Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning foreclosures, junk fees, and Twitter.

Long story short: tell our VA to help veterans stay in their homes, tell our FTC to fight junk fees, and tell big corporations to abandon Twitter. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Veterans Administration (or VA) to prevent veterans from being foreclosed out of their homes. Our VA allowed veterans to defer mortgage payments during the pandemic – you remember when unemployment was 14%? – but now our VA is telling veterans either to pony up five figures or refinance their homes post-haste, though they’d be refinancing at much higher interest rates now. Hence at least four Senators have asked our VA to extend the mortgage-deferment program and pause all VA loan foreclosures, which sure seems like kindness to me. I guess some folks would rather throw veterans out on the streets when it sure wasn’t their fault a pandemic slammed into America. But I think a capitalist system that benefits the rich more than it benefits anyone else can take the hit.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous anti-junk fee rule possible. Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is also working on an anti-junk fee rule, but out FTC’s purview is broader (i.e., not just the banking industry), so their rule could do even more good – but only if we speak out. And this ought to be a lay-up! No one likes finding out that the good or service they bought actually costs more than they thought it was going to cost, after all, and no use saying that’s just how things are, get used to it, not when you don’t actually have to get used to it, since no law of physics or morals compels us to accept any abuse a corporation heaps upon us in the name of TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!! People before markets!

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Twitter, or X, or whatever; plenty of corporations have stopped advertising on Twitter, but not all corporations, and no corporations should help fund a hellscape where assholes can bully the disadvantaged and then claim DISCRIMINASHUNZ!!!! whenever someone stands up to them. Beware of hostage-taking in opposing arguments! Plenty of disadvantaged folks still use Twitter or X or whatever, they’ll say, and they’ve spent years building audiences and making connections there, so boycotts only hurt them! But I suspect these disadvantaged folks would say the same thing anti-apartheid activists said in the late ‘80s: “seriously, you’re worried about things getting worse for us?”

Around the table: the most pro-corporate Supreme Court ever! And other total non-surprises.

I’m sure you already knew that the John Roberts-led Supreme Court is easily the most pro-corporate Supreme Court in recent memory, but it’s still good to have some data behind it, even if we’d also like to know how the Roberts Court compares on this matter to, say, the Courts led by Salmon Chase or Morrison Waite. How incoming Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson writes on corporate issues will help tell us whether President Biden actually wants to change our politics so that ordinary Americans count again, or whether he just wants to look like he's doing that.

I wouldn’t blame you for being skeptical that “the teacher shortage in America has hit crisis levels,” because our “liberal” media cry “crisis” at a lot of things (cough crime cough) that aren’t actual crises, and the fourth paragraph of this article admits it can’t teacher levels well, at least not beyond data and anecdotes from (by my count) nine “state and district-level reports.” To the degree that it’s happening, though, I point the finger at right-wingers yelling and screaming at (and threatening!) teachers over wearing masks and getting vaccines and teaching about racism. Yes, the pandemic was rough on teachers, but I’d lay money that all the right-wing whining afterward tipped more teachers over the edge.

Not long before Kyrsten Sinema finally signed off on the Inflation Reduction Act after forcing through at least one significant change-for-the-worse, someone in the “liberal” media actually wondered why Democrats “left (her) out” of negotiations on the bill. Gosh, I don’t know – maybe because they hate her even more than they hate Joe Manchin? Joe Manchin is garden-variety corrupt, after all, but Kyrsten Sinema thinks she’s so much smarter than us, and the next person I meet who actually likes people who think they're so much smarter than everyone else will be the first. And anyway, “mavericks” don’t go to bat for banksters, not when even Donald Trump says nasty things about them.

Surprise, surprise, study links “Earning Persistently Low Wages” “With Faster Memory Decline In Old Age,” which results include dementia. I’ve long said that people aren’t “bad at math” or “bad at budgeting” so much as they don’t make enough money to make a budget work, and I’ve also suspected that failure at that task alone (never mind the consequences of that failure, like foreclosure and eviction and getting your water and your heat and your electric turned off) makes you less sharp as the years go by. I’ve even suspected that not having savings to fall back on (as low-wage earners rarely have) also makes you less sharp. Now we have data that supports these notions.

The money shot from this article about how John Fetterman’s parents supported him and his family well into his 40s shows pretend-Pennsylvanian Mehmet Oz calling Mr. Fetterman a “pretend populist,” but I don't care that Mr. Fetterman grew up in a (his word!) “cushy” suburb or needed a substantial cash infusion from his parents as late as 2015. No child picks where they’re born or where they grow up, and if you're lucky enough to have privilege, your life's work is leveraging that privilege for all the folks who don’t have it, so in that light, giving up an insurance underwriting career to mentor young orphans and high-school dropouts seems heroic. And how did Mr. Oz leverage his privilege at pandemic's outset? By telling Sean Hannity that some kids would have to die to keep the economy going. Gallant, meet Goofus.

Now Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI), the man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name, wants Congress to have to renew Social Security and Medicare every single year. As a way of “controlling government spending,” something the Ron Johnsons of the world never do when it comes to all the welfare handouts they give to corporations. But Americans like their Social Security and Medicare, and the only way this ends well for Mr. Johnson is if Mandela Barnes – the presumptive Democratic nominee now that his top three Democratic opponents have bowed out – simply doesn’t mention it in campaign ads. Sadly, this is not difficult to imagine. Too many Democrats preoccupy themselves with being “different” and “special” and "thinking outside the box" when what they really need to do is go for the throat.

Finally, let us take a moment to celebrate good Kansans turning back an anti-abortion constitutional amendment by an impressive 59-41 margin. The people of Kansas accomplished this despite a) voting on the matter during a primary election which always has lower turnout, b) a poorly-worded-probably-on-purpose ballot question, and c) a mysterious effort to mislead pro-choice voters into pulling the wrong lever that’s almost certainly going to send someone to jail. The news wasn’t all good from primary Tuesday, though: Lucas Kunce, as impressive a candidate as Democrats have ever lucked into in Missouri, lost his bid for the Senate nomination to (sigh) the beer heiress who goes-along-gets-along with Republicans like that has ever energized turnout. Even that cloud’s got a silver lining, though: Mr. Kunce’s strong showing (he lost 43-38; a lot of folks ran) puts him in a good position for a 2024 Senate race against Josh “Running Man” Hawley.

Around the table: send the kids to jail for life! And other cruelties.

Our Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, OKs life without parole for children who commit certain crimes -- and Justice Kavanaugh, in his majority opinion, appears to eviscerate precedent even as he claims to uphold it! I do recall this being exactly the kind of thing we feared from a Justice Kavanaugh. And where's the sense, from some of our highest judges, that if a child fails to badly that we even contemplate shutting them away in prison forever, that we, as a civilization, have failed that child? You could count on that, at least, from Anthony Kennedy.

Uh oh: Congressional investigation finds at least one Capitol Police official ordering, on the morning of January 6, that police look only for "anti-Trump" protestors, not the pro-Trump ones who then tried to stage a coup. Characterizing that order as "be on the lookout for counter-protesters because that is often where we have clashes between both sides," as one official does, ain't exactly a denial, and in any case I certainly hope the subsequent events of that day disabused them of the notion that "anti-Trump protestors" is where you look for the violence.

You might be irritated to confront a headline like "State-Supported 'Clean Energy' Loans Are Putting Borrowers At Risk of Losing Their Homes," but the full story is even worse: one of the Obama Administration's brilliant ideas from 2009 was to help low-income homeowners pay for improvements to their homes by giving low-interest loans to municipalities, who would then loan the money to homeowners and have them repay it in their property taxes! Nobody could have predicted that this would be a way to repossess those homes! And I'm pretty sure you were nodding off as you were reading the first sentence of this paragraph, but people with bad, convoluted ideas count on that.

Upon hearing that Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) seeks to "establish her independent bona fides as she faces a tough re-election battle in New Hampshire next year," you have to wonder why she thinks voting against a $15/hour minimum wage and opposing an end to the 20-year war in Afghanistan are good ways to do that. Assert your independence from Joe Biden, sure, but we might more reasonably say that Maggie Hassan is "asserting her independence from the public will," and that never ends well for a Democrat.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) vetoes a bill that would have banned transgender girls from participating in girls' sports, and the state Senate fails to overcome his veto, meaning the bill is dead, for now. Ah, but don't give him too much credit: this may be how they all want the drama to shake out. After all, if you "solve" a "problem," it's much harder to stoke rage over it later. Isn't it?

Finally, the Tennessee state House passes a bill banning state and local governments from requiring COVID vaccines, and all I can say is waaaaaaaaaaah! That's some "conservatism" there, preventing municipalities from determining what's best for themselves! But today's "conservatives" care about nothing but stoking rage in people, and they dishonor their forebears in doing so. I guess they don't see the irony.

Action: the HEROES Act yea, the HEALS Act nay.

Today we have one simple task: to call our Senators and tell them to pass the HEROES Act and reject the HEALS Act.

It's one simple task because the choice is simple: the HEROES Act, which has already passed the House and which would actually help a lot of good Americans get through this pandemic -- or the HEALS Act, actually a suite comprising 10 different bills, which is a steaming piece of dung. The HEALS Act's centerpiece -- a provision that would not only effectively give big corporations immunity from lawsuits when they reopen so stupidly that they cause you to get sick and die, but would let them sue workers who demand safety from said illness and death -- is noxious enough. But the bill would actively injure the American people in other ways: it would slash enhanced unemployment benefits by $400/week, it would create a commission to cut Social Security benefits "behind closed doors," and it would funnel $25 billion of your money to defense contractor corporations so they can continue to flush money down the toilet on planes that don't work. The bill would also continue the Paycheck Protection Program, which has become a notorious corporate welfare mill, with minimal additional restraints on the PPP continuing to hand out taxpayer money to big corporations. And of course the bill would also do negative damage, as it would allocate exactly zero dollars to our upcoming election, our Post Office, our states and localities, and our public schools they're so hot to reopen so they all become COVID hotspots.

