Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning health care and nativism.

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

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

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

Action: concerning Medicare privatization, workplace heat standards, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell New York City's mayor to stop forcing city employees onto Medicare Advantage, tell our Department of Labor to institute its proposed heat standard, and tell our government to reject Postal Service privatization. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Be a Hero helps you tell New York City Mayor Eric Adams to stop forcing city employee retirees to use Medicare Advantage instead of traditional Medicare. Because the only advantage to Medicare "Advantage" is that private health insurance executives make more money while denying more care – and, of course, siphoning off taxpayer funds that could have gone to traditional Medicare! Remember when they said Eric Adams was the future of the Democratic party? Well, this marks him as the same-old same-old. So let's fight him, and protect folks who paid into Medicare all their lives and deserve the best Medicare they can get.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor to implement its heat standard rule now. Why now, as fall is upon us? Because the next President might be a whiny, traitorous asshole who will shit all over this rule, just to please bosses who think being cruel to their workers is their "right"! Also too, in some parts of the country (i.e., the South), it's still pretty hot, and Southern workers could use all the help they can get. If you hear anyone say this rule will mainly help illegal immigrants, back away from them, slowly, and maybe stop talking to them. Even if that were true, which it’s not, no living being deserves to die of overwork and heatstroke. As civilized people, we should do better.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government to reject any effort to privatize our Postal Service. Postmaster General DeJoy, who really needs to be fired and replaced with someone not-evil, has lately said, after he cut services, raised prices, and slashed jobs, that our Postal Service is in a "death spiral"! That is, of course, the nature of power in these times – take over something that works, fuck it all up with your incompetence and greed, and then position yourself as the "only person who can fix these problems." Come to think of it, I've just described the entire George W. Bush Administration. Want to be done with all of that stupidity? Then we've got to get to work.

Around the table: “truly the most oppressed minority."

David Corn reminds us that Donald Trump badly mishandled the COVID pandemic while he was President. Well, he also talks to memory experts to explain how Americans might actually have forgotten that (long story short: the pandemic sucked, why would you want to remember it?), but the better public service is reminding good Americans that a President less interested in creating drama at every turn and more interested in leading us through and out of the pandemic might have saved many more lives. And putting this guy in charge again would just mean more drama, more hysteria, and more assholes threatening to kill people who actually know how to do things, which is all pretty much the opposite of the future I signed up for.

Ho hum, right-wing "journalist" discovers that libel is actually a thing and not just a weapon to brandish at anyone you don't like. Specifically, a Scranton Times reporter reminded everyone that said "patriot reporter," who makes a living claiming that "certain high-ranking elected and public officials are satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles sexually abusing children and drinking their blood to ingest the life-extending chemical adrenochrome," has, in his own past, a Corruption of Minors conviction. The "patriot reporter"'s libel lawsuit, predictably, failed. Nice to know Scranton, PA still has a local daily, though will they still have one after a few more frivolous libel suits?

Portage County, OH Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski advises his Facebook followers that, if Kamala Harris wins the Presidency in November, they should "write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards! Sooo...when the Illegal human 'Locust' (which she supports!) Need places to live...We'll already have the addresses of the their New families...who supported their arrival!" (Odd capitalization and use of ellipses in the original.) When he feels like responding to press inquiries, he'll no doubt say that of course he didn't mean to intimidate anyone, but was just "trying to make a point," but I'm pretty sure most folks just read "write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards" and reacted accordingly, and that's almost certainly just as he intended. In case you were wondering, I think folks so obsessed with "illegal immigration" that they'd upend law and order are racists.

With the news that the Florida ACLU has sued a state health care agency for using taxpayer money to spread lies about the abortion-related ballot initiative up before Florida voters in November, we will gain some insight into what right-wingers plan to do if they lose this fall. They'll do what they did with their book banning and masking-related attacks in 2021 – attack where liberals are strong, and with clear majorities supporting the liberal position on abortion, they'll dig in with their "abortion always hurts women's health" rubbish and their LIBRULZ AREZ TEH REALZ FEARMONGERURZ!!!!! rubbish. In the meantime, someone should go to jail for misuse of taxpayer funds. And whoever ordered police to interrogate petition-signers at their homes maybe should go to Hell – in addition to jail or in place of it, whichever.

I'm old enough to remember when saying you "create stories," as Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance did on CNN when confronted with the fact that he repeated lies about Haitian immigrants eating cats, would finish your campaign, but in the Donald Trump era, you can get away with saying pretty much anything anymore – if you're a Republican, anyway. Those who would respond "well, fiction writers create stories to get you to pay attention to other people suffering" should note that Vice Presidential candidates are not fiction writers. We should expect political candidates to tell the truth; if we don't hold them to that, we're not "superior" because we're more cynical, we're just not doing our job as citizens. (At the risk of piling on, Mr. Vance sure is one to claim that "the left needs to tone down the rhetoric," since his running mate is the one who says 99% of all the obnoxious shit we hear.)

New Hampshire Libertarian Party opines on X/Twitter that anyone who would "murder()" Kamala Harris would be "an American hero" – and then deletes the tweet, saying they only did so because the tweet violated X/Twitter's terms of service, laments that "(i)t's a shame that even on a 'free speech' website that libertarians cannot speak freely," and further adds – and you may want to sit down for this – that "Libertarians are truly the most oppressed minority." Yeah, I remember when our government enslaved Libertarians and marched them off to detention centers and gas chambers and threw them out of helicopters! I kid, of course. I fucking hate whiners.

Finally, an internal Department of Homeland Security report reveals that under former President Trump, DHS tried its damnedest to link Portland, OR protestors to an "imaginary terrorist plot." Just as anyone who had even one working brain cell could have predicted when Tha Bush Mobb created the Department of Homeland Security after 9.11! The good news? Some DHS rank-and-file pushed back, because no one could prove the antifa "terrorist organization" even existed. But don't worry, folks! If we put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office this November, he'll make damn sure this time that nobody who ever stood between him and his evil fantasies will ever work for our government again! I wish I were kidding, but Project 2025 has essentially said the same thing.

Around the table: with more dire warnings about mistakes good people still make.

Matt Stoller tells us "How Joe Biden Engineered Apple's New Air Pods," which can, with a software update, also be used as actual hearing aids. The hate-blind will guffaw with joyless laughter at that statement, but the Biden Administration did in fact force our Food and Drug Administration, via Executive Order, to approve over-the-counter hearing aids for folks with moderate hearing loss after our FDA spent years dragging their feet (and defying our laws) on that matter. Getting hearing aids without prescriptions also breaks up the collusion between health insurance corporations, hearing aid manufacturing corporations, and hearing specialists, since most folks can adjust their hearing aids with their smartphones these days. They say the politicians don't do good things for people any more, but Joe Biden does. So of course our "liberal" media ran him out.

I am not actually sure that the Trump tax "reform" "led to a $20 billion reduction in charitable giving within a year." The evidence: that "Americans who stopped itemizing their tax deductions gave less to charity in 2018 than they otherwise would have," but if only 30% of Americans itemized their deductions before that, what of the 70% of taxpayers who weren't itemizing their deductions in the first place? We don't learn. Also, charitable giving has gone up and down over the last six years, and ended up $35 billion higher in 2023 than in 2017. The expanded standard deduction is one of the few good things about the Trump tax "reform," and though we ought to allow more working families to deduct their charitable deductions more easily, the "finding" described above isn't a reason for that. So file this under "The Flesh is Willing, But…"

Some red states – namely Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska – will put paid family/medical leave before the voters in 2024. I suspect that voters in all three states will handily approve paid family/medical leave, since voters are generally better human beings than their representatives – but those representatives, in at least two of those states, will try their damnedest to overturn the express will of the people, and may even succeed. (I give Alaska politicians more credit than those of Nebraska and Missouri. Especially Missouri. What a political cesspool! They should all be turned out of office!)

So now we hear that the individual who first posted about "immigrants eating pets" on Facebook "was simply repeating a story she had heard from a neighbor," "who’d heard it themselves from a friend, who’d heard it from someone else" Jesus Mary and Joseph I can't even. This rumor enabled domestic terror threats against the government of Springfield, OH, which, last I looked, was composed of people, despite what right-wingers want you to think. And while I'm tempted to say people should just STFU until they know what they're talking about, I don't even believe the rumor-spreader's story. I think she knew full well what she was doing, because Trumpholes don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore. How can they, after all these years?

When I hear that Democrat politicos are salivating at all the attack ads they can run against Donald Trump just using clips from his disastrous recent debate, all I can say is: have these fuckers learned nothing from 2016? Because I remember watching negative ad after negative ad in 2016 and thinking too many independents were going to throw up their hands and stay home because "everyone's so negative," and that's what happened, and Donald Trump got elected. Democrats have lately been running ads that focus on issues and solutions; they've even run some funny ads. They need to keep doing that, so people see the difference between them and Republicans, whose ads will all be shouting at the top of their lungs about crime and immigration because what else have they got?

Finally, I feel compelled to warn you, yet again, about stories of right-wingers fighting each other over that immigrants-eating-pets fake news: just like with the recent Marjorie Taylor Greene/Laura Loomer "fight," remember that right-wingers occasionally disagree with other right-wingers just to look "sane" or "independent" every so often, so they can bring it up next time you accurately call them insane or a jackboot lockstep marcher. So don't ever get sucked in by the drama! And don't start a lot of sentences with "even so-and-so thinks." That's how they get you to normalize them, and we should never, ever, ever normalize these awful people.

Around the table: the drama, it still burns!

Some 500 psychologists told ProPublica why they left health insurance networks; you won't hear from all 500 here, but the feeling you get – that good Americans can't get good mental health care because the big health insurance corporations can't make stupid money from it – will be no less oppressive. God forbid you or I find ourselves holding broken glass to our wrists while our therapists' health insurer cuts us off because our therapy's gone past whatever arbitrary deadline they demanded. Big corporations made efficiency their god and made the rest of us pay for it; what a work to take to the Pearly Gates!

Ho hum, our "liberal" media cares little that French President Macron is throwing a giant tantrum and refusing to form a new government respecting the fact that more French voters voted for leftist officials than for centrist or far-right ones. Of course you'll also recall that our "liberal" media also lost interest after right-wingers scored early polling leads that turned out to be completely illusory! But, you know, stability centrism sensibility compromise business-friendly. Remember that unreasonable people make things better.

Surprise surprise, car buyers surveyed by JD Power say that too much "advanced technology" in their cars doesn't do anything useful. People do like their rear cameras and blind spot monitors, but not their automated parking or their passenger screens, and certainly not their facial recognition systems (what, keys suck all of a sudden?) and their "gesture controls,” which I imagine good Italian Catholics like myself would find especially frustrating. Wait until JD Power gets to ask car buyers about their subscription-based brakes service!

No, Donald Trump will not vote for Florida's pro-choice constitutional amendment no matter what he says. He knows that some seven out of 10 Floridians will likely vote for it, but he also knows that his stated preferred position ("six weeks isn't enough") isn't actually on the ballot, so this is all noise, drama, misdirection, fodder for Trumpholes to gaslight people by saying Trump isn't as bad as you say he is, you know the deal.

In a related note, I can't decide whether that two-time Trump voters MSNBC talked to who now says she's actually "afraid" of him getting elected again has reached an unusually high level of wisdom or is just playing us. No, wait, I've decided; she's playing us. I mean, I try to believe the best about people, but I don't let that turn me into a schmuck, especially if Trump voters want to shoot up my house for having a “Love Wins" sign on my lawn.

Steve Benen asks why "Republicans keep forgetting who was in the White House in 2020," when the White House supposedly suppressed an anti-Hunter Biden report. Of course, Republicans pretend to forget – one might even say they perform a drama of forgetting – because they want you to forget. Remember all those Republicans who blamed Mr. Obama for the 2008 bankster Armageddon when George W. Bush was President? Remember all those Republicans who extolled Mr. Bush's record "protecting this country" after 9.11 happened on his watch? They hope you don't. But we do.

Finally, Rick Perlstein interviews David Neiwert about "the election story nobody talks about," that "a substantial bloc of American politics is talking about committing acts of violence and bringing down the government." Mr. Neiwert paints a very unpretty picture – vigilantes "helping" the Border Patrol, counterprotestors shooting at protestors if Mr. Trump wins, bad people trying to obstruct the vote-counting again, more domestic terrorism if Ms. Harris wins. Two things we need to do, then: one, vote Donald Trump into oblivion, and two, shame and ostracize his supporters until they remember they're not the only people who have ever mattered.

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: fight the real enemy, part 922.

After hearing about right-wingers blaming liberals for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump even though the shooter was a registered Republican, I can only say, well, how typical. Having been unimpressed with crying about Sarah Palin’s “role” in the Gabrielle Giffords shooting back in 2011, why would I be impressed with efforts to link Joe Biden to the Trump shooting? (Both used crosshair imagery in various campaign efforts.) And yet Republicans, despite positioning themselves as “the party of personal responsibility,” can’t seem to blame anyone who fires a gun at another human being for, you know, firing a gun at another human being. I’d call it irony, but irony should be more pleasurable than that.

Appalachian expat Neema Avashia reminds us that new Trump running mate/Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance is an “opportunist” who “only represents himself.” She also reminds us that there aren’t many non-white folks in Mr. Vance’s Appalachia although Ms. Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants, “(a)nd in his campaign rhetoric, we only exist as the root of Appalachia’s problems; never as one of its sources of strength.” Let me say, also, that we should be wary of being too impressed with Mr. Vance’s populist bona fides – yes, he makes sympathetic noises about monopolies, but plenty of people make sympathetic noises and then do nothing, and anyway sympathetic noises are no reason to vote for a fascist, particularly when our current President has actually done something about monopolies.

You heard about the Microsoft software crash that threw airports into chaos this past week? Well, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but Microsoft pushed back against an FTC investigation of “the risks of a handful of cloud services companies controlling the world’s technological infrastructure” because of course they did. Brook no what-do-you-expect-a-corporation-to-do cynicism, because we should expect a corporation to do right by its customers. Of course FTC Chair Lina Khan is right that “a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto-dealers” and that monopolies create “fragile systems,” and of course anyone with a functioning brain would come to the same conclusion, but cue another six months of headlines from the Wall Street Journal about how wrong she is about everything.

Tennessee state legislature, never content with all the harm they’ve done to good Tennesseans, extends a law letting police officers fly drones over private property without getting a warrant first. The law’s defenders actually compare it to airplanes flying over your property! Because police routinely use planes flying 30,000 feet above your property to spy on you! And of course the law’s defenders also offer a) anecdotal evidence and b) anecdotal evidence that would fall outside warrant requirements anyway, meaning no one actually requires cops to get a warrant before saving someone in a cornfield from their own attempted suicide. Even this U.S. Supreme Court, the one that immunizes Presidential “official acts,” wouldn’t smile on any of these arguments.

