Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning government shutdowns, price-gouging, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end government shutdowns, fight corporate price-gouging, and protect voting rights. 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.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to end government shutdowns forever, by passing laws eliminating the debt ceiling and authorizing spending to continue at current levels whenever Congress can’t agree on continuing resolutions. Seriously, the only people in America who want government shutdowns are people who worship chaos and drama, and they shouldn’t get all the say about everything, or very much of anything, frankly. And stamping feet and preening about “runaway government debt” in order to cut Social Security and Medicare? Folks who do that should have their own circle of hell.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act, while Inequality Media helps you tell them to pass the Price Gouging Prevention Act. What’s the main cause of inflation? Not supply chain issues, not stimulus checks, not higher wages for workers – it’s corporate greed simple and plain, and these bills would make it harder for corporations to be greedy, as far as giving you less for your buck (the former bill) or raising prices higher than inflation or using inflation as a cover to raise prices when no other cost pressures would cause that (the latter bill). Ignore free market votaries; people matter more than ideology.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former bill would advance a slew of reforms nationally, including same-day voter registration and fairer redistricting, while the latter bill would allow our Justice Department to strike down new vote restriction laws from any state or locality that has demonstrated a history of vote suppression. These bills would help more good Americans vote; that may not be the Republicans’ goal, but so what? Duty is duty, right is right, and wrong is wrong.

Action: concerning endless war, Social Security, and law and order.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop unconstitutional war-making on Yemen, stop trying to cut Social Security benefits, and stop trying to cut IRS funding. 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.

Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the Biden Administration’s unconstitutional war-making in Yemen. Which even our President himself says isn’t working! We’re already far too involved in one Middle East war, but only a madman then says I know! Let’s start another one! America is far too involved in the Saudi/UAE campaign against Yemen, and don’t go hoping Donald Trump will stop that if he gets re-elected, since he did nothing about it the first time. Not for nothing, but it seems like the big powers just hate people who fight al-Qaeda well, as the Houthis do. Ask the Kurds about that! If you can.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the creation of any “fiscal commission” aiming to cut Social Security benefits, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits. Word on the street is they’re going to try to attach the “Commission” to must-pass budget legislation, but I’d rather have a government shutdown than cut our earned Social Security benefits! And no, if you want to cut Social Security, you’re not “brave” – you’re a corporate shill, which is another way of saying “coward.” Jesus Mary and Joseph if you can’t fight big money, what damn good are you?

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any further IRS funding cuts. Republicans got some funding cuts as part of the debt limit “deal” last year, but IRS funding still went up bigly, meaning that our IRS has been able to catch more rich tax cheats. Cutting IRS funding will actually increase deficits, since every extra dollar spent on enforcement brings in another $22 in revenue, yet Republicans, who serve no master but mammon, still want more cuts. They want it so bad they’re going to defund the police! And that’s what this is, just for tax cheats.

Action: concerning air traffic safety, campaign spending, and IRS funding.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get us more air traffic controllers, make campaign spending restrictions real again, and stop trying to cut IRS funding. 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.

Public Citizen helps you tell Congress to address our air traffic controller shortage. As they say in their petition, “How many close calls is it going to take?” But what does the air traffic controller shortage have to do with, for example, a Boeing window blowing out in mid-air? Well, more well-trained and well-paid air traffic controllers would greatly help manage the next crisis – or the next hundred times, given the greedheads who run airline corporations these days. Remember when air traffic controllers almost single-handedly ended the 2019 government shutdown by walking out? Now imagine having enough of them!

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to amend our Constitution so we can restrict campaign spending again. In a world where even two-thirds of Republican voters think the Citizens United ruling was rubbish, this shouldn’t be hard – except that too many of our Congressfolk only care about money. I ran down most of the rubbish arguments against this amendment years ago (and also in my second book, have you heard of it?), but beware the right-winger who says but you need money to get your arguments across. Do you need unlimited money to do that? History says you don’t, or else Dr. King would have had a SuperPAC.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut IRS funding. Odd that Republicans, who constantly whine about “defunding the police," have such a hard-on for cutting funding that lets our IRS actually enforce our tax laws; why, it’s like they know that increased IRS funding also means more prosecution of rich tax cheats! They’ll tell you it means they’ll come after you and I, of course, but what an offensively stupid argument — our IRS was already going after working families almost exclusively, because we can’t afford big-money lawyers like rich folks can. So STFU, Republicans. Again.

Action: concerning Social Security, corruption, and housing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject all efforts to cut Social Security, tell Sen. Menendez to resign already, and tell your Congressfolk to increase housing funding. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject all right-wing efforts to cut Social Security benefits or raise the retirement age. Because people already work long enough for executives who hate them! And when right-wingers say we have to go “behind closed doors” to cut Social Security benefits, they’re really saying I hate democracy. I mean, there was a reason Bush the Lesser couldn’t even get a Republican-dominated House and Senate to vote on privatizing Social Security in 2005 – and that was because the people wouldn’t stand for it. Using a government shutdown as leverage to cut our earned benefits isn’t really any better – it’s still hostage-taking, and it’s still fascist. But these drama hounds will do it if we don’t speak out in numbers they can’t mistake.

Win Without War helps you tell Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to resign his Senate seat. He’s entitled to try to prove his innocence in court, but no law compels us to put up with him as a U.S. Senator any longer, because no one has a “right” to a Senate seat. This is a hard thing to explain to some people, as we were all reminded during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. And the indictments keep coming for Sen. Menendez, the latest one for conspiring to act as a foreign agent for Egypt. But Mr. Menendez acts like his constituents are rallying around him, although at present he’s polling around five percent in the Democratic Senate primary for 2024. So it wouldn’t kill him to actually show some leadership and resign.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase, not cut, housing funding. Perhaps our Congressfolk don’t know this because they live such sheltered lives, but rent is out of control in America now, thanks in part to the corporation with the monopoly on software that "suggests" rental prices, which means that federal housing assistance has to keep going up just to keep pace. I guess that doesn’t matter to the Republicans who can’t even find a new House speaker, since they think any government funding that actually helps people is evil. But they matter a whole lot less than we do, and the more we act like it, the more we’ll get out of our government to begin with.

Action: concerning genocide, government shutdowns, and school lunch debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to prevent genocide against Palestinians, stop this interminable government shutdown drama, and cancel school lunch debt. 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.

Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to do what they can to stop Israel from committing genocide against Palestinians. Don’t let folks interpret this call as anti-Semitic, or even as dismissive of Israeli losses – I mourn all the dead; every life taken by terrorism represents one fewer chance at a better world. But if we can’t oppose genocide, then what good are we, really? And justifying the genocide of Palestinians by pointing to Hamas’s evil is, logically, rather like justifying a genocide of Americans by pointing to our right-wing domestic terrorists. Indeed, Mr. Putin used similar reasoning to attack Ukraine. Want a good rule for living? Don’t be like Vladimir Putin.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk not to let our government shut down, again. You know what government shutdowns mean – parks close, checks don’t go out, no food stamps for folks who need it, air traffic controllers work for nothing if we’re very lucky – and since our government belongs to us and exists only to do our will, then politicians are defying our will if they let it shut down without funding it properly. I do not give one rat’s hind quarter if Republicans still haven’t elected a House Speaker by then, because work is work, and duty is duty. These preening, drama-loving "representatives" make almost three times what I make, but I earn every cent, unlike them.

Finally, RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act, which would (as its title suggests) cancel the $260-plus million in school lunch debt that somehow encumbers our nation’s children in the richest country on Earth. Seriously, we can’t call ourselves a civilized society if we won’t feed kids because they can’t afford school lunches which our taxes should already pay for. I’m happy to report that in five American states taxes do now make school lunches free for our children, but can we at least alleviate the suffering of those who don’t have that yet? And can we at least stop shaming our kids for something that’s not their fault at all? We don't use shame just because we can, after all.

Action: concerning taxes and budgets.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations and pass a clean budget bill without poison-pill dramas. 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.

While House Republicans stage ever-more absurd and obscene dramas about deficits and debt, we can call our Reps and tell them to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations! Hey, if you care about deficits and debt so much, you’d raise taxes on the very folks who can most easily afford it – not regular folks like us who struggle just to make ends meet. The 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and the 55% tax bracket on corporate profits helped create the greatest middle class ever back in the New Deal era, and if we bring them back, we can bring that middle class back again. Worry not that it’ll kill jobs, because bosses do that anyway when we give them too much freedom! They only create jobs when we force them to, and high taxation is one of the best tools we have to force them to do the right thing. So let’s do it.

In the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell your Reps to pass a clean budget, mercifully free of far right-wing fever dreams and hostage crises. They think they have us over a barrel, because they have to pass something in 12 days or our government shuts down, but that’s never how it is – we have them over a barrel, because a government shutdown sure ain’t gonna reflect well on House Republicans, and neither would a bill larded down with poison pills that would never pass on their own. So let’s exercise our power and make them do the right thing.

Around the table: featuring yet more life lessons from Joe Manchin.

Jack Shafter at Politico says it's well past time to "pull the plug" on cable "news", certainly as far as acting like it's so damn important. The big three traditionally over-the-air networks pull in five times the viewers for their nightly news broadcasts than all the big three prime-time cable news programs put together, and it doesn't get any better when you compare them to other audiences (Netflix streamers outnumber prime-time cable "news" watchers by about 17 to 1). Problem is these channels make so much money from advertisers and cable corporations, all about as equally-deluded as to cable "news"'s importance. And that's why we'll keep telling big cable corporations to drop cable "news" channels.

Two Georgia election workers sue right-wing website Gateway Pundit for defamation. Their suit alleges that Gateway Pundit "repeatedly published demonstrably false claims that portrayed the women as 'traitors' who conspired to 'steal the presidential election in Georgia'," which apparently "incited months of death threats and harassment against them." I wouldn't put it past Gateway Pundit to assert an absence of malice because they would have attacked any election workers, not just the plaintiffs! In any case, I wish the plaintiffs the best in their efforts to get justice for what's been done to them.

Ben Horton at TruthOut reminds us that "Corporate Political Spending is Bad for Democracy", and I bring it partly because Mr. Horton actually provides some solutions in a post-Citizens United world, including limiting SuperPAC contributions and banning contributions from corporations with "substantial" foreign ownership. I also bring it up because it turns out former Supreme Court Justice Byron White, in a 1978 dissent, put the problem as succinctly as I've seen it put: our First Amendment doesn't "the public to allow 'its own creation to consume it.'" We would have to be nihilists to demand that our First Amendment provide the means for its own destruction, after all.

Margaret Hartmann at New York magazine reminds us that Dr. Mehmet Oz's Senate run in Pennsylvania forces us to "to reckon with Oprah Winfrey’s penchant for promoting pseudoscience that harms society." She brought Dr. Oz to the masses, after all, just as she brought Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccine malarkey from the middle of the 2000s to the masses. She also brought Dr. Phil to the masses; the only advice most of Dr. Phil's couples deserved was "I want you two to go back in time and prevent yourselves from ever meeting," and now Dr. Phil ain't a good place to go for COVID advice, either. Ms. Hartmann's article is very well-sourced, by the way; acquaint yourself with Dr. Oz's fall from early grace now and maybe we can prevent him from winning later. (As an aside, of course all the Trumpian Islamophobes will rally to Dr. Oz's side. He tells them what they want to hear, after all, and how else to convince yourself you're not prejudiced by carefully tabulating all your non-WASP friends?)

When I hear that Joe Manchin will join all 50 Senate Republicans in passing one of those notorious "resolutions of disapproval" aiming to take down President Biden's vaccine mandate, I note that he says we should "we should incentivize, not penalize, private employers whose responsibility it is to protect their employees from COVID-19," and I wonder why do we even have Republicans? They no doubt appreciate him making their arguments for them, but I must also ask: if it's employers' "responsibility" "to protect their employees from COVID-19," why wouldn't we punish them for evading that responsibility? I'd ask if he "incentivized" his kids doing their homework by giving them cookies before they did it, but given how his daughter turned out, I think I already know the answer.

Finally, I know the almost-shutdown is so last week's news already, but dig how House speaker Nancy Pelosi attacks the Republicans who would have shut it down in order to defund vaccine mandates: "How do they explain to the public that they're shutting down government because they don't want people to get vaccinated?" They say "Democrats can't message," but I think that's brilliant messaging, and I have to wonder why our "liberal" media doesn't recognize it as such. I can't decide if it's more because she's not a Republican or because she's not a man.

Action: concerning budgeting, drug addiction, voting rights, and monopolies.

"One major reason" Congress never passes a budget on time anymore, according to Public Citizen's latest email missive, is "poison pill policy riders" slipped into must-pass appropriations bills; you can name a lot of poison pills that have found their way into budgets over the years, like our President's months-long partial government shutdown over his vanity border wall. A Republican Congress wouldn't fund that wall, you remember, so he induced a shutdown until he got his way (or, more precisely, could con his votaries into thinking he got his way). But this year (as in recent years!), "poison pills" include riders preventing our government from finishing various campaign finance disclosure regulations. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass clean budgets, without noxious "poison pill" policy riders. How popular is anonymous big money campaign spending, after all? So popular Congress has to take the budgeting process hostage to enable it!