But in the meantime, the HEROES Act would -- at the risk of turning this into a Goofus and Gallant strip -- help fund our states and localities, help fund our Post Office, extend unemployment benefits as they are through the end of January, and it would do all that without the stupid "corporate immunity" or "cut Social Security behind closed doors" or "hand out even more corporate welfare to defense contractor" provisions. The HEROES Act would also expand certain working family tax cuts and repeal a big bankster tax-cut-for-the-rich that "somehow" made it into the CARES Act. It would also cut working families another stimulus check -- a more sizable one than the CARES Act did, and also a more sizable one than the HEALS Act would. It would extend and expand national moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures; the HEALS Act would let the current, more limited moratoriums on these things expire immediately. And, not for nothing, but the HEROES Act's COVID-19 testing and tracing provisions are better than those of the HEALS Act. Our President loves bragging about the number of tests we've done, but America has over 330 million inhabitants, so bragging about how you've done more tests than, say, Luxembourg is just empty bragging. I chose Luxembourg for a reason, of course: that nation performs over five times as many tests per million inhabitants as we do, and they have noticeably fewer cases per million and deaths per million, too. (If your right-wing uncle says it's easier for Luxembourg because they're smaller, just remind him that great nations don't make excuses.)

I hate to make it seem to cut-and-dried, but it is: the HEROES Act is a good bill, and the HEALS Act is a bad one. I wish Republicans were less of a clown car than they are -- it seems to me it would be quite easy to create a conservative COVID-19 relief bill, one that would (for example) actually protect mom-and-pop shops instead of pretending nationwide restaurant chains with hundreds of employees are "small businesses." But they are a clown car -- indeed, one would better conclude that Republicans saw this ongoing pandemic as yet another opportunity to convert trillions more of our hard-earned taxpayer dollars into corporate welfare handouts for their cronies, as well as an opportunity to destroy even more of the institutions (like our public schools and our Post Office) that actually sustain a civilization through hard times like these. Needless to say, these actions demand that we issue them not merely a decisive defeat at the polls this year, but a humiliating one, one that discourages any of their kind from ever holding office again. In the meantime, we tell our Senators today to pass the HEROES Act and reject the HEALS Act; as always, you can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone), and you may have to call their local numbers if you can't reach their D.C. number. Good luck, and God bless.

Action: concerning coronavirus policy, solar power, and product safety.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to impose a national moratorium on evictions and foreclosures. You know how this is going to go: too many Americans are going to lose their jobs, either because the economy's about to go in the toilet or because they're sick and can't come to work and have neither paid sick days nor a union to fight for their jobs, and when they lose their jobs, they're not going to be able to make their monthly bills, and rent and mortgage are two of the biggest monthly bills you can pay. Even Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says we might have to prepare for a 20% unemployment rate! Of course, Steve Mnuchin is also the Foreclosure King, the man who kicked an elderly woman out of her house because she owed 27 cents on her mortgage, and I expect a lot of right-wingers will be like him: all those people thrown out of work will just get lazy if we let them stay in their homes! Yeah, all these "lazy" people needing respirators to help them breathe -- they should just get a job!

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: solar power is a lot less expensive than it used to be -- for many folks it's within the reach of a home equity loan now -- but why not help everyone enjoy the benefits of solar power? HB 531/SB 705 would set guidelines for the creation and operation of community solar organizations, which would enable a group of people to pool their resources together to get solar power if they can't afford it on their own, or if they rent rather than own a home, or if their house gets too much shade to have a proper solar set-up. Some right-wingers would call that "socialism," but not all right-wingers would! Some right-wingers would also say it's more self-reliant to use your own source of power, rather than relying on some distant utility. Too many folks don't understand that our government doesn't automatically cripple freedoms through laws and regulations, but can actually create and secure freedoms this way. If you're as subtle a thinker as that, then let the Sierra Club help you tell your PA state legislator to help spread solar power by passing HB 531/SB 705.

Finally, with a ProPublica investigation finding at least corporation designed its testing so that it's "side-impact-tested" car seat almost couldn't possibly fail it -- which sure doesn't tell you very much about whether your kids would die in a car crash if they were in that seat! -- US PIRG helps you tell our National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (or NHTSA) to enact the most vigorous car seat safety standards possible. Congress only told the NHTSA to accomplish this task 20 years ago, so maybe they should get cracking! And no, this isn't "socialism," either -- our government must step in where private corporations fail to protect us from their own greed and laziness; otherwise, why do we have one? To more effectively deliver corporate welfare to some politician's crony or other? Because that seems to be what today's politicians what our government to be. Luckily, we live in America, and they don't get all the say about everything: we do. But not if we don't use the power that belongs to us. Not if we don't speak out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Social Security, public housing, and our Post Office.

S. 2733, the so-called TRUST Act, would of course create a fast-track process to cut Social Security "behind closed doors," as Sen. Ernst might put it. Because how else can you cut Social Security? The politicians pretend Social Security is going to go belly-up any minute -- I'm old enough to remember when they said it would go belly-up in 2016! -- when actually it'll pay out full benefits until 2037 and we could put it on sounder footing (with expanded benefits!) if we merely taxed income above $132,000 into the system. But that's just impossible, says the "bipartisan" "consensus" among our elected officials, which has little to do with reality as ordinary Americans experience it, and sadly the TRUST Act has four co-sponsors among the Democratic caucus. They keep using that word "bipartisan", but I do not think it means what they think it means. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject secret Social Security cuts by rejecting the TRUST Act. (Those four Senators are Messrs. Manchin, Sinema, Angus King, and Doug Jones, if you're looking to do more.)

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the infamous Faircloth Amendment, which has stymied the building of public housing for the last two decades. The Faircloth Amendment represents yet another capitulation by nominal Democrat Bill Clinton to the far right; we said Republican moderates were useless the other day, but that's no less true of Democratic ones. And guess what's happened in the meantime? A major housing bubble burst, throwing millions of good Americans out of their homes, and several major American cities (and minor ones -- hello, Berkeley, California, where the $400,000 listings are all empty lots) have become too expensive for folks to live in. Oh, and America has 50 million more people now, and they can't live in tents. Republicans used to say that when the "free" market failed us, government had to step in; now they say "oh, the free market failed you? Well, tough toodles for yoodles!" But we don't need to take that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to reject any Postmaster General appointee who aims to privatize the service, then Progress America still helps you do that. Too many right-wingers say PRIVATIZE TEH POST OFFICEZ!!!! as if it will cure all of America's ails; these folks seem unaware (do I mean "unaware"? Perhaps I do!) that our Post Office has taken exactly zero dollars in taxpayer money for operating expenses since 1982 -- or that our Constitution literally mandates the creation and Congressional oversight of a national post office. But, if anything, we should bring our Post Office more under the American people's control. If we did that, we could more easily reinstitute the postal banking service that was a regular feature of our Post Offices until the late 1960s, and that would better serve urban and rural folks banksters don't bother to serve -- certainly it would serve them better than check-cashing joints! But if we privatize our Post Office, that won't ever happen -- and good Americans won't get the services they pay for and deserve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Around the table: more lessons about drama and duty.

Surprise, surprise, while the Senate Judiciary Committee created all that drama on Friday, the House passed yet more tax-cuts-for-the-rich. Not that they planned it precisely that way, of course -- but creating drama all the time does give folks cover to do nefarious evil, and I'm sure the folks who create the drama are quite aware of that. (The House did not pass the bill in question, H.R. 6760, as part of a budget reconciliation process, meaning our Senators can filibuster it, and of course we'll get on our Senators to do that presently.)

Natalie Shure at In These Times instructs us, in examining the collapse of alleged innovative corporation Theranos, that we're not going to "innovate" our way out of our health care problems. "Ingenuity isn’t what our healthcare sector needs," she writes. "We have plenty of it already, and it hasn’t managed to stop poor people from dying over 10 years earlier, on average, than their wealthy peers." I was going to add that "looking to private corporations to fix health care is more than a little like looking to banksters to fix the foreclosure crisis," but then I realized it wasn't much of a joke, because the Obama Administration did all of that. Didn't we used to think scientists, not entrepreneurs, were the big innovators?

Rebecca Solnit at The New Republic does a public service by reviewing three books about female anger. Male anger -- the kind that ends up in school shootings, wife beatings, and whole movements of men who never stop whining about woman constantly rejecting them I wonder why -- gets most of the ink in America, but it's well past time we acknowledged that women have a right to be angry, and that we need to stop telling them they don't. (I mean, I don't put up with oooooh why are you so angry? from the haters, and it never occurs to me that I should -- but we make women feel like they should.)

Jake Laperruque and David Janovsky at the Project on Government Oversight inform us that aerial drones may have reached a point where they're good enough and cheap enough to tempt local police departments to radically increase spying on the citizenry. And the more automated they become, the fewer people will be involved in their use and maintenance -- which means, yes, that aerial drones kill jobs. How many times must I tell these pimps! Ensuring that government spying doesn't violate our rights is the work of a democracy, and only people can do the work of a democracy -- and if that last part puts the fear in you, then your task as a citizen is to help create people worthy of that work, not throw up your hands and let machines do it.