From In These Times we learn about “green” biomass corporations turning trees into wood pellets. It’s not even better than coal, since burning wood pellets actually creates more carbon than burning coal does, and biomass definitions of “waste wood” are much more, shall we say, liberal than common sense would dictate, so this is exactly the kind of thing that makes right-wingers go HAHAHAHA YOURZ RENEWABULZ AREZ TEH DURTEEZ!!!!!, so maybe we ought to do better. Sometimes you wonder if some executives don’t want to do better – yes, I mean that they may literally be doing it wrong just to enrage folks they find sympathetic, or useful. Hey, if I thought of it, I’m sure they have.

Finally, in a development that will surely enrage those who complain about the “weaponization of the Justice Department” ha ha I kid of course, a jury finds Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) guilty of bribery charges. Good riddance to him, but I can’t help but wonder if he could appeal to our Supreme Court and say he should be immunized for his “official acts.” Again, I kid – they’d respond that their doctrine only applies to Donald Trump ahem Presidents because only Donald Trump ahem Presidents need to be “vigorous” and “energetic.”

Action: concerning worker safety, fairer trade, and free tax filing.

Long story short: tell our government to better protect workers from heatstroke and keep cheap imports out of America, and tell your Governor to opt your state into our IRS’s Direct File program. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor to issue the most vigorous possible rules protecting workers from extreme heat. We just endured a heat dome for most of the last week, and a lot of folks work outside all day, and their jobs (especially in Texas, amirite?) often don’t even have to give them water breaks. Yes, a lot of undocumented immigrants work outside, too! But if you’re the one who says well they should have known the dangers when they came here, then step away from this blog; it’s not for you. Cruelty is never the right answer, and nobody should have to suffer from extreme heat just because some boss says a minute spent drinking water is a minute spent “not working.”

Trade Justice helps you tell our Office of the Trade Representative to protect us from cheap foreign products made by workers paid too little. The Biden Administration has proposed imposing tariffs “strategically,” and I bet his plan could be better. Still, it would do a lot of good, and when the pundidiots on the TV wail about TEH ECONOMIEZ WILLZ BE TEH DESTROYEDZ!!!!!!, just remember that ending cheap imports empowers more local businesses and more local workers, and that it also means we’ll pollute less hauling it around. Also remember that Donald Trump had four years to do something like this, and (just like with infrastructure) he did nothing.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Governor to opt your state into our IRS’s Direct File program, so that you and yours can enjoy the benefits of filing your taxes for free with our government. While it is true that most Americans can in theory already file for free with the big tax prep corporations, most Americans don’t file for free because the big tax prep corporations go out of their way to make that process confusing! And you know what happens then – people give up and resign themselves to paying hundreds of dollars for something they should get for nothing. Why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea! Here’s a better idea: let folks actually use a service they paid for with their taxes.

Action: concerning safe elections, Social Security, and IRS funding.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect election workers, expand Social Security, and fully fund our IRS. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Worker and Polling Place Protection Act, which would, as you might imagine, stiffen penalties for threatening or causing harm to election workers and polling places. Shame we even have to pass such a bill! But we now live in a nation where whiny-ass sore losers threaten the lives and livelihoods of election workers who counted the votes in an election Their Personal Lord and Savior lost. I think the people who threaten election workers over Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss are the lowest of the low – and not least because they generally don’t even have the guts to carry out their threats. So it’s time to get all law-and-order on them.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect and expand Social Security by taxing the rich harder. At present, income over $168,600 doesn’t get taxed into the system at all! But if we did that, we could actually shore up the trust fund in the long term – not that I really expect the trust fund to ever fall short, but whatever – and we could also expand benefits so good Americans can enjoy their much-deserved retirement more. At least our “liberal” media isn’t giving so much oxygen to the ZOMG YOU MUSTZ CUTZ ALL TEH BENEFITZ!!!!!! crowd. That happens when you demand more justice! Now we just have to keep following through until Congress does our will.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to scale back IRS funding. The Inflation Reduction Act expanded IRS funding, as you know, but Republicans have pretended that’s some kind of existential threat or something – if they can come for rich folks, they can come for you ha ha ha ha our IRS has only been coming after us because they didn’t have the money to fight rich people’s lawyers! The good news? Republicans made our IRS an election issue in 2022, and it didn’t work out for them, much like whining about crime and immigration didn’t work out for them. Still, we need to put them on notice, since they’ll pretend we don’t matter the first chance they get.

Action: concerning asylum-seekers, clean air, and marijuana legalization.

Long story short: tell our government to stop using aslyum-seekers as a whipping boy, protect air quality as vigorously as possible, and legalize marijuana (rather than just move it from Schedule I to Schedule III). Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

HIAS helps you tell President Biden to abandon his draconian plan to curtail asylum-seeking in America. Exactly zero right-wingers have said way to go, Joe! since he announced his intentions, but what’s even more insane than constantly courting right-wing voters who will always spit in your face? Using asylum-seekers as your whipping boy, that’s what. Folks seeking asylum in the United States aren’t looking for a free ride so much as they’re looking for a life where their own government doesn’t kill them. And anyone who whines about “terrorists” or criminals in the context of asylum-seekers knows neither facts nor common sense. We do still value these things when we make policy decisions, right?

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect air quality as vigorously as possible. Right-wingers act like big corporations will do the right thing if we just leave them alone, but the only reason we have clean air and clean water is that we make big corporations pollute less by enacting laws and regulations. In other words, they use our success to justify not doing what makes us successful! Also too, do right-wingers tend to think people will do the right thing if left alone? Hell no! Otherwise you’d have less of them trying to regulate women’s health care and who can get married and what books you can read.

Finally, VERA helps you tell the Biden Administration to fully-decriminalize marijuana, not merely move it from Schedule I to Schedule III. I won’t lie, moving it from Schedule I (where it most certainly does not belong) to Schedule III will do a lot of good, but I think we know enough by now – and that’s pretty impressive, since Schedule I seriously hamstrings marijuana research – to say pot should be as legal as alcohol. One of the reasons we know enough by now, of course, is we know the cotton lobby wanted pot on Schedule I so no one would ever try to grow or use hemp, ever. We also have John Ehrlichman on record saying the “war on drugs” was really a war on “the anti-war left and Black people.”

Around the table: this week with 50% good news!

Good news, everyone! The state of Minnesota just killed a community broadband ban, joining the 34 American states that don’t ban community broadband networks just because big telecom corporations throw tantrums about it. Minnesota’s ban was especially offensive, in that big telecoms could claim it wasn’t an outright ban, but “just” a ban in areas where big telecoms operated, or pretended to operate, or “might one day” operate, which means, like, everywhere. Consider that another blow against monopoly power in America.

Speaking of which: our FBI raids a landlord corporation Cortland Management, which has allegedly schemed with national rent-fixers to keep rents absurdly high in at least two thirds of our nation’s apartments. You’ll recognize the national rent-fixers (RealPage) from an October 2022 ProPublica article, you remember, the one where a RealPage employee said landlords didn’t raise prices fast/high enough because they had “too much empathy”? That is to laugh! Also too, RealPage’s owner is a hedge fund firm, a.k.a. a bankster.

Baristas at coffee chain corporation Blank Street Coffee win a union contract for workers at 19 NYC locations, with hopes of winning over workers at the other 21. Of course banksters started Blank Street, of course they understaffed the locations and didn’t fix safety issues, and of course they hired a notorious union-busting firm once they got wind of how dissatisfied their workers were, but the baristas overcame all of that – plus the inevitable losses within their ranks – to get a contract negotiated in a relatively short period of time (nine months, versus the 15-month average per a 2022 Bloomberg analysis). Given how much everyone wants coffee these days, it made a lot of sense for union organizers to look baristas’ way long, long ago; glad to see that’s finally become obvious (albeit largely due to the baristas’ own efforts).

Because we need the reminders, Robert Reich runs down all the “nothingburgers” Republicans try to make big dramas about these days. Like “illegals” voting (it’s already illegal!) and crime that’s half of what it was 30 years ago and, of course, “wokeness,” the whine of people who think they should be exempt from change or accountability. And yes, the border counts as a nothingburger! And anyone that obsessed about it needs to start with the man in the mirror! It’s all drama, all hysteria, all the time from Republicans, and forget about Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene – the vast majority of this drama and hysteria comes from men, including the Republican Presidential nominee, the Shouter-in-Chief.

When I hear that a Texas woman almost died miscarrying because of that state’s draconian anti-abortion laws, I think maybe our sensation-hungry “liberal" media might run with it. I suspect I will be disappointed – our “liberal” media lives in mortal fear of right-wing nutjobs, and to the degree that’s justified (I’m not saying it isn’t), the correct response must be to defy the nutjobs, lest you remain hostage to their drama and hysteria for the rest of your life. Otherwise folks will think our “liberal” media only cares about stoking right-wing rage with their sensationalism, and “I didn’t tell the truth because assholes threatened me” is not a work you want to bring to the Pearly Gates.

From the “this is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD!” file: more Republicans now think it’s not so bad for a felon to be President than before their candidate got convicted of 34 felonies. What we don’t say enough about this case is that it’s a campaign finance issue – Mr. Trump thought, once upon a time, that fewer people would vote for him if they knew he had sex with a porn star, so he tried to hush it up. Apparently the “law and order” voters of his party no longer think that’s true. Anyway, we leave these people to God – the folks who more likely have a problem with all of Donald Trump’s legal problems are independent voters, and they’ll more likely decide Mr. Trump’s fate at the ballot box than all his shouty dittoheads.

In a related note, legal scholars think Donald Trump “has an opening” to appeal his 34 felony convictions to our Supreme Court, and that opening could involve federal campaign finance laws. Rick Hasen, as good a source of legal wisdom as exists in America, says that Mr. Trump could “argue that the New York election law that he was prosecuted under to turn the false business records misdemeanors into felonies improperly relied upon alleged federal election law violations,” since the judge specifically mentioned the Federal Election Campaign Act in his instructions. I can easily imagine at least four of nine Justices crying “injustice” at that, and they’ll probably whine about the “harm” done to his Presidential campaign like anyone should give a hoot about that – after all, our Constitution hamstrings the Executive branch for a reason.

Finally, the publisher of the notorious 2000 Mules film has announced it’ll stop distributing the film – because they face a defamation lawsuit from Mark Andrews, whom the film depicts as a “mule” but who was, as it turns out, legally dropping off ballots from his family. Let’s not let it pass that Mr. Andrews faced death threats from right-wingers after they saw him in the film. Anyway, though this is good news for Mr. Andrews and for America, the truly-devoted will continue to hawk “voter fraud” nonsense and keep whining about how everything’s stacked against them. If you’re wrong, everything should be stacked against you!

Action: concerning corporate evil, anti-immigrant cruelty, and Project 2025.

Long story short: tell our government to prosecute Boeing, support immigrant care workers, and tell big corporations to reject the notorious Project 2025. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Justice Department to prosecute Boeing for violating the “deferred prosecution agreement” it signed with the Trump Administration. “Deferred prosecution agreements” give our government a way to let big corporations off for the harm they do (in this case, building planes that crashed and killed 346 people) as long as they don’t do further harm (in this case, partly by making sure planes conformed to plans submitted to our government). So how did that work out? With plane doors blowing out and whistleblowers mysteriously dying, for a start! Maybe the Biden Administration is thinking second term with this, but they may not get a second term, and the time for justice is always now.

Moms Rising helps you tell our government to support immigrants who comprise over a quarter of family care workers. Even folks – regular folks, that is, not professional anti-immigrant haters – who want to deport all immigrants who commit crimes would hesitate, I would think, before deporting law-abiders who might take care of them one day. Professional immigrant-haters, of course, use “deport the criminals” as a first step to deporting the rest of them! Would I prefer American citizens to do these jobs? Yes, and I sure wouldn’t be above making them citizens to meet that criterion, and I’d pay them more. But it’d be cruel to deport caregivers before we bring our ideal world into existence.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell big corporations to stop supporting the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Project 2025, if enacted, would defund our Securities and Exchange Commission, defang our Federal Trade Commission, and abolish our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, all of which have, under Joe Biden, fought corporate monopolies and junk fees for the first time in 40 years. So remember that Project 2025 votaries aren’t just against anyone who’s different from them – they’re also against our government agencies whenever they do anything good on our behalf. And these days, big corporations don’t want either PR stink on them.

Around the table: behold, the *anti-sex party*!

Good news, everyone: the Biden Administration adds back most of the teeth to the Endangered Species Act that the Trump Administration knocked out, by extending the same protections endangered species get to “threatened” species, and by ignoring the “economic impacts” of endangered species protections, “economic impacts” really only meaning “whether some rich CEO gets even richer” to Donald Trump and his kind. The Biden Administration did not reverse a Trump-era rule allowing agencies to essentially disregard any predicted impact that wasn’t “reasonably certain,” but get the right people in agencies – i.e., not industry people – and you can mitigate that error, as well. Joe Biden hit the big targets, and good for him – and good for you if you left one of the 450,000 public comments telling President Biden to roll those Trump-era rules back.

Oregon government ends its experiment with drug decriminalization, by making possession of hard drugs in small amounts illegal again, though they also increase funding for drug treatment programs. I’ve always been wary of legalizing, for example, heroin and fentanyl, but Oregon used the legislative process to overturn the will of the people as expressed in a ballot question, and that’s more than a bit unnerving. South Dakota did it much worse by overturning a campaign finance ban mere months after good South Dakotans approved it, whereas Oregon waited three years, but I’m sure they could have better respected the people’s wishes. Yes, I know, the people elect representatives – but the people speak more clearly and directly through ballot questions.

Ho hum, Elon Musk passes around yet more “extremely concerning” information about voter “fraud” that doesn’t actually qualify as “information,” let alone “extremely concerning,” because it’s utter bunkum. No, anyone getting a Social Security number is not automatically an “illegal” registering to vote illegally, and a state could submit information about a citizen to a voting database more than once; Jesus Mary and Joseph what is wrong with just shutting the fuck up until you know what you’re talking about? Or is that something only “little people” like us, and not the richest man on Earth, have to worry about? Undocumented immigrant voting in elections is extremely rare, and that finding meshes well with actual common sense – folks here without papers tend not to give out very much personal information about themselves for reasons you can easily imagine. Apparently that finding does not mesh as well with some folks’ desire to be constantly enraged about anything and everything – or with certain rich individuals’ strange desire to show off for such people.

Just Security reminds us that most of the D.C.-held January 6-related inmates Donald Trump wants to release assaulted a police officer. (No, really – 10 of the 29 have been convicted of it, while another 10 have already pleaded guilty to it, which makes 20 of 29.) Well, so much for I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!! And so much for law and order, too. Of course, nobody thinks of themselves as law-breakers, and most folks who break the law tell themselves (and us) that their circumstances were “unique” and they had “no choice.” That is all, of course, very convenient reasoning. Please allow me to keep believing that I’m doing some good by pointing this out.

Newsweek asks if DEI – a term describing efforts to increase diversity, equality, and inclusion in corporations and academia – has become a “racial slur,” now that right-wingers blame literally every bad thing that happens on it, but remember that some people are so evil they’ll turn everything into a bad word. Remember when Barack Obama said he wanted his Supreme Court nominee to possess “empathy”? Oh, how the right-wing media pissed and moaned about that! And if they’d kept it up for longer than a day, they might have succeeded into making “empathy” into a cuss word, too. I wish I'd had as much success trying to turn “bold” into a cuss word during the George W. Bush era.

