Thieves in the Temple.

Penny rants for June 23, 2022: special "right-wingers still suck" edition!

Texas's state police head testifies, at a state House committee meeting, that enough police were at the Uvalde school quickly enough, and were armed enough, to stop the massacre, and though the officers' failure to check an unlocked door sure doesn't make them look good, we should suspect a narrative that places all the blame on one guy, in this case Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo. But admittedly I'd also suspect a narrative that places all the blame on "lack of training," tired as I am of trying to make police into the Swiss Army knives of our civilization. What narrative would I not suspect? The one that finally admits that "more cops" isn't the answer to every conceivable problem, that "freedom" doesn't mean more and bigger guns for everyone so much as the freedom not to get mass-murdered, and that we can in fact keep semi-automatic guns off the streets without touching handguns or rifles. Can we get used to a world where we don't reflexively trust police? Of course we can! We're Americans, after all.

So now Trumpholes are putting up fake wanted posters on social media supposedly depicting folks who helped "steal" the vote for Joe Biden, and probably the only thing saving these Trumpholes from multiple defamation lawsuits is that potential plaintiffs don't know they're out there like that. Of course social media corporations suck at their job – by which I mean they’re failing to enforce their own standards for using their sites! – but dig this response from True the Vote's founder about "voter fraud": "I do think that when 80%+ of America is concerned about election integrity, something must be done to address the situation." We can easily guess that 80% figure doesn't describe what she wants you to think it describes, but why would "80% of America concerned about election integrity" mean the "something" that "must be done" should be "we should randomly accuse people of election fraud"? Hell, why does it mean "we should make it harder to vote"? This is what right-wingers do: identify "problems" and then tell you their solutions are the only solutions.

Finally, I haven’t been watching the January 6 hearings with any regularity, because I don’t need to be told who the assholes are, and how much of my rage do I really want to relive? But I will note the testimony of Shaye Moss and her mother, “Lady Ruby” Freeman, two Georgia election workers targeted by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani as “election stealers.” But most news reports haven’t foregrounded the fact that Trump supporters forced their way into Ms. Moss’s grandmother’s house and yelled that they were making a “citizen’s arrest” on the pair. Get ready for a lot more of that garbage as Republicans lose more elections. That only makes me angry, though – hearing that Ms. Freeman felt guilty over maybe being the “cause” of her family’s stress made me sad. I wish more Americans understood who really causes their pain, and I wish more bad people felt guilty about causing that pain. I don’t even mean Messrs. Trump and Giuliani, because they're irredeemable; I mean the would-be “citizen” cops, who may not be.

Action: concerning mass murder, education, monopolies, nukes, corruption, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to invest in counselors-not-cops in schools, pass the College for All Act, the American Innovation Choice Online Act, and the Open App Markets Act, reject funding for certain nuclear weapons programs, pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our state, local, and federal governments that we need to invest in counselors and service workers in our schools — and not cops. The right-wing solution to every problem is “more cops,” but we live in a world where more teachers have foiled mass murderers in schools than cops have. And we just witnessed a mass shooting where police arrived but didn’t engage the shooter! And that’s not a good argument to put more cops in schools. I hope America has learned its lesson about making cops do every damn thing, but if not, I’ll keep teaching it.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2730/S. 1288, the College for All Act, which would eliminate tuition and fees at for all students at two-year community colleges, and for all working- and middle-class students at four-year public universities. (The bill would also eliminate tuition and fees for some students at private, historically Black universities.) This would be the way to do “free college”: by giving the most help to working families, who are most of the folks attending community colleges and public universities. If you’re an upper-class dude who wants to go to Harvard, you still can — and if you need financial help, this bill will do that better, too.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 7030/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act. The former bill would cover online platforms with more than 50,000,000 active monthly American users, and would prevent them from discriminating against competing products on their platforms and selling your private data willy-nilly; the latter bill would prevent app stores from discriminating against competing products or forcing app makers to use certain payment systems as a condition of using the market. Big tech corporations hate these bills, but what offends them doesn’t necessarily offend regular people, so let’s not let that stop us.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject more funding for the SLCM-N and B83 nuclear weapons. How useless are these weapons? So useless that President Biden, no great friend of reduced defense spending over the last half-century, has requested that our Congress not fund these weapons! The SLCM-N is a nuclear, sea-launched cruise missile, but our Navy already has conventional cruise missiles on its subs; would you like to be the one who launched the wrong missile? The B83, meanwhile, has the biggest yield of any nuclear weapon, but how well does “high-yield” do against IED-wielding terrorists? And remember: the first one to drop the bomb always loses.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7706/S. 4177, the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would make our Supreme Court Justices follow the same Code of Conduct as all other federal judges and prevent federal judges from holding any investments except those in “non-conflicted” funds (i.e., funds diversified enough that a judge or Justice would gain little or nothing by ruling a certain way in a certain case). We talk about the first item in the context of Justice Thomas’s wife running around trying to overturn the election on January 6, but the second item is also important, corruption being evil and all.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner already. Our Senate let that nomination twist in the wind so long that President Biden had to renominate her, but they’re still letting that nomination twist; why, it’s like they want to make sure net neutrality never comes back but they don’t want the blame for it! Voters love that sort of courage. And Senators from West Virginia (you know who) and Arizona (Mark Kelly this time!) say they just haven’t evaluated the nomination enough. They can’t do in 18 months what I did in 10 seconds? Ms. Sohn is one of the architects of net neutrality; that should be enough.

Action: concerning Medicare, COVID, workers, guns, pollution, and cruelty.

Long story short: tell our President to fix inflated Medicare premiums and use his Executive powers to fight the COVID pandemic, tell Delta’s CEO to do better by Delta flight attendants, tell Facebook to enforce its gun sale ban, tell our EPA to reject the proposed Pebble Mine project, and tell North Carolina to protect bears from being hunted at bear sanctuaries. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fix inflated Medicare premiums by rebating overcharges back to seniors. You may recall the issue: Medicare raised its premiums by 15%, the biggest hike in history, largely due to their decision to cover a very unproven and very expensive Alzheimer’s drug; now that Medicare has (under popular pressure, probably including yours) reversed course and will only cover the drug when used in clinical trials, the price hike ain’t necessary. So they should give the money back! They’re claiming it’s too hard, but how hard it is to issue rebate checks? They have no damn excuse and we shouldn’t tolerate it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to use the powers Congress has already granted him to keep fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, Congress should have already approved another COVID package, but our President sure ain’t helpless — he can use the Defense Production Act to manufacture more Paxlovid, for example, or he can use "march-in" rights to break through the corporate stranglehold on vaccine patents so that more folks worldwide can get the vaccine (more folks worldwide getting vaccinated, of course, means less COVID for us in the future). And those aren’t the only things he can do! He’ll do nothing, of course, if we don’t get on him about it.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Delta’s CEO that you support Delta flight attendants’ efforts to unionize. They’re the only flight attendants who haven’t unionized yet — which may well be why Delta flight attendants have to put up with staffing cuts and forced overtime and illegal shifts and their bosses changing their schedule without notice, sometimes after you’ve already flown a thousand miles and were kinda counting on getting home to pick up your kids from day care. Naturally Delta has responded to the workers’ wishes not by trying to fix the problems, but by trying to stop them from forming a union. If Delta won’t learn, we’ll have to learn ‘em.

Free Press helps you tell Facebook to actually enforce its rules banning gun sales on Facebook pages. Hey, it’s their rule! And currently you have to break that rule 10 times before they even look in your direction, and by then, the kid who could’ve cured cancer might be dead in a bloody heap in his biology class. Facebook also lets folks post “calls to arms” on its site, because free speech I guess, even though demanding that everyone actually take up weapons for your cause isn’t necessarily First Amendment-protected speech. Telling everyone to tell Facebook to actually enforce its own rules and stop actively making the world a worse place? I’m pretty sure that’s First Amendment-protected. And necessary!

Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to protect Alaska’s Bristol Bay from the notorious Pebble Mine project. Yes, it still walks, despite all the head shots we’ve given it! And not just us, either — even Scott Pruitt’s EPA was none too eager to rubber-stamp copper mining in the Bristol Bay, home to (among other things) the last great wild salmon fishery employing tens of thousands of good Alaskans. And plenty of potential financiers have pulled their support from Pebble Mine as well. And when all that happens, some too-rich dude will stillsay no one likes it, so I’ll make a killing off it! Sadly, that won’t be the only killing going on if our EPA lets this project proceed.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell North Carolina legislators to ban killing bears in bear sanctuaries. Yes, our world is so sick, immoral, and decadent that we have to tell legislators to do that, lest some too-rich dude come along and threaten sanctuary workers’ jobs if they don’t let him bag a trophy. Thinking maybe this was a workaround for a population-control issue at sanctuaries? If so, you were giving the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission too much credit! The Commission said it was about letting hunters hunt more, and also about bear-human conflicts later resolved by (get this) bear-proofing food lockers! Like I said, sick, immoral, and decadent — unless we fight.

Around the table: more thoughts about how bad people kill good ideas.

Researchers in Liberia find that offering a small amount of cash and eight weeks of behavioral therapy to folks at risk of committing crimes actually reduces crime, and now that experiment is coming to Chicago. Although the Chicago program offers job training in place of cash, this is still exactly the kind of thing right-wingers will easily lie about — as opposed to all the things they labor absurdly to lie about now, of course — because we can all imagine a lot of Americans saying well-where’s-mine, as well as what’s-next-giving-them-drugs? and of course so-we’re-giving-crooks-therapy-now? Here’s the thing, though: you can always respond "well, more cops and more guns sure ain’t doing the job, so how about we try something that works?"

When I hear that some 44% of Republicans think mass shootings are just the price of freedom in America, I find that maps pretty well onto my supposition that about a quarter of the American electorate is batshit crazy. These Republicans are just doing what their thought leaders tell them, but it’s still a sad statement, and dare I say an un-American one. I mean, what kind of can-do American just gives up at the thought of mass murders of children? Also, the 56% who don’t believe mass shootings are "just the price of freedom" will still almost certainly vote for insane Republicans just because they're not Democrats, and then guess what? Nothing will get done.

Ever wonder why you don’t remember your own birth or all the milestones (first words, learning to walk) your parents never shut up about? Vanessa LoBue at The Conversation explores the nature of infant memories. Long story short: babies do form memories from the start — they recognize their mother almost right away and remember more faces as the months go on — but they don’t form (or can’t retrieve) autobiographical memories, or stories about themselves, until they’re 2 or 3, possibly because they don’t use language until about that time, or possibly because the hippocampus isn’t fully developed yet.

Again we hear that Social Security will pay all of its planned benefits through 2035, and again our "liberal" media covers this as a catastrophic event, with no apparent memory of the time they said Social Security would be tapped out in 2016, for example. I say "apparent" memory because I actually doubt they really don’t remember; I think they just gin up hysteria about Social Security because it grabs eyeballs and makes them money. I’ll give our "liberal" media some credit for admitting that raising the payroll cap is a way of strengthening Social Security (though I’ll give liberal blogger Atrios more credit for that!), but all these sky-is-falling predictions about pension plans never take into account that the economy grows most of the time.

Starbucks closes an Ithaca, NY store that had unionized, leading the newly-unemployed workers to call for a boycott. I've wondered why Starbucks hadn’t done this already — remember how quickly Walmart closed the Quebec store that unionized in 2007? — but with over 100 stores unionizing, I think Starbucks actually might have acted too late. And anyway, the bigger story here is that the workers at this Ithaca Starbucks went on strike in April after discovering a clogged, maggot-ridden grease trap one morning that management wouldn’t do anything about when informed. Now management is "doing something" by closing the store! That’s not very can-do of them, though, is it? After all, maggots and grease aren’t forever.

Finally, Dan Pfeiffer confronts the question "Why Do Democrats Suck at Messaging?" If you’re like me, though, you already know the answer: as with the song "Why Hip Hop Sucks in ’96," it's the money — as in "big campaign donors pay people to suck at messaging and keep Republicans in office which keeps campaign donations coming, rinse, repeat." Thus the sight of Dan Pfeiffer talking to people with money about this question is truly absurd — I mean, he’s a smart dude, so I don’t get why he doesn’t get how he comes off there. He makes a few good points, but if you don’t start with how big campaign donors infect both parties, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Action: concerning Medicare, mass murder, the war on Yemen, discrimination, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell President Biden to rebate seniors for wrongly-inflated Medicare premiums, and tell your Congressfolk to address gun violence and end the War on Yemen, and tell your Senators to pass the Equality Act and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Social Security Works helps you tell our Biden Administration to give seniors rebates on their inflated Medicare premiums. What happened? Our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) hiked Medicare premiums this year, in anticipation of being forced to cover a bad and expensive Alzheimer's drug -- but then massive popular pressure forced our Administration to cover that drug only for clinical trials, meaning those premium hikes don't need to be there. Hence, our Administration should rebate those premium hikes to actual senior citizens using Medicare. Really, it's pretty simple math, both morally and politically, so let's make sure they do it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to do something effective about gun violence. There will be room, at the end of Moms Rising's long missive, for you to say Congress should a) amend the National Firearms Act so that it covers semi-automatic weapons as well as automatic weapons and b) require gun owners to register guns, get shooting licenses, and buy liability insurance, just like we all have to do with cars. And what a burden that is upon us, I tell you! Seriously, the only "burden" is on those gun corporations that manufacture weapons of mass murder, and we must of course weigh their imaginary "burden" against our actual burden of possibly being shot dead by some rage-addled man at any moment.

Both Daily Kos and the Center for Rights and Dissent help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 87, the War Powers Act resolution aiming to end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. It's well past time for Congress to assert their war-declaring powers and put an end to this madness. One sentence from a Roots Action missive about this matter really hits home for me: "If Yemenis were treated with the value accorded Ukrainians by U.S. media, this war would have ended long ago." Yes, it would have -- millions of Yemeni children have either died from or suffered from malnutrition. So let's get our government to -- finally! -- do the right thing.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Ohio has lately passed a law allowing school officials to inspect children's genitals to make sure they're not trans athletes -- this, from the state that sent Jim Jordan to Congress. But the Equality Act would put a stop to such insanity, by adding "sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)" as one of the classes of folks you can't discriminate against in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- which would also prevent banks, landlords, and employers from discriminating against gay and trans folks. If our Senators won't stop injustice, what good are they?

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Our Senators worked so hard to obstruct her nomination that it expired at the end of 2021; President Biden dutifully renominated her, and our putative Democratic majority finally worked through all the obstructions to clear her for a vote back in March, but here we are, three months later, waiting for our Senate to put a real internet freedom warrior on our FCC like we deserve. And their excuses for inaction are getting even lamer -- oh, the Fraternal Order of Police doesn't like her? Please. West Virginia and Arizona residents will want to target their Senators especially -- and we should contact our President, too.

Around the table: featuring some of the usual suspects -- monopolists, corporate welfare kings, weak Democrats.

Actual epidemiologist David Martinez, who's worked on both COVID vaccines and COVID treatments, informs us that future COVID vaccines will have to adapt to (and predict) new COVID variants. Flu shots do this now, and they don't always predict ascendant variants perfectly because, as they say, the future is the hardest thing to predict. But better to go with what we know works, and to improve on what works, than to trust the "truth" of social media "influencers" looking for eyeballs, or right-wing media "personalities" who gin up rage for ratings.

Matt Stoller discusses how banksters are "gobbling up" baby formula manufacturing corporations like that won't make our problems even worse. Along the way he presents even more evidence of monopolists saying I want higher prices out loud. And yet folks still blame higher wages and/or more government spending for inflation, and I don't think they're "not getting it," I think they don't want to get it. But let them be complicit with this massive income-redistribution-upward scheme -- we can shame and shun them once they're out in the open, and then God'll sort 'em out at the Pearly Gates.

Ho hum, Atlantic City casinos plead pandemic-related poverty to get corporate welfare, and good citizens suffer, since cities run on tax dollars, after all, and if big corporations pay less, regular Americans pay more. And the crushing irony? The casinos actually did what any self-respecting corporation would do -- invest more heavily in online gambling after predicting that its on-site gambling would plummet due to COVID -- and still demanded, and got, the PILOT tax break! I guess right-wingers will tell us next that they "earned" the tax cut by doing the right thing! Tell that to the good citizens of Atlantic City who have one real grocery store in the casinos' shadow and whose kids have the highest level of lead exposure in the Garden State.

The National Rifle Association planned to hold a massive fundraiser at a farm owned by a nominal Democrat running for Senate in Missouri. Said candidate, Trudy Busch Valentine (yeah, of those Busches), apparently convinced the farm's board to cancel the event, but only after the Intercept published its article, and ain't no scrubbing 15 years of her family funneling money to the NRA. Actual Democrat Lucas Kunce should run ads about this, in addition to all the legitimate issues (monopolies, financial predators) he can run winning ads about. Only the furthest right folks in America still approve of the NRA, after all, and there ain't enough of them to win elections on their own; all we need to beat them is a Democrat who stands for something other than "winning," which is all a lot of losing Democrats (like Ms. Valentine) stand for.

The Biden Administration will forgive any remaining federally-backed debt owed due to attendance at the notorious Corinthian Colleges, the for-profit college chain which went defunct in 2015 after a raft of corruption-related allegations. Forgiveness, here, includes both the end of future loan payments and a rebate for past loan payments on still-outstanding loans, and this money will go mostly to folks who went to Corinthian for vocational training, exactly the folks who too often get left out of the student loan debt conversation. Now cue some crying from Marco Rubio, who called Corinthian Colleges a "constituent" back in the day, a label he has never affixed to any good Floridians who got the shaft from Corinthian.