You can get too hypnotized by the inside politics in this excerpt from Michael Lewis's upcoming book (The Fifth Risk) about how our Administration is destroying our government from within, but you'll probably agree that, regardless of the specific context in which he said it, "fuck the law...I want my fucking money" is pretty much the motto of our President and of the corporate executives he regards as his real constituency. Remember that motto every time our Administration tries to slash clean air, clean water, and product safety regulations.

Finally, we learn the amazing story of how Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) went from declaring his support for the Kavanaugh nomination to demanding an FBI investigation into the allegations against Mr. Kavanaugh after activists confronted him in a Senate elevator with their stories of sexual assault. That video is hard to watch, but "(l)ook at me when I'm talking to you!" is exactly how we must confront the powerful in America, and when we do, we have the opportunity to learn a simple lesson: that shame works. Never let the cynics and the haters tell you any differently.

Around the table: the real main characters of the bankster meltdown drama, and other revelations.

Leave it to the incomparable David Dayen to remind us that coverage of the 10-year anniversary of the 2008 financial services armageddon has virtually ignored all those folks who lost their homes in the fallout. Why does our "liberal" media admires egomaniacs more than they admire regular folks? I mean, what reasonable person could possibly care how Timothy Geithner justifies the evil he did to help cause the crash and the evil he did in "fixing" it? You'd think the story of how Wells Fargo absolutely screwed over Terrie Crowley would at least appeal to the sentimentalists in our media. I guess when big corporations get exposed as the lawless bastards they are, sentimentality doesn't mean as much.

Uh oh: infamous "Tiger Mom," who has helped vet clerks for Brett Kavanaugh in her capacity as Yale law school professor, told law students last year that Mr. Kavanaugh's clerks all "looked like models" and, further, that this was "no accident." Ms. Chua went on to advise students on how to "dress to exude a 'model-like' femininity," which did seem to put more than a few law students off on pursuing a clerkship with Mr. Kavanaugh. I guess right-wingers would look at such self-weeding and say that's how it's supposed to work! I'd say they've watched too many movies and too much TV, where everyone has to be "attractive" or else they "won't attract the audience's sympathy."

Did you hear about a right-wing punditoid's hilarious attempt to spread the notion that it wasn't Brett Kavanaugh who sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford, but a guy who looked like him? Turns out he got help, such as it was, from the same right-wing PR firm that worked with the Swift Boat Veterans back in 2004. Really, though, when a guy spends two full days teasing a revelation without saying what it might be or how he got it, you'd think "serious journalists" would know better than to report on it -- even to report on it as hype, which is how they get good journalists to do bad things. Sadly, they're all more afraid of being left out of a scoop than they are of the long-term damage they're doing to our civilization.

Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), who might well be that state's next Senator in a few months, unfurls an avalanche of ignorance about the whole Kavanaugh imbroglio. This is how they do it, of course: like His Personal Lord and Savior Our President, they sling so much fecal matter against the wall you can't keep up with it, so I'll say only two things: 1) you don't have to be "perfect" not to try and rape girls in high school, only good, and 2) if Mr. Cramer had been sexually assaulted, would he say it "never went anywhere" due to the mere absence of someone else's ejaculate in or on his person?

Laurie Penny at Longreads explains why we shouldn't debate right-wingers. Long story short: right-wingers don't care about "winning arguments" or "being civil" or "protecting the spirit of debate" so much as smearing the house of our civilization with shit and then laughing at our efforts to scrub it off -- and they use unctuous pronouncements about "debate" and "civility" only as a wedge to introduce ideas that civilized people wouldn't otherwise consider. You should spend the 15 minutes or so it'll take to read Ms. Penny's piece, so I'll only add two observations: 1) in my experience, folks who say "I like to debate" are generally trying to justify being jerks to other people, and 2) I don't like debate -- I like being right and getting attention for being right, and the difference between me and most people is that I just admitted it to you.

Finally, from the "Surprise, Surprise!" file: our President accuses Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), now running for Governor, of betraying him in public. What did Mr. DeSantis do? He wouldn't support our President's assertion that Democrats have been inflating death toll numbers over Hurricane Maria's landfall in Puerto Rico. We could go on about our President's peculiar notions of "loyalty," but let's just ask: when are our leaders going to be loyal to the American people? Because that's how this thing's supposed to work.

Around the table: the moral of every story learned, at last!

Another day, another reminder that making a "blue wave" the be-all-end-all of your life is very shortsighted, to say the least: Matt Stoller at the Washington Post says "Democrats Can't Win Until They Recognize How Bad Obama's Financial Policies Were." No, really, as in Mr. Obama's response to the foreclosure crisis was nothing more and nothing less than "a wholesale attack on the American home (the main store of middle-class wealth) in favor of concentrated financial power." It goes on from there; by the time you get to the point where the Obama FTC goes after "such villains as music teachers and ice-skating instructors" rather than, you know, any of the dozen job-crushing monopolies you or I could name, you'll hopefully be reminded that you are the Great Person you've been waiting for, not some Democrat politician who'll sell you out in the name of "bipartisanship."

I don't know that Brett Kavanaugh committed perjury per se during all of his various confirmation hearings over the last decade-plus -- some of the arguments made at the link are stronger than others, and the strongest argument anyone will really care about (what, you think the average voter could give one rat's hind-quarter how much input he really had into William Pryor's nomination?) concerns his testimony about torture. But politicians never seem to be as offended by torture as the people are, so I doubt Democrats will make much of an effort there -- though it'd be easy for Democrats to paint Mr. Kavanaugh as a "coward" for trying to distance himself from unpopular policies when convenient.

And now, from Sam Levin at The Guardian, here's "The Dark Side of California's Ending Cash Bail." What is the downside to ending the unconstitutional practice of detaining folks in jail indefinitely before convicting them of a crime? Well, the law's writers decided they had to come up with some system to keep suspects in jail, purportedly out of concern for public safety, but they came up with "risk assessment" algorithms to predict who's a threat, and guess whom they're most likely to "predict" are a threat? Poor, black, and brown folks, that's whom, since they're the folks law enforcement will most likely arrest in the first place! Maybe in time we can polish this turd, but right now we've just given rageheads another tool to impose their biases on the rest of us.

Uh oh: Louisiana state police were apparently circulating a list of antifa members they got from a Nazi wannabe website. Oh, and it's not even a list of real antifa -- probably just folks Nazi wannabes don't like, which means you or I could be on it! That'd be a little ominous, of course, but it would also make me a little proud. Naturally the Louisiana police tried to block the list's release, saying that doing so could "compromise" an investigation and out a "Confidential Informant" (caps in original), because, as we know, there's just no way civilized people could protect actual confidential informants and pursue justice at the same time.

I know our President didn't really mean all protests should be illegal, just the ones that take place during hearings on his Supreme Court nominees hearings at our Capitol, but he said what he said, and anyway he's dead wrong: our government belongs to us, so we've got as much right to be at our Capitol as our Representatives do, and if they get all angry-dad on us, we have every right to say "are you effing kidding me?" and act like the bosses we are. Seriously, if protestors dog your every move, don't you wonder what you might have done wrong?

Finally, Michaela Haas at Yes! magazine shares with us "Seven Strategies to Turn Trauma Into Strength." You're always better off trying to turn the bad shit that happens to you into some sort of positive, and I can tell you from experience that meditation, self-compassion, gratitude, and you-need-a-mess-of-help-to-stand-alone (to name four of the seven strategies) are big helps in doing that. And yet I also feel compelled to caution you against using positivity against folks who seem to have more trouble overcoming their suffering than you'd expect. You know, the way right-wingers do to poor, black, and brown folks? It seems like "don't be like right-wingers" is the moral of every damn story I tell.

Around the table: special "somewhat better news" edition!

In opening arguments against the first of the J20 defendants -- you know, the ones who face decades in prison on absurd felony rioting charges -- prosecutors somewhat inauspiciously concede that they have precisely zero evidence tying the defendants to any actual property damage. Ordinarily that wouldn't bode well for an attempt to convict people for, you know, damaging property, but the prosecution has plodded on, demanding that the defendants "intended" to destroy property (a claim which would surely raise the ire of Zombie Justice Scalia) and repeating random phrases as if mere repetition would rally folks to their side. In short, the prosecution is a textbook right-wing prosecution, and sadly it might succeed in Trump's America.

Bess Levin at Vanity Fair reports on all the rich-people tax loopholes that somehow made it into the House-passed tax "reform" bill. They largely describe hedge-fund managers, who as you know are very popular, and folks hiding money in large estates, who are similarly popular. Is it too much to ask that anyone who voted for this monstrosity be turned out of office in 2018? No, I do not believe it is too much to ask, even in an era where legislatures can gerrymander individual homes out of districts.

A second U.S. District Court judge blocks the Trump Administration's attempted ban on transgender soldiers in the military. Somewhere James Mattis is breathing a sigh of relief! And which gay-humping, flag-burning, income-redistributing Democrat President appointed this judge to the federal bunch? Why, Bush the Better, of course. I wish that made me feel better about the reactionary jerks Mr. Trump is putting on the federal bench at an accelerated rate.

Sammi-Jo Lee at Yes! magazine describes how the "internet co-op," of which there are now currently hundreds across the land, could be a bulwark against the FCC's attempts to destroy free speech on the internet. And of course these internet co-ops succeed in areas filled with Trump votaries, which matter they may want to attend, particularly after their hero helps make their corporate internet experience miserable. But let's not expect any consistency about "states' rights" from the man who would prevent the FCC from nullifying state-level anti-community broadband laws, but would also prevent states from enacting their own net neutrality laws.

