Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning health care and nativism.

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

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Health Over Wealth Act, which would make it harder for bankster hedge fund managers to take over nursing homes and strip the money out of them. Seriously, they buy nursing homes, cut services and jobs, load them up with debt, and eventually redistribute all the wealth upward to themselves when they "have to close" a "badly-functioning" nursing home – leaving seniors out in the cold! The Health Over Wealth Act would outlaw such asset-stripping and require DHS approval of nursing home sales – among other reforms! It ain't everything we'd want, but it'd make things better for our seniors, a class of people that will, ideally, one day include all of us.

Civic Shout helps you tell your House Reps to expel Rep. Clay Higgins (E-LA) for his most recent comments about Haitian immigrants. Mr. Higgins obviously thinks it's OK to say just any old thing, no matter whom it hurts, as long as you get attention for it. And while I would say he has absolute First Amendment rights to post his vile rhetoric on his Facebook page to his private (not public!) groups of friends and followers, he does not have a First Amendment right to a House seat while doing that. In fact, I'd say we have a duty, as civilized people, to keep him out of our government while he's doing that – and brook no cynicism about how “all politicians are bad,” because cynicism invites and enables bad behavior.

Around the table: now with approximately 29% good news!

Connecticut State Superior Court judge upholds Public Utilities Regulatory Authority’s order reducing Aquarion water bills by 11% – Aquarion wanted a 9% rate hike – and boy does he sound pissed: between “(i)t bears repeating that PURA possesses broad regulatory authority and equally broad discretion in setting rates” and “PURA is permitted to make its own factual determinations and is not required to accept evidence presented by Aquarion,” it sounds like he had to stop himself from writing how dare you waste my valuable time over and over again for 100 pages. Naturally Aquarion responds that keeping it from raising prices now means will only force it to raise prices in the future. Those who create rhetorical hostage situations deserve their own circle of Hell.

New York state settles with two Republican operatives for $1.25 million over their robocall campaign to keep Black voters from voting by mail. The playbook – telling Black voters that voting-by-mail means getting “tracked” for credit card debt and outstanding warrants – won’t surprise you, and though our FCC also fined them over $5 million, I really wish the state hadn’t settled on this; I really want folks like Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl to get jail time. And were they to emerge with a newfound zeal for getting better treatment and rehabilitation for prisoners, all the better!

When I hear that agents and brokers are switching good Americans out of their Affordable Care Act plans and into new ones without their consent, all I can say is: nice work if you can get it! Seriously, our civilization lets too many people who don’t do a damn bit of work just hurt good Americans over and over again. Getting defrauded in this manner means, among other things, not being able to see your doctors because now because they’re in a different network. Would it be piling on to to mention that if we expanded Medicare to include everyone, we wouldn’t need so many middlemen? No, it would not.

You may be familiar with most of the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) “playbook” on fighting and busting unions – “right-to-work,” prohibiting dues deductions from paychecks, like that. But you may not know about a new ALEC model bill called the “Uniform Worker Classification Act,” which, according to them, “ensures that the 80% of workers who prefer their independent contractor status are able to keep it, rather than being forced into traditional employment models.” You know, because California makes corporations to classify gig workers as “employees” (who get benefits) and not “independent contractors” (who don’t). I bet that 80% figure (if it’s not, you know, made-up) is about as useful as the 75%-prefer-their-private-health-insurance canard – people usually “prefer” the status quo until hard times find them and they learn how the status quo actually hurts them.

Mississippi state legislators can’t seem to pass a bill that would bring back ballot questions, even in the weak form (requiring supermajorities to pass, leaving abortion and the state constitution untouched) they obviously prefer. The 2021 state Supreme Court ruling – which held that ballot questions are unconstitutional, since the state constitution requires them to get signatures in five Congressional districts and Mississippi now only has four – may be the worst court ruling I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty in my lifetime. In the meantime, the legislature seems to telling the good people of Mississippi to go fuck themselves. I wish I could count on them paying for that with their jobs.

Jesus Mary and Joseph now Disney asserts it has a First Amendment right to fire Gina Carano for her social media posts. No, a corporation doesn’t have a First Amendment right to do a God damn thing, because a corporation is not a person, period, end of, full stop. And in the absence of a collective bargaining agreement that protects employees from being fired for their speech, Disney would already have the right to fire her for her speech. We’ve never had First Amendment rights at our jobs – though, as I’ve just suggested, we could organize and get them, or at least get some protection for our political speech, however noxious it might be. As long as we still have the right to organize! Louisiana Republicans are about to take that away from public sector workers as we speak.

Finally, the Oklahoma state House has overwhelmingly passed a bill criminalizing the “intentional or reckless” spread of sexually-transmitted diseases – which could make literally everyone in Oklahoma a felon! I’d think “intentional” would be hard to prove – though admittedly so many folks treat emails and texts like they’re not written records these days! – but “reckless” might be too much in the eye of the prosecutor, especially given that the bill doesn’t define “reckless.” Think any good Oklahomans will get tested for syphilis or chlamydia or the like if this bill passes? No, you do not. The state Senate hasn’t passed the bill yet; maybe they’ll at least pretend to be shamed by the media coverage. Seriously, though, Republicans can’t offer solutions unless they punish good people who don’t deserve it.

Around the table: the truth is obvious, part 987.

Good news, everyone: America now produces 40% of its electricity without pumping out more carbon emissions. I’m old enough to remember when Alaska paced the nation in renewable energy with a mere 25%, that figure goosed up by the 80 zillion miles of coastline Alaska could use to develop hydropower. If right-wingers want to call our decreased dependence on coal a “war on coal,” they might want to address why no one calls the antibiotic era a “war on bacteria,” but they’ll probably just settle for posting alleged pictures of electric car graveyards, when electric cars are no more the be-all-end-all of renewable energy than ethanol production ever was.

Ho hum, despite right-wingers’ incessant attempts to claim that the January 6 rioters were “antifa,” everyone they accuse of being antifa turns out to be just another garden-variety Trumphole. Because they all keep saying they’re Trumpholes on social media! Of course right-wingers never cared about proving their point, but only asserting it enough times that tired people will just accept it. And they certainly don’t care about their point being disproven, because they’ll just ignore it and try to enrage people about something else.

the Wisconsin state Supreme Court has found state legislative maps unconstitutional, and will redraw districts themselves if the state legislature won’t. If you’ve noticed Democrats getting more total votes statewide in state legislative races yet still winning only one-third of the seats, you have already anticipated this outcome. And if you’re still hearing right-wingers whine about the court’s “partisanship,” then you know they have no shame. (As an aside, I wince whenever someone calls a state a “purple” state, because bruises are purple, too.)

Surprise, surprise, very, very few British citizens now think Brexit has really benefited their nation, and while I was never particularly against Brexit regardless of how many assholes also supported it, I also thought Greece needed to leave the EU way, way more than England did. Why, the EU let England keep their own currency! Anyway, anyone who believed the $350-million-more-for-health-care per week lie was a fool, though I’m sure most of the folks who mouthed it didn’t really believe it. But though I’m sure Brexit delivered victory to the Tories in 2019, I still think inflation will mean more to British voters than Brexit does now. If only today’s Labour party wasn’t somehow even worse than Tony Blair’s.

Bruce Schneier is about the only person I’d ever listen to about the possible benefits of Artificial Intelligence (or AI), and though I’m sure he’s absolutely right that AI can, in fact, streamline a lot of processes for the better, there’s a reason we think inside a lot of boxes concerning AI: because we understand that Our Glorious Elites will never give up power without a fight, and they’ll leverage AI only to keep that power, which means, at this stage of what folks optimistically call Late Capitalism, preserving their nearly-unlimited power to skim money off all our doings while sitting on their asses. And then they’ll just tell us to work harder if we don’t want to spend all our money on rent.

Trumpholes are threatening the lives of the Colorado state Supreme Court justices who struck him from that state’s primary ballot because of course they are. The best people support Donald Trump! And they include the kind of person who’d threaten someone’s life in an online forum composed only of dittoheads but who would never have the guts to kill someone in real life. I just can’t wait until these fools whine that their threats are somehow “free speech,” when our First Amendment doesn’t protect terroristic threats.

Finally, you weren’t wondering what Joe Lieberman was up to, but I feel compelled to note that he’s now stumping for third parties, and he sounds as stupid as ever. It’s easy to say “I’ve never seen this much anger at the two major parties” when you a) are perfectly happy to pretend righteous anger against Republicans and masturbatory rage against Democrats are the exact same thing and b) never, ever look for anything else that might be happening around you. And can we not call him a “maverick” in headlines, please? He spent a quarter-century in the Senate sucking up to corporate power; “mavericks” don’t do that.

Around the table: mostly good news from antitrust enforcement to health care in Rwanda.

Big news: Lee Hepner at Big observes Thanksgiving dinner prices falling by almost 5%, and sees the hand of the Biden Administration antitrust efforts behind it – specifically, our Justice Department has broken (of all things) a turkey monopoly, our government has thwarted one proposed airline merger and forced another to be put on hold, and a federal jury found two big egg-producing corporations guilty of price-fixing, meaning those high prices that were all over the news last year had little to do with avian flu. It’d be nice if the Biden campaign would actually, you know, run on these efforts – but it’d also be nice if our “liberal” media covered these efforts the way they hysterically covered sky-high egg prices in the first place.

Have some more good news! Portugal lately relied entirely on renewable electricity for six consecutive days at the end of October and beginning of November. Plus Portugal made so much electricity they were able to export it to Spain for most of that stretch! Six days in a row is a big deal; the more it happens, the less we’ll have to hear about the “war on coal” and other manufactured outrages. And we should at least make it harder for Our Glorious Elites to manufacture outrages.

In a related note, the Guardian tells us that legendarily-frigid Norway has done a great job relying on heat pumps to heat their homes, largely through federal subsidies and – this is important – the absence of federal subsidies for fossil fuels. So when nay-sayers whine that heat pumps don’t work when it’s too cold, they actually mean it only returns about twice the heat for the electricity you use to run it when it’s far below freezing, which is another way of saying we want you to use the perfect to murder the good. Way too many folks still prefer chaos to progress.

In another related note, I am more than a little surprised to hear that electric scooters and e-bikes have displaced four times more demand for oil than electric cars have done, though, admittedly, much of that increase has come from China, where good Chinese were already riding mopeds a lot. I’ll admit I’ve always kinda side-eyed this option, figuring that e-bikes, especially, are for people who don’t want to exercise, but a) that may not even be true, since most folks split their exercise off from their transportation and b) it sounds like it’s actually helping save the planet. Also c) I moved to an area that’s really, really hilly and I see the attraction of an e-bike a little better now.

Ho hum, Iowa Republican official’s wife gets convicted of 52 counts of voter fraud, as she apparently filled out election forms for Vietnamese immigrants who, imagine that, didn’t really understand what she was doing. Strange how we only seem to catch right-wingers for actual voter fraud, despite all the whining they do about it. Ms. Taylor faces a max of five years of prison per charge; not that I think she’ll really get that (or that I think she should get that), but it’ll be interesting to hear right-wingers suddenly find Jesus about long prison sentences.

Ari Paul at FAIR reminds us that Elon Musk’s "thermonuclear" defamation lawsuit against Media Matters is “About Destroying Free Speech.” He must hope us “little people” don’t get it in our heads to tabulate which big corporate ads turn up right next to all that disgusting anti-Semitic/pro-Nazi content he allows on Twitter! I’d say I hope Mr. Musk loses this frivolous lawsuit in the most humiliating manner possible, but I actually doubt he’s physically capable of humiliation. Which is yet another reason a civilized society shouldn’t let billionaires grow this big!

Finally, Rwanda has seen a significant drop in malaria cases, to the point where its national Biomedical Center says it’s on track to achieve zero malaria. Scientists point to increased use of mosquito netting and indoor insecticides as major factors in the drop, and that, I’m sad to say, will be good practice for when too many folks refuse the malaria vaccine the World Health Organization has just approved. But Rwanda’s success reminds us that good people doing good works are everywhere on Earth, even in nations we call “developing” – or worse.

Penny rants for September 19, 2023: special "right-wingers, stop whining!" edition.

In explaining the trouble Joe Biden's having convincing regular Americans that his programs are working for them, Matt Stoller also provides the only analysis I’ve yet read that makes me think Joe Biden might not get re-elected in 2024. Key finding: our government hasn’t counted inflation right for decades, because it doesn’t count hikes in interest rates as inflation even though common sense would tell us that it most assuredly is, plus folks don’t feel inflation’s fall from 9 to 3.7% if they’re writing monthly checks for cars and houses they bought when inflation was 9%, or if today's higher interest rates are ballooning their payments! Somewhat less key finding: Joe Biden may be the most anti-monopoly President since FDR, but the judges he’s appointing, well, aren’t, and they’re kinda arrogant about it – though maybe not as arrogant as antitrust lawyers who, I feel compelled to point out again, commit the heinous sin of asserting that the way things have been during their careers is the way they’ve always been.

Ho hum, Whole Foods goes to court to prove they can prevent workers from wearing Black Lives Matter masks – but not because, you know, our First Amendment protects folks from our government and not necessarily from their employer and because we’ve always assumed corporations can dictate worker uniforms more or less absolutely, but because our Supreme Court provides a “clear roadmap” to let Whole Foods do what it likes. I guess they just want to cement our Supreme Court’s insistence that you can actually discriminate on the basis of a “sincerely-held” “religious” “belief,” which isn’t very libertarian of them. But it sure would be a shame if the facts of the case shined even more light on the non-existent complaint that enabled the 303 Creative LLC ruling. It’d be an even bigger shame if Whole Foods, in attempting to argue the merits of their case, accidentally proved the original ruling was unconstitutional!

Finally, this Fatherly article from late 2022 provides awfully good advice on how to deal with a child’s tantrums -- but not just a child’s tantrums, good peoples! “If a child wants attention, the solution is — as long as it's safe — to literally give them no attention, not even negative attention,” “(i)f a child is demanding a tangible, then the best solution is not to give them what they want,” “(t)he appropriate response to an escape-from-demand tantrum where the child doesn't want to put on their pajamas is to force them to do it with you,” hand-over-hand if necessary – notice any parallels to our current political situation? Because these all sound like tactics we should deploy against Republicans just about all the time! Doesn’t matter if they got elected and thus “deserve respect.” Doesn’t matter if they “have power.” Doesn’t matter if any of their constituents threaten their life, or yours, or mine! If we treat Republicans like tantrum-addled kids even one time, America will be a different country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning immigration, media, and health care.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to expand health care for DACA recipients, tell internet service-providing corporations to drop Fox News, and tell Merck’s CEO to drop his lawsuit against Medicare drug-price negotiation . Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

United We Dream helps you tell the Biden Administration to expand Medicaid and Affordable Care Act eligibility to DACA recipients, i.e., “dreamers.” You could say it comes down to if they’re here, don’t be so damn cruel to them, but it’s even simpler than that: DACA recipients left their home countries as small children because their parents immigrated to America, and we’d be cruel bastards to deny them access to health care simply because of a decision made long ago that they had literally no part in. No use squealing about terrorism, etc., at least not if you’re a proud member of the greatest nation on Earth. So many self-styled “patriots” have so little mercy; I wonder why.

Inequality Media helps you tell your internet service-providing corporation to get the Fox News (sic) Channel off their platforms. Fox News just paid out over three-quarters of a billion dollars to settle a defamation lawsuit, and quickly responded by gutting its hard news division, such as it had one, so even if you knew absolutely nothing about the trail of slime it’s left across the country we love over the last few decades, you would wonder why any cable company would carry a “news” channel that had suffered such a reversal (and responded by resolving to get even worse at news-gathering!). Our First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, but not an audience or a pile of money for that speech, so let’s keep up the pressure until they fold.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell Merck’s CEO to “drop your greedy lawsuit” aiming to end Medicare drug price negotiation before it even starts. Of course it’s even worse than a greedy lawsuit – it’s the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit, one that clogs up the courts and delays justice for all. And it’s filed by a rich corporation! There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. Anyway, don’t brook any cynicism from anyone about how Merck is just trying to protect its profits. Our Declaration of Independence speaks of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and none of that includes a “right” to price-gouge good Americans by overcharging them for the medicines they need to live.

Action: concerning conservation, social media, and pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to protect old-growth forests, tell YouTube to stop putting up 2020 election denialist claims, and tell our EPA to regulate truck emissions as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to protect old-growth forests from logging corporations as vigorously as possible. Once again, while it’s good our government would actually propose to protect old-growth forests – all the Trump Administration ever cared about was making money for bosses, you recall – our Forest Service would still allow far too much logging of these forests to take place. Thousand year-old trees trap carbon emissions like nobody’s business and help keep our air and water clean; in that context, cutting them down so you can make money you’re just going to spend anyway doesn’t seem very far-sighted. But that only means the most far-sighted among us must make ourselves heard.

Both Care2 and Common Cause help you tell YouTube to stop letting users post false claims about the 2020 election. Which Joe Biden won, which was not “stolen” from Donald Trump, which was not plagued by “voter fraud” – you get the picture. YouTube stopped posting such videos for a while, but lately they’ve reversed course; they must think we’re not looking anymore, or that 2020 election deniers have anything to offer YouTube users except masturbatory rage. But Fox News just had to fork over $787.5 million because they amplified this crap in their coverage; we can help YouTube avoid such a fate by reminding them that our First Amendment doesn’t permit or obligate them to publish just any old lie.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect us from truck pollution as vigorously as possible. This may be The Future, but we still ship most of our goods on our roads, and tailpipe pollution causes a lot of health problems (not to mention climate change!), so we ought to make that process as painless as possible. And not for nothing, but the ill health effects of tailpipe pollution do hit Black and Brown communities harder, no matter how many right-wingers say so the roads are racist ha ha snort? We built a disproportionate number of those roads through Black and Brown neighborhoods, so again, we should make that fact as painless as possible.

Around the table: folly runs amok!

Matt Stoller details the angry exchanges he had with antitrust lawyers at a conference, and as I hear these lawyers make bad arguments about why things should have stayed exactly the way they’d been for the last 40 years, I’m reminded that virtually everyone who’s ever had to do their job differently has reacted angrily about it. Including me! But we shouldn’t coddle people when they do that, no matter how powerful they are. That also goes for the police officers who claim that they “can’t do their job” under reformer D.A.s.

G. Samantha Rosenthal at The Conservation reminds us that “gender-affirming care has a long history in the U.S. -- and not just for transgender people.” When you confront the fact that yes, some too-short boys and too-tall girls have received gender-affirming care to make themselves “more male” or “more female,” you’ll recognize the problem from all those abortion bans that won’t let folks with ectopic pregnancies get abortions. Why, it’s like this has been the right’s plan all along – create the drama now, watch as history and better argument win the day, and then rail against history and better argument to create more drama. Jorge Luis Borges wrote about similar themes in “Deutsches Requiem.”