Finally, yes, Virginia, Republicans have actually advanced a climate change "plan" that consists almost entirely of corporate welfare to the fossil fuel industry. "Streamlining permitting" mostly means "skipping reviews that would catch and prevent pollution," and the Republican plan doesn't actually set any goals for reducing emissions -- after all, why would you ever want to measure your progress? -- so you'd be right to wonder if Republicans simply concocted the worst plan they could think of, just so they could gin up rage about it. Shouldn't work, right? People hate pollution, after all! Still, Republicans have created a new constituency out of book banning this year, so I can't say they'll fail here.

Around the table: tabulating even more drama from right and center-right!

National Republicans appear to be putting one of Steve Bannon's plans into action, by training an "army" of poll workers and linking them up with local Republican D.A.s. In the short term, I expect this plan could work pretty well in places like Michigan -- though it'd work better if their gubernatorial candidates could get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, amirite? -- but it won't work as well in places like Hawaii. I'm pretty sure 2022, which Republicans figure will go their way wherever they like though voters could prove them wrong, is just a dry run for a much bigger operation in 2024, when the party's biggest dick runs for President again.

Political Wire's Taegan Goddard, writing about why he has a membership model for his website, describes pretty well why the advertising model doesn't really work for our internet anymore. If you still think the world is all publications going out and getting advertisers so they don't have to charge customers, note well that the internet advertising model involves very little active involvement from publishers; too many middlemen control the process, hence you're bound to see an ad you can't stand. Like so much of modern life -- Amazon, social media, Bluetooth-enabled appliances, pharmacy benefit managers -- internet advertising cartels may make things easier, but they don't make them better. And they don't even make things easier for you, unless you're a CEO who hates doing real work.

Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Charles Booker runs a campaign ad with a noose around his neck. I wish it were 42 seconds shorter, of course, and at first I thought attacking Rand Paul for holding up anti-lynching legislation might be a mistake, since Mr. Paul eventually co-sponsored a similar anti-lynching bill that became law and will be more than happy to tell us that repeatedly. But what if that issue's a feint? After all, Mr. Paul will still happily tell you that Medicare-for-All is slavery, and his problems with the Civil Rights Act were the first thing anyone learned about him! And those charges will stick while he thinks he's brushing the other one aside. At least, I hope it works that way. And folks won't just remember the noose around Mr. Booker's neck; they'll remember him removing it at ad's end. All in all, pretty good, but, at the risk of sounding like Gordon Lish, make it 30 seconds -- or 15.

I'm pleased to see that professional athletes (and their bosses) have doubled down on their support for gun control legislation even though (because?) professional whiners like Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) didn't like it. (Want me to evaluate Mr. Rubio's complaints about China's treatment of Uyghurs and the NBA's complicity therein? Nah, screw that -- every time Marco Rubio seems sympathetic or smart, it's a feint, meaning to draw you into some offensive drama you'd otherwise never let yourself get bogged down in.) Watch out for Philadelphia Union soccer player Alejandro Bedoya, who says "(i)t ain’t freedom that we have to now look over our backs all the time." I'd like him to become a political consultant at career's end; America suffers too much from all the numbnuts who do that now.

When I hear, for the 443rd time, that Joe Manchin really, really wants to do something about prescription drug prices by the end of the year, I am compelled to note that it's a bit rich to hear the guy most responsible for Democrats Not Doing Enough suggesting that Democrats didn't do enough. Also, he better not forget to check with America's Other One True Great and Awesome Real American President, Kyrsten Sinema, who vetoed Medicare drug price negotiation and higher tax brackets on the rich and on corporations in 2021. My advice to Democrats, not that they'd ever take it, would be to cut through the Manchinema drama, produce a bill that addresses all their "concerns," and make everyone vote on it immediately. And if certain people vote it down because "it would strangle innovation" or "it's not bipartisan enough" or "it didn't go through the committee process," then let their words hang them. We don't need more Democrats as much as we need better Democrats.

Finally, buried in this horserace account entitled "Biden battles CEOs in inflation blame game" -- everything's a "game" when losing causes someone else to suffer, right, Politico? -- we get this shameful whinefest from an unnamed "CEO of one of the country's largest banks": "They said everything was going to be different under Biden and they would be more engaged with us, and they weren’t." And all I can say is: having all the power ain't enough? We shouldn't ask banksters for advice about anything, since they've amply demonstrated over the years that they don't care about anyone but themselves; really, we should be breaking their sorry asses up into much smaller and less harmful banks, which work I hope our FTC will begin soon.

Action: concerning guns, climate change, taxes, child care, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to do something about mass-killing machines already, fight climate change, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, cap child care costs for working families, tax corporations at a minimum of 15%, and lower prescription drug prices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Today's as good a day as any other to call your Congressfolk and tell them to a) amend the National Firearms Act of 1934 to include semi-automatic guns as well as automatic ones and b) require gun owners to register their guns, get shooting licenses, and buy liability insurance. Thom Hartmann describes this plan in more detail here. Don't believe any right-wing hype that this program would "kill our freedoms," because item a) already exists and keeps automatic weapons off our streets and item b) is what we already do for automobiles. And this plan wouldn't infringe on your right to own a handgun or a hunting rifle! (If you turn your hunting rifle into a semi, see item a).)

The Green New Deal Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight climate change now. You may have heard lately that our One True Great and Real American President Joe Manchin has started talking about a climate package with Senate Majority Leader Schumer again, but forget about that, at least until they actually produce a package that may or may not improve on what we've already got. Best thing right now is simply to communicate your will that Congress do something about climate change before we're all the proverbial frogs in the proverbial pot of boiling water. In the end, their dramas don't matter; our will matters, and lasting change comes when we express our will in numbers they can't deny.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion and cap child care costs at 7% of a family's incomes. The original Build Back Better Act would have done both of these things, and neither one is on the table in the Manchin/Schumer discussions, but that only means we have to keep telling them we want these things. Millions of kids went right back into poverty when the CTC expansion ended -- and inflation didn't go down, you'll notice! -- and child care has become so absurdly expensive it now rivals health care expenses as the thing corporations will charge whatever they want for because you have to have it. That ain't America, folks.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax corporate profits at a minimum of 15% and stop letting them pretend they're making money overseas when they're making it here. This, too, relates to whatever discussions Messrs. Manchin and Schumer are having, and the 15% minimum tax appears to be the only thing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) would agree to do regarding corporate taxes. I said "appears," of course, because she doesn't "negotiate through the press." And here you thought accounting for herself to her constituents via our press was part of her job! That's because we're not galaxy brains like she is. Anyway, corporations need to pay more in taxes and we need to tell our Congressfolk that until they do it.

Finally, both Public Citizen and Drug Prices Are Too High help you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices. Public Citizen's email tool specifically mentions Medicare drug-price negotiation, while Drug Prices Are Too High's petition suggests that maybe supporting lower drug prices would help them in the midterms! And it should -- Medicare drug price negotiation foe Kurt Schrader lost his primary last week, and another Medicare drug price negotiation foe, Kathleen Rice, decided not to run for re-election; such fates should befall any politician who opposes the clear will of at least 80% of Americans. Including Kyrsten Sinema, up in 2024.

Around the table: on "solutions" and drama.

When you hear that police prioritized keeping themselves safe over confronting the Uvalde shooter as he murdered 21 kids, you may be tempted to think that makes sense, that your first duty to yourself is to keep yourself safe. But you must also remember that right-wingers dismiss any criticism of police shooting unarmed Black folks by saying hey, they put their lives on the line everyday! Plus we watch too many cop shows; fictional characters put their lives on the line 22 times a year with nary a scratch, and that, too, gives everyone the wrong idea.

Surprise, surprise, "YouTube’s Biggest Info Channels Carry Corporate News, Not Alternative Views," and could that be because Google owns it? It's a question worth asking! Corporations aren't necessarily early adopters of new technology, but they eventually come to dominate new technology because of their power, which sure argues against untrammeled corporate power as well as anything else. Should we be comforted that 81 of YouTube's 100 most-subscribed news channels come from the Global South (with more than half of them coming from India)? No, we should not -- big is big, and no matter what language it speaks, really it speaks the language of money.

Study finds that more than one out of every five Republican state legislators belongs to some far-right Facebook group. Some of these legislators defend themselves by saying the groups are made up of jes' folks -- certainly not by folks radicalized by right-wing politicians! -- but hopefully it's not news by now that right-wing groups go out of their way to find (and foreground) "normal"-looking people among their numbers. Hopefully it's not also news by now that right-wing politicians and media outlets manufacture a lot of the "wants" and "needs" jes' folks have. They also whine well, what about the far-left websites? Hopefully it's not news by now that far-left websites don't get the big social media welfare that far-right websites do, and besides, "well what about" equals "I can't win the argument on the merits."

Recall my joy that Jamie McLeod-Skinner unseated Kurt Schrader in the Oregon 5th Democratic House primary? Well, it works both ways, as a bankster-backed group has poured $1 million into defeating Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), declaring its aim to "elect solutions-oriented Democrats." Anytime you hear someone utter a phrase like "solution-oriented Democrats," understand that the only "solution" they'll tolerate is the one that lets big corporations make more money, no matter how much that hurts people. Also, hedge fund managers are speculators and who therefore shouldn't get all the say about everything, or even very much of a say about anything. The good news: Rep. Tlaib looks ready to win this fight.

The Center for Media and Democracy looks at the "Right-Wing Families" who "Bankroll (the) Most Extreme GOP Candidates Nationwide. See the Uhleins give money to folks like Rep. Paul Gosar (E-AZ), a man abandoned even by his own family, and see the Toppers indulge their love of racists and insurrectionists or do I repeat myself? I mention this in case you were thinking there's a significant difference between the "corporate wing" of the Republican Party and the "extremist wing." I'd say there's no difference -- the Republican Party has only one wing, the drama wing. And frankly it's a bit of an aerodynamic miracle that it's still airborne.

Finally, my fellow liberals have done plenty of chortling at Donald Trump's rally for Liz Cheney's opponent in the upcoming Wyoming House Republican primary, but I noticed that Mr. Trump continually attacked Ms. Cheney for being a war-monger -- her dad was Vice President during the Iraq War, after all -- which reminds us, I would hope, that Mr. Trump is nowhere near as stupid as folks think. But if Mr. Trump's anti-war argument resonates with large numbers of Wyoming Republicans, just remember that 20 years ago they were all calling you traitor for opposing the Iraq war, and if pressed about that matter now they'd almost certainly deny it. We all deserve, at the very least, that folks remember where they stood when it mattered.

Around the table: mostly about guns.

"To End Mass Shootings," Henry Giroux writes at TruthOut, "We Need to Change the Deeper Structure of Life in the U.S." The Buffalo and Uvalde shootings "represent the end points of a culture awash in guns and violence, a society that nourishes and rewards the gun industries, and values the accumulation of profits over human needs." Thus we must pursue solutions well beyond the number/kinds of guns we can get in America. And valuing "the accumulation of profits over human needs" is not "just human nature," or we wouldn't have lived in a considerably different America between roughly 1932 and 1980.

Folks are wondering why police didn't rush into the building during the Uvalde, TX school shooting, and what we find out in time might be worse than what we know right now. But here's what I know for sure: right-wingers have been selling "more cops" as the solution to virtually every law-and-order issue for decades, but "more cops" didn't save the lives of 19 kids in Uvalde, so we can surely understand the anger of parents whose children bled out before any police officers made a difference that day. How about we end the myth of the "good guy with a gun," then? And how about the next couple dozen cop-show producers give us some help with that?

Guess what? The right wing's notion of controlling school shootings by "arming teachers" is also a terrible idea! Among the problems: people shoot their guns accidentally all the time, students could get their hands on the guns, even the best shooters hit their targets less than once in five tries, police might mistake a teacher shooting at a school shooter for the school shooter, and anyway if police aren't going to lay their lives on the line why should we expect teachers to do it? Also too, we demand "more training" of folks (here teachers, elsewhere cops) in all kinds of things that aren't directly related to their field as if folks' minds are really all that flexible. It's getting to the point where I'm starting to think "more training" really means "I don't want to work to solve real problems."

Jonathan Chait at New York magazine describes "The Conservative Playbook for Deflecting Anger After Mass Shootings," and though I wouldn't call it a "conservative" playbook -- a right-wing playbook, a reactionary playbook, an asshole's playbook -- it is pretty much a masterclass in evil argument! Call your opponents "political" when your own worldview is political, say that because a policy doesn't do everything nobody should ever do anything, and then go find "causes" of mass shootings that your opponents won't fight, like "critical race theory" as Sen. Johnson did the other day. Of course, bad arguments keep winning because Democrats won't fight for good arguments.

And on cue: Sen. Bill Cassidy (E-LA) suggests we ought to keep AR-15s around because some people use them to kill feral pigs. Many questions would ensue, chief among them is an AR-15 really the only way to kill a feral pig? Even so, his objection would be moot under Thom Hartmann's proposal, the one I've supported for a couple of years now -- the AR-15 wouldn't be illegal under the Hartmann plan, but you'd have to jump through more administrative hoops to get one, which presumably someone who needed it to kill feral pigs could do. If they need it.

Finally, after a week of ballot-counting issues, Jamie McLeod-Skinner has bested Rep. Kurt Schrader in the Oregon 5th House district Democratic primary by a pretty damn decisive 13-point margin. Finally politicians are paying the price for defying the will of the people -- in Mr. Schrader's case, for opposing Medicare drug price negotiation. You know what would be even better? If Republicans started paying the price for opposing the will of the people! Of course, you need fewer Democrats like Kurt Schrader, and more Democrats like Jamie McLeod-Skinner, to be able to do that, and the party establishment tends to enable the former and destroy the latter.

Around the table: useful idiots, everywhere!

Lots of good ways to think about our current predicament in Ben Debney's article "Culture Wars Defend the Minority of the Opulent From the Majority." The other day I suggested cultural warriors were "useful idiots" for corporate power, but Mr. Debney reminds us that the culture war is also very much like a protection racket -- "at a price, they offered protection against evils that they themselves would otherwise inflict, or at least allow to be inflicted." We find this to be literally true in the latest child-molestation scandal involving Southern Baptists! And maybe I don't say this enough, but the cultural warriors are all whiny little diaper-loaded brats! Their real problem with America isn't that they have "no voice in the public square," but that theirs isn't the only voice in the public square.

It's a damn shame that there are enough mass school shootings that scholars can study them and detect patterns in them, but from James Densley and Jillian Peterson at The Conversation we can learn a few things about these shootings. Like, either boys or 18-year-old men carry them out, they generally don't intend to live past the shooting, they generally leave warnings about what they're about to do, and most of them have a connection to the school at which they kill people. Also, it's not so much about "fame and notoriety" as it is about anger. I found getting along with other kids pretty tough when I was that age, which certainly wasn't all their fault, and I imagine it's only gotten worse for the teenagers who've come after me.

Our Supreme Court essentially sentences two likely-innocent men to death in ruling that inmates convicted in state courts can't appeal to federal courts if they had bad counsel. Why should a state get to abridge a citizen's Constitutionally-granted (and therefore federal) rights? Beats me. Oh, wait, I know: so that the Court's far-right wing, now numbering six of nine, can claim a broad "state's right" to ignore our Constitution whenever convenient, at which point it'll be bye-bye to a lot of things we've fought and died for. And dig Justice Thomas's whining about having to deal with "serial relitigation of final convictions"! Or, as your right-wing uncle would say, how many trials do we have to give a guy? The civilized person's answer: as many as it takes until justice is done. That is what great nations do, isn't it?

Henry Kissinger says that defeating Russia would have "disastrous" consequences. Like? Oh, you know, "upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome," and remember that Russia's been around for hundreds of years! Citing these as reasons not to hand Russia a decisive defeat sure sounds like an argument against ever doing the right thing if it injures any nation that happens to have endured for centuries. If our country gets taken over by fascists and starts bombing the crap out of Central and South America, I guess he'll argue against our "humiliation" or "defeat" for the same reason. Personally, I think the civilized people should make these decisions.

Finally, Sen. Sinema (D?-AZ) says that "D.C. solutions" to our mass murder epidemic aren't "realistic" (while Arizona's other Senator, whose wife nearly got killed by a mass shooter, has a more humane response). First off, new rule: no one who works in government gets to suggest that government just doesn't work, as the phrase "D.C. solutions" surely does, not just because they might be the reason government doesn't work, but also because they're biting the hand that feeds them and we are that hand, since we're the taxpayers who pay her salary. Second, her vaunted "message discipline" is starting to sound merely like the absence of empathy, which might make her the Sam Alito of the Democratic caucus.

Action: concerning mass murders, reconciliation, "forever chemicals," law and order, and antibiotics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop mass murders, pass a Build Back Better-style reconciliation bill, and pass the PFAS Firefighter Protection Act, the EQUAL Act, and the PASTEUR Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

On the occasion of yet another mass school shooting, I present Thom Hartmann's two-pronged solution to the mass shooting issue: make it as hard to get semi-automatics as it is to get automatics, and regulate guns the same way we regulate cars. You may want to call your Congressfolk with some version of this plan. Right-wingers will say they don't want to get their guns registered because TEH FREEDUMZ!!!!!, but ignore them. Liberals will say there wouldn't be enough background checks, but ignore them, too, because the registration process does that job. As for fewer semis meaning less "freedom," remember that mass murder isn't a "freedom."

