breast Cancer Action still helps you do that. Our EPA calls it the "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science" rule, but Breast Cancer Action's moniker is far more apt, because our EPA's proposal would do the opposite of making rule-making science more transparent: it would, actually, make rule-making science more corporate, since corporate studies are magically more likely to meet the new proposed standard. How did this happen? The EPA decided that any scientific study that contains any data that isn't "publicly available" -- but a lot of good scientific studies, including those that have informed Clean Air rulemaking that has literally saved good Americans tens of trillions of dollars in health care costs, have confidential data like people's private information in them. Thus they make "transparency" more opaque, and enable more corporations to pollute more filth into our air and water. Nice work if you can get it, I guess. So let's not take this lying down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning bad budgeting, human rights, and gerrymandering.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our Administration's skewed budget priorities, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Don't believe folks who say our President's budget doesn't cut Medicaid, food stamps, and Social Security disability programs, because his budget does these things, and the fact that neither House of our Congress wants to hold hearings on his budget doesn't matter -- the time to communicate our will to our representatives is always now, and don't think Congress wouldn't pull a bait-and-switch and pass this nefarious budget if we weren't watching, because of course they would. And regarding SSI, don't believe right-wingers when they sling around anecdotes about someone they heard or thought played up their back pain into SSI like that justifies $75 billion in cuts over 10 years. To amend Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and "let me just tell you three stories."

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Apple to stop enabling China's awful human rights abuses, then Sum of Us still helps you do that. You'll want to get cracking on that one, since their annual shareholder meeting is happening as we speak, and you want to make sure they can see us wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR. Apple has garnered plenty of good PR by standing up for encryption in the United States, but they're helping China spy on activists' phone calls and text messages by refusing to sell (encryption) apps on the App store in China. No doubt they'll argue that China will just "disappear" anyone who downloads such apps, but China can't put everyone in a concentration camp at once, though they'll try. Just as South African anti-apartheid activists instructed us that divestment couldn't make their lives any worse, I bet Chinese human rights activists would prefer having the ability to shield their communications from their government.

And finally, Pennsylvania residents, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to pass the anti-gerrymandering bills HB 22 and 23, then Fair Districts PA still helps you do that. HB 22 would amend the Pennsylvania state constitution to permit the creation of an eleven-person redistricting commission to handle the drawing of legislative boundaries; this would take the from the the state legislature, which has proven it can't handle it, such Rorschach-blot districts (excluding sides of streets and single houses, even!) do they draw. HB 23 would attend the nuts and bolts of the creation of the commission, the selection of its members (four voters from each of the two major parties, plus three more unaffiliated voters), and the criteria by which it can redraw legislative districts. If we can pass these bills, we'll be closer to a world in which voters actually pick their representatives, instead of representatives picking their voters.

Action: concerning our nation's budget, law and order, and dangerous baby products.

You've no doubt heard by now that our President has put out a budget that would, guess what, cut Medicaid, cut Medicare, cut Social Security, cut food stamps, cut housing assistance, cut job training funding -- but jack up funding for defense, since spending more than the next eight highest-spending countries in the world combined somehow just isn't enough. Even Republicans in Congress act like the President's budget is a dead letter -- retiring Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, announced last week he won't even hold a hearing on the budget, but that doesn't mean we can't weigh in anyway! And we must weigh in -- our President has decided to weigh in, after all, on "his priorities," so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject our President's budget and fight for our priorities. Mr. Enzi is correct to note that "Congress holds the purse strings, according to the Constitution," but our laws require that our President submit an annual budget proposal; it's a real, legal thing that happens, so we, the American people, must attend to it.

Meanwhile, you've also no doubt heard by now the tantrum our Administration threw over its Justice Department prosecutors recommending seven to nine years in prison for Administration crony Roger Stone, the subsequent hullabaloo resulting in the resignation of four prosecutors in the Stone case (I feel their pain, but I wish they hadn't quit, since now our President will replace them with four new cronies) and over 2,000 former Justice Department officials demanding the resignation of Attorney General Barr for his interference in the matter. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our House Judiciary Committee and the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate our Justice Department for possible wrongdoing. Yeah, I know, look how well the impeachment investigation worked out. But this won't go before a Senate full of Administration lapdogs: this will go before a hostile House committee and an Inspector General mandated by law to be independent. Maybe our President will fire all the Inspectors General -- he's already tried! -- but let's at least make him humiliate himself before the people.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban inclined baby sleepers, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Do it quickly, though, since our CPSC's comment period ends in eight days. Researchers have linked, at this time, the inclined sleepers to 73 baby deaths and over a thousand baby accidents and injuries to the inclined sleepers, and remember, 73 is the number of babies we know about. Manufacturers touted the sleepers as a way to rock babies to sleep faster and keep them asleep longer, but the sleepers allow babies to roll onto their stomachs while rocking, and then they suffocate because they can't get back on their back. Babies also suffocate when their heads fall forward (their heads tend to be disproportionately heavy) in the sleeper, or when their faces roll into the product's sides and they rebreathe carbon dioxide-filled air. We all know parents are exhausted (indeed, it's almost like our economy wants it that way) but we also need to get rid of products that kill their babies.

Action: concerning trade, food stamps, and evil media.

Public Citizen helps you tell your House Reps not to vote on our President's USMCA trade agreement until he fixes its problems. Those problems include extended intellectual property protections for big pharmaceutical corporations -- which will keep drug prices higher, and drugs less accessible to the public, for longer -- and its relatively weak labor and clean air/clean water standards. If you're thinking big pharma deserves to make more money off what it makes, remember that most drugs don't get to market without a lot of government help, i.e., taxpayer help, i.e., your help. Remember, also, that no one should have monopoly power over life-saving drugs. The USMCA will drastically curtail the use of "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) systems which nullify our laws and outsource our jobs, and that's no small thing. But the other things aren't small things, either, and we deserve the best trade agreements we can get. So get on the horn to your House Reps and communicate your will.

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed taking away state options, under the federal food stamps program, to assist working families who have significant child care and shelter bills. Sounds wonky, I know, but the end result will be no more food stamps for three million good Americans who still need it, so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our USDA to reject its own proposal to take away food stamps from so many people. No, it's not absurd to tell them to reject their own proposal -- it was absurd for them to propose something that merely injures us. And when I say "us," I do mean us -- we all pay into the food stamps program with our taxes, and any one of us could need it at any time, and we're not "lazy" or "stupid" merely because we need to avail ourselves of it. Hate to pile on -- OK, I don't -- but depriving states of flexibility in administering federal programs sure doesn't sound very conservative.

Finally, Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson called white supremacy a "hoax" a few weeks back, and then promptly went on "vacation," but now he's back, albeit with fewer advertisers, so now's as good a time as any to remind you that Media Matters still helps you tell big corporate advertisers to "drop Fox." Big cable corporations won't let us buy cable channels a la carte, so the next best thing we can do is make Fox toxic to big corporate advertisers, since as long as Fox is making money, they'll never change. At least not for the better! Pressuring Fox advertisers is already working -- Mr. Carlson's program has been hemorrhaging advertisers for a while, and big fast food chain corporation Long John Silver's has lately pulled all its ads from Fox. Still, corporations like Expedia, Allstate, and Applebee's still seem to look at Fox News as just another avenue to hawk their wares. But big corporate CEOs ought to be ashamed of themselves for giving money to Fox News. It's a good thing the Big Stick of Bad PR still works.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning government spying, renewable energy, and food stamps.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Homeland Security to stop spying on reporters and refugee advocates, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. As you likely know, our DHS has kept fairly detailed records on these folks -- even going so far as to collect make and model info on their cars! -- and handed over that data to Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (or ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (or CBP). So did DHS get the warrants, or did ICE and CBP get the warrants? I kid, of course -- this Administration doesn't need any stinkin' warrants! Spying on folks who are fighting or recording your slow-motion train wreck of a border policy does not exactly demonstrate a whole lot of confidence in your border policy, does it? So let's remind our government (again!) that its political opponents have rights just like everyone else.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 11 would amend the state's Alternative Energies Portfolio Standard -- which requires utilities to get some of their power from renewable sources -- to include nuclear power. Recall how hard it is for nuclear power plants to make money without massive government handouts and you'll already see why folks call this the "nuclear bailout" bill. But then the bill's lead sponsor, Rep. Thomas Mehaffie (R-106), cites two nuclear power plants that'll have to close if his bill doesn't pass -- and one of them is Three Mile Island! Gosh, "pass my bill or the poster child for nuclear meltdowns will have to close" has to be one of the dumbest attempted hostage situations I've ever seen. But Republicans dominate the state legislature, and Democratic Gov. Wolf is no great battler of corporate welfare, so, as usual, it's up to us. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Pennsylvania legislators to reject HB 11.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our USDA to reject its proposed rule changes that would result in fewer folks getting food stamps when they need them, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. You'll recall our President saying that "good people need to stop paying for bad people," a statement of idiocy that rivals Paul Ryan saying "healthy people need to stop paying for sick people." You cannot reasonably divide a population into good and bad people on the basis of whether or not they receive food stamps! Why? Because everyone pays into the food stamp program with their taxes, and anyone could, at any time, hit a run of bad fortune that puts you in a position where you'll need food stamps to help make ends meet. Note well the words "everyone" and "anyone," both of which have received the blessings of the Italics Hammer, and let's stop with the real politics of division.

Action: concerning war in Venezuela, food stamps, and taxes.

Fresh off Congress's attempt to nullify our President's vanity border wall emergency, S.J.Res. 11 would prevent our President from starting a military campaign against the democratically-elected government of Venezuela without Congressional authorization -- which, for once, might not be coming! I mean, normally, Congress just nods its head and goes along with whatever Presidents want to do foreign policy-wise, which is a precise inversion of our Founders' will as expressed in our Constitution. I won't get too mad at Congress for only figuring out their Constitutionally-mandated role because it's this President; if I understand the Parable of the Prodigal Son correctly, it matters less when, how, or why you come to wisdom than that you come to wisdom. So Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep us out of an unconstitutional war with Venezuela by passing S.J.Res. 11. And you don't even have to reckon with all the one-sided reports on Venezuela coming from our "liberal" media to support this bill. After all, if it were your country, you wouldn't want to be invaded, would you?