Donald Trump won’t tell Hugh Hewitt – about as sympathetic a media audience as he could hope to get – that he’s “100% with Israel” even after being asked twice, and while I know a lot of people in America are saying Israel might be wrong to themselves for the very first time (and Donald Trump knows that just as well as I do), just imagine what our “liberal” media would say if a Democrat refused to say directly he was “100% with Israel.” They’d call them weak, or a flip-flopper, or whatever – all things they refuse to say about Mr. Trump, because then they’d have to explain why he’s not actually a “strong leader” like all the polls they conduct say he is.

Finally, the incomparable Rebecca Solnit argues that Republicans – with their opposition to abortion and birth control and their embrace of fascism – have become an “anti-sex movement.” They’re saying it out loud! The Heritage Foundation wants to “restor(e) sex to its true purpose,” i.e., procreation, which means they want women to be breeders and nothing more (plus they want women to have no say over their breeding). Has the sexual revolution has been an unqualified good? No. But it doesn’t have to be for us to protect what women have won over the last half-century-plus, and calling Republicans the anti-sex party would be weapons-grade PR – most people still like sex, after all. I’ll whisper it into as many ears as I can.

Around the table: today with one-quarter good news!

Biden Administration reverses a lot of changes former President Trump made to short-term health insurance plans, requiring more transparency about what they don’t cover (because that’s a lot!) and shortening the maximum period folks can have short-term health insurance from 36 months to four. That’s good news, but it’s also another argument for putting all Americans into Medicare, because short-term health insurance is, frankly, a shit product, and no, good Americans shouldn’t have the “option” of shit products, nor should our government even tout shit products as an “option.”

Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in the big house for fraud over his cryptocurrency shenanigans, so it’s starting to look like law and order has actually come to the cryptocurrency field, despite its votaries claiming it’s just too complex for us regular folks to understand (but don’t pass any new laws, because that would “crush innovation”!). Can our “liberal” media stop calling him a “cryptocurrency guru,” though? We don’t need to mystify cryptocurrency any more than its votaries already do. I’d also be happy if we stopped calling him by his initials, like he’s FDR or JFK or LBJ. He’s not even OBJ.

I missed this, because I watch very little TV news, but apparently some TikTok attention hound has been telling everyone how to “legally” squat in buildings and homes, and our “liberal” media covered it rather credulously. Because crime and immigration! It’s a two-fer! I imagine TikTok is no better or worse than other social media, but between this and birth control, one day soon we’re going to ruefully speak about folks with degrees from TikTok University, just as, not that long ago, we rued folks with degrees from the University of Google. In the meantime, our “liberal” media might remember that covering TikTok videos breathlessly as if they mean a damn thing doesn’t make anyone any cooler, let alone smarter.

Surprise, surprise! Our government recently sanctioned the corporation that chartered the cargo ship that took down the Francis Scott Key bridge, and for what? For violating the rights of whistleblowers alleging safety violations. You wish that had done more to prevent the bridge’s destruction, but it still represents a welcome change from the War on Whistleblowers waged by the Obama Administration. Of all the wars (coal, jobs, etc.) right-wingers accused the Obama Administration of fighting, they were strangely silent about the war they were actually fighting. What is the moral of this story? Right-wingers are useless, except maybe to teach us how not to be. I said “maybe.”

The good folks at The Conversation inform us that ”For-profit nursing homes are cutting corners on safety and draining resources with financial shenanigans − especially at midsize chains that dodge public scrutiny.” If, like me, you think banksters ruin everything and corporations shouldn’t own other corporations, you must also accept that nursing home chains shouldn’t exist. (That doesn’t mean nursing homes shouldn’t exist; it means they shouldn’t be part of big chains.) And while some folks would balk at our government taking over Boeing, I bet many, many fewer would balk at our government taking over some of these midsize nursing home chains. People find tales of abuse at nursing homes persuasive, after all. They also hate middlemen. And banksters.

We just talked about how squatting wasn’t really a thing, but it’s still always a good time to be reminded that even though Donald Trump says “violent crime has skyrocketed in virtually every American city,” actual FBI statistics tell us that crime is down, and violent crime is down 11% in cities with more than a million people. And what does the Trump campaign spokeshack say in response? “Joe Biden is trying to convince Americans not to believe their own eyes.” Yes, people do watch a lot of crime on TV, but anecdotes aren’t facts, no matter how many anecdotes pile up. And on the count of Donald Trump trying to convince Americans not to believe the facts she is strangely silent. I will not read her inevitable tell-all about how she came to be disillusioned with the Big Man, either. Seriously, anyone still working for him after January 6 is just a fool.

Ho hum, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s running mate has called intravenous fertilization (or IVF) “one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today,” and I wonder how the millions of Americans born via IVF feel about that, let alone their mothers. Naturally there’s a personal angle – because what good is our personal experience if we don’t get to smother everyone else with it? – as IVF practitioners apparently turned her away many years ago. This is why Donald Trump has been working overtime to call Robert Kennedy, Jr., a liberal – so his votaries would know they shouldn’t vote for Kennedy/Shanahan no matter how much their, ah, unorthodox medical opinions might appeal to their false pride.

Finally, Georgia Republican party official gets hit with a $5,000 fine for illegally voting nine times. Now, I could gloat (and have gloated) about how only Republicans ever seem to get caught voting illegally despite how much they whine about Democrats doing it all the time – and Mr. Pritchard sure has whined about that latter item, despite never proving it! – but I think it’s far more important to note that the state should never have taken his voting rights away in the first place. No, not even for forging checks! Even though I imagine that’s one of those crimes murderers beat people up for in jail.

Around the table: with jewels of good news struggling to rise above the muck of bad news.

Big coffee corporation Starbucks and Starbucks Workers United announce a “foundational framework” for contract negotiations, with Starbucks finally extending credit card tipping to unionized stores (as it had for non-union stores, which I’m pretty sure is illegal). Could this framework be a PR ploy on Starbucks’ part? Perhaps. But it would never have happened without workers’ agitation for fair collective bargaining, and it also wouldn’t have happened without consumer boycotts and Starbucks’ losing almost 2% of its value on one December day alone. And unionized Starbucks stores might be the thing that breaks the dam for the rest of America’s working families.

Ho hum, Donald Trump keeps talking about a “migrant crime wave” that doesn’t actually exist, as actual data affirms what common sense already tells us – that immigrants without papers commit less crime, because they have an obvious incentive not to have a run-in with police! Naturally a Trump campaign spokeshack alleges that “Democrat cities purposefully do not document when crimes are committed by illegal immigrants,” and, well, that’s a defamation lawsuit waiting to happen! Of course, Mr. Trump has a lot of experience being sued for that.

Study confirms that reported COVID-19 vaccine side effects exist and are rare, but social media drama hounds tend to leave out the part that they’re rare. The vaccine that had more pronounced side effects – the J&J vaccine, associated with neurological problems and blood clotting disorders – you can’t even get in America anymore, and that sure does resemble how civilization is supposed to work. Anyway, I’ll take a one in 1.75 million chance of acute brain or spinal inflammation over the considerably higher possibility that COVID would kill me painfully. Also, ignore people who write entire phrases in capital letters.

Gallup poll finds that Americans think “immigration” is the top problem facing them right now, and I guess it’s good that it’s not inflation, but note well that Gallup didn’t offer extremism as one of the choices, and behold! A Reuters/Ipsos poll ranks extremism at the top, above immigration. Anyway, if 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane, the results of both polls on immigration (28% and 18%, respectively) suggest that all Republicans' yammering about the border isn’t working so well, even if our “liberal” media, which doesn’t talk to regular Americans, seems to think it is. Yet fools like Rep. Suozzi (D?-NY) say crap like this: “The best politician is the politician who says what the people are thinking already. If the number one thing on people’s minds is the border crisis, you’ve got to talk about the border crisis, and you’ve got to talk about how to solve it.” Sure, people just happen to be thinking about the “border crisis,” and Republican hysteria over it, and credulous “liberal” media coverage of it, have nothing to do with it.

Ho hum, Rep. Maria Salazar (E-FL) takes credit for children’s hospital funding in a bill she voted against. I doubt her explanation – she "made sure" the goodies got in the bill, but she voted against it because it was “fiscally irresponsible” – will resonate very broadly with the electorate in her toss-up district, and her real calculation (I got the funding and I also got the attention for voting against it! I’m such a player!) will only appeal to the cynical, who are not as numerous as our “liberal” media want us to think — I mean, cynicism requires deep commitment, and most of us are just trying to get through the day with a little bit of dignity. I’d run an ad depicting a voter falling asleep as someone describes Ms. Salazar's labyrinthine scheme, and then add a voice-over saying can you believe how politicians are these days?

Finally, “Mob Boss” Mitch McConnell (E-KY) will step down as Republican Senate leader at the end of 2024, and will leave the Senate when his term is up in 2026. I want to say don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya, but that doesn't take his evil seriously enough – all he ever did as Senate Republican leader was kill good ideas dead, and in so doing hurt good Americans, all so Republicans could have more power to do even more harm to good Americans; I doubt St. Peter smiles upon any of these works at the Pearly Gates. And while I hesitate to quarrel with folks when they say the nearness of death informs their decisions, I know why he’s really retiring: because January 6 showed him that the world had left him behind. Republicans are all about naked brutality from now on; they have no use for Mitch McConnell’s brand of evil anymore.

Around the table: good news about gerrymandering, bad news about corporate spying.

State legislative elections are about to be a little fairer in Wisconsin, as the Republican-dominated legislature voted to adopt Democratic Gov. Evers’s proposed district map, one which nominally gives Republicans a slight edge in holding both chambers, but not with near- or actual supermajorities, as they have now despite generally getting fewer votes than Democrats in the aggregate. Other proposed maps might have given Democrats a greater advantage (and, more to the point, been fairer), but with the end of Roe v. Wade I wonder if Republicans even have the edge observers think they have in the Evers map. I also wonder if a Trump ticket will boost downballot races (as it did in 2020) or be a drag on them.

Kate Wagner at The Nation tells us that the camera that yells at you after you trigger a motion sensor – I’ve experienced the “Hi! You are being recorded!” in my own neighborhood while bicycling, how obnoxious – “is an escalation of an already omnipresent aggression.” “It intrudes into our consciousness, induces paranoia and anger, makes us feel unwelcome in public life, furthers the idea that one’s private property extends beyond the stoop, and suggests that by owning property one has earned the right to curtail the rights of others.” And that prompts another reminder that both property crime and violent crime are half what they were 30 years ago, even if some folks obsess about it even more than they did then.

In a related note, private data-collecting corporation tracked visits to Planned Parenthood and helped anti-abortion groups do ad targeting with the location information – but the corporation apparently told investors it obtained that location information with user consent, which at least one highly-placed officer says isn’t true. Would have been nice to have all that information in the lede! Our SEC might sanction the now-bankrupt corporation for lying to investors – our SEC, you may recall, exists to protect investors from bad actors – while our FTC might sue to keep the now-bankrupt data-collecting corporation from selling off its location data without users’ consent. Note well that a second Trump Administration would pack our SEC and FTC with drama hounds who would “look for ways to partner” with bad actors.

Right-wing Congressdolt tries to get a zinger off on Joe Biden’s immigration policy, but winds up tripping over his own genitalia twice. First he tried to illustrate said immigration policy with a photo of an immigration “caravan” from 2018 – remember who was President in 2018? -- and then tried to pass off a photo of an immigration “caravan” in Mexico as a “caravan” in America. Of course, Rep. Edwards doesn’t care that he got called out for being stupid twice; he only cares that he “got the message out,” no matter how stupid the message was. You may not win converts that way, but you might intimidate the tending-toward-cowardly into submission.

A special election took place in George Santos’s old House district – and despite all the hand-wringing and horserace polling showing the race close, the Democrat won by eight points. I remain tired of hearing how “moderates always win races against crazy people” because, hello, 2016! But look at all the things Republicans and our “liberal” media insisted might propel Ms. Pilip to victory – immigration, crime, Israel, Joe Biden – that didn’t. Eight points is not a close race, abortion still matters, and, perhaps most importantly, Republican politicians all appear to be rage-filled drama hounds. I say “appear to be” because I think they’re all playing. Imagine living a life in which you decide that pretending to be an asshole is the road to power and glory!

Finally, folks are making a big deal about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Joe Biden; she also said she’d vote for him in July, so I’m not sure why it’s big news again in February. I will say that her assessment of Joe Biden as “one of the most successful Presidents in modern American history” is entirely accurate, even though that’s not a high bar to clear. I just hope enough good Americans prefer Mr. Biden over an objectively bad human being who pretends to be a rage-addled drama hound because that’s how you get attention in America these days. Yes, I’m saying a vote for Joe Biden is, among other things, a vote against the drama and sensationalism we should all have had enough of by now.

Around the table: now with one-third good news!

Good news, everyone: our FCC has ruled that AI-generated robocalls are illegal, using authority granted by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits (among other evils) using artificial voices in solicitations. An AI-generated voice surely is artificial no matter how much it sounds like your mother, or Joe Biden. But every silver lining has a dark cloud: our FCC has assessed over $200 million in TCPA-related fines since 2015, but as of 2019 (when the Wall Street Journal looked into the matter) had collected less than $7,000 of that amount.

Also good news: our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) has told Medicare Advantage insurers they can’t use AI or algorithms to deny coverage to seniors. You’ll read the article and you’ll understand exactly how bad this problem is, but here’s another problem: that Medicare Advantage exists at all! It’s part of right-wingers’ plans to privatize everything, when you’re much better off dealing with your government than you are dealing with a private health insurance corporation that makes money mainly by denying coverage.

Our Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) now estimates that expanded IRS funding will bring in even more tax revenue; they previously predicted our IRS would bring in another $18 billion annually, but now they say the number could be as high as $81 billion, if Congress doesn’t slash their funding (even more) before then. Both numbers would improve matters in America, but please, right-wingers, keep making “defunding the police” your only aim. (Yes, “defunding the police” describes the Republican stance on IRS funding accurately. IRS agents are law enforcement, after all, and anyone who says they’re afraid of them but not regular cops is just lying to you.)

Actual climate scientist wins over $1 million in defamation suit against two right-wingers. The first compared him to Jerry Sandusky, “except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data” – I wonder how many times he delivered that line to his friends and family before he got a laugh – while the second merely called his research “fraudulent,” which I guess is why the second is on the hook for almost all of the money. It’s a good thing scientists can actually prove their research isn't fraudulent – although sooner or later a right-wing judge will just come out and say that facts don’t matter anymore.

FactCheck.org gamely tries to “unravel() misinformation” about the now dead-in-the-water immigration bill. You remember when Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) misrepresented Medicare drug price negotiation as a benefit cut? Republican objections to the immigration bill are about that stupid. And they’ve made Sen. James Lankford (E-OK) look like a moderate, which he is most definitely not. On the plus side, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) finally said some mean things about Republicans on TV. Gosh, she might be running for re-election after all.