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a reconciliation bill that attacks climate change, raises taxes on the rich and on corporations, and extends the Child Tax Credit expansion. Yeah, the Build Back Better Act failed last year, because Joe Manchin finally said "I just can't get there," but if we turn out in force to demand the things BBB would have done, we'll increase the possibility of him "getting there." And don't believe the Manchinean hype that the Child Tax Credit expansion drove inflation. First off, you'd think it would have come down by now, since the CTC expansion expired almost five months ago. Second, we all know there's a relationship between high prices and high corporate profits.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7597/S. 4076, the PFAS Firefighter Protection Act, which would keep PFAS chemicals out of firefighting foam. They don't call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for nothing -- they leach into our drinking water and then our bodies and they don't break down, and firefighting foam is one of the main sources of PFAS chemicals. And if we really care so much about our first responders, then why do we expose them to chemicals that could give them cancer, thyroid problems, or reproductive issues? Don't believe the hype that PFAS-laden firefighting foam is the only or best option; at this writing at least 100 PFAS-free foams exist, and it seems unlikely they all suck.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1693/S. 79, the EQUAL Act, which would equalize sentences for crack and powder cocaine and allow resentencing of past crack-related offenses. Over a decade ago, Congress reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, and I guess that was progress, but we should go all the way to 1 to 1. Now some Democrats are afraid of doing anything daring about crime before the midterms, a strategy that very recent experience has taught us completely assures defeat at the polls. A lot of times you have to wonder if that's the idea. If so, history will treat them badly -- if any historians remain!

Finally, speaking of apocalyptic settings, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act, which will fund research and development of new antibiotics. As you know, seven out of every 10 antibiotics don't go to sick people or animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, ostensibly so as to make them meatier. But thanks to antibiotic abuse, we face a future of superbugs that can't be killed by antibiotics; you don't want to live to see folks sit around the campfire and say sure, the next cut can kill you now, but at least we had cheap chicken for a while! One way to ensure we don't is to keep researching, and finding, new and better antibiotics. So maybe do that instead of more corporate tax cuts?

Around the table: with more horrible truths about rioters and insurrectionists.

You've heard that the January 6 coup-plotters weren't really that violent (despite what we all saw on TV!) because they "didn't bring guns"? Oh yes they did bring guns to their little coup attempt! That finding jibes with the testimony of DC police, who say their gun recovery units were "working constantly" during the coup attempt, and it also jibes with the testimony of DC rioters, who say there were a lot more folks bearing arms than police have yet found. And again, we all saw what happened on TV. We have no reason to listen to right-wing politicians who themselves enabled by the coup attempt. If they didn't actually take part in it, that is.

Thank God for good Americans like Steven Rosenfeld, who describes at length how right-wingers plunge forward even though their treasured Arizona fraudit didn't tell them exactly what they wanted to hear -- and also dissects all the weasel words in their arguments! Ballots that might have come from inaccurate addresses, ballots that might have come from moved-away voters, or video purporting to show election employees who might have erased computer election records -- I've tried to highlight this to right-wing voter fraud screechers, and they just ignore me. They probably jerk off over provoking me into pointing it out to them, too. Little do they know I don't aim to convince them, but to convince other, more reasonable people who might be listening in. Anyway, I sure hope they wipe their screens off when they're done.

Our Postal Service has begun to slow down deliveries per Postmaster General DeJoy's "bold" plan, and the Postal Regulatory Commission slams it, saying it won't even achieve its own goals by the end of 2022 and that (of course!) it didn't take into account the effect the plan would have on customers (i.e., the American people), particularly those who rely on the mail to get their medicine. Of course, the plan makes sense when you realize that Postmaster General DeJoy's purpose is to destroy the Postal Service so his cronies can privatize it. And I wouldn't be too keen on the idea that President Biden might be waiting until good Americans can't get their life-saving drugs on time to finally sack Mr. DeJoy -- if you know a problem is coming, you have a duty, as a leader, to solve it before it hurts anyone.

When I hear that Wisconsin Republicans want to ban words like "diversity" and "white supremacist" in public schools, all I can say is waaaaaaaaaaah! Diaper-loaded brats, these Republicans, imagining that teachers and students can't handle complex ideas about race relations, in a nation with a long, long history of white supremacy, no less! And here you thought conservatives trusted people. Maybe conservatives still do -- but these reactionaries who call themselves "conservative" certainly don't. They'd rather a real fascist like Donald Trump told everyone what to do and say and think. That's so much easier than working to maintain a civilization, after all.

Ho hum, right-wing asshole admits to pretending to be a Black Lives Matter supporter as he shot up a Minneapolis police station. I said over a year ago that a lot of these "rioters" were actually right-wing agents provocateurs, and I was right! I wonder if this Ivan Harrison Hunter fellow knows the asshole whose buddy filmed him busting up windows at the AutoZone last year, which kick-started riots in Minneapolis. If he doesn't, I bet Facebook can bring them together. Even in jail!

Finally, Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) says he "never knew about" the strategy to pass two spending bills that Democrats have been pursuing for months. Never mind that documentary evidence shows him talking about the two-track strategy in June -- the two-track strategy only exists in the first place because he insisted that infrastructure legislation be "bipartisan" and because Republicans would block most of the Democrats' agenda without reconciliation. Don't think he's dumb, or old, or tired, or just misheard the question -- he's gaslighting you, just like they all do when they can't win the arguments on the merits.

Around the table: why insane Republicans keep winning, part 463.

So which monopoly is behind our chronic medical supply shortages, according to the incomparable Matt Stoller? The Group Purchasing Organization (or GPO), "a kind of Costco or Sam’s Club for all sorts of medical supplies and medicines, with hospitals as the members." Sounds like a good idea, right? Not when GPOs can collect fees (i.e., kickbacks) from medical supply producing corporations -- and, more recently, when hospital executies can collect the same kickbacks from the GPOs themselves. Mark Meadows, of all people, wrote a bill in 2017 that probably would have put a stop to all of that; if it had passed, Donald Trump might have gotten re-elected in spite of himself.

In case you were wondering, scientists tell us that the murder rate shot up in 2020 for three main reasons: "(m)ore guns, pandemic stress, and a police legitimacy crisis." I'd include financial stress in "pandemic stress," of course. Getting 2020 figures in 2021, unfortunately, allows right-wing assholes to blame Joe Biden for a phenomenon that happened the year before he became President, and right-wing news sources won't issue corrections about that in any case you might actually see it. I'm perfectly alright with blaming Joe Biden for his own mistakes, but I fucking hate stupidity.

Uh oh: When South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem's daughter didn't qualify for a state real estate appraiser's license, the Governor apparently reamed out the state official in charge of such licenses -- and four months later, her daughter miraculously got the license! Also, the state labor secretary demanded the retirement of said state official a mere week after the meeting with the Governor. Naturally the Governor's spokeshack claims coverage of this matter is about "disparaging the Governor's daughter in order to attack the Governor politically," and if you didn't hear a denial in there, you're not the only one. If any spirited Democrats remained in South Dakota, I'd say that between this and her (likely deliberate) mismanagement of the pandemic, Ms. Noem's career might be over. (Billie Sutton only lost to Ms. Noem by about 3 1/2 points in 2018, but he doesn't strike me as someone who goes for the jugular.)

Of course people who whine about kids "suffocating" with "diapers" (i.e., the same masks surgeons wear for 8-12 hours every day without ill effect) on their faces are diaper-faces themselves, but that phrase "with their pockets full" is exactly why folks confuse right-wingers for populists! And Democrats never talk like this when they're trying to sell their policy prescriptions -- if Democrats would say "you can't let rich folks and corporations sit there with their pockets full while you don't have paid medical leave and pay a thousand dollars a month for insulin," our Reps and Senators' phone lines would crash. We keep telling Democrats how not to be weak, and they keep ignoring us. I guess we'll have to keep telling them.

Speaking of which, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) actually held a fundraiser a few days ago with the exact same corporate lobbying groups trying to kill the Build Back Better Act. Meeting people with their pockets full instead of her constituents -- see how easy that was? Again, that fuck-off ring is for us, and "us" includes, not incidentally, the 80% of good Arizonans who support Medicare drug price negotiation. (Also, New York Times, the word you're looking for to describe Sen. Sinema is not "inscrutable" but corrupt.)

Finally, FedEx driver loses his job -- whether he quit or got fired isn't clear -- after ranting on TikTok that he wouldn't deliver any packages to houses with Biden/Harris or Black Lives Matter signs. When Rosa Parks got arrested for refusing to sit in the back of the bus (I know this FedEx clown thinks he's just like Rosa Parks, so let's get ahead of him), she knew she was breaking the law, but she calculated that breaking the law in that instance would create more opportunities for real justice everywhere. In this, she was right, but all this clown did was spit into the wind. And too many of today's martyrs think they're entitled to all the notoriety of martyrdom but none of the accountability. (But I couldn't let this pass without noting that FedEx treats their drivers like trash, which makes them more likely to go off on these right-wing rants; why, it's almost like that's the whole idea.)

Around the table: the California recall effort comes alive, and other developments.

Wondering if California pro-recall forces might actually come up with, you know, some reason to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom from office? Well, now they don't have to! I suspect a not-insignificant number of Cali voters would really hate the notion of big corporations saturating the state with "charity donations" that may have resulted in some of those corporations getting special treatment in state matters. Granted, you shouldn't count on a Kevin Faulconer or a Caitlin Jenner fixing that system -- or, indeed, tramping down on corruption generally -- but this is exactly the kind of thing that makes people hate politics, and thus also the kind of thing that can energize infrequent voters in a recall election, which is always about the incumbent.

If I'd submitted a short story to my upper-level creative writing class about the President of the National Rifle Association being an absolutely lousy hunter who maybe shouldn't be trusted with any kind of firearm -- or, indeed, any kind of story about a guy pretending to be salt-of-the-earth who turned out to spend six figures on designer suits -- my professor would have rapped my knuckles. But such is the quality of irony in this sick, immoral, and decadent age; it doesn't even offer us pleasure. Some would say I don't look hard enough, but the most obvious hypocrisy sure does seem to saturate our media, and too many of its practitioners barely try to hide it anymore. And, not for nothing, but only assholes hunt elephants.

You may be tempted to cheer when you hear that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) thinks we should have a January 6 investigation that focuses solely on January 6 and not on "violent" anti-racism protestors, but again, she doesn't deserve a whole lot of credit for standing up for the obvious. Indeed, she may be doing it because she knows the party's about to boot her out of Republican House caucus leadership anyway! C'mon, she learned at the knee of her father, one of the worst human beings ever to be Vice President.

When I hear that Tucker Carlson now sounds so unhinged -- lately saying you should call the police and child protective services if you see kids outside playing with masks on -- that maybe he's "joking," I'm reminded that brats hide behind jokes and adults take accountability for what they say. I'm further reminded that our "liberal" media has spent literally decades covering ever-crazier right-wing punditoids as if they're just folks-with-ideas, and if you don't do your job protecting your civilization, post-modern speculation is all you've got left. Also, satire has to be funny. Tucker Carlson ain't funny.

When I hear that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says the story of Joe Biden's first 100 days is "it's Biden's way or the highway," we should remember that this this is how the privileged talk when they don't get their way on everything, plus they project all their faults on their opponents. I wouldn't characterize the last 12 years as anything but "it's Mitch McConnell's way or the highway." And I would venture to say that President Biden would be following the people's will on "working with Republicans" as long as he works around them, or through them, or over them, but not "with" them. If I never hear the word "bipartisanship" again, it'll be too soon.

Finally, maybe he's just figured out which way the wind is blowing, but longtime Democratic consultant James Carville gives some good advice in this interview with Vox. I don't know that "wokeness is a problem" so much as people too proud of their wokeness (or strutting around with fake "wokeness"), and he doesn't say how he's going to cut into rural voting spreads, and he shouldn't use the word "cancel" like it means what Republicans want it to mean, but "stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Yiddish" is good advice, "make the Republicans own that insurrection every day" better advice, and his take on Florida reminds me (because I need it some times, like everyone else!) that people are much better than their voting records might lead you to believe. Also, over a year after calling Bernie Sanders a "Communist," he seems to like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Action: concerning gun control, anti-transgender bills, campaign donations to seditionists, treating workers right, and flavored tobacco products

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass real gun control legislation; tell Florida and Kansas state legislators to oppose anti-transgender bills; tell big corporations to stop donating to insurrectionist Republican Congressfolk; tell a European hotel-owner to treat its housekeepers right; and tell our FDA to ban flavored tobacco products. The paragraphs below provide all the email/petition links you'll need.

With all the police shootings and mass shootings we've heard about the last few weeks (see, things are really going back to normal!), and with most politicians either shrugging and saying nothing can be done or trying to do things that won't solve the problem, I refer you, again, to Thom Hartmann's proposals for real gun control, which you can share with your Congressfolk. Mr. Hartmann would make it as hard to get semiautomatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons and would regulate guns the way we already regulate cars. I no longer oppose banning assault weapons, but I remain wary of the kind of broad background checks politicians like to propose, and in any case I don't think these policy prescriptions would do as much good as Mr. Hartmann's would. And I prefer solving the problem to worrying about whose feelings we'll hurt if we solve the problem.

The Florida House has passed HB 1475, a bill that would, get this, allow schools to examine the genitalia of young girls in an apparent effort to keep transgender children out of girls' sports, and Change.org helps you tell the Florida Senate to reject this bill. How many ways is HB 1475 an abomination? Let's start with nobody should be looking at children's genitals except a physician trying to diagnose an illness directly relating to those genitals. And then let's go on with how public schools already know which of their students are transgender! I know, I know, some folks think transgender children, or our "tolerance" thereof, are abominations. If that's you, kindly navigate away from this page -- you can learn nothing from me, and yes, that's your fault.

Change.org also helps you tell Kansas state legislators to reject HB 2210, which would make it a felony for doctors to perform gender reassignment surgery or hormone replacement therapy on children, which should make even the folks who think it should be the parents' decision wince. I'm not impressed that Section 1(c) exempts doctors from this crime if "if a child was born with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development" -- that raises the possibility that the bill only exists to create drama, and that's the kind of thing we should smack down whenever we see it. And frankly, I trust any kid who says they're in the wrong body -- how likely is it that they're "just acting out" when there are a) so, so many other ways for kids to "act out" and b) there are so, so many other ways for kids to "act out" that don't result in them getting the crap kicked out of them by their peers? So much right-wing rage doesn't stand up to the gentlest application of logic.

Color of Change helps you tell big corporations such as Toyota and JetBlue to stop giving campaign funds to the same insurrectionist members of Congress to whom they said they'd stop giving campaign funds! I won't say it's useless for big corporations to give lip service to the causes we care about, but what Toyota and JetBlue (among others!) are doing is less than useless -- they want the good PR for "doing the right thing" without the bad PR they deserve for going back on their word. But we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR, so we don't have to put up with any of that. Remember, these Congressfolk smiled upon the events of January 6, even if they didn't actually aid and abet them; depriving them of campaign contributions is more toward the "least we can do" end of the spectrum.

Sum of Us helps you tell Ibis hotel owner AccorInvest to stop paying its housekeepers in dung pellets and treat them like human beings, which includes not running them through "scientific" task-timing, as they're currently doing. They give their housekeepers 17 minutes to change over hotel rooms, and as someone who works for a living, this is personal to me: I'm sick and tired of bosses looking at a spreadsheet and thinking they can learn more from it than they can from, you know, doing the job. Any idiot knows that if you've really got lollygaggers working for you, you confront them head-on, and you don't hide behind stupid assumptions about "how long a task should take" when you won't actually dirty your hands by doing it. Maybe that sounds old-fashioned, but I'm an old-fashioned dude, and this kind of task-timing doesn't sound like "making workers work more efficiently," but delivering wealth upward to executives more efficiently.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell our FDA to ban the sale of flavored tobacco products. They might taste like bubble gum or cotton candy or "tropical twist," but they all contain nicotine, and we really don't need to be starting children on a lifelong addictive habit. Whomever came up with this probably thinks they're a super-genius -- get 'em started young, and we'll be able to keep selling to them until they're old and grey! High-five! -- but they're not; they're just evil. I mean, I insist cleverness should result in good works, not (once again) in redistributing working folks' income to the undeserving rich.

Around the table: who gets gun control right? Not us!

From Francis Wilkinson at Bloomberg we learn about "Canada’s Reasonable Vision of Gun Control." 15 hours of classes to get a mandatory gun license, a month-long approval process that requires references, gun instructors who wish there were fewer gun owners -- why, it's like an alternate universe where everything works! In the Universe of America, however, some people call everything that might interfere with their rage-gasms "tyranny," and, as evidenced by the fact that Louisiana had double the murders of Canada last year with one-eighth of the population, they still get too much say in what goes on in America.

Our Supreme Court supposedly disappoints the gun-rights-über-alles crowd in America by refusing to take up three appeals of our national ban on guns ownership by non-violent convicted criminals, but they disappoint me, as well: generally we should not use criminal convictions to deprive people of rights after they've served their time, and that's as true for gun rights as it is for voting rights. You may recall, of course, that the Trump Administration, supposedly the greatest boon to the 2nd Amendment this land has ever seen, did nothing to restore gun ownership rights to non-violent offenders.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) plans to file a bill calling for the expulsion of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) for what she calls her "continual incitement to violence." What if we never actually see such a bill? It will matter not to right-wing votaries, for whom the thrill of rage is all that matters. Anyway, tit for tat ain't the most mature way to go about legislation, but this ain't even tit for tat, as I think most people can tell the difference between Donald Trump telling January 6 seditionists to "take back your country!" and Maxine Waters telling anti-racism protestors that "we've got to get more confrontational."

Surprise, surprise! Two Democratic Senators who oppose the PRO Act, Sen. Kelly of Arizona and Sen. Warner of Virginia, received buku bucks from Amazon in their recent campaigns. However, Sen. Kelly tended to get his campaign contribution from Amazon workers, while Sen. Warner got most of his from Amazon executives, and Mr. Warner sounds like a typical anti-union knucklehead in his opposition, with all his talk about "process issues" like that doesn't make him sound like a smartypants or something. Will Democrats never understand how much Americans hate people who sound like smartypantses?