Ho hum, many of the same right-wing “pundits” who call Donald Trump’s indictment “politically-motivated” played a totally different tune when former Senator/Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards got indicted for virtually the same crime in 2011. Of course, these clowns don’t care about their hypocrisy, or about history, or about memory, even, and whatever short-term gain they think they’re getting now, they’re not going to enjoy taking all of that to the Pearly Gates. In the meantime, let us recall that the woman Mr. Edwards wronged – his wife, Elizabeth – was the talent in that couple.

A U.S. District Court judge blocks Tennessee’s anti-drag law for at least two weeks, saying that “the Statute’s broad language clashes with the First Amendment’s tight constraints” and that the bill could ban drag shows “just about anywhere,” including “a citizen’s private residence,” “a camping ground at a national park,” or even the internet. I don’t know who gets to rule on it next, but perhaps Tennessee Republicans ought to declare victory and retreat here – I mean, as with abortion bans and anti-trans laws, they got their drama here, and the only way they’ll be able to create more drama about it is if the drag shows go on.

Finally, a jury convicts Douglass Mackey of conspiring to suppress votes in 2016. You remember those social media posts telling folks to “stay home” and vote for Hillary over text or social media? Well, that was him, and a few other “influencers.” Gratifying as it is to hear any of the “lock her up” crowd get justice, it’s still like they only put the little people in jail. Mr. Mackey would likely bristle at that characterization, what with his 58,000 Twitter followers or whatever, but it’s true: he’s small potatoes, and his hero Donald Trump would certainly describe him that way, though maybe not to his face.

Around the table: the time to call George W. Bush a liar was *always* now.

Michigan looks ready to repeal its notorious “right-to-work” law, a.k.a. the “right to work for less” law, because apparently there are no Kyrsten Sinemas in Michigan’s slim Democratic majorities. Right-to-work laws, as you know, starve unions of funding by enabling union workers to get services without paying dues, and Sonali Kohatkar has a good way of thinking about that: “(i)magine calling AAA and demanding its roadside benefits without paying the auto club’s modest yearly fee.” That’s perfect, right down to the word “modest” – my dues cost me around 35 cents an hour.

Fox News producer sues her employer for coercing her to “take the fall” when testifying in the Dominion defamation suit. She’s also suing over sexist and anti-Semitic commentary at the workplace, which, gosh, that is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! You suppose Maria Bartiromo, as notorious a right-wing shill as has worked in the “liberal” media these last few decades, will change her ways now that she’s discovered her employer thought she was utterly disposable? I kid, of course – I mean, she’s no Gretchen Carlson.

I’ll admit I was not hopeful about this Los Angeles Times opinion piece on “how to stop the polarization” in American politics, but the advice dispensed therein isn’t bad – helping right-wingers “communicate ‘what (they) are observing, feeling, and needing” sounds like a full-time job, but I agree that name-calling famous people is a hell of a lot better than name-calling your friends and neighbors, and I think it gives them the space to change their minds. I even think they appreciate being given that space, even if they don’t articulate it that way. I guess I’m still an optimist, then.

Some, ah, distinguished individual called in a bomb threat to a Tuesday hearing on New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million lawsuit against Donald Trump for allegedly inflating real estate asset values. Because take-your-country-back rallies take more work, apparently! This kind of soft terrorism actually makes me think more kindly of hard terrorism – folks who make death threats and bomb threats without intending to back up their words actually rank below mass shooters in my book, meaning they’re pretty much at the bottom of that book.

Jesus Mary and Joseph did Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) actually say he’s different from Donald Trump because his style of leadership includes “no daily drama”? Yes, he really did, and that’s hilarious, because he’s all about the drama! If calling everything you don’t like “woke” and banning books like it’s the 1930s and going after anti-racist education like it’s the 1830s and demanding menstrual records of teenage girls (and this is a not-at-all comprehensive list!) ain’t drama, then what is? Oh, almost forgot: come get your poll tax from me, Governor, if you can.

Finally, two former CIA agents with four decades’ combined experience in intelligence describe at some length how Tha Bush Mobb lied about their findings so they could sell the invasion of Iraq. I feel terrible for these two good Americans, who detail the many, many honest assessments our CIA gave to Tha Bush Mobb only to have them lie about it because they were going into Iraq and damn everyone else. But the Insider is wrong to say that now it’s “time to call George W. Bush a liar,” because that time was the fall of 2002. If you were paying attention and thinking for yourself then, you were calling him a liar.

Action: concerning free speech, endless wars, tax cuts for the rich, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Florida legislators to reject an anti-free speech bill,and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq War AUMF, repeal the Trump tax cuts for the rich, and pass the Social Security Expansion Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Free Press helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject SB 1316, which would require any blogger who writes about Gov. DeSantis or state legislators register with the state or face heavy fines. Can you say "poll tax," boys and girls? And how do they justify such a thing? By saying all we want to know is who our enemies are? Here’s who your enemies are, Florida: everyone who thinks for themselves. And that’s most of us in America. I’m serious; no more than a quarter of Americans are mindless drones lapping up whatever right-wingers spew forth. They get a lot more media coverage than we do, but to quote a famous philosopher: they do not surround us; we surround them. So let’s remind everyone of that.

The American Friends Service Committee helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that “authorized” the Iraq War. And while the 2002 AUMF, like the 2001 AUMF that enabled all kinds of madness in the “war on terror,” is worse than a wad of used toilet paper, every President since Bush the Lesser has used it to justify all manner of extra-legal military adventures – think Obama in Libya and Syria and Trump in Iran and Syria. We can’t bring back dead soldiers or dead Iraqis, or those whom ISIS has exterminated, but perhaps we can begin to earn their forgiveness by repealing the 2002 AUMF.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, which would include the tax cuts in the top tax brackets and the massive cut in the corporate tax rate. Republicans are doing the helicopter dance about “deficits” and “debts,” but they all voted for the Trump tax cuts, which helped make trillion-dollar deficits in America the norm. So if they won’t force the rich to pay more in taxes now – you know, because DEFICITZ BADZ!!!!!! – then why should we listen to them about a damn thing? And if Democrats won’t have guts, we’ve got to have it for them.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act. When right-wingers play offense, what do we do? Play offense! Nobody roots for the team running the prevent defense at the end of the game! And taxing rich folks to pay for expanded Social Security benefits is actually quite popular, as you would imagine, given that most Americans, as I’ve said, are pretty smart. What are right-wingers going to do, pretend that taxing the rich is dumb? Taxing the rich, more than anything else, made ours the greatest middle class in history after World War II. So take no BS about this matter.

Action: concerning campaign finance, price-gouging, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment overruling Citizens United and prevent big oil corporation price-gouging, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already . Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment to overturn our Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling now. That ruling called laws restricting campaign finance “unconstitutional,” even though virtually everyone in America, conservative or liberal, supports such restrictions, and anyway money isn’t “speech” any more than a corporation’s a person. And though its proponents argue that redressing one’s grievances against a government costs money these days, having more money shouldn’t give you “more rights.” (I wish that were the worst argument against campaign finance reform; this post I wrote almost nine years ago lists some of those.)

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would penalize big oil corporations for price-gouging. Whenever you see high price hikes coupled with high profits, you’re free to say “look, I’m not a schmuck.” Oh, sure, they said it was the war in Ukraine, but, again, we’re not schmucks. And we don’t live in a “free” market, either – we live in a corporation-dominated market, where corporations make decisions based on what delivers the most money to their executives and shareholders, not on, you know, what’s good for people. Or even what’s good for the corporation long-term! And that’s why our government has to step in on our behalf.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission already. Look, I don’t care that big telecom corporations hate her, and I don’t care that one police union in Chicago hates her; I care that she helped create our FCC’s short-lived net neutrality order from 2016. Every normal person who’s ever thought about net neutrality – the principle that you, not some corporation, should decide how fast and in what order internet documents gets to your computer – likes it; it doesn’t matter whether they’re liberal or conservative, and when liberals and conservatives stand together against the corporations, we deserve to win. Getting Gigi Sohn on our FCC will help us get that win.

Around the table: good people fight bad people, part 842.

This article’s headline reads “People Return to Offices, Productivity Plunges,” and though I would warn against worshipping at the Altar of Productivity, I’m quite glad to hear someone in our “liberal” media finally blaming bosses instead of workers. And when I hear that bosses are installing “productivity-tracking software” on their workers’ computers, I am reminded, yet again, that the good boss inspires more productivity while the bad boss acts like a damn fascist trying to control what he can’t control.

Right before midterm elections, we pick up another victory over monopolists, as a King County (WA) Superior Court Commissioner granted a temporary restraining order preventing two banksters from essentially looting the grocery chain store corporation Albertsons in advance of its proposed merger with Kroger. The banksters in question – the private equity corporations Cerberus Capital and Apollo – made the tactical error of making their looting, ahem, dividend recapitalization, a part of the merger, which puts the entire proposed merger in danger, if our government will be aggressive enough. And they might!

Ho hum, right-wingers push another activists-are-the-real-fascists narrative by saying the hundreds of writers and Penguin employees who spoke out against Justice Barrett’s $2 million book deal are the real “censors,” the real “book bann(ers),” and the real “cancel culture” practitioners, though we all know right-wingers are the actual censors, book banners, and cancel culture practitioners – as right-wingers themselves prove by calling for the “firing” and “blacklist(ing)” of everyone who has (so far unsuccessfully) protested the future Barrett book! Anyway, do publishers have a First Amendment obligation to publish every single conceivable manuscript? No, they do not. The end.

When I hear that Texas Republicans have been trying to suppress the vote by confiscating smartphones, looking over voters’ shoulders in voting booths, and going around to voters’ homes to tell them they’ve voted illegally when they haven’t – and I think that last item merits a slander lawsuit! – all I can say is that this is where the feedback loop of masturbatory rage leads. I’m also reminded that William S. Burroughs used to say all a junkie wants is junk – not food, not water, not sex, just junk – and today’s rage-addled right-winger is little different than a junkie. I guess that should call for more compassion on my part, but rageheads do a lot more harm than junkies do.

Elon Musk has run Twitter for a week and already he’s fired a bunch of employees after failing to give them the notice required by law, and now they’re suing him. These bazillionaires all think they’re so great – too great for our laws, apparently! – when in reality they trip over their own dicks more than you or I ever will. And though one hates to say bad things about someone who popularized the electric car, note well how that electric car hasn’t gotten any cheaper over the last 10 years. I’m old enough to remember when the Toyota Prius was too expensive for working families, but I’m also old enough to remember when it wasn’t anymore.

Whoa Nelly: the Republican candidate for North Carolina’s 13th U.S. House District actually wants to create “a community-level review process outside the jurisdiction of the federal government” that would evaluate whether a woman can get an abortion because of rape or incest, and though his campaign thinks that’s a compromise position (you know, from NO ABORSHUNZ EVAHZ!!!!), Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall had another name for it: a “rape panel,” which I expect will stick, though “Star Chamber” wouldn’t be a bad name for it, either. Think it might be much easier to, gosh, I don’t know, let the woman and her doctor decide the matter without state interference? Think that’d be a more small government solution than any “rape panel” would? Barry Goldwater would have said so.

Finally, Emily Oster at The Atlantic thinks we should “declare a pandemic amnesty” so we can all “move forward,” and, ah, no. There is no equivalence between yelling at someone who got too close to you on a hike in April of 2020 and the millions of Americans who simply wouldn’t get a vaccine in 2021 out of rage – the former may have hurt your feelings, but the latter reignited the damn pandemic. The author doesn't explicitly mention these latter folks, probably so we'd all avoid making the comparison I just made. I lump those latter folks in with all the other folks I’ll never forgive, like (for example) the Iraq war hawks who called me “traitor.” Don’t worry, God’ll sort me out in the end.

Action: concerning political prisoners, campaign finance disclosure, and chemical plant safety.

Long story short: tell Iran to release Vahid Afkari, tell President Biden to require campaign finance disclosure for federal contracting corporations, and tell our EPA to protect good Americans from chemical spills and explosions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first: Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to release political prisoner Vahid Afkari immediately, expunge his record, and drop any charges against him. Mr. Afkari's story has a lot of recognizable particulars: participated in peaceful protests against Iran’s repressive regime, got arrested on trumped-up charges, got sentenced to over 30 years in jail (plus 74 lashes), has spent the last two years in solitary, and now has health issues that I’m sure are completely unrelated to the injustices his government has inflicted upon him. But, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, only a snowflake government does this to their own people. And if we pressure them enough, they’ll fold, because that's what snowflakes do.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to force corporations that contract with our government to disclose their campaign spending. This should be a layup – most corporations do business with our government sooner or later, and they spend taxpayer money, which is to say our money, so we deserve to know which politicians they’re funding. Right-wingers will whine that this would have a “chilling effect” on “free speech,” but it won’t, because money is not speech. Corporate executives will still be able to say what they like; they’ll just be less able to bribe their way to getting what they like. And why should they have it so easy, when the rest of us must howl to be heard?

Finally, the National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous Risk Assessment Plan possible for American chemical plants. More than one out of every three Americans lives within three miles of a chemical facility, meaning more than one out of every three Americans faces a significant chance of exposure to toxic leaks, fumes, fires, and explosions. And not for nothing, but most of these Americans are Black, Brown, or poor; why, it's almost like that's the idea. But if we believe that everyone deserves a chance in America – and even right-wingers make a show of believing that – then we must protect everyone from the toxic waste that could sicken, injure, or kill them.

Action: concerning corruption, drug prices, and campaign finance disclosure.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress, stop trying to prevent Americans from importing prescription drugs from Canada, and pass the DISCLOSE 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.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress. Yes, you’re telling them to pass laws that would prevent themselves from trading in stock, but hell, if you’re serving in Congress, you ought to be quite familiar with the temptations of power by now – and you should also know that power corrupts. Congressfolk investing in corporations will absolutely make them less willing to take on those corporations when they prey on consumers of pump filth into our air and water, and they’re supposed to take on polluters and financial predators on our behalf. They say we can trust them; I say it’s our duty as Americans not to trust them, and to demand better behavior from them.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to prevent good Americans from importing prescription drugs from Canada. Why do folks do that? Because the drugs cost a lot less, that’s why! And how do they cost less? Because Canada’s government buys drugs on behalf of its citizens, and with the bargaining power of an entire nation, they can get better prices. Hmm, there’s a lesson in there, somewhere. In the meantime, Congress might actually pass a FDA funding bill that would include a provision preventing good Americans from getting cheaper drugs, so we need to tell them to cut that out.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 443, the DISCLOSE Act, which would (among other things!) force disclosure of all big campaign finance donors who give more than $10,000 to campaigns or committees. I know, I know, Senate Republicans blocked it yesterday, but why take that from them? Why assume that we can't express our will because they've expressed theirs? And, let's face it, their will sucks. Money isn't speech, campaign spending is a far, far larger impediment to free speech than making big donors donate in public, and calling campaign finance disclosure "bullying" can just cry into their thousand dollar bills. They really shouldn’t whine about it, though. Nobody except a Trumphole likes whining.

Around the table: evil works have a long half-life -- and so do good works.

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut informs us that “The Secret Service Text Cover-Up Keeps Getting Bigger and Bigger,” as the mass text-deletion scandal now encompasses our Department of Defense and our Department of Homeland Security as well as our Secret Service. One observer wonders if folks have a “moral right to presume the worst about Trump entities that deliberately destroyed federal evidence regarding January 6,” but “moral right” is a bad way of putting it – we as Americans have a duty to ensure the survival of our own civilization. “Trump entities” would enjoy the presumption of innocence if they stand trial in a court of law, but Americans need not give them that presumption either at the ballot box or the water cooler. Hey, that’s the marketplace of ideas.

Texas jury finds right-wing blowhard Alex Jones guilty of defamation over his repeated assertions that the Sandy Hook school mass murder was somehow not real, and orders him to pay nearly $50 million in damages. Stupid Texas law will limit that outlay, but it’s still a big deal anytime someone pays a price for their evil works. And if you’re thinking Alex Jones only paid that price because he’s a relatively small player in the system, so is almost everyone else who deserves his fate. Why keep Alex Jones or Steve Bannon around when a hundred other jerks can rise up to take their place? Hell, they only keep Donald Trump around because he won’t go away.

When I hear that New York state’s Health Commissioner says the single case of polio they’ve found so far could well mean hundreds of other folks might have it, all I can say is: heckuva job, Andrew Wakefield! Mr. Wakefield, you may recall, is the ex-scientist who manufactured “data” finding a “link” between the MMR vaccine and autism; anti-vaxxers ran amok with this “research” and convinced numerous Americans that all vaccines were dangerous. Fast forward to the summer of 2021, when numerous crybabies refused to take the COVID vaccine and thus helped keep us all in danger to this day, and we can see clearly the damage anti-vaxxers have done. What’s next, smallpox?

West Virginia man gets a little over three years in jail for sending threatening emails to Dr. Anthony Fauci and ex-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins while they were both federal officials. Let the record show that this man was no expert dancer on the free-speech-or-terroristic-threat high wire. And while it’s great that we got justice here, how about we go after everyone who threatened a schoolteacher or school board official over masks or vaccines or “critical race theory”? Because good teachers won’t come back until we prove we’ve got their back.

Ho hum, FactCheck.org finds too many folks using misrepresented vaccine safety data in order to claim that the COVID vaccines have “serious side effects” they don’t actually have – but this time the database is German, not American. And naturally Tucker Carlson, who jumped all over misrepresented data coming from our VAERS database last year, jumped all over this one, too, proving that those who would exploit the rage-added never rest, nor do they feel shame when we expose their lies. It’s enough to make you think that Jon Stewart’s method – good old-fashioned ridicule! – is the better way.

Finally, in an act of political aikido I can’t believe came from Democrats, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the Inflation Reduction Act couldn’t contain a $35/ month insulin price cap for non-Medicare patients and still comply with the Byrd Rule concerning budget reconciliation – but Democrats left the cap in the bill anyway, daring Republicans to force them to take it out, and Republicans dutifully took the bait. 60 votes would have overcome the point-of-order raised by Sen. Graham (E-SC), but only seven Republicans voted with Democrats to overcome it – meaning that headlines like “Republicans strip insulin price cap from bill” are now completely valid both in newspapers and campaign ads! Of the seven Republicans who voted to keep the insulin cap, only two – John Kennedy of Louisiana and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – are up for re-election in 2022, so you have to wonder what goes through the minds of people like Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley, and Rand Paul, each of whom have formidable Democratic challengers this year. (The insulin price cap is particularly in Kentucky Democrat Charles Booker’s wheelhouse, for reasons you might easily imagine.)