Finally, ex-Republican Stuart Stevens at the New Republic says Democrats should “Just Say” that “Biden Has Been a Great President, and while he is the best President of my lifetime, “great” is a bridge too far for me. I did notice him turning questions about his memory around in order to trumpet his achievements, and I’d like to see him do more of that. As I said long ago, dumping on Trump only takes you so far – and, sadly, I think this remains true even after he tried to overthrow our government. (As an aside, could it be that Joe Biden wanted the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents to think he was a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”? Hey, pretending to be stupid always works for Republicans, so why not for him?)

Action: concerning junk fees, private prisons, and clean water.

Long story short: tell our FCC to ban cable termination fees, tell big banks to stop financing private prisons, and tell our EPA to get lead out of our drinking water pipes post-haste. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to ban cable termination fees. You know, the onerous fees cable corporations charge to dissuade you from cutting the cord? They’ll probably whine that we have to do something with all the streaming going on nowadays, but ask yourself: how many people oppose onerous fees? There’s an easy way to figure that out: think of how many people you know, and then subtract the number zero, and that’s how many people oppose onerous fees. Only big corporations like them, and they’ve had all the say around here for far too long.

Eko helps you tell big corporate banks to stop financing private prisons. It’s not just because private prisons waste taxpayer money on bad services for our prisoners – and if you don’t care about serving prisoners and helping them rejoin communities, just turn in your Civilized Person card now, ‘K? It’s also about the atrocities, like concentration camps at our Southern border, which one of the most notorious private prison corporations, the Geo Group, helped build, and which courts both here and in Australia have found responsible for prison deaths. Some banksters have decided this is toxic, so now we work on the rest of them.

Finally, Earth Justice helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get as much lead out of our drinking water pipes as possible. Specifically, you’ll ask our EPA to rewrite the Lead and Copper Rule (which helps our government enforce the Safe Drinking Water Act) so that corporations that make drinking water pipes have to get the lead out of them as quickly as possible. Only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment would respond to the idea that “government should get lead out of our drinking water” with cries of AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!! and BIG GUMMINT SUX!!!!!, so let’s not let them have all the say about everything, either.

Around the table: of planes, rageheads, bad cops, and trillionaires.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Boeing airplane operators filed about one service difficulty report per day between 2020 and 2023, with Alaska Airlines filing the vast majority of them. Problems include not just windows blowing out in mid-air and denuding children but also fuel leaks and debris in fuel tanks and “malfunctioning stabilizing motors.” And while you may recall the Trump Administration shoving as much taxpayer money as it could Boeing’s way in 2020, the vast majority of these reports have come during Pete Buttigieg’s tenure as Transportation Secretary, and the FAA’s official response to The Lever’s report sure ain’t promising. “(S)ome airlines may file more reports than what is required”? Whoever wrote that needs to lose their job.

Oxfam International tells us that the world may have its first trillionaire within the next decade, and about the only consolation I can take from that is that, if history is any guide, that trillionaire will almost certainly not be Elon Musk, regardless of how good things look for him now. Of far less consolation: the person who does achieve trillionaire-hood will almost certainly be an even worse human being. In the meantime, more than half the world’s population has become poorer over the last three years, while the five richest men on Earth have more than doubled their worth over that same period, but please, right-wingers, keep whining about immigration and crime.

Pro-Palestinian protestors at Columbia University get hit with an Israeli chemical weapon – and college administrators chide them for holding an “unsanctioned” protest! After all, getting hit with skunk is something you ought to expect, since pretty much everyone can buy it at their local supermarket! Seriously, if only you had protested the way we wanted you to you’d have been OK goes well beyond scolding and into hostage-taking. Ask Rosa Parks how well the civil rights movement would’ve done if she’d just protested the way the state wanted her to. (And hey, wanna put some pressure on Columbia over this matter? Jewish Voice for Peace helps you do that.)

Families suing Koch Industries-owned Georgia-Pacific over the havoc asbestos has wrought in their lives condemn Koch for using a bankruptcy work-around called the “Texas two-step” to avoid paying out. Texas law allows corporations to divide into two corporations and then dump all their legal liabilities onto the second corporation – which then declares bankruptcy! I would never expect our Supreme Court to do its duty and assert that such bankruptcy arrangements hurt the rights of others to redress grievances, but that’s what they ought to do. In the meantime, boycott Dixie cups and Brawny paper towels. “Tear-a-square” paper towels are stupid anyway; I’ll always be a size-a-sheet man.

”21 Bodycam Videos Caught the NYPD Wrongly Arresting Black Kids on Halloween,” announces ProPublica, so “Why Can’t the Public See the Footage?” I’m going to go out on a limb and say the answer is “because it would embarrass the NYPD.” Look, if you do bad things, you should expect to be embarrassed, and you should expect your friends and neighbors and family to shame you; all that’s called civilization , and too many powerful people think they’re above it. And if the NYPD remains in control over who can see body cam footage, that doesn’t mean “body cameras don’t work” – it means we should have more control, and the police should have less control, over who gets to see body camera footage.

Finally, a Christofascist who shall remain nameless because history will forget him assures us that folks “involved in election fraud” will be “struck dead by God.” Well, I guess so, eventually, though it seems He’s working awfully slowly, particularly in that Georgia case where everyone heard Donald Trump say he just wanted to find 11,780 – oh, wait, he means us! Everyone thinks God’s on their side, long after it’s obvious He’s not. But then, rage is a hell of a drug.

Action: concerning taxes, public transportation, and asylum rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop cutting IRS funding, better fund public transportation, and establish asylum-seeking as a human right. 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.

Both Patriotic Millionaires and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to stop with the cutting IRS funding drama. When you hear that every dollar our IRS invests in auditing taxpayers above the 90th percentile brings in twelve dollars of revenue, you understand that cutting IRS funding doesn’t actually save money, but costs money, and you also understand that efforts to defund our IRS (which we might also call defunding the police) are really efforts to give the rich more tax cuts. Shame these “fiscal hawks” Republicans pretend not to understand any of that. But then, we’re better than they are, and it’s well past time for that to actually mean something.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act, which would, as its title suggests, invest $80 billion into our public transportation systems over the next four years. That would be $80 billion out of a projected $20 trillion in total federal spending, so don’t let anyone get all where-you-gonna-find-the-money about this. Better bus and rail transportation not only means less pollution, fewer carbon emissions, and cleaner air and water, it also means fewer temporarily insane people driving cars on our roadways. Your children and your children’s children will thank you for both.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to affirm seeking asylum as a fundamental human right. It’s a shame we have to tell Congressfolk to exercise basic compassion and mercy! But we have far too many drama hounds running around acting like asylees are all drug-runners, terrorists, and job-takers, when asylees are actually running from terror in their home countries. You’d like a place to go if you had no place to go, wouldn’t you? And the thing about rights is they occasionally interfere with your desire to do whatever diddles your rage gland. But that’s what they’re supposed to do! They’re supposed to outlast the fevers of the day!

Action: concerning immigration, clean water, and social media.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate Gov. Abbott’s anti-immigrant dramas, tell our EPA to get rid of all lead pipes in America, and tell social media corporations to better protect their users from political campaign lies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for human rights abuses. Like what, you ask? Like busing asylum-seekers to liberal cities, which may be juicy drama to right-wingers but is cruel to folks fleeing oppression in other lands; why, he even bussed asylum-seekers to Los Angeles as a tropical storm approached. Oh, and he also put razor wire in the Rio Grande and then literally pushed asylum-seekers back into the river. Anyone who uses people as pawns to prove a “point” is evil, especially like this. So let’s do something about it.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to switch out all the lead pipes in America. Because lead pipes leach lead into our drinking water and cause brain damage in our children! Most reasonable people would agree with that; some less reasonable people would try to convince you that we should leave it to the “free” market, which ha ha ha what a crock. But after Donald Trump told Iowa ralliers that we have to “get over” school shootings, how long before some other prick says we have to “get over” pollution? Hey, if I thought of it, I know they have.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell big social media corporations to better protect their users from election lies, while Eko helps you helps you tell Meta, specifically, to stop allowing ads claiming that elections in the U.S., Brazil, and Italy were “stolen.” Literally none of this should be controversial! It’s only “controversial” to folks who want to lie to you because otherwise you won’t vote for knuckle-draggers! And for “stolen” election lies, I have literally zero patience. Some folks whine like diaper-loaded brats whenever they don’t get their way; right-wingers have had us convinced for years that we call those people “liberals.” But no: they’re right-wingers.

Action: concerning health care, drama, and housing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to lower health care costs, stop their big-drama impeachments, and stop cutting funding for affordable housing. 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.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass legislation lowering health care costs and making them more transparent. Specifically, you’ll ask them to make hospitals disclose costs in dollars and cents – yeah, we have to actually tell them to do that – and mandate “site-neutral payments,” where a service costs the same whether it happened in a hospital or doctor’s office. How would folks argue against that? By saying the “free” market knows best and we must bend the knee to it? The “free” market sure doesn’t seem very free for good Americans, does it? One might even call it costly.

Daily Kos helps you tell House Republicans to stop their big-drama impeachments, while Civic Shout helps you tell House Republicans specifically to stop impeaching our DHS Secretary. Why are they impeaching Joe Biden? For drama, of course! And some of them have the gall to say they have to impeach him in order to find out why they’re impeaching him, which sure sounds like a fishing expedition, and don’t they have a government to fund past this month? They want to impeach Secretary Mayorkas over the border. I guess they find Brown folks really threatening!

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase, not cut, investment in housing assistance. These guys, I tell you – they don’t want any immigrants to come in unless their presence cuts wages for everyone, and they don’t want to help anyone stay out of the damn cold; it’s all pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps with them, as if landlords aren’t raising rents absurdly high because they can, as if homelessness ain’t up 12% over the last year, as if redlining still doesn’t keep Black and Brown folks from living where they want. But if we don’t speak out, the cruel and heartless will win. And the cruel and the heartless should never win.

Penny rants for November 29, 2023.

Where does one begin with the observation that a lot of Republican state governments are trying to remove local Democratic officials and curtail governing power of Democratic localities? Really, one could say so many things! Like: so much for letting the voters pick their representatives! Or: so much for letting the smallest government make the most decisions about its constituents’ welfare! Or: so much for making sober decisions based on the data! I say that last thing because “runaway crime” is the reason right-wing governors remove liberal prosecutors and district attorneys from office, but both violent crime and property crime are half what they were 30 years ago, even if right-wing whining about it often seems like it’s double what it was back then. The good news? Many more people are willing to call out these things as “not conservative” now. I’m old enough to remember feeling like it was just me.

Amanda Marcotte criticizes the Washington Post for saying liberals won’t date right-wingers anymore like that’s a bad thing. If there’s one thing our “liberal” media still does that I can’t stand, it’s whine about how liberals refuse to engage with right-wing assholes – I mean, buying right-wing coffee or right-wing underwear is one thing, but who in their right mind would demand a woman lash herself to a Trumphole for life in holy matrimony because America needs her to? We liberals have suffered a lifetime of being told we’re worthless and weak and traitorous for our beliefs, and no, us calling right-wingers callous assholes simply doesn’t compare as an injury. And not for nothing, but I don’t hear our “liberal” media outlets demanding that white folks date Black and Brown folks or foreigners so that they, too, can appreciate “alternative perspectives”; only Trumpholes get this kind of affirmative action from our “liberal” media. Jesus Mary and Joseph haven’t we pandered to them enough?

You probably already know that sports writers will happily tell us that the Carolina Panthers’ bankster owner is much more of a problem than newly-fired head coach Frank Reich, and while we’d all have fun recounting the tale of how the owner spent a mint landing a talented-but-small quarterback and then surrounded him with bad blockers and receivers, we should also question the notion that hedge fund magnate David Tepper “made billions of dollars hiring smart business people to do smart business things.” Hopefully we all know by now that making a billion dollars requires reputation and connection more than “smarts,” and a brief perusal of Mr. Tepper’s PR describes a man who made a living buying big corporate stock when it's low and selling it when it goes up again, which anyone can do, if they have enough cash to start with. So, yeah, big shock that he’s running the Panthers into the ground.

Finally, when I hear that “Americans Are Angry About Immigration,” which is what a Gallup poll supposedly shows, I am reminded of two things: a) bad politicians whine about immigration just like they whine about crime when they realize they have literally nothing else to offer the electorate, and b) it helps to actually look at the data. The author infers "anger" from the fact that 40% of Americans say we’re letting in too many immigrants, but that number was still higher throughout most of the 2000s, and the only years it fell below the current level was when we had a nativist asshole as President; do we really want to go back to that just so four out of 10 Americans will feel better? Also, nearly as many Americans (37%) don’t seem to feel one way or the other about it; maybe getting those people mad at hysterical nativists would be a better strategy – politically as well as morally! – than constantly pandering to people who'll just find something else to be enraged about.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 498.

Now that Mitt Romney’s retiring, we’re hearing from him – through a book written about him – that at least one “top” Republican Senator voted to acquit Donald Trump on January 6-related impeachment charges because he was afraid Trumpholes would come after his family. And I’ve heard this kind of thing before before! Still, in America, we expect better from our leaders than that. Cowing to imagined threats, even threats against your family, means you shouldn’t have any power in the first place.

In a related note, bomb threats “prompt” the city of Chicago to close all of its public libraries this past Thursday, but anyone can threaten to blow a place up! I just want to see one library respond to a bomb threat by saying no more and staying the hell open. I’m tired of the worst people getting all the say about everything, and I’m beyond tired of the politicians who defend them by saying they have legitimate grievances. No grievance excuses terrorism.

Maud Newton at Slate writes an extensive, personal essay about dealing with her mother’s extreme right-wing views – in the process describing a Christian nationalist TV network called the Victory Channel, run, of course, by a super-rich right-wing evangelist. So now you know where folks who say “I don’t get my news from Fox” get their news! I always suspected Fox News would be a gateway drug for far worse things – not to mention far more lucrative scams! – and sadly, I was right.

It's sad that I hardly blink at the news that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has apparently been having an affair with Corey Lewandowski for years despite being yet another anti-gay marriage, “family values” politician. Her votaries – and there’ll be more of them if Donald Trump makes her his running mate – not only don’t care about the hypocrisy, they like it when their people get away with being hypocrites; they think they're sticking it to us, but they're just sticking it to themselves. We’re going to come back to this point momentarily.

As promised: Vivek Ramaswamy says he’ll “gut” the H-1B visa program that he just so happened to use 29 times as he was making his fortune in the big pharma biz. One could make a point about how corporations use such programs to drive down wages for everyone, but of course he doesn’t make that point! And I’m sure his votaries would applaud him for using the system to get ahead and then pulling up the ladder before others could. (As an aside, his press hack’s analogy in paragraph 9 is ridiculous. No, it’s not like “using water and electricity” though water and electricity regulations are “broken,” because using water and electricity isn’t the same as trying to get rich. The stupid, it burns!)

Finally, I’m not surprised that all these indictments have only hardened Trump votaries’ support for their Personal Lord and Savior, and not just because I’ve watched it happen at my own job. But when they talk about “the system” being “rigged against him – and, by extension, them,” they are demonstrating their utter ignorance of not just recent American history, where Walking While Black still gets you the death penalty in too many areas, but of distant American history, during which police have spent far more time beating up strikers and protestors than arresting men of means. All of which reminds us, again, that we should only minister to those we can save, and leave the rest to God’s mercy.