Meanwhile, our USDA would very much like to prevent states from giving food stamps to folks who can't get a full-time job, even though food stamps is, you know, the kind of program that exists to help people through tough times. Gosh, it's like this Administration doesn't understand how anything works, though of course I know they would prefer to give you the impression they're stupid rather than the impression they're evil. No need for anyone to cite the 3.7% unemployment rate as proof that our Administration should do this, because the U6 unemployment rate -- the one that actually counts folks who've given up looking for work or who can only get part-time work when they're trying to get full-time work -- is still almost twice that, at 7.3%. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our USDA to reject its plan to cut food stamps for large numbers of Americans. If you're wary of this, you may want to remember that we all pay into this program with out taxes, and any of us could suffer misfortune and suddenly be in need of food stamps. I'm starting to think that having trouble imagining that happening to you is a character flaw.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to "repeal the Tax Scam," i.e., the 2017 Republican tax "reform," known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. (I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can't magically transform any pile of dung into meatloaf merely by sticking the word "job" in its title.) You know, if I were a less spiritually-advanced person, I'd find it hilarious that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will go down in history as the "tax cut" bill everyone thought of as a tax hike bill! It's not just the many folks who rely on that four-figure check from the IRS every April who are now going to owe money because the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act changed the withholding tables -- it's also the folks who can't deduct as much in state and local taxes anymore or the folks who can't deduct medical expenses anymore. Meanwhile corporations got a massive welfare handout from the bill, which supposedly helps them "create jobs," which is to laugh, since anyone knows if you give someone a big pile of money they're going to hoard it, but if you raise taxes on big piles of money, then the holders of that money will put it into the economy so they don't have to pay taxes. So it's time to repeal this pile of dung.

Action: concerning war in Venezuela, food stamps, and pollution.

H.R. 1004 is, like a lot of recent anti-war bills, quite simple: it would prevent our President from spending any money on military force in Venezuela unless specifically authorized by Congress, as mandated by our Constitution and the War Powers Act. Too often, over the years, Congress has just rubber-stamped anything our President wanted to do overseas; perhaps the ascension of a clearly unqualified individual to the Presidency has galvanized Congressional somewhat. But if something bad were to happen in the world, you know this newfound resolve would dissipate -- unless we demand otherwise. Hence Just Foreign Policy, Roots Action, and Win Without War all help you tell your Congressfolk to restrain our President from wanton war-making in Venezuela by passing H.R. 1004. Even if you support yet more American interference in Venezuela -- which sure didn't work out in our government's favor in 2002, amirite? -- you can still urge your Congressfolk to do it the right way. We have laws for good reason, after all.

Meanwhile, our Department of Agriculture has proposed some nefarious changes to our food stamp program; they would restrict the number of Americans who would qualify for food stamps, and hamstring states' ability to grant waivers for those restrictions. Citing the low U1 unemployment rate and the growth in GDP kinda misses the whole point of food stamps -- it's supposed to be there for the folks who need it. Hence when Agriculture Secretary Purdue says it "belies common sense" that three quarters of Americans on food stamps weren't working in 2016, well, actually, the opposite is true. It's a shame that we have to spell this out to anyone. It's also a shame that we don't fully understand, as Americans, that we all pay into the system with our taxes and that any of us might need it at any time, if bad fortune befalls us; thus it's not a "handout" but insurance. So Moms Rising helps you tell our USDA to abandon its efforts to make food stamps less accessible to those who need it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to abandon its efforts to roll back regulations protecting us from mercury emissions from power plants, then Environment America still helps you do that. Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin, and as such can do serious developmental damage to children; it used to be enough of a problem that just about every state in our great union warned against eating the fish you fished out of your local lake or stream, such was the problem with mercury contamination from coal plants. Of course, our incoming EPA Administrator is a former coal lobbyist, and our President often seems to think coal CEOs are his one true constituency. Would that he were even as good a boss as a coal CEO! I could fault coal CEOs for their greed and their inability to change with the times -- I can't believe coal CEOs simply never had the money to broaden their portfolio to include renewables -- but our President certainly takes greed and shortsightedness to a whole new level. That doesn't mean we have to, though.

Around the table: celebrating our third consecutive day with at least one item of good news!

A ProPublica/WBEZ Chicago report describes how the meteoric rise of video gambling in Illinois has been little more than a "botched money grab," as underregulated gambling corporations make off with the money while leaving towns and counties even more destitute. Why, it's almost like that was the whole idea! The video gambling troubles began in 2009, at the height of the Great Recession, when "something had to be done" to raise money. And the gambling bill, with the Orwellian title of the Illinois Jobs Now! (exclamation point in original), was a truly modern bipartisan mess, created by Democrats too afraid to raise taxes on big donors and Republicans who had clearly abdicated conservatism (and who now say they should have studied the matter more, which is just dandy now that the barn door's open).

Well, how about that -- poll finds almost 60% of Americans support a 70% tax on income above $10 million. How "radical" can an idea be if a decisive majority of Americans support it? "Not radical at all" is the correct answer. Americans generally support higher taxes on the rich, but it's good to see such support when someone puts a number to it. Yet I do wonder if Rep. Ocasio-Cortez means to forestall a drive to set the top tax rate even higher -- say, at 91%, and on millionaire income -- which would, in turn, suggest that the Democratic establishment's hand-wringing over her is, that's right, drama. I'd be happy to be wrong about all of that.

You think the government shutdown's bad now? Well, three Bloomberg writers remind us that it could get a whole lot worse -- not just no food stamps and no housing assistance, but no court hearings, no flights, no buses. Why, even Wall Street might shut down! And then, if our President is really lucky, we'll have a terrorist attack to rally the country around him, I'm sure they've mooted this possibility at the White House -- I mean, they've lost all the arguments, so how can they hope to keep winning elections without sowing chaos? Remember: if terrorists attack, immediately blame our President for holding up government funding over his precious wall for however many months it's been by then.

Here's some more good news: federal District Court Judge halts our Administration's efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire, saying our Commerce Secretary broke "a veritable smorgasbord" of rules and laws in adding the question. Per the judge, he also "cherry-picked facts to support his views, ignored or twisted contrary evidence and hid deliberations from Census Bureau experts." All that sure doesn't bode well for the FCC's net neutrality repeal of 2017, particularly since the judge found that our Administration's census question did, in fact, violate the Administrative Procedures Act.

Finally, I don't go looking around for Iconic Photos of Our Age, but the sight of our President inviting the national college football champion Clemson Tigers to eat mountains of junk food is actually a pretty good one. Junk food is really the perfect metaphor for everything this Administration offers -- it might taste good in the moment, but it'll ultimately leave you fat and malnourished at the same time. And there ain't nothing else on the menu.

Action: concerning tax policy, voting rights, pollution, and the government shutdown.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has lately said a 70% income tax on income over $10 million could easily fund the sort of "Green New Deal" that would put us on the path toward a renewable energy grid while creating jobs, and while I of course support both those ends, I'd go rather harder on the tax end than she would. I'd enact a 91% on millionaire income, but since we also need to prevent folks from exploiting our current loophole-ridden system, I'd also bring back the 55% tax rate on corporate profits, stop treating dividends as separate from income for tax purposes, and outlaw stock options. That would make taxes fair again, revitalize our economy, and give us our best chance to kill climate change dead. I think all that merits a phone call to your House Reps, who need to know that calling Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's ideas "radical" is even stupider than our not-that-recent history (we did have a 91% tax bracket and a 55% corporate tax rate during the '50s, after all) would suggest.

I've been looking for the right contact tool to express support for the ideas that H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would codify into law, and Common Cause has it: they help you tell your House Reps to make H.R. 1 as vigorous as possible. You've no doubt heard that H.R. 1 would strengthen voting rights, expose big campaign donors, make Congressional redistricting fairer, and shut the "revolving door" between corporations and our government -- among other worthy aims -- but it's our job, as citizens, to make sure H.R. 1 actually does these things. And Democrats have no excuse to weaken H.R. 1 -- the Republican-held Senate won't pass it anyway, so playing 13-dimensional chess games with this bill in the vain hope that the Senate might pass it is a vain endeavor. You know what isn't a vain endeavor? Humiliating those politicians who refuse to pass legislation that holds our government accountable to its owners, the American people. That includes Republicans -- and it also includes Democrats who'd weaken the bill.

Meanwhile, our President has nominated acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to be his official choice for the job, and if you think Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt was bad, you're likely to find Mr. Wheeler to be significantly worse -- Mr. Wheeler worked most recently a coal corporation lobbyist, but before that he was Sen. Inhofe's Chief Counsel for over a decade, and before that he worked at the EPA, so he likely knows better than Mr. Pruitt how to destroy from within our EPA's ability to protect us from polluters. I mean, it could also be that Mr. Wheeler can't pass up wierd freebies any better than Mr. Pruitt could, since we've just learned that Mr. Wheeler has, shall we say, an expensive weakness for a certain kind of hamburger, but that's a hell of a thing to count on. Better to tell our Senators to confirm an EPA Administrator who'll actually protect our clean air and clean water more than he'll protect corporate paymaster profits, as the Environmental Defense Fund helps you do.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell our Congressfolk to end this ludicrous government shutdown. I actually have nothing against government shutdowns per se, but seriously, do we want to force Americans to choose between food inspections and a border wall that won't protect American but will diddle the rage glands of our President's votaries? How about between airline safety inspections and a border wall? Or between EPA clean air monitoring and a border wall? Or between health care for Native Americans and a border wall? Or, come the end of February, between food stamps for the working poor and a border wall? Of course, a lot of good Americans -- like air traffic controllers and TSA workers -- are already working without paychecks, so we're already forcing them to make dreadfully hard choices. But over the last quarter century, politicians have shut down our government for nothing but stupid reasons, and it doesn't matter that this border wall is "totemic" for our President. You know what's totemic for me? A government that does our will.

Around the table: the computer is to blame! And other follies.

Philadelphia City Council passes a vigorous fair scheduling law, mandating that larger employers give workers 10 days' notice of their upcoming work schedule. This bill takes aim at the many big chains operating in the city, not small businesses -- unless folks think a "small business" has 30 stores and 250 employees. Hopefully our NLRB gets the message we've been sending them about not letting big corporations pretend to be small businesses by pretending their franchises are independent "small businesses."

Wells Fargo improperly denies loan modification requests to almost 900 people, forecloses on nearly 550 of them, and then blames a "computer glitch" for all the trouble. This all sounds eerily like that scam where you fall behind on your mortgage payments, your bankster says they might be able to modify your mortgage, and while you're waiting for their decision, they take your home from you. Well, Wells Fargo tried blaming its employees in their account-opening scam, so now they're blaming their computers. And they say corporations don't learn from their mistakes!