Around the table: concerning pollution, abortion, labor, and Joe Manchin.

Now that our Supreme Court seems determined to gut pretty much any part of our government that actually helps good Americans, Branko Marcetic at In These Times reminds us how well our Environmental Protection Agency has worked over the years. “From dramatically improving air quality and banning cancer-causing substances, to cleaning up toxic sites and making long-poisoned natural attractions habitable again, the EPA has been the worst nightmare for right-wing, anti-government forces: an example of government power working for the benefit of the average person,” he writes. But he doesn’t forget to note that activists have often had to prod our EPA into working for us. And that’s as it should be: a tool is only any good if folks use it, after all.

The so-called National Right to Life Committee has proposed model legislation that would not only make abortion illegal everywhere in America, but would put anyone who helps someone get an abortion in jail. And naturally the bill is just vague enough to ensure that journalists reporting on reproductive issues would get swept up in its nefarious dragnet, meaning it’s also an anti-free speech bill. As more than one observer has noted, we need to understand the right-wing agenda as, ultimately, an anti-free speech agenda – they’ll make everything illegal and if you talk about it, they’ll make you an accomplice.

So how did right-wingers react to the 10-year-old girl who had to travel from Ohio to Indiana to get an abortion because she was six weeks and three days pregnant? By calling it fake news, of course, though they strained not to use that exact term, and naturally Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler didn’t do his due diligence, either, which was exactly the cover they all needed. I would not oppose defamation lawsuits against all the right-wing fools who claimed the story wasn’t true only to be proven wrong (and who then labored mightily to cover their tracks without correcting their statements).

Starbucks says it’s closing 16 stores (including a few unionized stores) under the guise of “store safety,” and Starbucks Workers United (the union organizing their workers) files a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. Starbucks execs think they’re clever for closing some non-union stores along with the union stores, but they’ll never escape the bitter irony that store safety issues provoked a lot of the union organizing to begin with! Perhaps these executives imagine someone will write a Mahabharata about their exploits one day, but they’re wrong – no one will remember their names or their evil works in a hundred years, and that’s as it should be. In the moment, of course, we must overcome their evil.

You’ve heard that Joe Manchin has killed the latest iteration of the Democrats’ climate change bill – and that President Biden has rather vocally moved on, though we’ll see if that actually produces any results – but I guess I should note that Mr. Manchin himself has denied killing the bill, saying he just wanted to see what inflation was going to be like and see what the Fed planned to do about it before going further, which sure sounds like every other damn excuse for inaction he’s offered the last 18 months. I normally have no sympathy for Chuck Schumer, but it sure looks like he just decided to cut to the chase already.

Finally, in a related note, Paul Kane at the Washington Post warns that we should “Always listen to Joe Manchin’s public comments, not what others hear in private,” and adds that Democrats “seem to have all made the same mistake: hearing the nice tones that the West Virginia Democrat said in their private meetings, while dismissing his pessimistic comments in public as standard negotiating ploys. Instead, Manchin is the odd politician whose public pronouncements, whether in brief Capitol hallway interviews or in detailed prepared statements, carry more weight than whatever he tells his colleagues in private.” I must say that is an awfully long way of saying he negotiates in bad faith, and I’m not sure letting Rep. Jayapal say essentially the same thing makes up for that.

Action: concerning the Espionage Act, marriage equality, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act, protect marriage equality, and lower prescription drug prices. 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.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so that our government can’t use it to silence journalists and whistleblowers. You know, like they’re trying to do to Julian Assange for the crime of exposing American wrongdoing during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That embarrassed a lot of American elites, but embarrassing American elites ain’t no reason to use anti-spying legislation to silence journalists. And silencing whistleblowers? Who expose corruption at great personal cost? Anyone who says they love America should be ashamed of doing such a thing. Allow me to believe that shaming still works in America.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to codify marriage equality in our laws before our Supreme Court uses its dastardly “deeply-rooted rights” notion to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges. Because you know they’re just itching to do it – why, Justice Thomas said they should do it in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization which overturned Roe v. Wade. Hence we need our Congressfolk to act. It’ll take a while for a case to reach our Court that could outlaw gay marriage, but don’t let that make you complacent. Whenever our Court takes our rights away, it always seems like it’s too soon.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices already. Feel free to tell them exactly how in the space for comments – like, by letting Medicare negotiate drug prices, or capping insulin prices, or fining big pharma corporations when they raise prices faster than inflation. People like all of these ideas, and would it kill our Congressfolk to do some things that people actually like, and actually want them to do? As Drug Prices Are Too High suggests, it might even help them in the midterms this November.

Action: concerning free speech, voting rights, oil, corporate NDAs, and OAN.

Long story short: tell Russia to stop oppressing protestors, tell PA state legislators to stop wasting taxpayer money "investigating" the 2020 election, tell California to stop buying Amazon rainforest oil, tell state governments to stop allowing NDAs between legislators and corporations, and tell Verizon to drop OAN like a hot potato. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Russian government to stop oppressing anti-war protestors. Russia has arrested some 15,000 of them, and this is Vladimir Putin's Russia, not Anton Chekhov's Russia, so "arrest" might well equal "never see the outside world again." Russia has charged some of these protestors with "disseminating false information" and "discrediting" Russian soldiers, which are just the kinds of "charges" snowflake governments come up with when they can't win arguments on the merits. Do we expect Russia to wilt under our express will? No, we do not -- me, I expect them to laugh at us. But do we consider it our duty as human beings to express our will anyway? Yes, we do.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to stop wasting taxpayer money (i.e., your money) on their sham election "review." They've spent nearly half a mil on this, and guess what they've found? Nothing, of course, in over a year and a half, and they've just extended the "review" for another six months, because that'll make the difference. But no matter how much they look, they ain't gonna find what ain't there. Of course, they don't expect to -- they're merely creating drama. Think maybe good Pennsylvania taxpayers might be sick of their legislature using their money to create more drama? Reader, I think so.

Stand.Earth helps you tell the state of California to stop buying oil from the Amazon rainforest. For a whole lot of reasons! Oil drilling in the Amazon threatens the world's greatest climate change fighter -- they don't call the Amazon rainforest the "lungs of the Earth" for nothing! -- plus it also threatens the numerous Indigenous folks who live there and who spend far too much of their time fighting developers. Don't believe the hype that "gas costs too much in California so we need to get it anywhere we can." That's how evil gets you -- by exploiting you when you're not at your best. They'd do much better expanding public transportation -- yes, even in California! -- so they can be stronger the next time evil strikes.

More Perfect Union helps you tell state governments to stop allowing big corporations to force state legislators to sign non-disclosure agreements. I've been talking about this issue perhaps too abstractly, though I still find the theoretical problem -- of forcing state legislators not to talk about issue with their bosses, their constituents! -- to be rather comical. Fact is, Amazon (the big corporation, this time) has been forcing non-disclosure agreements on politicians in places they've tried to build warehouses. What could Amazon be trying to hide? Tax breaks they don't deserve, their awful record with COVID-19, their general hatred of unionized workers? Whatever it is, folks deserve to know.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell Verizon to stop carrying the notorious One America News Network. DirecTV dumped them this past April, now it's everyone else's turn! How do you know OAN deserves oblivion? Because they sued Rachel Maddow for defamation after she called them "literally paid Russian propaganda" -- and lost. Meanwhile they're the defendant in at least one other defamation suit concerning the lies they spread about the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost by seven million votes. No, it's no "victory" for "free speech" if they still get to spew filth; nothing in our Constitution guarantees a paid platform for your free speech, only protection from your government oppressing you for your speech.

Action: concerning pollution, law and order, corporate taxes, non-disclosure agreements, and Fox News.

Long story short: tell our EPA to strengthen cross-state pollution rules, tell the city of San Francisco to investigate Jaxon Sales's death, tell Amazon shareholders to prod their corporation to pay more taxes, tell state legislatures to ban non-disclosure agreements between legislators and corporations, and tell your cable corporations to de-platform Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our EPA to update our cross-state pollution rule. As you might suspect, big power plants' pollution doesn't obey state lines, but frequently travels to other, downwind states; our EPA could protect those downwind states better than they do, but first they need to hear from us that they need to do it. And not for nothing, but "downwind" often means, in practice, "toward Black and Brown neighborhoods." Cue right-wingers yelling now pollution is racist? Pollution doesn't have a will of its own, of course, but polluters do. Like how right-wingers disappear polluters from the conversation? Why, it's like that's the whole idea!

Change.org helps you tell the city of San Francisco investigate the mysterious death of Jaxon Sales in 2020. Mr. Sales apparently went on a blind date only to die in another man's bed with the notorious date-rape drug GHB in his system, yet city officials told his family they wouldn't investigate because gays use GHB. You know who else uses GHB? Rapists! Seems to me an investigation isn't too much to ask! And when you confront the city's other odd decisions, you might think they're protecting the man in whose bed Mr. Sales died. An investigation might help us not to think that.

Both Public Citizen and Americans for Tax Fairness help you tell Amazon shareholders to support a resolution calling for Amazon to pay its fair share of taxes. After all, if Amazon doesn't pay for police, firefighters, and libraries, then the rest of us have to pay more! And remember: shareholder resolutions don't have to win; they only have to demonstrate that a not-insignificant number of shareholders disagree with something the corporation is doing and that if the corporation doesn't change, they might take their money elsewhere. Certainly a shareholder resolution is a more peaceful way of resolving our differences than whatever the "Dark MAGA" crowd might employ.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state legislatures to ban non-disclosure agreements (or NDAs) between legislators and corporations. To whom are state legislators supposed to account for their works? To their constituents! And non-disclosure agreements prevent that! They say they need non-disclosure agreements to ensure that people can speak candidly, but people speak candidly all the time! Anyone in politics who says they "feel" otherwise is full of shit! Corporations just don't want their unpopular (or unlawful!) "advice" to become public knowledge! And ask folks who signed NDAs with Donald Trump or Elon Musk how they feel about that decision now.

Finally, Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to dump Fox News from their platforms. The Buffalo shooter's manifesto had a certain from-Fox's-lips-to-the-shooter's-ears quality to it, and though I wouldn't put Tucker Carlson in jail for those murders, I don't think corporations should compel us all to pay to keep Fox News on our cable platforms. Without Fox, folks would have to work harder for their masturbatory rage. Like it should be! (And remember: no one has a First Amendment "right" to a cable platform; one only has a First Amendment right not to get thrown in jail for their speech.)

Action: concerning climate change, corruption, pollution, mine reclamation, and peaceful protests.

Long story short: tell Home Depot to stop using the Canadian boreal forest for its products, tell our government to investigate FDA corruption in re our baby formula shortage, tell our Army Corps of Engineers to examine pollution from pipelines more vigorously, tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, and tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the removal of peaceful protestors outside Supreme Court Justices' houses. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Environmental Action helps you tell Home Depot to stop sourcing its wood products from the Canadian boreal forest. Our reasoning is the same for our world's largest intact forest as it would be with the Amazon rainforest or the Tongass National Forest: old trees are our best weapon against climate change; they don't call them "the lungs of the planet" for nothing. Thus turning them into cabinets or toilet paper is, in this context, rather short-sighted. And if we can prompt the world's largest hardware store into abandoning logging in the forest, we'll likely get others to follow. If not, the Big Stick of Bad PR is always ready for deployment.

Progress America helps you tell our government to investigate our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) for its role in our current baby formula shortage. And I don't care what corruption at our FDA this uncovers! If you don't want to get shamed and shunned by your civilization, then don't hurt people. Chances are that investigators will find that the revolving door between industry and our FDA doesn't help us deal with food safety crises, and they might also find that our FDA has given established baby formula-manufacturing corporations too much of a free pass on safety inspections. That'd be a shame to learn that, but knowledge is power.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to close the loopholes that big oil and gas drilling corporations use to evade scrutiny about the pollution their proposed pipelines cause. Specifically, we'll call for less "fast-tracking" of pipelines. We should be "fast-tracking" solar and wind projects, if we must "fast-track" anything at all! Yet big oil and gas drilling corporations constantly assert that their pipelines are "too urgent" to ensure they don't spew filth into our water tables. But no one will be sitting around a campfire in a hundred years saying we can't drink the water now, but at least CEOs made good money for a while!

The Sierra Club helps you tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. We should blame our Senate for dragging their feet on confirming Mr. Biden's nominees, but this one's on our President, because he hasn't even put a name forward. The long name gives you the idea that this is some bureaucratic rando, but with all the coal mines closing up around America, reclaiming and repurposing that land becomes a lot more important, and someone's got to run things at the department that would do that work. And, ah, this is the kind of thing that actually helps potential Trump voters in Appalachia. So how about we do it?

Finally, FAIR helps you tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the repression of peaceful protesting outside of Supreme Court Justice's homes. They actually suggested these protestors were totalitarians! By suggesting that they were "(e)rasing any distinction between the public square and private life"! Key word there, of course, is any -- protesting outside of the private homes of public figures who have, very publicly, made known their opposition to the popular will does not erase literally "any" distinctions between public and private spheres. And, ah, who exactly "harassed" or "intimidated" these Justices? If anything, protestors have been too polite.

Around the table: in which we describe yet more foolish behavior.

Malia Jones at The Conversation advises that we stop obsessing about "risk assessment" in re COVID and return to risk reduction: "wearing masks, getting vaccinated and boosted, avoiding indoor crowds and improving ventilation." The last item often requires legislation (for public buildings) and/or shaming and shunning (for private buildings), but you have a lot more control over the first three items. Remember: you're better off trusting an actual epidemiologist on these matters than a social media "influencer."

Study reverses memory loss in aging mice by "washing" their brains in cerebrospinal fluid. The fluid apparently washes out waste products, bathes brain tissue in proteins, and boosts growth of myelin, the sheathing material that protects neurons. Needless to say no one's done this in humans yet, but if it works anywhere near as well as it did in mice, it could be a game-changer in treating dementia and similar conditions. I wish the researchers (from at least four nations!) the best in continuing their work. If only spinal fluid could wash out the memory of watching all those pricks on Fox News!

Find yourself cringing a bit that Spain has outlawed harassment of women who try to get abortions at clinics? The key word in that formulation is harassment -- you don't need to be that creative, of course, to exercise your right to free speech without actually harassing an individual. But I would have struck the words "annoying" or "offensive" from the list of proscribed behaviors -- let shame, not the law, handle that stuff; outlawing "intimidating or coercive acts" is justice enough. It'll all be moot in the United States, of course, once our Supreme Court rules there's no right to an abortion anymore.

When I hear that Elon Musk says he'll be voting entirely for Republicans this year because Democrats are "too much captured by the unions" which is to laugh, I can't help but think I might be using that information as a reason not to vote for Republicans! But in truth, we've got enough evil to which we can tie Republicans (book banning, immaturity about masks and vaccines, fear about confronting their own racism, and of course, January 6), and also Elon Musk just isn't as unpopular as other titans of industry such as Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. At least, not yet.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (E-FL) has signed a bill that actually makes protesting in front of a private home illegal. How typical -- if someone, somewhere, is being an asshole, Ron DeSantis gets insanely jealous and tries to be an even bigger one. And where sane people see peaceful protestors, Mr. DeSantis sees only "angry mobs," which sure is rich coming from a man who obviously aspires to be a one-man angry mob. I'd say our Supreme Court would smack this down with a quickness, citing the precedent about protesting at abortion workers' homes, of course, though given how many good Americans have protested their houses lately, I'd just as soon expect the opposite -- which sure would be ironic, coming from a gang of jurists who've spent their lives devaluing other folks' lived experiences.

Finally, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he opposes NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, and though I prefer not to resort to ad hominem arguments, if Mr. Erdogan's against it, that's a pretty good reason to be for it. And dig his reasoning! Finland and Sweden haven't "taken a clear stance against terror organizations"? I think everyone's taken a "clear stance" against "terror organizations," though we may disagree that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party actually is a "terror organization." Anyway, yammering on about "terror organizations" is what dictators do. We know Mr. Erdogan's a dictator not just by what he does, and not just by how easily he wins re-election these days, but by the fact that our former President has such a hard-on for him.

Around the table: tabulating even more right-wing drama!

House January 6 panel subpoenas five Republican House Reps, including wannabe-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. At the risk of going out on a limb, I expect he'll defy the subpoena, because that's what hard guys do! Laws aren't for him; laws are for Those People! All that will endear him with Trump votaries, who hold these two beliefs as irrefutable truth. (As an aside, if justice seems to be moving a little slowly, recall that Joe Lieberman had subpoena power during the Enron hearings but didn't use it.)

Guess what else is causing our current baby formula shortage? Big corporations dissuading our FDA from conducting more regular/more stringent inspections, that's what! Because waaaaaaaah it'll cost us money, though Abbott Nutrition (the corporation with all the contaminated baby food!) spent $5 billion last year just on stock buybacks. Remember: when you give corporations more money, they don't do the right thing. When do they do the right thing? When we make them do the right thing, through vigorous safety inspection and regulation.

Is it nice to know that Tucker Carlson's recent drama about a purported "masculinity crisis" is older than dirt? I'm not sure anymore. Anyway, long before the bow-tied Hungry Man heir, Bernarr Macfadden trained Italian fasicsts and told us they were more vigorous than Americans, which sure turned out to be a laugh once World War II started and Germany had to bail them out, and even President Eisenhower's Council on Youth Fitness came about because we were afraid the Communists were more manly, though today's "Communists" are somehow 97-pound weaklings and unstoppable killers all at once. And if you're tempted to think the guy who went on an all-milk diet seems harmless by comparison, recall that we have just had a two-year education in how health fads can be most emphatically not-harmless.

Republican Governors Youngkin of Virginia and Hogan of Maryland tell our Justice Department to crack down on protests at Supreme Court Justices' houses, but I bet you just can't guess why they can't do that: because our Supreme Court long ago decided that going to the homes of Planned Parenthood workers was also First Amendment-protected free speech! Of course Messrs. Youngkin and Hogan know that; they're just stirring up drama, like all right-wingers do. "(P)reserve the integrity of our American judicial system" my ass -- Sam Alito just made up a rule aiming to scuttle 70 years of American jurisprudence.