Meanwhile, H.R. 2569/S. 1365, the Comprehensive Addiction Resources Emergency (or CARE) Act, would allot $100 billion over the next 10 years to address opioid addiction -- and not in a punitive way, because that clearly ain't working. The CARE Act would spend money on treatment, support services, and early intervention, among other things, and it would give states and localities considerable power over how they spend that money, not that right-wingers will notice actual conservatism happening under their noses. If you still think we "have" to put drug addicts in jail, just ask yourself? Have you ever gotten high on anything (not necessarily something illegal!) that could have hurt you in some way? And did the threat of incarceration ever stop you from getting high on that thing? The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to get folks affected by the opioid crisis real help by passing the CARE Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. And since Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) says he won't hold a vote on the For the People Act, because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on," you can go to his Senate website, scroll all the way down, and find a phone number so you can call his office and tell him to hold a vote on the bill already. Use whatever number gets you through; hell, I've had to do that with my Senators for a while. Nine phone numbers I have in my cellphone for each of my two Senators! And sometimes I have to call all nine! But if we had the ethics, voting rights, and campaign finance reforms contained in the For the People Act, maybe, just maybe, our Senators would be a bit more accessible to us. We are their damn bosses, after all! And if we get in their grills enough that they pass the For the People Act, maybe they'll start acting like it.

Finally, American Family Voices helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to block the proposed Bristol-Myers Squibb/Celgene merger. I'm old enough to remember when Bristol-Myers and Squibb were two separate corporations! And now they want to get bigger? Big pharma corporations are already too big, and have too much power -- witness how often their price-gouging schemes actually get a lot of coverage in newspapers and TV news programs, and how little they suffer for it! When you're big enough and powerful enough, after all, you can buy Congressional legislation that protects and expands your power -- generally they're not stupid enough to take a quid pro quo bribe, but they all know the game, and this proposed merger would be the largest one ever. If we want to hear less about 800% price hikes for life-saving drugs, we should prevent big pharma corporations from getting so big in the first place.

Action: concerning health care, voting rights, and worker pay.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You may have read Paul Krugman's recent New York Times column stating (among other things!) that although it "(c)ould" be true that Medicare-for-All will result in better health care, and that we'd pay less in taxes to support it than we're currently paying in premiums, these would be hard to sell to the American people. And indeed, when folks confront the loss of their private insurance and how we're going to pay for that, support does fall off. But Medicare-for-All wouldn't poll well in the first place if folks were that emotionally-invested in their private health insurance; their support wavers not because they really think their insurer's doing a great job, but out of fear of the unknown. And we don't let that keep us from doing the right thing, do we?

Meanwhile, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow folks serving time in prison to be able to vote. No, letting prisoners vote won't turn prison into a "country club" (seriously, people say that to you whenever you argue that a civilization should treat prisoners better!), but it will prevent some fairly serious problems. One, our government won't be able to put people in jail just to prevent them from voting! I wouldn't argue they're doing that now -- I presume that putting folks in jail, particularly black and brown folks, is an end in itself, and our government looks at their inability to vote as icing on the cake -- but if I thought of it, you know they have. Two, denying prisoners the vote lets governments pack Congressional districts with large numbers of people who can't get proper representation! Sadly, state governments are already doing that. So let's put a stop to it.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell our government to give back pay to federal contractors during the government shutdown over our President's vanity border wall earlier this year. Federal employees got back pay, of course, but our government contracts a lot of work out to private corporations, and those workers didn't get back pay, though it wasn't their fault, or their employers' fault, that they didn't work. And a lot of these workers work low-paid jobs as cafeteria workers, security guards, and janitors. Which doesn't make their work any less important! And they have bills to pay just like the rest of us! Of course, our government shouldn't be contracting this work out to private corporations, and not just because these little government shutdowns leave them out in the cold. But we ought to do right by them while they're working for us, although our President is the kind of person who high-fives himself for sticking it to people who work for him.

Action: concerning net neutrality, government shutdowns, and William Barr.

First things first. Three fake net neutrality bills just debuted in Congress, these being H.R. 1006, H.R. 1096, and H.R. 1101. Republicans have been pumping out "pro-net neutrality" bills for years, bills that pretend to protect your right to go where you want on the internet without worrying about being herded into junk news ghettoes by big corporations, but their bills are full of loopholes that would let those big corporations throttle traffic and block websites, and their bills also try to reclassify broadband so that our FCC can't ever regulate net neutrality again. So why these bills now? Could Republicans be a bit nervous that our FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal -- you remember, the one where the FCC came out and said it ignored most of the public comments it got -- is about to die in court? Whatever the reason, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject these fake net neutrality bills and fight only for the real thing.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to insure that federal contract employees, and not just employees who work directly for our government, also get back pay from our most recent government shutdown, then Moms Rising helps you do that. And if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government you don't want either another shutdown or a vanity border wall, then a group of good-government organizations still helps you do that. Our government has already provided for back pay to public employees, but contract employees don't work directly for our government; they work for private corporations that have contracted with our government, so even though taxpayers pay them, their bosses won't -- unless we make them. Of course, if we just stood up to our President every time he had a tantrum over his vanity border wall, we wouldn't have these shutdowns in the first place. See? Fixing one problem fixes the other!

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of William Barr as Attorney General, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. Mr. Barr's career has been one long lesson in believing folks when they tell you who they are -- he has been quite public with his animus toward Roe v. Wade, the Affordable Care Act, and the God-given rights of LGBTQ folks in America. And that's in addition to all the other reasons we should oppose him: he thinks the President should have more power than the Constitution grants, he thinks our government should let more contractors rip off the public, he's been far too cagy about whether he'll let the Special Counsel do his work, and he helped President George H.W. Bush pardon a crapload of folks who were neck-deep in Iran-Contra. If that doesn't sound like law-and-order to you, you need to tell your Senators with a quickness.

Action: concerning our Estate Tax, voting rights, and government shutdowns.

Perhaps in response to Senate Republicans' latest push to abolish the Estate Tax entirely, Sen. Sanders has introduced S. 309, the For the 99.8% Act, which would actually reform the Estate Tax. S. 309 would subject estates worth over $3.5 million to the tax (the low threshold is currently $11 million thanks to the 2017 tax "reform"), and would not only bring back the 77 percent rate on estates over $1 billion, but would create several new brackets (for example, estates over $50 million would face a 55% tax) that would make the Estate Tax more progressive. These are all marginal tax rates, of course -- an estate worth $50,000,001 would only face the 55% tax on that last dollar, since it's the only dollar over $50 million. And no the Estate Tax doesn't kill family farms! People who tell that lie should be ashamed of themselves! Tools for calling your Reps and Senators are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone).

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, then Common Cause still helps you do that. If you've been hearing that "Mitch McConnell calls a bill proposing to make Election Day a federal holiday a 'political power grab,'" well, that's H.R. 1, and making Election Day a federal holiday is just one thing it would do -- H.R. 1 incorporates excellent (but sadly unpassed) bills like the Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Fair Elections Now Act, and the DISCLOSE Act, all of which have deserved our support in the past. Mr. McConnell should consider whether a federal campaign finance system is really a "power grab," or whether disclosing the names of big campaign donors in ads is a "power grab," or whether patching the hole our Supreme Court blew open in the Voting Rights Act -- a hole that's allowed a lot of vote suppression in America -- is a "power grab." I mean, the man whose entire career represents a power grab from the people really has no room to talk.

Finally, federal funding runs out at the end of next week, with our President threatening to declare a "national emergency" if Democrats won't give him his border wall funding, so Demand Progress (among other good government groups) helps you tell your Congressfolk that you don't want our government shut down over our President's vanity border wall. Our President will yell that he's "keeping a campaign promise" -- and that's the most generous thing I can say about his stubbornness -- but which is more important? Keeping a campaign promise that induced no more than 46% of the electorate to vote for you, or doing the people's will? Polling consistently shows a majority of Americans don't want our government to shut down again and don't want a border wall; it's really as simple as that. Of course, if you watch a lot of cable news, you're likely too conditioned to think in terms of "winners and losers" and "this is my team" to remember that a democracy is supposed to serve the people's will. Still, I'm happy to remind you of that, as often as you need it.

Action: concerning the next government shutdown drama.

Late last week, our Congress reached an agreement with our President to end the partial government shutdown, but that agreement only lasts until mid-February, at which point we will face either another government shutdown or the spectacle of our President declaring a "national emergency" so he can build his vanity border wall. Thus today I urge you to call your Reps and Senators, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a smartphone), and tell them, explicitly, to prevent either of these occurrences from happening next month.

Don't believe the hype that Congress is somehow powerless to prevent these things. Congress can vote in favor of their next appropriations bill in numbers that will override a Presidential veto, and they can repeal the National Emergencies Act which gives our President the power to declare a "national emergency" at the border. The first course of action does contain one significant peril: that House Democrats would cave to a Republican-flavored appropriations bill with all sorts of poison pills in it so that they can get the vote numbers past the two-thirds threshold that would override a veto. But this fact doesn't make hostages of us, for we have an absolute, inviolable right to give our honest counsel to our Reps and Senators, and they have an absolute, inviolable duty to do our will. Hence it's not a heavy lift for us to tell our Reps and Senators to stop playing games with appropriations bills and pass a bill that funds those parts of our government at appropriate levels, regardless of whether our Congressfolk act like it's a heavy lift for them.

Generally I encourage you to keep your messages to your Congressfolk short and sweet, but this is one time you may want to game it out for your Congressfolk at some length. I've said on numerous occasions that a government shutdown would be a perfect time for the kind of 9.11-style terrorist attack that "rallies America around our President." While it also seems that our President is too fixated on Venezuela to be hunting bigger game, or that he uses a government shutdown to demonstrate how "unnecessary" we should find our government, these could both be feints, and I certainly do not put it past this Administration to have already discussed the political "opportunities," such as war against Iran or a new wave of anti-free speech legislation, that a terrorist attack could bring. I think you'll want to tell your Congressfolk that if they're gaming it out this way, you're on to them. If enough of us say it, out loud, to our Congressfolk, I believe we'll make a difference. They can't function unless we're as naive as they need us to be, so let's show them we're not.

I suppose I should address the possibility that your Congressperson believes we should build a wall along the Southern border, by any means necessary. You'd be right to argue that a vanity wall would do nothing for border security and that there is no "national emergency" along the Southern border, but you won't win the argument merely by saying that. You will also have to remind your Congressfolk that our President couldn't get his wall out of a Republican-dominated Congress, either -- one that could easily have bypassed a Democratic filibuster by including border wall funding within a budget resolution passed via the reconciliation process -- and that, more to the point, our President is acting like a spoiled brat and that America is sick of all the drama he creates. When our Congressfolk finally get it into their heads that America is sick of the drama, they will bend to our will. But if we don't tell them that, in so many words, they'll pretend it's not happening. And you never give your Congressfolk that kind of opening.

So I guess a good script for your phone call would go something like this: "I'm calling to tell you to fund our government appropriately for the rest of the year, without poison pill amendments and without funding for our President's vanity border wall. I also urge you to repeal the National Emergencies Act which supposedly gives our President the power to build his wall. Like most Americans, I am sick and tired of all the drama our President creates, and it's your job, as a federal elected official, to demand more from our politics than just drama. His vanity border wall will do nothing to secure our borders, and frankly I'm afraid that another partial government shutdown will leave us vulnerable to a 9.11-style terrorist attack. And I'm further afraid that our Administration has already decided that a 9.11-style terrorist attack would be another big drama that would yield immense political benefits for them. So I think you would do well to be able to tell our posterity that you didn't let that happen." Tough toodles if they don't like what they hear; they're Congresspeople, and you're their bosses, so you have an inviolable right and duty to tell them what they don't want to hear.

Good luck and God bless.

Around the table: how our government shutdown actually ended, and other truths.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media sure do seem awfully anxious to overthrow the government of Venezuela. You don't have to love the Maduro regime to see where further American interference will lead, because you've seen where it has led -- to bigger and bigger problems "requiring" more American intervention, almost like that's the whole idea. You also don't have to love the Maduro regime to acknowledge that American interference has already helped send Venezuela's economy into a tailspin. I'm a little surprised that our President seems so transfixed on war with Venezuela as his ticket to unearned prestige and perhaps an unearned re-election -- although I guess it's easier than waging war with Iran! -- but then I wonder if that, too, is a feint, to take our eye off the next terrorist attack happening after the next government shutdown in a few weeks.

Eric Levitz at New York magazine reminds us that our Founders also regarded excessive wealth as evil, and regarded controlling the unbridled expansion of private property as a moral duty. Go ahead and read the article in its entirety; just don't get too distracted by infamous multimillionaire Sean Hannity's counterarguments, since they suck -- saying that you "better guard your nice things" from the "excess police" is weak tea, which testifies not only to the paucity of his arguments but the goodness of the American people, which has boxed him in with regards to what he can reasonably argue about the societal benefits of unbridled wealth. (And seriously, if your "dream" is to have the most money ever, you need a new dream, one that'll maybe benefit others in addition to yourself.)

Another day, another reminder that our Social Security program is most emphatically not "going broke" and that eliminating the cap on earnings to be taxed into the system would go a long way toward solving the "modest fiscal challenge" Social Security faces. No one said more people weren't retiring or that the system wouldn't face some additional strain, but today's politicians pretend the only solution is to completely raid the fund on behalf of big donors, even as they're instituting massive tax cuts for the rich that make the problem they're purporting to address ("runaway deficits," naturally) much worse. Social Security, having its own funding stream, doesn't actually contribute to the deficit, except in right-wing fever dreams.