When I hear that "The GOP's Fallout With Big Business Is Already Mending," I'm tempted to reply: that implies the fallout was ever real! But I'm pained to admit that I thought, for a minute and a half, that maybe the CEOs of today are younger than they used to be and maybe a bit more tolerant, etc. One day I'll learn not to be such an optimist. (As an aside, why do any sane people listen to what the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce says? It's like they're setting an example of what not to do.)

Finally, when I hear about Ivanka Trump getting an earful from right-wing loudmouths after she gets her COVID vaccine, I struggle to remember any of them being all that anti about the Big Man Himself getting his shot when they heard about it. Perhaps this is a good sign: that the "devotion" Donald Trump "inspires" can't be so easily transferred to others, not even his namesake. On the other hand, if Jared got his shot, maybe the faithful would be less angry, and then we'd suspect their real problem is Ivanka not having a penis.

Action: concerning voting rights, gun control, police brutality, internet freedom, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Sen. Manchin you don't care whether our Senate passes the For the People Act in a "bipartisan" manner, then tell your Senators to pass real gun control legislation as well as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and put a fifth Commissioner on the FCC who'll help defend internet freedom and expand internet access, then tell President Biden to fire two Social Security Administration executives who are trying their damnedest to screw up our Social Security. You can find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page), but I'll also provide email/petition tools for most of these alerts below .

Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) says the American people won't accept "as legitimate" a For the People Act that isn't "bipartisan" -- so go ahead and call him, at 202.224.3954, and tell him you don't give one rat's hind-quarter whether or not any Republicans vote for the For the People Act. We're well past noting that people don't care about "bipartisan" government, they only care about good government -- Jesus Mary and Joseph more than two-thirds of the Republican House caucus, and almost one-fifth of the Republican Senate caucus, supported an overthrow of our government on January 6! And he wants to "work with" these people? You don't "work with" evil, you work around evil -- or over it, or through it. The good news? Sen. Manchin is neither stupid nor insensitive; he can be pulled toward the truth.

In 2018, Thom Hartmann offered the best gun control proposal I've yet heard: make it as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons, and regulate gun ownership the way we regulate car ownership. Folks would have to jump through a lot of hoops to get a semi: if you had to (for example) have a police officer vouch for you before you get a semi, well, that'll stop a lot of people from getting them. And it ain't that tough to fill out the paperwork for a car, so the paperwork for a gun won't be particularly onerous, either. Rather than support blanket gun bans, you may wan to call your Reps and Senators and tell them you want this instead.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1280, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Don't brook any silliness that this is a "defund the police" bill -- in fact, it actually increases federal police funding! -- and don't brook any other silliness, either. In fact, you can go ahead and think of this bill's opponents as objectively pro-choke holds, since this bill bans them, or objectively pro-militarizing police since the bill would fight that, or objectively pro-getting away with murder since the bill limits "qualified immunity." That middle item, right-wingers should note, is something that can easily be turned on them, even though it mainly gets turned on anti-racism protestors these days.

Battle for the Net helps you tell our President to nominate, and our Senators to confirm, a fifth FCC Commissioner who'll help restore net neutrality and ensure everyone can have access to broadband internet. Not just because we're the richest country on Earth, but don't they know there's a pandemic on? More folks work from home and take classes from home than ever before, so letting the big corporations do whatever they want (like install data caps, thanks Comcast!) ain't gonna cut it anymore. And, you know, Mitch McConnell said that if we make Senators talk through filibusters from now on, they'll retaliate by slowing everything down, and this fifth FCC Commissioner is just one thing they'll try to hold hostage. But don't be a hostage! Being a hostage is un-American! Just hound them until they give in.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fire two notorious Social Security Administration appointees, Andrew Saul and David Black. For what? For gumming up the works wherever they can, that's what! Lately they've prevented some 30 million good Americans -- both seniors and folks with disabilities -- from getting stimulus checks by not giving needed data to our IRS. Think this was just some oversight on their part? Nah, we're not schmucks: they've also tried to make it harder for folks to get Social Security disability benefits, plus they told SSA workers they had to keep commuting to their jobs despite the pandemic -- while they worked from home! Maybe we should put people in charge who aren't trying to burn everything down? (President Biden's phone number is 202.456.1111, if you want to go that route.)

Around the table: in which we confront yet more endless Republican hypocrisy.

From Karen Hao at the MIT Technology Review we learn "How Facebook Got Addicted to Spreading Misinformation." Long story short, in the words of one UCal-Berkeley professor: "When you’re in the business of maximizing engagement, you’re not interested in truth. You’re not interested in harm, divisiveness, conspiracy. In fact, those are your friends." And apparently Facebook's efforts to rein in harmful algorithms since 2018 either failed or were set up to fail. Read the whole thing and you may find yourself convinced that "smart people" aren't all that smart. But I still think people are smarter than AI generally, and particularly once they stop letting their egos dominate them.

Sen. Roger Wicker takes credit for restaurant assistance he managed to get into the COVID relief bill, then gets swamped by Twitter users reminding everyone he voted against said COVID relief bill like every other Senate Republican. I said they'd try to take credit for something they tried their damnedest to kill -- and I was right! Roger Wicker's up in 2024; perhaps we can scuttle his re-election by reminding Mississippi Republicans that he worked with nominal Democrat Kyrsten Sinema on that restaurant initiative.

Senate confirms Merrick Garland to be our next Attorney General by a 70-30 vote. Yes, the same Merrick Garland who couldn't even get a confirmation hearing to be a Supreme Court Justice in 2016. And as much as I really don't want to hear Mitch McConnell (who refused to hold hearings on his nomination) praising him, I really don't want to hear anything Tom Cotton has to say about it. For Tom Cotton, you're "weak" if you're not shooting Black folks for brandishing a cellphone.

The state of Florida will get some good press for getting rid of the five- to seven-year waiting period for most felons to wait to have their voting rights restored, and for restoring more of their other rights, but they don't deserve it -- felons will still have to pay court costs and fines before getting their rights restored like rights should be subject to payment, plus the people of Florida spoke and still ain't been heeded, plus felons should never have lost their right to vote in the first place! Oh, and they still won't be able to own guns, which will certainly induce more folks to suspect that the 2nd Amendment crowd is really a 2nd-Amendment-For-Whites-Only crowd.

All of America's living ex-Presidents cut an ad encouraging everyone to get a vaccine when they can -- all of them except for one manchild, that is. Mr. Trump wouldn't help cut the ad, but has left a statement "reminding" us that he's "responsible" for creating the COVID vaccines, a "reminder" that'll come as a surprise to those scientists who actually created it. How can people who strut around about their own manliness support this whiny-ass baby? Oh, wait: that question answers itself.

Mississippi Governor signs bill preventing transgender girls from competing in girls' sports. I've said it before and I'll say it again: anyone who thinks a boy will become a girl just to get an advantage in sports doesn't understand boys or girls, and not just because all transgender folk face the distinct possibility that someone'll kick the crap out of them: what boy becomes a girl to beat girls at sports and still gets to hang out and talk trash about girls with her buddies?

Finally, some good news: Iowa jury acquits Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri of "failure to disperse" and "interference with official acts" charges stemming from her coverage of a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. Give Ms. Sahouri props for refusing to take a guilty plea on one of the misdemeanor charges and instead seeing this thing through to the bitter end -- and winning. And n.b. that the arresting officer's failure (or perhaps "failure"?) to properly preserve body camera evidence wound up figuring heavily in the verdict.

Around the table: in which we try to see things a bit more clearly than our pundit class does.

Turns out that planned kidnapping of Michigan's Governor could have been even worse than we thought: militia members had a "Plan B" to take over Michigan's statehouse and execute politicians, as well as a Plan C to burn down the statehouse and kill everyone inside. And over what? Over being told to wear masks so you're less likely to infect other people with COVID-19! Adults, with guns, throwing tantrums worse than any ever thrown by a two-year-old! And yet our "liberal" media implores us to "understand" them, by which they clearly mean excuse their evil.

A few Senate Republicans say they'll back any Biden Cabinet appointments as long as they're "mainstream." They're lying! Recall that right-wingers call anyone to their left a "socialist" anymore, and consider that if we can imagine Mitch McConnell simply refusing to hold hearings on Cabinet appointments, then surely Sens. Collins, Murkowski, and Romney can as well, and I'm sure they're much more comfortable professing "alarm" at Mr. McConnell's shenanigans than actually forcing him to allow Mr. Biden to staff a functioning government. Our soon-to-be-ex-President will leave behind an Augean mess, and Mitch McConnell will bury all the shovels.

I wouldn't even note the news that U.S. trade deficits with other nations, including China, have risen rather dramatically over the last four years, except that our soon-to-be-ex-President has not only acted like he alone could turn around a cruise ship on a dime, but has also acted like he's already done so without even coming close to doing so. Of course I don't expect the math (which shows the trade deficit increasing at a faster rate than it did during Mr. Obama's second term, even!) to penetrate the rage-addled minds of his votaries.

About a week after William Barr's nomination to Attorney General in 2018, our Justice Department told federal investigators to take "no further action" against Caterpillar, a corporation Mr. Barr used to represent. It gets better: we were investigating Caterpillar for tax avoidance, to the tune of $2.3 billion -- in other words, we were investigating them for taking food out of our mouths, since that's what corporations do when they avoid paying their taxes. Presumably our Justice Department thinks it hasn't broken the law because it hasn't actually closed the investigation, but we've seen judges reject similar arguments.

I'm not sure why Joe Biden would consider D.C. Circuit Court Judge/could-have-been Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland for Attorney General. I'm sure he'd do an excellent job, but such an appointment would also leave a seat open on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that Mitch McConnell might not let him fill, and if this is Joe Biden's way of trolling Mitch McConnell, then he's got a lot to learn about trolling. Anyway, I hear Doug Jones is available, and I'm sure he'd do an excellent job, too.

Finally, when I hear that Kentucky Senate race loser-by-20-points Amy McGrath has started a Super PAC to help out in those two Georgia Senate runoffs, all I can say is: haven't you done enough? She lit almost $100 million on fire losing to Mitch McConnell by the second-largest margin of his seven Senate races! When will these fools learn that voters don't give one rat's hind-quarter how much money you can raise, but that they only care about what you will do once in office?

Around the table: in which we consider various law-and-order matters in a different manner than our allegedly law-and-order President would.

A ProPublica/Maine Monitor investigation describes the sad state of Maine's public defender program, upon which poor folks depend to get justice. Long story short: the state's program had always been private, which as you know usually makes it more expensive, and then never funded it properly, resulting in (among other evils) the worst lawyers, some with criminal convictions, representing the state's poorest residents. I bet this happens in every state once QAnon candidates start winning -- which they will, if Democrats retake power in Washington and then come up with excuses not to use it, as is their habit.

Contra our President's hysteria, Goldman Sachs analysts tell investors a Democratic victory at the polls this November "would likely prompts us to upgrade our forecasts." Well, they did quite well during the Obama years, so I guess they would know. Seriously, our President is clever enough to hang this around Joe Biden's neck, banksters still being extremely unpopular in America, but, ah, we have reason to doubt that he's vigorous enough to do that at present.

Walker Bragman and David Sirota at Jacobin evaluate Judge Barrett's record at the Seventh Circuit, and find it as wanting as Nathan Robinson did. (She opined correctly in Kanter v. Barr, actually, but even a blind squirrel finds a nut.) Given a slavish devotion to non-interpretation of even obviously unjust laws that would make Neil Gorsuch blush, you have to wonder what Judge Barrett thinks judges are even for.

Dean Baker suggests that our President is "throwing away" our shot at a vaccine by refusing to cooperate with other nations on that task. And, you know, also by valuing a corporation's potential "intellectual property" over sick people getting better. You should suspect the good heart of anyone who consistently puts things over people. No, they're not "smart" if they do that; they're evil if they do that.

Facebook kicks all QAnon and Q-related accounts off its platform, which means, in the short term, that Q-believers will slink off to other platforms, nursing their unearned sense of martyrdom, and await the shit-ton of right-wing money coming their way if Democrats annihilate Republicans this November. Still, Facebook did a good work here, particularly if other platforms take the suggestion and conclude that our First Amendment protects people from our government, not from social media platforms.

Finally, our President breaks off all negotiations with Congress over a COVID-19 relief bill, saying there won't be another one until "after I win." He contradicted himself on Twitter shortly thereafter, but we know folks by their deeds, not their words. And when he says Speaker Pelosi (who shepherded the HEROES Act through the House almost five months ago) isn't "negotiating in good faith," he really means she's not capitulating to all his demands. Just like the rest of them.

Action: concerning credit reporting and gun violence.

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban negative credit reports during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because over 40 million good Americans lost their jobs and still need to put food on the table! Ideally, credit reports measure how well you manage money, but who's managing money well during this pandemic? Only the rich, and it's a lot easier to balance the checkbook when money's coming in by the boatload. As it happens, this pandemic seems to be prompting a lot of mistakes on credit reports -- compare the number of credit report mistake complaints filed over the last five months with the number of similar complaints filed during the same five months of 2019 and you find they've almost doubled. Stupid or evil, who cares? The end result is the same: good Americans can't get loans and can't get jobs, through no damn fault of their own -- or, more precisely, because of the incompetence and venality of our President. Don't blame good Americans for his bad works, that's what I say. Even if the "free" market demands it.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund community anti-gun violence programs. To the tune of $150 million, which ain't that much in the context of a $4 trillion-plus federal budget. And note well that "community anti-gun violence programs" is not the same thing as "banning handguns." If you know someone who can't tell the difference, well, you may want to leave their instruction to God. We can only be so reasonable, after all! By "community anti-gun violence programs," we mean direct intervention and outreach on streets and in hospitals, and these ideas have worked in the past, when they've been well-funded, of course. And again: $150 million on one hand, $4 trillion on the other; if you can save lives and rescue souls with a mere four one-thousandths of one percent of our federal budget, you do it. And, you know, funding intervention and outreach is also a job creation scheme -- unless you're one of those benighted souls who thinks working for our government somehow doesn't count as a job.

Penny Rants for Sunday, September 6, 2020: concerning right-wing violence and "suckers" and "losers."

Our "liberal" media finally get around to covering the armed right-wing violence at a Democrat-sponsored voter registration drive in Tyler, TX over a month ago -- but even now they can't get it right! Even with an extra month of lead time! Luckily Dorothee Benz at FAIR helps us sift through all the lousy reporting, where "fights break out" and "disturbances happen" without any apparent causes and "people on both sides" are always to blame, even in "liberal" media reports like the Washington Post report of August 27 documenting eight incidents of right-wing violence and one incident of left-wing violence. Ms. Benz also reminds us (because, sadly, we need reminding!) that "privatized violence aimed at popular democratic demands is a hallmark of right-wing authoritarianism," and we can rather easily document how this trend's operating right here in America right now. One more thing: given the truck caravans that have rolled through protests across America (not just in Portland), how long before the pick-up truck stops being a symbol of hard work and starts being a symbol of racism?

Speaking of right-wing violence at protests, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) opines that infamous militia member Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three protestors in Kenosha over a week ago, actually showed "incredible restraint." If you wonder why someone shows up to a protest armed, or have seen him shoot two protestors plainly trying to disarm him, you'll be surprised, but let's let Mr. Massie explain further: "(h)e didn't empty a magazine into a crowd." What a low bar to set! He "showed restraint" because he only shot three people instead of a hundred! I'm old enough to remember when conservatives demanded a lot more of us (and each other) than that! Mr. Massie would have earned more sympathy if he'd pointed out that Mr. Rittenhouse is only 17 and shouldn't be tried as an adult; instead, the man who wouldn't ban semiautomatics because someone-somewhere can turn a rifle into a semiautomatic seems, again, only to care about protecting guns. No, not even "gun rights" -- as Russell Kirk used to say, rights have responsibilities.

What's the worst thing about our President calling dead soldiers "suckers" and "losers"? He's wrong! I think soldiers who die at war are generally the best ones, and their officers more likely just figured out how to get others to die in their place. All of which means I'm not surprised by our President's remarks, for who is better at screwing other people over just to protect himself than he? Here's what surprises me: he's been way too slow to portray these remarks as anti-war -- they would be pretty damn clumsy anti-war statements, true, but not irredeemably so, and they might also get that sliver of the anti-war vote he's going to need to get re-elected. He seems content with calling everyone a liar and speculating about who might have "betrayed" him, as any drama king would do. So, when our President said all the generals were stupid, his votaries could tell themselves he wasn't talking about the rank and file, but now that he's said the rank and file are "suckers" and "losers," how will they respond? I kid, of course -- they just say whatever makes them think they're owning the liberals.

Around the table: concerning swordfighting, immaturity, "moderates," and the things that are more important than all of them.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut suspects that the dominant story of 2019 won't be our President's impeachment, but movements of resistance around the world. And in a just history, that would be true! Our President loves to make everything about himself, but popular uprisings in Hong Kong, Chile, and Haiti -- not to mention Oakland and Hawaii! -- aren't so much about him but the rampant rot in Our Glorious Elites that he merely epitomizes. Bad leaders die, but civilizations live on -- if we keep them.

Ex-Republican slams right-wing gun worship, calling it "conservative virtue-signaling." Having guns is one thing, enjoying guns another, but throwing folks who don't fight every conceivable gun-control proposal to the death out of Conservative Nation is another thing entirely. "Virtue signaling" is too long and obscure a phrase, though -- I call it "swordfighting," and yes, when I say "sword," I kinda mean "penis."