Ho hum, Michael Grabell at ProPublica describes "The Plot to Keep Meatpacking Plants Open During COVID-19." Long story short: "the callousness of meatpacking executives and the level of industry influence over the Trump administration were far greater than previously known." Emblematic of that callousness, Tyson implemented mask-wearing and social-distancing on the chicken lines very quickly -- in China, not in the United States! Result: by July of 2020 you could tie over 6% of all COVID-19 cases to meatpacking plants, and then a few months later these meatpacking corporations were all desperate for schools to reopen, and you know why. I hope their 300% profit hikes get them into heaven, because I'm not sure anything else will.

Finally, Arizona Attorney General/Senate candidate Mark Brnovich's 2020 election lies are so brazen anymore that even Arizona Republicans have slammed him for it. I won't call this drama per se, since everyone can see the extensive documentary evidence of Mr. Brnovich's two-facedness on this issue, but I don't want to give Arizona Republicans too much credit, either, for without that evidence they might have more easily brushed off his evil works. See, thanks to January 6, I can hardly give Republicans the benefit of the doubt anymore. And I don't think that's my failing! Sooner or later, America has to get back to blaming the real villains.

Around the table: in which we contemplate various legal matters.

Elon Musk says he'd reverse the Twitter ban on Donald Trump, calling the ban "a morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme," and if I can think of an even clumsier way of putting that I'll let you know. His point is that the ban didn't silence Mr. Trump, though, actually, it kinda did -- not totally, but we don't let the perfect murder the good, do we? And none of Mr. Musk's nattering on about "free speech" changes the fact that Twitter is a publishing house -- whether he likes it or not, whether our laws recognize it as such or not -- and no belief in "free speech" requires that Twitter publish Donald Trump's ramblings any more than it requires that Random House publish mine.

Normally we turn to Patrick Cockburn for incisive analysis of foreign policy, but here he writes about "Mistakes I Made in Response to My Son's Mental Illness." Mr. Cockburn quit his job in order to "devote all efforts to helping Henry recover," not realizing that "I could not do much more than I was already doing and being jobless simply added to the strains on the family." He also didn't realize his son wasn't taking his meds for several years, which matters because "few therapies help until a person is stable on medication." The good news: coming together as a family or community helps "frequently a lot more than (people) think." And Henry has "done far better than most" in his predicament.

Folks are whining way too much about protestors holding vigils outside Brett Kavanaugh's house and the like; while I object to directly petitioning courts to rule the way I want them to; I certainly don't object to good folks taking to the street. Not too many months ago right-wingers waxed rhapsodic about a bunch of obnoxious truckers honking their horns all day and night because they didn't want to wear masks or get vaccines. (Naturally Susan Collins called the cops after someone wrote a chalk message outside of her house. Those poor, oppressed politicians! Sure, it's brightly-colored sidewalk chalk today, but what about tomorrow?)

Mob Boss Mitch suggests that Republicans will pursue a federal abortion ban if our Supreme Court overturns Roe as expected, and we say "suggests," of course, because he's trying to say it without actually saying it. And for good reason -- polling has lately told us that Democrats are doing better on the generic Congressional ballot, and do even better than that once voters figure out whicn one's the pro-choice candidate. In the meantime, Mitch ain't fooling anyone -- there's a reason he is literally the most unpopular Senator in America. Sadly, there is also a reason Democrats haven't given him the humiliating retirement he deserves. More than one reason, actually.

So why does Tucker Carlson say Disney's "behavior" "sounds like the behavior of a sex offender"? Easy -- because he knows actually coming out and calling them a sex offender might erase his family fortune in a lawsuit. The guy with the ZZ Top beard who calls you a "groomer" may not be so careful. Seriously, "grooming" is actually a thing, and if someone accuses you of "grooming" because you're not a complete asshole to gay and trans kids, get their name and sue them for slander. Right-wingers would call that a "frivolous lawsuit," even after you win it, so ain't nothing you can do about that. (What behavior was Mr. Carlson talking about, anyway? Your guess is as good as mine!)

Finally, speaking of the relationship between truth and lawsuits, One America News airs a 30-second statement stating, in part, that "Georgia officials have concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020" -- including, of course, the two workers who filed defamation lawsuits against the network. A settlement between the two parties forced that statement, and though the plaintiffs had the right idea there, I would have demanded a stronger statement -- "Georgia officials have concluded" gives OAN too much wiggle room -- and I'd make them read that statement on-air once every three or four hours every day for the rest of their lives. Hey, I've had enough.

Action: concerning monopolies, racism, pollution, abortion, and bad media.

Long story short: tell your government to fight monopolies, environmental racism, and truck pollution; tell big corporations to stop funding anti-abortion politicians, and tell Verizon to drop OAN from their lineup. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous rules possible against mergers. Mergers hurt people -- through lost jobs, higher prices, and increased corporate power to do more harm. I bet "higher prices" sure resonates with good Americans right about now, but increased corporate power also means lower wages, dirtier air and water, and more dangerous products. It also means no Medicare drug price negotiation, if you've paid attention to Kyrsten Sinema's big donor gatherings. We can help put a stop to all of that, by telling our government what to do.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our EPA to help communities afflicted most by pollution -- meaning, generally, our poorest communities, which will also be Black or Brown communities most of the time. Right-wingers can sneer at the notion of "racist pollution" all they want, but big polluting corporations situate their most polluting facilities near the poorest neighborhoods for a reason -- namely, that the poorest communities are also the least powerful communities, and thus the least able to stop pollution from overrunning their neighborhood. Thomas Sowell might cringe to hear this, but there's only so much damn bootstrapping folks can do; they also need help keeping polluters out of their grills.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous heavy-duty truck emission regulations possible. I said "regulations" just to trigger right-wingers who think regulations are inherently evil! Heavy-duty trucks aren't the most common vehicles on our roads, but they do cause most of the air pollution that wrecks our lungs. And we might as well ask for zero emissions from our trucks; even if we don't get them, we stand a much better chance of getting something better than what we've got. And no, regulations don't kill jobs. Corporate executives kill jobs. You know they'd replace you with a mound of dung if they could get away with it.

People for the American Way helps you tell big corporations to stop funding attacks on abortion rights, mainly through their donations to anti-abortion politicians. They say they do it for economic reasons, which is an excuse almost calculated to offend someone like me more, but their intent doesn't matter when the result is a Supreme Court that's all but declared open season on every right not specifically imagined by a 250-year-old dead man. Don't brook any right-wingers saying it's their money and they can do what they want with it. It's your speech, too, and you can shame them and shun them if you like. Corporations don't have more rights than you.

Daily Kos helps you tell Verizon to drop the notorious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN) from their lineup. We got AT&T to do it, so now we get other corporations to do it. OAN purveys noxious right-wing propaganda with every breath their on-air personalities draw, but don't settle for throwing up your hands and saying they have the right to free speech. First off, people have First Amendment rights, not corporations. And second, insofar as a corporation has a right to speech, it doesn't have a right to publication of that speech, on a platform, anymore than I have a right to compel Random House to publish my books. We have to think harder about this stuff than we used to.

Around the table: in which right-wingers salivate at their new-found prospects.

What is "the anti-abortion movement's next target," according to Kiera Butler at Mother Jones? Birth control, of course. After all, the "reasoning" Justice Alito used -- that rights not specifically listed by our Constitution should be "deeply-rooted" in order to enjoy Constitutional protection -- would form the basis for overturning Griswold, which allows birth control and is only eight years older than Roe. I fail to see how privacy isn't a "deeply-rooted" value in America, though; one would think the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would ring a bell. Anyway, read the article to discover (among other things) how well "suspicion of vaccines" maps onto "suspicion of birth control."

Did we all get a good laugh over the guy who painted Mr. Trump's face on his lawn winning the Republican primary for Ohio's 9th U.S. House district? Well, note well that Ohio recently redrew that district so that it's now one Mr. Trump would have won by three points. Marcy Kaptur's a good egg, the sort who has long won over independents and right-leaning voters, but in the meantime, let's discover which nuclear power corporation Mr. Majewski worked for as an executive, if any, and let's also see his text messages leading up to January 6. After all, Ginny Thomas also said she "left before the riot."

Looking to blue states as abortion havens in a post-Roe world? Not so fast: not every state has laws that guarantee that right fully. Parental notification laws still apply in many of them, and not every state makes health insurance corporations cover them (or lets Medicaid cover them); even in California, abortion after fetal viability is illegal. And while judges don't often deny a minor's request to bypass parental notification laws (Texas judges denied 7% of such requests last year), that won't be much comfort to those who do get denied, because it just happened to 100% of them.

Does PayPal have the right to shutter accounts of left-wing media organizations, as they've done to at least two media outlets lately? Depends on the contracts those outlets signed, of course, but broadly, yes. Do we have the right to shame and shun them for it? Hell yes we do! Nobody buys that "some potential risk associated with this account" rubbish with Consortium News, right? Yeah, I may not agree with everything Consortium says about Russia and Ukraine, but PayPal cutting off their ability to collect money doesn't exactly attest to PayPal's confidence.

In another post-redistricting Rep-on-Rep House race that always leads you to wonder who pissed off whom, avid Trumphole Rep. Alex Mooney leads actual moderate Rep. David McKinley by 15 points in West Virginia's 2nd House district Republican primary. David McKinley may not be the only Republican politician I still like, but I can't remember any others at the moment. If he took on Joe Manchin in 2024 and won, I wouldn't be heartbroken, but chances are another Trumphole would beat Mr. McKinley in that primary, too. Anyway, Mr. McKinley's relative lack of success in touting his Joe Manchin endorsement should maybe caution the Penguin about that 2024 race.

Finally, when I hear that Gov. Greg Abbott (E-TX) wants to challenge our Supreme Court's 1981 ruling that all children in America, including those of undocumented immigrants, must get public education -- mainly because THEREZ AREZ SO MANYZ OFZ TEH IMMIGRANTZ NOWZ!!!!! -- I feel compelled to note that more folks routinely came over the border in the '80s and '90s than now, drama and hysteria over the "crisis at the border" notwithstanding. Indulge me in my belief that saying so means something, even though I expect that fact to "elude" Sam Alito, too.

Action: concerning monopolies, drug prices, gas prices, campaign finance, forced arbitration, immigration, and internet policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets App, tax the windfall profits of big oil corporations, pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow campaign finance law again, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, reject any bill that would force President Biden to reinstate Title 42, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. 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.

With the news that both H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act, and H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee by large bipartisan margins, it's time to tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer (whose contact information you may find here) to put the bills on the floor, not wait for "commitments" from 60 Senators. Because that's a stalling tactic! Both of these bills would strike blows against big tech monopolists, so our Senate should pass them. While you've got him on the line, tell him to put H.R. 6833, the Affordable Insulin Now Act, up for a vote as well. The bill would cap insulin prices, and "waiting to see how the broader reconciliation bill goes" is another stalling tactic! We already know how it'll go: Joe Manchin will string us along for six months and then say he just can't get there. Enough already.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits. Right-wingers will say that's "taxing success," but it's actually taxing greed, or taxing price-gouging, either one will do. Every time they call something like that "taxing success," they murder a part of our world, because they help condition folks into thinking corruption equals success. We've got to get back to the society that equates corruption with evil. Anyway, just four big oil corporations made over $70 billion in profits last year, and brook no silliness about how that's only six cents per gallon or whatever, because hello! $70 billion! You can't just slice $70 billion into ladyfingers. Next up on the right-wing noise machine: CEOs are underpaid because they only make 12 cents for every breath they draw!

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 80, which would amend our Constitution to allow governments to regulate campaign finance like sane people again. Let me be clear: nobody but a troll gets up in the morning and says praise the Lord corporations can spend as much money as they want on stupid campaign ads that put us all in a crappy mood! We actually live in a world where two-thirds of Republican voters want the kind of campaign finance laws that our Supreme Court outlawed in their notorious Citizens United v. FEC ruling, so we should pass H.J.Res. 80. Brook no slippery-slope arguments from right-wingers! A Constitutional amendment will not open the floodgates for all kinds of free speech restrictions, not least because money is not speech.

Daily Kos, Public Justice, and Public Citizen all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Why do so many good government groups want us to pass this bill? Because forced arbitration is awful! It forces people to redress grievances with corporations through arbitration rather than court, and guess what? You're far more likely to lose in arbitration -- it doesn't matter that oh, but the average award is bigger in arbitration if you lose. And not for nothing, but forced arbitration is yet another one of those monopolistic practices by which corporations fix wages. And since wages are the price an employer pays for your labor, wage fixing is also price fixing, and price fixing, as we know, is illegal. Judges don't call it that enough, but we're working on that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would preserve the notorious Title 42 immigration policy. Title 42 supposedly aimed to keep immigrants from making the COVID pandemic worse, and guess what? It didn't work -- with their whining about masks and vaccines, right-wing Americans kept that pandemic going quite well by themselves, thank you very much. No, the Trump Administration came up with the Title 42 program just to give them another reason to keep immigrants out of America, and too many Democratic politicians are going all Henny Penny at the prospect of even more immigrants, and the Republican attacks that will come with them. But failing to do the right thing on immigration because Republicans will attack us for it is cowardice. Which, again, Democratic politicians are good at.

Finally, FAIR helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. All you need know about her nomination? That the Wall Street Journal doesn't want her on it, out of a "fear" that she'll "silence conservative voices." Oddly, both the One America News Network and Newsmax have supported her nomination! If the Wall Street Journal thinks net neutrality (which Ms. Sohn would help restore) amounts to "censorship" of "conservative voices," that's their problem, because net neutrality -- which would prevent internet service providing corporations from delivering some files faster than others -- is not censorship. Like "conservative" and "socialist," "censorship" has become a word its users torture until it tells them what they want to hear. But we don't do any kind of torture here.

Action: concerning taxes, law and order, energy security, protecting our democracy, immigration, and copyrights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, oversee FBI investigations more closely, pass the Energy Security and Independence Act and the Protecting Our Democracy Act, support ending Title 42, and reject the SMART Copyright 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.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to revive the Child Tax Credit expansion that put $250 and $300 checks in the bank accounts of working families. Because that will help people struggling with inflation! Don't believe the Manchinean hype that "expanding the Child Tax Credit caused the inflation in the first place." For one thing, if that were true, inflation would have gone down by now, since the CTC expansion expired almost four months ago. For another, corporate greed causes most of the inflation we're experiencing! Corporate pre-tax profits went up 25% in 2021; recall that inflation was about 7% for the entire year. It's cruel to "get tough" on folks who need help making ends meet, and not to get tough on the powerful people who cause all the problems.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to conduct more stringent oversight of FBI "sensitive investigative matters" -- i.e., investigations of political organizations, religious organizations, public officials, or the media. We learned last month that our FBI allowed more than two errors per investigation on average in 2019, errors that contravened our FBI's own rules about these investigations and included such basic failures as failing to get proper authorization to even start an investigation. Law enforcement officers must answer to the law, and if not to the law, then certainly to internal procedures; we can't let them cut corners, because good Americans get hurt when they do. Sure, it's a "political organization" today, but tomorrow it could be you or I.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7439/S. 4013, the Energy Security and Independence Act, which would amend the Defense Production Act of 1950 so that it would cover energy production in America. Donald Trump will tell you that'd be "black helicopter territory" if our government stepped in and made big corporations produce renewable energy so we wouldn't have to rely on foreign countries so much, but no, it's not "black helicopter territory" for our government to actually insure that we rely on ourselves for our energy needs. And if big corporate CEOs think losing a few million dollars off their annual salaries constitutes "government oppression," I'd like to introduce them to some Russian anti-war protestors who could explain to them what oppression is really like.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which our House passed late last year. That also means contacting Senate Majority Leader Schumer (here's his contact info) and telling him to schedule that vote in the first place! No excuses about this one or that one maybe not voting for it! Hold their feet to the fire! The Protecting Our Democracy Act would prevent Presidential abuses of power like those perpetrated by Mr. Trump during his four notorious years in office, specifically targeting a President's ability to profit from his office and abuse his pardoning power, both of which Mr. Trump surely did. I guess this bill's opponents will yammer on about all that being in the past, ignoring the fact that the past teaches a great deal about what to avoid in the future. Hmm, that sounds almost conservative.

NETWORK, the National Catholic Social Justice Lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to support ending the Title 42 "health care-related" immigrant expulsion policy. President Biden (finally!) announced that he's ending this cruel policy, one former President Trump supposedly enacted to keep COVID out even though Mr. Trump's most devoted supporters then proved they can keep a pandemic going all by their damn selves. But quite a few Democrats have spoken out against this announcement in recent days -- they smell blood, might it be their own? -- but don't believe the hype that Joe Biden's not giving us tools to deal with the influx of immigrants. Those tools are laws and courts; they take a long time to work their will because they serve justice, not the need for second-rate politicians to "look tough."

Finally, No Censorship Filter helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3880, the so-called SMART Copyright Act. The SMART Copyright Act would basically force every internet entity that handles content to install automated filters aiming to catch copyright infringement, but if there's something worse than an overzealous human censor, it's an algorithmic censor that can't be reasoned with, let alone tell the difference between actual infringement and fair use! Seriously, too many politicians think machines can just do anything, when the tech bros feeding them that nonsense just don't want to hire people and pay them and give them health insurance and vacation time and paid family/sick leave and the like. And these tech bros laugh at the politicians they con! We won't be laughing if this bill passes, though.

Action: concerning insulin, monopolies, privacy, banksters, and media.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act; tell your Congressfolk to pass the Open App Markets Act and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, reject the Kids Online Safety Act and the SMART Copyright Act, and pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act; and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: our House passed H.R. 6833, the Affordable Insulin Now Act, earlier this month, so now's the time to tell your Senators to pass this bill as well; you can find their phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page. Also, you can find contact information for Senate Majority Leader Schumer here, and tell him to schedule a vote on the bill post-haste. Brook no excuses! Nobody cares if it "has the votes"! Democrats act like it's a mortal sin to lose votes, but sometimes the best way to win a vote in the long term is to lose it in the short term! Won't Ron Johnson's opponent, or Rand Paul's, want to run ads about their refusal to stop price-gouging of diabetics? And won't Mark Kelly and Raphael Warnock (who's sponsored the Senate version) want something to run on? This is Politics 101.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act, and H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Both these bills would stop big tech corporations from herding you toward their chosen products, versus letting you get the products you'd like, and note well that the big tech corporations are getting all Henny Penny about these bills. As the article points out, when big corporations tell you a bill would result in apocalypse, you can be pretty sure they're more scared than you should be. Getting to use the app store of your choice to get apps? Preventing big corporations from favoring their products in your searches? That hardly sounds like the end of the world -- unless, I guess, you're used to making money without earning it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3663, the so-called Kids Online Safety Act, because (and stop me if you've heard this before!) it wouldn't keep kids safe from online predators so much as it would expand internet surveillance upon them (and, of course, on us as well). The bill would also let state Attorneys General censor websites they deem unsafe for children, which, given so many state-level politicians have done recently, will let them call gay and trans websites "predators." This is exactly the kind of bill that lets politicians look like they're doing something, but actual child molestors and sex traffickers will still circumvent these "protections." Put it like that, and you may move the needle for some of your Senators.