Heather Vogell at ProPublica informs us that federal regulators have been slow to stop the flow of laundered money (i.e., from drug lords, terrorists, and the like) into and out of hedge funds. The PATRIOT Act mandated that our government write regulations requiring hedge funds to install anti-money laundering (or AML) programs, but here we are, over 17 years later, with no regulations written. Naturally, hedge funds "want" AML programs and federal enforcement, but just so happen to have eighty bajillion objections that of course must take precedence over the public good. I'd object that if they've done nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear, but I also wonder why our government doesn't simply do the regulating itself, instead of telling the hedge funds to do it (which, of course, they haven't done, either).

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fines a man who spent eight years swindling veterans out of their hard-earned pensions a mere one dollar, after said man swears he just can't pay more. They call it the "Mulvaney Discount," after former acting CFPB administrator/current acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, because it's not the first one. While it is possible that the CFPB will pursue action against the corporations this man owned, and maybe then swindled veterans will get some justice, a one-dollar fine makes a mockery of law and order in America -- particularly in a nation where (as the article makes sure to point out!) cash bail puts folks in jail for months without even convicting them of a crime.

Finally, we are reminded that the politicians didn't end the partial government shutdown at the end of last week so much as the workers who, after exhibiting great patience in working for weeks on end without pay, took action last week. Air traffic controllers slowed flights in at least three major airports, flight attendants visited their Congressfolk en masse, and 14,000 IRS workers didn't come to work, and regardless of what you hear from right-wingers about how workers who serve the public are supposed to serve the public even when our President has a massive temper tantrum, these workers are all heroes. It gives me hope that the next shutdown might be even shorter, and our President humiliated for real this time. (No, I think his "emergency declaration" will ultimately die in court, just like most of his other "bold" acts have died in court.)

Action: concerning H.R. 1, the minimum wage, and drug pricing.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, now has 225 co-sponsors, which means more than half the House has co-sponsored the bill, and I presume the House will begin deliberating the bill soon. I mean, yeah, the shutdown takes the oxygen out of the room, almost like that's the whole idea, but if we speak out enough, we can move the conversation in our direction, so Common Cause still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the most vigorous reforms in H.R. 1 possible. As you know, H.R. 1 aims to reform voting rights laws, campaign finance laws, and ethics laws, and many of its reforms originally appeared in bills such as the Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Fair Elections Now Act, both of which deserved our support. But of course Mob Boss Mitch calls the bill a "power grab," fearing it'll increase Democratic political power. Maybe if he and his kind weren't such elitists, he and his kind would benefit from the bill, too!

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Raise the Wage Act, then the Economic Policy Institute (among other good government groups) still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act (sorry, Congress.gov still doesn't have a bill number at this writing!) would gradually increase our minimum wage to $15/hour by 2024, which is five years from now, so don't believe the hype about the "shock to small businesses" the bill would cause. The bill would also index the wage to inflation, which means it won't be some politician or other's manufactured hostage crisis every year, and it would also phase out the far lower tipped worker minimum wage, and anyone who complains about that very likely has a heart of stone. Seriously, they should go to the doctor and get that checked out. The rest of us will welcome more good Americans being able to make ends meet -- and get ahead.

Finally, the big pharmaceutical corporation Teva has introduced its own generic version of the EpiPen drug -- and, at $300, it just so happens to cost the same as Mylan's generic EpiPen. You remember Mylan? The big pharma corporation that took massive PR hits for jacking up the price of its EpiPen to absurd heights? Achieving parity with Mylan isn't a good look for Teva, but we're here to help, as a Change.org petition helps you tell Teva to make its generic EpiPen more affordable to good Americans. After all, it's not like most folks just have $300 lying around for a life-saving drug. If you want to mention to them that the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act would let our government manufacture generic versions of life-saving drugs whenever big pharma corporations price them too high, well, I won't stop you. Corporations do generally try to avoid governmental involvement in their affairs.

Action: concerning the government shutdown and law-and-order issues at the border.

A consortium of good government groups helps you tell our President and our Senate Majority Leader to end the government shutdown now. As I may have said, I don't oppose government shutdowns per se, but I oppose this shutdown, which our President has orchestrated not so he can protect America or end a humanitarian crisis, but so he can keep on diddling the rage glands of his votaries. And our House has passed several bills aiming at funding those areas of our government which are currently shutdown, but Mr. McConnell says no, because our President won't sign them, or because the bills aren't a result of negotiations between our President and the Democrats, or something. Of course, if a bill has 67 Senate votes, it doesn't matter if a President signs it or not. What's he afraid of? He should be afraid of losing re-election in 2020 as more good Kentuckians figure out he thinks he works for Our Glorious Elites and not them.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our President's deployment of military personnel at the southern border to "assist" with Border Patrol work. Turns out that using soldiers for domestic policing matters is just about always against the law per the famous Posse Comitatus Act, and never mind that Southern states pushed for such a law back in the day to get Reconstruction-era troops out of their hair, because keeping our law enforcement and our military separate is still a good idea, as anyone who thinks about it for a second will see. Our President, unfortunately, cuts the figure of someone who does not think about things even for one second -- he just says do it, and then one day the people who carry out his orders annoy him and he turns on them. You'd think more good Americans would know this by now. We'll just keep having to tell them.

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: time for another exciting installment of "when's that terrorist attack coming?"

As we count the cost of our ongoing government shutdown, I feel compelled to ask: when's that terrorist attack coming? I mean, our President could be hunting really big game here -- not just the right to strut around for years saying you should have given me that wall so I could have prevented that terrorist attack, but also expanded "emergency powers" legislation enabling him to do whatever he likes, whenever he likes. Hey, if I thought of it, you know he has. Just remember: if terrorists (or whomever!) do attack, the first thing out of our mouths should be our President failed -- the President who won't read intelligence briefings and won't staff a functioning State Department, and who also struts around like he alone knows everything.

Third Circuit Court of Appeals refuses to reinstate court order preventing the Republican National Committee from engaging in the kind of "ballot security" measures that just so happen to suppress minority voters, and Rick Hasen foresees "supercharge(d)" vote suppression in 2020 as a result. I do find it interesting that Mr. Hasen's Republican lawyer acquaintances would "bristle" at the kind of things the RNC used to do, but the RNC got in trouble (in part) for caging voters, and what's Interstate Crosscheck if not caging? Things like Interstate Crosscheck and Voter ID don't necessarily come at the end of a gun or a fist, but I'm not sure that's progress. It certainly ain't enough progress.

Ho hum, our President thinks he can unilaterally turn Medicaid into a block grant program though even many right-wing analysts disagree that he can do that. So I guess the Tea Party is right now taking to the streets to protest this AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!!!, right? I kid, of course. I'd be more confident that this latest attempt to subvert the rule of law will die in court, except that Tha Bush Mobb successfully imposed spending caps on two states back in the day, albeit spending caps so high those states had no chance of hitting them. And that's why I always say George W. Bush is worse than our current President.

I agree with Charles Eisenstein at Yes! magazine that "(p)eople are not going to be frightened into caring" and thus doing something about climate change, though I doubt most folks would find "deep and active care for the planet com(ing) through experiences of beauty and grief" to be useful advice. I do agree that the best climate change messaging is pro-clean water, pro-clean air, and anti-pollution messaging rather than TEH PLANETZ IZ GOINGZ TO DIEZ!!!! messaging; I even agree that local efforts to defeat the effects of climate change can do better than big centralized nationalized ones. But the main reason climate change messaging isn't working? Because we're not all saying "let's kick climate change's ass!"

Finally, because you deserve some good news, yet another ag-gag law goes down in federal court, and this time it's Iowa's. You may wince at the court's reasoning -- that our First Amendment protects lying, since someone who takes a job at a factory farm so they can do undercover reporting on animal treatment is lying -- since similar reasoning has also, at times, protected media outlets that lie. But of course our First Amendment not only protects lies, but efforts to expose those lies. (And dig the pork lobby's we-never-intended-to-infringe-on-your-rights-sucker act! As if corporations have literally no other way to "conduct our businesses and care for our animals" than to procure unconstitutional tools for dealing with undercover agents!)

Around the table: concerning the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-All, among other topics.

Ellen Brown instructs us that a nationwide network of public banks could fund the Green New Deal that's all the talk these days. I'd prefer bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income myself, but public banks are a good thing (as the good people of North Dakota can tell you!), and I'm sure they can help. Be sure to note America's Last Economist, Michael Hudson, instructing us that hyperinflation has just about never resulted from "governments just printing money," but rather from "foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate." The dollar is virtually a world currency, so I suspect that's even less likely to happen here.

I was ready for a big argument with Michael Corcoran at TruthOut about his statement that "Democrat Support for a Public Option" is the "Biggest Obstacle" to a Medicare-for-All health insurance system. I still regard all the ZOMG TEH 34 TRILLYUNZ OF DOLLARZ!!!!! scaremongering as the biggest obstacle, and if you slay that dragon, the others will fall more easily. But the litany of Democrat weakness he tabulates is still pretty depressing, and we all remember how President Obama put a wedge between us and single-payer with the "public option" he clearly had no intention of fighting for. And we also remember when Sen. Lieberman supported the Medicare buy-in until approximately the moment it had a chance of passing, which should serve as a warning to Sens. Harris and Booker as they try to "support" Medicare-for-All without actually helping us to get there.

Kelly Blanchard at TruthOut says "It's Time for an Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill," but if you remember Carly Fiorina supporting that during the last Presidential campaign, you do have a question: what will the cost of the over-the-counter birth control pill be? Prescriptions do tend to save money on your out-of-pocket drug costs, even on drugs commonly available over the counter, so making birth control more affordable will also require intervention from our federal government -- which is always less likely when Republican winged monkeys get too much of the say about everything. Hard to believe that, for Barry Goldwater, the uterus was one more thing our government had no business interfering with.

Adam Johnson at FAIR catches our "liberal" media getting its shorts in a bunch about some prisoners, somewhere, getting steak once a year during the holidays. Yes, it's not fair that prison guards work without pay because our President holds our government hostage over a wall, but our "liberal" media don't bust out best stock photos when prisoners find maggots in their food. And I think it may be a bit sanguine to call this story "(c)lickbait that'll soon be forgotten" -- in fact, I bet a lot of our President's votaries will bring up TEH PRIZNURZ EATINGZ TEH STEAKZ!!!!! every time someone corners them in an argument about inhumane prison treatment.

Finally, American carbon emissions jumped over 3 percent last year. You may recall that the IEA found carbon emissions dropping worldwide as late as 2015. But dig our EPA Chief's attempt to take credit for carbon emissions dropping from 2016 to 2017 -- you know, before he stopped doing the things that helped carbon emissions come down! The road to hell is paved with the skulls of men like Andrew Wheeler.

Around the table: our President isn't crazy but enables craziness in others, and other lessons.

President Trump slaps 30% tariff on imported solar panels, because of course he did. Yeah, I'd prefer to make solar panels here too, but I don't see him moving this quickly on the Chinese steel he uses in his own buildings, and it sure looks like he got up in the morning and asked around the office for the best way to piss off liberals -- which is an understandable political strategy, I suppose, if the only "liberals" you know are the Democrats in Congress. As policy, we'd best interpret his move not as a "pro-worker" move (what, he thinks robots install solar panels?) or even as an "end to corporate welfare" for solar corporations; we'd best interpret is as actual corporate welfare for oil, gas, and coal, three industries that are losing ground to solar.

I approve of data showing the income gap between rich and poor across the planet, but comparing the "1%" to everyone else, even when the 1% makes more than 80% of the world's income, just isn't the most effective comparison, even if it rolls off the tongue more easily. Try the 0.1%, since you're just not in the same club as Rupert Murdoch if you make $450,000 a year -- nor do you do the same amount of damage to civilization. It is, after all, all about restraining the most powerful from running roughshod over everyone else's rights, even if right-wingers call the most powerful "job creators"! (In fairness, the "just eight people own as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet" is the better comparison.)

Execrable "evangelical" right-winger Tony Perkins announces that evangelicals have given President Trump a "mulligan" and a "do-over" when contemplating the President's extramarital affairs and general vulgarity, as long as he "delivers" on evangelical policy preferences. That may be taking the Parable of the Prodigal Son too far. I presume, also, that Mr. Perkins means evangelical elites, not your evangelical friends and neighbors, have been handing out these "mulligans," since a lot of them already know that if you keep handing out mulligans to folks like Mr. Trump, you'll just have to keep handing them out. (Read the whole article, though -- the work of defending Mr. Trump makes Mr. Perkins, and others, sound utterly unhinged.)

Florida voters will get to vote on a constitutional amendment guaranteeing most felons the right to vote this November. I sure hope those voters do the right thing, which is give back what their government took away, and deal another death-blow to the notion that folks who commit crimes should just keep on paying even after they've completed their sentences and reintegrated into society, all so some politician or other can make everyone watch his balls swing. (But I still think murderers and sex offenders still deserve the right to vote -- rights are either for everyone or they're not really rights.)

Finally, one of the male Trump offspring says the recent government shutdown "is a good thing" for the Trump Administration politically. I don't presume to disagree with his assessment so much as I presume to excoriate a society that tolerates such cynicism openly expressed, a society that encourages folks to think of life and death matters as sporting events where one side is up and the other down, a society that too rarely evaluates events in terms of the harm they do to people. In other words, we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society.