Study finds that between 65,000 and 115,000 New York City residents would be pushed into poverty if our Administration forges ahead with its plan to widen the definition of "public charge" to include just about anyone who ever got public assistance, ever. These would be the folks who would avoid getting assistance via food stamps or Medicaid so that their later attempts at, say, securing a green card wouldn't go awry. But this story has a happy ending: our Presidents' many votaries get to diddle their rage glands over TEH IMMIGRANTZ GETTINGZ ALL TEH THINGZ!!!!!

Anthropologists warn us to avoid stereotyping Amish attitudes toward our environment. We might be tempted to think of them as natural environmentalists because they "live simply" or "live in nature," but Amish folks tend to regard nature as "a manifestation of God’s handiwork, created for the benefit of humans," and as something "temporary" and not necessarily to be regulated by our government. Even the most "temporary" of things could last lifetimes, of course, and the Amish man who pooh-poohs biodiversity by saying the Amish "privilege humans" posits the only alternative as "we should just open the doors and let in all the flies," when surely Creation offers us more diverse options than that. It sure does seem they're taking it in the ear from Big Ag corporations as much as every other small farmer, though.

Finally, in case you were wondering why Vice President Pence's Chief of Staff, Nick Ayers, declined to take the same job with our President Who's So Desperate to Finally Once and For All Get Rid of John Kelly, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds us that Mr. Ayers is a very wealthy man who made most of his millions in dark money advertising. If Mr. Ayers has indeed rejected our President's job offer so he can run a dark money group ostensibly dedicated to our President's re-election, as at least one news outlet has said, I guess that would explain our President's relatively sanguine public reaction, for whom does the grifter admire but another grifter?

Action: concerning war, media, and immigration.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the war in Afghanistan. Their latest email missive informed me that some folks who were pre-teens when the war began in 2001 just got elected to Congress, which I found a bit sobering, but these new Congressfolk are considerably less emotionally-invested in this war than the folks who started it, and now (at last!) they get a bigger say in whether we keep that war going. Which we shouldn't, not least because we got Mr. bin Laden years ago. The forces of evil will try two tactics: 1) ZOMG TEH TERRURIZTZ WINZ!!!!!, and 2) let's privatize the Afghanistan War. Both arguments are moronic -- respectively, fearmongering is a way of announcing that you can't win the argument on the merits, and if we're going to fight wars, we should fight wars, rather than let mercenaries bleed the taxpayer. And taxpayers will be paying out the wazoo for bad results, if past privatization efforts are any indication.

Meanwhile, Media Matters's latest email missive opens with this blunt and completely accurate statement: "Fox News is a malevolent and destructive force." One almost (I said almost!) longs for the day when Fox's on-air "talent" went to some lengths to hide their racism, but now, with President Bigballs as their Personal Lord and Savior, they don't even have to do that anymore. And since we can't buy cable channels a la carte in America, we can't directly hit Fox News where it hurts (i.e., in their pocketbook). But we can tell Fox's corporate advertisers to stop sponsoring Fox News, which Media Matters helps you do. Do not tolerate any guff that boycott efforts like these "hurt free speech." Fox News punditoids have an inviolable right not to be imprisoned for their speech, but they have no "right" to six- and seven-figure TV jobs. Our First Amendment protects us from our government -- not from advertisers, not from activists, and certainly not from viewers.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) that their proposed expansion of the definition of "public charge" will unfairly punish immigrant families, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. As you may know, we've always kept immigrants out if we can establish that they'll become a "public charge," or someone completely reliant on the taxpayer, but HHS has proposed calling anyone who has ever availed themselves of Medicaid or food stamps a "public charge," which would make a lot of folks who work and contribute to society (not to mention pay taxes!) into "public charges." Our Administration is basically trying to deport as many immigrants as possible, which is a stupid way to make policy. And either "public charge" means something or it doesn't; our Administration obviously prefers meaninglessness and nihilism. But we don't have to put up with any of that.

Action: concerning government spying, antibiotic abuse, and cruelty to immigrants.

You may have heard that our military is trying to figure out if they can predict mass protests (i.e., against our President) from social media activity beforehand. Before we get into figuring out exactly which Philip K. Dick short story our government is trying to make into public policy this time, let's step back: why would our government want to know about protests beforehand? I can think of only one reason: because they don't want any good Americans to protest! And I'm sure they felt exactly the same way when Tea Partiers were making asses of themselves in our streets and on our public lands! Hence Free Press helps you tell Congress to pimp-slap any Administration effort to obstruct lawful protest in America using surveillance. Seriously, if they want to figure out when the protests are coming, all they have to do is note when they're about to do something that's going to hurt good Americans. Seems easier to just stop hurting Americans than to do all this hifalutin spying.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell Darden Restaurants to get the antibiotics out of the meat it sells at its restaurants. Darden, as you may know, owns Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, LongHorn Steakhouse, and the Capital Grille, among others; in total, Darden runs over 1,700 restaurants serving 400 million guests in North America annually, so it's got reach. And its shareholders have, in each of the last three years, put forward a resolution demanding that Darden meats stop relying on animals pumped full of antibiotics; the most recent iteration of that resolution got 40 percent. Add the Big Stick of Bad PR to shareholder pressure Darden's already getting and we may yet get Darden to rid its supply chain of antibiotic-drenched meat, and thus Darden could help us avert a world where antibiotic abuse in feed animals renders antibiotics useless for medical use, which would also be a world in which the next cut could kill us. So let's get to wielding that Big Stick.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration not to distend the definition of "public charge" so it can deport more immigrants later, then the National Women's Law Center and the Union of Concerned Scientists still help you do that. We've always tried to prevent immigrants from coming to America if it seems likely they'll become a "public charge," or someone who'll depend entirely on taxpayer assistance, but our Administration would dramatically expand the definition of "public charge" to include anyone who's ever used food stamps or Medicaid, when a lot of good Americans fall on hard times and need to rely on those services sooner or later. I guess it's asking too much for a President who was literally a millionaire before he was eight years old -- and not through his own hard work, but through his father's sketchy inheritance schemes -- to understand that hard-working people face hard times every once in a while. But we're happy to teach him otherwise.

Action: concerning vote suppression, immigration, education, and gas mileage.

You've no doubt heard by now that Georgia's Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, has refused to process over 50,000 voter registration applications because liberals -- or maybe because blacks, as the Associated Press has found that these registrations come disproportionately from black folks. A Kemp spokeshack says the Secretary is using "exact-match" criteria which would put a voter registration on hold for something as small as a hyphen dropped from a last name. Just like Interstate Crosscheck, which catches voter fraud through vigorous matching of folks with the same middle names and Social Security numbers! I kid, of course -- Interstate Crosscheck isn't so rigorous, but hey, whatever gets the job done. Who's running for Georgia Governor this year? Well, Stacey Abrams is one, and the other one, let's see here, wouldn't want to get his name wrong -- oh, yes, Brian Kemp! What a coincidence! Color of Change helps you tell Mr. Kemp to process the damn applications already. I mean, if he's really the best candidate, he should be able to win without tricks, right?

Meanwhile, our Administration, always looking for ways to diddle the rage glands of its votaries, would like to make it much, much harder for immigrants to gain citizenship if they've ever relied on public assistance. We have always tried to prevent folks from immigrating to America if it seems likely they'll become "public charges," or folks we'd have to completely support forever, but our Administration wants to make immigrants into a "public charge" if they've ever used Medicaid or food stamps, which a lot of good Americans have to use at some point or other. If someone said out loud that six months on food stamps makes you a hopeless "taker," we'd call that person a narrow, or even cruel. What would we then say of a government that held this position? We'd certainly say they don't give people enough of a chance to make something of themselves, when we as Americans assume that anyone can make something of themselves. The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell our Administration to reject yet another cruel immigration proposal.

In other news, people who think technology is the answer to every conceivable problem (and, ah, people who think technology is a good way of diverting taxpayer money away from public schools and into the coffers of private corporations) have been pushing online pre-K schools as a way of "helping" underprivileged kids, but I bet I don't even need to tell you why that's bunk: because if there's one thing kids need even less than junk food, it's screen time, and if there's one thing that today's "bright," "bold" "innovators" don't seem to get, it's that kids need real-life interaction with other kids and with adults in order to grow. Well, soda taxes funding universal pre-K doesn't seem so bad now, does it? (Full disclosure: soda taxes are still bad.) But seven states now run a "pilot" program involving online pre-K, and you can guess where that's going to end up even if it doesn't do these kids any damn good: "we're broke, so we have to keep doing it." Hence the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell your state education committees to fund real universal pre-K.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to stop trying to roll back our Clean Car Standards, then the Environmental Defense Fund still helps you do that. Stronger fuel efficiency standards means lower prices at the pump and less pollution in our air -- so what's the problem our Administration has with all of that? None of that makes oil CEOs richer, that's what, and if you've been attending our Administration's doings, you know that the only people they think deserve any say about anything in America are bosses. Forget you and your desire to pay less for gas and breathe clean air! Our EPA knows they don't have a leg to stand on, of course, or else they'd never have argued for lower fuel emissions standards by claiming that higher standards cause people to drive more and thus put them at a higher risk of car accidents. I mean, that's a cluster bomb of stupid right there. And we Americans deserve better than that from our public servants.

Action: campaign finance disclosure, better wages for working families, and rehabilitating prisoners.

Both Public Citizen and Common Cause help you tell the Federal Election Commission (or FEC) to mandate strong disclosure rules on internet campaign ads. (Only sign one or the other, though, otherwise it'll be like sending two comments on the same thing to the FEC.) Disclosure of campaign donors is far more common in TV and print ads, but, generally, our government doesn't get around to overseeing new things until it's far too late, i.e., after Russia allegedly spent a crapload of money influencing votes on Facebook. You know my opinion on that particular development: if Democrats would stand for something other than Not Being Republicans, it'd be a whole lot harder for a foreign country (or big donors) to swing an election their way. But we should demand the same transparency from internet ads that we demand from ads on the more traditional media. And if you're a big donor trying to influence an election, maybe you should have the guts to show yourself.

Meanwhile, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has proposed a corporate "freeloader tax" for corporations that don't pay their workers enough to keep them off of government aid programs like food stamps. The Republicans' most recent Farm Bill did impose new work requirements on food stamp recipients, but most food stamp recipients are already working, thus prompting the question (as put by the article at the link above): "Is the problem that people aren’t working enough? Or is it that they don’t receive a high enough wage or generous enough benefits from their employer?" Sen. Brown would impose a 0.25% tax (that's not 25 percent, "liberal" media dogs!) on corporations with 25 percent of their workers under the federal poverty line, a 0.50% tax for corporations with 50 percent, and a 1% tax for corporations with 75%. I'd go 1%, 2%, and 3% myself, but still, call your Reps and Senators about this plan. They won't see it coming.