Fight for the Future helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 3880, the so-called SMART Copyright Act, which would force every website to put content filters on it. To what end? To "protect copyright," supposedly, but "content filters" are algorithms, and algorithms won't err on the side of fair use, but will censor like mad, which will cripple free speech on the internet, almost like that's the whole idea. How do we protect copyright, then? We do it with the laws we have; the internet is not so unique a thing that existing laws won't protect copyright anymore. And we also do it by forcing corporations to hire people, not machines, to monitor for copyright violations! Corporations wouldn't hire anyone to do anything if they could get away with it, but people are so much more subtle and effective than machines.

Stop Wall Street Looting helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. This bill would stop banksters from buying up corporations and draining the wealth out of them by doing at least four things: 1) making banksters legally liable for the wreckage they leave; 2) closing tax loopholes that make predatory behavior so lucrative; 3) protecting workers first when big corporations go bankrupt; and 4) forcing banksters to reveal costs and returns to investors. A bankster who decides to go all In the Company of Men on some big chain restaurant will think twice about bleeding it dry and leaving working families out on the street if he might go to jail for all of that! And even country club jail time would be more law-and-order than corporations paying a fine and then deducting that fine from their taxes.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. How do you know that Ms. Sohn would do a good job at our FCC? Because Comcast went very far out of its way to lobby against her nomination -- and then got caught trying to hide that fact in its lobbying disclosure forms! Our FCC has been deadlocked 2-2 for over a year, meaning (among other things) no net neutrality restoration like virtually everyone in America wants and no work ensuring that infrastructure money helps build out broadband in rural and urban areas where it's needed. I don't care that Republican Senators will oppose the nomination; I don't care that Kyrsten Sinema might oppose it (since she opposes net neutrality, what a maverick!). I only care about doing the right thing, and making our elected leaders do the right thing, and this right thing is long overdue.

Action: concerning immigration, junk fees, grizzly bears, antibiotic abuse, wage slavery, and the notorious OAN.

Long story short: tell President Biden to end the notorious Title 42 program, tell our CFPB to end bankster "junk fees," tell our Interior Department to protect grizzly bears, tell our FDA to root out antibiotic abuse from factory farms, tell Wendy's to do better by the farmworkers in its supply chain, and tell AT&T to sever all ties with the notorious OAN. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Moms Rising helps you tell President Biden to end the Title 42 program that Donald Trump put in place so he could turn more refugees away. I know they said their Title 42 program was a health care thing, designed to keep COVID out of the United States, but what a crock of shit that was! How much COVID came from Mexico, or Honduras, or anywhere else a "caravan" supposedly came from? Now how much COVID came from a quarter of Americans refusing to get vaccinated in an elephantine hissy fit over Their Guy losing the 2020 election? Yeah, sure was a good thing we kept Mexicans out for "health care" reasons. Title 42 only allows our government to send refugees back without even the hearings our laws guarantee them. As civilized people, we demand better from their leaders as well as ourselves. So let's get to the demanding.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to stop the "junk fees" bank love to impose on working families. You can name overdraft fees as a "junk fee" -- do you really put a bank out that much when you make a math error? -- but our CFPB also wants to hear from you about "fees for things people believed were covered by the baseline price of a product or service," "unexpected fees for a product or service," "fees that seemed too high for the purported service," and "fees where it was unclear why they were charged." Banksters do come up with creative ways to steal your money! And of course they do it the most to working families and seniors. Our CFPB will fight for us -- but only if we demand it.

Change.org helps you tell our Department of the Interior to reject any plans it might have to remove Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears. We've been working to help improve grizzly bear numbers for almost 50 years -- yes, good works do occasionally take a very long time. But grizzly bears still only number around 1,200 in the United States (a far cry from 200 years ago, when their numbers were more like 50,000, not that we'd be trying to get back there, necessarily), and when the Governors of Montana and Wyoming talk about revoking protections for grizzlies, they don't foreground "tyrannical federal mandates" or "protecting other animals" or "we got wells to dig!" -- they foreground trophy hunting. It's like they're trying to be soulless! And soulless people shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to eliminate antibiotic abuse on factory farms. We've been telling them for a long time, and it's not like they've done nothing, but the need remains. Two out of every three antibiotics in America go not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, partly to make them "meatier" and partly to help them better endure the squalid conditions at factory farms. And what does antibiotic overuse help create? Superbugs, which took over a million lives worldwide in 2019, which was less than 2% of the 58 million folks total who died that year, but we could see 10 million annually by 2050, per a U.K. government study from 2014. And if a superbug gets you, the number that'll really matter will be 100% of you.

Daily Kos helps you tell fast-food corporation Wendy's to join the Fair Food program, which roots out the wage slavery and unsafe work conditions on farms supplying food to fast-food corporations. Every other big fast-food corporation has joined the Fair Food program, so Wendy's needs to step up its game, lest farmworkers march on Wendy's board chair Nelson Peltz's huge Palm Beach, CA mansion in the next few weeks and brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR against him. Imagine him having a gathering there; and then imagine him and his fellow travelers all laughing at the "little people" who think they can make a difference against his awesome power. Then imagine us winning, because his power is less like a machine gun and more like an anvil around his ankle.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut off all ties with the notorious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN). DirecTV dropped OAN from its lineup staring next month, and AT&T owns most of DirecTV, but OAN wouldn't exist without AT&T money to begin with, so starving the OAN beast of a platform isn't quite enough if you're still feeding it. OAN has, of course, filed a hilarious lawsuit against AT&T just for doing what it did, even suggesting that if they don't get an audience fed hand-to-mouth they have no free speech, though dozens of 2000s bloggers got big audiences without big corporate sugar daddy money. To think OAN says that with a straight face and still calls itself "conservative." C'mon, OAN, bootstrap up! Prove you don't need the corporate welfare!

Action: concerning monopolies, labor, Russia, bank fees, COVID vaccines, and Fox News.

Long story short: tell our government to pause bank mergers, tell local governments to stop cracking down on striking workers, tell the International Satellite Laser Ranging Service to stop helping Russia, tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop "junk fees," tell big pharma corporations to share their vaccines so fewer people die, and tell corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell federal regulators to stop allowing banks to merge until our government can institute merger guidelines that better protect good Americans. And if our government decides that mergers do, in fact, injure good Americans -- a conclusion they appear to have already made! -- well, big banksters who want to merge and become even bigger will just have to sacrifice for the common good. Everyone in America has made immense sacrifices during this pandemic, except for big corporate executives, who, oddly enough, have just gotten richer while the rest of us ran to stand still. Does that sound like America? No, it does not -- unless one has a very cynical view of America. Cynicism is easy; civilization takes work.

More Perfect Union helps you tell local governments to stop putting corporate interests ahead of everyone else's when dealing with striking workers. Police will squash strikes and escort scabs to jobs, while judges will set absurd limits on how many striking workers can picket and (even) where they can stand. Does that sound like free speech to you? Governments profess to be concerned with "inconveniencing" other people, but if striking workers risk alienating passers-by when they picket, why do we need to limit their picketing so severely? And those who would complain about them blocking workplace entries had better not be the same folks who cheered on the convoys in Canada, for they surely alienated plenty of passers-by, and were far noisier than any group of picketers.

Change.org helps you tell the International Satellite Laser Ranging Service to stop providing data to Russia, so that Russia won't be able to make its GPS service work. Then, if they want to figure out where they're going next in Ukraine, they'll have to read the street signs just like we did in the old days! And I've heard that good Ukrainians have already figured out what to do about that. Seriously, we are doing the right thing in shaming and shunning Russia -- though of course the many Russians who don't support the war, and risk life and livelihood protesting it, deserve our support -- but there's no reason to make it easier for Russia to invade Ukraine. Keeping the data that helps run Russian geo-location efforts away from them won't affect too many Russians too badly. Just, you know, the ones at war.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to go after bank "junk fees." A "junk fee" might be an overdraft fee or an insufficient funds fee, the kind of thing a bank hits you with not because you really cost them $15 or $20 with your mistake, but just because they can. After all, it's a pain to move your money to another bank (or credit union hint hint), and your new bank probably won't be much better about the junk fees. And junk fees tend to slam the poorest among us, who aren't "bad at managing money" but merely don't have enough money to manage it effectively! Our CFPB apparently feels like we do, but we still need communicate our will, so they can better fight the banksters' inevitable frivolous lawsuit.

Amnesty International helps you tell big pharma corporations to share their COVID vaccines with the billions of world citizens who can't get them now. I usually argue pragmatically about this matter -- the more citizens worldwide get vaccinated, the less these new COVID variants can fester and bite us in the ass. But it's also the compassionate thing to do. Big pharma CEOs don't agree, because they only see money, though of course they don't put it like that: they have a litany of excuses, involving "the shareholders" and "the future" and such. But these are the concerns of small minds! Having money, cultivating the appearance of having money, the next awful thing you have to do to secure both of these to avoid shame -- we've got to do better than all of that. Big pharma CEOs can do better by getting COVID vaccines to everyone on Earth.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News already. "That's where all the eyeballs are" is no excuse -- we have an obligation, as a civilization, to make sure eyeballs get somewhere useful, and Fox News isn't useful, unless you consider "trapping people in a death-spiral of masturbatory rage" useful. (Spoiler alert: it is not useful.) You can pick whichever recent asinine utterance by a Fox News "personality" you like, but it may be enough at this moment in our world's history that the Kremlin has told Russian media that they should share as much of Tucker Carlson's bloviation as possible, as if he speaks for anyone but the masturbatory-rage crowd. These may be the proverbial emptiest wagon of our discourse, but we outnumber them.

Action: concerning pollution, worker safety, clean water, and dumping Fox News.

Long story short: tell Brazil to reverse an Amazon-killing rail project, tell our Postal Service to use electric trucks, tell the Biden Administration to protect Chaco Canyon, tell UPS to treat its injured workers better, tell our EPA to get all the lead pipes out of our water, and tell big telecom corporations to stop carrying Fox News in their cable packages. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell the government of Brazil to reverse course on building the Ferrogrão railway project, which would cut through indigenous lands and destroy nearly a thousand kilometers of Amazon rain forest. Naturally Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro -- who, with Donald Trump out of power, may rank as the world's worst political leader -- doesn't care about indigenous peoples, or about the ancient that do more to fight climate change than perhaps any other spot on Earth, but we care, and frankly we matter more than he does. And, frankly, so do the indigenous people who have heroically fought the Bolsonaro government. At least, in a sane, decent, and moral society, that would be true. But we must work to create and preserve that society every day of our lives. Hence we do it here, regardless of what he or his corporate cronies want.

Penn PIRG helps you tell the Board of Governors of our U.S. Postal Service to change direction on their new fleet of mail trucks and make them all electric instead of gas-guzzling. That'll have a big effect on climate change, since these trucks go all over the country every day. Now some right-wingers will do a victory lap after saying all mail trucks use electricity from coal ha ha ha snort. But even the electric mail trucks that would run in West Virginia (the only state that gets nearly all its energy from coal) won't be pumping tailpipe carbon emissions into our air, and in states that use more renewables, of course, running those trucks will cause even fewer climate emissions. This is progress! Right-wingers want you to let the perfect to murder the good, so that you never do good. We've gotta fight that.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our Department of the Interior to keep mining and drilling out of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and its surroundings. By now you may be able to recite the reasons why we'd do that -- mining and drilling pollutes the water, pollution kills wildlife, Chaco has religious significance to nearby Native nations. The Biden Administration has proposed a 20-year ban on new gas and oil leases within a 10-mile radius of Chaco, but we'd like that to extend rather past that, ideally to "forever." I've said it before and I'll say it again: when you blow up land that folks lived on for thousands of years, that land is gone, forever -- and the fuel you'll make from it will be gone almost as quickly, as will the money you make from it. As far as renewable energy, the sun may set and the wind may die, but they always come back.

More Perfect Union helps you tell UPS to stop retaliating against injured workers and start doing right by them. UPS runs a lot of warehouses, as you know, and its workers handle a lot more heavy packages than you or I do, so they get hurt a lot -- and UPS tries to keep them on the job, or catch them in "lies" so they can fire them (if you get asked 50 times exactly what time you got hurt, you think you'll give exactly the same answer 50 times?), or send them to Concentra, a corporate clinic chain that apparently specializes in pushing workers back to work without giving them basic health care like X-rays or MRIs. Not for nothing, but Concentra has close to three dozen complaints on the Better Business Bureau website, where they're ranked one star out of five. UPS needs to do better.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get all the lead pipes out of our water systems. There's money to do that now, thanks to the infrastructure bill Congress passed last year, but our EPA still has to mandate that the lead pipes be gone, or else we risk losing some of that money. There's literally no benefit to having lead pipes in our waterways -- lead leaches out of those pipes and into our water eventually, and there's no safe amount of lead one can imbibe, because any amount of lead can cause brain damage, which then leads to other intractable health problems. You know how you get preventive health care for no additional cost now? Well, we should also get clean water from our government at no additional cost.

Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to take the Fox News Channel off the air. It's not censorship! Censorship is when our government takes something off the air; good Americans joining together to pressure private corporations to take something off the air is just the churn of civilization. And no, Fox doesn't have a First Amendment right to get carried by other big corporations! If folks really want to diddle their rage glands all day, they can go find Fox News on the internet, where big telecoms should deliver all files at the same speed (per net neutrality principles); needless to say, we'd fight algorithms that shove Fox News down your throat. We've got to win civilization every day.

Around the table: no more placating Joe Manchin, please!

Here's an interesting wrinkle on the subject of tax-preparing corporations that offer "free" filing but make you jump through flaming hoops to get it: TurboTax manufacturer Intuit gets class-action lawsuit over its free-filing feature dismissed, forcing plaintiffs into arbitration -- but a Chicago law firm is paying for thousands of arbitration claims against Intuit, which will cost Intuit millions in legal fees and might force a settlement! I have to admit, that's some good aikido, there. The writer compares this tactic to "guerrilla warfare," which, after all, is how underdogs win. Didn't we learn that in Iraq? Isn't Mr. Putin about to learn that in Ukraine? By the way, Intuit also faces challenges from state prosecutors and federal regulators over allegedly forcing folks to pay for tax-filing when they could have had it for free.

After a CBS reporter foolishly laments what's happening to Ukraine because it's "relatively civilized," Zeb Larson at Teen Vogue argues that we too easily declare some nations "civilized" and others not, and thus we effectively erase whole suffering populations. I remember folks who opposed the Iraq war in the mid-2000s still describing the area as "full of savages" who had "never had peace" -- mainly out of intellectual frustration, I'd bet -- but every nation has doctors, lawyers, engineers, poets, and peacemakers, and while folks like the Taliban make it hard to see that, all you need do is talk to a handful of individuals from so-called "backward" nations and you'll never think of them as "uncivilized" again. I shudder to think that so many Americans don't even have my meager experience in this area.

When you read about Hershey's efforts to thwart an organizing drive at its Stuarts Draft, VA factory, you'll notice a lot of familiar tales -- the corporation making record profits and touting its "efficiency," its insinuation that it could be a better friend to the workers than some union ever could, its jacking up prices and blaming it on "inflation," worker complaints about a two-tiered pay system and being forced to work 72 days in a row and never seeing their family. And, of course, there's also the corporation's sudden zeal about resolving certain long-standing complaints lodged by their workers, which only proves that the threat of unionization works. I wish the Stuarts Draft workers luck in their attempt to bargain for a better work life.

Twitter bans Missouri Republican Rep./2022 Senate candidate Vicki Hartzler from its service for an anti-trans tweet, and that's bound to kick-start her campaign! Now she can tout herself as someone victimized by cancel culture, and you know how Trumpholes love their self-pity, even if it's more like Twitter was her publisher and didn't want to publish her venom anymore because it gave Twitter a bad name. If she gets the nomination -- and all the other candidates really have so many problems! -- she can keep this seat for Republicans, as long as establishment Democrats do what they do best and snuff out Lucas Kunce's campaign. Heaven forfend they nominate a candidate who can win -- and whose stance against monopoly power, particularly as it relates to defense spending, now seems awfully in tune with the zeitgeist in America.

Jesus Mary and Joseph Joe Manchin has presented a framework for a major bill "he can support," though he knows full well that other Democratic Senators oppose prescription drug pricing reform and tax hikes on the rich! Why, it's almost like he's designed this effort to fail! You know, just like the last one, which infamously ended with him declaring he couldn't even vote for his own counterproposal, this after Democrats gave him everything he wanted! I presume he wants to stretch this out to October before he finally declares he just can't support what he originally proposed, which will demoralize the Democratic base and let the fascist party formally take control of Congress. Y'all've noticed I've stopped beating the drum for Build Back Better, right? That's because we can't give this drama king any more attention.

Finally, the Arizona state Senate censures one of their number, Sen. Wendy Rogers, after she fantasized about hanging her enemies at a racist conference and called the Ukrainian President a "globalist puppet" of George Soros, "globalist" and "George Soros" being code words now for "hating Jews." Ms. Rogers, of course, remains defiant, and says the censure violates her "free speech rights," though she has no comment on whether the censure might represent her colleagues' free speech rights. Could we finally be seeing a sea change in American politics, where folks start shaming those who habitually transgress our norms and mores? I'm not hopeful. But I'll happily accept proof that I'm wrong.

Around the table: more thoughts about Ukraine, oil, dark money, and stupid right-wingers.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch reminds us that Vladimir Putin "Has Gambled Everything on His Snap Invasion of Ukraine" but "Now His Political Survival is in Doubt." "So why did Putin do it? Explanations that he has gone mad or plans to rebuild the Soviet Union are propagandistic. More convincing as a reason for him taking this present extraordinary risk is hubris, which is an occupational disease among those who have been too long in power -- 22 years in Putin’s case." I actually thought Russia would roll over Ukraine fairly quickly and then get worn down by years of guerrilla war, but now I'm not even sure Russia will do that well. Even George W. Bush could claim MISHUNZ ACCOMPLISHEDZ!!!!! for a few minutes.