Apparently our Administration went to great lengths back in 2017 to discover which employee of our office of the ambassador to the European Union liked a Chelsea Clinton tweet that responded to something bad our President said about Ms. Clinton. We'll never know for sure if our President knew about all of that, but that of course he knew about all of that, acting as he does like a diaper-loaded brat every time someone criticizes him (or answers his obnoxiousness without backing down). Of course he does it for "his people," who have so thoroughly internalized his "battles" as their own.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) gets it right, for once, in criticizing both sides for demanding a particular conclusion to our President's impeachment trial in the Senate. Yes, it is bad that Mr. McConnell seems to think our President should have so much of a say in how he gets tried in the Senate, but Ms. Warren shouldn't be declaring him guilty, either, given that she'll be one of 100 jurors. So am I ready to say "moderates" have some utility after all? I kid, of course -- even a blind squirrel stumbles over a nut every once in a while.

And on cue, Joe Biden says he'd be "open" to running with a Republican on a "unity" ticket, which as usual will unify right and center-right and guess who that leaves out? Seriously, he must never talk to regular Americans anymore -- no one but a Beltway insider would be impressed with such a pronouncement, and more Americans would run through a wall for that obnoxious turd of a President than for a politician promising another round of let's-all-get-along-with-the-people-who-constantly-set-our-house-on-fire.

Finally, Lauren Gambino at The Guardian wonders whether any of the Democratic Presidential candidates will "excite voters." I've said this before and I'm sure I'll say it again, but trying to game out Who Can Beat the Beast is a fool's game -- it makes the election All About Him, which is how he wants it, and not about us, which is the way all elections should be. And hearing people try to play 13-dimensional chess while apparently forgetting that they all have votes is a persistent annoyance. And, seriously, letting freaking John Delaney's campaign strategist have the last word?

Action: concerning immigration, mandatory minimums, and fossil fuels.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Defense's Inspector General to investigate the militarization of our Southern border. When you hear that our Administration has deployed armed soldiers at our Southern border, you might reasonably ask: are we at war with someone? Our President would no doubt answer "yes," being a member of Our Glorious Elites, and therefore someone who uses the word "war" to mean all kinds of things it does not mean. But we are not at war with Mexico, and U.S. law actually forbids our government from using soldiers to enforce domestic laws. We don't use soldiers to enforce domestic laws because we don't want to become a tinpot dictatorship where people are afraid to be free. I suspect our DoD IG (Inspectors General still display a large amount of independence) will come to the same conclusion we have. But only if we speak out. After all, saying nothing and hoping for the best doesn't work.

Meanwhile, even though our Pennsylvania state Supreme Court overturned mandatory minimums many years ago, word on the street is that our state legislature wants to bring them back, in a four-pack of bills, HB 726, HB 1850, HB 1851, and HB 1852, that would target offenses committed with firearms. I understand that people want to "do something" about guns these days, but this is doing the wrong thing -- we should let judges do their job and decide case-by-case whether possession of a firearm really merits a longer sentence. I've been saying for a while now that we should make it just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons, and I'd rather support that solution than another set of mandatory minimums that wind up slamming folks of color harder and costing the taxpayer more money -- and feeding into the prison-privatization machine, too. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject more mandatory minimum sentences.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell big media corporations to stop taking advertisements from fossil fuel corporations and their flunkies. Sound harsh? Consider the simple fact that you already know whatever you need to know about fossil fuels -- you know what fuel your car needs and whether your house takes oil heat or gas heat and whether your stove takes electric or gas, for example -- and fossil fuel advertisements typically therefore extol the virtues of particular fossil fuel corporations; is it really too much to ask that ads give us information we can actually use? It's not particularly of issue that such ads tend to lie about fossil fuel corporations' commitment to renewable energy and about the real effects of pollution and climate change, but ads disguised as "news stories" or "opinion pieces"? They're a big deal, and any media outlet worth its salt would reject them out of hand. They don't do it now because they're corrupt, but that's why we're here: to show them a way out of corruption.

Around the table: of unearned mandates, law-and-order posturing, and rich folks acting stupid.

Our Administration finalizes rules putatively allowing them to enforce the Endangered Species Act far less vigorously than before. Among the changes: our government can how "take into account" the purported "economic costs" of saving a species; perhaps our alien overlords will do the same when mulling whether to save humanity! And where does Commerce Secretary Ross imagine our President has a "mandate" to "eas(e) the regulatory burden on the American public"? First off, they're not "easing" a "burden" on "the public"; they're just making it easier for big corporate cronies to make more unearned millions. Second, 54% of the electorate wanted someone else to be President in 2016, so he has no "mandate" other than the ones our Constitution gives -- you know, the ones he ignores at every opportunity. So I guess we'll see these pricks in court, then.

Acting CBP Chief will not confirm for CNN's Jake Tapper that CBP is investigating any of our President's corporations for their well-reported reliance on undocumented immigrant labor. While it is true that "there are investigations going on all the time that you’re unaware of," it is equally true that I am not a schmuck, and I do not expect ICE to show up in Bedminster anytime soon, not because our President is innocent, but because they knows better. Or, maybe, because he's their bastard. I'd prefer the former reason, but either one is alien to a nation where we pride ourselves that no one is above the law.

Speaking of which, Current Attorney General William Barr tells the Fraternal Order of Police that those newly-elected district attorneys who do not shove their testicles in your face to prove their toughness are, of course, "anti-law enforcement." Here's a clue: if you say someone is "anti-law enforcement," you're pretty much telegraphing that you can't win the argument on the merits. It's like saying something is "socialist." And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that his statement that suspects should always "comply first" with police instructions and then "if warranted, complain later" will not resonate very much with families of folks executed by police after, say, pulling out their cellphone or telling a police officer they have a registered firearm in their car.

Visa CEO says he won't block gun sales, saying, as a matter of comparison I suppose, that "(w)e shouldn’t tell people they can’t purchase a 32-ounce soda" and "(w)e shouldn’t tell people they can’t buy reproductive drugs." I guess he brings "reproductive drugs" in because he's trying to say he's Hip Like Us, but comparing guns to soda is rock-stupid, because no Big Gulp has ever killed 30 people in 60 seconds. People like Mr. Kelly love saying everything is a "slippery slope," but actually almost nothing is -- civilized people have been debating the boundaries of what we allow and what we outlaw for thousands of years, but I guess corporate CEOs are too bold to acknowledge history and heritage.

Finally, wealthy supporters of our President who live in the Hamptons whine that they have to keep their support of our President "in the closet" (way to insult the entire gay experience, whiners!) for fear of ostracization and lost business, and even "physical violence." America is going into a "dark place," they say, and given our President's overt racism I sure would have said that differently! If rich folks really fear physical violence they can call a cop, but they don't seem to understand that when folks injure our community, we ostracize them, because that's how civilization is supposed to work. Or, to put it in a way our President's supporters might better understand: fuck your feelings.

Around the table: no, every problem is not a Gordian knot! And other insights.

Politico wonders: "How Do You Solve a Problem Like 8chan?" Simple: you do what Dean Baker suggested we do last week -- you hold corporations like Facebook and Twitter accountable for the public postings of their users, in much the same manner you hold book publishers accountable for what they put out. (People who post privately to their friends will have to rely on their friends to tell them when they're full of it.) But you certainly don't throw up your hands and say the First Amendment "protects" hateful speech without specifying exactly how it does that (i.e., that it protects you from your government, and not your publisher).

And now for the WHEREZ TEH DATAZ!!!!!! crowd: researchers using FBI data on 248 active shooter incidents over 17 years, find that semiautomatic weapons "roughly double" victims' chances of getting killed or wounded. My initial reaction: they only double your chances of getting killed or wounded? But the Brigham and Women's Hospital study didn't count incidents with the largest death tolls or with multiple shooters. Headline from the no-gun-control-ever lobby: SEE TEH SEMIZ DON'TZ KILLZ TEH PEEPULZ MORE EFFICIENTLYZ HAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Of course, the more pertinent finding (and the one that aligns with common sense) is that semis do hit more people and thus result in more deaths.

Ben Freeman, Nia Harris, and Cassandra Simpson at TomDispatch explode the myth that military spending creates jobs. You've likely started to suspect that military spending enriches big defense contractor CEOs more than anything else, but it's nice to have some facts behind it. Lockheed's share of taxpayer money went up about 37% between 2012 and 2018, but their total workforce went down almost 13% -- and their CEO's salary went up 32%. Two other big defense contractors also cut jobs over that time, and two more only "gained" jobs because they bought other corporations. Stick that in your Tea Party uncle's hat next time he talks about defense creating jobs -- and then pivot to things that actually create jobs, like infrastructure, renewable energy, and health care spending, and you'll likely find a sympathetic audience. If only Democrats would act on this insight!

Another day, another finding that the 2017 tax "reform" hasn't goosed up capital investment like its supporters said it would, and this finding comes from our Administration's Commerce Department, which you would think would have an interest in saying the exact opposite. Then again, maybe not, as long as our President is willing to say whatever. But cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% did not, in fact, "free" corporations to spend more money on capital projects. Historically, the only thing that does that is a higher tax rate, since corporations will spend more money on capital projects once they realize it's going to get taxed away if they don't. (That's also why corporations don't really need "incentives" to do research and development -- research and development are expenses, and corporate taxes only tax profits.)

Finally, our President voices his apparent belief that his "rhetoric" not only doesn't divide our nation but actually "brings people together." And it is possible that he may be right about that one day -- at that moment where we can all observe his rhetoric bringing people together against him. Sadly, that moment isn't now, because his votaries are still too eager to make excuses for him -- this, even though conservatives always told us conservatism wasn't about making excuses for people!

Action: concerning good bills, soldier pensions, and mass shootings.

That stack of good House-passed bills keeps piling up on Mitch McConnell's desk, and he doesn't care what you think about that, but that's OK, because we don't care what he thinks! Go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act. Mob Boss Mitch ain't the boss of your Senators, after all -- you are. People say I'm naive for thinking we can get Republican Senators to pass bills supporting voting rights, civil rights, internet freedom, better paychecks, and secure elections. But what would they hate even more than passing these bills? Being humiliated and jobless, that's what, and if enough of us speak up, they'll either bow to our will or be humiliated and jobless. Having the better arguments ain't enough -- we also have to deploy them, in force.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court gave our President the green light to appropriate some Defense Department funds for his vanity border wall, and then the Pentagon announced late last week that it would divert almost $225 million in military pension funds toward the wall. Taking from our troops' retirement to keep drama going -- how utterly despicable! I wonder how our President's votaries will explain it away. Perhaps they'll say it's only $224 million, which I'm sure will comfort our retired soldiers as they make ends meet. Or they'll say they're taking a lot more from real defense spending, so shutup or he's cutting money for weapons we don't even use, and that's a good thing -- but neither of these arguments can magically convert taking pension money into a good thing. Our President's phone number is 1.215.456.2011. He doesn't care what you and I think, but he's also sensitive to bad PR, so doing our duty might actually yield a result here.

Finally, on the heels of yet another mass shooting perpetrated by yet another white supremacist asshole, too many of our politicians are offering "thoughts and prayers" again, apparently having completely forgotten the backlash they got over their "thoughts and prayers" last year. Hence Greyroots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to get to work and pass some common-sense gun control legislation for once. Since I oppose very much control of handguns and hunting rifles, I'm going to use Greyroots' contact tool to specify the common-sense legislation I want -- legislation that would amend the National Firearms Act to make it just as hard for folks to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons. And all that bill did was get tommy guns off our streets. Our main job as civilized people is to fix problems without resorting to violence; if we don't commit to that, we'll never have enough weapons for the resulting apocalypse anyway.

Action: concerning data security, Arctic drilling, gun research, and cryptocurrency.

Lately our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has fined Equifax $650-$700 million for failing to secure the private data of almost 150 million Americans, but that's not as big as it sounds -- if you don't believe me, divide the fine by the number of people it hurt! -- and good Americans need more protection than that. Hence H.R. 2545/S. 1336, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would establish an Office of Cybersecurity within our FTC which would regulate data security at credit reporting corporations, would set strict notification requirements for data breaches, and would make penalties for losing consumer personal data a lot steeper. If you're one of those who reflexively respond oh great another bureaucracy, I would remind you that "just letting the corporations who know their stuff do it" clearly ain't working, and that's the world we're already in. Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumer data by passing the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the CEOs of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips to back out of their apparent plans to drill in the Arctic. Drilling in the Arctic has been a fever dream of big oil since time immemorial, but we all know the reasons we shouldn't drill there -- for one, it's much harder to clean up an oil spill which will happen in the Arctic than it is even in the temperate Gulf of Mexico (and you recall how well BP cleaned up that spill, which is to say "not particularly well"). Here are some more reasons: it'll threaten the famous Alaskan sockeye salmon industry, wreck the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, endanger the Native populations of the region, and it won't even give us very much oil. If I, an hourly-paid schmuck, can recite these reasons off the top of my head, then I bet a lot of other people can, too -- and surely these not-very-popular big oil CEOs are acutely aware that There Is-So Such a Thing as Bad PR. If we need to remind them of that with (wait for it!) the Big Stick of Bad PR, hey, we're here to help.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Senate to fund gun violence research by our Centers for Disease Control and our National Institute of Health, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Congress last year passed a spending bill that explicitly authorized gun violence research by these agencies, but naturally they didn't actually give them a dime to do that research; what are they afraid of? I'm no great fan of keeping people from having handguns and rifles -- though I think it should be just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as automatic weapons -- but there's no harm in researching gun violence scientifically, and our CDC and NIH have sterling reputations, though I imagine our President's trying to change that as we speak. Even the author of the Dickey Amendment that restricted gun violence research in the first place said before he died that he regretted his amendment's effects. I wish that remorse was more contagious in Congress these days, but hey, that's why we're here.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to block Facebook's efforts to create its own damn currency. Yeah, you read that right, and I'm sure Libra will be even more annoying than bitcoin has been over the years. They're selling cryptocurrency as, get this, a way of reaching the "unbanked" citizens of the world. Setting aside that we should never privatize currency, and setting aside, also, that Libra won't help the "unbanked" if they're also "uncomputered," there's a better way to help the "unbanked": stop treating the world as your personal fuckjar. Seriously, when we keep the world's biggest actors from exploiting good folks from other lands, those good folks will have more power to do the things they want to do with their lives, and they won't need Libra or whatever to do it. And an important step toward restraining the world's biggest actors would be to stop "freeing" obnoxious tech CEOs from "burdensome" regulations because they're such great "innovators." Mostly what they innovate is new ways to separate you from your money.

Around the table: concerning health care, bad arguments, bad technology, and patriotism.

Already tired of our "liberal" media calling Medicare-for-All "government-run healthcare"? Well, we've got a response when they say that: "we are the government." They're trying to make you think of spineless bureaucrats making big health care decisions -- you know, like spineless bureaucrats at private health insurance corporations do right now! -- but we need to keep practicing thinking of ourselves when we think of our government. And anyway, that silly polling about folks preferring to keep their private health insurance? Turns out that support collapses when you tell folks they can keep their doctors and hospitals under Medicare-for-All, which is true, since the Medicare-for-All bill would mandate that doctors and hospitals accept Medicare.

Dean Baker at TruthOut says we should "Replace Patent Monopolies With Direct Public Funding for Drug Research." You know, versus the system we have now, where the public funds a significant amount of drug research (some $40 billion annually!) but asserts no power over the results, which is just about a perfect way of socializing the cost while privatizing the profits. And patents bloat these profits, of course, because when you can't get a drug from more than one manufacturer, what are you gonna do about it? Big pharma says they need the patent monopolies because they do a lot of drug research that goes nowhere, but if they're spending $70 billion and we're spending $40 billion, well, let's just say our government could probably get the whole job done for less than $110 billion. And then we-the-people could keep the patents.

Been thinking lately (or for decades!) that maybe the punditry is behind the American people a bit? Jonathan Chait will prove that point for you with all his pearl-clutching about "unpopular stances" Democratic Presidential candidates supposedly take. Not "unpopular stances" like supporting Medicare-for-All, of course, but the "unpopular stance" of "replac(ing) all employer-provided private insurance with a government plan," see how long it took to get all that out? I wonder when I'll ever hear punditoids talk about Republicans taking "unpopular" stances, though they do that all the time. (No, they didn't criticize our President for taking "unpopular" stances during his campaign, but for being generally uncouth.)

FAIR describes "liberal" media efforts to sell "Mayor Pete" Buttigieg as the guy who can unite the big donors and the small donors. The New York Times, naturally, resorts to very fuzzy numbers to make this point, and though you don't need to do differential calculus to expose their flimsy argument, you can also think of Mr. Buttigieg as the Jon Ossoff of 2020. And Mr. Ossoff not only lost that 2017 special election during which he raised all that money, he proved that the district could be won by a different Democrat, since a different Democrat -- someone who actually gave a voters a compelling reason to turn out to vote, since "but I can win" clearly ain't cutting it anymore -- won that district just this past November.

Ho hum, those "aggression-detecting" microphones some schools are using, purportedly to head off the next school shooting, are doing a very bad job, since a girl with a bad cough can set them off (and a girl screaming at the top of her lungs for a drama class apparently can't). Get a cold, become a "misfit" targeted by overzealous school administrators! I hate to sound old-fashioned, but maybe, you know, we should get our heads out of our cellphones and pay more attention to each other, rather than letting "technology" do it for us? And as for heading off the next school shooting, we should a) make it just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons and b) stop giving school shooters so damn much media attention.