Finally, H.R. 5682/S. 2795, the FIRST STEP Act, would make it easier for prisoners to rehabilitate themselves once in prison, by mandating the Bureau of Prisons to incarcerate them within 500 driving miles of their home, making various improvements to the federal compassionate release process, expanding home confinement sentencing for low-risk criminals, and increasing "good time credits" prisoners earn with good works. And the FIRST STEP Act would also provide additional funding for the drug treatment, counseling, job training, and education programs that prisoners need to get a leg up once they get out. If all this sounds like coddling to you, kindly reacquaint yourself with the purpose of imprisonment, which is not merely to punish but to rehabilitate. Hence Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell your Congressfolk to support actual prisoner rehabilitation by passing the FIRST STEP Act.

Action: farm policy, GMO labeling, and the Iran nuclear deal.

The House plans to vote on the nefarious H.R. 2, the "farm bill" that'll set farm policy in the United States for the next five years, and Moms Rising helps you tell your House Rep to reject the House Farm Bill. Don't worry about people suddenly having nothing to eat if the Farm Bill doesn't pass, not just because that won't happen (Congress will just extend the old Farm Bill for a while if they can't pass a new one, as they've done the last two times), but because Americans don't let themselves be taken hostage, do we? The current Farm Bill is a cornucopia of evil, not just in cutting food stamps and imposing work requirements on them (for people who very likely either already work or are children or seniors, no less!), but in giving more subsidies to big farms, less assistance to farms trying to get off chemicals and monoculture, and more loopholes to corporations trying to put out pesticides, and more welfare handouts to factory farms. This bill deserves a humiliating death, so let's give it one.

Meanwhile, the USDA is considering labeling requirements for foods made with genetically-modified organisms (or GMOs), and surprise, their draft rule sucks! The USDA's standard would basically exclude sugars and oils (allowing more than two-thirds of GMO foods to go unlabeled!), would require labelers to use the nearly-unknown initials "BE" (for "bioengineered") instead of the far more well-known initials "GE" or "GMO," and would allow corporations to use various electronic means of labeling their food, without just, you know, writing some variation of this food has GMOs in it on the food label you're actually holding. But the USDA still has to take public comments on the proposed rule -- which they'll do for 60 days, in the hopes that well-organized food corporations will swamp us out. Let's destroy that hope by letting Just Label It help you leave a public comment opposing the USDA's inadequate GMO labeling proposal.

Finally, our President may have removed the United States from the Iran nuclear deal -- remember, when they tell you he's acting crazy like a fox, that George W. Bush's "crazy like a fox" act got us ISIS -- but the other six signatory nations can still keep the deal going, hence Roots Action helps you tell the other signatory nations to keep the Iran nuclear deal together. It is actually working, after all, and our President can't say it's not working without telling bald lies about it. Some will tell you you're "undermining America" by doing this, particularly by contacting Iran; others will even call you a "traitor." They can all go diddle their rage glands somewhere else. You never "undermine" your country by speaking out about what you think is right, and anyone can call anyone a "traitor," instead of taking the effort to persuade people they're right. And if this Administration's defenders resort to name-calling, they won't convince anyone of courage and character that they're right.

Action: internet freedom, farm policy, veterans' health care, and automatic voter registration.

Word on the street is that tomorrow Democrats will force a vote on S.J.Res. 52, the "resolution of disapproval" that would roll back the FCC's net neutrality repeal, so today's as good a day as any to call your Senators and tell them to vote in favor of the resolution, and thus support real internet freedom for all Americans. The FCC had the stones to call their net neutrality repeal "Restoring Internet Freedom," but their repeal only "restores" internet "freedom" for big corporations -- as in freedom to prevent you from visiting websites, freedom to slow down the loading of websites, and freedom to demand tribute from websites in order to prevent either of these things from happening. What about your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than let some corporation tell you where to go? Clearly, that actual freedom is not as important to the FCC as those other corporate "freedoms." But with S.J.Res. 52, we can begin to take our freedom back.

Meanwhile, Congress is mulling another farm bill, since that needs to be reauthorized every six years, and in H.R. 2 they've concocted a real stinker of a farm bill: one that stretches the definition of "family farm" so that huge farms can take even more farm subsidies they don't need, one that rolls back incentives that help farmers get off chemicals and one-crop farming, one that exempts pesticides from clean water and endangered species protections, and one that tramples on state-level efforts to control factory farms. Oh, and it also imposes new work requirements on food stamps, as if too many working families aren't already on food stamps because their employers don't pay enough. In short, this is another pro-corporation, anti-people bill from Congress, and it deserves a humiliating death. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support small farmers and healthy food choice by rejecting H.R. 2.

In other news, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5671, the Burn Pits Accountability Act. So what are burn pits? Burn pits are what we used to dispose of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan, waste that could include human and medical waste, chemicals, paint, plastic, rubber, and even munitions. If that doesn't sound like an utterly toxic stew, I don't know what does! For all that, scientists haven't yet established a firm link between burn pits and Iraq/Afghanistan veteran illnessess, but the Veterans Administration maintains a Burn Pit Registry which can make establishing that link far easier, and H.R. 5671 would mandate that our Department of Defense ask soldiers whether they've been exposed to burn pits -- which they can do during health exams and separation interviews -- and then automatically register any veteran who answers in the affirmative. Thus the research -- and the healing -- can get a kick-start.

Finally, voter registration is now automatic in 13 states -- meaning citizens in these states become registered voters whenever they use state services like the Division of Motor Vehicles -- and Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to enact an automatic voter registration law. You know what some right-wingers say when confronted with the common sense notion that we ought to make it easier for people to vote? They say voting should be hard! No: the work of citizenship should be hard, but it does not logically follow from that statement that each and every task associated with citizenship should be hard. You shouldn't have to spend endless time on hold when you call your Reps and Senators, you shouldn't be completely deprived of townhall meetings because your Rep is a criticism-hating snowflake, and you shouldn't have to fill out piles of paperwork in order to register to vote just because some politicians want fewer people to vote.

Action: ranked-choice voting, food stamps, torture of autistic students, and the Sinclair/Tribune merger.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to create a ranked-choice (or instant runoff) voting system in Pennsylvania. A ranked-choice system allows you to designate first, second, third, and so on choices for elected offices, rather than simply designating one choice (very likely while holding your nose). The top two vote-getters then advance to a runoff election (hence the term "instant runoff"), and if your first choice didn't make it to the runoff, your second choice would get your vote (or your third, if your first and second choices don't make it, and so on). That means you'd never have to worry about "throwing away your vote" on a "spoiler" candidate again. Ranked-choice voting could help us break the wheel of voting for political parties that too often seem to conspire against us. And that's worth fighting for.

Meanwhile, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the upcoming Farm Bill if it winds up cutting benefits for low-income working families. Yeah, Congress is working on a Farm Bill again, and by "Congress," in this case, I mean Republicans. And you know what that means: more regulations that make it harder for good Americans to get the help they need -- because Republicans only like the regulations that actually constitute a burden! -- and more rules kicking more Americans off the food stamp program. They got some nerve, passing trillions of dollars in tax cuts mainly for the rich and then saying that big corporate tax cuts will trickle down to the poor! I rather suspect the poor are used to something else trickling down upon them from the rich. Food stamps: you pay for them, so you should be able to get them when you need them. This is not a very difficult principle to understand, or at least it shouldn't be.

In other news, you may recall that horrid 2002 video of the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts administering electric shock "therapy" to an autistic student 31 times in seven hours for refusing to take off his jacket. The Rotenberg Center is literally the only American program for disabled children using remote electric shocks as punishment, which is nothing to yell WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. Between 2014 and 2016, our FDA debated and then wrote regulations banning these shocks. Then what happened? A man who fervently hates all regulations that actually help good Americans got elected President, and since then, the FDA has done nothing about the matter. Typical. So the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the FDA to implement regulations banning electric shocks, and thus help end the torture of special-needs students in America.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC and the DOJ to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. There's no need to theorize about what could happen when one corporation owns over 200 TV stations nationwide and can reach into every corner of the country, because we've already seen from Sinclair what that means: trading favorable coverage of the President for more access, mandating that their anchors support the "war on terror" after 9.11, and forcing all their newsreaders to recite from the same script about "fake news." It ain't far from there to imagine the Administration itself writing their "news" copy, and then what would separate us from your average developing-world dictatorship? You know, aside from the fact that we have a lot more weapons? Our Glorious Elites' lust for mammon will bring the rest of us hardship and misery -- unless we speak out in numbers our government can't ignore.

Around the table: with horrible truths about the Pennsylvania 18th district special election.

The President's nominee for CIA director, current CIA deputy director Gina Haspel, allegedly ran a CIA "black site" in Thailand where prisoners got waterboarded, and may even have ordered the destruction of video evidence of that torture. Right-wingers, of course, are squealing that ProPublica got the identity of one tortured suspect wrong, which of course automatically means she never ever tortured anyone ever ha ha ha suck it liberals! Seriously, though, this is what we get for looking forward, not backward. Right, Mr. Obama?

Study finds that of the 150 counties that get the most food stamps, 136 are rural. A majority of counties isn't the same as a majority of recipients, but surely this finding means our "liberal" media and our politicians underplay the prevalence of food stamp usage in rural counties. That's because of racism, of course -- keep telling rural food stamp recipients that any cuts in the program are really for TEH BLACKZ!!!! and they'll keep voting Republican. Unless, of course, Democrats start running campaign ads about Republican cutting your food stamps. I kid, of course -- these are Democrats we're talking about.

Turns out at least two stories about Executive branch corruption are worse than we thought: EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's little "cone of silence" wound up costing $43,000, not $25,000, and the Carsons did-too pick out their $31,000 dining set on the taxpayer dime. I wouldn't blame you for thinking this doesn't look a whole lot like "draining the swamp," but you must remember that when they say "drain the swamp," they really mean "stick it to liberals."

Senate votes by a nearly 2-1 margin to pass the nefarious S. 2155, which would loosen financial regulations on big banksters. Any good news? The House thinks the Senate bill isn't evil enough, and wants even more easing of regulatory "burdens," so when House and Senate go to conference out differing versions of the same bill, Democrats can filibuster the resulting conference bill. Yes, even the ones who voted for it the first time who feel "betrayed" by the changed conference bill. I mean, Jon Tester's not a fool -- if the President's going to remain this unpopular, why throw him a lifeline?