In case you've been caught short by Mr. Putin's claim that his real aim is to fight "neo-Nazis" in Ukraine who practice "genocide," Jeffrey Veidlinger at The Conversation will set you straight. Long story short: Russians have more free speech rights in Ukraine than they do in Russia, and the neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine today have virtually no electoral power. I guess Mr. Putin is hoping you'll remember there were pogroms in Ukraine in the 19th century and that many Ukrainians collaborated with the actual Nazis, but these facts don't exactly make Ukraine unique (and the Ukranian pogrom occurred while it was part of the Russian empire, maybe that's a cautionary tale!). Besides, if Mr. Putin really wants to punish the sin of Nazi collaboration, why isn't he invading Norway or France?

If you've been thinking how refreshing it is that our "liberal" media has learned to hate imperialist wars, Jeff Cohen at Common Dreams will bring you back to Earth with the reminder that our "liberal" media never refer to American imperialism, except in quotation marks meant to be ironic. I'm still a bit puzzled that folks aren't thinking of the Iraq war when they think of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia has deployed 190,000 soldiers to take over a nation of 44 million people living on a little over 600,000 square miles; America deployed 150,000 soldiers to take over a nation of a little over 25.5 million folks living on a bit less than 440,000 square miles. The numbers ain't that different; I guess some Americans just want to forget it all, particularly that part where they called folks like me who opposed the war traitor.

When I heard that nationalizing the fossil fuel industry might be a good way of controlling inflation, I thought, well, with all the corporate welfare they already get, this isn't such a bad idea. We would (per Robert Pollin, who makes a lot of good suggestions in the article) spend about $350 billion buying a controlling interest in the three biggest oil corporations, but that's a one-time cost, of course, and it'll save the taxpayer a lot years down the line! I also remembered that the Trump Administration imposed (and the Biden Administration has, sadly, continued) imposed economy-crippling sanctions on Venezuela essentially because they had the same idea. Does that mean that if we nationalized the oil industry in America, our government would impose sanctions on itself?

You won't be surprised to learn that dark money is funding women's groups opposed to the nomination of Judge Jackson to our Supreme Court. I hope, after all these years of pretending the exception to the rule destroys all rules, we've learned not to devour every perceived irony as if it were manna from heaven. Women against women? Big whoop! The world's a big place, with lots of places for Teh Stupid to hide! I'm about as tired of hearing that right-wing judges always respect "the rule of law" while liberal judges are all "activists." Have they read some of these decisions coming from Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh? If it's not "activist" to ignore precedent, or to go on a fishing expedition for a precedent that fits your conclusion, I don't know what is.

Finally, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) spewed this forth on Twitter this past Sunday: "You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets." The rest of the Twittersphere roasted him, but I would like to point out that incoherence is a step up for this guy -- just five years ago, he was a first-term House Rep yelling that we "kill" "all" "radicalized Muslim suspects." To think this dude was a police captain and he still said, out loud, that we should kill suspects! And now he's a Congressdolt. I hope no one uses him as an example of "how people rise on merit in the Republican Party."

Around the table: concerning the Ukraine, inflation, transgender folks, social media, and a heartland business that's doing it right.

Angus Roxburgh at The Guardian argues that sanctions against Russia for invading the Ukraine should target Mr. Putin's advisors, not his funders, because targeting the billionaires hasn't worked, and targeting those members of Russia's legislature or Mr. Putin's council who actually advise him -- and who "love to swan around on yachts, ski slopes and fine hotels in the west, posting pictures of themselves on Instagram" -- would hurt more. This is such a good idea you have to wonder why Western nations haven't done it already, and I shudder to think that the answer might be "because we need Vladimir Putin around to distract you from our doings."

Since Facebook is "fact-checking" the assertion that corporate greed causes a large part of inflation, here's a mainstream media report entitled "Rising Fuel Prices and Corporate Profits -- Not Wages -- Are Chiefly to Blame for Inflation." OK, they put corporate profits second, but baby steps! This is our "liberal" media, after all! But let's quote: "If higher worker pay was truly the main driver of prices, it follows that more labor-intensive service sectors of the economy would be seeing the largest jump in consumer prices. Yet the inflation picture today shows the exact opposite: price increases for goods are outstripping services by a factor of three." And if energy price hikes add only two percentage points to inflation, and labor costs add next to nothing, well, that leaves five and a half points to attribute to corporate profits.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered the state's child protective services agency to investigate any child who's had any sort of "sex change" procedure as possible "child abuse." That extends only as far as hormone therapies and puberty blockers; our laws already prohibit more invasive surgical procedures, but naturally Texas is "focusing" on that, too. You know what would be really cynical? If Gov. Abbott trumpeted this order so he could survive a primary challenge against someone even further right than he -- then reminded everyone in the primary that the agency didn't actually investigate any children on this basis during the general election. See? I'm not actually a knuckle-dragging ogre like the liberals say! Except, of course, that the threat of investigation still exists, and can, in fact, be carried out if too many rage-addled right-wingers notice that "nothing's being done." If Beto O'Rourke can't prepare for that, he deserves to lose. Hey, I'm just a schmuck on the internet and I can game it out; this is his job.

Ho hum, Donald Trump's new social network, the daringly-named Truth Social, is not only suffering from technical glitches that have bloated its waitlist to 500,000 folks, but has already booted people off its network for perceived offenses despite billing itself as a "free speech" haven. Of course Mr. Trump probably looks at the waitlist and says "look at all the people who want to join!" And as I've always said, you can kick anyone you want off your privately-held network, but maybe you should slow your roll on the "free speech" pity party if you're going to do that. Hilariously, Truth Social has received a number of five-star reviews from folks who not only haven't used it, but say they're still having trouble getting on it! Maybe these folks really think the Deep State is keeping them from signing on, but you know who else reviews something without having used it? A troll. And their Personal Lord and Savior is the greatest troll of them all.

So how does a "Century-Old Small-Time Retailer" in West Virginia "Survive() Walmart," per John W. Miller at The Daily Yonder? By "realiz(ing) we’d have to sell higher quality products, put a premium on service and also develop relationships with everybody in town," per Ruttenberg's owner/manager, and yes you're "more likely to pay $100 than $25 for a pair of work boots, but they’ll last longer, and that transaction will keep money in the community and feed a relationship with the family selling you the shoe." As for "developing relationships," that's mostly about learning all your customers' names and asking how they're doing; how odd, that the solution to all the problems hyper-mechanized efficiency causes is always people.

Finally, leave it to Donald Trump to call the Russian invasion of the Ukraine "smart," in the sense that "he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions." You know, in the sense that making all that money without paying any taxes (as he has frequently been accused of doing) was also "smart," as he suggested in the second Presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016. The more cynical among us probably agree with Mr. Trump, but cynicism is evil, and more to the point, let's see if the cynics call it "smart" when Mr. Putin drags down his entire regime by fighting a guerrilla war in the Ukraine for however long he stays invested in that. So proud of their "learning" in "the School of Hard Knocks," some people are. (Hate to pile on, but his bringing up the "rigged election" to Laura Ingraham provokes me to ask: if this guy was Teh Greatest President Evah, as he has so often said, how come he couldn't "rig" his own re-election? How does someone so great constantly get tripped up by his enemies?)

Around the table: concerning crime hysteria, corporate climate BS, and other stupid crap.

If you find yourself inundated with TEH CRIMEZ IZ TEH RISINGZ!!!!! media reports, Amanda Mull's December reporting on "The Great Shoplifting Freak-Out" provides a much-needed corrective. Why should we suspect stories alleging that organized shoplifting is on the rise? Partly because we don't categorize them correctly (i.e., we lump in armed robberies with shoplifting when they're really two different things, and our media too often links the two), but mainly because if crime rates really are up for 2021, that's most likely because we had a pandemic-related lockdown in 2020, and thus didn't get out to commit many crimes. Think Republicans didn't talk about that at Legion of Doom Headquarters? Of course they did.

I guess we should not be surprised to learn corporations pledging to get to "net zero carbon emissions" are mostly BSing us, as a NewClimate Institue/Climate Market Watch study finds they'll only get their emissions down 40% by 2030 and less thereafter. It gets worse: corporations seem to think they'll be able to plant enough trees so they don't actually have to change their dirtyass habits. It gets even worse: corporations are cherry-picking their worst climate-emissions year (in the case of CVS, 2019) to make their carbon reductions look more impressive than they really are. It gets even worse than that, but this should serve as a reminder that promising to do better ain't the same as actually doing better. Right, Joe Rogan?

Jesus Mary and Joseph no, banning Donald Trump from Twitter is not a slippery slope toward Nazism, or else we could claim that every unpublished novel in America is a slippery slope toward Nazism. What is a "free voice"? A voice free to redress grievances with our government without being put in jail, and that's it. It's not "a voice free to bloviate endlessly on Twitter." And of course right-wingers don't want you to remember why Twitter finally banned him -- because he incited an attempted coup on January 6. And you also know David Perdue doesn't fear a "one-party state" in America -- he wants his party to be the one party.

Here's a provocative statement from Hamilton Nolan at In These Times: "Legalized Sports Betting is a Class War Against You." Money quote: "States like to think of the tax revenue they bring in from legal gambling as free money from heaven, but it amounts to a regressive tax on citizens, aimed most intensely at those who are so desperate for financial salvation that the vanishing hope provided by the idea of hitting the lottery is worth the certainty that you will, in fact, not hit the lottery." Remember that gambling websites aren't in it to lose money to you. And now pretty much anyone with a smartphone (i.e., pretty much everyone) can gamble easily, which won't result in addiction for everyone, but will result in a little less money every month, and more decisions about which bill you can get away with not paying this month. And that money is going to rich gambling corporations, which makes it what, class? An income redistribution upward scheme.

When I hear that Rand Paul hopes the Canada trucker protest comes down to every city in America, I feel compelled to note, again, that I don't oppose the tactic, but I think the people employing the tactic in this particular instance are a bunch of diaper-loaded brats. Maybe he should be careful about what he wishes for, though, because COVID cases are way down from that mid-January peak, most American states are about ready to get rid of mask mandates, and our Supreme Court struck down President Biden's vaccine mandate (except in health care). So if truckers start blocking highways in mid-March, most Americans are going to see them as a bunch of whiners, just like I do now.

Finally, this New Yorker interview with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has a clickbait title, and foregrounds her description of Congress as a "shit show" although there's really no better word or phrase for it, but the article reveals her as a thinker of considerable power and clarity, and if you don't like what she's saying, the first thing I'm going to ask you is to repeat something, anything, she's actually said. But talking about the difference between being "reactive" and "responsive" on important public issues? Confessing that she wonders whether she's "poking the bear" too much? Saying depression is a natural response to your politicians constantly failing you? These are all examples of deep thinking, unlike, you know, what you get from Kyrsten Sinema, who obviously thinks of herself as a galaxy brain.

Around the table: covering inflation, censorship, right-wingers, vaccines, and bipartisanship.

Apparently Democratic politicians are having a difficult time messaging inflation hikes -- they're "kind of all over the place" when describing the causes of inflation, quite possibly because inflation has several causes, while Republicans just say "Big Gummint spending" like the demonic robots they are. But I am in a position to help! Here's what Democrats should be saying, particularly if they're at all emotionally-invested in our FTC's anti-monopoly efforts: "corporations are causing most of the inflation, by jacking up prices just because they can." You're welcome, Democrats.

Ari Paul at FAIR reminds us that "Defenses of (Joe) Rogan Aren’t About Free Speech; They’re Right-Wing Solidarity," as we would know from right-wingers' ignorance/indifference about Starbucks baristas who get fired for organizing, or the Catholic school teacher fired for twittering about her school memorializing two dead police officers. And no one's actually censoring Mr. Rogan! Censorship is something the state does; it's not something Neil Young does, and no, it's not something activists do, either. And if at-will workers can be fired for pretty much any reason, might that be a reason to support labor unions? I mean, we can't all insulate ourselves from harm by becoming obnoxious podcasters.

I applaud Amanda Marcotte at Salon for saying we ignore/belittle Marjorie Taylor Greene's drama at our own peril, and not just because I think the real Ronald Reagan was more like Phil Hartman's famously energetic and detail-oriented ass-kicker who only acted like a doddering old man for photo shoots. But I think Ms. Greene intended a joke by swapping out "Gestapo" with "gazpacho" (it's harder to say, after all); she wanted you to imagine "Nancy Pelosi's secret police" as such Birkenstock-wearing liberals they must eat gazpacho soup all the time, and switching to "goulash" for the follow-up was just icing on the cake. It's not a transcendent joke -- gazpacho may be "exotic" in America, but folks from all walks of life eat it at its birthplace on the Iberian peninsula. But it's not devoid of actual cleverness, either. Such a thing might give me hope for Ms. Greene's soul, except that I'm too old for that.

Sarah Lazare at In These Times discusses Moderna's refusal to share vaccine info with South African scientists, who have had to reverse-engineer the Moderna COVID vaccine on their own. An impressive achievement, surely, but they shouldn't have had to do it -- not just because it's cruel to let people die of a disease they don't have to die of, and not just because the longer most of the world's people don't have a vaccine the longer we're going to have to deal with COVID, but because our government should have stepped in and told Moderna you couldn't have made that vaccine without our help, so we're going to make you give South Africa the info they need. But that would be too much like, you know, not worshiping mammon. (Also, Ms. Lazare reminds us that it's racist to assume that Those Countries don't have the "resources" to make COVID vaccines. Every country has doctors, engineers, and poets.)

Finally, from the "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" file: Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), quite possibly the most useless of all the useless moderates who plague our political scene today, says of recent relatively bipartisan legislation moving through Congress: "(w)hat the Democratic leaders seem to have finally realized is that in a 50-50 Senate, the only way you’re going to be able to produce any accomplishments that matter to the American people is to work across the aisle." Set aside, for a moment, that the things Democrats tried to pass without Republican help (paid family leave, Medicare drug price negotiation, higher taxes on the rich) actually remain quite popular with Americans, who would consider any of them "accomplishments that matter." Fact is, we may be seeing this burst of non-awful bipartisan legislation only because Republicans have realized that 14 years of absolute obstruction is played out, and it'd help to actually pass some bills for which they could actually take credit. The trouble with that stratagem? Democrats can more easily take credit for a functioning government if they control it. If they have the will, of course.

Action: concerning Congressional intransigence, bad media, free tax preparation, and pollution.

Long story short: tell President Biden to get with the Executive Orders already, tell all the other cable corporations to keep OAN out of their lineups, tell Spotify to eject Joe Rogan from its service, tell our IRS to make tax filing free for all Americans, and tell the Biden Administration to protect the Chaco Canyon area from fossil fuel drilling. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell President Biden to make 2022 "the year of Executive actions." Sure, right-wingers will cry tyranny whenever he does something the law already allows him to do, but right-wingers cry tyranny every time a liberal disagrees with them, and do they remember our last President? The one who openly admired dictators and constantly joked about how he wished he had their powers? Anyway, the federal firefighters now making $15/hour won't consider their raises an example of "tyranny," and if good Americans can get cheaper prescription drugs and cleaner air and less student loan debt, they won't bemoan that we didn't wait until we got permission from Joe Manchin to get it done, either. Seriously, do good works and people will appreciate it.

You've heard that DirecTV is kicking the nefarious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN, who cares?) off its lineup this spring, so now MoveOn helps you call Verizon at 1.844.329.6087 and tell them to do the same, and MoveOn also helps you find phone numbers for corporations like Xfinity, Dish, and Spectrum at this website, so you can tell them to keep OAN out of their lineups. OAN doesn't have a constitutional right to a place in cable corporation offerings, for many reasons: 1) it's a thing, and things don't have rights, 2) if OAN were a person, our First Amendment would only protect it from our government -- not from employers, not from customers, and not from activists. When we hear that OAN might not be able to promulgate more 2020 election lies without DirecTV's support, all we can say is: we can only hope!

UltraViolet helps you tell Spotify to get rid of the so-called "Joe Rogan Experience" already. Mr. Rogan's anti-vax nonsense no doubt violates Spotify's own ban on COVID misinformation, but he's also a franchise dealer of other kinds of bullshit, among them white supremacy, xenophobia, and transphobia. Mr. Rogan no doubt imagines himself a free speech martyr, all while trying to deflect criticism by suggesting you shouldn't really take him all that seriously, and no doubt he also imagines that anyone who disagrees with him is trying to censor him; all I can say about all of that is, yes, I also remember being a hormone-addled 15-year-old boy who aspired to the purest cynicism. But I became a man, and put away childish things. And we have no obligation, as a civilization, to enable those who don't -- let alone pay them $100 million a year.

Demand Progress helps you tell our government to offer tax-filing services for free, for everyone. It does seem more than a little absurd that in the richest nation on Earth you generally pay someone to do your taxes, does it not? Actually, our laws obligate our IRS to provide a free tax filing option -- but for the last 20 years our IRS has, er, partnered with private tax prep corporations Intel (which owns TurboTax) and H&R Block, which have, for their part, gone very far out of their way to obscure their free tax prep services even from Google searches. Both corporations have lately dropped out of this program, so what's the holdup? Is our IRS looking for yet another private tax prep corporation to do their job for them? Don't they get that privatization, including "public-private partnerships," means higher prices?

Finally, Pew Environmental Trusts helps you tell Interior Secretary Haaland to protect New Mexico's Chaco Canyon area from gas and oil drilling. The Biden Administration has lately advanced a fairly solid proposal for the Chaco area that would ban new oil and gas drilling leases on all public lands within a ten-mile radius of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico for the next 20 years, a ban praised by the All Pueblo Council of Governors, which represents 20 Pueblo nations in Texas and New Mexico. Of course, at my age, 20-year bans don't seem so imposing anymore -- the 20-year moratorium former Interior Secretary Salazar imposed on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon area is now more than halfway over -- but a 20-year ban can more easily turn into a permanent ban than, say, a zero-year ban. And renewables have gotten a lot cheaper over the last 20 years.

UPDATE. Common Cause also helps you tell AT&T to cut all ties with One America News. AT&T owns about two-thirds of DirecTV, but AT&T money put OAN on the map in the first place, so let's, as they say, starve the beast.

Around the table: concerning social media, law and order, and right-wing whining.

Dean Baker describes how he'd reform the law that protects social media corporations like Facebook from being sued over the noxious crap they allow on their platforms. You may recall that "(n)ewspapers and broadcast outlets do not enjoy this protection for third party content," but Mr. Baker splits all the knots here -- he'd repeal protections against lawsuits only for corporations that accept ads or sell personal info; sites that survive on subscriptions or donations would continue to enjoy those protections. These would include colleges, non-profits, and small businesses, of course, but also sites like WordPress and Blogger and Typepad, and that's where the real free speech happens anyway.