If you've any benefit-of-the-doubt left for Roy Moore because he married his wife when she was an actual adult, note well that Mr. Moore himself says he first laid eyes on her when she was around 15 or 16, and that she made a strong impression upon him then. So either he really believes it's better to pick a mate who's not old enough to consent to sex yet so he can mold her more easily into a "good wife," or he sublimated an urge society can't tolerate by picking a girl when she was young and then keeping his hands off her until she was an adult capable of consent. I'm sad that believing the best about him requires accepting the latter choice.

Finally, Michael Arria at In These Times writes about the "Affordable Housing Movement" "Rising from the Wreckage of the Foreclosure Crisis." You'll read about successful efforts to protect renters in San Jose, Seattle, New York, and Minneapolis, and you'll be reminded that right-wingers sold Proposition 13 in California in the 1970s by arguing that capping property taxes would be a way of capping home prices and rents. Forty years on, exactly the opposite has happened, almost like that was the whole idea!

Action: EPA funding, affordable drugs, and drug policy.

Given Congress's failure to repeal methane emissions limits on public lands late last week, today's as good a day as any to let the Environmental Defense Fund help you call your Senators and tell them not to slash EPA funding as President Trump is so hot to do. But then again, why play defense? You can just as easily tell your Senators to increase EPA funding, so that the EPA can actually do more of the things our laws mandate that it do! EPA funding has, after all, been chronically short since the early 1980s, which makes it much harder to chase down the fossil fuel drillers who leak methane into the atmosphere and dangerous carcinogens into the water, for example. No one, and I mean no one, wants dirtier air and dirtier water -- even the CEOs who constantly whine about regulations preventing them from creating jobs boo-freaking-hoo won't drink the water near their drilling wells. And one more time: a CEO would never create a job if he didn't have to -- but regulations do create jobs, for all the people who have to figure out how to comply with them.

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 Sign Here Now still helps you do that. The bill would, as its title suggests, help good Americans get prescription drugs more affordably, partly by letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices and allowing reimportation of cheaper-and-no-less-safe-because-they-re-the-same-damn-drug drugs from Canada, but also by hiking taxes on corporations that jack up the prices of their drugs. A word about that: corporations that pull a Daraprim or an EpiPen on the American public justify it by saying that the cost of drug research causes them to jack up prices. Now, how do we know that's utter bullshit? Because research is an expense, and only profits get taxed. Revenue minus expenses equals profits. So you don't need an economics degree to be able to smell that pile of dung -- in fact, I wonder if economics degrees actually hinder such olfactory acuity.

Finally, you've heard that Trump Administration Attorney General Jeff Sessions has directed federal prosecutors to level the most serious charges possible at accused nonviolent drug offenders, and also to seek mandatory minimum sentences wherever possible. Of course, that's his prerogative, but it's also a dumb idea. Every Executive branch makes do with finite resources by deciding it'll go after some things more than other things, but what do you think causes more problems in America? People smoking weed in their living room, or banksters illegally foreclosing on homeowners? Have we heard a peep from the Trump Administration about this latter item? No, we have not -- in fact, we have at least one foreclosure fiend in Mr. Trump's own cabinet. And though politicians constantly talk like we're in a massive out-of-control crime epidemic, we're actually not -- and even if we were, wouldn't treatment for drug addiction take care of the problem more effectively? So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell the Justice Department to rescind its memo, and thus support smarter crime prevention in America.

Around the table: in which we finally say good riddance to political "moderates."

U.S. Supreme Court rules that the city of Miami can sue Wells Fargo and Bank of America under the Fair Housing Act -- but also says the city would have to prove that the increased costs of bankster lending practices directly affected city revenue. I figure Miami proves pretty easily that predatory lending to minorities led to foreclosures which led to reduced tax receipts, but they might have a tougher time drawing predatory lending to falling property values. Also, Chief Justice Roberts's opinion essentially gives Miami personhood status; not being a fan of corporate "personhood," I'd prefer a different avenue to getting the good folks of Miami the relief they deserve.

Roosevelt Institute reports on how political contributions caused specific vote changes in financial reform and net neutrality. Key finding: "for every $100,000 (a) Democratic representatives received from finance, the odds they would break with their party's majority support for the Dodd-Frank legislation increased by 13.9 percent." Considering the damage financial deregulation has always done, these votes were bought very cheaply -- as they always are, if you recall the USPIRG/CTJ report from 2012 finding that 280 Fortune 500 corporations spent $2 billion on lobbying between 2008 and 2010 and got over $220 billion in tax breaks during that time.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt asks callers to come forward about the "damage" stringent EPA regulations allegedly do, but callers instead mostly complain that EPA regulations don't protect clean air and clean water enough. Well, ask a stupid question! Paragraph 6, in which a Pittsburgh resident talks about the days you had to change your shirt at lunch because of mill smoke, should really finish any argument about whether regulations "serve a purpose." But you know the haters never stop hating, and the worshipers of mammon always need another fix.

Jesus Mary and Joseph nobody cares about what the "moderates" in both parties want to accomplish. Sometimes I think the only thing worse than an extremist lying without shame or consequence is a "moderate" droning on about "innovation" and "public-private partnerships" and "right-siz(ing) regulation," because such nattering still enables extremists. And why should we work on "the President's priorities," instead of the people's priorities? I'd been feeling a bit glum that a 2018 Democrat wave (if such a thing materializes!) would take out a Charlie Dent long before it took out a Devin Nunes, but not so much now.

Finally, woman who laughed audibly during a confirmation hearing at the suggestion that then-Attorney General Sessions had always fought for racial equality now faces up to a year in prison for "disorderly and disruptive conduct." How many times must I tell these pimps! Laughing at our elected officials is our birthright! And dig all the hair-splitting done at the trial over exactly how loud her laugh was! Gosh, what are they going to do when we're all laughing at them?

Around the table: what "extreme vetting" is actually like, and other tales.

Oops: Steve Mnuchin tells Sen. Casey (D-PA) that OneWest didn't indulge in the notorious and illegal "robo-signing" practice while he was there, and guess what? Of course it did. And then he had the cojones to complain that "filling out these government forms is quite complicated"! Nothing's that complicated if you're not evil, Mr. Mnuchin.

President Trump signs another Executive Order requiring agencies to slash two regulations every time they introduce a new one. OMB leeway to waive the requirement or not, I'm pretty sure he can't really do this, either, since the Executive's authority to regulate comes from Congress, and Congress orders the Executive branch to issue regulations to meet specific legislative aims. But if his Executive agencies obey him, which they will, it's still going to be a mess.

Remember that "mass resignation" at the State Department last week? Turns out it was less a "mass resignation" and more a purge. Add this to the list of accusations you can hurl (skips intelligence briefings, purges ambassadors, signed Executive Orders that attacked refugees and immigrants who don't terrorize Americans, struts around like he's got church bells for balls) against Donald Trump when he lets terrorists attack us.

Mostafa Housson writes about the "extreme vetting" he went through when he came to America as a Syrian refugee earlier this decade. He writes 25 paragraphs describing multiple interviews over 15 months, plus "enhanced" DHS review of Syrian refugees and an eight-hour physical. But please, right-wingers, tell us what we could be doing differently. Oh, wait -- you don't care about doing things differently; you only care about doing nothing at all. Civilization is so hard, after all.

Trump spokeshack Sean Spicer says Mr. Trump's Executive Orders will prevent terror attacks like the San Bernardino shooting, but the San Bernardino shooters were not from any of the countries listed in Mr. Trump's orders. I could also point out that it won't prevent domestic terrorists like the Planned Parenthood bomber, but would that be piling on? (The answer to that question, by the way, is always no.)

California state Senator calls upon the White House to release Melania Trump's immigration papers. I mention this only to point out the precise thing we, as good Americans resisting evil, should be spending precisely zero time wringing our hands about. They're already throwing so much crap at us that we can't grab at every perceived hypocrisy and wrestle it to the ground, so let's all stay focused.

Action: largely action alerts about corruption, good government, and health care.

Given that the Senate would rather rush through a vote on unpopular Trump cabinet nominees than give the American people a chance to weigh in, I'm going to advise that you go on offense, and call your Senators (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page, of course) to oppose the nominations of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General and Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary. You can oppose Mr. Sessions because you're not convinced he'll protect either civil rights laws or the right of folks not to get shot to death by police before they've even been accused of a crime, and you can oppose Mr. Mnuchin not merely because he seemed to have a hard-on for foreclosing upon homeowners while running OneWest (with the aid of corporate welfare, naturally!), but because he "omitted" more than $100 million in personal assets in his December disclosures to the Senate. I was about to say you and I should have $100 million we can just forget about!, but if we did, we might also be hopelessly corrupt. Love of money does that, after all.

Speaking of going on offense, Rep. Conyers (D-MI) has reintroduced H.R. 676, the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, and you can call your Reps and Senators and urge them to support it. H.R. 676 would, of course, expand Medicare to include all Americans and thus create a single-payer health care system -- you know, like most other civilized nations have. People who oppose it like to say TEH CREEPING SOSHULIZM!!! and TEH TAXEZ WILL GOEZ UPZ!!!!!, but it's not "creeping socialism" so much as "creeping effective health insurance," one that would make controversies over uninsured folks and pre-existing conditions and out-of-network costs a thing of the past. And it wouldn't "increase taxes, either -- it would merely take the money you and your employer are already paying for your health insurance and call it a payroll tax. And it would reduce what you and your employer are paying, too -- after all, England and France famously pay less than half in health care expenses per capita what Americans pay. Why can't we have nice things, too? Merely because Our Glorious Elites don't want us to have them?