Now that Democrat Conor Lamb has upset Republican Rick Saccone in the Pennsylvania 18th special election -- in a district the President won by almost 20 points in 2016 -- some Republicans, including the President himself, are scrambling to claim Mr. Lamb as a conservative. Because he's personally pro-life but believes abortion should be legal, an opinion that has impressed exactly zero pro-lifers since Geraldine Ferraro? Because he "doesn't like" Nancy Pelosi, another opinion that will have zero consequences in the real world? They're even resorting to lies like saying he "love(s) the tax cuts," which is the precise opposite of the truth, without breathing a word about Mr. Lamb's many attacks on repealing Obamacare and slashing Medicare and Social Security. Well, when you've got nothing but you still feel the need to flap your yap, what can you do but lie?

Finally, and perhaps even worse, Republicans were calling Mr. Lamb's opponent, Rick Saccone, an "F candidate" even before the election. Mr. Saccone is an ignorant, blustering fool, certainly, but you don't even have to look at our President to see that he's not exactly an anomaly -- that in fact he represents the natural progression of the mainstream Republican candidate. When Republicans spend decades defending indefensible Presidents and policies and provoking their most rage-addled adherents with bad arguments and lies, then Rick Saccone is precisely the kind of person winds up carrying their banner. Seriously, they're all "F candidates" now.

Action: defending free speech, law and order, and civilized budgeting.

The Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (or BDS) movement aims to hit Israel in its pocketbook, thus hoping to end its continuing occupation of Palestine. States like New York and Florida have responded by refusing to contract with corporations that support the BDS movement, and though I find these state actions odious, I'm not willing to say corporations supporting BDS have a "right" to taxpayer-funded contracts. But S. 720, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, would go considerably farther: it would "prohibit() any U.S. person engaged (in) interstate or foreign commerce from supporting...any boycott fostered or imposed by any international governmental organization against Israel or any request by any international governmental organization to impose such a boycott." That should sound an awful lot like our government telling us what to think, or else! So Jewish Voice for Peace helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them to oppose S. 720.

Meanwhile, Sens. Sanders (I-VT), Lee (R-UT) and Murphy (D-CT) have introduced S.J.Res. 54, which would require our President to remove our soldiers from Yemen (or from areas of the world where they're supporting Saudi Arabia's war against Yemen) until such time as Congress actually declares war there. S.J.Res. 54 makes an exemption for efforts against al-Qaeda, but of course you already know that the Saudis are fighting the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and the Houthi rebels have proven to be some of the best al-Qaeda fighters in the world -- so maybe the best way to fight al-Qaeda is to simply pull out. Don't brook any silliness about TEH CONGREZZEZ TYINGZ TEH PREZNITZ HANDZ IN TEH YEMENZ!!!!, because that's the whole point -- letting the President wage whatever war he likes wherever he likes is not just un-American, it's unconstitutional. Hence both Stop the War and CREDO help you tell your Congressfolk to support human rights in Yemen, and the rule of law in America, by supporting S.J.Res. 54.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject the President's latest budget that takes from working families to pay for his tax-cuts-for-the-rich, then CREDO still helps you do that. This budget, as you know, would slash (among other things!) food stamps, housing assistance, infrastructure spending, Medicaid, Social Security, and the EPA -- but would increase defense spending, which is more and more like a corporate welfare program. And the Administration has the cojones to say their budget shows compassion to the poor people who pay taxes! As if those folks don't benefit from any of these programs at all! Of course a lot of the Administration's "forgotten Americans" use these programs at various times in their lives, and they "use" EPA funding, too, in the sense that the EPA can keep their air and water clean if it has enough money to enforce the law. So let's help these "forgotten Americans" by opposing the President's budget.

Action: fighting efforts to destroy food stamps, Medicaid, and Social Security.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop trying to impose work requirements on food stamps and Medicaid, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. To the folks who say imposing such requirements will induce poorer folks to get work, I have two things to say: 1) slap yourself, and 2) the whole point of food stamps and Medicaid is to give people a hand up when they need it. As it happens, our economy has become so insane that most folks getting food stamps and Medicaid are already working, because their bosses don't pay them enough so they can make ends meet. Maybe instead of telling tall tales about the "laziness" of the poor, we can restrain the rich from redistributing everyone's income upward to themselves? Or pass higher minimum wages, since that's a rising tide that actually does lift all boats? Or would doing these things cut too deeply into right-wingers' need to be in a state of rage all the time?

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject the scam of a "paid family leave" plan offered by Sen. Rubio, then CREDO still helps you do that. Why would we ever reject a paid family leave plan, since we've been fighting for one for years? Well, because Mr. Rubio's plan would take from Social Security to fund it, and we've never fought for weakening one earned benefit for another. This is nothing more than a plan to injure the Social Security benefits you worked for, paid for, fought for, and deserve. And America is a great country that deserves better than our leaders taking the people's will hostage in order to do evil. Also, too, drawing money out of Social Security now cheats today's seniors, now -- meaning that Mr. Rubio also intends to pit senior against new parent. Of course, pitting American against American is how Our Glorious Elites keep their power. The good news? If we resist them, we'll take their power away.

Action: fighting loansharks, banksters, and the Trump budget.

President Trump has released his fiscal 2019 budget, and he's not calling it the "hard power" budget or the "skinny" budget -- see? He learns! -- but he is calling it "An American Budget," which is more offensive, since his budget doesn't reflect the priorities of Americans, but of Our Glorious Elites, who do not get all the say about everything in America. This budget would not only slash EPA funding by a third and slash food stamps and eliminate the Community Development Block Grant program -- it would also cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, because he's already won Florida and won't need to win it again until 2020. Congress has already funded our government for the next two years, so this budget is DOA. But the "ideas" in it aren't -- they keep getting up no matter how many headshots we give them. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trump Un-American Budget.

Meanwhile, the House is mulling H.R. 3299, the so-called Protecting Consumers' Access to Credit Act, which would amend several federal laws to ensure that "(a) loan that is valid when made as to its maximum rate of interest in accordance with this subsection shall remain valid with respect to such rate regardless of whether the loan is subsequently sold, assigned, or otherwise transferred to a third party, and may be enforced by such third party notwithstanding any State law to the contrary." What that ultimately means, however, is that such a loan could blow right past any state caps on interest rates, thus rendering them meaningless. Now there's "small government" for you! H.R. 3299 doesn't "protect consumers' access to credit," it protects loansharks' access to their borrowers' money, never mind whether it's usurious or not. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to actually protect consumers by rejecting H.R. 3299.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject S. 2155, the so-called Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. They call it a bill that loosens restraints on community banks by raising the threshold of heightened regulatory scrutiny from $50 billion to $250 billion in assets, but that's a load of bollocks, unless we redefine the phrase "community banks" to include corporations like Credit Suisse and American Express do. Why, they're community banks with a glandular problem! The bill would also let smaller banks indulge in higher-risk mortgages, because that's what smaller banks need: more leeway to do things that would harm them and their customers. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the greatest enemy of the small bank isn't Big Gummint, but the big bankster. So let's push Congress to fight the real enemy.

Action: defending Medicaid, food stamps, clean air, clean water, and our coasts.

Now that Republicans have doomed us to trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future -- and not even so they can goose up the economy, but so they can give massive welfare handouts to the rich and to corporations -- they're all hot to destroy food stamps and Medicaid, so Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject proposed cuts to food stamps and Medicaid, while CREDO helps you tell state Governors not to impose work requirements on folks who get Medicaid. Never mind that most folks who get food stamps and Medicaid already work, so successful have corporations been (at least since the Clinton years!) at paying their workers so little that they qualify for Medicaid -- what about the folks who literally can't work, or who literally can't find work? Do right-wingers really think everyone's faking it? Oh, right -- they think everyone's faking it but them. You can lead a right-winger to other people's struggles, but you can't actually make him empathize.

Meanwhile, President Trump is ready to unleash yet another "hard power" budget proposal, so Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose all proposed cuts to EPA funding. Right-wingers love spewing the lie that EPA funding cripples a corporation's ability to make money, but you know what funding the EPA actually does? It enables the EPA to actually put boots on the ground at fossil fuel plants, and see what harm they might be doing to our clean air and our clean water. It also enables the EPA to properly clean up America's especially toxic areas via the Superfund program, which, naturally, EPA Administrator Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt wants to slash by a third. And you know, Mr. Pruitt might think climate change could be a good thing, but all these once-in-a-lifetime-this-month storms climate change has brought us, and will bring us more of, will actually make cleaning up toxic sites harder. Feel free to tell your Senators that.

Finally, speaking of the Trump Administration's compulsive short-sightedness, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to scuttle its plan to open up virtually all of our coasts to offshore drilling, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Yes, it is short-sighted to drill for oil and gas off virtually every coast in America -- the energy you'll extract will be burned off, but oceans are forever, and if you pollute them, you'll take a long, long time cleaning them up. But then Mr. Trump doesn't care about the long-term, as evidenced by his long career driving businesses into bankruptcy right after extracting all their value for himself -- he only cares about other bosses, the real beneficiaries of expanded offshore drilling. No, drilling workers aren't the beneficiaries, not when the Trump Administration rolls back safety standards for them, and not when we (or their employers!) could put them to work building out a renewable energy grid in America.

Action: food stamps, Medicaid, and postal banking.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk and your President to keep their money-grubbing hands off food stamps and Medicaid funding. Our Glorious Elites act like you're supposed to be ashamed of needing either one of these things, when hard times can hit anyone, and we all pay into food stamps and Medicaid, so we can all draw from it when we need to. But naturally the politicians are trying to attack these things so they can pay for their welfare handouts to the rich and to corporations, with our President allowing states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. Hello! Most Medicaid recipients, and more than half of folks who get food stamps, are already working, because their employers don't provide health insurance or pay them enough -- and, again, these are the same employers who got a massive welfare handout from the tax "reform." Is it too much to ask that our representatives do something other than give us the back of their hands?

Meanwhile, Rootstrikers helps you tell the U.S. Postmaster General to support postal banking for low- and middle-income working families. Bank of America just ended free checking accounts for folks with less than $1500, despite making $21 billion in profits last year and getting handed an estimated $3.5 billion in handouts from the Trump tax "reform," so yeah, there's a need for working families to be able to open a savings account at the Post Office, as they did for over 50 years, ending in 1966. Banks were proliferating and could offer the same services just as safely then -- but not too many years later, they started pulling out of low-income areas, leaving an opening for check-cashing services and payday lenders, which are, ah, decidedly not safe places to park your money. And with banksters still loathe to serve urban and rural poor areas some 40-odd years later, postal banking deserves another shot.