Action: voting rights, bad federal judges, and the government shutdown.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2978/S. 1419, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would essentially restore the Voting Rights Act to full power. You recall that the Court struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act partly because they now constituted discrimination against the South. But the Court all but invited Congress to pass legislation that would both achieve the ends of the Voting Rights Act and answer the Court's objections, and the Voting Rights Advancement Act does that: it wouldn't subject certain areas of the South to DOJ preclearance whenever they want to change their voting laws, but would rather subject any area of the country with a history of voting rights violation to that preclearance. Really, that should satisfy anyone wringing their hands over "what's been done to the South in the name of racial justice." Unless, of course, rage is the only thing that satisfies them. We can't do anything for people like that, except outvote them.

Meanwhile, speaking of Southern vote suppression, President Trump has renominated one Thomas Farr to the federal judiciary, though he couldn't clear the Senate last year (Democrats showed some spine, for once, and revoked unanimous consent after Mr. Farr's nomination cleared Judiciary). Mr. Farr has a long and troubling history, not just in working for the infamous Sen. Jesse Helms, not just in helping Mr. Helms suppress the black vote in North Carolina during the 1980s, but in lying about it to the Senate last year. And Mr. Trump has some chutzpah claiming that "judicial emergencies" have forced him to renominate Mr. Farr. This U.S. District Court seat has been empty for 11 years, but that doesn't mean you put just anybody in it -- and Mr. Trump's justification for doing so sure seems like rhetorical hostage-taking to me. Color of Change helps you tell your Senators to oppose the renomination of Mr. Farr to our federal judiciary.

Finally, as you know, our government shut down late last week, and though Mr. Trump famously said years ago that we should consider a government shutdown the President's fault because of, you know, leadership, of course this week he's saying it's the Democrats' fault, though Republicans hold a majority in both houses of Congress, and though the final Senate vote (50 nay, 49 yea, with Sen. McCain again not voting due to health issues) included five Republican nay votes. Now I wouldn't have insisted, as Democrats did, on putting the DREAM Act in a budget bill, but they might have been politically adept, for once, in doing so -- I can imagine a lot of center-right Hispanic-Americans throwing up their hands for the last time. Regardless, we don't play 13-dimensional chess; we only want our government to pass good legislation, hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass both the DREAM Act and CHIP reauthorization, which seemed to be sticking points in the budgeting negotiations.

Around the table: conservatism's ongoing decay, and other sad developments.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy provides us with yet more helpful data demonstrating that outsourcing the IRS's debt collection function is a terrible idea. The IRS spends about $3 on private debt collectors for every $1 they bring in, which won't surprise you if you have, well, virtually any life experience at all. Strange that today's "conservatives" push for privatization, then do nothing when the private corporations deliver bad results. Aren't conservatives all about making government more efficient and saving the taxpayer money? Or is that just what they told us?

Gov. Walker's little corporate welfare deal with Foxconn will now cost Wisconsin taxpayers $4.5 billion, instead of the $3 billion he previously said it would cost. I wouldn't put it past Mr. Walker, who's as politically astute as he is evil, to try to get some insulation from the backlash by letting President Trump announce the Foxconn deal last year, but this imbroglio remains a major opportunity for Democrats to finally find bipartisan hatred of corporate welfare sexy enough to run ads about. Of course, these are Democrats we're talking about.

Not quite two weeks after passing the massive tax "reform" bill, House Speaker Paul Ryan gets $500,000 in campaign contributions from Charles Koch (of Koch brothers infamy) and his wife. I won't say you could prove a quid pro quo in a court of law, but I'd be a schmuck to say the two events are completely unrelated. I've become convinced that the future of campaign finance is the small contribution, and that big campaign contributions like this will become massive PR headaches for donors. But I wouldn't mind the future being now, of course.

Ho hum, West Virginia's plan to drug test welfare applicants has caught exactly four people in its web over the first three months. One shouldn't compare number of welfare applicants who fail drug tests to the number of folks who use drugs in the population as a whole, but to the number of folks who fail drug tests in the population as a whole. But proponents of this sort of thing have failed to make the case that welfare drug testing is fiscally responsible, which is, again, the sort of thing we thought conservatives cared about. Of course, I'd also argue that punishing addicts is far less fiscally responsible than treating them.

Finally, former Maryland Lieutenant Governor/RNC Chair Michael Steele says the Republicans are entirely to blame for the current government shutdown. I never enjoyed watching Mr. Steele, an obvious moderate, run as far right as he could to appease the rest of the party -- you remember him popularizing the phrase "drill, baby, drill" at the 2008 Republican convention? And you remember his apology for his very mild criticisms of Rush Limbaugh the next year? -- but if he's really as fed up as he sounds these days, he might do some good for this great nation after all.

Around the table: good news about government funding and net neutrality, but bad news about who's still President.

Congress apparently averts government shutdown by striking relatively non-obnoxious deal to fund our government through September. The deal (if it passes!) will preserve almost all EPA funding, increase renewable energy funding and National Institutes of Health funding, and cover a Medicaid shortfall in Puerto Rico and permanently extend retired coal miners' health benefits. How did we get this out of a unified Republican government? Because we spoke out and wouldn't quit. Make no mistake, Congress didn't "get this done" -- the American people did.

Trump Administration Chief of Staff Reince Priebus says the Administration has considered amending the Constitution, apparently to protect him from criticism. It's really not a good sign when our President thinks of criticism as a personal attack, let alone that he would change the Constitution, possibly, as Mr. Priebus all but says, by effectively abolishing the First Amendment. They say they're against "false" stories about Mr. Trump, but gosh, doesn't the President have the biggest megaphone in the country? If Mr. Trump uses his megaphone to whine incessantly, that isn't the media's fault, and good Americans sure don't need to coddle him.

Dean Baker at TruthOut reminds us that Mr. Trump didn't strike a deal on currency manipulation with China while he met with its President last month -- but he sure did get some Chinese trademarks for his daughter's clothing brand. This, again, is the kind of sickness, immorality, and decadence we ought to attack (versus, say, whatever Melania Trump's immigration status was all those years ago), because it sure looks like he sold out his votaries in order to get something for his daughter.

Speaking of the Great Man, Mr. Trump "seems unaware" that his health care plan essentially makes the pre-existing conditions ban meaningless by allowing states to "opt out" of them. No use playing the stupid-or-evil game, because of course he knows what's in his plan and what's not -- the biggest mistake we make is in assuming these assholes are just dumb, when they're actually malicious. Seriously, I've long thought this 1986 Saturday Night Live skit to be much closer to the truth about Our Glorious Leaders. (Kudos, at least, to Face the Nation for not covering the bill like it's a horserace. You know, the way Chuck Todd would.)

Finally, we have some evidence that Mr. Trump's votaries on Reddit may be breaking with the Great Man on net neutrality. Net neutrality has Actual Bipartisan Support, as you know, but I remember Tea Partiers being a lot more unified in their opposition to net neutrality -- a few said they didn't want big corporations to run the internet, but they hated their government more, particularly when run by Teh Furriner, so of course they opposed net neutrality. The good news? Most Trump votaries used to be Tea Partiers (who in turn used to be Bush Derangement Syndrome voters), so this skepticism is an improvement.

Action: budgetary hostage-taking, and "liberal" media war worship.

Congress is back to work, such as they do, and they have a mere two days to pass a spending bill and authorize raising the debt ceiling -- so of course they're considering all the ways they can hold the people hostage to their will, like refusing to fund Affordable Care Act subsidies, clean air and clean water enforcement, or funding that stupid border wall of Mr. Trump's. So I think a phone call to your Congressfolk about that is in order, and as always you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone). Feel free to complain directly to your Congressfolk that you're sick and tired of them using all these artificial deadlines as excuses to create hostage situations so they can shove evil policy initiative down our throats. I bet they don't hear that from their constituents enough, and they should be hearing it a lot more, since what they're doing is so blindingly obvious. They also argue through hostage crisis, of course ("don't make me keep coal plants from polluting, or people will lose their jobs!"), but today we'll concentrate on Congress's more direct threats to our well-being.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell traditional "liberal" media outlets to stop glorifying violence and war. One doesn't need to slam Brian Williams (who might have been signaling disapproval of Mr. Trump's missile strike in Syria with his use of an obviously ironic Leonard Cohen lyric) to find the "liberal" media's warmongering plenty obvious -- not just in their effusive praise of Mr. Trump for "becoming President" the day he threw almost five dozen Tomahawks at an air base the Syrians had already pretty much cleared out, not just for covering that event almost solely in the context of whether it constitutes a "win" for President Trump (the American people never win on "liberal" media programs!), but in their wall-to-wall coverage of war-making in general, which reminds one of nothing so much as a hormone-addled teenage boy at his video game console. War is essentially a way of admitting the complete failure of your statecraft, so our "liberal" media shouldn't get all giddy when Presidents drop bombs -- they should treat the occasion with considerably more sobriety. Maybe that doesn't "get ratings," but it does inform the people more effectively, and the latter is, after all, their real job.

Action: federal budgeting, and Syrian refugees.

Once they return from their recess that I wish they'd stay on forever, Congress will have a mere five days to put together a budget -- or, more likely, a continuing resolution -- that will fund the government and raise the debt ceiling, and given that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the Presidency, I have no doubt they'll use the occasion to hold our government hostage to all sorts of right-wing budget priorities, including Mr. Trump's priority to cut $8 billion from the National Institutes of Health to build his precious border wall. And you cannot discount the possibility that Republicans will use the threat of a government shutdown and a default on our national debt to set other things aflame -- to slash Medicaid, to privatize Medicare and Social Security, to ram their health care "reform" bill down our throats, to defund FCC efforts to enforce net neutrality regulations, to slash EPA funding for clean air and clean water regulations, and any dozens of others you can name. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to fund our priorities, rather than use another manufactured hostage crisis to ram through theirs.

Meanwhile, as noted by more alert observers than I, it's a bit rich, so to speak, for President Trump to claim that he fired nearly five dozen missiles at a Syrian airbase because he wanted to save the lives of good Syrians, when he's so far issued two executive orders (both on hold, thanks to our court system) designed to prevent good Syrian refugees from coming to America! He'll say he needs to keep Syrian refugees out in order to keep terrorists out, but that's not how it works -- refugees, being people who, as the term implies, seek refuge from tyranny, are about the least likely people to try to foment terrorism on some other shore. The folks who commit terrorism are generally the reasonably well-off folks who watch other people get hurt, and who sympathize with them; really, every refugee we help is a blow not just against tyranny, but also against terrorism. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trumpian anti-refugee agenda. Because I won't let America become a nation of assholes just because our President is one.

Around the table: more "liberal" media conflict-of-interest non-disclosure, plus at least two bad ideas from our Senate.

Ho hum, Comcast-owned media outlet runs positive article about app literally hours after Comcast sinks half a billion dollars into said app, without disclosing this fact. That's yet another good argument against corporations owning other corporations! Also, too, why are we covering corporate valuations like they're sporting events? Even if you're not actually invested in Snapchat (and your pension fund might be!), you might still be affected by its stock crashing, and more so than by your football team losing.

Sen. Shelby (R-AL) suggests Republicans might be able to get big chunks of Dodd-Frank reform repealed through budget reconciliation. And all the right-wingers who squealed like pigs when Democrats used reconciliation to pass Obamacare rose at once and shouted Sen. Shelby down! I kid, of course. And, ah, there might be a reason Congress hasn't foregrounded these pro-bankster efforts, while ensuring Obamacare repeal takes up all the oxygen in the room. (That reason would be "because the people would hate them.")

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) suggests Democrats might be willing to shut down our government if Republicans won't help them get to the bottom of President Trump's Russian ties. Jesus Mary and Joseph that is one of the stupidest things Democrats could possibly do. I can think of far, far better reasons to allow a government shutdown, and certainly I'd never allow it over something that would never have happened if Democrats were really the party of the people -- not to mention something that damages Mr. Trump more by the minute.

Here's something that almost escaped my notice: Sanderson Farms has begun to run ads suggesting that those corporations who are cutting out antibiotics from their chickens are merely indulging in a "marketing gimmick" that is "just a trick to get you to pay more money." And if antibiotic abuse really does bring about a world where the next cut you get can kill you again, there may not be many of us left to tell Sanderson Farms "I told you so." But I bet they'll still be around, feeling no shame over their enabling of civilization's destruction.

Finally, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wants to pass a law mandating that all Presidential candidates for 2020 release their tax returns. He says that would include Mr. Trump "if" he runs for re-election, but surely Mr. Graham knows that Mr. Trump has already filed re-election papers with the FEC, which I guess raises the possibility that his team would regard such a law as a sort of "bill of attainder" for Mr. Trump, which of course the Constitution prohibits. I'm sure Mr. Graham knows that, too, which makes all of this yet more bad theatre from the Republicans.

Around the table: Democrat weakness, overtime pay, millennial longings, security questions, and the prisoners' strike.

Congress averts a government shutdown by extending funding through December 9 -- but includes neither of the legislative priorities Democrats supposedly fought for, i.e., funding for Flint clean water efforts and the SEC being permitted to mandate publicly-traded corporations disclose their campaign spending. Which means Democrats can now ride campaign ads about Republican opposition to clean water and campaign finance reform all the way to victory in November! I kid, of course -- the only thing Democrats do well is let Republicans kick sand in their face.

The House also passes H.R. 6094, which would delay the Obama Administration's overtime pay rules for another six months. Note well that some House Democrats were pushing a similar bill not long ago, though only five House Democrats actually voted for this one. President Obama has threatened a veto, and the House won't be able to override it without somehow getting 46 more votes. And, ah, note to the folks who are still complaining that the cost of living varies from region to region: one, that's one reason the Obama Administration didn't raise the pay threshold even higher, and two, state governments are mostly twiddling their thumbs on this matter, so our federal government must act.