In other news, you've no doubt heard multitudinous reports that President Trump plans to slash trillions of dollars in government spending that actually helps people and actually exemplifies our values as a civilization -- you know, versus the kind of spending that merely funnels hard-earned taxpayer dollars to some government official's cronies, which is exactly the kind of Big Gummint Donald Trump seems to like. Per media reports, Mr. Trump would privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, zero out funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, eliminate Violence Against Women grants (because what else does a "pussy-grabber" do?), cut funding for renewable energy research, civil rights enforcement, and community policing -- and that's before we get to all the corporate welfare handouts, privatizing Medicare, cutting Social Security, and rolling back regulations on banksters. Is this what happens when 46% of the electorate elect a President? Not when 100% of Americans get to have their say about anything they want, at any time, regardless of whether or not Steve Bannon tells you to "shut up" or Trump votaries beg you to "give him a chance." Hence CREDO helps you oppose Trump's draconian, anti-American budget cuts.

Finally, Mr. Trump has lately signed an Executive Order that would allow work on the Dakota Access Pipeline to proceed more easily -- but his own investments in the pipeline have been of some interest in media reports. Mr. Trump held shares in Energy Transfer Partners and Phillips 66, two corporations involved in the pipeline's construction; a Trump spokeshack has announced that Mr. Trump has since divested in Energy Transfer, but we've heard nothing about his investment in Phillips 66. Hence MoveOn helps you tell Congress to require that the President prove he's divested from Phillips 66. I know plenty of reasonable-sounding but unscrupulous right-wingers are champing at the bit to reply that every President has cronies, and that since Mr. Trump's been more successful at business than all the other Presidents before him, his cronies will be more obvious. That objection would easily earn two counter-objections: 1) that we have an obvious interest in ensuring the President does not make decisions that directly benefit him, and 2) the fact that "every President has cronies" does not make it right. That's before we get to the meaning of "success" in the context of Donald Trump, which we could argue at least two ways.

Action: two bad Trump nominees, national parks, and Dakota Access.

Senate hearings for Rep. Tom Price's nomination as Health and Human Services Secretary began yesterday, and Steve Mnuchin's hearings for Treasury Secretary begin today, but you can express your opposition to both with one phone call and two sentences, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page. Your Senators need to know that Rep. Price's oft-stated desire to privatize Medicare makes him unfit to administer Medicare to our nation's seniors, and that Mr. Mnuchin's mania for making unearned millions off unfortunate foreclosed homeowners makes him unfit to head up our nation's Treasury. For Rep. Price, though, you could also cite simple corruption, as Judy Stone, writing at Forbes, summarizes here. The big story lately has been CNN's report that Mr. Price introduced a bill that would benefit Zimmer Biomet literally days after investing in Zimmer Biomet himself, but Ms. Stone's article documents a years-long pattern of corruption that's pretty hard to ignore. Even, perhaps, by the Diaper-Loaded-Brat-in-Chief who nominated him.

Meanwhile, Republicans will control both Houses of Congress and the Executive branch in a little over a day, so naturally (so to speak) they want to gut the Antiquities Act, with which the Executive branch designates certain national monuments, thus protecting them from polluters. With Mr. Trump anxious to drill everywhere immediately regardless of the consequences for good Americans' air and water, you can expect this attack with a quickness. Already the House has declared (in that notorious "rules package" from earlier this month) that it will consider any legislation that sells or gives away publicly-owned land (and/or the energy resources contained therein) to be "budget neutral." That'll be true whether it actually is budget-neutral or not -- and only seems to exist to prevent the American people from knowing which public lands have been sold off and for how much. What do they have to hide? An attempt to give away public lands to their cronies that'll be unpopular with the lands' actual owners, the American people? The Sierra Club helps you tell Congress to treat our public lands with the respect they deserve -- and treat us with the respect we deserve.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the 17 banks currently financing the notorious Dakota Access pipeline to divest from that project, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Army Corps of Engineers has delayed giving some permits to Energy Transfer Partners (the corporation building Dakota Access) until they can complete another environmental review, but you can bet that the regulation-hating President Donald Trump will put as much pressure on the Army to dispense with that pesky environmental review as he can -- a lot of it through Twitter, I suspect -- and I wouldn't count on Congress being a stalwart defender of clean water and religious freedom (yes, Virginia, Native Americans also get to have religious freedom; it isn't just for right-wing bigots). But if the money ain't there, then it ain't getting built, no matter what our government does. A few banks have already divested from the project, but it's been a while since anyone saw water cannons hitting peaceful protestors, so the rest of them might be waiting until they think no one's watching. Which is why we remind them that we are watching them.

Around the table: Social Security, racism, banksters, corporate welfare, and Republican excuses.

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX) releases a bill that would cut Social Security benefits without raising revenues. So, I came up with an ad that would oppose that bill, and here's how it would look: a senior sits down to eat, until a Republican politician comes along and snatches a fifth of what's on her plate; then she goes food-shopping, and the politician takes out a fifth of what's in her cart; then she goes on a plane to visit her grandkids, and the politician tries to throw her out of the plane in mid-air, since she's only got enough money to make four-fifths of the trip! Ah, why do I bother? No weakling Democrat's going to run that ad. (BTW, when I get action alerts about what I think would aptly be called the Johnson bill, you'll get action alerts.)

Adam Serwer analyzes the evidence that Jeff Sessions fought desegregation while Alabama's U.S. Attorney, and finds it wanting. Mr. Sessions's "20 or 30" desegregation filings have become "10," and that's the first bad sign. The second? Mr. Sessions didn't bring any of this up when he was up for the federal bench in 1986, though that would certainly have been a good time to do it! The third? Lawyers and officials who actually worked on these cases hardly remember Mr. Sessions being all that involved with any of them. So now you know what to say when Trumpoids proclaim that TEH SESSIONZ IS NOT TEH RACISTZ!!!!! -- you know, besides all the racist stuff he's done and said.

Peter Dreier at The American Prospect digs deep into possible new Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin's nefarious past as a serial forecloser and corporate welfare-hoarder. You heard about the former last week, but the latter -- where he got the FDIC to assume all the risks for all the bad mortgages he took on when he bought IndyMac and renamed it OneWest -- you may not have known about. Anyway, by the end, you'll think Donald Trump had it right the first time, when he said hedge-fund managers like Mr. Mnuchin "are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky," though of course he only ever said that to get people to vote for him.

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times tells us how "Trump's Carrier Jobs Triumph Looks More Like a Sham Every Day." The hostage-taking aspect ("give us more tax cuts, or these jobs get it!") and the corporate welfare aspect (the aforementioned tax cuts, some coming right away from Indiana, the state the incoming Vice President runs) you already knew about, but you may not know it didn't save 1,100 jobs (actually 730), or that Carrier is still cutting over 1,200 jobs by moving them to Mexico or shutting down another Indiana plant. You may also not know that the aforementioned Indiana Governor who's going to be Vice President soon has handed out some $24 million in welfare handouts to corporations that then shipped nearly 4,000 jobs overseas. Again: you don't give your kids cookies as an "incentive" to do their homework, and these "incentives" don't work any better.

Finally, Jonathan Chait at New York magazine summarizes the excuses Republicans make to justify Donald Trump's apparent zeal to use the office of the President to further enrich himself. You'll read a lot of come-on-he's-not-even-in-office-yet (when Mr. Trump's conflicts of interest are obvious now, and when Rep. Chaffetz said, months ago, that they were going to investigate Hillary Clinton hard!) and from Newt Gingrich, of course, you'll get the-American-people-voted-for-this (well, 46% of them did, anyway!). Really, from Republicans, it's a whole lot of fuck-you-we-won these days. If this is going to be their attitude toward the American people, then their only hope to avoid punishment at the ballot box is another 9.11-sized terrorist attack. Think that hasn't come up in transition-team meetings?

Action: living in a bankster paradise!

The Chinese government has sentenced Ilham Tohti to life in prison, officially for "separatism" -- didn't know "separatism" could get you life in jail somewhere on Earth, did you? -- but basically for his lifelong activism in support of the Uyghur population, one of some 55 ethnic minorities officially recognized by the Chinese government. Mr. Tohti, an economist by training, has long agitated for greater regional autonomy for the Uyghurs, who mainly live in southwestern China -- and who wouldn't, if they lived in a country that blends the worst aspects of Communism and capitalism?. But I guess "official recognition" comes with "great responsibilities," like toeing the Chinese government's line. Nobody who speaks their mind and peacefully tries to get a better life for their people should be imprisoned for life, and when even our current Secretary of State has called for Mr. Tohti's release, you begin to suspect Mr. Tohti might really be the "Uyghur Mandela," as he's been called. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the Chinese government to free Mr. Tohti.

Meanwhile, President-elect Trump has tapped yet another Goldman-Sachs bankster (you know, besides Steve "Don't Call Me Racist" Bannon) for his brain trust, this time nominating hedge fund manager Steve Mnuchin to be Secretary of the Treasury. Remember when Donald Trump said hedge fund managers "get away with murder"? I guess that was for us "little people." So how did Mr. Mnuchin make his money? Oh, the same way any average hard-working salt-of-the-earth does -- by foreclosing on homeowners in ways that one federal judge called "harsh, repugnant, shocking, and repulsive," including (but not limited to!) foreclosing on an elderly homeowner after she made a payment error of 27 cents. 27 cents! And naturally, Mr. Mnuchin wants to take down the modest Dodd-Frank reforms once he takes control of Treasury, reforms which have prevented banksters from sending our economy into freefall again. This is not someone we want in our government -- a person whose life work is hurting other people for personal gain. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to block Mr. Mnuchin from becoming Secretary of the Treasury.