Action: tax "reform," children's health insurance, and Muslim Ban 3.0.

Today's as good a day as any to pick up the phone and call your Senators -- and you can find their phone numbers, as always, by using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or, if you're on a cellphone, on the bottom of the page -- and tell them no to cutting the top tax bracket by more than four percentage points, no to cutting the corporate tax rate, no to repealing the Estate Tax and the Alternative Minimum Tax, no to "simplifying" the tax brackets so that middle-class families wind up paying more in taxes, and certainly no to all of the food stamp cuts, Medicaid cuts, Medicare cuts, Social Security cuts, and all the other cuts they're planning in order to "pay for" more tax cuts for the undeserving rich. I understand at least one Trump advisor has suggested that people won't care about the tax cuts rich folks are getting as long as they're getting a tax cut. Setting aside that working families ain't getting much, if any, of a tax cut: we wouldn't stand for Medicaid and Medicare cuts during the health care "reform" debate, so why would we stand for them now?

Meanwhile, Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to get on the ball about extending the Childrens' Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. Letting CHIP expire while trying to pass a bill that would take health insurance away from over 30 million Americans should be a campaign ad that writes itself, yet Republicans in Congress really did all that. They must think Democrats are too weak to run ads about it! And they're probably right -- I'm sure Democrats are lining up their get beyond partisanship and streamline regulations and I'm a nonideological problem-solver 2018 ad campaigns as we speak. After all, it's not like affordable health insurance for nine million kids gets anyone worked up, right? You know, like, say, parents, who would run through a wall for their kids? Seriously, in a sane and moral universe, anyone who let CHIP expire would be defeated for re-election. Unfortunately, we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society, one in which weakling Democratic politicians continually sabotage our efforts, so we must, again, demand that Congress do our will, until they do it.

Finally, as you know, President Trump has issued the third version of his Muslim travel ban, one which may better survive court challenges, since it includes Venezuela and North Korea on it, neither of these a Muslim-majority nation, but, c'mon, we know better, and we know it from Mr. Trump's own mouth -- a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" was his stated goal during the campaign. But none other than the Cato Institute has found that Muslim Ban 3.0 would have saved precisely zero lives if it had been applied in 1975, which makes Muslim Ban 3.0 not just hateful policy, but stupid policy as well. And I hate to have to say it, but we just had the worst mass shooting in recent American history out in Las Vegas, and guess how much Muslim nationals traveling from the eight countries in Muslim Ban 3.0 had to do with it? People who think hatred is a Muslim thing must not be very observant. So 15 national organizations have started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Congress to rescind the President's Muslim ban.

Action: the House budget, Puerto Rico relief, and war in Yemen.

The House is putting together a budget resolution they're hoping to pass tomorrow, and, as you might expect, it would not only slash trillions of dollars from Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps, housing, and education, it would pave the way for the Senate to pass massive tax cuts for the rich and for corporations without having to worry about a Democrat filibuster. Hence you may 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 Rep's phone number so you can call and demand that they vote against the House's proposed budget. Don't let your right-wing friends ape that notorious pedant, OMB head Mick Mulvaney, in saying things like how can coal workers in West Virginia be told to pay for things like this? Gosh, think coal workers in West Virginia will ever use Medicare and Social Security? Might coal workers who fall into desperate times, as we all do sooner or later, need to avail themselves of food stamps or Medicaid? Of course they will, and cutting them so that rich folks and corporations can get more tax breaks is evil. And we should always fight evil.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell Congress not only to pass a relief package for Puerto Rico, but to restore local autonomy over economic matters to Puerto Rico's government, and even forgive Puerto Rico's debt. I don't fully agree that Puerto Rico's debt is "Washington-manufactured" -- "bankster-manufactured" would be more accurate, and even that would incorrectly absolve corrupt Puerto Rican politicians from the mess they helped make. But instead of contemplating the "moral hazard" of forgiving Puerto Rico's debt, we should contemplate the actual moral hazard of using Puerto Rico's financial troubles as a way of turning them into Greece. Mr. Trump loves telling everyone that Puerto Rico "want(s) everything done for them," so it's more than a bit ironic that we've literally deprived them of the ability to make economic decisions as they see fit! And, seriously, right now, they still have hardly any electricity and hardly any access to food and water; there's no shame in asking for help if a hurricane put you in that position. There is a considerable amount of shame in refusing to give it because the Mayor of San Juan hurt your fee-fees, though.

Finally, Reps. Khanna (D-CA), Jones (R-NC), Massie (R-KY), and Pocan (D-WI) have introduced H.Con.Res. 81, which would direct the President to remove our troops from hostilities in Yemen. Is it enough to say that Yemen is suffering from famine and cholera? Is it enough to say that Saudi Arabia's only interest in attacking Yemen is self-interest? Is it enough to say that fighting Houthi rebels in Yemen, as we're helping Saudi Arabia do, puts us on the same side as al-Qaeda? Well, that should be enough, but consider also that Congress has not authorized either of the last two Presidents to take military action in Yemen. Too often the President wants to do something and Congress doesn't remind him that our Constitution only grants him the power to conduct a war, not start one. I mean, the Founders broke off from Britain in the first place at least partly because they understood that free people don't just "trust" their leaders to do the right thing -- free people keep their leaders in check. Peace Action helps you tell your House Reps to help stop our involvement in Saudi Arabia's immoral war against Yemen by supporting H.Con.Res. 81.

Action: tax "reform."

President Trump finally released the broad outline of a tax "reform" plan, and it's an even bigger turd sandwich than we thought. We knew it would repeal the Estate Tax and the Alternative Minimum Tax, we knew it would slash corporate taxes, we knew it would deliver a massive income tax cut for rich folks and a piddling tax cut for working families, and we even knew it would raise taxes on certain middle class families in collapsing seven tax brackets down to three. But wait, there's more! The Trump tax plan would get mortgage interest deduction reform exactly wrong -- the home mortgage interest deduction gets abused by folks who buy up craploads of buildings just so they can take the tax break, but the Trump plan would actually only offer that deduction to folks who pay more than $25,000 annually in mortgage interest, meaning working families wouldn't be able to take it anymore and slumlords still could. Any reasonable person would try to accomplish the exact opposite in a reform proposal, but not our President -- his mortgage deduction proposal is perhaps the most despicable tax policy proposal I've ever seen, and anyone who supports it would be, in a sane and moral world, too ashamed to show their face in public.

But none of this has stopped Mr. Trump from claiming that the tax cuts wouldn't benefit him, which, thankfully, seems to more and more Americans to be the offensively absurd statement it actually is -- why, even our paper of record seems to have no patience with tax cut stupidity anymore. Mr. Trump peddles the same lie that repealing the Estate Tax "helps family farms," when the next family farm he finds that was ever destroyed by the Estate Tax will be the first, and he also peddles the lie that corporations just can't compete with other countries and their lower tax rates, but corporations have soaked up nearly all of the increase in income from this economic "recovery" and buy enough corporate welfare tax breaks that they pay a much lower effective tax rate. And I'm sure his minions in the right-wing media will peddle the lie that "everyone will get $1,600." That'd be based on the Tax Policy Center's finding that the average tax break will be $1,600, but averages don't pay the mortgage, and if I get a tax break of $40 and someone else gets a tax break of $3,160, that doesn't mean $1,600 flows into my bank account.

It gets worse. The Senate Budget Committee has drafted a budget proposal that includes the tax cuts, but doesn't offset about $1.5 trillion (over the next decade) of their cost. They're imagining that the Magic Unicorn Power of Tax Cuts will goose up the economy such that they'll collect an extra $1.5 trillion in revenues, but when they don't -- no, it's not even an "if," it's a "when"! -- they'll use the resulting shortfall as an excuse to cut budgetary programs that actually help good Americans, like food stamps, like Medicare, like Medicaid, like Social Security. And of course the House is, as we speak, putting together a budget proposal that would allow them to "fast track" such program cuts. You might call this rule-by-incompetence, but assessing their competence gives them far too much credit: they mean to do us harm, because doing us harm is the way they keep their power. Their plans represent nothing more and nothing less than a massive income redistribution scheme from working families to rich folks, and civilized people cannot, and must not, suffer such evil.

So of course we should be clogging up their phone lines with our will that they must not pass the Trump tax plan, that nearly every aspect of it is evil, that supporting it is absolutely toxic and will bring them down if they're up for re-election next November. But we should also, of course, argue for the world we want. If we bring back the 91% tax bracket and close corporate tax loopholes so that corporations actually pay 35%, executives won't pay themselves outlandish sums and won't let profits sit in corporate coffers to be taxed away, so they'll spend that money hiring people to make stuff. I know that's what'll happen because that's what did happen in the middle of the last century, when we created the greatest middle class that ever walked the Earth. And if we imposed a one percent tax on all Wall Street trading (a.k.a. the "Robin Hood tax," or the "Wall Street sales tax"), we'd raise hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and then we could actually, for example, develop a renewable energy grid in America, one built by, among others, all the fossil fuel workers who would be displaced. We could find other tax policy items to support -- I post about them all the time here -- but let's get our Reps and Senators on the line and make our will known about this matter, right now. Good luck, and God bless.

AUTHOR'S NOTE. See also my tax "reform"-related action alert from early September, which focuses more on the corporate tax angle than today's action alert does.

Action: food stamps, and campaign finance reform.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any cuts to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, i.e., food stamps. A lot of folks really don't understand how the food stamps program works -- not just because right-wingers want to destroy all good federal programs, but because centrists pretend that pandering to people's shallowness is the path to victory. A lot of folks seem to think that the food stamp program works by taking their taxpayer money and giving it to folks who don't deserve it, but that's not how it works: it takes taxpayer money from all of us and gives it to anyone who needs it, which could be all of us, at some time or other. I mean, even the hardest-working folks suffer bad luck and reversals in life. If you really think too many of "those people" get your hard-earned money, then you have an obligation to change the system so that it's fairer. If that's even the problem -- if the problem is you're just a racist, then you need to change yourself.