Finally, Gallup finds a mere 45% of Americans are "extremely proud" of being American, the lowest number ever recorded, and though that number's been falling at least since George W. Bush won a second term, the poll theorizes that it won't go back up until our current President's out of office, whenever that is. Well, as a member of the "extremely proud" camp, I'll happily tell you that our President has nothing to do with my love of my country -- and that's how the Founders wanted it! We invest our love and our patriotism in each other, not in some diaper-loaded brat who got 46% of the vote, struts around like he got 66%, and whines like he got 26%.

Penny Rants for Sunday, June 30, 2019: concerning certain law and order matters, plus did you know David Brooks is a "moderate" now?

In yet another decision purporting to demonstrate "non-partisanship," our Supreme Court rules that federal courts can't strike down state redistricting efforts that demonstrate extreme partisanship. The best I can say about their ruling is that it cuts both ways, and already has -- Pennsylvania state Republicans twice tried to interest Justice Alito in the state Supreme Court's redrawing of state districts before the 2018 election, but Justice Alito didn't bite either time. I could add, I suppose, that the ruling affirms Congress's right to make the process fairer (i.e., in the For the People Act), but that's not some elephantine act of generosity. And, at the risk of beating a dead horse, this Court would turn over every rock in Arizona to find an "animus" against religious folks whenever someone enacts an anti-discrimination statute protecting gay and transgender folks from bigotry, but seems utterly incurious about the actual animus of Republican politicians stupid enough to put their explicit intent to use the redistricting process to expand their power in writing.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court's ruling striking down our Administration's attempt to add a citizenship question to the census form will do some good in the short run, and I can't help but dig Chief Justice Roberts's understatement in saying Secretary Ross's reasoning behind the question "seems to have been contrived." I'm not as disturbed as other folks that our Court seems to think a citizenship question on the census is A-OK as long as you follow the Administrative Procedure Act in getting it done, because I'm not sure any Administration could get that done if they get too many public comments against it, which they almost certainly will. I'm far more disturbed that four of nine Supreme Court justices seem to think the Administrative Procedure Act doesn't mean a damn thing. I'm also annoyed to hear our President wonder, out loud, if he can "delay" the census, for "no matter how long." He can't, because our Constitution says we have to conduct a census every 10 years, and does not add "or whenever our President stops throwing a tantrum about a citizenship question."

Another day, another "moderate" warning Democrats to reject the numerous populist and popular positions they're just now starting to take again after all these years. And I know what you're saying: when did David Brooks become a moderate? I won't tabulate my objections to his argument, since they number approximately one per point made, but I will point out that the math he presents doesn't work the way he wants you to think it does. I don't even mean all his cherry-picked polls about the economy and health care; I mean presenting Gallup's notoriously misleading polling about how conservative, moderate, or liberal Americans think they are -- as if every last one of them will vote, let alone vote as a bloc, let alone vote in precisely the way they describe themselves. If you know any conservatives who would rein in corporate campaign spending or any moderates who would raise taxes on the rich or any liberals who would regulate handguns and rifles pretty much as we do now -- hell, if you know anyone who's ever described "holding their nose" in the voting booth -- then you know what I mean.

Action: concerning "limited strikes," gun violence research, and corporate welfare.

Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell Rep. Engel (D-NY) that it is unconstitutional for our President to conduct a "limited strike" on a foreign country without a Congressional declaration of war. Seeing the differing responses of Rep. Engel and Sen. Sanders (I-VT) on the matter is rather like reading a Goofus and Gallant strip, except that the guy with the unkempt hair is actually Gallant here. It should be fish-in-a-barrel easy to refute Mr. Engel's suggestions that military strikes without Congressional authorization are OK as long as someone, somewhere, can define them as "limited," but sadly our "liberal" media doesn't seem prepared to do it, as they parrot the lines Mr. Engel himself parrots. And I hate to be a hard-ass (OK, I don't), but "t(ying) the President's hands" isn't a bug in our Constitution, it's a feature. The Founders were fairly disgusted with untrammeled executive power exercised by a wannabe tyrant, as you may recall. You know, like the 46% President we've got now.

Meanwhile, our House slipped $50 million for gun violence research (to be conducted by the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control) into a must-pass budget bill, so CREDO helps you tell your Senators to ensure that this legislative rider makes it into their budget bill, too. I've laid out my boundaries on gun control -- I want semi-automatic weapons treated the same as automatic weapons (which means there'll be almost no semi-automatic weapons on the streets), but I don't want universal background checks or greater limits on gun or rifle ownership. That being said, I, at least, am confident enough in my beliefs that I see no harm in funding more federal research on the matter. Oh, and that absolutely is my way of saying the rabid pro-gun crowd is not secure enough in their beliefs to endure the trauma of research that might (or might not!) tell them what they don't want to hear. And any Congressfolk who are "afraid" the research will "automatically" (semi-automatically?) lead to gun bans can, you know, perform oversight duties.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Sierra Club helps you tell your state Senator to oppose SB 618, which would give corporate welfare handouts to big coal corporations to burn off their coal waste. These handouts would total over $750 million over the next 17 years, and if you're thinking maybe we should give corporations some incentive to deal with their waste, consider, first and foremost, that giving corporations "incentives" to do the right thing is always a bad idea -- almost certainly they'll take the "incentive" and do nothing. Consider, also, that burning off coal waste in this matter doesn't reduce the volume of the waste very much and adds to the pollutants already in our air. Consider, finally, that there are better ways to ameliorate this problem, like revegetating on top of the coal waste, which not only works better but costs less. You thought conservatism was about being fiscally responsible? If so, then the funnel-taxpayer-money-to-cronies-at-all-costs crows is not conservative.

Action: three alerts concerning *real* national security.

Our Administration plans to admit only 30,000 refugees into America this year; recall that refugees are running from terror and are thus far less likely than everyone else to commit terror and you'll see their plan as the grandstanding cruelty it is -- unless, of course, you're a rage addict. But our ministry is not for rage addicts, but for those who may be thinking "we need to do something," when the whole point of living in this world is not to do "something" but to do the right thing. I will say we would find it a whole lot easier to do the right thing in re refugees if we a) stopped treating the world's citizens as impediments to resources we could take for ourselves and b) stopped letting corporations import workers willy-nilly so they can pay workers less and keep more money for themselves. In the meantime, we still have to do the right thing, hence Amnesty International helps us tell our Congressfolk to welcome more refugees to America.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6534, the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, would ensure, within six months of its passage, that employees of our government, and not private contractors, perform essential diplomatic and consular security functions in those areas of the world we're fighting. The bill would then give our President a little over a year to get rid of private contractors in other war-making functions. If you recall how Tha Bush Mobb tried to win the Iraq war with too few soldiers, and then recall how much they paid Blackwater private contractors to perform security functions in Iraq, then you no doubt see how fiscally responsible it would be to ensure we don't privatize so much of our war-making. And if we can't fight or win wars without privatizing some part of them, well, that may just be an indication we shouldn't be fighting the war at all. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop privatizing our wars by passing H.R. 6534.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 6840, the Hold the LYNE Act, and thus stop our Administration's efforts to build so-called "low-yield" nuclear weapons. ("LYNE" stands for "low-yield nuclear explosive." I know, you also thought of this, too.) Anyway, we're already capable of destroying the world hundreds of times over with the nuclear weapons we already have, so you have to wonder why we'd consider building more. I'm sure LYNE advocates try to tell us that we need to have nukes that can cause less damage and give us more military flexibility. But setting aside the notion that we'd ever want to make nuclear war easier to fight: while there's a difference between a handgun and a semi-automatic rifle, there's really not very much difference between a low-yield nuke and what we're used to -- they both kill, they both make survivors very sick, and they both make worlds uninhabitable. It's enough to make you think LYNEs exist merely to make defense contractors rich.

Around the table: starring 3D-printed guns and the FCC hack that wasn't.

Jon Stokes at the Los Angeles Times reveals "The Boring Truth About 3D-Printed Guns." If you know that 3D printing is mostly about making knick-knacks right now, you probably guessed at least one boring truth: that making a gun out of plastic is a recipe for making a gun that fires maybe once before melting. You may not have known that the ability to make guns out of parts is not a new thing, or (even!) that putting gun blueprint files on the internet is not a new thing. In re what to do, Mr. Stokes comes to more or less the same conclusion as Thom Hartmann did earlier this year -- "(s)omething like a federal license for simple possession of semiautomatic weapons."

Ho hum, a Washington Post report finds that rents are still going up for poor folks in America's most expensive cities but actually dropping for rich folks. Because rich folks are landlords' kind of folks -- and what are poor folks going to do, live in the street? How many times must I tell these pimps! This is not how a free market operates! Truly free markets don't give landlords the "freedom" to extract as much tribute from renters as possible -- truly free markets reduce payments that exceed required costs. The economists' word for "payments that exceed required costs," as you may know, is rent.

Have we reached the point where anti-Nazi protestors will now vastly outnumber pro-Nazi protestors, as happened this past Sunday at the "Unite the Right" rally? We can only hope! But we ought to remain vigilant anyway, lest, oh, I don't know, hypothetically speaking, some future Presidential candidate who panders to racists and says nasty crap about black and brown people all the time somehow gets elected. (At least we had the spectacle of the rally's organizer whining that "I have people attacking me left, right and center" at a rally called Unite the Right.)

FCC Inspector General does, in fact, report that the FCC lied to Congress about a hack attack that never took place. Remember that this "hack" just so happened to take place the same two days that a crapload of Americans -- having just watched John Oliver's latest righteous rant on HBO about the matter -- took to the FCC website to comment on their net neutrality repeal proposal. And you know, FCC Chair Ajit Pai can talk all he want about those other people who failed him, but that only makes him just another boss who only acts like the boss when things are going well. A real boss would take responsibility for failures on his watch, too. Then again, see his boss, our President.

I don't know what you've heard, but scientists have most certainly not figured out how to reverse aging -- they've managed to stop individual cells from aging in laboratory experiments. Specifically, they've delivered very small amounts of hydrogen sulfide (found in rotten eggs!) to some very old cells and made them start dividing again; cells tend to stop dividing when they get old, and then they accumulate in organs, and adversely affect the functioning level of other, younger cells. Next step, I imagine: trying to figure out how to deliver hydrogen sulfide a) only where it's needed and b) in amounts that aren't poisonous. That means don't go around huffing rotten eggs so you can stay young.

Finally, Negin Owliaei at the Our Future blog describes how the good citizens of Lancaster County, PA kept the notorious private prison corporation Geo Group from taking over the country's prison re-entry function. How did they win, when clearly the county government stood against them? They planned townhall meetings and packed county commissioner meetings, that's how, because if there's one thing politicians don't like, it's the people they're supposed to serve getting all up in their grills, like they're supposed to do. I wish the good folks of Lancaster County luck, since they kept Geo out, but they still have to convince the county that what they had (a group of non-profits helping prisoners readjust once they got out) wasn't broke and thus doesn't need fixing.

Around the table: containing two of the President's best stratagems for winning the midterms.

With both parties of Congress anxious to give our President even more unconstitutional war-making powers, it's left to Pat Buchanan to remind us not only that Israel struck Iranian forces in Syria first last week, but that the neocons who supposedly hated our President so much now control his foreign policy. Mr. Buchanan rightly reminds us that the notion that "Iran is on 'a quest for nuclear weapons'" is a "Bush-like assertion," and that "the foreign policy that America Firsters voted for" is "being replaced by the Middle East agenda of Bibi and the neoconservatives," but I bet these "America Firsters" were never that committed to ending foreign wars, especially now that their Personal Lord and Savior seems to favor one. Who wants to bet that this Administration will start banging the drums for war right around a month before the midterms?

Administration spokeshack says opposing torture-approving Gina Haspel for CIA chief would be somehow anti-feminist, and our "liberal" media seems to agree. I presume that a real feminist would know that women are, being human, as capable of evil as men are, and a real feminist certainly wouldn't let someone else's bean-counting get in the way of the truth. And, seriously, the CIA doesn't employ a single woman who can lead and who opposes torture? That seems unlikely, not just because the CIA is now almost half female, but because the world is a big place, much bigger than torture apologists tend to imagine.

Our President rolls back transgender protections for prisoners, meaning transgender prisoners will have to use the bathroom of their birth gender and get the crap kicked out of them by other prisoners as a result. Also, too, federal prisons will have to use "biological sex at birth" to determine housing assignments, which will also result in a lot of beaten-up transgender prisoners. I guess our President really doesn't care who gets hurt, as long as religious bigots get to diddle their rage glands.

There's so much to say about Vice President Pence's statement that "in the interests of the country, I think it's time to" end the Mueller investigation into his Administration, but I'll just say this: Mr. Pence should not act like the Administration "fully cooperat(ing)" with the Mueller investigation is some great gift to the American people -- "full cooperation" with a criminal investigation is, frankly, the minimum we, as Americans, have a right to expect from our government. (Is this what moved George Will to declare that Mr. Pence is even worse than our President? I don't know, but that statement certainly merits further evaluation.)

New NRA President Oliver North claims his organization is a poor, poor victim of "civil terrorism" by the multitudinous political activists who now oppose it. And, he adds, the NRA faces even worse opposition than even the civil rights movement did back in the day, though I suspect marchers who got the crap kicked out of them by police will beg to differ. All together now: waaaaaaaah! Remember: folks who present themselves as tough guys are more likely the real snowflakes.

Finally, we learn that our President would like the upcoming midterms to be "a referendum on his Presidency" and that he's far more likely to talk about himself at rallies than the candidates he's nominally supporting. Of course our President loves talking about himself, but this instinct may also be the Republicans' best path to victory in 2018 -- talking only about him erases the hopes and dreams of good Americans from the conversation, after all, and surely we remember how he rope-a-doped the Clinton campaign into talking only about him as Election Day approached in 2016, until TV became an onslaught of two-sided negative advertising that kept a lot of Americans home. If Democrats make this midterm all about our President's bad behavior, rather than what good Americans deserve from their government, then they deserve defeat.

Around the table: more thoughts about law and order, health care, and media folly.

Self-described former "Second Amendment absolutist" says it's now time for "common-sense gun control." I wholly sympathize, having only lately accepted Thom Hartmann's prescriptions for a) regulating semi-automatics as strictly as we regulate automatics and b) regulating guns generally the same way we regulate cars. Averse as I am to making people pay over and over again for their past crimes, I would caution expanding background checks too broadly -- I would only want to check someone's criminal background if they were buying an automatic or semi-automatic, and only because these guns are basically killing machines, and thus machines whose sole purpose is to deprive other people of their rights (like, you know, life).

The unsuccessful prosecution of the Pulse shooter's widow constitutes, for Maha Ahmed at The Intercept, "The Criminalization of Domestic Abuse Survivors." Shooter Omar Mateen being dead, prosecutors rang up his abused wife, Noor Salman, on charges for which she has since been acquitted but which took up two years of her life fighting. Prosecutors often go after "somebody to punish," in one observer's words, and "(a)buse victims often end up being that 'somebody'" -- and a prosecutor has a lot of ways to bend these victims to their will, like charging them with failure to protect their children from abusers. With the vast majority of women in prison having suffered domestic abuse at some point in their lives, you'd think we could intervene more effectively than we do. But I sometimes think we'll even get past racism before we get past sexism.

Texas woman gets five years in prison for voting illegally -- because she was a convicted felon who did not understand that she had to finish the supervised release part of her sentence before she could get her right to vote back. Maybe she should have known beforehand, and maybe we should be treating folks who commit tax fraud more harshly than we do, but none of that matters in this instance, because she should never have lost her right to vote in the first place! Laws depriving folks of their right to vote because of felony convictions are a stain on our nation, and not merely because a vote isn't anything like a Tommy gun.

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times notes that the current Administration's "sabotage" of the Affordable Care Act will result in our government spending $33 billion more to insure 6.4 million fewer people. I like saying "heck of a job" to things like that as much as the next guy, but as a journalist (and a damn good one, by the way!) I suppose Mr. Hiltzik can't just come out and say the obvious: why, it's almost like spending more federal money and covering fewer Americans is the whole idea! Luckily, I'm not a journalist, so I get to say it.

Finally, the notoriously right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns nearly 200 TV stations and will own over 40 more if its proposed merger with Tribune Media goes through, has apparently forced its media personalities to read the same script about the "the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country." And then an enterprising Twitter user put together an 11-second video (embedded at the above link) depicting at least nine of these media personalities saying the exact same thing. A bunch of "local" news stations all owned by the same corporation all denouncing "fake news" and "media bias" in exactly the same way? Didn't I see that on Black Mirror?

Around the table: comprising mostly warnings about the next war, plus Rick Santorum says The Worst Thing Ever, Again.

Alex Ward at Vox puts the problem with killing the Iran nuclear deal: per a former State Department official, "(i)f I were the North Koreans, and Trump pulled out of the deal with Iran, why should I make an agreement?" Logic is not this Administration's strong point, and of course its votaries think logic is Communist or something, so I suspect the Administration will make the bad deal described in paragraph 26 -- one that would let North Korea keep the nukes it's got, versus the actual deal the Administration has such a hard-on to scuttle, in which Iran can't have any nukes. After that I presume they'll Blame Obama.

Andrew Sullivan sees the appointment of the Mustache of Evil as National Security Advisor as "the next step toward tyranny." It's a good analysis worth reading in full, but I would caution against thinking the next war will come after the midterms -- President Kennedy's Cuban missile crisis just so happened to take place weeks before the 1962 midterms, and I suspect having the country rally around him saved a lot of Democrat ass that year.

Of course unidentified sources say income National Security Advisor John Bolton will "rein in" his "hawkish views" once he joins the Administration, because what else would they say? That's he's going to make damn sure we go to war with Iran, regardless of whether America wants that or not or whether it's a good idea or not? Besides, going around announcing you're going to break everything would lead people to suspect you're going to break everything, and people who want to break everything can't have that.