Finally, though it's hard to keep up with all the awful characters Donald Trump is trying to put in charge of our government (why, it's almost like that's the idea!), the National Womens' Law Center helps you tell your Senators to oppose the nomination of Rep. Tom Price of Georgia as Health and Human Services Secretary. Mr. Price's opposition to abortion doesn't annoy me so much as does his opposition to birth control -- I mean, where does he think you begin to reduce abortions? With chastity belts? Mr. Price also took gleeful part in that Planned Parenthood witch-hunt, and is also a steadfast votary of privatizing Medicare. It boggles the mind that anyone still thinks Mr. Trump will actually stop other Republicans from privatizing Medicare -- if you're planning to do that, you don't put a staunch Medicare-privatizer in charge of HHS, which, guess what, oversees the administration of Medicare! Mr. Price's notions aren't "fresh" or "new" or "innovative," and "draining the swamp" doesn't mean putting even bigger assholes in charge of stuff.

Around the table: the price of coddling banksters, and other lessons.

The New York Times finds that "Squatters See a New Frontier in the Empty Homes of Las Vegas," a city hit harder than most by the 2008 financial services meltdown and resulting foreclosure crisis. The article then focuses on an anecdotally-supported "trail of crime" squatters "often" bring with them (in addition to illegally occupying houses, apparently), losing an opportunity to ask if the squatters are victims themselves, let alone focus very much on how those houses got empty in the first place. But this is the price we pay when our government decides that coddling banksters from their screw-ups is better than protecting homeowners from unearned hardship. Next time, why not let the banks fail, and give some aspiring bankers a shot at doing better?

Kim Zetter, writing at Wired, presents a brief history of the FBI's hacking of the citizenry over the last two decades. Carnivore, keystroke loggers, Magic Lantern, CIPAV, watering holes -- in all these you'll see a pattern: the FBI introduces a tool, swears it's selective about what it captures, and surprise! It's a damn Hoover. Also, they can't tell you what they're doing because EVERYONE WILLZ DIEZ!!!!! But it seems we've gotten more leaks about specific FBI surveillance methods during the Obama Administration than we did during Tha Bush Mobb's reign. Maybe that recommends Mr. Obama -- though, again, being better than Mr. Bush isn't exactly hurdling a high bar.

Surprise, surprise, yet another poll demonstrates a huge majority of Americans support a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health insurance plan. I am surprised to find it reported in Politico -- though, of course, all the horse-race stuff afterward could have used some analysis. How much of that slim majority that wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act is composed of folks who'd want to replace it with single-payer, for example? After all, the numbers themselves suggest overlap, and other pollsters have considered the question.

The Huffington Post finds more and more mainstream media outlets using the word "Islamophobia" in headlines. I do remember being surprised (and pleased!) when Ron Paul used the term to describe the "Ground Zero mosque"'s opposition in 2010. Normally I hesitate to assign that much importance to diction, but characterizing folks' racism and rage as fear might make us regard their feelings as less significant, and that's a good thing. Of course, they'll whine about everyone calling them "phobic," just like they now whine about everyone calling them "bigots," but haters gonna hate.

Finally, Florida Republican Senate candidate Carlos Beruff calls President Obama an "animal." And when probable Democratic Senate nominee Patrick Murphy criticized him for it, a Beruff spokeshack accused Mr. Murphy of "resort(ing) to name-calling and the politics of racial division." And here you thought calling a black President an "animal" in front of a group of Republican supporters at a Florida country club was an example of ""resort(ing) to name-calling and the politics of racial division"! If I'm Florida Democrats, I'm putting up ads calling Carlos Beruff "the only real conservative in the race" right quick.

Around the table: "free" trade, "entitlement" "reform," and other fictions.

Hillary Clinton says she opposes the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," that Congress shouldn't vote on it before or after the November election, and that we need a "fundamental rethink" of future trade agreements. That's an awfully big commitment -- it doesn't just mean "during the lame duck session," which she may want you to think it means; "after the election" would cover at least up to November 2020. But when she goes back on her word, as I expect she will, she'll probably still say she was taken out of context.

Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, wonders why "entitlement" "reformers" talk about how we can't "afford" Social Security and Medicare, but not so much about how we can't afford corporate tax loopholes and military spending. Oh, but it's even worse than that: when they talk about military spending, they're more likely to talk about veterans' pensions (apparently we can't afford that, either!) than weapons boondoggles or wars fought off-budget. I've also noticed that our "liberal" media never talks about closing corporate tax loopholes without talking about the absolute necessity of reducing the corporate tax rate. This is why we can't have nice things in America.

Uh oh: Republican Rep. Steve Knight says "I think Social Security was a bad idea" at a candidate debate. There's no way to claim he was taken out of context, either. His statement is ready-made for a Democrat attack ad; now watch them pass it up because it's "uncivil," or because their 13-dimensional chess game requires them to keep a Republican Rep in a district President Obama only lost 50-48 in 2012. (On the other hand, the Senate Majority PAC pulls no punches in this ad attacking Nevada Republican Rep./Senatorial candidate Joe Heck for calling the foreclosure crisis "a blip on the radar.")

Rupert Stone, writing at Newsweek, reminds us that science teaches us that torture doesn't get us very good intelligence. Among other things, torture damages the brain enough that terror suspects can hardly keep their heads together enough to answer questions intelligently. Millions of Americans squeal in response: but what about the incontrovertible science of my inexhaustible rage? Also, they saw on TV that it works.

Finally, Bill Scher picks out Donald Trump's secret weapon in his attempt to appear populist: "incoherence." You can pick out pretty much whatever you like from what Donald Trump says -- if you think he wants to give the rich a tax cut, you can find support for that, and if you think he wants to raise taxes on the rich, you can find support for that, too. And given that so many of Mr. Trump's supporters believe whatever reflects best on their Personal Lord and Savior, I expect "incoherence" to remain a valued strategy for Mr. Trump. Hey, it worked for George W. Bush.

Around the table: from the Trump tax plan to the actual will of small business leaders.

Don't be swayed by soft "liberal" media coverage: Donald Trump's tax plan is a big fat turd that mainly helps the super-wealthy. Also, don't be swayed by the promise to close hedge fund tax loopholes, or by vague promises to close other corporate tax loopholes, and certainly don't be swayed by the promise of no taxes for folks who make less than $25,000 (which is, thanks to the EITC and the CTC, already happening!) -- note well that Mr. Trump would slash the top rate from 39.6% to 25%, would slash the corporate tax rate from 35% to 15%, would repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax and the Estate Tax, and would allow corporations to repatriate offshore profits at 10%, which will only encourage more offshore tax sheltering.

Rick Cohen at Nonprofit Quarterly finds redlining still alive and well in America. Key quotation: "it is kind of remarkable how much of the public has slowly bought into the notion that the problems of, for example, mortgage foreclosures have been largely due to borrowers making silly or stupid decisions about how much debt they could carry and not about banks selling more expensive loan products in minority neighborhoods and lenders engaging in often nefarious, even fraudulent practices." Yes, we are too quick to criticize the folks who've been victimized by evil, and very slow to criticize the folks who do the evil.

NASA scientists declare that Mars must contain liquid water, after finding water molecules in the salt deposits on Martian mountainsides. No one has observed water actually flowing on Mars yet -- the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter observes the surface once a day, at the hottest point of the day, which is what I'd do if I wanted to be sure Mars had water -- but more vigorous observation may yet find it.

Ho hum, Jeb Bush releases his energy plan. So, is there anything good about it? Well, let's see: it would gut federal regulations on coal and fracking, punt a lot of responsibility and accountability to the states, allow us to export oil and gas which won't lower energy prices but which will make oil and gas CEOs wealthier, and would approve the Keystone XL pipeline, so no, no, no, and no. Oh, but it would also impose a strong 40%-by-2040 renewable energy standard, because we've got to find new ways to create energy! I kid, of course -- Jeb Bush doesn't care about renewable energy, because renewable energy CEOs aren't his people.

Finally, Good Jobs First points us to a study from the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation, suggesting that most small business leaders think state laws and programs benefit large corporations more than small businesses. Which you already knew, but, as always, it's nice to have some data behind it. And anyone who complains that the survey includes responses from only 41 business leaders had better complain just as loudly when pro-big corporate articles include responses from single business leaders. Spoiler alert: they won't.

Action: clean government budgeting, help for underwater homeowners, and "banning the box" for federal contractors.

Congress is back to work this week (please take a moment to boo), and naturally they haven't finished spending bills yet, so Public Citizen still helps you tell House Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader McConnell to pass clean budget legislation, without the nefarious policy riders that would wither and die if exposed to sunlight. Politicians frequently treat "must-pass" appropriations bills as a means to pass riders defunding climate change efforts or financial regulation efforts or campaign finance efforts (to name three of Mr. McConnell's pet projects). If Congress tried to pass legislation doing these things on their own, they run the risk of exposing their heartlessness, and they might even lose their jobs next November. But use a must-pass bill as a hostage and you can strap all kinds of bombs to it, and our President too often compromises with hostage-takers so he can look like he's governing. I don't care about looking like I'm governing; I only care about good government, so I'll keep agitating against nefarious legislative aims, and I hope you will, too.