Harold Meyerson reminds us that "Young Voters Love Gary Johnson -- For All the Wrong Reasons." Mr. Johnson would legalize pot, of course, though I doubt that's as important to young voters as his stated aims to ditch the surveillance state and fight police brutality against black folks -- but Mr. Johnson would also do nothing about climate change or student debt, and would replace what remains of our progressive income tax with a totally regressive national sales tax, all of which will hit our youngest voters the hardest. I haven't given enough credit to millennials for supporting Bernie Sanders, the only candidate for whom I could vote without holding my nose. But their support for Mr. Johnson just reinforces the stereotype we oldheads tend to have about them -- that they don't care about the future.

Lily Hay Newman at Wired suggests it's "Time to Kill Security Questions -- or Answer Them With Lies." The hacking of half a billion Yahoo! accounts suggest that security questions have become just another piece of data that can be stolen, and used against you -- you can imagine a hacker stealing your identity this way, particularly in an age where social networks reveal a lot of this stuff anyway. Hence security experts suggest that you lie when answering these questions, and though they suggest you lie by answering with a nonsensical series of numbers and symbols and then use a password manager to store it, I find the prospect of simply answering with lies (using "Blanco" for my mother's maiden name, for example) more fascinating, since what do your lies say about you? is one of the more interesting questions pondered in literature.

Finally, Beth Schwartzappel at BillMoyers.com presents "A Primer on the Nationwide Prisoners' Strike," now in its third week. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlaws slavery, of course -- "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." But I question whether the Constitution really allows inhumane treatment of a citizen under any circumstances, including as punishment for a crime. (Personal to the fools who think that sentence means "prison should be a country club": learn to read.)

Action: anti-science legislation, harassment of protestors, and antibiotic abuse.

Congress has a number of appropriations bills to pass, as you know, and Congress would like nothing better than to use the threat of a government shutdown to ram through all sorts of legislative riders that wouldn't stand the light of day if they tried to pass them on their own -- legislative riders that would hamper the EPA's ability to enforce the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, for example. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject anti-science legislative riders in upcoming budget bills. Your average right-wing Congressperson -- who will generally be smart enough not to say that they oppose pro-science protections because they tend to cost their big donors money -- will probably hang their head unctuously and declare that we just don't have the money to protect folks from pollution. At that point, you're perfectly free to ask, "do we have endless money to take care of the intractable health care problems that pollution causes?" Of course, their big donors won't bear the cost of those problems -- but we will.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate allegations of police harassing, and retaliating against, folks who film and otherwise monitor their behavior. You probably already know that, try as they might, police officers can't simply tell you to stop running your smartphone camera in their general direction, because that violates your First Amendment rights. Still, if you use your smartphone camera to document police misconduct, they might try some stuff, like taking your camera from you and/or sending a handful of armed officers to arrest you for unpaid traffic tickets, and that just adds to the list of stuff you have to fight -- and discourages others from speaking out. But just as television blew the lid off the Vietnam War by showing its horrors, the age of smartphones has put police brutality out front-and-center. It's not that the good old days were better; it's that the good old days covered up better. But this genie ain't going back in this bottle, and police officers are public servants who should not get special protections (like protection from their own misconduct) while they're serving the public.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell McDonald's to get antibiotic-raised beef, poultry, and pork out of its supply chains, and thus out of its meals. It'd be easy to say, oh, to hell with them, they're McDonald's, fast food shouldn't even exist, but that would be letting the perfect murder the good -- we live in a world where plenty of people eat at McDonald's every day, and since we're not likely to observe the disappearance of fast food in our lifetimes, we might as well agitate for better behavior from fast food purveyors. And McDonald's, like the other fast food corporations, has shown itself to be responsive to the Big Stick of Bad PR, which we wield here for very good reason: overuse of antibiotics in feed animals makes bacteria more resistant, until we find ourselves in a "post-antibiotic world," where the slightest cut can be deadly -- just like it was in the old days! Surely even the most reactionary individual doesn't want a return to such "innocence," and surely even the most corporatist individual can see the limits of just letting food producing corporations do exactly as they please.

Action: clean budgeting, hospital bombings, and voting rights.

As you've heard, the process of electing a new House Speaker has become, shall we say, a bit more convoluted of late, as House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has taken himself out of the running, and though reports alleged an affair between Mr. McCarthy and another House Rep, I won't discount the possibility Republicans cooked up that story to make Mr. McCarthy's decision seem, well, normal -- since your gut probably tells you he didn't want the job because the House Republican caucus has gone bat-guano. At any rate, now is not the time to pretend that we have to "deal with" crazy people because they "have power." They have no power but the power we the people allow them. Hence CREDO helps you tell Democratic leadership not to cave to any manufactured hostage crisis over the budget, and Public Citizen still helps you tell your Reps to pass clean budget deals, with no corporate giveaways. Don't let Democrats say they're worried about getting blamed for shutting the government down if they stand their ground. When you stand your ground, people have your back.

Meanwhile, CREDO also helps you tell our government to comply with a "full and transparent" investigation into our government's bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz. Note well that the "liberal" media took nearly two days to start parroting the line that the Taliban used the hospital as a "human shield," and that assertion essentially amounts to a personal attack on Doctors Without Borders. You know what I always say: once your opponents resort to personal attacks, they've lost the argument. In fact, go ahead and say that to every single moron who tells you you're wrong because "you're getting your information from the liberal media," since that's also a personal attack. And I'll brook no hostage-crisis rhetoric from right-wingers that such an investigation weakens the war effort and/or endangers the troops. If a war can wither under the weight of such an investigation, then the war obviously isn't worth fighting to begin with. And what's the best way to keep our troops out of harm's way again? Don't send them off to stupid wars, that's what.

Finally, you remember that Alabama not only requires its citizens to produce photo ID at the polling place -- a requirement that already puts an unfair onus on those seniors, poor folks, and minorities who've never needed that photo ID before, or who lack the means to get the ID -- but is also closing DMV offices all over the state (blaming a "budget crisis," which of course can only ever be resolved by hurting the citizenry!), such that 28 of Alabama's 67 counties will have not one single DMV. Would it surprise you to learn that those 28 counties serve a lot of black voters? So People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2867/S. 1659, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would give our government more power to stop state-level voting rights violations like Alabama's, and CREDO helps you tell U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to investigate Alabama's actions. The Supreme Court may have eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in its Shelby County v. Holder decision, but our Attorney General can still investigate, and we can restore voting rights with the Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Action: the government shutdown, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and the "revolving door" between Congress and lobbyists.

Shutdown day is tomorrow, and both Americans for Financial Reform and USAction help you demand that Congress keep more corporate welfare handouts for Wall Street banksters out of the government funding bill. They'll happily do it, especially since the "liberal" media's eyes are trained exclusively on Planned Parenthood funding in House and Senate funding bills. Should we fund Planned Parenthood? Of course we should -- they do a lot of good things for poor women, and our government already doesn't fund abortions. But should we allow Our Glorious Elites to divert our attention from the far more harmful things Congress might do to permit another round of useless financial speculation that could crash the economy? Hell no! And could some of my brethren on the right stop for a minute and realize they feel just as used as I do, that our Congressfolk hold us hostage to get things passed that would never pass if we shone light on them, that vigorous financial regulation doesn't "kill jobs" but protect consumers from corporate greed? Hope does spring eternal with me, you know.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Census released data last week showing that, sadly, women still make 79 cents on every dollar men make, on average. And adjusting for similar experience, qualifications, etc. doesn't up that figure very far -- certainly not to a dollar-for-a-dollar. Hence H.R. 1619/S. 862, the Paycheck Fairness Act, would help close that wage gap by limiting the factors employers can use to pay women differently to "bona fide factors" including education, training, and experience, and would force employers to prove those factors really do justify wage gaps. The Paycheck Fairness Act would also prevent corporations from prohibiting employees from discussing their pay with their co-workers, since such discussions are often the only way workers find out they're getting shorted. Why have Republicans consistently blocked these reforms? Because "it just helps trial lawyers," they say -- implying that it doesn't help women, which claim they don't, of course, even try to prove. One way to keep lawyers away: stop discriminating against your female employees. Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1959, the Close the Revolving Door Act, and prevent Congressfolk from becoming lobbyists after they leave Congress, then Rootstrikers helps you do that. Last time I posted about S. 1959, a reader objected that employers generally can't control what employees do after they leave their employers, unless it's written in their employment contracts. That might exempt Congressfolk who retire before the bill becomes law (and then again it might not -- who is a Congressperson's employer, anyway?), but once you stand for re-election and gain re-election, you'll essentially have a new "employment contract." And we the people certainly have an interest in keeping our Congressfolk from ever becoming lobbyists -- it gives them a major financial incentive to serve mammon, rather than people, by knowing they can exploit their vast network of connections inside government to make money tenfold once they get out, if they just play the game. Congressfolk should avoid such temptations, of course, but if they need our help to do that, we're more than happy to give it.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: paid sick leave, media posturing, an embarrassing video, a law-bomb, and another "religious freedom" suit that should fail.

President Obama signs executive order mandating corporations that contract with our government give its workers at least seven paid sick leave days. Cue the Republicans shouting AMURIKAN CAESURZZZ!!!!!, though they led the cheering for warrantless wiretapping and NSA spying. And if they want to claim that he's "circumvented the legislative process," they'll have to show, exactly, where Congress hasn't already delegated authority to the Executive branch to set such standards for federal contracts. Bet they don't.

Ho hum, Fox News punditoids denounce Mr. Obama for ignoring the shooting of a police officer who was just filling up his damn gas tank -- for several days after Mr. Obama condemned the shooting. He even called the officer's widow, but apparently living in the modern world means that if you're a media punditoid, you never have to admit you're wrong.

Conservative party candidate/appliance technician in Canada bows out of Toronto-area parliamentary race after video of him urinating in a customer's coffee cup surfaces. In America, you could get away with this, because plenty of punditoids would happily go on TV afterward and say, well, maybe the customer deserved it, and we've all wanted to do that to a customer, amirite? -- as if peeing into someone's mug is ever acceptable behavior, from anyone.

And now, for more from the government-is-incompetent-and-we're-gonna-prove-it-by-being-incompetent crowd in Kansas: the state's entire court system will be defunded, per a 2014 law restricting some state Supreme Court powers. How? The law states that if any court struck it down, the whole state court system will be defunded as a result -- and a district judge just did that. What do we call that, kids? A hostage situation. We also call it petty. And if any liberal ever attached the legislative equivalent of an IED to a law, the "liberal" media would suddenly see it exactly as I do.

Muslim flight attendant files suit after being suspended by her employer for refusing to serve alcohol to her customers, because of her "religious beliefs." I find folks who fervently oppose alcohol fairly sympathetic, and the co-worker who filed the complaint against her may be a better target for a lawsuit than her employer, but the same logic holds for this situation as it does for pharmacists who won't fill birth control scripts and county clerks who won't issue gay marriage licenses: consuming alcohol is legal (if you're over 21), consuming alcohol generally doesn't violate the religious beliefs of your customers, and if your "conscience" leads you to oppose doing that part of your job, you need to find another job.

Action: toward a non-stupid Congressional budgeting process, and better protections for Pennsylvania gays.

Congress comes back to work after Labor Day, though I wish they'd just stay home, we're headed for some truly awful budget-making and hostage-taking over the next few months. I wouldn't focus too much about Planned Parenthood being defunded; I don't want that to happen, of course, but that's not where the real battle will be -- the real battle will be over the policy riders they want to put into budget bills, riders that would defund clean air and clean water regulation enforcement and defund net neutrality enforcement and defund bankster regulation enforcement and roll back campaign finance law enforcement, that have a much better chance of making it through the process and become law. These are all policy riders, mind you, that would amount to nothing more and nothing less than corporate welfare handouts for Congressfolks' big donors. And there ain't no constituent of no Congressperson who demands more corporate welfare handouts. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell House Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader McConnell to pass clean budget legislation this fall.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Pennsylvania Fairness Act (HB 1510/SB 974) would update the state's landmark Human Relations Act of 1955 to extend protections against discrimination to gay and transgender Pennsylvanians. What sort of protections? Protections against being fired on the job for who you are, protections against refusing to serve gay folks in your place of business just because they're gay, and protections against being turned away by banks, real estate agents, and landlords if you want to rent or own a house in a particular area of the state, among others. And no, other people's "sincerely-held religious beliefs" do not constitute a freedom-to-discriminate card. And If your teabagger uncle demands to know why THOSE PEEPULZ GETZ TEH SPESHUL RIGHTZ!!!!!, remind them, gently or otherwise, that what's equal rights for us ain't special rights for them. The whole phrase "special rights" really is one of the most dishonest and dishonorable phrases right-wing smartypantses ever came up with. Keystone Progress helps you tell your PA state legislator to support the Pennsylvania Fairness Act.

Penny rants for Sunday, August 2, 2015: "I see weak people!"