CNBC poll finds a little less than one third of Americans reporting having more take-home pay as a result of the recent Republican tax "reform." That doesn't mean more folks aren't getting more money in their paychecks, but they sure ain't getting what rich folks and big corporations are getting, and people are going to vote how they feel. It is a bit miraculous that we're seeing this kind of reporting -- you know, instead of all the parroting of right-wing talking points we normally see when the "liberal" media tries to talk about taxes.

Finally, there is so, so much wrong with Senator Rick Santorum's suggestion that high school students should learn CPR instead of protesting gun violence, and the fact that CPR doesn't help you if you're bleeding to death isn't the half of it. He wants you to think "t(aking) action to ask someone to pass a law" equals "looking to someone else to solve (your) problem," when it actually equals getting your representatives, who are called "representatives" for a reason, to do their jobs. And he says kids should be asking "(h)ow do I as an individual deal with this problem," because if kids ask "how do we come together to deal with problems," then people like Rick Santorum don't win elections anymore. But worst of all: he thinks kids should accept the reality that they could be shot to death at school for no damn reason, and prepare for that eventually not by demanding more from their leaders but by learning CPR. I mean, c'mon, America is a can-do nation.

Around the table: guns, education, populism, decadence, and strategy.

Zenobia Jeffries at Yes! magazine writes about black folks who have strongly embraced gun ownership in the wake of the "megalomaniac" who's now President. Many years ago, I embraced a very rigid view of Second Amendment rights out of a similar fear that Tha Bush Mobb would haul me away, but I've come to believe that, in a civilized society, that you don't locate the idea of "self-defense" solely in a handgun, but mainly in the values and institutions that neuter megalomaniac Presidents in the first place -- and if those values and institutions, frankly, haven't worked very well for black folks (just ask Philandro Castile!), our task is to make them work well, not abandon them.

Betsy DeVos's Department of Education informs Department workers that they'll no longer negotiate with those workers' chosen representative, the American Federation of Government Employees Council 252, but instead imposes a "collective bargaining agreement" upon them. I can't fathom the circumstances under which this could possibly be legal -- I can imagine even John Roberts saying that if management imposes its will on labor without negotiating, it can't be said to be "collective bargaining," or even "bargaining." But then, this is the Administration way: do what you want, regardless of the law, and dare anyone to stop you.

It really shouldn't surprise us by now that West Virginia's public school teachers don't fit snugly into the red-blue paradigm, nor should it surprise us that socially-conservative-but-pro-union is really a thing. I also don't think West Virginia's particular brand of pro-union populism should be a template for the rest of the country, since West Virginia's economy relies on coal more than any other state. And "bringing jobs back to coal country" might be more about reclaiming used-up coal land for agriculture and renewable energy than recasting REGULASHUNZ BAD!!! as a populist tenet.

If you want a true indicator of how sick, immoral, and decadent our society has become, you need look no further than all the cable news personalities the Administration has either hired or is contemplating hiring. The President has recently hired CNBC's ridiculous Larry Kudlow to replace the almost-as-ridiculous Gary Cohn as his top economic advisor, and one Fox and Friends host (not a famous one) has actually moved up in the State Department. TV news is the worst news, which means cable TV news is the worst of the worst. Hence another reason to demand the ability to buy our cable channels a la carte: so we don't have to financially support these morons as they schmooze their way into our government.

Finally, Republicans are apparently hoping that they can keep their Senate majority by having the President go to states he won and talk about how "Democrats are hindering his agenda." I'm not sure how big the President's "base" is, really, and it sure does seem "counterintuitive" to have him go around the country and whine about how he can't get anything done. On the other hand, since this President isn't a Democrat, the "liberal" media will be much less likely to cover all of his whining as whining. And out of all the Senators up from states the President won, the only two I'd miss are Tammy Baldwin and Sherrod Brown.

Around the table: tabulating continuing bad behavior from the "liberal" media, corporate front groups, and, of course, our President.

Wondering how the Republican tax "reform" plan started getting positive numbers? It may have been because the "liberal" media kept parroting right-wing talking points about thousand-dollar bonuses, which were a) not given to all workers by all corporations and b) pale next to the windfall those corporations are going to get. The bad news? When you refuse to pay workers what they're worth for so long, a thousand-dollar bonus will feel like manna from heaven, rather than a small pile of money that'll be gone in two weeks. The good news? Only around 25% of Americans seem to be noticing a tax cut in their paychecks, and that number maps too easily onto my old saw that 25% of the electorate is insane. Remember when President Obama got a tax cut designed not to be noticed into your paycheck? Remember how the 2010 midterms went for him?

On the other hand, Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic suggests that Democrats will fumble away their chance to take back Congress by "fail(ing) to effectively challenge the GOP claim that its tax-cut plan is benefiting average families." We're seeing a little evidence Democrats understand this -- ads supporting Sens. McCaskill and Donnelly mention the probability that tax-cuts-for-the-rich will lead to Medicare cuts for seniors -- but, gosh, the reality we've described above (people not seeing bigger paychecks, small bonuses spent and forgotten) should be fairly compelling, too. I'd shoot an ad with a bunch of bloodhounds looking for tax cuts. Hey, it worked for Mitch McConnell against Dee Huddleston in 1984.

Democrats formally introduce the resolution of disapproval aiming to overturn the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, and the corporate lobbyists have already begun their whining. Dig the "Broadband for America" group's asinine assertion that "such a significant policy issue should (not) be decided by an obscure legislative device that bypasses congressional debate and important input from the public." They sure didn't complain when Republicans used that very same "obscure legislative device" to repeal FCC consumer internet privacy protections, and they didn't defend "important input from the public" when the FCC came out and said it ignored most of the public comments it got, so Broadband for America, whoever they are, can drink a big glass of STFU.

The U.S. Geological Survey plans to eliminate its Biological Survey Unit, which costs a mere $1.6 million annually (out of a $4 trillion-plus budget!) and keeps over a million plant and animal specimens. Civilizations do not do this; sick, immoral, and decadent societies do this, and the more they say they're doing it for the coal miner in West Virginia or the single mother in Detroit -- who do both benefit from research on plants and animals in America -- the sicker, more immoral, and more decadent they become. And only truly sick individuals like Newt Gingrich say some billionaire could do it if it's that important, like only billionaires can do important things. We do it, as Americans, because we do important things.

In case you were wondering, no, we shouldn't deprive gun owners of due process rights just because the President gets frustrated with having to think hard about things that require hard thinking. We have preserved due process rights over the centuries precisely to prevent governments like this one from becoming too powerful, but sadly I bet a lot of the President's votaries agreed with him, even the biggest gun-lovers among them (who, after all, always think it's those other people who deserves to have their rights violated). Being civilized is hard work. It's supposed to be hard work. And folks who don't like doing the hard work should go live in a police state. It's that simple.

Finally, notorious right-wing gasbag Erick Erickson says Parkland high school student David Hogg is a "bully." Our Glorious Elites, feeling "bullied" by high school students! And dig how they suggest that anyone who proposes a boycott is a "bully" -- where's their love for the "free" market? And dig how Mr. Erickson says "(h)igh school kids are not people we should take seriously on any subject," as if that's not profoundly elitist, and thus also anti-American! Our Glorious Elites do nothing, ever, but bully the people, and then pretend they're the victims when the people finally push back. May God have mercy on their immortal souls.

Action: "free" trade, gun violence research, and the DREAM Act.

NAFTA renegotiation drags on -- out of sight of the American people or their Representatives in Congress, naturally, since it's not like the people are the owners of government or anything. But regardless of what comes out, Congress will still have to vote on it if they want to, you know, enact it, so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that any renegotiated NAFTA protects working families and protects our clean air and clean water. Previous "free" trade deals have represented a race to the bottom, as countries find themselves hamstrung from passing (or enforcing) laws protecting their people because some trade pact won't let them do it. Our President has talked a good game on trade, and has withdrawn us from the hated Trans-Pacific "Partnership," but that doesn't mean he won't make NAFTA even worse, as all the "free" traders he put in his cabinet "wield their influence." Fortunately, this is America, where the people always get a vote. And not just on Election Day.

Meanwhile, Sarah Clements, of Newtown, CT, has started a petition on Change.org, which helps you demand that Congress repeal the Dickey Amendment, which has effectively banned gun violence research for 20 years. The Dickey Amendment to the 1996 omnibus spending bill states that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control," but, really, facts are facts, and it doesn't really matter what those facts "advocate" or "promote," particularly since Congress would still be able to ignore the CDC's findings. And former Rep. Jay Dickey (R-AK) himself said in 2012 that we should absolutely research the causes of gun violence. But since the findings of such research might ultimately cost some gun corporation CEO the money to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, I guess we can't have nice things. Unless we demand them, of course.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean DREAM Act, without the kind of poison pill amendments that placate bigots. If you're of the mind, as I am, that corporations use foreign workers to drive down wages, you still shouldn't be so cruel as to demand that folks brought here as children, brought here without their consent, be deported to home countries they don't recognize after spending literally decades here and building a life here. Don't let two recent court decisions preventing the Administration from sending DACA recipients home next week, nor the Supreme Court's recent decision not to expedite the Administration's appeal of those courts' decisions, lull you into complacency. Congress still doesn't want to get this done, so afraid are Republicans of the President's supporters. But an obnoxious minority doesn't get all the say about anything. At least, not if this is America.

Action: fighting banksters and gun violence.

I would not blame you for finding it strange that S. 2155, the so-called Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, still hasn't gotten a vote in the full Senate, despite having no less than 12 Democrat co-sponsors, which Roots Action has dubbed the "Bailout Caucus." (The Bailout Caucus includes no less a distinguished personage than the Democrats' most recent nominee for Vice President, Tim Kaine.) S. 2155 would loosen regulations that protect us from banksters, and though we know banksters are of course very popular, the bill clearly has the votes not merely to pass but frustrate a theoretical Democratic filibuster. So why haven't they voted on the damn thing? Because they know it's a pile of hot, steaming dung and they're waiting until they think no one's paying attention. So let Roots Action help you tell your Senators to reject S. 2155, and thus remind our Senators that we always watch what they do.

Thom Hartmann's "Two Simple Laws Could Solve America's Epidemic of Violence" article from last week set out two principles -- treating semi-automatic weapons under the law the same way we treat automatic weapons, and regulating guns the way we regulate cars -- that form an ideal basis for gun control regulation, and you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them you would like future gun control legislation to follow these two principles. Note well, even in the face of endless squealing from the right, that these principles do not ban guns, nor do they heap additional "red tape" upon owners of handguns and hunting rifles. I've been wrong to reflexively oppose gun control proposals over the years, and the activism of our high school students has both inspired and shamed me. But, hey, that's their job as civilized people.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell American corporations to stop funding the National Rifle Association. As of this writing, nearly two dozen corporations have already cut ties with the NRA, but we can wield the Big Stick of Bad PR to get more corporations to abandon the NRA, too. The NRA runs mainly on dues from its members, but also depends heavily on discounts coming from corporate partners, so if we can choke off that money-stream, we can make the NRA less powerful, and maybe get some common sense gun control legislation passed in our great land. The growing insanity of the National Rifle Association is a genuinely sad tale: a half-century ago, they extolled the virtues of licensing and regulation and fought the spread of automatic weapons, but in the last several decades, the NRA has become an organization of far-right extremists, serving only mammon and hatred. And remember, when right-wingers squeal TEH ECONOMIKZ OPPRESSIONZ!!!!, that discounts aren't a Constitutional right.

Around the table: with mostly more thoughts about guns and Russia.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo describes "Why the Trump/Russia Skeptics Are Wrong." By "skeptics," of course, he doesn't mean those of us who are skeptical that obsessing about Russia will really result in a more perfect union; he means analysts skeptical that "we’ll ever find a proven and explicit agreement between President Trump and Vladimir Putin or some other similarly high-level Russian official to collaborate in subverting the 2016 election." Mr. Marshall makes good points: we can't claim the current Administration is "too disorganized" to collaborate with Russia, because "(s)pies...look precisely for chaotic and disorganized contexts" in which to operate, and we also can't simply say there's either a "smoking gun" or "nothing at all," because the current Administration knew it was going on and not only kept meeting with Russians, but went to precisely zero law enforcement officials about what they knew, which all sure smells like smoke regardless of whether we find the actual gun that actually fired.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who famously warned a year ago that our President might concoct a "Reichstag fire"-style event to consolidate his power, now fears that he may try to cancel the 2018 mid-term elections out of fear of "Russian interference." To be honest, I feared that Mr. Bush would cancel the 2004 election, too, out of fear of the "war on terror," so I'm at least accustomed to thinking this way. We have to get the rest of America accustomed to thinking this way, not to cause panic, but to (in Mr. Snyder's own words) "get that idea out there in order to make it less likely" (italics mine, perhaps not surprisingly).

Houston school superintendent threatens three-day suspensions for students walking out to participate in gun-control protests. Schools can certainly discipline students for walking out, but I have to wonder if Houston schools routinely hand out three-day suspensions to students when they walk out for other reasons, since they can't dish out larger punishments for taking part in political protests. (Also, too, I bet a suspension isn't exactly a deterrent for a significant number of schoolkids.)

Dear Leader has announced that his coveted military parade -- you know, the kind that dictators all over the world really like! -- will take place on Veterans Day, November 11. That's some smarts, there, as the coming parade will no doubt dominate news coverage the weeks before, which means the kind of voter who's easily impressed by our President and his parade will more likely turn out on Election Day, which takes place on November 6. I mean, if he did it on July 4, that'd be four months before Election Day, and thus mostly forgotten before Election Day -- though I'm sure they'll say "logistics" is the reason they're not doing it then.

Finally, in the wake of completely laughable accusations from right-wingers that today's teenage gun-control protestors are "coached" or "paid actors," Niraj Chokshi at the New York Times reminds us that similar charges dogged those who fought racism after the Civil War, including the civil rights protestors of the '50s and '60s. One of the reasons these charges are so ridiculous, of course, is that they too often come from folks who are coached by their big donors, and paid-in-all-but-name by those same big donors. And these folks also live in abject fear that they have lost the argument -- which should give us hope, except that desperate folks are usually the most dangerous.

Around the table: more thoughts about guns, health care, corporate crime, and "environmental terrorism."

Thom Hartmann at AlterNet offers "Two Simple Laws" that "Could Solve America's Epidemic of Violence." These would a) treat semi-automatic weapons exactly the same under the law as automatic weapons and b) regulate gun ownership the way we regulate car ownership. Remember, cars may be killing machines, but they also get us places; guns are just killing machines. Even if you don't want to ban guns outright, it's hard to argue against getting proper training and licensing before buying killing machines -- unless you're a snowflake, that is. Seriously, no whining about ALL TEH RED TAPEZ!!!! It makes you look stupid and lazy.

Jonathan Chait at New York magazine says our current Administration has fomented "a Golden Age for Corporate Crime." The SEC, whose job is to protect shareholders from malevolent executives, is of course bringing far fewer cases and hauling in far less money in penalties than Mr. Obama's 2016 SEC did over a comparable period of time -- please recall that Mr. Obama spent eight years bending over backward to please banksters after they destroyed our economy -- and the EPA, whose job is to protect our air and water from polluters, has of course collected less than half the money in fines that Tha Bush Mobb did in its first year in office (though, to be fair, Tha Bush Mobb was still trying to look like reasonable moderates back then). And that's before we get to the CFPB dropping a major case against a loanshark outfit, then lying that CFPB employees -- the same ones who'd spend years building the case -- made the call! It's enough to make a man wish these CFPB employees could sue their boss for libel.

Idaho Republicans announce plan to defy the Affordable Care Act, by letting insurers sell plans that don't meet the ACA's standards in re lifetime caps, covered conditions, and pre-existing conditions. The Otter Administration is placing one good bet in assuming that the current Administration won't bother enforcing the Affordable Care Act, but they're placing one very bad bet in assuming that the good citizens of Idaho will simply take it lying down, pre-existing conditions bans being, as you know, very popular. I'd like to remind Idaho populists hemming and hawing about running for office that this is the state that sent Frank Church to the Senate four times.

Ho hum, Blue Cross is pressuring its employees to donate to the Michigan Democratic gubernatorial candidate who doesn't support single-payer health insurance. And Gretchen Whitmer (whose dad use to run Blue Cross, no less!) is just like other weakling Democrats, refusing to answer direct questions about corporate contributions to her campaign while touting her willingness to "work with everyone," as if everyone's worth working with. What do you suppose the chances are that Blue Cross demands its employees donate to the Republican candidate once Ms. Whitmer wins her primary? It's a question worth asking!

When confronted with this lengthy report on how our government wants you to think environmental activists are "terrorists," you might well be compelled to ask: why aren't laws protecting vandalism on private property enough? After all, any activist who (for example) shuts off an oil pipeline valve knows they're breaking the law. I can only conclude that law and order simply isn't good enough for corporations who have lost the argument and won't change with the times. Bonus: ALEC can only come up with anecdotal evidence about "environmental terrorism" to make its argument -- and most of its anecdotes are rubbish!

Finally, Sen. Ted Cruz, talking with another right-wing hack, discusses that Simpsons episode where Homer goes all 2nd-Amendment and Lisa opposes him and utters this priceless flatugasm: "The Democrats are the party of Lisa Simpson and Republicans are happily the party of Homer, Bart, Maggie and Marge." If you want to say Democrats are so-smart-they're-dumb, you don't liken them to the Simpsons character who actually knows science, thinks hard about things, and plays a mean saxophone. Is it too much to ask that, after this, nerds never vote Republican in significant numbers again?

Action: national monuments, methane emissions, and ALEC.