When I read about the state of Arizona going way out of its way to convince our Supreme Court to send a man back to death row despite the lack of evidence (and ineffective defense counsel) behind his conviction, I'm reminded of a hundred annoying ticky-tack arguments I've had with right-wingers about how procedure is so, so much more important than justice -- which, sadly, suggests to me that our Supreme Court, as full of ticky-tack judges as any other, will look favorably upon Arizona's request to send Barry Jones back to death row, even though you will find plenty of reason to doubt that he should ever have been convicted in the first place.

Already the right-wingers are whining about Twitter banning Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) for spreading lies about COVID vaccines, even though she entirely deserves her banning. If you're tempted to do the same -- perhaps out of a misguided both-sidesism -- recall that a) there are still plenty of social media platforms for right-wing assholes and b) if some liberal wrote an op-ed full of stupid crap, you would be perfectly right to demand that the newspaper should have exerted some editorial control, just as right-wingers will when some liberal writes an op-ed that's not full of stupid crap but just hurts their fee-fees.

Ho hum, the Trump-appointed Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chair is resigning, mainly because the other FDIC members forced a vote on bank mergers. By the time you read exactly why she calls the bank merger vote a "hostile takeover" -- basically, she refused to vote on the matter, and claims the vote is thus illegal, now you try that! -- your reaction will most likely be waaaaaaaaaah. And Ms. McWilliams was explicitly trying to protect banksters' "rights" to merge at will, good Americans be damned! So to her I'd just say don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.

California school superintendent investigates students wearing swastikas, then gets death threats. I believe I have already anticipated the right-wing objection: that these eight white kids who painted swastikas on their torsos were just joking. But if it's "just a joke," then why the death threats? You don't threaten to kill someone for taking offense to your gags, do you? Or do we say that's OK behavior now, just because so many rage-addled right-wingers seem to think it's OK?

Finally, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (E-CA) says Democrats are using the January 6 attempted coup as "partisan political weapon.". Well, the attempted coup was itself a partisan political weapon, so what does he expect? Frankly, I suspect Democrats aren't using January 6 as a partisan political weapon enough. And no, Mr. McCarthy you have not all "said from the start, the actions of that day were lawless and as wrong as wrong can be." I hate gaslighters.

Around the table: from the Pandora Papers to Trumphole whining.

When I hear that the "Pandora Papers" reveal the "illicit financial activities of the super-wealthy from 200 countries," I'm tempted to say that this is starting to get repetitive -- not that many years ago the Panama Papers told us the rich cheat on their taxes like mad, and even if these are the "Panama Papers on steroids," I'm starting to feel a little like our "liberal" media has already forgotten about it. Just so happens Joe Biden continues to talk about going after tax evasion, but you still have to get Sens. Manchin and Sinema to sign on, and Sen. Sinema, in particular, seems impervious to outside counsel, even though, you know, taking counsel from your constituents is your job as a Senator.

Not long after Joe Manchin gloated about wanting to means-test everything, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reminds us that "means testing" really means failing to deliver services for good Americans who need them because they haven't jumped through the right flaming hoops. And good on her for saying it means "more bureaucracy, red tape, and waste," because that's the only argument a lot of independents will hear. She also reminds us that America "doesn’t even measure poverty accurately to use for a means test" -- among other things, we concoct models in which working families all have a spouse who stays home and looks after the kids all the time, which hasn't been the norm for as long as I've been alive.

Surprise, surprise, a Lancet study finds that more than half of all police killings have gone unreported over the last 40 years. The study also finds that Black folks are 3.5 times more likely to die at the hands of police than white folks, which maps pretty well onto that Harvard study from last year finding that Black folks die 3.23 times more often at police hands than white folks do. Still, all some folks have to say about that is I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!!, which is an illogical response, mainly because folks who criticize the police aren't necessarily being "unsupportive." I'm going to bang that particular saucepan until I die -- "support" does not mean "jackboot lockstep agreement."

You probably already knew that quoting the Bible out of context, or misquoting it, isn't a particularly new phenomenon, but it's still great to have a little historical context -- the next time right-wingers burn down a church that doesn't agree with them because they misheard or misinterpreted something and flew into a rage about it, I guess it'll be of some comfort (though not much!) to know that Protestants did the same thing to Catholic churches in Pennsylvania in 1844 all based on hearsay. The cynical would note the similarity between the two events and throw up their hands, but "cynicism is evil" is another saucepan I'll spend my whole life banging.

Our Department of Justice directs our FBI to address the "disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence" against teachers and school board members, and, well, duh! If you tell a teacher or school board member that you know where they live, you're making a terroristic threat and thus breaking the law! And no, having feelings about politics doesn't alchemically transmute a terroristic threat into "free speech"! (I don't know if I'd go talking about "domestic terrorism," though. Isn't being an asshole lawbreaker enough?)

Finally, former Vice President Mike Pence whines to Fox News that our media keeps focusing on the January 6 attempted coup to attack Trump supporters, to wit: "They want to use that one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believed we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration in 2016 and 2020." "(T)hat one day"! Like they weren't shitting the bed every other day, too! Look, if you supported Donald Trump, you enabled this disgusting act with your actions every day, and I don't care if you were honest or peaceful about it, or if you just wanted more judges and tax cuts -- I want nothing to do with you. They tried to destroy our country! We should be hearing about "that one day" every damn day, until they learn how to feel shame again! Seriously, I don't ask for that much.

Around the table: more about the uselessness of moderates, the venality of contemporary media, and the evil of Republicans.

It continues: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) says she won't support any tax hikes on corporations and/or the rich in the budget reconciliation bill, while Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) says he won't support the Medicare expansion provisions in the bill. Shades of Joe Lieberman suddenly deciding he didn't support a Medicare buy-in back in 2009, at precisely the moment it looked like it might actually make the Affordable Care Act! And Sen. Manchin tells you he supports Medicare drug price negotiation as we all know Sen. Sinema doesn't, so it won't make it into the final bill! Welcome to another exciting episode of "The Uselessness of Moderates."

And now, another episode! Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) says she won't support the Women's Health Protection Act, just passed by our House. She says it would "severely weaken the conscious (sic) exceptions that are in the current law," exceptions that let health care workers who oppose abortion for reasons of "religious" "conscience" to opt out of abortion-related procedures (how about find another line of work?), plus she finds some of the language in the bill "extreme." I knew she'd find something if she looked hard enough! Oh, and she's endorsing Paul LePage for Maine Governor, because small businesses job creators hard-working families.

Charlie Sykes writes about the "sane Republicans" who are "purging themselves" from the political offices they hold, but are they sane, really? If they ever accused any Iraq war protestor of treason -- I heard that all the time from Republicans back in the day! -- then the answer is no. I know, that was almost 20 years ago already, but that's part of my point: Republicans constantly obliterate their own past as they push right. Why, Mr. Sykes himself was one of Scott Walker's biggest boosters, and the only thing Scott Walker really cared about was handing out corporate welfare, though he also broke public unions and suppressed protestors' free speech. True, Mr. Gonzalez's successor will be worse than him, but I'm more bummed about injury ending his football career than Trump ending his political career.

Dan Froomkin at Press Watch notes that the New York Times has hardly written a word about the Eastman memo that laid out Donald Trump's plan to steal the 2020 election despite losing by seven million votes, and helpfully cites non-coverage of the notorious Downing Street memo as a reminder of our "liberal" media's decided lack of courage. And just as our "liberal" media ultimately concluded that the Downing Street memo was "old news" -- no thanks to the folks who wouldn't make it news at all! -- I'm sure today's "liberal" media will look down on the Eastman memo similarly, particularly since Mr. Eastman now says he was just spitballing there. (Since Mr. Froomkin's article, the Times has published an opinion piece on the Eastman memo by Jamelle Bouie -- which sure doesn't mean they didn't drop the ball before then!)

Tucker Carlson, always looking for a way to convince his audience they're really not assholes, says immigrants, not unvaccinated Americans, are really clogging up our hospitals with COVID cases. I searched in vain for some support to that thesis, but then "supporting your argument" is never the point with people like Mr. Carlson -- the point is "making your viewers diddle their rage glands." Anyway, who are you going to believe -- all your friends and family and neighbors telling you that unvaccinated people are clogging up the hospitals where they work, or Tucker Carlson? (Also, too, folks ain't leaving health care because of vaccine mandates -- they're leaving because a 20-months-and-counting pandemic, one restarted by the immaturity of the unvaccinated, has burned them out.)

Finally, if you were wondering how right-wing crybabies were handling the Arizona "fraudit" report that actually said Maricopa County undercounted Joe Biden's vote count by a few hundred votes, well, they're handling it about as well as you'd expect -- by calling the whole thing "biased" (!) against them from the start, by yelling about problems and hoping you don't notice modifiers like "potentially" and "possible," by pretending that John Smith and Maria Garcia aren't common names but are names of criminals, and, of course, by calling for even more audits. In a sane, moral, and decent society, these people would be too ashamed to show their faces; in this insane, immoral, and decadent society, the Facebook "engagements" will keep on coming.

Around the table: what to do about dystopia, part 869.

Edward Snowden proposes a two-step response to begin dealing with the dystopia promised by the Pegasus Project: "ban the commercial trade in intrusion software," and hold corporations liable for investing or producing it. If you make it illegal, after all, you can hold people liable for making it. If we do these things, we won't eradicate spyware like Pegasus -- which, as you may recall, can turn on your iPhone's microphones remotely and listen in on what you say -- but we will make it a lot harder for spyware to do damage. As Mr. Snowden suggests, this is the same logic that operates behind vaccination.

In a peripherally-related note, Sara Morrison at Vox explains "how police can get your data -- even if you aren't suspected of a crime." Long story short: they can get it from a third-party data broker (the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would fix that), or they can use "reverse search warrants," which should be illegal. Should we be "happy" that our police don't have access to Pegasus yet? This sorry state of affairs is yet another reason we don't leave important questions to corporations. Trouble is, our legislators think only corporations know anything about anything!

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: ISIS supporters have glommed on to the Trump-friendly social network GETTR, posting videos of beheadings and the like. Well, they always said ISIS understood the social media landscape better than anyone! And they'll find plenty of sympathetic souls among the whiners who've left Facebook and Twitter because their friends shame them for saying obnoxious crap. GETTR's guru shrugs off the ISIS influence, but "free speech" still doesn't cover terroristic threats, nor does a private media corporation have any obligation to publish literally anything.

ICU doctor confesses that what her unvaccinated COVID patients tell her leaves her "surprised, disheartened, but most of all, angry," and who can blame her? You risk death taking care of COVID patients, you endure all the loneliness and all the supply chain shortages, you update your own living will, and now some YouTube University graduate lectures you about how intubation is the real killer? I'd slap a pimp if they did that -- which is yet another reason why I'm not a doctor. My patience with the unvaccinated is short, and I don't even encounter very many of them in my travels.

In a related note, Dartmouth University sociology professor Brooke Harrington writes about the "anti-vaccine con job" and reminds us that folks who've been so thoroughly conned can't just switch on a dime. And I would say the con is significantly longer than "anti-vaccine con job" suggests -- almost 20 years ago, for example, the same damn people all fell for the Iraq War Con Job. Apparently only other right-wingers can reach them, which I guess is good in the short run if it helps us get the upper hand on COVID again, but can they even reach them? Or have decades of right-wing yelling and screaming created a group of Americans who won't listen to anything that doesn't diddle their rage gland?/p>

Finally, California restauranteur Tony Roman hangs sign outside restaurant demanding that potential customers show "proof of being unvaccinated." In that spirit, I'd like some proof that Tony Roman hasn't fucked a goat. I mean, I don't want to associate with goat-fuckers, so I'm entitled to demand official documentation about that fact from other people. See how easy this game is? In the meantime, I urge folks to avoid dining at Basilico's Pasta e Vino in Huntington Beach, not least because for all you know you might run into a goat-fucker.

Around the table: do not give corporations taxpayer money as an "incentive," and other lessons that bear repeating.

Headline of the year so far from Vox: "Robots Were Supposed to Take Our Jobs. Instead, They're Making Them Worse." After you read about all the Amazon warehouse workers getting fired for not moving fast enough and the gig workers who get offered $2 delivery jobs, you may come away thinking, as I did, that the "drive for efficiency" at work too often turns into a need for controlling workers and redistributing their hard-earned income upward. Plus delivery drivers no longer get incentives, like more pay, to work harder -- now they get disciplined if they don't work harder. The future, ladies and gentlemen! (As an aside, I am of course quite glad to read that someone else hates automated supermarket checkouts as much as I do.)

The Associated Press assures us, in an excellent report, that Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin's "private equity résumé draws scrutiny in Virginia," as it should -- putting seniors out on the street after your bankster firm buys their mobile home park is an ad that should write itself, and the Carlyle Group's rather intimate involvement in the Iraq war should finish Mr. Youngkin with independents. But, alas, Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe also invested in the Carlyle Group! Literally, that is! To the tune of at least $690,000! Again, this is why Democrats lose -- you catch their fingers in the same cookie jar and people just throw up their hands. Not to say Mr. McAuliffe will lose, but I'd lay money the 2021 election will be as close as the 2013 election, when he barely beat Ken Cuccinelli, arguably the furthest-right individual holding statewide office at the time.

When I heard about the seven House Democrats in Trump-won districts "balking" at the upcoming reconciliation bill, I said to myself, so this is how it begins! But then I read Axios's actual report about the matter, and I think they're dramatically overstating the case. Your first clue is Rep. Cindy Axne (D-IA) saying that broadband and child care actually are infrastructure, and by the end, you may conclude, as I did, that five of these seven House Democrats will vote for the reconciliation bill, whether they can make it more to their liking or not. You may or may not conclude, as I have, that the other two (who didn't say) are probably toast in 2022 anyway.

Ho hum, ProPublica finds that too many corporations took Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) money in 2020 but still laid off workers. Also, our government opened too many loopholes allowing big corporations and foreign corporations to pretend they were small businesses and get PPP money, and our government made it too easy to get the loans "forgiven," meaning they all essentially became corporate welfare. The lesson, once again: you don't give a corporation taxpayer money as an "incentive" not to fire people, you make them not fire people. The corollary lesson: never let Republicans manage a crisis, because they only take care of bosses.

Ho hum, Paul LePage will run for Governor again in Maine in 2022, despite having actually carried out his threat to move to Florida after Democrats recaptured the Governor's mansion in 2018. Were you just thinking "gosh, I've really missed all his whining about instant runoff voting"? Then you're in luck! Though he's not exactly in luck, not now -- 37% and 48% (his share of the vote in 2010 and 2014, you'd think these facts would have induced more humility) ain't gonna win it now. And hey, speaking of Florida, he's still a registered voter there, which means he'd be exactly the sort of fellow right-wingers whine about when they whine about voter fraud, except, of course, that he's one of them. Plus he may also have broken Florida law by failing to deregister himself when he moved back to Maine. Law and order!

Finally, Texas's Lieutenant Governor orders the cancellation of an event in an Austin history museum where the authors of Forget the Alamo -- a book critically reviewing the facts and myths of Texas's founding -- planned to give a talk. Once again, right-wingers indulge in literal "cancel culture" while decrying it! I don't mean to assert that the Bullock Texas State History Museum had a legal obligation to host the talk, but I do mean to assert that the people who cancelled it are cowards and hypocrites, and that our First Amendment doesn't protect them from me saying so.

Action: concerning credit errors, internet privacy, methane emissions, social media, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell big credit corporations to fix errors in our credit reports, tell TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, tell our EPA to enact vigorous methane regulations, tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep drillers away from Dinosaur National Park, tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump permanently, and tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 of student loan debt per person. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will. And good hunting!

Consumer Reports helps you tell the big credit reporting corporations to fix errors on their reports and make their reports more transparent and accessible to their customers. Which could be any of us! More than one in three Americans told Consumer Reports that they've found errors in their credit reports, and an error could cost you a job, a house, or a loan, so this ain't nitpicking here. You'll also ask Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion to freeze your credit by default (rather than make you jump through hoops to freeze it, you know what I mean) and making credit reports and credit scores free to access forever. I eagerly await Republicans complaints that this would all be some kind of "job-killing" plan.

Fight for the Future helps you tell big social media corporation TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, like voice and face prints, from its customers. All these newfangled social media contraptions seem to come up with all these newfangled ways to intrude upon your privacy! And it's no use saying this is the future, there's no such thing as privacy, because that's a defeatism a civilized person can't abide. Losing $92 million in a biometric-related lawsuit earlier this year and $5 million to an FTC fine (for collecting children's data, no less!) have apparently taught them the wrong lesson. Perhaps the Big Stick of Bad PR can teach them the right one.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to fashion stronger methane regulations than the ones we've got. For all the good reasons: because methane-mitigation technology has gotten a lot better over the years, because methane packs a climate change punch even worse than coal, because leaking methane into our air is not only pollution but also a waste of energy, and because leaking methane into our air is not only pollution and a waste of energy but also steals taxpayer royalties, since any usable energy found on drilling operations on public lands belongs to us. Congress famously failed to roll back Obama-era methane rules in 2017, but the Trump EPA rolled them back late in 2020; now it's time to roll back the roll-back, and keep pollution and climate change from killing us.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep oil and gas drilling away from the Dinosaur National Monument. They call it that at least in part because you can find actual dinosaur fossils in the cliff faces! The century-old monument straddling the border between Colorado and Utah isn't just the home of historical wonders, but of two rivers that feed the Colorado River, so if some big corporation goes blasting a mere mile from the edge of the monument, it'll pollute the drinking water used by over 40 million people. It's not worth polluting that much water just so some executive can gild the plumbing on his 19th vacation home. Executives ought to learn to make money off renewable energy. Hell, some already have.

Progress America helps you tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump permanently. Some liberals have publicly worried about the free speech "risk" of doing such a thing, too, but remember that hardly anyone was using Facebook 13 years ago, so we don't actually have to treat it like it's the all-media or something. And Facebook's a private corporation, so it doesn't have to publish everything someone wants, any more than Random House does. We should hold Facebook liable for the slander and terrorist threats it publishes, but that's a different discussion. And besides, who stopped Donald Trump from putting his rantings on a weblog like we did in the old days? Oh, right: he did, because he apparently has no patience. So let's stop coddling him.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 of student loan debt per borrower. He's showing an awful lot of reluctance, and I remember when Barack Obama showed this kind of reluctance, it meant he wasn't going to do anything. But don't let that stop you! We need to keep on him, because we're right -- forgiving that much student loan debt would stimulate the hell out of this economy, plus it would show we're actually willing to correct the wrongs we commit as a civilization. What "wrong" was that, you ask? The wrong where we told everyone they should go into massive debt on a college degree so they can get good jobs -- and then took away all the good jobs! Worse than Lucy with a football, we were. So let's do better.

Action: concerning Social Security, social media, saving our Post Office, fuel efficiency standards, and pollution.