Allegedly trenchant analysis for September 5, 2023: Vivek Ramaswamy as Republican front-runner.

It’s now a few weeks after the first Republican debate, and I’m still sure the smart play for Republicans is to get behind Vivek Ramaswamy as their nominee and put someone on the ticket with him who might actually be able to run a country. Doesn’t matter that he’s non-white – evangelicals didn’t turn up their nose at Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, the number of liberals caught off-guard by conservative Black and Brown folks is very small now, and right-wingers may not love Black and Brown folks in the abstract or the tangible but they’ll defend their Black and Brown fellow-travelers to the death. Doesn’t matter that he sounds batshit, either. That fool Ron DeSantis actually thinks all his precious oppo research will make a difference? Was he paying attention in 2016? What does matter, though, is that Mr. Ramaswamy helps Republicans get the Trumphole vote without actually having to have Trump on the ticket. How stupid do Republican politicians sound trying to defend Donald Trump these days? Very, very stupid, that’s how. Now imagine a world in which they don’t even have to talk about Donald Trump anymore, let alone defend him, but can run someone who’s pushes all the same emotional buttons without having any of the Trump baggage. Then imagine those Republican politicians reassuring nose-holders that since someone like Tim Scott is on the ticket, things will actually get done. That sure is a better idea than letting Donald Trump run again (and again!), and it’s also a better idea than getting behind the trans-hating, race-baiting, book-banning, COVID-enabling Ron DeSantis.

That doesn’t mean Mr. Ramaswamy will beat Joe Biden. Joe Biden’s done a good job. Doesn’t matter that Mr. Biden’s approvals are low now, or even next year, because I suspect our economy will keep on chooglin’ into Election Day 2024. And it also doesn’t mean Mr. Ramaswamy will have the same coattails Donald Trump obviously had on Election Day 2020, when Republicans picked up 15 House seats and damn near held our Senate. But Republicans need to face facts: they are the party of masturbatory rage now, and nothing else. They can still win elections wherever they can gerrymander districts or suppress voting rights, but that’s a tough thing to do across an entire nation, and the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections – the exception being George W. Bush in 2004, who would never have been able to win re-election in the first place but for the Electoral College. So the best strategy for Republicans, going forward, is to nominate freak candidates for President. It’s not a good strategy. But it is their best one.

At the risk of opening up a hole in space-time, I will devote a small amount of space to understanding the Trumphole a little better. Like Amanda Marcotte, I am enormously tempted to say that Trump supporters are “deplorable bitter clingers” and nothing else, but I really think it’s more than that: just like murderers think of themselves law-and-order adherents facing extenuating and unprecedented circumstances, Trumpholes throw tantrums they feel perfectly justified in throwing – and yet would happily use the word “tantrum” on anyone else on the other side who ever got emotional. A lot of Trumpholes have been provoked, I suppose, but not by liberals, or immigrants, or transgender folks, or public school teachers, or whomever the Enemy of the Week is. Big corporations provoke them, and the politicians who suck up to big corporations – which has, as you know, been a bipartisan attitude for some time – also provoke them.

Many Trumpholes will agree with that analysis; some will even volunteer it – and then support candidates who have enabled their provokers, because Critical Race Theory Cancel Culture Bud Light Trans People Try That in a Small Town. Even this ain’t entirely stupid – everyone knows Democrats have been chasing big campaign donation money as much as Republicans, and Democrats have long pushed so-smart-they’re-stupid solutions to our problems (we’re going to teach construction workers to write code! No, I am never letting that go!) for decades. But Democrats have also come around a bit lately – Joe Biden is the most anti-monopoly President we’ve had since FDR, and it’s not exactly business-as-usual to see large-scale public investment (mainly through the Inflation Reduction Act, but also through the American Rescue Plan Act) that actually moves us forward as a civilization. That dilemma will impale Mr. Ramaswamy; he’s not stupid enough to oppose public investment or support monopolies, but saying “I’ll just do all of that better” won’t win hearts and minds, either. And yet he represents a better bet than hoping the Big Man himself survives all his interlocking indictments with all their interlocking co-defendants. In or out of jail, Mr. Trump could still get the nomination and win, though likely not if the economy’s still humming along. But if you’re a Republican politico, you’d rather not keep drawing to an inside straight.

Action: concerning monopolies, banksters, elections, and immigrants.

Long story short: tell our FTC to fight monopolies as vigorously as possible, tell our CFPB to crack down on predatory medical lenders, tell our CFTC to outlaw betting on elections, and tell our DHS to crack down on law enforcement abuse of immigrants. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Our government has issued new antitrust guidelines, and Matt Stoller describes them at some length and helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to adopt the most vigorous anti-monopoly guidelines possible. Maybe if these guidelines were before that Microsoft/Activision judge she wouldn’t have issued such a stupid ruling – or maybe not! But our merger guidelines have been too lenient for too long, and with all the supply chain problems we’ve had lately, we’ve seen that has to stop. And if you want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to stop trying to defund our antitrust efforts in appropriations bills, what can stop you?

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau People to crack down on predatory medical payment products, like high-interest credit cards you can only use to pay medical bills and high-interest installment loans. Banksters who wave high-interest loans in your face at your moment of need are some of the lowest people on Earth; at the risk of blasphemy, I hope most of them have toasty asses after Judgment Day. In the meantime, we have a task on Earth: to prevent people like that from making a killing on other people’s misfortune. And if you want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass Medicare-for-All legislation, what can stop you?

Public Citizen helps you tell our Commodity Futures Trading Commission (or CFTC) not to allow betting on elections. Yeah, they’re really considering that. You’ve heard your co-workers talk about how (insert name of sport they’re always betting on) is fixed? Now imagine how that’ll be if we allow betting on elections! And no use arguing that most betting will be on relatively arcane stuff (i.e., how big a lead in the Hispanic vote a candidate has over the other), because an election is not a sporting event. We treat too much of politics like sports, not just in our allegiances, but in our constant hunger for the latest polling; it makes us sick, immoral, and decadent, so we have to stop it.

Finally, our ACLU helps you tell our Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) to stop collaborating with so-called Operation Lone Star, which has inflicted unconscionable cruelty upon would-be immigrants. Imagine running from death squads in one country only to be met by cops literally pushing you back into the Rio Grande, where they just so happened to have installed razor wire; does that sound like something a civilized people would do? Only the most hardened heart can read these details and say BUTZ WE HAVEZ TO DOZ TEH SOMETHINGZ ABOUTZ TEH ILLEGULZ!!!!! I don’t speak to such hardened hearts anymore; I leave them to God.

Around the table: the Tulsa massacre *was* racist! And other truths.

When I hear that ”(t)he stock market is not loving Thursday’s job data,” I must ask if we need any more evidence that worshiping the stock market is evil. It’s all big corporations do now, and it hollows out our economy and ensures misery for most of us, so we need to fight it with every breath. (ADP’s job creation data, which reports that our economy gained almost 500,000 jobs in June, reported more than twice as much job growth than the Department of Labor, which reported a hair over 200,000 jobs. Either way, it’s not hard to tell right from wrong here, unless you worship mammon like our corporate CEOs do.)

Thinking maybe North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson was just calling for us to read the works of Hitler and Stalin and Mao more closely in his remarks before Moms for Liberty? Well, when you learn that Mr. Robinson has a history of saying racist and anti-Semitic crap on social media, you won’t think that anymore. Isn’t this about the point where Republicans decide they need to support someone who loves Nazis but isn’t so obvious about it? And who needs to read Mein Kampf just to be sure Hitler was an evil bastard?

When I heard that the New York Times clutched its pearls over Brazilian judges banning Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for the next eight years for the crime of election fraud, the very first thing I thought was: where were they when Brazilian judges were ginning up impeachment charges against one liberal President and throwing another liberal in jail so he couldn’t beat Mr. Bolsonaro in a Presidential race? The answer, of course: spewing forth over three dozen articles sympathizing with the Brazilian justice system. Read the whole thing, because the details are even worse than the summary.

Canadian judge counts a thumbs-up emoji as a contract agreement, meaning the emoji-ing farmer is out over $60,000, and while I might agree that an emoji could constitute a contract agreement in other circumstances, I could not count it as a contract agreement when the questioner merely asked if the emoji-er received the contract. Receiving a contract and approving it are two different things! Sounds like a judge is trying to force a point without adhering to the law or common sense; sound familiar, good Americans?

Donald Trump says he’ll do his next Muslim ban even bigly-er than his last one if he gets re-elected, though I’m not sure that declaration diddles the rage gland of even his most devoted followers; maybe anti-Muslim hate can be reactivated, but more likely they’ve moved on to new hatreds, like anti-racist teaching in schools. But don’t expect that declaration to attract moderates, either – he can talk all he wants about people “blowing up our shopping centers,” but I think everyone knows by now that the face of American terror is white and male, and its heart is right-wing and bigoted.

Finally, Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Schools suggests that we shouldn’t tell kids that the Tulsa massacre of 1921 was racist because “that is Critical Race Theory” and “kids should never be made to feel bad or told they are inferior based on the color of their skin.” He’s tried to backtrack, largely because good Oklahomans seem to protest his every appearance and good for them, but let me just say that when I learned about slavery as a child, I didn’t take it so damn personal because I knew that I didn’t enslave anyone. Sure, I came to understand privilege later, but right-wingers will never get there, because that’s wisdom, and wisdom is their Kryptonite.

Action: concerning immigration, media, and health care.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: Republicans will eat themselves! And other truths.

Some rare good news from our Supreme Court, as they have thrown out Alabama’s 2020 redrawing of Congressional districts on the grounds that it unlawfully concentrated Black voting power into one district. Blacks comprise more than a quarter of Alabama residents, so they can easily have two districts to represent them. I keep hearing that the ruling will have ripple effects in other Southern states, but that would require our Supreme Court (or one of the lower federal courts) to specifically rule against their district maps; the idea that these states will preemptively give up power strikes me as more than a little optimistic. No one gives up power easily, particularly those who never deserved it in the first place.

George Chidi at The Intercept wonders why, if “no one believes in” the Cop City training facility in Atlanta, then “why did Atlanta’s city council fund it?” One reason is that virtually no one thinks current police training facilities are anywhere near adequate, but another reason is that the mostly-Democratic city council is afraid of being painted as “soft on crime” – and/or thinks they won’t suffer too much electorally from building it, which may not be true, given how close the 2020 Presidential/Senate and 2022 Senate races were. I will say that the activist who said to a City Council member “I will fucking find your ass” belongs in jail. Hey, if the pricks who say “I know where you live” to school board members belong in jail, so do those I might find more sympathetic. Threats are threats, no matter who issues them.

Ho hum, right-wingers take to our airwaves to tell us that all that carcinogenic wildfire smoke that was all over the Eastern seaboard last week was perfectly safe for us to breathe! Just like the air in India and China, one Koch-funded hack said; even the least informed among us know the air is not, in fact, safe to breathe in India and China. “(W)ildfire smoke” is “natural,” they say, but particulates cause breathing problems whether they come from “nature” or burning coal or driving cars. We all know it’s climate change causing more wildfires, too. Now would be a good time to remind everyone that highly-paid fossil fuel industry hacks wouldn’t exist if we still had a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income.

In the wake of Target’s cowardice in the face of a few drama kings, Sonali Kohatkar reminds us that “corporations are not allies” to the queer community. Seems to me knocking down a pride display at a store is a reason to call the cops, not capitulate, and it also seems to me that when someone accuses you of putting trans-friendly bathing suits in the kids’ section when you haven’t done any such thing, you shame them for their stupidity/evil, but then I’m not a very flexible person. Also too, “(c)orporate support of causes is simply public relations. It is a sign that the culture is shifting thanks to the hard work of those impacted. It does not mean the business actually cares. Target’s recent capitulation to right-wing bigots proves this point.”

Florida Republicans, trapped between a rock and a hard place of their own making, start telling migrants that Gov. DeSantis’s new anti-immigration law “has no teeth” and is only “designed to scare you.” So that’s what you have to do when you’ve stepped in it that badly! One is of course tempted to laugh at Republicans attempting to justify having voted for the worst bill they could possibly find. And of course this law bites pretty hard for something with “no teeth” – ask anyone working in Florida’s farming industry if they’ll go to a hospital now that they’re going to get asked their immigration status. Oh, well – wherever Democrats are weak, fascism flourishes. It’s that simple.

Finally, North Carolina Republicans formally censure their senior U.S. Senator, Thom Tillis, for not being adequately conservative I guess, and all I can say is how soon they all forget! Thom Tillis was the North Carolina House Speaker who helped shepherd the most reactionary agenda in history from 2012-2014, and though North Carolina’s legislature has done far worse since then, these fools should be grateful for all he’s done for them. So North Carolina Republicans can primary him out in 2026 in favor of a “true conservative,” and then primary that fool out in 2032 in favor of a “true conservative,” and on and on and on until they start electing actual rabid raccoons to office. If any courageous Democrats ever emerge in North Carolina, of course, they’ll stop the cycle cold dead.

Penny rants for June 7, 2023.

Ho hum, 11 Oregon counties want to secede from Oregon and join Idaho, and you know why. NBC doesn't report it this way, but I'm pretty sure these folks want to secede over immigration and transgender folk and STOP TEH STEALZ!!!! more than over feeling “used” by Multnomah County, and anyway when will they realize their real enemies aren't haughty cityfolk but big ag corporations making it impossible for them to make a living? And don’t be intimidated by maps showing the size of the counties that would secede, because fewer than 207,000 people inhabit them; for your reference, Congressional districts typically contain 640,000 residents. All 11 counties sit in Oregon’s already heavily-Republican 2nd district; their secession alone wouldn’t flip that seat, although the state legislature might see secession as an opportunity to redraw the boundaries to make the 5th district more friendly to Democrats. And I’ve just given this process way more thought than has anyone trapped in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage in the 2nd district.

When I hear that Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) has declared both his D.C. home and his Arizona home as his primary residence at different times and for different reasons, all I can say is maybe Kyrsten Sinema has a better shot getting re-elected than I thought! Partisan Democrats will tell me this is much ado about nothing, but even though Mr. Gallego appears to have adhered to the letter of the law, good Arizonans won’t just hate that he ever declared D.C. as his primary residence, they’ll also hate that he declared it to get a Veterans Administration loan a year after getting a refi on his Arizona home. And when he says hey, have you seen interest rates lately?, they’ll hate that he bought a $940,000 house with that VA loan, which sure doesn’t seem like the purpose of government assistance. Don’t any of these folks ever give a minute’s thought to how anything they do looks? So many “breaks” you can get in life just aren’t worth it, and if you make over $150,000 a year like Mr. Gallego does, you don’t need them as badly as most folks I know.

Nikki Haley, at a CNN “town hall,” blames the spike in suicidal ideations among teenage girls on – wait for it! – the possibility that there are trans girls in their locker rooms. I’m almost ashamed that I even bothered to look this up, but apparently she referenced a CDC study (CDC, tsk tsk!) saying that nearly a third of teenage girls contemplated suicide in 2021 (a hike from 2019), but you can look at the year 2021 and say maybe the pandemic, which arguably hit schools harder than any other institution, had more to do with that than trans girls in their locker room. You might also note that more Black and Brown girls contemplated suicide than white girls – and you might also imagine that Black and Brown girls had other reasons to contemplate suicide than trans girls in their locker room, like, you know, racism – and of course gay/lesbian/trans/questioning girls also had comparatively high rates. Because we treat these kids like shit, maybe? Anyway, I’ve got good news for you: even if she does another 10 CNN “town halls,” Ms. Haley will never get enough Trumpholes to vote for her.

Around the table: ChatGPT is "way stupider than people realize"! And other total non-surprises.

Now it can be told: an AI expert informs us that “ChatGPT is Way Stupider Than People Realize,” because “large language models are good at...saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be.” If you were one of the many teachers who easily detected your students farming out their essays to AI, you already understand this. Of course, if you’re a CEO desperately trying to cut jobs so you can pretend your corporation’s “efficient” and thus goose up your stock prices beyond what any moral or economic reality would justify, then your job depends on you not understanding this. (And sadly, “(i)t gives an answer with complete confidence, and I sort of believe it. And half the time, it’s completely wrong” might as well describe almost any politician you’ve heard of.)

Ho hum, Gov. DeSantis (F-FL) is putting his state workers’ pension funds into the grubby hands of underperforming hedge funds that donated to his campaigns because of course he is. After all, if you want to present yourself to rich right-wing donors as an electable candidate, you can’t just do the culture war stuff, you also have to do the grift! Meanwhile, public employees in Florida haven’t gotten a cost-of-living increase in 15 years! I’d say it doesn’t pay to make everything subservient to one man’s power, but a significant part of Florida’s population apparently doesn’t care, and deserves whatever horrors befall them. (My estimate that a quarter of the electorate is batshit insane applies nationally; surely some states have more batshit insane voters than others.)

Lo and behold, former Rep. Kurt Schrader (D?-OR), who did his damnedest to kill Medicare drug price negotiation even though over 80% of Americans strongly support it, has just gotten a job for a big pharma lobbyist. I wonder if that’s a good hire, considering that his name is now dogshit. I’ll never forget the why-am-I-here-don’t-waste-my-time-just-elect-me-already look on his face as he “debated” the woman who ultimately defeated him in the 2022 Democratic primary – or his whining afterward that the Republican wave of 2022 would begin in his district. His district did flip, but narrowly, and, ah, what wave? I would like to think the times are passing Kurt Schrader by, though big lobbying money might prevent him from realizing that for a little while.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that our Surgeon General says that social media can present “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” When you’re on social media, you always feel like you’re performing, and why do kids really need that sort of pressure? So they can handle it later? That’s like setting people on fire to prepare them for an eternity in hell. This is why sane people like us have been telling social media to avoid roping kids in. After all, our Congressfolk are about as hands-off about social media as they are about guns – or financial predators. (Our Surgeon General’s advisory does inform us that social media can help marginalized folks find each other and support each other. I have no doubt that’s true – until Elon Musk takes over!)

Ho hum, ”The U.S. Is Unhappy That Mexico Is Spending Money on Its Own Citizens.” One day we’re going to take a good, hard look at our history – and not just our history, but the history of every nation that ever ruled the Earth – and we’re going to find that even when we treated our own citizens well, we did it on the backs of nations that treated their citizens like dung. My hope is that when regular folks read sentences like “President Lopez Obrador’s federal budget for 2023 gives priority to social spending and signature infrastructure projects, rather than the investments needed to address bilateral issues with the U.S. such as migration, security, and trade,” they’ll see it for the whining it is. (AMLO has cooperated with the U.S. more on immigration, though I doubt he’ll ever get much out of that.)

Finally, because the news can’t be all bad, scientists at U. Mass-Amherst have developed technology that can harvest electricity from air moisture, even in the Sahara desert. All my peeps on the Eastern Seaboard are no doubt exclaiming at last! A use for all this damn humidity!, but this technology can work with any amount of humidity in the air, though I imagine it’ll be less effective in the desert. Now comes the part where the big corporations that fund scientific breakthroughs sit on the funding that could make this technology affordable and available to all. Have I mentioned that government funding would comprise an alternative to this reality? Yes, I believe I have.

Action: concerning cruelty to animals, water pollution, oil drilling, and family separation.

Long story short: tell world governments to ban octopus farming, tell Trinseo PLC to stop polluting the Delaware River, and tell President Biden to reverse course on the Willow Project and reject efforts to bring back family separation. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell world governments to ban octopus farming. Octopi, in case you haven’t heard, are intelligent enough that folks joke (or perhaps “joke”!) that they’re aliens from another planet, so let’s not create a massive torture chamber for them – as an octopus farm would surely be – so food corporation executives can make more money. Note well that elephants mourn their dead, and nobody eats an elephant – and we’re making headway keeping people from hunting them for their tusks. Is this is a slippery slope to starvation, as we one day discover that chickens and cows and salmon are sentient and pissed? We don’t have the tools to say that yet, and by then 3D printers might actually be good food replicators.

Change.org helps you tell Trinseo PLC to stop poisoning the drinking water of good Americans in the Delaware Valley. You heard of the chemical spill in the Delaware River a little over a week ago? That was Trinseo PLC of Bristol, PA, leaking 10,000 gallons of butyl acrylate, methyl acrylate, and ethyl acrylate into good Americans’ drinking water, and sadly, they’ve got a record of screwing up, as most chemical corporations do. Is that an excuse to throw up your hands and say that’s just the price of living with chemicals? A right-winger would do that, but a civilized person wouldn’t! A civilized person would demand that we “live with chemicals” by keeping good Americans safe from them.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to reverse course on the Willow oil drilling project in the Arctic. Yes, the Biden Administration approved it in mid-March, but at the same time prohibited all other drilling on federal lands nearby, which means he could, in theory, do the same thing to Willow. Possibly he’s gambling on ConocoPhillips competitors (ConocoPhillips got the permits to pursue the Willow Project) suing the project into endless delays, but let’s not assume Presidents play 13-dimensional chess. Instead, let’s play 3-D chess, where we demand that he does the right thing until he does it.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden to scrap plans to bring back the family separation policies for which Donald Trump became rightly notorious. OK, one of the many, many things for which he became rightly notorious! But as with Title 42, the program that pretends COVID pandemics come from Mexicans more frequently than from rage-addled Americans, this is yet another stain on our national character we need to scrub out of our national character. And, you know, there’s a reason we call detention centers “concentration camps” – they treat detainees badly. And as I’ve often said, a great nation doesn’t have to do that.

Action: concerning price-gouging, birth control, social media, and family separation.

Long story short: tell our FTC to investigate possible egg corporation price-gouging, tell our government to make birth control free again, tell Meta to hold Donald Trump to the same rules it holds all of Facebook’s users, and tell the Biden Administration not to restart family separation policies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Real Populists helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to investigate possible egg industry price-gouging. Egg prices went up so far so fast earlier this year it fueled a hundred Facebook memes, but of course whenever you see “high prices” and “high profits” in the same spot – and, surprise! You see it here, too – you have to at least investigate the possibility that it’s just price-gouging. Yeah, they said it was avian flu, but avian flu has been hitting wild birds hard and commercial flocks only sporadically, and how many eggs do we get from wild birds again? So there’s yet another reason we need our FTC to investigate.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the strongest birth control access rule possible. The Administration’s proposal rescinds the Trump Administration’s “moral objection” but not the “religious objection,” and provides an “Individual Contraceptive Arrangement” for folks whose employers have a “religious” objection. No one will ever convince me that your employer should force its own alleged “religious” or “moral” objections upon us in re covering birth control in health insurance, even though Hobby Lobby convinced our Supreme Court of that. But we must press the Biden Administration to expand no-cost access to birth control as broadly as possible.

Free Press helps you tell Meta (Facebook’s parent corporation) to hold Donald Trump to the exact same community standards it holds everyone else. Simply put: if they’re going to allow Mr. Trump back on, they shouldn’t hide behind arguments about TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!! every time he does something they’d ban you or I for. And I guarantee you he will do many, many more awful things on Facebook than you or I will ever do, and Mark Zuckerberg will throw up his hands and say well what can I do? It’s democracy! Facebook isn’t a democracy, of course, but a publishing house. Do we demand that Random House publish every manuscript it gets? No, we do not.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to abandon plans to bring back family separation at the border. One of the more shameful episodes of the Trump years and that’s saying something, President Biden pledged to end family separation once he took office, but hasn’t – he’s done it less and grandstanded less about it and that’s all I can say in his favor – but now he appears willing to reinstate the program formally, and for what? So right-wingers can simply ignore it and vote against him next time he runs just like they did with Barack Obama? You’d think Mr. Biden, having witnessed all that close-up as Vice President, would be more attuned to that. Hence we have to remind him.

Action: concerning the freedom to work, immigration, law and order, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC to outlaw noncompete clauses, tell the Biden Administration not to bring back Trump-era immigration policies, tell our Justice Department to disclose data about deaths in police custody, and tell our Postal Service to reject the DeJoy privatization plan. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban noncompete clauses in employment contracts. “The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy.” Who said that, some object of “free” marketeer hero worship? No, it was our own FTC Chair, Lina Khan, and though that does bode well for our efforts, you know that corporations – also somehow the object of “free” marketeer hero worship – will be flooding our FTC with their comments about how they can’t lose trade secrets when they lose employees, even though we already have other laws to deal with that. So we’ve got to show up.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Biden Administration not to bring back the notorious asylum ban and family separation plans. Everyone hated the Trump Administration for doing these things, so why would President Biden bring them back, inflicting cruel and needless hardship on folks who thought they were getting away from all that? Because he’s “moving to the center,” I suppose, though the “center” doesn’t comprise an “average” between right-wing cruelty and left-wing compassion. And anyway, no right-winger will ever support him for it, or acknowledge he did it. Really, there’s no upside here, for President Biden or anyone else. But he’ll do it, unless we get in his grill about it.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our Department of Justice to disclose how many good Americans die in police custody. Because the law demands it, that’s why! I don’t care if the police unions don’t like it! If they don’t like it, they can stop killing people in custody! One wonders why anyone dies in custody – I mean, isn’t law enforcement in control at that point? Too often the answer is because cops thought they deserved it, which isn’t very law-and-order of them, nor of us. And to those who think we should just put up with it because crime, I can only say: go live in a real police state.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell our USPS to fire Postmaster DeJoy and reject his 10-year plan to cut services, slash jobs, close Post Offices, and raise prices. Because a plan to cripple our USPS in this manner is also a plan to privatize our USPS! And we should fear that even more with our Postal Service, since our Constitution literally mandates that we keep the mail moving, and right-wingers would love for big corporations to gouge us at the same time they’re “fulfilling” that mandate. It’s all fun and games until a diabetic doesn’t get their insulin because they didn’t sign up for spam emails from some private mail carrier. You know late capitalism, so you know that’ll happen.

Action: concerning child labor, health care, immigration, and product safety.

Long story short: tell Iowa state legislators to reject a bill that would loosen child labor laws, and tell your Congressfolk to defend Medicaid and CHIP and pass the DREAM Act and the Sunshine in Product Safety 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.

Care2 helps you tell Iowa state legislators to reject Senate File 167, which would loosen child labor laws so that corporations could put 14-17-year-olds to work in such carefree childhood vocations as demolition, mining, and meatpacking. Perhaps even worse, the bill would let corporations off the hook in civil suits for any kids they neglected, sickened, injured, or killed at the workplace! Because trial lawyers bad! No: putting kids to work in dangerous occupations is bad, though maybe it’s not as snappy a bumper sticker slogan. Look, either children are the future, or they’re just another workforce for fat-cat bosses to use and discard. They ain’t both. And if we have any say about it, they ain’t the latter.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to defend both Medicaid and the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) from Congressional debt-limit hostage-takers. Maybe they won’t get Social Security and Medicare cuts and then again maybe they will, but we need to put them on notice about Medicaid and CHIP as well. Medicaid is less popular than Social Security and Medicare, because of the absurd perception that it only helps lazy people, but it’s no less important than any of the other programs they’ve taken so much flak about cutting. And Republicans already let CHIP expire once, so they don’t care about kids, and why should they keep getting away with that?

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk pass the DREAM Act, which, as you no doubt remember, would help immigrant children whose legal standing in America has lapsed, but who’ve met certain standards of service and education, to remain in America (and keep contributing to American culture) rather than get deported back to the countries they’ve never known. Because that’s cruel! And to those who reflexively respond AMURKIA FIRSTZ!!!! to everything because they can’t argue their way out of a paper bag: the DREAM Act would help, at most, some 1.9 million folks out of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in America, so this is not so damn much to ask.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sunshine in Product Safety Act, which would let our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) warn the American public about dangerous products without having to get permission from the corporation that manufactured the dangerous product first. Yes, you read that right! Currently we can’t spread the word about dangerous products lest we hurt some corporation’s fee-fees! That’s because Congress amended the Consumer Product Safety Act to give corporations an effective veto over product safety announcements in 1981. Still we deal with the bitter fruits of the Reagan Revolution. This is why we fight.

Action: concerning Social Security, refugees, banksters, and the minimum wage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act, reject the TABS Act, and raise the minimum wage. 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.

Both Civic Shout and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would ensure that income over $250,000 gets taxed into the system for the first time. Yes, currently Social Security doesn’t tax income over $160,200 annually, meaning that only working people pay into the system; the fat-cat class is exempt! I suppose right-wingers would argue that since they don’t need Social Security they shouldn’t have to pay into it, but that’s exactly the sort of everyone-for-themselves masturbation that’s gotten this country into the trouble it’s in. Rich folks need to pay more into Social Security, for the good of all Americans.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would help some 78,000 Afghan refugees living in America to get legal immigrant status. I can already hear the right-wingers saying when are we going to provide for our own people? As if a great nation has to choose! And, you know, as if giving legal status to a refugee really injures someone else. I didn’t ask for Tha Bush Mobb to invade Afghanistan, nor did I ask the Obama and Trump Administrations to stay there, so I also didn’t ask for tens of thousands of Afghan refugees. But I’m not an evil bastard, either, so I’ll still demand we take care of them, because that’s what great nations – and great civilizations – do.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (or TABS) Act, which would repeal our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB)’s independent funding mechanism, and instead subject it to the whim of Congressional funding. Other banking regulators have independent funding mechanisms, so why not our CFPB? Because banksters hate our CFPB, and Republicans live to suck up to their bankster overlords, that’s why. This may all be moot, since our Supreme Court obviously has the long knives out for our CFPB. But we should still tell our Reps how we really feel about their drama.

Finally, the Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour or more, since $15/hour has been a calling card for so long that inflation’s outrun it a bit. Don’t brook any right-wingers telling you good luck getting that through this Congress ha ha ha snort. Congress passed a minimum wage hike in 2007 why? Because they wanted to? Because Democrats had impregnable majorities in either House? No, because we demanded it. And don’t brook any where’s it going to stop? hysteria from right-wingers, either. That’s a loser’s argument. It’s going to stop when we get justice. Which is what they’re really afraid of.

Action: concerning junk fees, immigration, and taxes.

Long story short: tell our CFPB to end credit card junk fees, tell President Biden to abandon the Trump-era asylum ban, tell our IRS to actually crack down on rich tax evaders, and tell our government to make tax filing free. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to outlaw credit card junk fees. Your credit card corporations doesn’t need to charge you $35 and $50 and $100 late fees when $8 will actually cover their costs! They only need to cover their costs! They don’t need to profit from your misfortune! Profiting from your misfortune is evil! Let me know if I’m not being absolutely clear here. And make no mistake, the banksters will still make money if we cap their credit card fees – it just won’t be as easy for them to make enough money to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, that’s all. And that’s not a hardship for a healthy civilization.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to scuttle his plans to revive the Trump-era asylum ban. This supposedly “conservative” notion – that we should default on the side of assuming that potential asylees don’t have a case, or that we should require them to seek asylum in a neighboring country, never mind how dangerous that country is! – actually increases immigration-related bureaucracy, as I’m sure Donald Trump intended. Naturally the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Trump ban; maybe Mr. Biden thinks our Supreme Court will overrule them. Better to evaluate asylum claims carefully, like civilized people would.

Daily Kos also helps you tell our IRS to actually crack down on wealthy tax-evaders, as intended by the Inflation Reduction Act. We need our IRS to prove that it can actually work the way we intended it to work. Anyone can screw up and then claim TEH GUBMINTZ DOESN’TZ WORKZ!!!!! – right, George W. Bush? – but getting our IRS to catch a couple of rich tax cheats will help defeat the right-wing zombie lie that more IRS funding means more poor people get harassed. If you’ve been awake these last few years, you know our IRS was so under-funded it could only go after the poor! That's why we must make our IRS do the right thing.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Daily Kos also helps you tell our government that tax preparation should be easy and free, and not corporate welfare for big tax-prep corporations. Think about it: your employer has already given our IRS all the info it needs to fill out a tax form, and you very likely don’t invest in the kind of convoluted schemes designed to evade our laws, so why do you need to get someone to help you fill out your taxes? Because our IRS made a deal with corporations that they wouldn’t create a free tax-filing option if those corporations did – and then they made those free options almost impossible for you to find! And we deserve better than that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning immigrant kids, bankster fees, and judicial ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Children’s Safe Welcome Act, clamp down on predatory overdraft fees, and pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption 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.

RAICES helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8349/S. 4529, the Children’s Safe Welcome Act. You remember family separation at the border under the Trump Administration, and the revelation that the separated kids lived in squalor in our detention centers? The Children’s Safe Welcome Act would prevent that, by prohibiting family separation, ensuring that unaccompanied kids get legal representation, and giving more health care to kids at the border. Nobody’s afraid of immigrant kids getting legal representation, right? And the answer to “why do they get it but not me?” ought to be “why doesn’t everyone get it?” We are the greatest nation on Earth, right?

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to rein in usurious bank overdraft fees. When you think about it, banksters collecting $35 every time you overdraw your account is an awful lot like not working. And if you’re the person who says then just budget correctly and don’t spend more than you have, well lucky you! With the cost of higher education and health insurance (to name just two costs Americans can’t just ignore!) rising much, much faster than inflation has done, maybe not everyone has the headspace to realize that their next $3 cup of coffee will put them in the red. And $35 fees sure overstate the tiny amount of work a bank does to keep them afloat!

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would at long last make Supreme Court Justices adhere to the same ethical standards as every other federal judge. Clarence Thomas (whose wife helped immensely with the attempted January 6 coup) isn’t the news hook here, for once: this time it’s Amy Comey Barrett, who hasn’t been transparent about her husband’s work representing corporate clients. Always they think they’re too “great” for ethics rules. But what’s the lesson of America? The American people are great, and individuals who think they’re better than the rest of us are fools.

Action: concerning voting rights, treating prisoners like human beings, and immigrant youth.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Mail Act and the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, and pass legislation protecting immigrant youth. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 4487, the Election Mail Act. The bill would (among other things) require our Postal Service to process all mail-in ballots the same day they get them, to process mail-in ballots free of charge to the voter, and require states to count mail-in ballots postmarked on or by Election Day that arrive up to seven days after Election Day. And if that makes Republicans whine about how we should always know the winner by 8 pm on Election Day, well, tough toodles. Better to make mail-in voting easier for all Americans. And we all have to deal with change, so why should we coddle Republicans in their incessant efforts to avoid dealing with change?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. Big telecom corporations get to charge usurious rates for prisoners to talk to their families, and these big corporations have massive bankster funding behind them – thus explaining why Americans for Financial Reform brings you this action alert. Prisoners who stay in touch with their families are also more likely to stay out of jail once they get out; you can see why banksters invested in big telecom corporations and private prison corporations don’t want that, but again, why should they get all the say about everything?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation protecting immigrant youth (i.e., “dreamers”) from deportation. To a nation they left when they were very young and therefore not of their own free will and therefore also to a nation they won’t recognize, I feel compelled to mention again. In the meantime, we could keep hoping that reactionary judges (and Justices!) might interpret the law in such a way as to not be cruel bastards – or we could tell our Congressfolk to solve the problem with legislation. And if they don’t, we tell them again until they do. Easier than relying on a right-wing judge, that’s for sure.

Action: concerning racism, tax cuts for working families, and immigration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and codify DACA protections for “dreamers” into law. 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: as you may know, the GI Bill helped a lot of WWII soldiers buy houses they wouldn’t have been able to buy otherwise, but racist enforcement of the GI Bill left most Black soldiers behind. No, really – when you’re Black and you fill out your application five times and your government loses it five times, that’s racism. But H.R. 5905/S. 3210, the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, would help fix that, by making survivors and direct descendants of WWII Black soldiers eligible for the GI Bill benefits their forebears were denied, the benefits that lifted so many Americans into the middle class for the first time. So this bill merits a phone call to your Congressfolk.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion that helped so many good Americans weather the pandemic and inflation in 2021. The CTC expansion deposited $250 or $300 checks (per child!) every month in working families’ bank accounts in 2021, and why aren’t Democrats running ads saying we cut your taxes and Republicans fought us? Regardless of their negligence in this area (or because of it!), we should get in our Congressfolks’ grills and make our will known, that the CTC expansion kept millions of kids out of poverty and we should bring it back so they can get back out of poverty. Why does anyone deserve poverty, after all?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to permanently enshrine DACA protections for immigrant youth into law. I’m speaking, of course, of the children who came here long before they were capable of remembering their birth country – and thus had literally no say in coming here, of course – and who have maintained a residence here and contributed to American society. I have just given at least three reasons why deporting them would be unconscionably cruel. We’re either a great nation or we’re not, and if we’re unconscionably cruel, then guess what? We’re not. So let’s not let such cruelty be our legacy.

Action: concerning immigration, pollution, and corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the DREAM Act, reject efforts to gut the National Environmental Policy Act, and prohibit Congressfolk from trading in stocks. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 264, the DREAM Act. Like President Biden's recent moves on marijuana pardons and student loan debt, the DREAM Act is not some radical act, but a bill that would simply expand the number of immigrants brought here as children who can stay in the only country they know anything about, as long as they demonstrate continued residence here and continued contributions to society. Shouting about PROTECTINGZ TEH BORDURZ!!!! and BUILDINGZ TEH WALLZ!!!! is entirely inappropriate in the context of someone who literally had no say in coming to America. In fact, it’s damn cruel. Is it so fucking much to ask for people not to be cruel in America?

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk not to weaken the National Environmental Policy Act. When you hear the likes of Joe Manchin talk about “permitting reform,” they really mean they don’t want federal agencies to evaluate big gas, oil, and pipeline projects for the harm they might do to our clean air and clean water, hence the drive to “reform” the National Environmental Policy Act. I guess we should be happy that Republicans helped take down Mr. Manchin’s infamous “side deal” on “permitting reform,” which they appear to have done out of pique. The pique of evil people is a hell of a thing to count on, though; we’d do better to count on ourselves, doing our job as Americans.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation banning members of Congress from owning or trading individual stocks. Because you can’t trust people who are compromised by their own investments! And if your Congressperson pretends to get all offended at that, trust your own common sense rather than their histrionics. Congresspeople oversee vast swaths of our economy, and if they invest their own money in the parts of our economy they’re overseeing, they won’t do it on our behalf, but on their own. It’s that simple. Congress has really dropped the ball on this matter this year, but that just means we have to make them do better.

Around the table: containing at least three trips down Memory Lane.

What’s the latest BS 2020 election conspiracy theory? Why, that certain “voting machines have features built into them under the auspices of protection or equal access for people with disabilities that can be used nefariously,” and supposedly were in Maricopa County to help deliver Arizona to Joe Biden. And why is this a BS theory? Because (among many, many other things!) over 90% of Maricopa County’s ballots were mail-in ballots, and only a few hundred folks even used the equal-access machines in Maricopa County, in a state Mr. Biden won by over 10,000 votes. And why is this theory even more disgusting? Because it implies that “helping disabled people vote” equals “cheating at elections,” and thus we should never fight discrimination ever. And what should we do to folks who come up with such “theories”? Shame and shun them unto death, that’s what. Healthy communities put up boundaries, and healthy communities also know when to get tough.

University of Exeter-led study surprisingly finds that Alzheimer’s disease changes non-neurons rather more dramatically than it changes neurons. Scientists had long supposed, reasonably, that Alzheimer’s has its biggest effects on neurons, but the Exeter-led study was able to isolate different kinds of cells much better than previous studies had done, hence the finding. This finding could change or expand the kinds of treatments doctors can use on patients with dementia; if you’ve witnessed first-hand how dementia takes over a mind, this will give you hope that folks in the future may be spared this debilitating disease. I wish the researchers the best.

Did you know that the FBI compiled a file on Aretha Franklin that was over 270 pages long? Given her lifelong involvement with the civil rights movement, I guess it’s not surprising, though the sheer clumsiness of the FBI’s efforts to tie her to pretty much any fevered fantasy is either amusing or disgusting, depending on your level of spiritual elevation. (I vote “disgusting” and I still don’t know which level is higher or lower.) I guess I’m curious about the FBI files on Robin Gibb; perhaps our FBI was listening a little too closely to “I Started a Joke.”

When I hear that tech billionaires are not only “dumber than you think” and think of themselves as “utterly powerless to affect the future” in the face of apocalypse, but are also “comedic monsters, who really mean to leave us all behind,” I am reminded that several of these fools are running for U.S. Senate right now, namely J.D. “Pretend Redneck Bankster Robot” Vance in Ohio, and yet another "libertarian" with a face even a mother could punch, Blake Masters in Arizona. I am also reminded that though my father’s and grandfather’s gardening talent has largely eluded me, I could still feed myself in an apocalypse far better than any of them could.

When I hear that New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc has now taken his third distinct position on the 2020 election – in order, he said it was stolen, then that it wasn’t stolen, and now that he doesn’t know – I’m reminded that people hate flip-floppers. He’d have done a lot better sticking to “it was stolen”; even the folks who don’t agree will more likely respect a man who sticks to his guns, as it were. I’m also reminded that Scott Walker took three separate positions on birthright citizenship in just one week that time he ran for President; anyone remember how many delegates he won? Oh, right, he flamed out before the primaries.

Finally, Herschel Walker sure has had a rough week, what with that allegation he paid for a woman's abortion and his son's turning oh him. I wonder if all this news is coming a bit early in the month, but then I also wonder if too many voters suspect any revelations they hear in late October, so maybe early October is the new late October. It sure was for Roy Moore in 2017 – though it wasn’t for Donald Trump in 2016 and, more importantly, was for Hillary Clinton that same year. Will right-wingers have pause before pulling the lever for him? I kid, of course – the only thing that matters to them is power, which they’ll have more of if Mr. Walker beats Sen. Warnock.

Action: concerning housing, privacy, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase affordable housing funding and pass the Protecting Data at the Border Act, and tell your Senators to pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase funding for affordable housing in America. Why? Because rents are skyrocketing, because a lot of good Americans face eviction, because too many rich folks block too many working families from buying a good home – and because we were a much, much stronger country when we took affordable housing seriously. Don’t brook any rubbish about how folks just need to bootstrap, because when rents shoot up higher than inflation, ain’t no bootstrapping happening. Don’t brook any dumb jokes about “the projects,” either. Racism looks intractable, but to just throw up your hands about it? That’d be un-American.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5524/S. 2957, the Protecting Data at the Border Act. Typically our government has to get a warrant to see your cellphone, but officials have been searching everyone’s cellphones at the border willy-nilly, our Constitution be damned. The Protecting Data at the Border Act would require our law enforcement to get warrants before searching cellphones at the border, and before you protest but they’re not citizens, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) consider how easily our government could abuse this loophole to harass American citizens at the border, if they, you know, happen to be the “wrong color.”

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Your right-wing Senators will likely lecture you about giving workers a “choice” to organize, but they ignore the bosses who don’t give them that choice! Bosses make workers’ lives miserable, demanding more for less pay, and then force workers to attend anti-union propaganda meetings and threaten those who organize by telling them they’ll fire them or outsource their job or close their plant. If all that’s OK with your Senator, he’s a monster. If it’s not OK with you, then you’re a decent person, and you ought to give your Senators what-for about it.

Around the table: drama, snowflakes, and evil, part 773.

The real story of Ron DeSantis’s shipping off of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard so that Teh Libruls can deal with Teh Immigrantz in their own backyard is how well the good folks of Martha’s Vineyard rose to the challenge. Your right-wing friends and neighbors will never admit such a thing, since they think of liberals – and therefore you, and you need to deal with that head-on! – as traitorous snowflakes. At least Gavin Newsom is willing to give Ron DeSantis what he deserves: “you have only one overriding need – attention,” he says, and we should all emulate his example. By “all” I mean you, too, Charlie Crist.

I’ll admit I was actually surprised to hear that Roll Call organized an event enabling a special interest group to give away free donuts to folks who probably didn’t know this group opposes antitrust legislation that would help rein in big tech corporations. I hadn’t thought a nominally objective “liberal” media outlet would do something that brazen. Yet, for all their brazenness, they sure do wilt when real journalists ask where they’re getting their funding. Remember the lesson of the Star Trek story “The Savage Curtain” (yeah, the one with Lincoln flying around in space, you gotta get past that): when good confronts evil, evil runs away. Because evil folks are the real snowflakes.

When I hear that 45% of Pennsylvania voters absolutely will not vote for Doug Mastriano for Governor, but about 28% would never vote for Josh Shapiro and 21% would definitely vote for Mr. Mastriano, I believe we have yet more data suggesting that about 25% of the electorate is bat-shit insane. Another 15% would “probably” vote for Mr. Mastriano; what do you suppose is tamping their enthusiasm? His “no exceptions” anti-abortion stance? That he won’t STFU about the election his Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump lost? His promise to install a Secretary of State who’ll throw out any vote he doesn’t like? I don’t know how one could be undecided about these things. And 45% “hard no” ain’t 50%-plus-one “hard no.” Just ask Hillary Clinton how that can work out.

Ho hum, Georgia Republican Senatorial hopeful Herschel Walker uses incorrect crime figures to attack his opponent, Sen. Raphael Warnock. I say this not in the hope he’ll feel shame and stop saying crap like TEH CRIMEZ IZ UPZ 47% SINCEZ TEH WARNOCKZ!!!!, but in the hope that you will be more skeptical when you hear crime statistics, because generally, you’re better off erring on the side of they’re fucking lying. Also too, rape in Atlanta (to name just one of Mr. Walker’s cherry-picked concerns) actually went down from 2019-2021.

Jesus Mary and Joseph now Donald Trump says we’ll have “problems” “the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen” if our Justice Department indicts him. “I’m just saying,” or I’m just delivering a terroristic threat? I kid, of course – it’s the latter. And anyone who decides to shoot anyone over a Trump indictment deserves everlasting shame until they die and everlasting Hellfire afterward – yes, I’m willing to blaspheme to make that point! – and in between, they don’t get to say “Trump ordered me to do it,” because that’s what a snowflake would do.

Iranian “morality police” beat a woman to death for not complying closely enough with that state’s new hijab-wearing law, and let me just state for the record that tiny, tiny men did this, and they’ll answer to their god for it. What, you think Allah favors beating women to death over not wearing a hijab? Too many people imagine their god is as small-minded as they are. And yes, this kind of crap absolutely will happen in the United States unless we start shaming the people who would do it. Even in America, there must be a price for being an asshole.

Finally, let’s not do victory laps over Rep. Lauren Boebert (E-CO) saying “wonton attacks” in place of “wanton attacks,” because – as with the helpfully-referenced Marjorie Taylor Green “gaffe” about “gazpacho police” – I’d lay money that Ms. Boebert said “wonton” on purpose, partly to get attention, partly to get liberals to attack her for her “stupidity,” but mainly to tap into stupid right-wing hatred at the Chinese. Once she said “wonton,” she reminded the racists in her district that she’s one of them. How nice for them, that they can feel such kinship with each other, when all they deserve is loneliness.

Around the table: from bad airlines to bad education leadership.

Matt Stoller explains why airlines run so badly these days, and proposes a number of solutions to make them run better. Long story short: re-regulate them, and not just for our good, but for theirs, since regulating them as a public utility also guarantees them a certain amount of income, and the airline industry actually does suffer a lot more from external events (cough COVID cough) than other industries do. I bet the airline CEOs won’t go for it, since all they really care about is how much unearned money they’re making, but at some point we gotta talk to them like the whiny little brats they are.

David Moore at FAIR explains why polling “telling” us that most Americans think what’s happening at our Southern border is a “crisis” or an “invasion” is bunkum. If you ask “do you think what’s happening at our Southern border is a crisis” without giving respondents any other response option like, say, “a serious problem,” respondents will feel more pressure to say “crisis.” The “invasion” question was a true-false question (which pollsters rarely do, people hesitating to say “false” as they do) which gave you four options: “completely true,” “somewhat true,” “completely false,” or “don’t know,” and if you counted two “true” options and one “false” option, you know why that question’s bunkum, too – and you know more than at least two major media outlets, apparently. Hate to pile on, but “invasion” is one of those words right-wingers torture until it tells them what they want to hear. You know, like “caravan.” Or “conservative.”

Wondering if maybe a college degree is prohibitively expensive on purpose? Then you’ll want to note that an Eisenhower/Nixon/Reagan advisor said in 1970 that we were in “danger” of having an “educated proletariat,” and that right-wingers like then-Governor Reagan were already laying the groundwork for what the National Review called a “system of full tuition charges supplemented by loans which students must pay out of their future income.” James Madison, as it happens, had a much more sanguine view of publicly-funded education than those who would claim to be his ideological descendants – though Edmund Burke, you may know from his Reflections on the French Revolution, thought the working classes were incapable of deep thought. I don’t blame Mr. Burke very much for that – by the measure of his time, he was a liberal, and if you don’t believe me on that, believe Russell Kirk, who said he was a liberal up until his Reflections. I do blame contemporary right-wingers, however for not absorbing over two centuries of intellectual progress. The good news? They’re worse at covering up their evil than Ronald Reagan was.

In a peripherally-related note, here’s another reason the Biden student debt relief plan won’t increase inflation: because “debt payments are spread out over years, if not decades. The inflation impact depends on the extent to which savings in monthly payments are channeled into consumer spending.” (Italics in original, believe it or not.) Also too, canceling all student loan debt would free up an amount consumer spending equaling less than one-quarter of one percent of the total amount of consumer spending, so yeah, don’t listen to anyone crying BUT TEH INFLASHUNZ!!!!! Besides, if the payment moratorium ends in January, as the Biden Administration has proposed, then inflation ought to come down a tiny bit, shouldn’t it?

I think suggestions of Mehmet Oz’s impending downfall in Pennsylvania’s Senate race this year are a bit premature. Does attacking John Fetterman for his recent stroke mean Mr. Oz has “just had it,” or does it mean he’s actually counterpunching effectively for once? If he’d ever eaten a vegetable he wouldn’t have stroked out does have a crude humor about it, after all, and though many folks would think going after a guy’s near-death experience a low blow, others would be annoyed to hear that guy was sick and maybe hasn’t been fully truthful about it. And the article doesn’t mention Mr. Oz’s other recent counterpunch – that John Fetterman lived off his parents until he was 50. Neither of these counterpunches is true, but they still might resonate with low-attention voters. Some of them might even feel sorry for Mr. Oz, even though all his wounds are self-inflicted. I mean, seriously, did you see that bag of carrots? He wonders why it’s $4? It’s bigger than my left thigh!

Finally, a school district just northwest of Dallas, TX, votes to forbid any discussion (or recognition) of transgender issues in their schools. It’s like they said waaaaaaaah don’t make me expand my mind or heart! The good news? Most of the 200 comments from actual community members about their proposal opposed it, which means, once again, that the people are far wiser than their leaders. It’s almost like that’s been a theme here in America for decades now. It’s a shame we have such problems getting rid of bad leaders; part of that problem, of course, is we don’t get very many good leaders stepping forward anymore – maybe more than we used to, but still not enough.

Action: concerning climate change, health care, taxes, immigration, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inflation Reduction Act and prevent ICE officers from pretending they’re police officers, and tell President Biden to require that federal contractors disclose their campaign spending. 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. Our Senate passed it yesterday – the final tally was, of course, 51-50, with all Republicans voting against – so now our House has to pass it. The bill has no $35/month insulin cap for non-Medicare patients (thanks, Republicans!) and no narrowing of the hedge fund loophole (thanks again, Kyrsten Sinema!), but it still taxes corporations harder, lets Medicare negotiate some drug prices, extends expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, and helps us kick some climate change ass, plus it now contains a 1% tax on stock buybacks! That tax should be higher, but the Inflation Reduction Act would make our lives better, and so deserves our support.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation prohibiting Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) enforcers from identifying themselves as “police.” It’s a shame we have to do this! But when a branch of law enforcement abuses their power, we as civilized people must step in and make our government work on our behalf. And when right-wingers whine that doing so would “tie the hands” of ICE enforcers, they’re basically admitting they’re against civilization. Also, ICE enforcers who misrepresent themselves prevent our actual police from questioning immigrants about other crimes. But then, right-wingers only care about stoking rage.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell President Biden to make all corporations that get federal contracts disclose their campaign spending. We have an interest, I would think, in knowing which corporations receive taxpayer money and then spend money goading our representatives in Congress into voting against our interests. Right-wingers will call that “stifling free speech," which not only pretends spending money equals “speech,” but also pretends not to know that if you take taxpayer money you have to follow taxpayer rules. Right-wingers like that notion, until it doesn’t suit them, but civilized people know better.

Action: concerning health care, big tech monopolies, and Presidential power.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to cut health insurance prices, pass anti-monopoly legislation, and restrain Presidential power. 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend health care subsidies so that at least nine million Americans will be able to afford health insurance. The American Rescue Plan Act enacted these subsidies, but they expire later this year, hence the urgency. You’ve seen health care premiums continue to go up faster than even current inflation rates? Then you see the need, and what will right-wingers say in response? That we’re “broke,” as they refuse to tax the billionaires and corporations who’ve gained trillions of dollars in unearned income these last two years? That people who need health insurance should “just get another job”? “Just getting another job” is no solution in an economy that serves unearned wealth above all.

Both Consumer Reports and Antitrust Summer help you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation reining in big tech monopolies. The bills in question – H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 7030/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act – would attack tech monopolies at the margins, for sure (which may be why these bills have relatively strong Republican support), but we haven’t even been attacking at the margins for the last 40 years. Even Donald Trump’s policy of attacking monopolies that offended him personally was better than what we’ve been doing. But these bills would keep big internet corporations from discriminating against competing products on their platforms, which is certainly better than Trumpian drama.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to restrain Presidential emergency powers. Apparently some Congressfolk plan to do by amending the defense appropriations bill, which isn’t a bad idea, since that bill is all about, you know, national defense, and the American people need defending from bad Presidents who declare “national emergencies” to build their little vanity border walls and such. Think of that power in the hands of someone who’s good at being a fascist! They could shut down our internet, seize homes and public buildings, or commandeer planes and trains, and ain’t none of that going to come to any good. This is a law and order issue, good Americans!

Action: concerning banksters, law and order, pollution, immigration, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FDIC to stop predatory lenders, tell President Biden to do more for police reform, tell our EPA to curb cross-state pollution, tell our government to protect DACA recipients, and tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our FDIC to stop predatory lenders from laundering their three-digit interest loans through banks our FDIC supervises. These banksters also work through furniture stores, pet stores, car mechanics, and the like, offering loans for love seats and pets and car repairs and the like that don't charge interest if they're paid off in 90 days -- but charge up to 225% interest if they're not, which they generally won't be, since folks don't have much in savings anymore, and just try to turn such a loan down when they've got your car in the shop! Scheming sure is easier than working, but there's no reason we should allow this kind of scheming, particularly through federally-insured banks.

Roots Action helps you tell President Biden to go much further than his police reform Executive order does. The order bans military vehicles for police departments -- unless those departments say they'll use them only for disasters and the like. A police department that says they need a tank for disasters won't use it on protestors? Yeah sure. We're hearing these days that police "need" even more military equipment so they can deal with school shooters, but I think their inaction during the Uvalde mass murder has pretty much exposed that argument's bald spot for everyone to see. Those cops didn't act like your TV heroes, after all, and more weapons ain't gonna change that.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our EPA to finalize the most vigorous cross-state pollution rule possible. Cross-state pollution (particularly with nitrous oxide) is a real thing; air pollution doesn't just say whoa hold up when it gets to a state line, after all, nor can downwind states simply build barriers to keep upwind states' pollution out. You can already hear right-wingers whine how are those poor, poor power plants supposed to control what crosses state lines? Here's a response: same way you control your urge to say racist crap: just don't do it. Far too often I sound like the real conservative when I talk to right-wingers. Why, it's like they're not really conservative at all!

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to permanently protect recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program. The DACA program helps immigrants who arrive here as minors stay here, as long as they meet fairly strict standards (military service, college attendance, no felonies). After all, forcing them to go back to nations that don't know them, to make them pay for decisions they had nothing to do with, is cruel. And though our Supreme Court protected DACA recipients last time they ruled on the matter, don't think they'll do it again. They've been killing precedents like kitchen ants lately.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Our Senate has finally -- finally! -- confirmed the last two Biden nominees to the USPS Board of Governors, so they ain't got no excuse now: Louis DeJoy has got to go. He tried to sabotage voting-by-mail, he had investments with a (now-former) USPS Board member, he had his hands in the corporation that just so happened to make COVID tests for our USPS, and he's implemented a higher-cost, worse-service plan that no executive in his right mind would have implemented anywhere 50 years ago. And note well that "worse service" could well mean "you don't get your life-saving meds when you need them."

Around the table: featuring people who fought for things!

Thomas Alter II at In These Times writes about "The Radical Immigrant Farmers Who Helped Defeat the Robber Barons." And by the end you might be saying oh, so that's why so many right-wingers seem to be so anti-immigrant these days! You might also be reminded that a lot of what we take for granted these days -- or, at least, what we took for granted half a century ago -- came about only because folks smeared as "radical" and "socialist" held their ground and fought for a better life. These farmers fought slavery in Texas, too; I don't know how many of my contemporary Americans would have fought slavery if they'd lived in Texas in 1848. But I do know how many of them are doing nothing about fascism in America today.

Speaking of which, Russian anti-war activists, facing jail time for the nefarious offense of opposing Mr. Putin's little adventure in Ukraine, have had to get a little more creative in spreading the word. We're not as close to an era where a One True Great and Awesome American President can just put people in jail for opposing his wars, but we are much closer to an era where a One True Great and Awesome American President can incite his votaries to smash heads of anti-war protestors. So if you see a lot of Paladin memes on Facebook during that time, that might be a good way for American anti-war protestors to find each other. Facebook's algorithms sure won't do it, because that only works for racists.

It's not a big surprise that pro-choicers overstate the case somewhat that abortions since Roe v. Wade are safer -- one would imagine technology has improved over the last 50 years! -- but right-wingers no doubt cite this very fact (though not likely from Snopes!) as if winning a point in an argument is exactly the same as winning the entire argument. It's a form of personal attack -- ha ha, you're incorrect on a technical point, therefore I win the whole game just for pointing it out! Let's see any of those clowns inflict their morality on their daughters when they get pregnant. They'll all be saying "it's her choice" at that very moment. And I'm not inclined to see that as a strength, but as a weakness -- I mean, if your values don't challenge you, they're not very good values.

Can we really know if "your practice of Buddhism through listening to podcasts or use of meditation apps is 'authentic'"? Not to put too fine a point on it, but yes, if you don't sit in awe of podcasts and apps as this completely unprecedented technology, or as a direct conduit to magic learning. Anyway, long story short: "If digital Buddhist practice approaches the good life as eudaimonic -- as leading to human flourishing based on the pursuit of a deeper meaning -- it can be judged to be authentic. An inauthentic practice is one that just furthers hedonism by merely peddling bliss and relaxation."

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (E-NC) lost the Republican primary for his own House seat last week -- after a series of scandalous behaviors came to light somehow, and please understand that by "somehow" I mean "by the will of other state Republicans" -- and, well, he's not taking it too well: "I am on a mission now to expose those who say and promise one thing yet legislate and work towards another, self-profiteering, globalist goal...It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command." What does "dark MAGA" mean? Does it mean MAGA but actually shooting people? Seriously, the right needs to reinvent itself as a "new" right every few years because it has nothing nourishing to offer Americans; how many more of these must we sit through?

Finally, a Utah hunting guide faces jail time for baiting a bear out for Donald Trump, Jr. to shoot -- and he baited him out with "a pile of grain, oil and pastries"! I sure do hope "pastries" is what everyone remembers about this incident. Here's what else I hope folks remember: pretend-hunting -- hunting that isn't for subsistence, or even for training for the possibility of having to hunt for subsistence -- is uncivilized enough. But cheating at it is even worse! How lousy a shot is Trump the Younger?