As you likely know, President Trump has announced his intention to reduce the boundaries of the Bears' Ears National Monument by 85% and reduce the boundaries of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by about half. And he even went to Utah to make these announcements, perhaps figuring that everyone in Utah believes exactly as big mining corporations executives do -- that public lands should be drilled and mined as much as humanly possible. And here, you might have been thinking, like me, that Utah's a damn gorgeous state and the people there probably want to keep it that way. There's some question as to whether the President actually has any authority in law to shrink the size of national monuments, but Mr. Trump loves doing crap first and trying to use the consequences of his actions against us later, so let's engage in a little pre-emption, as it were, by letting the Wilderness Society help us tell President Trump to abandon his plan to give up large swaths of these national monuments to mining and drilling corporations. Did I mention that five Native American tribes consider Bears Ears' land holy? Think maybe that's just another reason for President Trump to hate it?

Meanwhile, as you may recall, the Trump Administration wants to delay implementing the EPA's new methane emissions standards for two years, presumably so they can gut them after that (though saying so out loud, as they've done, won't help them win the inevitable lawsuits against them). Of course you already know why this is a crappy idea: not just because methane pollutes the air, not just because methane packs a much larger climate-change punch than coal, but because allowing gas drilling corporations to vent methane into the air wastes energy -- methane being, you know, an energy source -- and when gas drilling corporations vent methane on public lands, they're also cheating the American taxpayer out of well-deserved royalties. Of course, President Trump doesn't care about any of that, as long as some executive, somewhere, is raking in money he hasn't earned through hard work and good leadership. And "delaying" the rule for two years does what, exactly? Besides give more children asthma attacks and make more good Americans sick from carcinogens, I mean. So the Sierra Club helps you tell our government to put people ahead of polluters and stop trying to delay methane emissions regulations.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell the CEO of UPS to stop funding the radical right-wing legislative agenda of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. I've found that the corporations that still associate with ALEC think it's perfectly OK to say that they don't agree with ALEC on voting rights or climate change or gun rights, but they support ALEC because of their work on economic issues. If there was ever an argument tailor-made to repel me, that's the one. Of course, everyone doesn't think the same way I do (a matter about which many people are thankful, I'm sure), and plenty of corporations have abandoned ALEC for reasons that seem (to me, at least) to be of secondary importance to the fact that ALEC's main reason to exist is to keep corporations far more powerful than people. But if "ALEC is a bunch of climate change-deniers and I know you care about passing on an inhabitable planet to your posterity, don't you?" gets more corporations to abandon ALEC, I'm on board. I'm a demanding bastard, but I don't let the perfect murder the good. And depriving ALEC of the funding it uses to let corporations run roughshod over people? Doing that seems to me almost a textbook definition of "good."

Around the table: the biggest threat to small restaurants, and other horrible truths.

In a wild development, Saudi Arabian government arrests over a dozen of its elites, including ten princes, on vague "corruption" charges not more than a few hours after creating an anti-corruption commission. You may be tempted to shrug at the sight of some elites abusing other elites, but don't be -- when a nation gives itself the power to jail folks and freeze bank accounts at will, it's telling the world how insecure it really is, and nothing good comes of powerful nations acting insecure.

Sadly, we have cause to be reminded, again, that "arming all the civilians" won't stop mass shootings. If you recall that mass shooters first and foremost have the element of surprise, and that they generally shoot a lot of people before everyone else can even figure out what's going on, you'd see that right away, but if you're someone who watches too many cop shows, you might not see it. Gosh, everyone on a cop show is a great shot, and it just isn't like that in real life.

President Trump meets with Native American leaders, and advises them to just go ahead and take resources like oil and gas from the ground. They blanched, of course, knowing that there are laws against that, but Mr. Trump reiterated that they should "just do it"; read the quoted passage again and you'll see that any interpretation suggesting that "just do it" meant "just get rid of regulations" is wishful thinking. People like Donald Trump seem to think regulations keep us from being tough guys, but tough guys don't whine about having to follow rules that protect our air and water, do they?

U.S. trade deficit increases nine percent over the previous year. As usual, we're buying more imports than we're selling exports, and usually I'd respond that the economy's like a cruise ship, and you can't turn around a cruise ship quickly -- except that President Trump constantly promises that he can turn a cruise ship around quickly, and constantly struts around like he's actually done it, so he gets no slack. The man's more comfortable running corporations into the ground and then extracting their value for himself, and that's not the skill set you'd need to turn around a trade deficit.

Finally, from the "Surprise, Surprise!" file, experts now tell us there are too many chain restaurants. You know the story: too many chain restaurants means that unique restaurants with good ideas can't survive, which demonstrates once again that the biggest enemy of the small business is the big corporation. At least the New York Times doesn't insult us by including testimony from an "economics expert" saying "well, this is just the economy getting more efficient." Efficiency is a tool, not a master.

Around the table: from various kinds of corruption to right-wing whining.

The incomparable David Dayen at The Nation tells us how JP Morgan Chase provided at least part of a settlement-mandated $8 billion in "homeowner assistance": by "forgiving loans on properties it no longer owned." (Italics in original, for once!) It gets better: Chase still collected loan payments on the properties it had sold! As one former Congressman said, "No one in Washington seems to understand why Americans think that different rules apply to Wall Street, and why they’re so mad about that. This is why." And it sure seems like those crappy Obama-era settlements were even worse than we thought.

Trump Administration declares that the American Insurance Group (a.k.a. the Notorious AIG) is no longer a "systematically-important financial institution" (or SIFI), and is thus no longer subject to more rigorous government regulation. The move just so happens to benefit Carl Icahn, one of AIG's largest investors and a Trump Administration advisor until he lobbied to roll back environmental regulations that, just so happens, would have benefited another of his investments. And that's another example of what really corrupts America's morals -- not ZOMG TRANGENDURD IN TEH BATHROOMZ!!!!! or any other species of right-wing idiocy.

In a peripherally-related note, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were thisclose to getting indicted for misleading potential condo buyers, until Donald Trump's longtime lawyer Marc Kasowitz personally intervened with Manhattan's District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., and got him to squash the case. The punchline? Mr. Kasowitz is a big campaign donor of Mr. Vance's, and although Mr. Vance returned Mr. Kasowitz's $25,000 donation before meeting with him, Mr. Kasowitz raised more than double that for Mr. Vance thereafter. Some four years later, Mr. Vance now says he'll return that money, too, which doesn't even avoid the appearance of evil.

Sen. Rand Paul, last seen helping to scuttle the Graham-Cassidy health care "reform" bill, has expressed serious concerns about the Trump Administration tax "reform" plan as well. And not from the "it doesn't hurt people enough" corner, either -- he links to a Tax Policy Center analysis finding that nearly a third of taxpayers making between $50,000 and $150,000 annually could see their taxes go up. Anyway, we could certainly do worse than to have Rand Paul go on a rampage against the Trump agenda, regardless of his motives.

Sen. John Thune (R-SD) advises potential mass shooting victims to "take precautions," "stay safe," and "as somebody said, get small." What are you supposed to do if you get shot before you realize something awful is happening? Well, I guess we can't expect that much wisdom from a U.S. Senator. And let's see him say "(i)t's an open society and it's hard to prevent anything" next time immigration reform comes up.

Finally, vaunted seer Pat Robertson informs us that all those people died in Las Vegas because "we have disrespected authority," adding that "there is profound disrespect for our president." He must have missed that lesson from our Founders that you're supposed to mistrust your leaders, so that you can keep them from doing you harm -- a lesson I bet meant more to him when Barack Obama was President. Anyway, disrespecting our President is our damn birthright as Americans, and seriously, it's well past time Our Glorious Elites and Their Glorious Institutions earned some damn respect.

Around the table: in which we are reminded that the work of defending free speech is very hard.

The ACLU, under considerable pressure from misguided liberals, announces it will scrutinize which hate groups it represents a bit differently than it has in the past, its executive director giving the wish to protest with "loaded firearms" as an example. But I find it far too easy, frankly, to defend protesting with loaded firearms as a legitimate free speech act protected by the First Amendment, even if the folks doing such protesting are assholes. Of course shooting people with those firearms isn't "protected speech," but maybe our police officers could prepare for such things, you know, the way they seem to do when liberals march?

From the "Liberals Do Obnoxious Swordfighting Too" file: Katherine Cross, at The Establishment, asserts that "(e)very person who’s ever misused arguments for free speech to defend Nazis or white supremacists...has some measure of Heather Heyer’s blood on their hands." Gosh, I guess that includes me! Call me old-fashioned, but I think James Alex Fields and no one else has Ms. Heyer's blood on his hands, and more than a few liberals (Dennis Miller may be the most famous example) have switched sides after people like Ms. Cross kept shouting at them that they weren't liberal enough. Luckily for me, God made me a liberal, and I stopped bucking God a long time ago.

The Straight Dope's take on net neutrality -- the principle that says you, and not some corporation, should get to decide where you go on the internet -- isn't all that deep, but it contains one brilliant observation: that the worst thing that could happen as a result of its disappearance is "a time when an ISP might think carefully about what kind of content it allows to be seen on the Web, for fear of poking the orange dragon," i.e., our infamously thin-skinned President. That's weapons-grade PR, right there, so tell all your friends: Donald Trump wants to kill net neutrality so he doesn't get criticized on the internet.

I agree with this Las Vegas Sun editorial's description of Republican efforts to recall two state Senators (one Democratic, one independent) as "an abuse of the recall provision" and "an attempt to hijack the democratic process,", but that doesn't mean I want to stop the recalls. Let the endangered incumbents campaign against the inherent stupidity of the recall -- it's possible to do that without sounding self-pitying, you know! -- and show Republicans that future efforts to nullify democratic elections will fail. I'm not even particularly upset by the notion of "nonstop elections" -- elected officials should expect to be accountable to their bosses, the people, at any time.

Finally, you've no doubt heard that Steve Bannon's out as President Trump's "senior strategist" or whatever, and has made a soft landing at his old employer, Breitbart. And just like his old boss he continues to let his mouth write checks his ass can't cash, saying "I've got my hands back on my weapons" (I shudder to think what he's actually got his hands on) and that he's "definitely going to crush the opposition," which is what approximately zero people who crush the opposition say before they crush the opposition. I look forward to ignoring him, just like I did before he joined the Trump Administration.

Around the table: when a pro-hearing aid bill becomes an anti-gun bill, and other absurdities.

Surprise, surprise, President Trump's boutique infrastructure plan would include tolls on existing interstate highway lanes and privatizing rest stops on those highways. One more time: the private sector doesn't do things better; it just redistributes income from workers to executives "better." And I bet Congress and the President aren't really "headed for a fight" about this matter -- one Republican Rep says "I don't like paying for a road twice," which, like, hallelujah, but then adds "(e)verything's on the table." Profile in courage!

Dean Baker calls a financial transaction tax (a.k.a. the "Robin Hood tax" or the "Wall Street sales tax") "The Best Solution to Income Inequality." Why? Because the cost will borne entirely by Wall Street, rather than Main Street. Mr. Baker also reminds us that a) folks don't care about the number of trades they make so much as the amount of money they make, and b) banksters can't argue that "more trades makes the market more efficient," as "(s)omeone would be hard pressed to argue that capital was better allocated in the housing bubble years than fifteen or twenty years earlier when volume might have been less than half of its current level."

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted" file: Oklahoma's state budgeting problems are so awful now that a lot of kids are only going to school four days a week. The good news? Not every kid in Oklahoma likes it -- some of them, for example, don't like all the rushing around you do when you try to cram five days of work into four. Still, I worry that too many of them will remember this as some kind of Golden Age, even after they're grownups and the ill effects of their education take their toll -- how many of them will say "a four-day school week never hurt me" as they suffer through their umpteenth consecutive year without work?

Hoo boy: former Fox News punditoid recalls how that network (among other things!) made the news "like pro wrestling" and "performance art," and how they "fixed" panel debates so that right-wingers always won. Fox News punditoids getting their scripted "last word" 24 hours beforehand, a Fox News "star" telling his guests what to say -- these are, of course, the hallmarks of folks who can't win arguments on the merits. And remember, kids: if we could buy cable channels a la carte, we wouldn't have to put up with this garbage.

Finally, from the "When Do They Feel Shame?" file, gun rights groups contort bill allowing over-the-counter hearing aids into an anti-gun bill, quite likely because Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is one of its sponsors. Go ahead and try to follow their reasoning, if you dare. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is also one of its sponsors, and has rebutted these groups' talking points, but apparently to no avail. What a shame that some gun rights groups make all gun rights supporters look bad.

Around the table: politicians who need "safe spaces," and other abject follies.

Justice Department decides not to prosecute a Mexico-based, Citigroup-owned bank on drug-laundering charges. They got a settlement instead, just like President Obama used to do! I'm not even sure the admission they broke a reporting law represents progress! Obviously this action contrasts with our Justice Department's "zero tolerance" policy toward drug users, but n.b. that the Trump Administration also fights nonviolent offenders who want to get their guns back while letting banksters launder drug money. Law and order!

While visiting Sicily on his European tour, President Trump needed a golf cart to get around the streets of Taormina, while seven other world leaders walked. I wouldn't bother with stuff like this, except that the Great Man has been yelling at us for years about how everybody but him is "low-energy." And now his votaries make excuses for him about how "exhausted" he is! Yes, doing evil is exhausting. That's just one reason to do as little evil as possible.

Here's something I hadn't considered about Mr. Trump's little "Victims of Immigration Crime" hotline: the Trump Administration can cover any PR reversals over deporting someone by saying hey, a citizen had a complaint, we gotta act! We'll see how much power citizen complaints have when some Trump crony pollutes a water table from which good Americans drink! But, as with too many Guantánamo Bay detainees, ratting out your neighbors not only isn't evidence, it isn't even probable cause. (I do love that good Americans clogged up the hotline with fake complaints about space aliens, though.)

Surprise, surprise, Fox News hacks cheer on Greg Gianforte's alleged assault of a Guardian reporter. But, seriously, they're criticizing the reporter for entering Mr. Gianforte's "safe space"? How much "safe space" do politicians "need" from the "liberal" media? And, really, who's the "snowflake" here? Right-wingers really have morphed into a twisted stereotype of everything they purport to hate about liberals. When Mr. Gianforte casts a vote in the House, I bet they give him a participation trophy.

Finally, middle school teacher in Texas gives out fake end-of-year "awards" to students, which include "Most Likely to Cry About Every Little Thing," "Most Likely to Become Homeless in Guatemala," and, of course, "Most Likely to Become a Terrorist." Adults can do this sort of thing to each other if they all agree it's funny and keep it to themselves, but adults can't do this to kids, lest they earn the "Most Likely to Think You're Hip and Ironic When You're Just Sick and Twisted" award.

Around the table: meet the Senate health care "reform" effort, same as the House health care "reform effort."

If this Bloomberg report on Senate Republicans health care "reform" efforts is true, then we're in for a world of hurt. Sen. Portman (R-OH) has expressed skepticism about a Medicaid rollback -- his state, unlike other Republican-run states, has accepted the Obamacare Medicaid expansion with vigor -- but now he's proposing a longer phase-out, which is still a phase-out. Also, their "reinsurance" idea is nothing but corporate welfare -- corporate welfare they "hope" will keep premiums down, wink-wink. And not that I really care, but how is "auto-enrollment" significantly different from the Obamacare mandate?

Greg Gianforte wins Montana U.S. House special election -- even after allegedly bodyslamming a Guardian reporter who asked him about the House's health care bill. I had high hopes for Rob Quist, and maybe I still should -- where Mr. Trump won by 20 points and Mr. Zinke won the House race by 16, Mr. Gianforte only won by 7, and if Mr. Gianforte winds up in jail soon (he may have money, but that's all he's got), I presume they'll have to do this again. The road back to relevance is going to be harder for Democrats in solidly Trumpian areas, even when Berniecrats run. Still, no way another "problem-solving" "bipartisan" milquetoast comes within 7 points of Mr. Gianforte.

Another day, another reminder that the ZOMG TEH ROBOTZ ARE TAKINGZ OURZ JOBZ!!!!! argument is pure hysteria. Folks who fall prey to hostage crises ("don't raise the minimum wage or the robots will take all the jobs!") would do well to remind themselves that though robots do replace people in particular circumstances, "particular circumstances" still doesn't equal "always." You might be able to talk me into replacing CEOs with robots, though. I mean, they'd be no less inhuman than the ones we've got!

Despite Mr. Trump's incessant posturing about guns, his Justice Department is fighting claims by former nonviolent offenders to have their gun rights restored. Wondering whether fidelity to 2nd Amendment rights would win out over Mr. Trump's bottomless hatred/exploitation of petty criminals? Well, wonder no more. And no use arguing they're just continuing the "tradition to defend federal laws in court" -- how many voting rights violation cases has Mr. Trump's Justice Department dropped like a rock?

Jeremy Mohler and Donald Cohen at The American Prospect put the central problem of privatization quite well: "(f)or decades, the corporate world has increasingly become the exemplar of good governance, and the market has come to stand for economic efficiency," but "(d)espite claims of greater efficiency, the reality is usually higher fees and costs, reduced services, lower wages, and loss of public control." And big money for corporate executives -- which is why our 46% President is America's biggest cheerleader for privatization.

Finally, Neal Gabler at Moyers and Company calls Roger Ailes "The Man Who Destroyed Objectivity." Others may argue that Jacques Derrida deserves that title, but Mr. Derrida didn't create a cancer on society like the Fox News Channel. Critical point: Mr. Ailes, who "got his start in entertainment," "turned television news into tabloid news," so that we now have a world that not only enables right-wingers to spew obnoxious filth without suffering the consequences, but we also have a world where telling the truth isn't sexy anymore because it doesn't look like TMZ.