Long story short: tell President Biden to fire two Social Security Administrators, tell Facebook to permanently ban Donald Trump, tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy, tell our EPA to enact more vigorous fuel efficiency standards, and tell President Biden to block the proposed Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. You can call President Biden at 202.456.1111 or use the White House contact form, or use the email/petition/comment tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fire two Social Security Administrators Andrew Saul and David Black, and fix the Supplemental Security Income (or SSI) program. Messrs. Saul and Black have done their damnedest to set fire to as much of our Social Security programs as they can, making it unnecessarily harder to apply for SSI benefits and "forgetting" to send info to our IRS so seniors could get their stimulus checks. You'd also ask our President to increase benefits so they at least meet the federal poverty level -- contrary to what Rand Paul might thnk, $794 a month ain't inducing anyone to fake back pain -- and raise asset limits, which are stuck at 1989 levels. Among other things! Making programs work better and firing bad workers ain't "socialism." Actually, it's what we expect and deserve from our government.

Left Action helps you tell Facebook to make its ban of Donald Trump permanent. Yeah, Facebook extended his suspension for two years, but if you lose an election and then whine about it being "stolen" without any damn evidence and then incite an attempted coup at our Capitol, then Facebook can err on the side of caution and just wash its hands of Donald Trump. Folks who still think this is about "free speech" -- as if anyone's put him in jail for spewing his filth! -- need to remember that this is 2021, where virtually anyone can publish their rants, however good or bad, on the internet. Why, Donald Trump just started writing a blog not even a month ago! And then, not even a week ago, he stopped. So he certainly has little standing to complain about "free speech."

People for the American Way helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who tried to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump by gumming up the works at our Postal Service and is trying to raise prices and cut services as we speak. Of course, the news that our FBI is investigating him for illegal campaign finance is just icing on the cake -- and could this be the thing that finally spurs our USPS Board of Governors to move? I kid, of course -- the only thing that should spur them to move is our will, communicated vigorously. And we'll keep communicating it until we get the Post Office we deserve, again.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to overturn the notorious "clean car" "standards" issued by the Trump EPA, and then set more vigorous ones. Because saving money on gas and polluting less are actually very popular with the American people! You can only get them to go along with less fuel-efficient cars by lying to them ("it'll reduce car prices," as if you won't lose that sticker price discount over the years you're paying more for gas) or demoralizing them ("accept the results," "then win more elections," etc.). Neither of those is a lasting strategy for governing, or, indeed, for preserving and perfecting a civilization. So, yeah, let's fight that.

Finally, Presente helps you tell President Biden to halt construction on Enbridge's notorious Line 3 pipeline. As we speak, over a thousand activists have blocked further construction of Line 3, and they're calling attention not merely to Line 3's path through Ojibwe holy lands but to Enbridge's, ah, not-so-steller pipe safety record. Remember when an Enbridge line ruptured and created the biggest inland oil spill in American history? It was only a decade ago, and you can bet the good folks of Kalamazoo, MI remember, since that spill dumped oil into 40 square miles of the watershed there. President Biden can stop this pipeline, ignore the right-wing wailing about TEH JOBZ!!!! -- and then stop negotiating with Republicans so he can actually help create jobs. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Action: concerning big pharma, transgender kids, the "citizen's arrest," social media, birth control, and Rahmbo.

Long story short: demand more affordable EpiPens, protect transgender kids in North Carolina, help end the concept of the "citizen's arrest," tell Facebook to keep Donald Trump off its platform, tell President Biden to roll back the Title X "gag rule," and tell your Senators to reject Rahm Emanuel as the next Ambassador to Japan. You'll find email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Change.org helps you tell Viatris to make EpiPen more affordable. Sound familiar? A few years ago, when Mylan owned EpiPen (Mylan merged with Upjohn in 2020 to create Viatris), it got in hot water for pricing it at $700 for two doses; the drug being delivered costs about a buck, and in 2009, two EpiPen doses cost "only" $100. But $700 for a life-saving drug that monopolizes the market? That's uncivilized, particularly coming from the richest civilization on the planet. In Europe they pay a whole lot less, despite the spectre of socialized medicine. Or do I mean because? In fairness, EpiPen also has competition over there, which our notorious "free" market somehow hasn't delivered. That means we're left with embarrassing EpiPen's owner into submission.

Change.org also helps you beat back yet another anti-transgender bill, this time SB 514 in North Carolina, which would (stop me if you've heard this one before) ban transgender surgeries and treatments in the Tar Heel state. The bill's authors appear to think trans kids are faking it, but if so, they don't understand children, like, at all -- the most important thing to a kid is approval, and coming out as trans risks that approval, whether from family or peers; who does that just for attention? When the "attention" you get is getting kicked out of your house or beaten up in science hall, the answer is "nobody." And it's not like there aren't ten thousand other ways to get attention that don't involve announcing you're really a different sex than you look like you are. Hell, for me it was aggressive sarcasm. You may be surprised to learn that people still remember me for it.

Progress America helps you tell New York state to outlaw "citizen's arrest" laws. Maybe you think of the "citizen's arrest" as something you saw on The Andy Griffith Show, though the "citizen's arrest" is as old as the hills -- or, at least, medieval England. But encouraging citizens to arrest other citizens doesn't befit a civilization that has police officers, and encourages far too many folks to do things they shouldn't do. Case in point: George Zimmerman, who was not a police officer but who took it upon himself to apprehend Trayvon Martin because he looked "out of place" or whatever. And you can all too easily imagine Trump-soaked citizens taking it upon themselves to "right" "wrongs" with powers they haven't earned and don't deserve.

Speaking of which, Free Press helps you tell Facebook to permanently ban Donald Trump from its platform. Because Donald Trump does not have a First Amendment right to a Facebook platform, that's why! He only has a First Amendment right not to be put in jail for his speech -- unless, of course, he makes terroristic threats, commits libel or slander, or (pretends to rack brain) incites folks to riot. Facebook is a private corporation, and though it too often acts like it just can't do anything about user content, we would best regard Facebook, both conceptually and legally, as a publishing house. And we don't demand that publishing houses accept every single manuscript, do we?

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to repeal the Trump Administration's Title X "gag rule," which keeps health providers from discussing abortion with their patients while receiving Title X grants. You've heard me say take government money, play by government rules enough times to think I might support the Trump-era "gag rule," but I've always said that when discussing employers taking our taxpayer money and then discriminating against employees. That's just wrong. Preventing health providers from discussing legal options for women's health care as a condition for getting federal grants? That's also wrong -- abortion is a legal procedure and a legal right.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to reject Rahm Emanuel's nomination as Ambassador to Japan. Because he's got a long rap sheet: as Barack Obama's first Chief of Staff, he was also the chief architect of capitulation in 2009 and 2010 -- calling liberals "retards" at one point for the heinous crime of wanting more out of a Democratic President than warmed-over Clintonism -- and from there he went on to serve two terms as Mayor of Chicago, overseeing systemic police brutality and privatizing as much of the city's public services as he could get his mitts on. And no, he gets no credit for Democrats retaking the House in 2006; if any one person gets credit for that, it's Howard Dean. We can't let the worst Democrats continue to fail upward.

Around the table: in which we find the American people courageous, and the politicians cowardly and the media personalities decadent, as usual.

Surprise, surprise: a Politico/Morning Consult poll finds support for the American Jobs Plan actually ticks up when you mention the price tag. So if Americans aren't scared of spending a lot of money to make America greater, why are the politicians? Because the big corporations get in their ear all the time and drown us out, that's why. We just have to be louder. We'll do that shortly.

Facebook keeps Donald Trump banned from its platform -- but says the ban should never have been permanent and will revisit the matter in six months. Naturally right-wingers who don't read are whining about it, and if Facebook were a public utility, they might have a point. Of course I said might, and of course they'd never support actually making Facebook a public utility, and in any case Facebook is really a publishing house, even if loopholes in the law permit them to evade the responsibility publishing houses have. And publishing houses don't have to publish you! Otherwise they could never reject a manuscript, no matter how awful! Anyway, Donald Trump just started a blog, so nobody's trampling his rights.

President Biden rescinds Trump-era rule that would have allowed big corporations to classify more of their gig workers as "independent contractors." We should treat gig workers as employees, so they can earn a decent wage and enjoy overtime and worker safety protections; no 11th Commandment mandates otherwise. And if the stocks of pseudo-corporations like Uber and Lyft take a bit of a tumble, who cares? No one puts a gun to your head and forces you to be a shareholder. And no one has a "right" to get rich quick in the stock market. Gosh, I'm old enough to remember when "get rich quick" was something nasty you'd say.

A Public Integrity/AP/Univision report reveals that employers who steal your wages rarely get punished. And repeat offenders don't get punished that often, either, though, you know, you'd think they would. No, a prosecutor shouldn't use past offenses to mislead juries into convicting people of current crimes, but Jesus Mary and Joseph if you've been told not to steal your employee's wages, then you should be punished harder for doing it again and again. Biggest total non-surprise: if you're Black or Brown, you're more likely to get shafted.

When I read that "The Real History of Anglo-Saxons Undermines Racists’ Theories," I say well, of course history undermines racist theory, not just because the Anglo-Saxons were actually quite diverse, but because history always undermines ideology, and "racist theory" isn't theory per se, but merely the articulation of rage. I also say, gosh, what an understated headline, and not in a good way -- strikes me as a way of being "fair" to racist rageheads, not a way of saying you won't let them get under your skin. If you got all the facts, go ahead and flaunt them, that's what I say.

Finally, Tucker Carlson says that if colleges require their students to get the COVID vaccine, that means (due to some not-fully-articulated slippery-slope reasoning, I have to assume) that "(t)hey will have total power over your body and your mind forever." "(T)otal power," "forever," achieved through a single vaccine? Gosh, dramatic much? Right-wingers really have completely morphed into their worst stereotypes of liberals.

Action: concerning payday loans, police brutality, vaccinations, and bad media outlets.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep payday lenders from gouging us, tell President Biden to guide cities toward using alternatives to police wherever possible, stop the flow of military weapons to local police departments, and help remove barriers to poorer nations vaccinating their citizens, and tell your cable provider to "un-Fox" your cable package. The paragraphs below will tell you how to contact these various entities. Good hunting!

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to roll back Trump-era rules that let payday lenders gouge more good Americans. 18 states (plus the District of Columbia, which should be a state) have capped loan interest at 36% or lower -- but the Trump Administration let payday lenders loan via banks in other states that, naturally, didn't have the loan interest cap. I'm old enough to remember when conservatives would never have allowed such a thing to happen. In these times, you could be forgiven for thinking Trumpian "conservatives" just go out of their way to hurt people so other people can make more money. What, it looks like something else?

The ACLU helps you tell President Biden to use his various purse-string and guidance powers to encourage localities to use alternatives to policing. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we use police officers like the Swiss Army knives of our culture, and no one is so good at everything that we can use them that way, so we shouldn't suggest that "more training" is the answer, either. Police officers should serve warrants and make arrests, and that's it. Firefighters should fight fires, EMTs should respond to emergent medical situations, and social workers should respond to mental health calls and domestic violence calls. Don't be tempted to say "that'll never work," because some localities are trying it now, and it works.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell President Biden to end the notorious 1033 program, which allows our federal government to send surplus military weapons to local police departments. Who don't use them to make their communities safer -- they use them to hurt protestors who protest their brutality in the first place! President Biden reportedly had an Executive Order curtailing the 1033 program all ready to go early in his Administration, but may have gotten cold feet after the National Association of Police Organizations weighed in. Now he may be thinking his good words about the Chauvin verdict will be enough, and he can continue to ignore his commitment to actually stopping police violence. We need to come together to say, guess again, Mr. President.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to support the proposed WTO waiver that will allow poorer nations to make COVID vaccines and give them to their people. They always talk about the supposed primacy of "intellectual property" when they say we can't do things like this, but a) our hard-earned taxes developed these vaccines, so we do in fact get a say, and b) no post-apocalyptic survivor will sit around a campfire saying "yeah, that superbug killed most of the world's people, but at least big pharma corporations got to make some more money!" Not convinced? Then consider that the pandemic can start all over again as long as it's alive somewhere in the world. As someone smarter than me put it: no one is safe until everyone is safe.

Finally, Consumers United for Fairness helps you, as they put it, un-Fox your cable box, which is to say, get your cable carrier to stop carrying Fox News as part of a "basic" package. So why this time? Oh, we could probably flip on Fox at any moment and find a good reason, but let's settle for Tucker Carlson alleging that the Chauvin jury convicted Mr. Chauvin not because there's a nearly-10 minute video showing him killing George Floyd, but because they were afraid of rioting if they exonerated him. Right-wingers love law and order until it gives them results they don't want! Does Mr. Carlson have a right to say such crap without being jailed by our government? Of course he does! But he doesn't have a "right" to be a highly-paid TV pundit; hell, he doesn't have a "right" to be broadcast, or else anyone who wanted a nightly news show would have to get one. And he certainly doesn't have a "right" to have his salary paid in part by the hundreds of millions of Americans who would never watch his program.

Action: concerning campaign finance, drug policy, sacrifice zones, child marriage, and facial recognition.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Democracy for All Amendment and the MORE Act and pass legislation outlawing "sacrifice zones," tell the Michigan state legislature to end child marriage, and tell event promotion corporations to reject the use of facial recognition technology. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the paragraphs below.

People for the American Way helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.J.Res. 1, which would amend our Constitution so that our federal, state, and local governments could regulate campaign financing again. Not that our Supreme Court has tossed all limits on campaign financing, but they've sure made it difficult for regular folks like ourselves to be heard over the din of rich folks' drama. Of course, it goes beyond "having a right to be heard" -- we have an actual First Amendment right to redress grievances with our government, with which the constant flow of money from big corporate donors interferes. Folks with more money don't have more rights, after all -- if they did, they wouldn't be rights, but privileges, and we better not be getting to the point where we call free speech a privilege.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3884/S. 2227, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. The MORE Act would take pot off of Schedule I, essentially legalizing the drug across our land, and would invest in communities most harmed by the "war on drugs," which, in most cases, will be communities of color. Pot has never belonged on Schedule I with heroin (ask Zombie William S. Burroughs about heroin!), and it's likely less of a "gateway" drug than alcohol, which remains perfectly legal, though we did try amending the Constitution once to ban it and it didn't go well. Basing so much policing around pot isn't going well, either, and I bet a lot of police officers agree, and would look forward to doing more real work.

The Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the notorious practice of "sacrifice zones," wherein our government essentially looks the other way while big corporations put all their pollution in communities of color, hence the term "sacrifice zone." We discussed this a bit yesterday when talking about the Byhalia Connection Pipeline going through communities of color in Nashville. President Biden has lately ordered the creation of a council to study the problem of environmental racism, which may do some good if the people on it are willing to go above-and-beyond, but you have every right to expect that "creating a council" might also result in "doing nothing," as it often does. Putting the force of law behind another front in the fight against racism would do a lot more good.

Change.org helps you tell the Michigan state legislature to make child marriage illegal. You mean child marriage is actually legal somewhere in America? Actually, it's still legal in 46 states! The exceptions are Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, at least three of which, ironically enough, right-wingers routinely describe as "liberal" states where "anything goes." But if a child can't consent to have sex with an adult, how can a child marry an adult? And as for laws allowing parental permission for children to marry adults, well, you can see how a child can be exploited that way, I trust. Welcome to episode 87 of my podcast, This Really Ain't That Hard.

Finally, Fight for the Future helps you tell live event producing corporations not to use facial recognition software on concert-goers. "Because it sucks and it's invasive" would be the short answer why, but these corporations are ready with a retort to that: they want to do it to "protect the public from COVID." So, to sum: we can't use a good way of protecting the public from COVID (like having folks carry around those "vaccine passports" to which right-wingers have tried to give a bad name), but we can use a bad way of doing it, one that routinely can't tell folks of color apart any better than your Tea Party uncle and Hoovers up all your data. Is it so much to ask that things not be so stupid?

Around the table: corporate welfare suffers a decidedly partial defeat in Wisconsin, and other tales.

Don't celebrate too much that Wisconsin has renegotiated that almost-$5 billion corporate welfare scheme with Foxconn and thus saved that state from pissing away more than half that money, for as Greg LeRoy at Good Jobs First reminds us, the close-to-a-billion dollars that the Village of Mt. Pleasant and Racine County put up just to accommodate Foxconn's empty shell of a manufacturing complex ain't never coming back. And let's not praise Gov. Evers too much for mitigating that harm, either -- with approximately zero good Wisconsinites favoring corporate welfare über alles, I think he should have done better.

Another day, another "anti-riot" bill designed to stifle actual free speech becomes law. We shame them for their violence and then they say 25 of us in the street are a "riot"! Here's the thing: blocking a street with a protest isn't actually "violent," it's just inconvenient, and our Constitution doesn't actually guarantee convenience. If it did, I dare say we'd never grow as people.

The NYPD has apparently deployed a robot dog inside that city's public housing projects, a headless dog described as "creepy," "a fancy toy in search of an actual use case," and a "prop() from a bad Black Mirror episode," an entirely sympathetic sentiment even though there are actually no bad Black Mirror episodes. These robot dogs collect a boatload of private data, can tow an 18-wheeler, and costs $70,000, in a time when people go hungry and teachers have to buy school supplies. And of course they're nowhere near as charming as this futuristic dog.

Two men die test-driving the Autopilot feature in a Tesla Model S -- and these men are, as you know, not the first to die at the hands of a driverless car -- and I'm reminded that some folks love saying that people cause a lot more accidents than driverless cars do. The problem with that, of course, isn't just that you can make cars safer so people cause fewer accidents, but that you can bring a person to justice if you need to. Just try bringing a thing to justice for killing someone. Why, it's almost like that's the idea.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) argues that the supposed deadness of D.C. on Wednesday night (a deadness disputed by at least one commenter!) after the Derek Chauvin verdict means that "BLM is the strongest terrorist threat in our country." Yikes, you riot, they yell at you, you don't riot, they still yell at you. I'm beginning to think nothing will ever be good enough for people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Finally, I have a bit to say about the Chauvin verdict. I remember saying, a few years ago, that even though George Zimmerman got off for shooting Trayvon Martin, Mr. Zimmerman had become approximately the most hated man on Earth, and Black lives would be saved merely because more wannabe cops would think twice before becoming such a pariah. But if Derek Chauvin had gotten off, and become an accursed wanderer himself, I'd have accepted that far less -- not as much because it's cooler to be a racist asshole now as because Jesus Mary and Joseph we have to come farther than that in seven years. I guess I'm relieved that we did, in fact, come that far. But we still have far to go.