Meanwhile, H.R. 20, the Government by the People Act, would create a public campaign financing program allotting six dollars for every dollar in small donations (donations $50 and under) made to campaigns. And thus the bill would amplify the power of small campaign donors; right now the really really big campaign donations seem to jump their donors to the front of any line to get their grievances heard, and our Constitution doesn't give you more rights just because you have more money. H.R. 20 wouldn't mandate participation by candidates in the public financing program, so reflexive Citizens United defenders can sheath that imaginary objection, and though it would likely have the effect of shaming candidates who forego participating in the system, there's no Constitutional "right" not to be shamed by your countryfolk, and anyone who pretends otherwise is a snowflake. Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to support real campaign finance reform by supporting the Government by the People Act.

Action: fighting cruel budgets, polluters, and banksters.

What's not to like about the Trump budget? Why, that it throws people off Medicaid so more poor workers will die, that it cuts food stamps so more kids and seniors will starve, that it cuts Social Security disability funding so workers who get hurt can become poor, that it cuts student loan programs so more students will be crushed by debt, and that it slashes renewable energy funding and clean air and clean water enforcement so Trump cronies can make even more unearned money and the rest of us can get sicker. OK, I don't know if Mr. Trump intended all those things with his budget, but intent matters a lot less than result, and those will be the results. And if anyone tells you that TRUMP HAZ TEH PAID FAMILY LEAVEZ HA HA YOU ARE TEH STUPIDZ!!!!!, remind them that Mr. Trump's six-week paid family leave program is, like his infrastructure plan, a boutique plan. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) and keep those anti-Trump budget phone calls to your Reps and Senators coming.

Meanwhile, I'm no great fan of the Paris climate accord, but I'm not above using Mr. Trump's withdrawal therefrom as a news hook to persuade you to tell your Governor to work harder to protect good Americans from the ill effects of pollution and climate change, as Penn Environment helps you do. When you can't get our federal government to do something, you can still get your state and local governments to do it -- indeed, it really ought to be easier, since you have fewer people to influence, and it's also how a lot of great change happens in America, and if today's state governments also seem only to respond to their biggest donors, that only means we must redouble our efforts. Renewable energy standards -- you know, the ones Rick Perry is so anxious to get rid of, how's that for "small government"? -- have come about entirely at the state level, and with Mr. Trump caring more about his fossil fuel cronies than the real job creators in the up-and-coming solar and wind industries, our state governments are our best bet for renewable energy investment, too. So let's get to stepping.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 10, the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, then People's Action still helps you do that. You might think that conservatism animates Republican politicians these days, but you'd be wrong -- nothing animates Republican politicians so much as delivering more unearned money to their biggest donors, whether through more tax-cuts-for-the-rich or more "relief" from the "burden" of regulation. But ask yourself: why is keeping banksters from cheating you a "burden"? Why is keeping financial predators from taking your home and your savings a "burden"? Frankly, the unchecked power of banksters, who do nothing but play casino games with our economy and want nothing so much as to make us all their debt slaves, is the real burden. And they crashed our economy not even a decade ago with their casino games, and given the "freedom" Congress wants to give them, they'll do it again and again and again -- and extract tribute in the form of bailouts again and again and again. Well, folks, we've got to break that wheel.

Action: food stamps, drug prices, and Presidential tax returns.

Trumpians say "it's time for good people to stop paying for bad people" in our federal budget. But they're not talking about taxpayers paying for welfare handouts for banksters and big pharma and nuclear power plants; they're talking about things like food stamps, as if only "bad people" (and not, say, children or seniors) use them. Trouble, of course, is that we now live in a society where (as Neal Gabler instructed us a year ago) nearly half of us would have big trouble scaring up $400 if we had an emergency, so the next time you cross the street against the light, you could be utterly broken financially as well as physically, and then you might need food stamps to make ends meet. Would that automatically make you a "bad person"? Of course it wouldn't -- and if we funded food stamps like civilized human beings, we could be there for each other, and not incidentally, for ourselves, since trouble doesn't discriminate. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Mr. Trump's proposed food stamp cut.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1776/S. 771, the Improving Access to Affordable Prescription Drugs Act, then Sum of Us still helps you do that. Want yet another measure of the sickness, immorality, and decadence of our society? Then consider how easily the notorious "Pharma Bro" could hike the price of the life-saving medicine Daraprim by over 5000 percent and then act all surprised anyone thought that was uncouth. Consider also how Mylan could hike the price of an EpiPen -- something you might need to deploy within 10 seconds to save someone's life! -- by over 400 percent. Consider how often cable news punditoids talk about us having to live with high drug prices as the price of research and development, without noting that research and development are expenses and thus don't get taxed as corporate profits! So if you're as sick and tired as I am of all the rhetorical hostage-taking, then the Improving Access to Affordable Prescription Drugs Act is for you.

Finally, supporters of H.R. 305/S. 26, the Presidential Tax Transparency Act, are now circulating a "discharge petition," which would require the bill to get a full vote before the House if more than half its members (218 of 435) sign it. Then House Speaker Paul Ryan wouldn't be able to deploy his usual excuse for refusing to consider a bill (that doing so would step on the tootsies of his precious little Committee Chairpersons!). The bill would, as its title suggests, force Presidential candidates to release their tax returns, as Mr. Trump famously refused to do during the campaign (and now he says he won so it doesn't matter nyah-nyah-nyah). It used to be tradition for Presidential candidates to do this, but Mr. Trump killed the tradition, so now it's gotta be law. And though the bill couldn't force a sitting President to release his tax returns, guess who's already declared his candidacy for re-election in 2020? Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Presidential Tax Transparency Act.

Around the table: time for another exciting round of "When's That Terrorist Attack Coming?"

Uh oh: Jonathan Chait figures out that the Trump budget assumes that $2 trillion in miraculous economic growth over the next decade will pay for both $2 trillion in tax cuts and enough growth in government revenues that the budget will balance -- but they can't both be true. The Administration's responses are even worse than I imagined they'd be, but let's not congratulate ourselves on the Administration's "$2 trillion math error," because that's exactly the kind of "mistake" evil people make when they're pretty sure circumstances (when's that terrorist attack coming again?) will cover them.

Administration Budget Director Mick Mulvaney insists that his President's multitudinous attacks on federal programs that actually help people actually show compassion for the taxpayer. Now here's why that's a pile of dung: anyone who pays taxes may, theoretically, need to avail themselves of the programs for which those taxes pay -- not just programs ensuring clean air, clean water, and working roads, but also programs like food stamps and Medicaid. In America, we should invest in each other, not redistribute income upward to the undeserving wealthy, as is Mr. Mulvaney's fervent wish.

Jesus Mary and Joseph why is anyone reporting that "Paul Ryan and the White House are barreling toward a tax reform show-down"? There will be no showdown -- only the drama they pretend to have so they can distract the people from the real evil they're about to do. We learn, at least, that the Republicans want to sell their "border tax" by saying it "ends the 'Made in America' tax," which is a pretzel of a notion to try and sell, and where were they when the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act came up for a vote? Filibustering it, of course.

Comcast sends cease-and-desist order to a pro-net neutrality website called Comcastroturf.com, saying the website's name is "confusingly similar to the (Comcast trademark) because it sounds the same, looks the same, and is spelled similarly to Comcast." The good news? If Comcast actually filed a copyright infringement suit against Comcastroturf.com, a judge would laugh it out of court in about 30 seconds. The bad news? Comcastroturf.com still couldn't sue under a federal SLAPP law, because it doesn't yet exist. Still, ain't nothing so pitiful as a big corporation that can't take a joke. Waaaaaaaah!

Finally, the Department of Labor decides it'll implement the 2016 "fiduciary rule" after all -- but activists wonder if the Trump Administration will actually enforce it. Like them, I suspect not -- but failing to protect pensioners from fund managers' selfishness (as the rule would do) would likely invite legal challenges, and trying to junk it as part of Mr. Trump's effort to randomly kill regulations would almost certainly invite more. Plus, sooner or later we'll get a President who'll enforce it, even if he's another center-right Democrat.

Action: fair budgeting, and worker rights.

I've got plenty of action alerts that'll help you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Trump budget: from Food and Water Watch, the Sierra Club, the National Women's Law Center, Americans for Tax Fairness, Social Security Works, Student Debt Crisis, and Moms Rising. Also, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you write your local paper to oppose the Trump budget. But, really, this demands a phone call, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone). You could tell your Congressfolk that slashing Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, anti-pollution enforcement, renewable energy funding, food stamps, public lands administration, and student loan programs is just plain evil -- or you could tell your Congressfolk that in a better budget like the People's Budget, one which would actually create jobs and advance our environment and make taxes fairer, we invest in each other, whereas in the Trump budget we invest in more corporate welfare handouts to Mr. Trump's rich friends.

Meanwhile, the city of London will review Uber's license to operate there at the very end of this month, so Sum of Us helps you ask Transport for London to reject Uber's license, and thus its ability to operate in London, unless and until it respects its drivers' rights, including the right to paid a decent wage for good work. As it happens, London is Uber's only foothold in Europe, largely due to good Europeans' agitation against it; Uber casts itself as the future of the economy, but it's very old-school in one fairly important way: it exploits the labor of its workers on its way to sky-high stock prices and executive compensation -- in short, it redistributes income from its drivers to its executives. And it doesn't have to be that way! Using cell phone apps to get rides is not at all evil in itself, nor is folks making money part-time with the resources they already own. But with its insistence on calling employees "contract workers," and thus avoiding those pesky minimum wage and safe workplace laws, Uber isn't encouraging innovation, but exploiting it. And we don't need to stand for exploitation.

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: the Trump budget, Keystone XL, and GMO labeling.