David Barton whines that putting a woman on the $10 bill proves that liberals "literally want to erase our history." After all, it's not like the other bills all have men on them or anything! But that wasn't the stupidest thing he said on July 27, and neither, amazingly, was his invoking of our Founders, as if he's not the guy who attributes all kinds of right-wingy quotations to the Founders without sourcing them. Here's the winner: "(t)hey want to remake this country; in fact, as Obama said, to transform America, and you don't transform America from what it was without trying to erase what it was." You know who thinks "transformation" can never, ever build on tradition or honor the past? Two kinds of people: 1) a simpleton, and 2) someone pretending to be a simpleton in order to turn emotionally-vulnerable people into right-wing rageheads. I don't believe you'll find very many simpletons in America, I really don't. But you'll find a lot of pretend simpletons -- or, as better folks than I have called them, "useful idiots" -- and they're very well-paid in our sick, immoral, and decadent society.

Sen. Cruz (S-TX) suggests he'd shut down the government over continued funding of Planned Parenthood. You know, over that stupid video that the "liberal" media is somehow covering as if it's not a badly-edited hit job, even though, you know, they're supposedly full of "journalists" and stuff, a lot of whom actually took classes in college about how editing creates reality, even! You'll recognize the threat as more right-wing swordfighting -- Ted Cruz can't just have a vote over defunding Planned Parenthood like Rand Paul, but has to shut down the government over it. (And then, of course, Mike Huckabee suggested he'd send in federal troops to stop abortions, which proves that someone always thinks they have a bigger sword.) But, ah, Politico? That headline is profoundly offensive -- Planned Parenthood wouldn't "shut down the government"; obnoxious politicians would shut down the government. I guess if Republicans threw a similar tantrum over, say, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, Politico's headline would read "How Black Voters Could Shut Down the Government."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), currently vying for the Democratic Presidential nomination, says he will not run as an independent candidate if he does not get the Democratic nomination, for one simple reason: "I do not want to be responsible for electing some right-wing Republican to be president of the United States." Memo to Sen. Sanders: you would not be responsible for electing a right-wing Republican as President if you were to run as an independent. Who would be responsible? The right-wing Republican Presidential candidate, obviously, for successfully lying to the American people about what he plans to do (cough Scott Walker cough), and also to the people who voted for him though it wasn't in their interest to do so -- and also to the spineless Democrat politicians who accomplish nothing when they have power and thus give no one any positive reason to vote for them. We liberals get enough guff for "always blaming the wrong people" that we should actually, you know, blame the right people when bad things happen.

Action: net neutrality, energy efficiency, and job application fairness.

You remember how the House's Financial Services/General Government Appropriations bill contained a rider defunding FCC efforts to enforce its new net neutrality regulations until three lawsuits could be settled? Well, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed a companion bill apparently doing somewhat less damage than the House bill on net neutrality, but the Senate doesn't get a damn cookie for that. So Demand Progress helps you call your Senators to reject any anti-net neutrality riders in appropriations bills. Feel free to remind them that riders defunding FCC net neutrality efforts are a crappy way of doing something about "rate regulation," just as using a sledgehammer is a bad way to kill an ant. With over four out of five Americans supporting net neutrality -- a number including a higher proportion of Republicans than Democrats -- I think the people have made their will clear. Now our Senators should do their job and listen to the people, instead of holding our will hostage to government shutdowns. The good news? President Obama has noticed these shenanigans, though he hasn't threatened a veto. I presume that'll be our next task.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2567/S. 1516, the Power Efficiency and Resiliency (or POWER) Act. What would the POWER Act do? The POWER Act would expand tax credits for developing combined heat-and-power (or CHP) and waste heat-to-power (WHP) systems, which capture wasted heat from various industrial processes (including paper and chemical manufacturing) and use it to heat buildings or create more electricity. Wasted heat makes up half of the energy many industrial processes use, so we might as well put it to use if we can. And who would oppose such a thing? Big fossil fuel energy corporation CEOs, that's who -- the people who say things like how can I make money off of that? when they actually mean how can I gild the plumbing on my 19th vacation home off of that? I'm old enough to remember when you could make money by making better products and designing better processes, rather than just funneling campaign contributions to Congressfolk until you got your way. But big fossil fuel CEOs don't get all the say around here.

Meanwhile, on the heels of President Obama's historic visit to a federal prison in Oklahoma last week -- he was the first sitting President ever to see the inside of a federal prison, prompting historian Rick Perlstein to comment, "damn you, Gerald Ford!" -- the ACLU helps you tell Mr. Obama to mandate that federal agencies and federal contractors to get rid of the "criminal record" box on job applications. Mr. Obama did just call for private corporations to do just that, so he might as well put his money where his mouth is. The "criminal record" box on job applications doesn't have very much to do with how well someone does a job -- I suspect that mainly the box helps job screeners make difficult decisions about whom to hire, but I don't believe in using arbitrary criteria to make decisions less difficult than they should be. I also don't believe in making it harder for folks coming out of jail to get work -- if they can't get work because no one will hire them, they're more likely to wind up back in jail. Private prison corporations might celebrate that cycle, but I don't, and they, too, don't get all the say around here.

Action: voting rights, food stamps, and "free" trade.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: state Sen. Vincent Hughes (D-7) plans to introduce legislation which would automatically register good Pennsylvanians to vote whenever they get any sort of state service (like a drivers' license) from an agency the state currently authorizes to assist with voter registration. Voters who don't want to register to vote can simply opt out of that registration within three weeks, and registration of course doesn't obligate people to vote, which is as it should be. All of that should answer the haters who would exclaim TEH STATE FORCEZ TEH PEEPULZ TO DO THINGZ!!!! Nah, just kidding -- nothing ever satisfies a hater. Anyway, Keystone Progress helps you tell your PA Governor and state legislator to support making it easier, not harder, for voters to register and therefore vote. The state legislature did go through an awful lot of trouble, under Gov. Corbett, to pass draconian Voter ID laws that state courts eventually struck down. It's about time we made it easier for people to vote -- and make politicians work harder to persuade people to vote for them.

Meanwhile, you know that House and Senate Republican budgets are mean to working families while being quite obsequious to the "needs" of the wealthy for more tax cuts so they can "create jobs" -- but you may not know that these budgets cut food stamp funding, again. Clearly they're emboldened by the fact that they were able to get pretty hefty food stamp cuts last year out of a divided Congress, but I am prepared to accept a lengthy government shutdown, with all of the problems that entails, so that Congress doesn't cut food stamps any further. So Moms Rising helps you tell Congress to stop cutting food stamps. It's really very simple: if Congress pursued actual job-creation programs, like taxing millionaire income at 91% and closing corporate tax loopholes so the rich and the corporate will have to create jobs for other people just to avoid paying taxes on their money, maybe then we can cut food stamps. But posturing about the value of hard work, when our casino economy no longer rewards hard work, is quite disgusting, and our leaders should really avoid it.

Finally, I haven't passed along action alerts opposing "free" trade agreements and the "fast-tracking" thereof in a few days, so the Campaign for America's Future (among other organizations) helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject "fast-track," while Public Citizen helps you tell Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), lately the Democrats' point man on advancing the "free" trade agenda, to reject fast-track. And the newest hostage crisis our leaders have tried to perpetrate, in order to scare us into acquiescence of "free" trade's ability to nullify our laws? Their suggestion that doing this deal would give us some say over the world economy. That suggestion, of course, is completely illogical: doing a bad deal so we have some say is absurd, when we would presumably use that say to get a good deal, or to avoid a bad deal. And, as usual, none of that explains in any way why we need to "fast-track" the deal with as little debate and amendment as possible. Nothing the "free" traders say makes any damn sense -- I'd say the Emperor has no clothes, but calling them "Emperor" would be giving them too much credit.

Action: starring a horrible, no good, very bad spending bill, plus items about Social Security, oppression in Saudi Arabia, and GMO salmon.

Today the House plans to vote on a bill keeping our government running; the Senate may follow. And this bill is a real stinker. Chief among any reasonable person's complaints against the bill is it allows banksters to gamble in derivatives with taxpayer money. You know what that means, right, good folks? More bailouts -- and maybe they'll get to steal our savings accounts this time. But it gets worse: rich folks could be allowed to contribute ten times as much money to political parties as they're currently allowed to do. And the bill also cuts OSHA funding, raises limits on trucker work hours, and lets big agricultural corporations dump more crap in our water -- because a vote for Republicans is, apparently, a vote for workplace accidents, getting killed on the highway, and poisoned water, in addition to a vote for banksters and corporate campaign ads. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to remove all the poison pills attached to this spending measure, or vote against it. And yes I would rather shut down our government than pass this bill. We deserve more from our government than the back of its hand.

Meanwhile, the Strengthening Social Security Act -- which would fund increased Social Security benefits by subjecting income over $117,000 to the payroll tax -- lost both its Senate champions in 2014, one (Tom Harkin of Iowa) to retirement and the other (Mark Begich of Alaska) to a Republican opponent. But Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio will reintroduce the bill when the Senate reconvenes in January; that Senate will have more knuckle-draggers than any Senate in recent memory, but to paraphrase a famous philosopher, you go to war with the Senate you have, not the Senate you wish you had. And if the new Republican majority refuses to listen to us, let them suffer the shame of doing so, because not only is Social Security very popular (keeping, as it does, so many seniors out of poverty), so is increasing Social Security benefits. And to hell with those who say we feel "entitled" to everything -- we worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, so it's ours. Social Security Works helps you tell your Senators to support the Strengthening Social Security Act in the new Congress.

In other news, Saudi Arabia has imprisoned Raif Badawi since 2012, for the following supposed crimes: "setting up a website that undermines general security," "ridiculing Islamic religious figures," and "going beyond the realm of obedience." What had he actually done? He had hosted a website from which some writers had criticized religious officials, and had alleged that one Islamic school had become a "den for terrorists." The Saudi government tried to get him for "apostasy," too, which carries a death sentence, but haven't succeeded, though not for lack of trying. Think of whether anyone in the United States, crazy as this country has become, has advocated putting people in jail for criticizing religious figures. No one has, at least not yet. And even Harry Reid's pet bills, SOPA and PIPA, which would have stifled internet free speech in the name of "copyright infringement" and "security," met with such forceful opposition that they couldn't pass. But clearly Saudi Arabian elites must learn, even more than our elites must learn, that free speech doesn't "undermine" our security but enhances it. Amnesty International helps you tell Saudi Arabia to free Mr. Badawi.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FDA to keep AquaBounty's genetically-modified salmon off our supermarket shelves, then CREDO still helps you do that. What's the problem with Aquabounty's genetically-modified salmon? After all, AquaBounty says it safe, and what motive could it possibly have for lying, besides, you know, making gobs and gobs of money? Aquabounty has modified this salmon so that it grows twice as fast as salmon normally grow and eats five times what normal salmon eat, which means it would wreak havoc on nearby aquatic environments if it ever escapes a fish farm -- which it will, sooner or later, especially given AquaBounty's well-documented inability to keep its own salmon within its Panama breeding facility. You have to wonder if that's the idea -- to turn all salmon into perpetual teenage salmon, consequences to the food chain be damned. It gets worse: our government doesn't require labeling of GMO food, so the only way you'll know you haven't eaten it is if you eat USDA-certified organic salmon -- and, well, when Aquabounty's salmon gets out, maybe not even then.

Around the table: the Affordable Care Act limits health insurance CEO pay! And other things you may not know.

Burger King plans to buy the Canadian donut/coffee chain Tim Hortons -- so it can reincorporate as a Canadian corporation and pay less money in U.S. taxes. The move already has American customers declaring they'll never buy a Whopper again, but I feel compelled to ask: if corporations have the "rights of personhood," how then do corporations get to buy one another, given that people have the right not to be bought by other people?

I didn't know this, either, but apparently an obscure section of the Affordable Care Act prevents health insurance corporations from deducting more than $500,000 of a CEO's salary from their tax bill. Whether it's "performance pay" or not, no less. The writer hopes this'll spread to all corporations -- I'm more a fan of the 91% tax bracket myself, but if closing the performance pay loophole has the same effect, I'll be happy to say I was wrong.

The state of Pennsylvania strikes a deal with the Obama Administration to expand Medicaid to 500,000 residents. Pennsylvania will get to charge premiums to these residents, who probably thought their taxes were already paying for it, but the state can charge only 2% of a resident's income, and only if that resident makes from 100 and 133 percent of the federal poverty line. So Tom Corbett can tell the voters he got the expansion done, which won't placate the liberals who've been telling him to do that for years -- and explaining that his big win was getting to charge people for it will only excite those who are already voting for him.

Vanity Fair notes that Time-Warner's massive internet outage on Wednesday, affecting most of their customers, reminds us that monopolists can't be trusted to deliver even decent service. And it comes at a perfect time -- when Comcast wants to buy Time-Warner and create one even bigger corporations controlling even more of America's broadband. Comcast is no doubt preparing PR releases saying see? Let us buy them so we can improve their customer service! But as we know, that would be a little like asking the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers to buy the 2008 Detroit Lions so the former can "improve" the latter.

Finally, Mitch McConnell says who, me? at charges that he's willing to risk a government shutdown to get what he wants if Republicans win the Senate. He even said "I am the guy that gets us out of shutdowns," a claim which no doubt caused Paul Ryan to lift an eyebrow. But if he's just signaled his willingness to fold like a house of cards if Mr. Obama dares him to, I don't know why I should look upon him more kindly.

Around the table: tax issues, solar mirrors, mortgage interest deductions -- we're bringing sexy back!