Meanwhile, seven years after Wall Street banksters took a massive crap all over our economy and put millions of families underwater on their mortgages, our government -- you know, that "socialist" government that hands out everything to everybody all the time -- has done just about nothing to help those underwater homeowners. Even the filibuster-proof Democratic Senate majority couldn't get a simple majority of Senators to support a bill allowing good Americans to renegotiate their mortgages in court -- this, even though our law currently allows people to do that with their second homes. But the Federal Housing Finance Agency (or FHFA) has the authority to help borrowers reduce their principal, and now that Edward DeMarco is gone as FHFA head, they really have no excuse. (Mr. DeMarco considered principal reduction a "moral hazard" -- always blind to the moral hazards of letting banks do what they like and then protecting them from the consequences of their actions, his kind are!) So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the FHFA to use its power to help underwater homeowners.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to issue an executive order forbidding federal contractors from asking job applicants if they've ever been in jail, then Color of Change still helps you do that. If the prospect of having co-workers who've been in jail skeeves you out a bit, consider that said folks have already paid the price society demanded of them, and it would be unlawful to keep making them pay, or to let employers keep making them pay. If their families want to keep making them pay -- in lawful ways, such as ostracizing them -- that's their affair. But allowing employers to discriminate as a way to keep punishing them for their crimes? That's not their job. And it also greatly increases the possibility that those folks who just got out of jail will go back to jail, since having a job is, I've found, a very good way of avoiding the sorts of temptation that land you back in jail. Of course, our private prison-industrial complex likes people who wind up back in jail -- and if they're black, they probably call that a bonus! But civilized people don't feel that way.

Action: net neutrality, consumer protection, and campaign finance disclosure.

The FCC's net neutrality vote is less than 10 days from now, and Demand Progress helps you tell your government that you want the most vigorous net neutrality protections possible. Because anything less, as the old ad used to say, would be uncivilized. No, really, it would be uncivilized to let big corporations with bad arguments win this battle simply because they have a lot of money. Americans deserve an internet where we, not some big corporation, determine which sites we want to visit, without big corporations censoring websites they don't like, without big corporations slowing down websites they don't like, without big corporations delivering some websites to your computer more quickly simply because those websites' owners have paid them for the privilege. Net neutrality won't create some Big Gummint-controlled internet -- it will give our government the tools it needs to prevent a corporation-controlled internet. I prefer a people-controlled internet myself, where anyone can start a web page with minimal financial investment, and where the best ideas really do have the best chance of flourishing.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts at gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, then National People's Action and Roots Action still help you do that. The CFPB has done yeoman work in curtailing the worst excesses of corrupt home lenders, greedy for-profit colleges, and predatory payday and title lenders, so why would Congress want to cripple the agency? Because it works for people, and doesn't work for their biggest donors, who are by and large the only people Congressfolk like to listen to. You'd think that Congressfolk would have realized by now that though money can buy you elections, votes actually win elections, and doing good works for the voters can actually win you elections even when you're outspent. Of course, as Ann Kirkpatrick would tell you, you have to actually advertise your good works to your constituents. I guess I can see why just listening to your biggest donors and blankly doing their will is the easier path. But that only means we have to make it that path the harder path.

Finally, the Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) was considering whether or not to force publicly-traded corporations to disclose the campaign contributions they make, but whether because of SEC Chair Mary Jo White's own pro-corporate biases or because of fear that Congress (now dominated by Republicans) would slash their agency's budget if they issued those disclosure regulations, the SEC has all but abandoned the idea, despite getting several hundred thousand comments from good folks like you and I in favor of it. Hence Avaaz helps you tell the SEC to force publicly-traded corporations to disclose their political contributions. The SEC is well within its right to do that, given that its mandate, by law, is to protect shareholders, and shareholders don't just care about money, they also care about good works. And we shouldn't let Republican hostage-taking deter us -- put the Republicans in a position where they have to defend cutting the budget of the SEC because it did the people's will and fought secret campaign contributions that no one but rich donors likes.

Around the table: from a "divisive" veto threat to actually divisive punditry.

The Hill's headline about President Obama's expected veto of the Keystone XL pipeline calls the putative veto "divisive", and even has the nerve to speculate that Republicans could successfully paint Mr. Obama as "obstructionist" if he vetoes too many bills. Strange how the "liberal" media didn't call Republicans "obstructionist" when they won all those Senate votes 41-59, or when individual Senators put holds on countless bills and judicial nominees that actually had broad bipartisan support. Republicans essentially nullified the 2008 election, but apparently, for the "liberal" media, the 2014 election is the only one that really counts.

David Dayen chronicles the failure of the Obama Administration's infamous Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP. HAMP gave banksters "financial inducements to modify loans for at-risk borrowers," but let the banksters determine how to disburse aid and to whom. And this is a program Mr. Obama didn't even need Congressional approval to do right! Naturally Obamanoids would counter that reducing principals for underwater homeowners would have put trillions in derivatives at risk. You recognize that, right, from your Debt Ceiling Studies class? That's right, it's a hostage situation -- it's as if they're saying, don't help homeowners, or I'll blow this economy's brains out!

"Don't Listen to Anyone Who Says the Unemployment Rate is a Big Lie," advises Matt O'Brien in the Washington Post. I wouldn't go that far -- like Mr. O'Brien, I've been cataloguing the U6 unemployment rate (still nearly twice the official U3 rate, in case you were wondering) with the appropriate regularity. Here's what I would say instead: "Don"t listen to anyone who says the unemployment rate is a 'big lie' if that person was completely silent about the matter during the Clinton and Bush years."

In a related note, Democrats still aren't prepared to handle our ongoing problem with the income gap between the very rich and the very poor. The very notion that Democrats would still listen to Larry Summers about anything tells me the Democrats don't listen to the American people -- or would like to convince the American people they're listening without actually listening. And that is why Scott Walker will be America's next President.

Nick Hanauer tells us we should prevent corporate executives from spending so much money on stock buybacks. Stock buybacks do little for the economy except drive up stock prices -- they don't, you know, result in higher wages for workers or more money lent out to enterprising businesses with good ideas -- and it turns out stock buybacks (which account for nearly $7 trillion in GDP since 2004) were almost nonexistent until 1982, so it's not like this is some radical idea. You know, the way that building a massive, leak-prone pipeline over heartland drinking water is a radical idea, or claiming a corporate "right to privacy" justifies not telling consumers about your products' dangers is a radical idea.

Finally, Fox News (sic) blowhard Eric Bolling instructs us that only Muslims have ever killed in the name of religion. Setting aside the half-dozen examples the author, David Perry (whose blog is a great read) lists at the bottom of the post: one couldn't even win that argument by saying BUT TEH CHRIZTIANZ NEVER SED THEY KILLED INFIDELZ IN TEH NAMEZ OF TEH JESUS HAHAHAHAHA!!!! But Eric Bolling may be the biggest asshole on television, and that's saying something. I can't remember if we've decided to never speak of him again, but let's resolve to do that now.

Action: a corporate tax amnesty, a Philadelphia paid sick leave bill, and a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at peril.

Word on the street is that Sens. Paul (R-KY) and Boxer (D-CA) are nearing completion on a transportation infrastructure bill that would raise revenue from -- wait for it -- a massive corporate tax amnesty. Oh, right, they call that a repatriation holiday now when our government allows corporations to bring back the money they've stashed overseas -- which they've stashed overseas in order to avoid paying their fair share of taxes in the first place, mind you -- at a reduced rate, this time 8%, instead of the standard 35% rate. I can't wait for the moment Mr. Paul says the low rate isn't such a big deal because 8% isn't that much lower than the 12% big corporations pay on average -- thus inadvertently refuting the right's claim that our 35% rate is a job-killing, economy-killing injustice. But you can call your Reps and Senators (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page) and tell them to make corporations pay their fair share, instead of promulgating gimmicks that induce more tax avoidance. Even dedicating the tax amnesty to necessary spending is too high a moral price to pay.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia City Council begins mulling a paid sick leave bill today, and Moms Rising helps you tell the Council to pass a strong paid sick leave bill. Which they've already done, you may recall -- they passed paid sick leave bills in 2011 and 2013, only to see them vetoed by nominally Democratic Mayor Michael Nutter; City Council missed overriding his 2013 veto by one vote. But things have happened since then -- more and more CEOs know now that paid sick leave helps their bottom line, and President Obama called for a national paid sick leave bill in his most recent State of the Union address. As we speak, some 40% of the city's workers can't get paid sick leave, meaning that when they get sick, they must choose between foregoing a day's pay (and perhaps losing their jobs) or going into work and getting their co-workers and their customers sick. Of course the city's big corporations (cough Comcast cough) complain that small businesses can't handle the cost, but what of the cost of firing and retraining workers, or the cost of lost business because a customer gets sick at your shop or restaurant?

Finally, our political class seems determined to turn the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into a puppet agency of Wall Street. What, they can't wait until Scott Walker becomes President, and he does that on his own? Seriously, I shudder to think that politicians hate the CFPB because the law mandates it to put the interests of consumers and borrowers ahead of the interests of banks, and not just because banks are approximately the least popular corporations in America these days, but also because politicians seem to care more about ensuring the sugar flows into their campaign accounts than they do about doing their job, which is to serve the people, all of whom are consumers and borrowers sooner or later. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the CFPB and thus protect American consumers and borrowers from being wronged by big corporations. The CFPB has done a lot of good work -- on foreclosures, payday lenders, debt collectors, and the like -- and has much more good work to do. But only if we fight for it.

Around the table: in which banksters attack pension funds and property rights.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept investigates how banksters have gotten their grubby mitts on our state pension funds. You remember from living in the real world that the most important thing about a pension fund is not that it makes buku bucks, but that it's there when you need it to be, which is why their managers used to invest conservatively. But investing pensions in things like hedge funds don't even make the pension funds more money -- they only make banksters money, through exorbitant fees. At least the provincial government of Quebec instructs us how to do it right.