Today's as good a day as any to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're viewing on your cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject the Trump budget or anything close to it. You know the drill: the Trump budget slashes spending that actually helps people, while jacking up spending that helps corporations. We should really call it the corporate welfare budget, since that's what it is. Seriously, a $54 billion hike in military spending, when we already spend more money on the military than all the countries ranked second through eighth in military spending combined? When we could eliminate considerably more than that in waste and unnecessary weapons? I mean, the only reason anyone's spent 25 years trying to build the F-35 fighter jet is corporate welfare, and that's a far greater moral hazard than spending on food stamps, public broadcasting, rural arts funding, and scientific research, to name just four necessary things that would suffer under the Trump budget.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard by now that the State Department has approved the Keystone XL pipeline. And you may have responded to that news by saying that sure was fast! You would not be alone in that -- though the Obama Administration sure did seem to drag its feet on the whole process, the sheer speed with which the Trump Administration got this done makes it more likely that they didn't go through all the legal procedures in approving it. Of course, for Donald Trump, law and order is for losers. Despite the rapid approval, the Keystone XL pipeline still faces many hurdles -- the Nebraska Public Service Commission has yet to approve that part of the pipeline that runs through Nebraska, for example, and this has long been a sticking point with good Nebraskans, as they scramble to protect the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides clean water to nearly two million good Americans in eight midwestern states. Hence the Sierra Club helps you urge the Nebraska PSC to reject permits for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Finally, Just Label It helps you tell the Nestlé corporation to label its genetically-modified foods for-real for-real -- by which I mean "not with QR codes" that only a smartphone can read, because that's not a good way of telling people whether your foods contain genetically-modified organisms or not. Nestlé doesn't just make iced tea, Crunch bars, and bottled water from public water sources, you know -- they also own a bunch of popular brands, including Buitoni pasta, DiGiorno pizza, Gerber baby foods, and Lean Cuisine meals. (They make a lot of dog and cat foods, too.) Would it kill Nestlé to commit to labeling its GMO foods, as many other major corporations have done? No, it would not -- certainly monks with quill pens don't write all their food labels, and certainly not everyone would reject GMOs in their foods even if they knew their foods even had them. If good Americans want to buy GMO foods, they should be able to -- and if good Americans don't want to buy GMO foods, they should be able to know which foods have GMOs in them.

Around the table: statecraft vs. "statecraft," and populism vs. "populism."

Michael Corcoran at TruthOut reminds us that the "liberal" media have a "deep-seated conflict of interest" in their reporting (or non-reporting) of Clinton Foundation donors having so much access to Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State -- specifically because a lot of "liberal" media figures are Clinton Foundation donors themselves. As we know, big donors generally aren't stupid enough to ask for a quid pro quo (which would get even John Roberts's antennae up), but they sure want something for their money. People have got to get over the idea that criticizing Hillary Clinton is the same as electing Donald Trump; as a citizen, your right to give honest counsel to your representatives is sacrosanct, and great responsibilities come with it, such as the responsibility to oppose what you don't agree with regardless of which "team" pushes it.

Michael Dear at Politico notes that "The World Is Full of Walls That Don’t Work," and wonders why Donald Trump is so bent on building one, since he's so obsessed with "winning." of course, Donald Trump isn't preoccupied with "winning" the "battle" against immigrants -- he's preoccupied with winning the election, which doesn't have to have anything to do with winning any real battles, or even putting forth workable policy initiatives. I suppose it's something that Mr. Dear's first in-depth example of an unworkable wall is the one dividing Israel and Palestine.

You know not to buy EpiPen on eBay by now, but Laura Northrup at The Consumerist tells you why you shouldn't buy them online from Canada, either. Only around one in 25 online pharmacies claiming to sell cheaper drugs from Canada actually meet U.S. or Canadian standards, so only use online sites with the domain ".pharmacy" in their addresses -- or get your doctor to prescribe Adrenaclick (not EpiPen, since one isn't a substitute for the other). And how about we let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, too? If we do that, we can really get drug prices down in this country (since Medicare represents a very large pool of drug consumers).

Trump toady Wayne Allen Root says people who get "free stuff" from the government shouldn't be allowed to vote because of their "conflict of interest" in voting for politicians who "give" them "free stuff." The idea that any good citizen should be stripped of their right to vote, for any reason, is not only a disgusting piece of un-American filth, it's a desperate argument -- arguing for disenfranchising people with whom you disagree tells the world you can't win arguments on the merits. Even when Mr. Root decides, upon minimal reflection, that folks who get Medicare and Social Security can still vote because they paid into them, he advertises his ignorance: we pay for all government services, including food stamps and "free health care," and we could, theoretically, need to avail ourselves of such services at any time. How about we never speak of this Wayne Allen Root again?

Finally, Shailly Gupta Barnes at In These Times interviews Bob Zellner about his community organizing work in the late '60s, which included members of the Ku Klux Klan. Two important lessons to learn here: one, Mr. Zellner's work was life-threatening -- in fact, he almost got killed by the Klan at his very first civil rights demonstration in the '60s. Two, Mr. Zellner didn't build bridges by compromising all his principles, like professional whiners about "bipartisanship" do -- he did it by concentrating on what he and the Klan had in common, which turned out, at first, to be a mutual experience of government spying. That could work again today -- though people like Bernie Sanders, not people like Donald Trump, can make it work.

Action: food stamps, and vehicle safety whistleblowers.

Now, at the behest of Governors eager to prove themselves as the biggest pricks in any room they enter -- led, of course, by the King of Pricks, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker -- Congress may permit drug-testing on food stamp recipients. You'd think you already qualified for food stamps if you were having enough trouble finding work, but no, now you must also qualify by not abusing drugs, even though your chances of paying for meth or heroin with your EBT card are precisely zero. And guess what? They will not catch drug-abusers on food stamps in any large numbers using this method. We know this, because some Governors have tried it with welfare recipients and failed. We'd be much better off making aspirants for public office pass a drug test, amirite? Of course we have other reasons to smack down this proposal -- if you take federal money you follow federal rules being one, people with drug addictions need treatment and not endless stigmatization being another. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to make receiving food stamps conditional on a drug test.

Meanwhile, a mere year after faulty ignition switches leading to over a dozen deaths forced General Motors to recall almost 50 million cars, and a mere six months after Congress passed the Motor Vehicle Safety Whistleblower Act, the Department of Transportation -- charged with writing the regulations that will implement the Motor Vehicle Safety Whistleblower Act -- has done approximately bupkus. I guess they're not quite as slow as the federal agencies writing (or not writing, as the case may be) the rules that would properly implement Dodd-Frank, but there's still no excuse to get rattled before the corporations no doubt hoping to run out the clock before President Trump takes office. What arguments could they possibly deploy in opposition? That corporations should always be free to do whatever they want or (pulls gun) your jobs get it? That they're "unnecessary," although, hello, 13 deaths? Anyway, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell the Department of Transportation to implement the Motor Vehicle Safety Whistleblower Act already.

Around the table: financialization hits the mainstream media, and other developments.

I am shocked to see this article in Time magazine, entitled "American Capitalism's Great Crisis," and subtitled "How Wall Street is Choking Our Economy and How to Fix It." Rana Faroohar sounds like a kindler, gentler Michael Hudson as she describes how the finance sector (i.e., the banksters) has taken over the economy such that very little bank money actually makes it to the economy, and how "(m)ost of the money in the system is being used for lending against existing assets such as housing, stocks and bonds," rather than the creation of new assets. However, where Mr. Hudson offers debt forgiveness as a solution, Ms. Faroohar doesn't -- possibly because her article is a condensed version of a much larger book, which will go on my reading list right quick.

Ho hum, Paul Ryan says the Obama Administration's new overtime rule is an "absolute disaster" blah blah blah, will kill small businesses blah blah blah. As "disastrous" as it was back in the late '60s, when we routinely had sub-4% unemployment rates and the overtime floor was actually higher, once you adjust for inflation? Yeah, those were "disastrous" times all right -- for takers like Paul Ryan who would redistribute income upward to his corporate paymasters.

Former two-term Massachusetts Republican Governor William Weld will seek the Libertarian Party's Vice Presidential nomination, in the hopes that he will be on the ticket with former two-term New Mexico Republican Governor Gary Johnson, seeking that party's Presidential nomination. But while Mr. Johnson is believable as a Libertarian, Mr. Weld -- who first won in Massachusetts in 1990 by running to John Silber's left, which wasn't hard -- just looks like he's trying to find a home, even though he was the Libertarian Party's nominee (as well as the Republican Party's nominee) for Governor of New York against Eliot Spitzer in 2006. Still, the Party must be pleased to have four gubernatorial terms at the top of their ticket, and they may even attract a few liberals disaffected with Mrs. Clinton's center-right economics and center-further-right "war on terror" positions. Think the Koch brothers will put their money where their mouths are and throw a few hundred mil the Libertarians' way? I kid, of course.

Los Angeles City Council unanimously passes ordinance requiring farmers' markets to accept food stamps. Perhaps that will stop right-wingers from complaining about poor people buying candy bars with their EBT cards! Again, I kid -- nothing stops right-wingers from complaining about the poor. Still, good Los Angelenos should be able to eat better (and eat better cheaper) this way, and we can chip away at the stereotype of farmers' markets as places ruled by yoga mats. (As an aside, I did not know that farmers could not sell their wares directly to customers in California until 1979. That doesn't sound like the sort of thing a truly free market would tolerate.)

Finally, Matt Taibbi writes about how Donald Trump is "Killing the Republican Party." He's not too sure the Republican Party will actually die, of course -- I figure they'll compete as long as they have money and rage-filled adherents, both of which they'll have for a long time -- but it's hard for me, even as someone who tries hard to avoid blasphemy, to disagree with statements like "(n)o hell is hot enough for them." At least there's optimism: "Money is important in politics," he says, discussing how well the Trump and Sanders campaigns have done, "but in democracy, people ultimately still count more."

Action: female genital mutilation, and food stamps.

Good news: Somalia's government is working on banning female genital mutilation, which is pretty much as dire as it sounds. The practice used to be known as "female circumcision" -- or, in some parts of Nigeria, "having your bath" -- but these days, though FGM still occurs in some 30 countries, Somalia seems to be one of its last major strongholds, and FGM, as you might imagine, puts girls at risk of infection and death, not to mention PTSD and difficulties with childbirth and menstruation. Why did anyone do this in the first place? I was about to look it up, but then I supposed it had something to do with societies controlling women; then I looked it up anyway, and it turns out it mostly has to do with societies controlling women, and the fact that women generally supervise FGM (or cite cultural concerns about hygiene and social standing) doesn't change that. I don't think we need to be anthropologists to condemn this practice, though some anthropologists are out there giving open minds a bad name as we speak. Avaaz helps you tell Somalia to keep working on a full ban on FGM.

Meanwhile, states across America, no doubt squealing WE'RE BROKE!!!!, plan to reinstate cruel laws that would cut food stamp access for hundreds of thousands of good Americans. Congress can prevent this catastrophe with legislation, but I doubt they will unless they hear from us, so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep food stamp access open for good Americans on the rocks. If you're about to tell me that too many Americans simply don't want to work hard, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) contemplate whether you're blowing the handful of lazy people you know way, way out of proportion, and 3) take the economy back from the real lazy, good-for-nothing Americans, the banksters. As long as we're going to have an economic system that crushes jobs and redistributes working family income upward to CEOs, we're going to need a large food stamp program. When we have a more equitable economic system, one that really rewards work instead of rewarding people whose only "work" consists of ingratiating themselves with Our Glorious Elites, we'll talk again.