Citizens for Tax Justice covers tax issues in Pennsylvania's upcoming gubernatorial election. I did not know, incidentally, that Pennsylvania's constitution bars a progressive income tax, which is largely why the state income tax rate is a flat 3%. Mr. Wolf, the Democratic nominee, has suggested raising the rate to 5% but exempting the first $30,000 of income, which would have a more progressive effect than the flat rate currently does; he also supports a 5% severance tax on gas drillers, which, as you may recall, the incumbent Gov. Corbett once called "un-American," which is what politicians like to call a lot of popular stuff.

Alex Ulam at The American Prospect notes that the mortgage interest deduction is rather more popular with the people than it is useful. It's actually fairly popular in my household, too, but when I think about it relatively objectively I can see no good reason to dump it -- I might lower the cap a bit more than Rep. Ellison would (he'd lower it from $1.1 million in mortgages to $500,000), but being mindful that a lot of middle-class folks are paying mortgages on housing bubble-priced homes, I wouldn't lower it that much more.

Another day, another story about birds catching fire as they fly over a solar plant, another time I feel compelled to add that we've read about this before, and it's not about the kind of solar panels you'd put on your roof, but a "solar plant" where mirrors reflect sunlight onto water boilers -- which, as I've said before, seems a rather roundabout way of creating "solar power." Why mirrors and not solar panels in one of the sunniest areas on Earth? A real solar farm would be harder to build, perhaps, but doing the right thing is always harder.

Arthur Delaney and Sam Stein catch Paul Ryan writing in his book calling the 2013 government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act a "suicide mission," without mentioning that he wanted to attach all kinds of other conditions to continued government funding at the time. In other words, he thought shutting down the government over health care was a bad idea, but shutting down the government in order to force more austerity on the American people was a good idea. Remember that when they try to shut down the government again before Election Day.

Finally, Kentucky blogger shows up at a town hall meeting with Sen. McConnell advertised to be open to the public, only to find that it's actually not open to the public. I'd say that's the kind of blunder that ends campaigns, but it didn't take down the aforementioned Mr. Ryan or Rep. Barletta (R-PA) when they charged admission fees to their town hall meetings back in 2011, and Uncle Mitch does have lots of campaign free speech money to play with. Still, Alison Grimes should make sure this arrow's in her quiver.

Penny rants: a hostage crisis, a campaign promise, a bad review, and an app for our divided times.

The New York Times informs us that ISIS wanted a ransom of over $100 million in exchange for the life of James Foley, the journalist they just brutally executed -- and the United States wouldn't pay it. Apparently our government did try (and fail) to rescue Mr. Foley and other hostages. But why do I get the feeling that Mr. Obama's stark refusal to pay this sizable ransom won't actually soothe right-wingers who constantly squeal that liberals always negotiate with terrorists? It couldn't have anything to do with Mr. Obama's partisan affiliation, could it? And I eagerly await the first right-winger to tell me that BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA JUST KILLED TEH HOSTAGEZ!!!! just so I can remind them that ISIS killed the hostages. I mean, conservatives hate liberals for blaming the wrong people all the time, right? So you may comfortably conclude that folks who would accuse Mr. Obama of "killing hostages" are not conservative, regardless of what they say they are, or how loudly they say it.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (E-KY) laid out his plans for bringing President Obama back in line if Republicans take the Senate in November. And the very first thing he said to Politico was that his main concern was the good citizens of Kentucky, whom he represents and before whom he must account himself in the upcoming elections. Ha ha, I kid, of course -- this is the man who famously said in 2010 that his "number-one job" in the Senate was ensuring Mr. Obama was a one-term President, and not, say, representing the will of those who elected him to do so. The "plan," such as it is, is to pass spending bills that place "a lot of restrictions on the activities of the bureaucracy" -- particularly the EPA, the one halfway-decent Obama alphabet agency -- and then dare the President to veto them, risking a government shutdown if he does. Right, because shutdowns always work so well for Republicans. If Alison Lundergan Grimes can't run ads about Mitch McConnell's "plans" being more important than the will of good Kentuckians, she deserves to lose this race.

Here's a bolt from the blue in Nevada's Attorney General race: Republican nominee Adam Laxalt -- grandson of former Nevada Governor/U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt -- received a bad first review from the law firm that employed him. Among the chestnuts: "He has horrible client service toward his partners," "His work is sloppy," "Jorgenson (his supervisor) said he had to babysit the cases more than he expected," "He doesn't even have the basic skill set," "He is a train wreck," "he ought to look into attending some legal writing CLE seminars and other CLEs that address basic legal principles" -- and, also, "his self-assessment is glowing," and has "typos." His now-former employer has since asserted that "the review documents being discussed in the media do not represent the current view of Lewis Roca Rothgerber LLP about Adam," plus they weren't for the public to know anyway. But Mr. Laxalt sure does sound like someone who counted on his pedigree (he is also the son of former New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici) to do his work for him.

Finally, the Washington Post seems very, very upset about the release of an app called BuyPartisan, which allows you to scan product barcodes and learn what percentage the product's manufacturer gives to Democratic or Republican campaigns. The Post "hope(s) BuyPartisan fails," because folks already "refuse to marry, socialize and live near people who disagree with their partisan affiliation. If the app succeeds, it would be a sign that Democrats and Republicans aren’t even willing to do business with one another any longer." They say that like it's a bad thing. We have the right, as Americans, to associate with whom we like -- as long as we're not actively depriving others of their rights -- and to shun those whom we think deserve shunning. But the Post seems afraid that Americans will have more tools with which they may shun and shame other Americans. Why? Because they couldn't peddle their Democrats-and-Republicans-coming-together-to-do-whatever-Republicans-want brand of "bipartisanship" as easily?

Around the table: financial service reform leaps ahead of health care reform, and other stories.

The federal health care exchanges may not be doing so well (though the state exchanges seem to be doing rather better), but Mike Konczal informs us that the derivative exchanges mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law of 2010 are actually going quite swimmingly, bringing transparency to the kinds of derivatives that crashed the economy in 2008 because regulators weren't watching them very closely. They're even regulating foreign derivatives transactions, a policy for which we've advocated here. It's a shame Mr. Obama will never be able to sell the phrase "swap execution facility" as well as his opponents have sold "Obamacare."

Weren't we just saying that maybe healthcare.gov shouldn't have outsourced its building to private corporations? Well, here comes Nation of Change's Paul Buchheit, giving us "Six Reasons Why" "Public Beats Private." For-real for-real, he's got more than six -- this is a pretty comprehensive list, if also a bit scattershot. Still, I bet you didn't know the USPS's 2-day price is actually $14 cheaper than FedEx's, did you? And pay attention to reason #5, "The Private Sector Has Incentive to Fail, or No Incentive at All," which won't surprise anyone who remembers all those banksters getting bonuses for no good reason.

CNN poll finds that more than half of Americans think it's a "bad thing" that Republicans control the House, and almost two-thirds want to replace John Boehner as Speaker. But before we break open the champagne bottles, we should remember that midterms are still over a year away, and a lot can happen between now and then, as Charlie Cook's analysis reminds us. Long story short: a lot has to happen before Democrats can retake the House in 2014 -- although now just about all of it is possible.

Kelly Phillips Erb at Forbes reminds us that giving away your Social Security number is a) a bad idea and b) frequently unnecessary anyway. Read the whole thing, and remember that a little assertiveness will help you on your way to keeping identity thieves away from your personal information.

Finally, George Washington University reveals that, despite its oft-stated commitment to "need-blind" admissions, it's actually favored wealthier students in the admissions process. And THAT! IS THE MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! HAVE EVER! HEARD!

Action: bankster settlements and debt ceilings.

Over the weekend, we learned that J.P. Morgan Chase has tentatively agreed to pay $13 billion in fines to settle mortgage lending abuse cases with the Department of Justice -- and that settlement won't allow it to escape criminal prosecution over at least some of their alleged wrongdoings. So yay Justice Department! But note well that J.P. Morgan Chase might actually get to deduct this "loss" from their taxes, such that the taxpayers -- that's you and I, dear reader -- will be on the hook for $4.5 billion of that. I know, I know, $13 billion minus $4.5 billion is still $8.5 billion, but why should we tolerate J.P. Morgan Chase getting a $4.5 billion handout for doing wrong? Fortunately, we don't have to tolerate it: the Justice Department can forbid them from deducting the penalties from their taxes, as part of the settlement. So USPIRG helps you tell the Justice Department not to let J.P. Morgan Chase deduct its penalties from its income at tax time.

Meanwhile, if you're as sick of Republican hostage-taking as I am, you might be interested in telling Congress to abolish the debt ceiling, which CREDO helps you do. Congress used to raise the debt ceiling routinely, and didn't even separate raising the debt ceiling from routine appropriations bills until Newt Gingrich became Speaker in 1995. All through the 2000s, Republicans routinely raised the debt ceiling, despite passing many fiscally-irresponsible bills -- it was only in 2011, with a Democrat President and an ongoing economic Armageddon, that Republicans suddenly "found their voice." And what a shrill voice it's been, one that conflates "fiscal responsibility" only with spending cuts, and spending cuts borne almost entirely by working families, at that! Even our current "fiscal hawk" House actually increased big corporate agricultural subsidies, while wagging their fingers at the growing number of Americans who need food stamps. So I say they don't get a "debt ceiling" to play with.

Action: protecting Social Security and Medicare, and paying fast-food workers decently.

The Republicans might look bad now because of their little shutdown drama, but Public Citizen reminds us that the continuing resolution Congress passed also preserved sequester budget cuts and mandated further negotiations over budget cuts -- and Republicans will almost certainly demand Social Security and Medicare cuts, and President Obama may well give in to these demands. Plus, of course, we'll almost certainly be doing the shutdown dance again in mid-January. Thus Public Citizen helps you tell President Obama to keep Social Security and Medicare off the table in these negotiations. Hell, in addition to (or instead of!) playing defense, why not tell Congress, again, to strengthen Social Security, as the Harkin/Begich bills would do? Why not demand that Congress allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices? That would reduce Medicare costs, which would be a lot better than reducing Medicare benefits. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Too often it does -- to everyone but our political elites.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell fast-food corporations to pay their workers a living wage, CREDO still helps you do that. If you've worked at a fast-food restaurant, you already know it's hard work, and you already know that $8/hour isn't a fair wage. If you care about stimulating the economy for-real for-real, then you know hiking up fast-food workers' wages to $15/hour would give a lot of people a lot more money to spend, and you also know that it wouldn't result in 20% unemployment or $10 Big Macs, either -- though it might result in CEOs having to pay themselves a little less. But if you know someone who hates how everybody gets to feed at the government trough but them, tell them they have every reason to support higher wages for fast-food workers, for over half of fast-food workers don't make enough to stay off food stamps and Medicaid, and that's taxpayer money -- our money -- going to fast-food workers because fast-food CEOs only care about their money. Always get mad at the right people, that's what I say.

Action: budget reporting, land grabs, and shutdown dramas.

MoveOn helps you demand that the New York Times report on what federal budget items cost in the context of the larger budget. In other words, the Times shouldn't tell us that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting soaks up about $400 million annually without also mentioning that the federal government spent about $3.3 trillion in 2012. If the Times told you that, then you'd know that NPR takes up a little more than one one-hundredth of one percent of the federal budget -- that's right, not one percent, but one percent of one percent -- and you might then think that fiscal "hawks" who whine about spending money on NPR might be full of soup. You'd be right to ask "why just the Times?" After all, the entire "liberal" media does a lousy job of reporting on budgetary items in context. Hell, they do a lousy job reporting on anything involving numbers! But if the Times starts doing it right, other papers will have no excuse to keep doing wrong.

Meanwhile, Oxfam has reported that Coca-Cola and PepsiCo benefit rather immensely from relationships with suppliers who steal land from indigenous peoples to grow sugar. If you're inclined to think (as I am) that your sugar habit is a lot more trouble than it's worth, consider this another impetus to ditch the habit -- and if you're at all familiar with the story of how the sugar trade absolutely ruined Central America over the last few hundred years, you'll find sad, sad echoes here also. We're not talking about lands seized via eminent domain -- we're talking about big sugar suppliers forcing people off their land, without their consent, without payment, occasionally violently. Coke responds by telling us very carefully exactly whom they don't buy "directly" from, which isn't the tiniest bit suspicious, and Pepsi tells us their suppliers have assured them they're following all "applicable" laws, which must be a tremendous comfort to the subsistence farmer whose house just got burned down. Thus Sum of Us helps you tell Coke and Pepsi to ensure their supply chain is uncorrupted by suppliers who steal land.

Finally, hot on the heels of the government shutdown/debt limit deal that got nothing for Republicans other than deep knowledge about the taste of dung but sets up another shutdown/debt limit crisis at the beginning of 2014, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to end these artificial hostage crises and start governing like responsible adults. OK, the Sierra Club didn't actually say "start governing like responsible adults," but nothing in the world prevents you from telling them that. No, really: they need to hear it. They need to hear, from their constituents, that we're on to their games and that we hate their games, especially when their little shutdown drama allowed over 800,000 gallons of fracked natural gas to spill in North Dakota with nobody to clean it up. The Sierra Club makes a number of good suggestions -- public campaign financing, restoring the Voting Rights Act, changing rules that allow minorities to hijack our government -- and you can, of course, add to them. But don't be afraid to tell them you're angry. They need to know you're angry.

Action: the government shutdown drama drags on, plus an anti-"conversion" "therapy" bill in Pennsylvania.

Everyone had enough of the shutdown yet? I sure have. MoveOn, the National Priorities Project, and CREDO all help you tell Congress to end the shutdown drama, and that's that. And let's not pretend this shutdown has been about the Affordable Care Act. Of course that's what Republicans said it was about at the beginning, before they realized how stupid that sounded, but that's not what it was about. This was about Republicans doing whatever they could to serve their corporate paymasters, and nothing else. No, I don't believe Wall Street has been breathing down John Boehner's neck telling him to avoid a default -- more likely, they know forcing a government default, with all the chaos and misery it'll cause, is their last chance to get our government out of their way for all time. All that stands between them and getting their debtors' prisons back is our will. We've given our Reps their orders, and still they pretend they're helpless, so we tell them again, and again, and again, until they can ignore it no longer.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell Pennsylvania legislators to support SB 872, which would ban "conversion therapy" for minors in the state. Gov. Brown signed such a ban in California earlier this year, and Gov. Christie signed a similar ban in New Jersey last month -- a deed I'm sure won't go unpunished by Republican primary voters in 2016 -- but Pennsylvania doesn't exactly have the most forward-minded legislature or executive. I mean, what bon mot would Tom Corbett bust out in defending "conversion therapy"? Seriously, though, this isn't a case where you just let parents make this decision, because parents don't get to inflict junk science on their children. Don't take my word for it -- take the word of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association. Also note well that "conversion therapy" actually makes gay kids more depressed, even suicidal. Parents typically don't want that for their kids.

Around the table: health care lies, "free" trade lies, and other stories.

Here, at last, you may find a truly inspired takedown of an Eric Cantor whinefest op-ed in the Washington Post. I actually did read the original op-ed, and it clearly describes events occurring in some alternate universe where the "clean CR" the Republicans won't pass doesn't give them 95% of what they wanted in the first place -- and where Barack Obama doesn't bend over backwards to work with Republicans who deserve only to be worked around.

David Sirota reveals our elite overlords' "plot against pensions." Read it all, so you know what to say when some ninny says ZOMG $1.3 TRILLYUNZ IN UNFUNDED PENSIONZ!!! Namely, a) that figure represents a gap over 30 years, so it's actually a much smaller number every year and b) that figure gets even smaller when you put it next to expected revenues. I'd add that the figure gets smaller when you consider how many states, municipalities, and localities America has.

In case you were wondering how/if the "liberal" media had been covering the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" negotiations, FAIR finds an NPR flack actually comparing the nefarious "free" trade deal to a "poker game" with "a pot full of jobs." Actually, the NPR flack is about half-right: the TPP is more like a casino run by the big corporations, where the house always wins! But the "pot full of jobs"? About as likely as the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

Surprise, surprise, the Affordable Care Act actually doesn't hurt small businesses like Republicans claim, but actually helps small businesses. Not just that the employer mandate (which Mr. Obama foolishly put off another year) doesn't actually affect businesses with fewer than 50 employees (meaning most of them!), but that it also keeps insurance corporations from jacking up premiums on small businesses if only one or two employees get sick, which, as you might expect, hurts small businesses more because they don't have the bargaining power of bigger corporations.

FactCheck makes a herculean effort to disprove a John Boehner assertion that the medical device tax has shipped "tens of thousands" of American jobs overseas. Personally I think if it comes out of John Boehner's mouth you should automatically assume it's crap, but at least we learn, through FactCheck's efforts, that Stryker (one of the big medical device corporations) has actually increased its workforce by almost 2,000 since the tax went into effect.

Another day, another right-wing state legislator calling President Obama "de fuhrer" (sic), this time for enforcing the government shutdown of national parks. And of course she doubles down, saying she didn't actually use the word "Hitler" when talking about Mr. Obama (clearly she meant that other "fuhrer"!) and blaming the press for not parsing the meaning of the words "democracy" and "republic" exactly as a right-winger would, and saying it's all Obama's fault anyway, clearly for not capitulating to Republicans 120% of the time. Anybody ever heard of Brenda Barton before? Me neither. Now let's never speak of her again.

Finally, an amateur Biblical scholar claims the Romans invented Jesus to pacify the Jews. And here's a pretty good counterpoint, if you like. I don't suspect that Mr. Atwill's theory, if persuasive (and it's not even very good realpolitik, actually!), would affect the value of Jesus's teachings very much -- would "love thy neighbor" or "help the poor" suddenly become bad ideas?

Around the table: the stupid, it burns!

Massive salmonella outbreak hits at least 18 states. And where's the Centers for Disease Control during this crisis? Operating with a skeleton crew, like most of our government. It's a big deal that we don't have the CDC at full power, because much of what it can do (like deploy lab resources in cross-state investigations) can't be done by anyone else and (just like we discussed yesterday) prevents future problems from even happening. At the risk of piling on, it's also flu season.

Been hearing John Boehner whine that Barack Obama won't compromise with him? Well, the Center for American Progress reminds us that the Senate "clean" continuing resolution already represents a compromise -- the Senate CR is much closer to the Ryan budget's levels of discretionary spending than Mr. Obama's original 2009 proposal for FY 2014. In other words, some victory this will be, if indeed we get Republicans to back down -- they've won basically 95% of the battle. Had enough of that yet?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reminds us of one fairly obvious way NSA spying makes us less safe -- the NSA insists on "backdoors" to internet systems that hackers can later walk through. They also remind us, not incidentally, that then-Sen. John Ashcroft (R-MO) was once on the right side of a debate, and that, once upon a time, a Republican being on the right side of a debate actually meant something. (Fast-forward to 2004, even, when Mr. Ashcroft's opposition to warrantless wiretapping meant bupkus to George W. Bush, even though Mr. Ashcroft was, like, Attorney General of the U.S. at the time.)

Finally, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) instructs us that Mr. Obama's non-existent arm-al-Qaeda-in-Syria program proves not only that "the end times are here" but that we should "rejoice" at the prospect. To wit, as it were: "the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in God’s end times history...Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand." And that's the sound of someone flinging feces against the wall in the hope you throw up your hands and walk away. Odd, then, that she's the one walking away at the end of her term.

Around the table: our long national nightmare continues!

Mike Konczal instructs us as to how "the non-essential parts of government that shut down are actually quite essential." Not just the parts that conduct economic research (miss that jobs report Friday? That's because there wasn't one), or the parts that clean up over 500 Superfund toxic sites, or (even) the parts that keep poor working women and children fed -- there's also the parts that invest in technological and biomedical breakthroughs. This may be why we don't have a hundred Coxie's Armies outside of the Capital right now -- the government shutdown's worst effects won't be felt for some time.

On Sunday, the House Majority PAC ran this ad, comparing John Boehner to a baby throwing a temper tantrum, in the Cincinnati area during the Bengals-Patriots game. I'd have preferred that the ad had depicted an adult in diapers thrashing about and kicking and throwing things, but it's good to see mainstream Democrat politicos finally making the argument I've been making for the last decade. I'd also have preferred they didn't run the ad during a football game -- sure, you get eyeballs out the wazoo, but a political ad is approximately the last thing football fans want to watch during a game.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has blocked the release of a book detailing their failed "Fast and Furious" sting operation, saying it would have "a negative effect on morale" in ATF's Phoenix office. That's right, not even because it contains NASHUNUL SECURITIEZ SECRITZ!!!! Hard to believe the ATF thought that reasoning could survive the light of day -- maybe they were desperate, or they did it because they could. Memo to Rand Paul: if you're looking to actually do some good in the Senate, this might be your chance.

Finally, public universities look to become more "autonomous" from state control, by making deals in which they get less oversight in exchange for (for example) less state funding. It's like they don't understand that the "state," no matter how it acts, still belongs to the people and is subject to the people's will. Public universities would thus do much better persuading people that what they want for themselves is best for everyone. I wonder why they don't.

Action: the shutdown drama and ENDA.

The shutdown of our government continues apace, unlikely to end until we run up against the debt limit in a little over a week, so CREDO helps you tell Speaker Boehner to call for a vote on a clean continuing resolution so that our government can operate again. The fun part? CREDO also plans to give Mr. Boehner one pacifier for every person who signs on to their petition. I've been calling right-wingers crybabies for years, but this is some imaginative activism. Remember when right-wingers always called liberals crybabies just for caring about stuff? Now we can give them some of their own. I wouldn't worry about whether sending a hundred thousand pacifiers to John Boehner will "only alienate him more" -- there must be a point where such alienation sickens even him. At least, I have faith that such a point exists. And if getting there requires that he suffer more spiritual hardship in the near term, who am I to question?

Meanwhile, People for the American Way provides an outstanding toolkit with which you may tell your Congressfolk to support ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. (If you need contact info for your Congressfolk, use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page.) I've addressed, on several occasions, the many non-reality-based objections one might have to ENDA -- that it confers "special rights" upon gays (it doesn't even confer affirmative action!), or that it would allow gays to dress flamboyantly at work without reprisals (it pointedly does not abridge a boss's right to determine a dress code for workers) -- but PFAW's toolkit summarizes five "religious" objections to ENDA, and you should brace yourself for how repugnant they are. It destroys our religious freedom! It's Jim Crow revisited! It'll put child molesters in charge of our kids! Well, as the gospel song says, sooner or later God'll cut 'em down.

Around the table: more foolish behavior from our government, plus a ray of hope for HIV treatment.

The New York Times reports that the NSA has been drawing social connections between and among Americans using the vast amount of metadata it collects. But they say they've only been using it when there's a "foreign intelligence justification," pinky swear, though of course they decided to expand this effort without any oversight in late 2010. We have two choices: trust our government, or be Americans.

Several Republican members of Congress suddenly aren't sure if furloughed government employees will get back pay resulting from the shutdown. Here's a clue: if you caused government workers to work without pay, you pay them for the work they did -- and if you caused government workers not to work because you couldn't fund the government, you pay them for the work they could have done. Really, they're writing new campaign ads for the other side every day. (Not that we'll ever see them -- after all, Democrats would have to run them, and they won't, because civility.)

Speaking of the shutdown, dig this wack quotation from Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN): "We're not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is." But why should anyone care what Republicans "get" out of this whole mess? And why should we care whether any of them feel "disrespected"? The only respect they should worry about is the respect they earn from their constituents. Really, it ain't that damn deep.

Because so many Congressfolk (including both my Senators!) have such a hard-on for abolishing the medical device tax in the Affordable Care Act, Citizens for Tax Justice explains why the tax isn't such a bad idea. Long story short: most of the medical device industry's complaints are irrelevant -- really, what's going to drive down demand for medical devices, besides large numbers of people suddenly preferring pain and misery? -- and, like, yo, it's a measly 2.3% tax, which won't even get levied on American medical devices exported overseas. They already got the weak medical device law they wanted from Congress last year; how much is enough for them?

Finally, University of Florida and University of California-San Francisco researchers have found that blood from folks with HIV can show an immune response if confronted with a protein from FIV, or feline immunodeficiency virus. Worst case scenario: we'll learn more about how to vaccinate against HIV by seeing what it has in common with FIV, or come up with a better vaccine for FIV. Cats suffer just as much as we do, after all, though they do their damndest never to let on.

Action: against more government shutdown drama.

The most recent continuing resolution expires today, meaning our federal government will begin to shut down tomorrow if Congress takes no action. But the Republicans are already looking ahead to the next drama -- in mid-October, when our government hits the debt ceiling. If you remember how much fun the last one was, brace yourself: the New York Times reports that Republicans have put together a list of demands to which Democrats must accede so the debt limit can go up again. Take a gander at the eleven-count-'em-eleven demands the Republicans make in paragraphs 12 and 13. How many of those have an army with pitchforks at the waiting? I mean, sure, people are a bit antsy about the Affordable Care Act, and maybe a lot of folks think an "all of the above" energy policy must include tar sands oil, but how many good Americans would put our government into default over either of these items? And where's the popular groundswell against coal ash regulations or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or limiting medical malpractice lawsuits? Outside of corporate boardrooms and Glenn Beck's viewership, who'll run through a wall to get this laundry-list enacted?

Now, we're not just about saying "no" all the time, though Congress gives us plenty of reasons to say no -- we're all about putting solutions forward, too. Remember our list of revenue-raising ideas from right after the last debt-limit debacle in 2011? Well, Congress ain't done any of 'em, so we should feel free to bring them up again. Remember our list of spending-cutting ideas from early January? Congress can't be bothered to enact any of those, either, since creating more drama is so much easier, for them as for the "liberal" media, so we can bring those up, too. You can look over the Republican ransom list, then look over the two lists from this paragraph, and use them to write your own list -- and then, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page, find email addresses and phone numbers for your Reps and Senators, and then call or write them, whichever makes you more comfortable. (You can always write something and then refer to it during a phone call.)

Now, since our government is supposed to do things on our behalf and at our behest, I oppose a government shutdown, even if I despise most of the folks in Congress who are running things. But I'd rather have our government go into default, with all the mayhem that'll cause, than ever play this game with Republicans again. What else will induce them to act like civilized human beings? Not our President, that's for sure -- I know, I know, he's talked a good game this time around, but I bet he gets his Grand Bargain itch again and his I-have-to-look-Presidential itch again and gives away more to Republicans than he ever has to. And when push comes to shove, the Senate will work with the House on something no less awful for being a "compromise." Whom does that leave? That leaves us; that leaves our voices; that leaves our will, sacrosanct in this democracy, and when our elected leaders hear us, when they realize that we're not "scared," that we're not "threatened," they'll finally get what years of losing elections and nonexistent popularity ratings haven't already helped them figure out. But first, we've got to speak out.