A Rasmussen poll finds more Americans thinking that private corporations spy on them more than their government does. But that's not an illuminating comparison -- corporations can spy on you to make you see ads and induce you to buy stuff, and in rare instances fire you, but your government can spy on you and put you in jail. And Americans who profess to worry little about government spying often forget that what's lawful today might become "terrorism" tomorrow. In any case, Rasmussen also found that nearly three in four Americans think our government's violated their privacy, which is the result I would have led with.

Noam Scheiber warns us that startups like Uber and TaskRabbit, which connect folks who need tasks done with folks who do them, could wind up turning us all essentially into temp workers. Yes, it is easy to imagine a Dystopian future in which we all get up in the morning worrying about whether some Amazon warehouse will need us to pull orders, or whether some wealthy bankster will need furniture moved. For a more historical perspective, I point you to Echidne of the Snakes, who also reminds us how organizations like Uber transfer risk "downstream" -- i.e., to workers.

Senka Huskic profiles the Southern Essex County (MA) Register of Deeds, John O'Brien, who continues to pursue the fraudulent foreclosure documentation foisted upon us by banksters, long after the Obama Administration settled with the big banks. Mr. O'Brien audited his county's mortgage assignments in 2010, and declared it "a crime scene," and not just because of robosigning. I'm glad he's fighting on, but it is unfortunate that right-wingers, constantly squealing about property rights in other contexts, have been largely quiet about how badly banks have screwed with property rights in America.

Finally, Europe's Parliament calls for breaking up Google. The vote was lopsided but non-binding, as the European Parliament has no jurisdiction over anti-trust matters -- but the European Commission does, and the vote could wave the stick of bad PR against the Commission enough that they act. What would action look like? "(C)hanges in its business practices and even possibly a big fine," the Times says -- so it would look like America's action, plus the changes in business practices and the size of the fine, of course.

Around the table: includes reason 424 why wireless broadband doesn't compete with Comcast no matter what Comcast says.

Today begins a 12-state "Moral Week of Action," an extension of the "Moral Monday" protests that have followed the wave of reactionary laws from the North Carolina government. Seven of the 12 states are Southern; the others are Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, and New York; the first four of these have seen similarly reactionary state governments, while the fifth can claim to be merely disappointing. I wish the Moral Monday protestors luck, but more than that, I wish them faith.

Trumpets are blaring about the $16.6 billion settlement between our government and Bank of America, but David Dayen at the Guardian reminds us not to expect too much good to come of it. Our government has mandated that out of the $16.6 billion, about $7 billion of that money actually go toward reducing homeowner principals or interest payments -- and if the JP Morgan Chase settlement is any guide, that money will come out very, very slowly. Banks can weasel out of helping homeowners in other ways, too -- by the time you read about them, you might well think our government and the big banksters have rigged these settlements to benefit the banksters.

Yet another data point in our ongoing effort to slam the Comcast meme that merging with Time-Warner is OK because the real competition comes from wireless: Kate Cox at the Consumerist finds that streaming the entire series Breaking Bad over one month's time would cost $1200-$2200 -- if your wireless provider doesn't hit you with the data-throttling stick first. You already knew (if you've ever used your laptop in a Starbucks, for example) that wireless broadband is slow, unsteady, and insecure; now you know it's also pricey as hell. Some "competition."

Remember the wealthy teenager who drunk-drove four people to death and got probation because his lawyer argued his wealth hadn't taught him enough responsibility? The kid's pa is in the news now, for impersonating a police officer. Why was he posing as a reserve police officer at a disturbance call? The world may never know, as Mr. Couch hasn't commented since the arrest. In any case, it looks like "affluenza" either runs in the family or is very contagious.

Finally, Larry Klayman says President Obama and Attorney General Holder "jump to judgment, on a consistent and regular basis, against 'whitey' and in favor of their black brothers." I'm sure glad he said "consistent" and "regular," or I would have had no idea what he meant. Seriously, passages like "racist hacks who should be removed from office and banished to hell by whatever legal means are appropriate" more accurately describe a writer with anger-management issues than they describe his targets. And if he thinks Messrs. Obama and Holder have created "a huge racial divide" in America, he must not be acquainted with slavery or Jim Crow or redlining.

Around the table: TEH MARSHUNZ HAZ NO CLIMATEZ CHANGEZ!!!! and other stories.

Israeli daily Haaretz unloads on extremists like the six Israeli citizens who murdered Mohammed Abu Khdeir. To merely note that Haaretz suggested they were "vermin" would be to cheat you of experiencing how brilliantly the metaphor unfolds in the second paragraph of its editorial. It's appalling that it takes courage to say things like this, and it's no less appalling that those of us who criticize Israel have their loyalty questioned routinely, as if telling your friend they're screwing up is no more and no less than a complete betrayal.

Ellen Brown describes how local governments could ameliorate the harm caused by our ongoing foreclosure crisis. Long story short: cities can use eminent domain power to "buy the bad mortgages at fair market value and then reset them to current value," or counties can sue the MERS database -- you remember, the database responsible for the "robosignings" that routinely violated state and federal law? -- and then, when MERS can't produce the required transfer records, states can claim the resulting orphaned properties. Then we'll have to press our local governments to do the right thing, but all I ask is a fighting chance.

British gay activist Julie Bindel opines that the gay rights movement has gotten too commercial. Lest this sound like a complaint about post-Peter Gabriel Genesis, Ms. Bindel notes that focusing on corporate sponsorship doesn't necessarily create a society "based on equality" or one that opposes consumerism and misogyny, and adds that the earliest gay rights activists held that marriage itself was itself an "oppressive, patriarchal regime." She's right to be suspicious of corporate involvement, and right to suggest that gays still have a long road ahead -- and yet I still presume that what changes the world also preserves the world, that successful movements have vigorous radical and conservative elements.

Pentagon has invested $40 million into "brain implants" that will supposedly help our PTSD soldiers restore their memories. That could be a big deal -- but if our government knows what neurologists know (which they know from reading their emails, amirite?), then they also know that neurologists can't say for sure you can even "stimulate the brain's memory centers" in this way, which leads me to suspect, naturally, that our government has some other aim. In any case, best to ameliorate the problem by not fighting stupid wars in the first place.

Finally, Kentucky state legislator suggests that climate change is a hoax because "the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here" and "there are no coal mines on Mars." Never mind that the average temperature of Mars is 138 degrees lower than that of Earth; never mind, even, that he did the helicopter dance in front of us by saying "(n)obody will dispute" the falsehood he spewed forth -- saying similar conditions exist in two places and supposing they could have only one cause is bad argument, and the anti-science crowd uses it a lot (cf. when they say the Earth has heated in the past, as if there's only one way to heat a planet).

Around the table: the news you need to know! Plus more right-wing whining.

Did all that Cliven Bundy stuff smell like junk news to you? Fortunately, Jessica Scheider at the Center for Effective Government explains some of the issues surrounding Western land rights. Long story short: the small fees ranchers pay for having their animals graze on public land is around one tenth of the fees they'd pay private land owners, meaning that the grazing fees aren't some don't-tread-on-me travesty but comprise a half-billion dollar annual "public subsidy" of ranchers. And yet the fees don't begin to cover environmental damage the grazing animals do to the land -- or, indeed, administrative costs. You might well think Cliven Bundy was just another whiner the "liberal" media seems to find so fascinating.

Paul Krugman finds Timothy Geithner's account of his time as Obama Administration Treasury Secretary more than a little self-serving. Key findings: Mr. Geithner's claim that he was "not an austerian" runs counter to reporting that he found federal stimulus programs worthless, and his claim that bailing out homeowners rather than banksters (or even alongside banksters!) wouldn't have helped the economy much runs counter to economic research indicating the opposite. Again, the moral thing to do turns out to be the pragmatic thing to do, but our elites somehow never see that. I wonder why.

Meta-analysis of ten studies involving 1.3 million children reveals, again, "no relationship between vaccination and autism." That's "no" as in none, zero, zip, zilch, nada. On one hand, I'm pleased that Forbes does this kind of reporting -- but on the other hand, I'm profoundly annoyed that it's left to Forbes to do this kind of reporting, as our more well-known "liberal" media outlets prefer to treat the science like it's still undecided, lest they look bad for all that free publicity they gave to noted University of Google scholar Jenny McCarthy.

Republican Senate nominee Ben Sasse claims that "(g)overnment cannot force citizens to violate their religious beliefs under any circumstances" -- apparently not even if your "religious beliefs" allow or command you to trample over other people's rights. Let me guess on Mr. Sasse's response: "the media got me all wrong by quoting what I said on my website." And now the bad news: Mr. Sasse will almost certainly win his election, Nebraska not being as moderate, even, as Indiana, where Richard Mourdock fumbled away Mr. Lugar's Senate seat in 2012 with his extremism.

New Hampshire Republican Senatorial candidate (and ex-Massachusetts Senator) Scott Brown actually asked Republican leadership to scuttle a bipartisan energy efficiency bill, because its main Democratic sponsor was his opponent, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. And he wanted to make her look bad. Anyone think he might look bad instead? Apparently he got his wish -- the bill failed to clear a Republican filibuster after Republicans demanded a vote on an amendment on approving the Keystone XL pipeline and another one on blocking the EPA's recent carbon emissions rule. But there has to be a point where fomenting chaos backfires on the fomentors of chaos. Right?

Finally, Operation American Spring, a movement planning to draw tens of millions to D.C. this past Saturday in an apparent effort to overthrow our center-right government for not being far-right enough, wound up drawing "hundreds," not millions. And THAT! Is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD!