Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning student loan debt and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let student debt be discharged via bankruptcy, stop scam political action committees, and undo the harm caused by the Citizens United decision. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to let student loan debt be discharged via bankruptcy. Since the late ‘90s it’s been almost prohibitively difficult to do that, and not long after that college started to become almost prohibitively expensive; think there might be a connection there? I’d be a schmuck if I didn’t! So when you hear that young folks ought to just buckle up and pay their debts, remember that colleges have made all those debts much, much larger than they’ve ever been, and the least we can do to free people from a life of servitude (yes, college is that expensive now!) is let them get rid of their debts through bankruptcy after a decade.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Scam PACs Act. Some Political Action Committees (or PACs) exist just to steal money from seniors and veterans and redistribute that income to PAC executives, believe it or not. (OK, it’s not actually that hard to believe.) But the Stop Scam PACs Act – sponsored by Reps. Porter (D-CA) and Crenshaw (R-TX) during the last Congress – would amend the Federal Election Campaign Act so our government can go after anyone (not just folks who’ve committed actual fraud) who misrepresents themselves so they can steal money from vulnerable Americans. That’d be a big help to those folks, and we should help them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would undo the evil effects of our Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC ruling and start reigning in campaign finance again. I know – the Republicans in charge of our House now would never do that, and the minority Republicans in our Senate would filibuster any legislation that somehow made it out of our House. But our will is our will, and almost no one in America, conservative or liberal, thinks unrestrained campaign financing is a good thing. When they don’t listen, we just keep telling them, because we’re right.

Action: concerning monopolies, corporate welfare, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, tell the Argentinian government to end fossil fuel subsidies, and tell President Biden to get rid of USPS Postmaster Louis DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger. You don’t have to believe that no corporation should be able to own any other corporation (as I do!) to see why the Kroger/Albertsons merger is such a bad idea – like all other mergers, it means killed jobs, higher prices, fewer choices, and more worker income redistributed upward to corporate executives. In this particular case, it also means a $4 billion payout to hedge fund banksters as they bleed Albertsons dry, and what did they do to deserve that? You already know the answer: nothing.

350.org helps you tell the Argentinian government to end all fossil fuel subsidies. What, Argentinians deserve freedom from corruption less than we do? People are people, after all. And the Argentinian government has become notorious for funneling taxpayer money to crony fossil fuel corporations, to the tune of over $3.5 billion just between 2016 and 2018, just to corporations operating in the Vaca Muerta area of western Argentina. Again, Argentinians deserve the freedom that clean water affords anyone who has access to it – mainly, freedom from illness – and they also deserve a government that spends their money on them, not on corporate welfare. So let’s help them get that.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to finish the job of getting rid of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. You know the main story by now – Mr. DeJoy, another in a long line of talentless CEOs our economy belches out like it’s just had a bowl of beans, has slashed jobs, cut services, and raised prices, which ain’t good for all the Americans who rely on our Postal Service for life-saving medications. But the side stories – his efforts to hijack voting by mail and block electric mail trucks, and his investment in the corporation that just so happened to provide the free COVID tests our Postal Service sent out – also testify to his evil.

Action: concerning Social Security, crypto, and the war on Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, stop treating the crypto “industry” with kid gloves, and end our involvement in the war on Yemen. 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 H.R. 5723/S. 3071, the Social Security 2100 Act. This bill would provide the kind of reforms Social Security really needs – like increasing benefits, adjusting cost-of-living increases more realistically, and taxing income over $400,000 into the system – versus the kind of “reforms” our “liberal” media says it needs, like cutting benefits and privatization so it can go up and down and up and down and up and down just like the stock market does. But people don't want Social Security to go up and down; they want it to be there, and do well by us, and the Social Security 2100 Act will help it do that better.

Americans for Financial Reform helps youtell your Congressfolk to avoid handing out corporate welfare to the crypto “industry.” Some call it my prejudice, but crypto ain’t real money, and “managing” it ain’t real work. How did crypto corporations spend $30 million lobbying Congress, then? Same way any elite does it: by rigging the rules to get far enough ahead so they can redistribute worker income upward to themselves and come up with new scams at will. Sadly, a lot of our Congressfolk think their crypto buddies are the future. They’re not – people and love are the future, like always – and we should regulate crypto so it does no harm, not let Congress go light on them.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Why are they waging war on Yemen? Because the Saudis didn’t like Yemen’s new government many years ago. Why didn’t they like the new one? Damned if I know, and I’ve tried to find out! Only things I can say are a) the war has driven Yemen to the brink of famine for many years and b) the Houthi rebels who are supposedly the Saudi/UAE coalition’s target are some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda in the world. But ask the Kurds how much grace such a title gets you. It’s almost like Our Glorious Elites want to keep the “war on terror” going. And that’s why we fight them.

Around the table: some Democrats rise to the challenge, others don't.

The AFL-CIO puts out a report finding that CEO pay went up much, much faster than inflation in 2021, and while normally I’d ask how much CEO wages went up in previous years, when CEO salaries go up more than twice as fast as inflation and nearly three times faster than worker wages, that’s really all you need to know right there. They said income redistribution would wreck this great nation – and they were right! So stop listening to the pundits telling you worker wages drive up inflation.

A Democratic politico comes up with a way to beat Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: feed right-wing news sources with stories about how Mr. DeSantis has been insufficiently right-wing. But, off the top of my head, I can’t think how he’s done that, and though the right-wing capacity for rage seems endless, I can’t imagine right-wing media outlets wanting to conspire with Democrats to oust Mr. DeSantis, since he trafficks in the rage that keeps the cycle of doom going. All of this, of course, supposes Democrats really want to depose him. Too many of them are asking why not keep raising money off him? as we speak, a strategy that has never led to disaster before! I’ve got a better idea: run a candidate who’ll do things with their power.

It “May Surprise You” “What the Bible Actually Says About Abortion” – i.e., nothing directly, and both pro- and anti-choice forces can find Biblical quotations that support their cherished position, plus Jesus’s own feminism continues to impress! – but facts about the Bible won’t impress any right-wing Christians; they don’t read the Bible so much as imagine the Bible already agrees with them. I’d prefer a Bible that didn’t agree with me on everything, just like I prefer to hold and practice values that inconvenience me.

Science puts out a study that instructs us, among other things, that about 20% of Americans think violence in defense of one’s political aims is A-OK, nearly half of Americans think a Civil War is coming, and, dig this, 40% prefer “having a strong leader” to “preserving democracy.” That last one, especially, is a stupid choice – there is no law of physics that says “democracy” and “strong leadership” are incompatible, though you need strong leaders who will let the popular will lead them. So, not Kyrsten Sinema, then.

And not Pete Buttigieg, either: Matt Stoller creates a giant Goofus and Gallant strip about certain Biden Administration officials and their attitudes toward monopolies, and he finds our Treasury Secretary wanting, as he is. Dig how Mr. Buttigieg says his office has concluded “ten separate investigations” on airline refunds! The whole country is talking about how bad airlines are treating them, and he unfurls a typical right-wing trick, hoping you’ll think “concluding an investigation” and “doing something” are the same thing! Anyway, how about we start promoting Jonathan Kanter and Rohit Chopra as Presidential timber? Because those two know what they’re doing. Or is “knowing what you’re doing” not sexy enough?

Finally, ho hum, Trudy Busch Valentine’s family farm has hosted at least two fundraisers for Missouri U.S. Senate Republican candidates, although Ms. Busch Valentine is running for Senate herself, as a Democrat! And her family’s ties to Republicans go considerably deeper than that! In a sane and moral world, this news would finish Ms. Valentine’s campaign – particularly since her main opponent, Lucas Kunce, would be a much better candidate! – but we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society where we can never underestimate Democratic politicos’ ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Action: concerning baby formula, child care, gas prices, big ag, and "forever chemicals."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to break up baby formula monopolies, help working families better afford child care, tax big oil windfall profits, break up monopolistic big ag practices, and keep "forever chemicals" off our farmlands. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell Congress to pass legislation ensuring we never get this short on baby formula again. Right-wingers tell us we're here because we have too many regulations gumming up the works, but that's ridiculous -- we're short on baby formula because four big corporations control the entire market, and a food safety issue at one of them has emptied our shelves. Thus we tell our Congressfolk to break up corporate monopolies; after all, as our President says, capitalism without competition is exploitation, and the only "efficiency" we really "gain" from monopolies is the efficient redistribution of income upward from workers to executives. I'd rather have babies not starve myself.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation expanding preschool and helping working families afford child care. It is a bit breathtaking that legislation about child care specifically has floated around for years, but now our President has embraced it, and the only reasons it hasn't passed, basically, are a) the opposition of Republicans and b) the Joe Manchin Drama Machine. But child care costs have plagued families for decades -- like health care, corporations charge what they want because they can! -- and families need relief now. Expanding preschool can also help deliver that relief; after all, if kids are in preschool, they're not in some private child care service. See? Big Gummint helps sometimes.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a big oil corporation windfall tax. As I've said, anyone who can't see the link between record profits and record-high gas prices by now simply doesn't want to see it. And folks (including Democratic politicians!) who claim that taxing unearned profits of oil corporations will "decrease the supply of oil" are all but saying not only that oil corporations have all the power, but that they should have all the power. It's rhetorical hostage-taking: don't make oil corporations pay their share of taxes, or the gas supply gets it! And if you're pro-freedom, you don't take that from anyone.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act, which would ban new factory farms, split up existing factory farms into smaller operations, and end the stranglehold middlemen have over meat production and sales. Yeah, this is a theme with us -- bigger is badder -- and it's a theme because bigness infects every part of our economy, and most Americans, be they liberal or conservative, oppose concentrated power. Right-wingers give lip service to small businesses, but they aim to give all of our power to large corporations. Because that keeps the big campaign donations coming! But we outnumber them, so we must overpower them.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep PFAS chemicals off our farmlands. You can find PFAS chemicals -- which scientists link to certain cancers, birth defects, and immune system issues -- in firefighting foam, fast-food packaging, waterproof jackets, and non-stick saucepans, but you can also find them in agricultural wastewater treatments, meaning you can also find them in our food, water, feed animals, and agricultural workers. They call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" because our bodies can't break them down; they should call them everywhere chemicals too! Odd how the more "efficient" they make our food-producing apparatus, the less healthy it becomes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: good news at Starbucks, bad news in Poland (and elsewhere in America).

In case you'd lost track, upwards of 54 Starbucks stores have now begun the process of unionizing, including 15 just this past Monday. Only the first two stores in Buffalo have actually begun collective bargaining for better pay and working conditions, but this is good news. Sadly, woke-ass Starbucks management haven't stopped the mandatory anti-union propaganda meetings, replete with whining that unions will divide workers from management, though you might think management has done a pretty good job of that already, and anyway no one wants "unity" with someone who'll hurt you so they can redistribute your income upwards to themselves. Really, the similarity with how domestic abusers talk is more than a little upsetting.

From Mikhal Dehel at Boston Review we learn that "Poland's Current Memory Politics Are Rewriting History" in a way you'll find eerily similar to what Americans like Glenn Youngkin aspire to do. Last year a Warsaw District Court convicted two historians of "violating the honor" of a former mayor of Warsaw during World War II, all due to a single footnote in which one Jewish woman testified that this man had robbed her and ratted out other Jews to the Nazis. Because, apparently, Polish law (rammed through by a right-wing government, imagine that) only allows you to blame the Nazis for what happened in Poland, even though we all know the Nazis had collaborators everywhere. End result: historians won't want to do research anymore if someone's descendant has a sad. People need to grow the fuck up, particularly about their past.

When I hear that Nancy Pelosi's going back to being a Republican "bogeyman" now that she's running for re-election, I must ask: do Republicans not remember Abigail Spanberger turning that against David Brat in 2018? Of course, to demolish this sad attempt at relevance, you have to count on Democrats to actually do what Ms. Spanberger did, which is remind their Republican opponents that they're not actually running against Nancy Pelosi and that using the current House Speaker as a crutch for your own bad ideas is just a bad look. David Brat might even give them similar advice, to the degree that they'd listen, and to the degree that he's capable of self-knowledge.

Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick says he never outsourced jobs, though he's on record having done just that (and using it to get a job with Tha Bush Mobb) two decades ago. Trumpholes hate outsourcing, which recommends them, though I still think it's more about the foreigner-hate with them, and not so much about the whole "let's not pay foreign workers in dung pellets just so we can avoid paying American workers decently" thing. Between that and Mehmet Oz's difficulties, I'm even more convinced that Jeff Bartos will be the Republican Senate nominee -- and that Trumpholes, at that point, will judge him to be a fellow traveler, regardless of what he's ever done or said.

Finally, when I hear that Democrats in Congress still think they can get Joe "the Penguin" Manchin to agree to some part of the Build Back Better Act, all I can say is: fools! He's going to keep playing Lucy to your Charlie Brown for the next 10 months, because he wants Republican majorities in both Houses after the 2022 elections, all so he can make himself "essential" going into his 2024 re-election bid. I mean, who's going to lift a finger to help him get re-elected in 2022 if Democrats wind up with, say, 56 Senators? Anyway, we're still going to have a lot to say about all that, but it'd be easier if we were already out in the streets protesting Democrat weakness and inaction. I'd have already willed those protests into existence, if I could.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, public water, tax cuts for working families, the war on Yemen, and women's health.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject pro-gerrymandering bills and pass an anti-privatization bill, tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, tell President Biden to get us out of the war on Yemen for-real for-real, and tell your Senators to pass the Women's Health Protection 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. Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA advises that you call your state legislators and tell them to reject both HB 38 and HB 2207. We've dealt with HB 38 before; it would make state judicial elections regional, which is essentially a way of gerrymandering state judicial elections, and given that our state Supreme Court consists of mostly Democrats at this moment, it wouldn't be untoward to call HB 38 a sore loser bill. For that matter, calling HB 2207 the same wouldn't be untoward; HB 2207 would replace the state's current, relatively objective redistricting commission with a brand new commission more beholden to the political party in control of the state legislature, which just so happens to be the Republicans. I call this a sore loser bill because Republicans lost to the express will of virtually every good Pennsylvanian that gerrymandering sucks and the politicians need to stop doing it. That's why we need to keep communicating our will.

Staying in the Keystone State, Sum of Us helps you tell your PA state legislator to vote "yea" on HB 527, a bill that would make privatizing public water in Pennsylvania much, much harder. Let me be the bajillionth person to tell you that my water bill has gone up noticeably since I went from a public water system to a privatized one. They say privatizing public works saves the public money, but no one who actually pays a bill believes that rubbish. Mainly privatization allows certain corporate executives to make more money without getting the necessary oversight by our government, which means it's what? That's right, it's yet another scheme that redistributes your hard-earned money upward. The politicians will keep doing that again and again and again, unless we step up and say no. It's that simple.

Today's also as good a day as any to call your Congressfolk and tell them to reinstate the expired Child Tax Credit expansion, which put $250 and $300 checks in the bank accounts of working families for the last six months of 2021. I haven't said this enough, but those checks were per child, meaning a single mom with four children could get as much as $1200 extra per month. So what do people use that money for? According to its recipients, they used it to buy groceries, pay the bills, buy clothes, buy school supplies, and the like. But according to the Penguin, who helped Republicans kill the expansion last month, they used it on drugs! Maybe some moms should show up at Joe Manchin's yacht with their kids in tow so he can explain to them why he blocked extending the CTC expansion!

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to end all American support for the ongoing Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Mr. Biden has made a lot of positive noises about ending our involvement in Yemen, but hasn't taken a whole lot of positive action, which is a lot more important. We're still giving the effort our intelligence and our logistical support, which shouldn't ease the conscience of anyone who's taking part in these efforts, and we're still selling weapons which wind up getting used there. This war, you'll recall, has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine and deprived us of some of the world's best fighters against al-Qaeda, and Congress has authorized none of that. And can you understand the arcane reasons the Saudi/UAE coalition is waging war on Yemen in the first place? If so, you may be the only one!

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. You may have noticed that not one but two cases currently before our Supreme Court could result in our Court overturning the Roe v. Wade ruling that prevents states from making abortion illegal. No, don't count on Chief Justice Roberts to swing enough justices in the direction of "precedent" and "settled law"; he's more likely been waiting for a big enough right-wing majority on the Court to come along so he can get his way and still look like a precedent-respecting jurist. We can avoid all this drama if our Senate passes the Women's Health Protection Act and enshrines abortion protections in federal law. Nobody wants to see a fetus aborted, but the alternative is turning women into breeders again, and we can't accept that.

Action: concerning, once more, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations (including enacting a Billionaire's Tax and a stock buyback tax) to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act invests in our care economy, funds paid family/medical leave, lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, expands our fight against climate change, and permanently expands the Child Tax Credit. 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 Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the full $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Billionaire's Income Tax in the Build Back Better Act and assess a 2% tax on corporate stock buybacks. Remember when they said the 2017 tax "reform" would put thousands of dollars in everyone's pockets? What it actually did was let big corporate CEOs buy back stock, so that shareholder power is even more concentrated in executive hands. That used to be illegal, by the way! And it should be again. In the meantime, we should discourage it with taxation, and then use that money to do good works, which we will describe below.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in the care economy in the Build Back Better Act. What do we know about child care and elder care? That we'll all need one or the other one day, and they could both be a damn sight cheaper. And none of that is about "creating an entitlement society," but about relieving real burdens on working families that cripple their ability to contribute more to our society -- burdens that only exist to make corporate executives rich. Yes, that's your bootstrap society for you -- this civilization, such as it is, redistributes our income upward to the undeserving rich, and then harangues us to "just work harder." I want this income-redistribution-upward scheme dead before I leave this Earth. Supporting the care economy is just one way to do that.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Every other wealthy nation on Earth does it, but our leaders would apparently prefer to churn out corporate executives who buy 18 homes and a hundred classic cars, fly to the edge of our atmosphere and call it "space travel," and build atomic clocks in mountains. You can have one or the other, not both, and I know which one I'll take -- I'll take the society that gives everyone a chance to succeed, rather than worship the folks who've already "succeeded" and indulge their lust for mammon even more. And paid family/medical leave would cost so little! And don't tolerate any whining about "workers abusing the program" -- just catch and punish the ones who do. This ain't rocket science.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make large investments in climate change action. That would include investing in solar and wind power, and it'd also include a methane emissions tax, which would slash carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry. Yeah, you heard Joe Manchin doesn't want to do this in the Build Back Better Act, either! But he already got his corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations in that "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" he insisted on having, so where does his greed end? I say "his greed" because of his own large investments in the coal industry, of course. I mean, you'd have to explain his ignorance of his constituents' will somehow! And I think they ought to be heard, for once.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Medicare drug price negotiation (which Bob Menendez still opposes, can't someone in New Jersey primary his sorry ass in 2024?) would save tens of billions of dollars annually, and remember what Bernie Sanders said: dental care for seniors isn't an "entitlement." It's more than Medicare covers now, and that has to change.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Moms Rising, and the Juggernaut Project all help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent in the Build Back Better Act. Working families in America have been getting $250 or $300 checks every month since mid-July, but those will end at the end of this calendar year -- yes, for 2022, working families will still get the expansion in the form of one lump sum at tax time, but why not keep doing it monthly? Families stimulate the economy better with smaller sums of money than they do with large windfalls. And, yeah, it'll be like a political ad every time the check arrives; why on Earth would Democrats refuse such a gift? Oh, right, because they're geniuses at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And that's why we offer our counsel to them at critical moments like these, when they're about to let big donors crash their entire agenda.

Around the table: from hidden monopolies to stupid Governor tricks.

Another week, another excellent Matt Stoller article showing how monopolies create shortages. You won't necessarily know the names of the monopolies in question (Shimano and SRAM for bike parts, Thermo Fisher and VMR for plastic lab supplies, Newell Brands for Mason jar lids), but you will get the point. You'll also witness the folly of producing most of our plastic resin in Texas, like no other American states had a shale boom last decade. Seriously, when they talk "market efficiencies," they really mean "efficiency in redistributing income upward to executives," because letting one or two corporations control everything -- even in niche industries -- is damn inefficient, actually.

From ProPublica we learn that landlords use algorithms to rate potential tenants, and surprise, surprise, no federal agency regulates this activity, nor do landlords make it particularly easy to find out what your "score" says about you, despite the fact that the Fair Credit Reporting Act actually mandates that they give you that info. There is literally no reason any of this should be a secret, and that includes how these algorithms work, or, perhaps more precisely, "work." Certainly no one would want us to think the answer to that question might be "it works in whatever way delivers the most money to landlords." (The CFPB also has some good advice in the article.)

Oh, splendid, now Joe Manchin gets to write the climate plank of the Build Back Better Act, which not only means he'll make sure big polluters get their welfare handouts, but that he'll get to seriously injure the bill before he figures out what bullshit reason he'll use to torpedo it completely. Or he'll just tag-team Kyrsten Sinema and she'll torpedo it! The New York Times leads with the fact that Mr. Manchin himself made half a mil last year from "coal production," but making half a mil in dividends from coal stock isn't really "production" per se; how interesting that a clearly dying industry can make so much money for some people, but not for, say, actual coal workers.

Speaking of Ms. Sinema, Tim Murphy at Mother Jones not only runs down the absurdity of "moderate" Democratic opposition to Medicare drug price negotiation generally, but reminds us that Ms. Sinema ran for Senate on lowering drug prices. In case you're thinking AHA TWO DIFFERENTZ THINGZ!!!!!, letting Medicare negotiate lower drug prices will lower drug prices generally, and not just for the more than 60 million Americans on whose behalf Medicare would negotiate drug prices. Once big corporate employers see the deal Medicare gets, they're going to want to get that deal, too. That doesn't mean we should just tolerate the existence of private health insurance; it just means we use the world we're in to get the world we want.

At least President Biden has said he'll negotiate no deals with Republicans in exchange for their voting to raise the debt ceiling; he learned that much from Barack Obama, who famously refused to give in to Republicans over this same matter in 2013, though I thought he learned that lesson rather late himself. Speaking of learning lessons, Democrats ought to lift the debt limit on their own and stop complaining that "both parties increased the debt, so both parties should lift the debt limit." The message they should bring to the midterms is we governed, they whined, and I think lifting the debt limit on their own actually helps spread that message.

Finally, did Gov. Brian Kemp (E-GA) really say that you shouldn't mandate the COVID vaccine because they didn't mandate the AIDS vaccine and that worked out? Yes, he really did say that -- more than once! -- and the only true part of it is that, yes, no one mandated an AIDS vaccine because the AIDS vaccine doesn't exist. So, is he trying to prove he really "cares" about people by suggesting that he supports a nonexistent AIDS vaccine? How 1999 of him. Well, they say right-wingers have trouble catching up with the times.

Action: concerning government spying, the debt ceiling, IRS funding, domestic violence, Medicare for All, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop warrantless FBI data searches, abolish the debt ceiling, increase IRS funding, and pass the Safe Connections Act, the Medicare for All Act, and the Equality 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, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Massie/Lofgren amendment (to the Commerce Department Appropriations bill) that would outlaw warrantless searches by our FBI into the massive data bank of internet communications our NSA collects. Our NSA shouldn't be collecting it, either -- they should get a warrant for every damn thing they want to collect! -- but certainly our FBI shouldn't be digging into that data some three million times a year without a warrant. They're just fishing, and one thing folks both left and right agree on in America is that our government shouldn't investigate us without first going to a judge and convincing that judge they can convict us of a crime. The more people you involve in that process, the less some dictator-wannabe can go off half-cocked and do whatever he likes. It's that simple.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to abolish the debt ceiling already. Because why do we have that? Has its presence ever slowed deficit spending? Surely it didn't when Donald Trump passed his tax "reform" and blew up the deficit! The only reason we have a debt ceiling now is so Republicans can act out hostage situations every few years when they're out of power, and that's something we ought to discourage. Don't be tempted to say I gotta budget, why can't our government? Because, as I feel like I've said a thousand times, you don't do that -- otherwise, you'd never have a mortgage, car payment, or student loans! -- and also because you don't have a debt ceiling, which is to say, you may have an idea how much debt spending you can get away with, but you don't send yourself to jail when you go over it.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase IRS funding so we can catch more tax cheats. It's not even deficit spending! Our IRS has estimated we lose $1 trillion every year to tax cheats our IRS simply doesn't have the staffing to catch, and how do you increase staffing? You hire more agents, that's how! Even Larry Summers says you'll raise $11 for every $1 you spend on additional IRS funding (assuming we spend $100 billion over the next 10 years). Don't worry that Republicans say no to it, because they're wrong. And don't get discouraged that increased IRS funding is no longer in the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" because Republicans didn't want it. It's still the right thing to do, and if they're too foolish to realize it, tell them so. They've earned it, after all.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 120, the Safe Connections Act, which will help survivors of domestic violence to escape their horrible situations, by enabling them to get their cellphones off their family plans and still keep their phone number without having to pay onerous fees. Maybe that sounds like a small thing, but I hope you don't learn differently because it's you who needs to get out. The bill would also mandate that our FCC create rules that protect good Americans' privacy when they need this kind of protection. Big telecom corporations should already be able to do all this, but they haven't; if the Safe Connections Act passes, then they'll have to, and good Americans will be able to get out of toxic and life-threatening situations more easily. Seems to me that's what government's for, after all.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. We've been telling them to expand Medicare as part of their infrastructure/jobs machinations, but I'm done with that process and I think we should all be done with that process, since it's now painfully obvious (with Joe Manchin's declaration that there'll be no reconciliation bill without the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" bill) that our leaders used that process to hurt us. So now it's time for us to be hardasses again, and demand that we expand Medicare to everyone -- not just people over 60, and not just ENT care, but all care, for everyone. It won't be as hard or as costly as everyone thinks -- it'll just be one fewer way for the rich to redistribute our income upward to themselves.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Because gay and transgender folk deserve not to be hurt by bad leaders and stupid laws, that's why! And because they deserve the same right to freedom and happiness as everyone else! Right-wingers squeal that if banks and landlords and employers can't discriminate against gay and transgender folks anymore, it somehow impinges upon their freedoms. If they really think that, they're the most clueless, self-absorbed people in America, and why should the most clueless and self-absorbed people in America get all the say about everything? If they're just playing, of course, that's even worse, and why should people who lie like that get all the say about everything? These aren't hard questions -- at least not for civilized people.

Action: concerning evictions, big tech, police in schools, women's health, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to extend the eviction moratorium, break up big tech monopolies, and pass the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Support Through Loss Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement 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, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell our President and your Congressfolk to extend the national eviction moratorium, which could help keep over seven million renters in their homes. President Biden has signaled that he'll let the moratorium lapse -- even though very, very little federal renters' assistance has found its way to renters thus far -- but surely he knows as well as you do that new COVID cases are skyrocketing, so perhaps he'll have a change of heart before the moratorium expires on July 31. Or, more likely, he'll hear from enough of us that he'll have to have a change of heart -- or our Congressfolk will hear from enough of us that they'll force him to have a change of heart. Not every change of heart comes on its own, after all.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a suite of bills that would help rein in big tech corporations. These bills would, among other good works, prevent big tech corporations from favoring their own products on their own platforms, let customers more easily move their data from one platform to another, prevent them from charging outlandish fees to customers when they try to switch to a competitor, and prevent them from buying up corporations solely for the purpose of ending competition -- plus the bills would provide additional funding to those government agencies that would enforce the bills, if they become law. These are all hard enough to oppose that more than a few Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors. That ought to give us a bit of a head start -- not that we should be complacent! -- so let's get cracking.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2125, the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act. This bill would get police officers out of public schools -- which are not safer because they're there, or else we'd stop hearing stories about how they're not! -- and use the money we'd otherwise spend on them to get more nurses and social workers in schools. Right-wingers say this'll result in "more dead social workers," but I think they underestimate how good social workers are at their jobs. And, really, what a thing to say about people, that they can't "handle" tough times. Here you thought conservatives were all about people being good enough to not need Big Gummint help! Clearly right-wingers only say they're "good enough" if they're the "right people," and only cops are the "right people" for them. But they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. With Mississippi having asked our Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, and with a majority of our Supreme Court justices looking for the right opportunity to do so, it's good to remember what Roe v. Wade actually does: it prevents states from restricting your right to an abortion if you need it. If our Court overturns Roe v. Wade, a lot of red states will rush to outlaw abortion. The Women's Health Protection Act would prevent that, plus it'd take down a lot of laws at the state level (like "heartbeat laws" and the laws that aim to close down most abortion providers in the name of "public health") that restrict access to abortion. If we pass this bill, we can prevent what right-wingers really want: a country that forces women to be breeders, and nothing more. Seriously, that's what they want. And that's an abomination. So let's prevent that.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Support Through Loss Act, which would provide paid family/medical leave to anyone who suffers through miscarriage, pregnancy loss, or other barrier to beginning a family (such as an adoption falling through or a medical diagnosis regarding fertility). The bill would also fund miscarriage and pregnancy loss research via our National Institutes of Health (or NIH). This is a big deal, especially since people feel shame over losing a pregnancy -- and since more than a few nations have tried to charge women who have miscarriages with having had abortions. We have a lot to shame people over, but a miscarriage shouldn't be one of those things. Go after the folks who redistributed all your wealth upward to themselves!

Finally, Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Plus Daily Kos helps you sign up to call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator, Joe Manchin, to vote for the For the People Act. And Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. These bills are our best chance to stop racist vote suppression and big corporate domination of our elections -- which is why right-wingers tell so many lies about them. They're afraid of the world we'd make. Why should they be afraid? If you can win arguments, you should win them. Maybe they're afraid they can't! But if you can't win on a fair playing field, then don't play.

Around the table: welcome to part 878 of "insane Republicans, spineless Democrats."

John Culhane at Slate instructs us that "Fox News Could Be Sued if Its Anti-Vax Statements Caused People to Die." I accept that his entire argument is valid; the hard part, I'd think, would be finding enough unvaccinated folks who get sick from COVID and who would say "I relied on Fox News to tell me the truth." It's true that at least one Trumphole facing prison for his role in the January 6 coup attempt has said, via his lawyer, that TEH TRUMPZ MADEZ MEZ DO TEH THINGZ!!!!, and that's similar enough. But a lot of these folks, when pressed, will simply deny they were relying on Fox News to tell them the truth, because, well, some folks think it's OK to say just anything when they're cornered.

Lost in all the gags about how his rocketship looked like a giant cock is the fact that "Poverty Wages and Tax Dodges" funded Jeff Bezos's trip to the very edge of space. When you contemplate that, in fact, you might begin to think that the penis-shaped rocketship was a deliberate distraction. No, I wouldn't put it past folks like Jeff Bezos to think of that. And, hate to beat on a dead horse, but our government got us to the moon and back six times, whereas a guy with $200 billion couldn't even get himself out of our atmosphere. And, yeah, I'm as much against the privatization of space as the next guy.

Joe Biden may be a relatively new President, but he sure has taken to drone strikes pretty quickly, most recently in Somalia. And yes, "collective self-defense" sure looks like the kind of legal doctrine that Presidents can use to subvert our Constitutional requirement that they get permission from Congress before conducting military operations. Donald Trump probably faced more pushback from Congress on this matter than any President of the last 70 years, and it still wasn't enough. (Also, in my experience, Mike Lee's protest against the drone strikes signals that our Congress will do nothing. I can't recall Mr. Lee ever taking a stand on principle that he's actually had to follow through on.)

Karen Hao at the MIT Technology Review discusses why reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang think "Facebook Can Never Fix Itself." "Facebook’s problems today are not the product of a company that lost its way," she writes, but are "part of its very design," and surely it doesn't help that, as far as Facebook's decision-making, "growth and revenue trump everything else." And when you have gazillions of dollars, you tend to think you know everything and everyone else knows nothing, when all you really know anything about is redistributing everyone else's income upward to you. I hope I live to see an America that shames and shuns such people.

1,500 union workers stand to lose their jobs at the Morgantown, WV plant owned by big pharmaceutical corporation Viatris, and despite the "prime opportunity for the Democratic-controlled federal government to score points in a red state," our Administration has done bupkus. You'll note that Joe Manchin is also the senior Senator from West Virginia, "the Senate's single most powerful member" by virtue of being the Democratic caucus's 50th vote. His relative inaction couldn't be because his own daughter used to run one of the corporations that merged into Viatris, could it? (Hopefully, when you read Viatris's statement about its job-cutting, you'll be offended by all the big words they use. Optimize this, ass-clowns.)

Finally, Sean Hannity, mere days after saying "it absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated," now says (after all that positive attention he got from liberals) that "I never told anyone to get a vaccine." Calling those two remarks "completely different" would be the height of pedantry, and though I bet some of his votaries would advance that claim, I also bet most of them don't care -- as William S. Burroughs used to say, junkies only want junk. No, I think he ginned up this whole controversy just to create drama, because what else can you do when you can't win arguments on the merits?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: from Joe Biden's recent success to Ted Cruz's fake populism.

Here's another deleterious side effect of moving quickly during a pandemic: new brands of hand sanitizers with high levels of carcinogens. The online pharmacy Valisure filed a petition with our FDA last week finding that at least 15 brands of hand sanitizer contained the carcinogen benzene at levels above 2 ppm -- a level our FDA set a year ago, probably to encourage production. Benzene is one of the worst carcinogens, per our Department of Health and Human Services and the World Health Organization. The link above provides a list of the brands Valisure identified; I haven't heard of any of them, suggesting that brand name recognition has some utility.

You've heard of Joe Biden's American Families Plan? Well, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy finds that the plan's tax hikes would fall almost entirely on the top 1 percent of taxpayers. Specifically, it'd bring back the 39.6% tax bracket on income over $400,000 (but why not go higher?), while also subjecting capital gains and dividend income over $1 million to the same tax rate (it's currently 20%). It'd do other things, too, like finally end the "carried interest" loophole that lets hedge fund managers pay less on their unearned millions than you do on your hard-earned thousands.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon writes that President Biden has "turned the tables" on Republicans, partly by speaking plainly (which I wasn't sure would be a strength with him!), partly by embracing actually-popular ideas (though not enough of them, not yet!), and partly because Republicans don't even talk policy anymore, but just talk about whatever diddles the Batshit Insane 25%'s rage glands. I just hope her assessment isn't premature, even though he's done a good bit better than I thought he would. And I'm ashamed to say I didn't realize that the Republicans' Kamala's-in-charge trope is all about stoking racist and sexist rage. I mean, I can't explain it any other way!

In a peripherally-related note, Chris Walker at TruthOut reminds us that Republicans demand "unity" but that most voters like President Biden's policy prescriptions thus far. Far from being "catnip for their liberal base," as Mob Boss Mitch put it, the American Rescue Plan enjoyed 63% support in polling, while the For the People Act, putatively a "Democrat power grab," also in Mob Boss Mitch's words, garners 68%, which is actually a bit lower than the 70% of Americans who think Republicans should find common ground with President Biden, a cunning reversal of the usual "liberal" media formulation. Thus we are reminded that, just as "healing" meant "forget the hurt we caused you," "unity" means "submit to our will."

Sen. Scott's Republican response to the Biden address got all the ink, but Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) also delivered a response to the Biden address -- for the Working Families Party, and from the left. The WFP has been a fixture of New York state politics for over 20 years, though it has run or endorsed candidates in other states. I sure hope nobody from the right whines about "the liberals" getting two responses to the Biden address, lest I remind them that it wasn't that long ago that both the Republican party and the Tea Party -- the latter of which existed more in fever dreams and fundraising drives than in reality -- gave responses to numerous Obama State of the Union addresses.

Finally, Sen. Ted Cruz (E-TX) declares he won't be taking any more corporate PAC money. Not because corporations redistribute worker income upward to executives or pollute the planet or make unsafe products, but because they "run away" when the "left's digital pitchforks come out." In other words, Ted Cruz is as much a friend to the American worker as Marco Rubio, who infamously supported the Amazon union drive only because Amazon no longer sells some of his favorite right-wing screeds. Well, Ted Cruz is nothing if not cunning, so he might get a few new votes by pretending to hate corporate power without actually hating corporate power. And rageheads won't notice the difference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning voting rights, equal rights, saving our Post Office, and filling out our FCC.

Long story short: Tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Equality Act and to confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees, and tell your President and your Senators to put a fifth Commissioner on our FCC who'll protect internet freedom and expand internet access. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Senators -- or use the email/petition tools provided in the paragraphs below.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, now stands before the Senate, and instead of focusing on hysterical Republican rhetoric about it, let's concentrate on what the bill would actually do: it would curtail legislative gerrymandering; it would allow two weeks of early voting in all states; it would force big campaign donors to disclose their donations; it would make automatic and same-day voter registration the law across the land; it would prevent House members from serving on for-profit corporate boards; it would end certain vote suppression tactics like the Interstate Crosscheck database and make it harder for states to remove voters of color from the registration rolls. Do Republicans think gerrymandering, corruption, big campaign spending, and vote suppression are popular? (People for the American Way and Public Citizen provide contact tools.)

The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, once formally introduced in this Congress, would give our government additional tools to ensure that everyone with the right to vote can vote, by plugging the hole our Supreme Court blew open in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling. The Voting Rights Act gave our government the ability to nix changes in election law in nine Southern states; our Supreme Court held, essentially, that this provision now discriminates against Southern states (I know, I know), but our Court also said a provision that didn't discriminate in this manner would pass muster with them. Hence the Voting Rights Advancement Act would subject any state or locality, from any part of America, with a history of vote suppression to the heightened scrutiny the Voting Rights Act intended. (Public Citizen provides a petition supporting the Voting Rights Advancement Act.)

H.R. 5, the Equality Act, is yet another good bill plagued by right-wing hysteria, but again, let's look at what the bill would actually do: it would prevent big corporations from discriminating against folks on the bases of "sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity," which, in practice, would mean landlords couldn't deny apartments to gay couples just because they're gay, banks couldn't deny loans to transgender folks just because they're transgender, and colleges couldn't deny admission to women just because they're women, just as a few for-examples. And yes, transgender folks could use public restrooms without getting beaten up. If right-wingers say it means "the end of religious expression" in America, they should ask themselves why they seem to base "religious expression" wholly on whom you can discriminate against. (People for the American Way provides the petition.)

Our Senators need to confirm President Biden's three outstanding nominees to our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, not least so they can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who's just rolled out a plan to "save" our Post Office that relies on higher prices and crappier service. Mr. DeJoy was a corporate executive not too long ago; do people still say big corporate executives know best? I sure hope not -- all they know how to do is redistribute their workers' income upward to themselves. And I know Mitch McConnell stands ready to throw a tantrum and gum up the works on matters like confirming USPS Board of Governors nominees, but seriously, when folks see Republicans demand a precise vote-count just to turn the lights off for the night, how do they think they're going to look? Especially now that folks ain't afraid of Fox News anymore. Progress America provides the petition.

Finally, we need a fifth Commissioner on our Federal Communications Commission; a fifth FCC Commissioner would break all those 2-2 ties that are bound to happen on any important matters now, and a fifth FCC Commissioner who would bring back net neutrality rules and help all good Americans get broadband access would do a great deal of good. We should make our government do good wherever possible, after all -- hey, it's what we demand from ourselves! Now, net neutrality is important, because it gives us more control over our internet experience, but greater broadband access in rural and urban areas is also important, now that so many Americans are going to work and going to school essentially over our internet. So let's get that FCC fully staffed so it can get to work. (Battle for the Net provides the petition.)

Around the table: featuring the usual Republican insanity and Democratic weakness.

Spain will trial a four-day, 32-hour work week, possibly as soon as this fall, where workers would make the same amount of money and the government would cover all costs during the first year (though less in the years thereafter). It's safe to say that no one's tried it on this scale, though individual employers report that it works pretty well; recall that John Maynard Keynes thought our ever-rising standards of living would be enabling 15-hour work weeks by now, though he didn't predict the massive income-redistribution-upward scheme of the last 40-plus years, which is what leaves us running to stand still. So of course I wish the Spanish the best in their endeavors.

Alan McLeod at FAIR catches the financial media doing all manner of pearl-clutching at the news that potential Brazilian Presidential candidate Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva has been released from jail. Who would say, out loud, that a politician getting cleared of trumped-up charges is "bad for the markets"? You'd only say something like that if you were an irredeemable asshole, and in this article, they say a lot worse -- plus, they might actually mean Lula will be bad for "US imperial ambitions in Latin America and beyond." Seriously, this may be the most triggering thing I've read in a while -- and I read a lot of triggering stuff.

Ryan Grim at The Intercept describes the formation of the "Woman's Equality Party" (or WEP) in New York state -- a party that seems to exist more to burnish Gov. Andrew Cuomo's (ever-more) suspect feminist credentials than to actually help women win office in New York. I couldn't help but notice, long before paragraph 13, that the WEP is also only one letter off from the Working Families Party (or WFP), and since the WFP is often a thorn in Gov. Cuomo's side -- endorsing Cynthia Nixon in the 2018 Democratic primary after getting seriously burned by Mr. Cuomo in 2014 -- I can't imagine that's an accident.

The COVID relief bill faces its first legal hurdle, if you can call it that, as the state of Ohio sued to block the provision preventing local governments from using federal aid to cut state taxes. I would be surprised to learn states have a constitutional "right" to use federal funds to cut state taxes, but I doubt Ohio politicians filed this suit to make a point or advance a philosophy; rather, I suspect they did it either to beat their chests about how Republican they are or to get ahead of the bill one day becoming unpopular. If it's the latter item, they may be waiting a very long time.

Tennessee historical commission votes to remove bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from state capitol -- and state Republicans promptly propose a law removing all 29 members and replacing them with 12 new ones. Republicans run everything in Tennessee -- which, again, is the natural result of Democrats being weak -- but all any Democrat has to do is ask: why do you fight for the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest? Dude made his fortune in the slave trade and then was the Klan's first Grand Wizard! They sure didn't put his bust in the Capitol because he might have had doubts about his life's work at the end.

Finally, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says he would "talk until I fell over" to prevent the passage of the For the People Act and the Equality Act, though he seems to have some confusion about what those bills would actually do. Anyway, I doubt he'd keep a real filibuster going, and not just because talking until you "fall over" about popular legislation would make you look bad. I doubt it because I think he's soft, just like I think they're all soft. They won't give up their three-martini lunches and big donor dinners to keep a filibuster going; in fact, I think the mere thought of hard work will make them wilt.

Action: concerning voting rights, insurance redlining, and saving our Post Office.

Today's a good day to call your Reps and Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to pass both H.R. 1, the For the People Act, and the Voting Rights Advancement Act (which has no bill numbers at this writing). The For the People Act has almost everything -- campaign finance disclosure, same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration, 15 days of early voting, independent commissions to redraw districts, and no more "address verification forms" that only seem to lead to folks of color getting de-registered. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act by requiring pre-clearance from our Justice Department for voting law changes in any area of our nation with a record of vote suppression, not just areas in the South. Who could be against more good Americans voting? Oh, right -- people who can't get majorities in elections. Well, they don't deserve more say than us.

Meanwhile, we learn from Consumer Reports that some big car insurance corporations will ask some people their job title and education level and use that info to set a rate quotation. And please understand that by "some people" I mean people of color. What does education level have to do with your driving record, you ask? Nothing -- some of the most educated people are the absolute worst drivers, and other folks with a high school diploma drive very well. I could make a similar notation about salary, and that's without noting that folks with higher salaries can obviously afford higher insurance rates, so why do they need a handout? No, these questions sound an awful like redlining to me. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell big car insurance corporations Progressive and GEICO to stop using irrelevant information in a clandestine effort to charge folks of color more for their car insurance. Brothers and sisters already have enough trouble getting better pay and more education in our society, so let's not heap more trouble on them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to do all he can to save our Post Office, then Progress America still helps you do that. Specifically, Progress America will help you tell Mr. Biden to appoint four decent, hard-working Americans to our USPS Board of Governors (the Board has six Governors total), so that they can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and institute some actual reforms, versus the DeJoy "reforms" that have led to longer wait times for mail. (As an aside, you've heard that Mr. DeJoy was a logistics executive, but don't assume that means he knows anything about logistics. Executives don't know anything about anything but redistributing income upward from their workers to themselves.) We don't need Post Office privatization, so that big corporations can give us far worse service while bleeding us for more money. We need a Post Office that serves good Americans, and Mr. Biden can begin to achieve that goal by appointing decent human beings to our USPS Board of Governors. So let's get to it.

Action: concerning our Post Office, another coal mine, and another proposed tax cut for the rich.

You've heard our media say that Postmaster General DeJoy is "suspending" all those "operational changes" that slowed the mail and threatened our Election? Not so fast! He said he'd "suspend" plans to move equipment around but said nothing about equipment already moved, and "suspending" the changes isn't rolling back the changes. As they say, when someone shows you who they are, you ought to believe them, and the man who is still financially invested in a corporation that alternately competes with our Post Office and does contract work for our Post Office shouldn't be leading our Post Office. I'm old enough to remember when folks actually tried to avoid even the appearance of evil, but too many of us are too cynical anymore to demand even that much from our leaders. For those of us who believe cynicism is evil, Progress America helps you tell Postmaster General DeJoy to restore the 600-plus mail sorting machines already removed, and then resign. It'd be nice, for once to be able to say someone resigned in shame.

Meanwhile, most big insurance corporations (including Liberty Mutual and AIG) have shunned the proposed Carmichael mine that would further befoul Australia's Great Barrier Reef -- but British insurance corporation Aon has not. Nearly 30 million tons of coal already go through the Reef, and one accident could destroy one of the world's oldest wonders, so why do our leaders continue to reject wind and solar? Apparently because, as Ralph Nader used to say, you can't own the sun, though you can own the infrastructure that collects wind and solar power and converts it to electricity, and you'd think that'd be enough for big corporations. They tell us they're our best and boldest visionaries, but their only apparent "vision" is obliterating our history and our heritage so they can redistribute more of your money upwards to themselves. Anyway, the Big Stick of Bad PR still operates, if we wield it, so Sum of Us helps you tell Aon to protect our world's treasures and scuttle its plans to insure the notorious Carmichael mine.

Finally, with over 30 million good Americans either unemployed or underemployed thanks to our government's absolutely miserable response to this pandemic, what's our President's new great idea? Cutting the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 15%, of course, though this would deliver yet another massive tax cut mostly to rich folks. Capital gains ain't just about real estate, of course, but also about stocks and bonds, meaning rich folks already pay a lower tax rate on their stock sales than working Americans do on income above $53,325. And there's no good reason for that: stocks and real estate aren't "better" than the work the rest of us do. Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to not only reject the capital gains tax cut proposal, but raise the rate to ensure that folks pay the same tax rate on their investments as the rest of us pay on our wages. The stock market doesn't make the economy go, after all: our work does.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Chaco Canyon, the quality of mercy, and working families.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, then you can still 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 Senators' phone numbers. I know, it's been weeks since the House passed that bill, and all kinds of other things are happening right now, but guess what? No law or social more compels you to attend only one thing at a time, and to the exclusion of all other things! Our Glorious Elites pretend only one thing at a time could possibly matter to anyone, but we're still seeing over 20,000 cases of coronavirus every day, and a crapload of good Americans will still need unemployment benefits after the end of July, and we still need to fund a Post Office past the end of September, and states and localities still deserve assistance thanks to all the reduced revenues of this recession, and at least one big tax-cut-for-the-rich still deserves repeal and oblivion, and another round of increased stimulus checks for all of us sure wouldn't hurt, so get on the stick and communicate your will to your Senators before they imagine you've forgotten all about the hard work they still need to do.

Meanwhile, our Interior Secretary has actually extended a comment period concerning opening up the Greater Chaco Region of New Mexico to even more fracking. And you know what that means! It means he didn't get enough pro-pollution comments from the fracking lobby! I mean, this Administration never wants to hear more from the American people, since good Americans generally oppose all the things this Administration does! Even the 2017 tax "reform" suffered from so much opposition from the people that they could barely pass the damn thing! And that cost Democrats exactly nothing in the 2018 midterm elections -- this, after Our Glorious Elites have been saying for years that opposing "tax cuts" is "political poison"! But I digress. Food and Water Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to halt its plans to drill for gas in the Greater Chaco Region. Why? Well, not just because drilling tends to pollute our air and water (and, of course, drillers will pay less in royalties to us because that's how our 46% President wants it!) -- the Greater Chaco Region also includes land sacred to the Navajo. Our Administration cares so much about religion -- just not when it's Native American religion!

In other news, Willie Simmons committed a $9 robbery back in the 1980s -- and has served 37 years for it! How did this happen? Mr. Simmons had three other offenses (all nonviolent, naturally) on his record, and thus got a life sentence under Alabama's "habitual offender" law. I don't need to tell you that Mr. Simmons served our country in the Army or that drug addiction may have figured in his "crime spree" -- I need only reiterate, with the italics hammer, that he's serving a life sentence for stealing nine freaking dollars. If you know any supposed devil's-advocates who'll say if you can't do the time don't do the crime or he should've gotten a lawyer to help with his appeals, just ask them: is it fair to give someone life in prison for stealing nine dollars? Any answer other than "no" -- and that most definitely includes "no, but" -- deserves no further engagement; just let your little Glaucon go with God, because God might be their only friend at the end of the line. In the meantime, let's try to do some damn justice and tell Alabama Gov. Ivey to commute Mr. Simmons's sentence, as Change.org helps you do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Walmart to give its workers a seat on its corporate board, then United for Respect still helps you do that. Because why the hell not? Are other CEOs the only people who know anything about running a corporation? Actually, given how badly so many corporations do at anything other than redistributing worker income upward to executives, I suspect most CEOs know just about nothing about running a corporation! And, in my lengthy experience as a worker bee, I've found that the people who actually do the work know more about how to do the work than the folks who bloviate all day about "the challenges ahead," which are always challenges for you, not for them! In any case, Walmart's situation is unique, and not just because it smashes any unionization effort with a frightening malice -- Walmart has been making a crap-ton of profits during this pandemic, but its executives have been dragging their feet ensuring their workers are safe at a store where it's almost impossible to socially-distance. So let's help our sisters and brothers help themselves! That's what a conservative would do, right?

Around the table: more bad arguments destroyed, more questionable moves by Our Glorious Elites exposed.

Surprise, surprise, a Guardian investigation reveals that bots produced one out of every four Twitterings about climate change during that period in 2017 where our President was mulling pulling out of the Paris Accords, and surprise, surprise, the vast majority of these bot-tweets promoted climate change denialism. Cue Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: "but what is a 'bot,' really? Do we really understand the deep epistemological and ontological questions we raise when we say something is a 'bot'?"

I'm not sure I would call the litany of tax ideas our Administration is throwing against the wall in an election year as "pasta policymaking" -- I usually go for a more colorful phrase -- but it is apt. You'd be right to question why we need more tax reforms when we supposedly did a big tax "reform" in 2017, but the tax "reforms" they're floating -- invest your first $10,000 in the stock market tax-free if you make less than $200,000, like we all have money laying around to throw into the national roulette wheel! -- would continue our Administration's efforts to "preside over an upward redistribution of wealth." And if a minimum corporate tax is such a great idea, you have to wonder why they didn't go to bat over it in 2017, when Congress repealed it.

David Swanson puts the absurd hand-wringing over Medicare-for-All's "costs" perfectly: "How Are We Going to Pay for Saving Trillions of Dollars?" You remember, after all, that the Koch brothers-sponsored Mercatus Institute said Medicare-for-All would cost $32 trillion over 10 years, while the Centers for Medicare Services said our total health care spending, using the system we have now, would be $49 trillion over the same period, meaning we'd save $1.7 trillion annually (versus the $450 billion the Lancet study says we'd save, which number Mr. Swanson cites here). He goes on to describe how you might actually fund Medicare-for-All and other "impossible" initiatives, but I trust the point is taken.

Ho hum, our President's choice for acting (of course!) National Director of Intelligence used to work for a Moldovan politician who's now on the run and can't get into the U.S. because of anti-corruption laws. I guess we can't discount the possibility that our President put him there in order to get said Moldovan politician into the country! He only lets the best people in, after all. Naturally, we can find no shortage of qualified observers who will note that the new acting DNI broke the law, has exposed himself to blackmail, and shouldn't even have a security clearance, let alone lead an agency specializing in a field in which he has no experience. Imagine the whining from the right if Mr. Obama had done any of this!

Finally, we learn that a Republican Super PAC spent millions of dollars trying to promote a liberal in North Carolina's upcoming Democratic U.S. Senate primary, in the hopes that it'd help incumbent Republican Senator Thom Tillis. And this liberal asks: are you guys sure that's wise? They say they're taking a page out of Chuck Schumer's playbook, but when Democrats ran ads supporting Todd Akin in the 2012 Missouri Senate Republican primary, they promoted a guy who nattered on about "legitimate rape." On the other hand, Erica Smith is an ordained minister, an engineer, and a math teacher in addition to being a state Senator; Republicans had better hope there's something under that hood -- other than her support of Medicare-for-All, I mean! -- or they might have thrown all that money away, and thus provided yet another argument to those of us who think some folks have too damn much money.

Action: concerning pollution, TV sensationalism, and Presidential tax returns.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its own attempt to loosen coal ash regulations, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. You'll want to get moving, though, because the deadline for public comments is tomorrow, January 31. Our EPA wants to allow coal corporations to put off closing unlined coal ash ponds, even though the state of Illinois alone has 90 leaking coal ash ponds, and even though coal ash a) contains lead, arsenic, and carcinogens and b) will leak into local water tables. (Since, you know, they're unlined.) Again our Administration pretends that a corporation's "right" to save a little bit of money (or, more precisely, a corporation's "right" to deliver a little more money to executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home) is more important than our actual right not to drink poisoned water. They care only about bosses redistributing more income upward to themselves, but money doesn't last forever. Clean water does -- if we take care of it.

Meanwhile, after TMZ leaked the news of Kobe Bryant's death in a helicopter crash before his wife, Vanessa, and their three surviving children could find out about his death from local authorities, a Change.org petition helps you tell Fox to cancel TMZ. I think everyone would agree that, no matter how famous they are, folks should get tragic news from their local authorities before they get it from the TV, let alone TMZ, which has been a notorious purveyor of uncivilized sensationalism for almost 15 years now. To be perfectly frank, I'd favor oblivion for them even if they had managed to display a moment's sensitivity on what I would imagine would be the worst day of Vanessa Bryant's life. And please don't entertain the notion that they're "better" at journalism because they got the "scoop" first -- do "scoops" about celebrities serve a purpose in our civilization other than titillation and arousal? If they don't, then they're not journalism, period, end of.

Finally, H.R. 273, the Presidential Tax Transparency Act of 2019, would require all major party Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates, as well as the President and Vice President themselves, to disclose 10 years of tax returns. This has been a big deal, as our current President was the first major party candidate not to disclose his tax returns since Richard Nixon, and several investigations into his conduct have tried to get his tax returns in order to see exactly how compromised he is; he says the issue is closed since he won, but of course that's not how democracy works: the issue is closed when we say it's closed, not him. So Americans for Tax Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to hold Presidential candidates accountable by passing the Presidential Tax Transparency Act. (Don't confuse H.R. 273 with H.R. 162, also titled the Presidential Tax Transparency Act, which would require only the President and Vice President to disclose their tax returns.)

Around the table: now with even more rich people whining!

Ari Paul wonders if Deadspin "Can Live Again as a Worker-Owned Website." Long story short: of course it can! Long story somewhat longer: "(t)he cost of paying writers a living wage, never mind hosting a major website and retaining a media attorney (a must if you’re going to be doing daring journalism), isn’t pocket change," and "anyone interested in this will have to pound the pavement looking for funders, people or groups with money that want, deep within their hearts, for independent media to survive." And the money might not be there, because how do folks get rich these days? By sucking up to the already-powerful! This theme's going to come up again shortly.

Like, now: JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says Sen. Warren "uses some pretty harsh words" that "vilif(y) "successful people," presumably people like himself. And all over our great land good Americans say why, he should hear the words I use! And, seriously, he calls people like himself "successful people" because he can't just say "we shouldn't vilify people who redistribute income from people who work to executives who don't." Or "we shouldn't vilify people who prey financially on other people." You know?

In a peripherally-related note, Microsoft founder Bill Gates says of Ms. Warren's proposed wealth tax that "(i)f I had to pay $20 billion in taxes, it's fine" but "when you say I should pay $100 billion, O.K., then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over." Ms. Warren's proposed 3% rate on Mr. Gates's estimated fortune of $106 billion would, of course, not result in a "$100 billion tax bill," but a $3.18 billion tax bill. Also, Mr. Gates added $16 billion to his net worth last year, and, seriously, is there a worse sound on Earth than the sound of the ultra-rich whining?

Billionaire, ahem, successful person Michael Bloomberg has begun to take steps to run for the Democratic Presidential nomination, having apparently identified a shortage of candidates anxious to tell the American people why we shouldn't get anything we want from our government. Kudos to the University of Iowa professor who sees Mr. Bloomberg as someone who would further divide the "center" currently occupied by Messrs. Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. I mean, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have the left to themselves; I suppose it's still possible they'll split the left enough that one of the other four aforementioned candidates can break through, but, frankly, the math favors the left here. You know what else favors the left? So many of us are so out of fucks to give.

Finally, former Administration Attorney General/long-time former Senator Jeff Sessions has declared that he'll try again for his old seat in 2020, where the punditocracy considers incumbent Democrat Doug Jones the party's most endangered Democrat. This could certainly be a unique opportunity -- Alabama voters might be able to choose the racist who said the NAACP were Communists, or the guy who put two of the Birmingham bombers in jail. I wouldn't worry too much about our President's supposed hatred of Mr. Sessions hampering his campaign, though, because our President revises history like George Orwell never predicted. (Also, too, "I was there to serve his agenda, not mine" -- uh, you weren't our Attorney General to serve our agenda?)

Action: concerning health care, worker safety, and defense spending.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384, the Medicare for All Act, now's as good a time as any to call your House Reps and Senators. H.R. 1384 doesn't tell you how it's going to fund Medicare for All, a matter our "liberal" media have been doing a lot of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching about, but Sen. Warren (D-MA) -- you may have heard of her, she's running for President -- has described how she'd fund it, and her plan would do what needs to be done: it would capture the money employers are already spending on private health insurers and redirect it toward funding Medicare for All. She would tax employers (except for small businesses with fewer than 50 employees who aren't providing health insurance) at 98% of the average rate they've been paying private health insurers for employee insurance over several previous years, which would make it useless for big corporations to suddenly convert themselves into franchises or convert their employees into independent contractors. So now we have a weapon against all the how-will-you-pay-for-it hysteria.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Amazon warehouse worker Billy Foister's death -- he had a heart attack at work, but lay on the ground for 20 minutes before anyone noticed, and once the ambulance took him away, his bosses told his co-workers to get back to work -- Demand Progress helps you tell Amazon to stop putting its work quotas above human life. Six Amazon workers have died in the last year, with many more injured, and it ain't for nothing that the National Council for Occupational Health and Safety lists Amazon as one of the 12 worst places to work, because Amazon puts productivity ahead of people, such that folks pee in a bottle lest they get a demerit, and some folks even try to kill themselves. Like this is Foxconn or something! Seriously, bosses don't just redistribute wealth upward to their bosses, they redistribute health -- folks push themselves to the brink trying to meet quotas while Jeff Bezos gets plenty of decompression time as he looks for a new mountain to buy. As they say, next-day shipping might be free, but it comes at a price.

Finally, Joe Biden has apparently told reporters it would be "outrageous" if our government were to attach any conditions to the military aid we give to Israel -- conditions that might include not expanding more settlements into Palestine. So he's beating his chest about being more pro-Israel than anyone else, and we could reasonably question whether it's actually "pro-Israel" to enable their uncivilized behavior, but the more interesting thing is that many of Mr. Biden's favorite Republican Presidents, including Messrs. Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush the Better, did exactly the same thing! You'd think a man who yammers on about "bipartisanship" all the time would know it when he sees it -- or that a man who boasts about his "relationships" with Republicans would find some actual common ground with them. Anyway, Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell Mr. Biden that conditioning military aid to Israel is not "outrageous". He doesn't care what we think, but we still tell him, because it's our duty.

Action: concerning war with Iran, racist housing policy, and school lunch shaming.

You've heard that our President doesn't want to go to war with Iran? Don't you believe it! No, him firing John Bolton doesn't mean we're in the clear, and him fighting Lindsey Graham over Iran policy doesn't mean we're in the clear, either. What would put us in the clear? Communicating our will to our Congressfolk that we don't want another stupid war in the Middle East, that's what! Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Khanna-Gaetz amendment, forbidding funding of any military operations in Iran without explicit Congressional approval, in must-pass defense authorization legislation. Seriously, if you're thinking that maybe this President is "different," or that only he can stop the "deep state," stop that. True, this President may be less adept at maneuvering the levers of power than his predecessors, but he only cares about his own ego, and the only people who can stop the "deep state" are us. So we need to keep working.

Meanwhile, our Administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed gutting civil rights protections mandated by the Fair Housing Act, so the National Women's Law Center helps you tell our HUD to stop its efforts to let more landlords discriminate against folks of color. I don't know what their rationale for this move is. I kinda hope it isn't we don't need these protections anymore, because, gosh, have they talked to a real estate agent? Real estate was, for many years, the last place you could get away with saying something openly racist like "this is a good neighborhood because it's mostly white." Actually, I do know what their rationale is -- our President and his father got sued real good back in the 1970s for refusing to put folks of color in their apartments. Is this his revenge? I kinda hope not, because a man who'd do that is a small man indeed, and I prefer to believe the best about people.

Finally, you may have heard that schools have been shaming kids whose parents can't pay school lunch fees, sometimes by making kids wear wristbands (gosh, so many people love strutting around these days, I wonder why?) or by putting their names on public lists. I've said we shouldn't be afraid to shame people, but we shouldn't shame kids who did nothing wrong -- we should shame adults who, for example, redistribute everyone's income upward to themselves! Anyway, H.R. 3366/S. 1907, the No Shame at School Act, would prohibit this kind of school lunch shaming, plus it would prevent school districts from handing over parents' private info to debt collectors -- because this, too, is apparently a thing now -- and it would streamline the certification process for school kids so that simple misspellings (for example) won't lead to school lunch debt. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out working families by passing the No Shame at School Act.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, factory farm waste, PFAS chemicals, and food safety.

California actually passed strong campaign finance disclosure legislation in 2017, but that law didn't cover everything -- it still lets big donors push out mass text messages without revealing themselves, and it also hides the big donors behind massive petitioning efforts. But AB 201 and SB 47 would close these loopholes, so the California Clean Money Action Fund helps you tell California state legislators to do more to expose big campaign donors by passing these bills. AB 201 would force candidates to put their names on text messages and PACs to put committee names or URLs leading to disclosure info; SB 47 would require petition gatherers to disclose the top three donors of that petition before soliciting a signature. We're looking at a few hundred million text messages and over two dozen ballot initiatives (in 2018) that require more sunlight, so this isn't a "solution looking for a problem" -- you know, like Voter ID or Interstate Crosscheck.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3844, the Farmer Fairness Act, would at least address this issue as it related to factory farm waste. As it is now, big ag corporations have gamed the system so that the small farmers who own the animals on factory farms take all the blame for the waste on big factory farms, while the big ag corporations make off with all the profit! But the Farmer Fairness Act would "require all persons exercising substantial operational control over the concentrated animal feeding operation," which would include anyone who "exercises any control over the activities, operation, or management of a concentrated animal feeding operation." Hence both small farmer and big factory farm would be on the hook for polluting nearby rivers and streams with their animal waste. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big ag domination of small farmers by passing the Farmer Fairness Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would better address the clean-up of ubiquitous and poisonous PFAS chemicals, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. Specifically, you'd tell your Congressfolk to support provisions of the must-pass defense authorization bill that would better track PFAS contamination and better coordinate PFAS cleanup efforts; this is a big deal -- not just because scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, thyroid disease, and liver damage, not just because you can find PFAS chemicals in so many commonplace items ranging from nonstick saucepans to food packaging, but also because firefighting foam is a major source of PFAS chemicals, and our soldiers do put out a lot of fires. So, for once, let's pass some defense spending that helps all of us, and not just some defense contracting corporation's CEO.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our Administration's plans to reduce safety inspections at pork processing plants, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. What on Earth has possessed our last two Administrations to try to mess with meat inspections? Do they not know that food poisoning always gets into the news? It seems like the best of our politicians listen too much to big agricultural corporations like they know everything, when mostly what they know is how to redistribute income upward from consumers (and farmers!) to themselves. Some "expertise," that. Of course, the worst of our politicians only pretend to be that stupid, but actually mean to make their big ag cronies richer and damn the consequences for everyone else. Oh, well, I guess Americans are only the people who eat the food. Seriously, we deserve better, from both our food processing corporations and our politicians.

Action: concerning birth control and media monopolies.

Our Administration is trying its damnedest to redirect public Title X funding away from organizations like Planned Parenthood and toward organizations like Obria, which is notorious for giving incorrect information about abortion and for refusing to give birth control to its patients, even though birth control sure seems like the best way to reduce abortions. If you're tempted to think that this move merely reflects a shift in our government's priorities, remember that providing comprehensive family planning services is the whole purpose of Title X, and I don't think even now you'll find too many federal judges who'd be convinced that Congress explicitly authorized the provision of half-assed family planning. Shame that the law-and-order crowd doesn't see our Administration's poor funding of family planning as a law-and-order issue; maybe if more black people were involved in the law-breaking, they'd see it. Anyway, Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to stop illegally giving taxpayer money to fake family planning centers.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Justice Department to block the proposed CBS/Viacom merger. CBS and Viacom are saying they need to merge so they can compete with Netflix, Disney, and the like, but who cares what's good for CBS? I'm such a bastard I only care what's good for America, and you know what happens when big corporations merge: they cut jobs, raise prices, and redistribute more worker income upward to their executives -- which, admittedly, sounds exactly like the program of this entire Administration, whose Attorney General, William Barr, is another one who thinks "freedom" is all about letting corporations do whatever they want and damn the consequences for the rest of us. But the fewer corporations that own all of our media, the worse it is for us, not just in lost jobs and lost income, but in lost freedom to get the kind of critical information and alternate viewpoints with which civilized people make good decisions. When a big corporation owns a media outlet, after all, that media outlet not only avoids criticizing its owner, but any other big corporation that owner does business with. And that's just another kind of corruption we need to fight.

Action: concerning working families, immigration, discrimination, and climate change.

H.R. 3590, the Building Our Opportunities to Survive and Thrive (or BOOST) Act, would enact a new tax credit of $3,000 annually for folks making less than $50,000 -- said credit would be higher for heads of household making less than $80,000 and married couples making less than $100,000 -- and the worst thing I can say about the BOOST Act is that it suggests we pay for it by repealing most of the 2017 Republican tax "reform" and enacting a fee on banksters with more than $50 billion in capital, when it should just be doing these things. Naturally the right is hysterical about it -- they're crying WHOZE WILL TEH PAYZ FOR TEH ITZ!!!! (psst: I just told you) and TEH PEEPULZ WILL WORKZ TEH LESSEZ!!!!, to which I have two responses: 1) you say that like it's an unqualified evil and 2) some folks clearly overestimate what folks would do with $3,000. Quit their jobs? C'mon, we all pay bills. CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to support working families by passing the BOOST Act.

Meanwhile, the tech corporation Palantir has become notorious lately for its huge contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), and though corporate spokeshacks have long said Palantir software doesn't contribute to our Administration's deportations, internal emails beg to differ. And while I wouldn't be upset at the mere possibility that Palantir helps our government deports undocumented immigrants, fact is they lied about it, instead of making the case that they were helping our government do necessary work. But then again, perhaps they lied about it because they're also helping our Administration tear children from their families, which civilized people generally agree is inhumane. Palantir has already suffered a bit from the Big Stick of Bad PR, but that only means more of us need to wield it! Hence Free Press (among other good government groups) helps you tell Palantir to break off its ties to ICE.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations like AT&T and Amazon to stop donating big wads of cash to politicians who are pro-discrimination against gay and transgender folks, then CREDO still helps you do that. A lot of big corporations position themselves as gay- and transgender-friendly these days, but they still support candidates who aren't, and we're all tired of excuses like "we support them for the economic issues, not the bigotry." And in and of itself, corporate pro-gay and pro-transgender positioning is of limited utility, and if corporations align with Democrats on social issues, that's all the more incentive for Democrats not to pressure corporations on economic issues. Indeed, it's almost like that's the whole idea! But if corporations cut off monetary support for pro-discrimination politicians, just so happens they'll also starve right-wing economic ideas of oxygen, too.

Finally, our United States Geological Survey (or USGS), upon whose research the National Climate Assessment draws in part, will now use scientific models that can forecast climate change's effects only up until 2040, even though most models forecast through the end of the century, and even though basically everyone knows that the worst effects of climate change will come after 2040. That'll teach the National Climate Assessment to embarrass our President! Clearly this Administration -- currently dueling with Tha Bush Mobb for the dubious honor of "most anti-science government of modern times" -- would rather you didn't know how bad climate change is going to get, lest it affect their plans to help fossil fuel CEOs redistribute ever more income upward to themselves. So Penn Environment helps you tell our USGS to abandon its plans to fudge climate change science for the benefit of big polluting corporations.

Around the table: containing horrible truths about "demonization" and "socialism."

ThinkProgress describes how the "Moral Budget" proposed by the Poor People's Campaign could raise $9 trillion over the next decade. A 5.5% surtax on income over $1 million, a 70% top tax bracket on income over $10 million, treating capital gains like the income it most assuredly is, lowering the Estate Tax threshold and closing other inheritance-based loopholes, taxing wealth over $50 million -- I'd make a lot of these proposals harsher to wealth, but they're certainly on the right track. Mr. Pyke also reminds us that decades of stupid, venal leadership by Our Glorious Elites has led us to the point where far-right racists are gaining traction all over the planet, almost like that was the whole idea.

Sen. McConnell (E-KY) dismisses statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as "full-bore socialism" And then discoursed at length about the subtle difference between liberal socialism and libertarian socialism! I kid, of course: he says it's "socialism" because it'd supposedly result in four more Democrats for the Senate -- it's like the thought of persuading people to vote for you has never occurred to him! -- and, coupled with inchoate proposals to expand our Supreme Court, which certainly aren't on the table for Democrats as long as this President is in office, well, I guess that's supposed to be "socialism." Calling everything "socialism" is what you do when you can't win the argument on the merits! Also, too, if you've ever breathed the air, drank the water, used a library, driven a road, or called a cop, then guess what? You're a socialist.

From the "I Shouldn't Waste Any Time on This But" file: let us properly contextualize the news that Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson has advised our President against making war upon Iran -- as drama, and bad drama, at that. Right-wingers constantly pretend they have massive differences with each other, and they do it to confuse us, but they also do it to pretend there simply aren't any other policy choices other than the ones they're fighting about in public -- you know, like, say, staying in the nuclear treaty that was actually keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but which this President couldn't abide, because our last President put it together.

Joe Biden tells big donors he doesn't "want to demonize anybody who's made money." Well, given that they've redistributed most of the world's income upward to themselves, divorced the concept of wealth from the concept of hard work, ground most small- and medium-sized businesses under their shoe, bought themselves enough politicians and media outlets to cripple the people's ability to redress grievances as guaranteed by our First Amendment, set fire to laws and programs that actually help us little people, and are very likely going to make our planet uninhabitable in the near future, I'd say mere "demonization" is too good for them.

Finally, in a related note, I don't particularly want Mr. Biden to apologize for saying it is-so possible for us all to get along because, hey, he had to work with segregationists like James Eastland and Herman Talmadge when he got into the Senate, because it often seems to me that apologies prolong drama more than resolve it. But let's remember that Joe Biden's way of "getting along" with his opponents and "getting things done" with his opponents has always meant capitulation to his opponents. He was a fierce opponent of desegregation busing in the early '70s, after all -- he even wrote Mr. Eastland a nice letter thanking him for his support. Folks who support Mr. Biden because he "can win" aren't just misunderstanding the lessons of 2016, they're getting democracy wrong: you're not supposed to be "on the winning side," you're supposed to be the winning side.

Around the table: stories about public banking, taxes, news deserts, retail worker activism, and "stability."

"I've Seen Goldman Sachs From the Inside," writes Nomi Prins at Truthout. "We Need Public Banks." There's a Mack truck-sized opening for the "fiscally responsible" "moderate" to point out that relying on banksters for infrastructure funding is far more expensive than relying on public banks. And it's no use complaining that public banks would be corrupt too, because as a citizen you can do more about public bank corruption. When they say don't let the perfect murder the good, this is kinda what they mean.

Misha Hill and Lorena Roque at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy ask the right question about the "opportunity zones" created by the 2017 tax "reform": "Opportunity for Whom?". The answer: "opportunity" for big developers to get even more corporate welfare from the taxpayer, as they push folks of color out of historically black and brown neighborhoods. And I'll bet more than a few of them are keeping buildings empty to get even more corporate welfare from the taxpayer, too. (Stick around for the last five paragraphs, though, to learn that there really are solutions to urban poverty, and that they even go beyond "stop handing out corporate welfare.")

Daily Yonder publisher Dee Davis explains how her area of East Kentucky became a "news desert." If you're thinking "but now you can get any viewpoint on social media at the click of a button," think again -- the Clinton/Bush the Lesser era saw the mushrooming of religious broadcast stations at the low end of the FM dial, stations now "weaponized by conservative think tanks and by Evangelical church networks," and if you've watched Fox News for any length of time you'll recognize how "the emotional button-pushing remains constant" on these stations. Wishing for a time when you could read two real local newspapers in almost any area of the country may sound like a conservative dream, and maybe it is, but it's also a democratic one.

Bryce Covert at The Nation describes the works of Rise Up Retail, a group of retail workers who have agitated for better treatment under the law, many of them after losing their jobs at retail chains owned by hedge-fund managers. You know hedge-fund managers are vampires, redistributing the wealth of their workers upward to themselves and hollowing out the corporations they run, but you may not know that Rise Up Retail is getting good bills a hearing, like S. 3170 in New Jersey, the so-called "Toys 'R' Us" bill that would mandate more severance and notice for workers at corporations about to go under. What hedge fund managers did to Sears and Toys 'R' Us (and Ms. Covert goes into great detail about that) ain't illegal, but it should be.

Finally, I know you all had a good laugh when former Clinton impeacher Kenneth Starr said that impeaching our current President would be "so bad for the country," but let's not let pass his explanation, such as it is, of why impeaching our current President would be "so bad": "(t)he American people want stability." "Stability"? What about this Administration has ever evinced stability? Someone tell Mr. Starr that a rhetorical hostage situation only works in America if we're not already spitting laughter.

Action: concerning Social Security and economic policy.

Social Security Trustees released their annual report on Monday, and you've seen all the crappy headlines: ZOMG TEH SOSHUL SECURITEEZ CANTZ PAYZ TEH FULL BENEFITZ BY TEH 2035!!!! and ZOMG TEH COSTS WILLZ EXCEEDZ TEH INCOMEZ NEXT YEARZ!!!!! If you're old enough to remember the ZOMG TEH SOSHUL SECURITEEZ WILL GOEZ BROKEZ BY 2016!!!!, then you won't be impressed. But if you're acquainted with simple arithmetic, you can see that raising the ceiling on payroll taxes so that income over $132,900 can be taxed into the system will not only help keep Social Security solvent, but also allow us to expand its benefits so our seniors can have a more dignified retirement. And ideally we're all going to be seniors one day, so what we do for them we do for us, too -- particularly since we're all paying into the system now! Social Security Works helps you tell Congress to protect and improve Social Security by passing H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2176, the Return to Prudent Banking Act, would (among other things) bring back the famed Glass-Steagall "wall" separating your bank account from a bank's risky investment activities. You still remember the big bankster meltdown of 2008, I trust? And you remember how politicians all went on the TV to blame anyone but the banksters? And you remember how banksters barely suffered for their evil, but the taxpayer had to bail them out? And you remember how well banksters have done in the succeeding years under a weak Democratic President and then an evil Republican one? Well, forcing banks to keep their speculative investments from crapping all over your savings and your investments would be a good way to start bringing the banksters to heel, as it is the duty of all civilized people to do. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back some sanity to banking by passing the Return to Prudent Banking Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to keep Stephen Moore off our Federal Reserve Board of Governors, then a group of good-government organizations still helps you do that. You know we should keep Mr. Moore off our Federal Reserve because he's long advocated the kind of economic flimflam that has destroyed state and local governments and served only to redistribute worker income upward to bosses. You may also have heard that he owes our government some $75,000 in unpaid taxes and that he owes his ex-wife four times that amount in alimony. His defenders will say these are the kinds of mistakes "big people" make all the time when they have a lot of money -- which only argues for not letting people get that "big" in the first place, as well for rejecting the me-first-and-only economic theories that cause all these "big people" "mistakes."

Action: concerning climate change, pollution, and the Electoral College.

Our government can pretend all it wants that climate change isn't happening and pollution isn't making it worse, but we've got other ways to fight it -- like telling big asset managing corporation like BlackRock to divest from fossil fuels, which Sum of Us helps you do. It's a shame we even have to tell folks with money to help us make the world a better place -- hell, we all remember when right-wingers used to say that folks with money need to be "free" from the horrible tethers of taxes and regulations just so they could be "free" to make the world a better place! -- but duty is duty. And BlackRock pumps more money than any other entity into new coal-producing plants (which sure ain't very forward-looking of them!) and BlackRock's fancypants "green" investment funds only comprise some three percent of the corporation's total assets. So, yeah, BlackRock could be doing more, and doing a lot more good.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its own plan to scuttle the 2011 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. How many times must I tell these pimps! Pollution actually kills people! And over 900,000 good Americans wrote public comments supporting these standards back in the day, which represents the vast majority of comments received about the matter; does the EPA mean to assert that public opinion simply doesn't matter as much as a dying industry's ability to redistribute income to its executives? I kid, of course -- the EPA absolutely means to assert that! The only thing this Administration cares about is other bosses! Maybe this regulatory rollback effort will die in court, like almost all the others have, but we still need to speak up, because even if our voices don't get heard by this Administration, the courts will still need to hear us.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to abolish the Electoral College, then CREDO still helps you do that. My, how trolls come out in force when you advocate for electing our President with the popular vote -- you know, the way we elect Reps and Senators and Mayors and Governors and state legislators and city councilfolk and the local PTA. Mostly the trolls just ignore what you actually say, even when you've preemptively dealt with their objections, but sometimes they also "remind" you that "America isn't a democracy but a constitutional republic," or they might even say "democracy equals mob rule." The latter statement, of course, is code for "most people aren't as good as I am," which is un-American, while the former is merely pedantic -- we call America a democracy because that's what we aspire to be, and stomping all over our aspirations for America really isn't the hill you want everyone to see you dying on.

Action: concerning clean water, Social Security, and the minimum wage.

H.R. 1417/S. 611, the WATER Act, would pay for water and sewer infrastructure restoration in America by hiking the corporate tax rate from 21% to 24.5%, and you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your House Reps' phone numbers and call them to tell them to support this bill. And what, exactly, will right-wingers' arguments against this bill sound like? Will they pretend that a hike in the corporate tax rate is a personal tax hike, despite the mountain of recent evidence that a corporate tax cut sure ain't a personal tax cut? Will they demand that "the market" fix our water infrastructure ills, despite the mountain of evidence that whenever "the market" takes over an essential function of our civilization it charges out the wazoo for bad service? No matter; opposing cheap, public, clean water is not the hill any sane person wants to be seen dying on. And the insane people don't get all the say around here.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Administration to stop sabotaging Social Security. Our President has pledged not to cut Social Security benefits, which he presents as some great gift to us ("thank you oh thank you sir for not setting this particular house on fire tonight!"), but if he's going to sign onto continued Social Security Administration budget cuts and office closures, then he will, in fact, cut benefits, because the word "benefits" doesn't extend solely to the amount of money in your Social Security check, but also describes the help Social Security can give you when you try to navigate the system, and it gives you a lot less help when the closest offices close (not everyone lives in a city or a suburb, after all!) or have fewer staff. And now they want to start charging fees to replace Social Security cards! I wouldn't blame you for thinking that maybe your taxes already paid for stuff like that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to help out working families by passing H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then Progress America (among other good-government organizations) still helps you do that. You know the deal: average wages don't rise much more quickly than inflation, if they do at all, and "average" wage increases, just like "average" tax cuts, don't necessarily put more money in your pocket -- most of the wage increases over the last decade have gone to people at the top, and if that ain't income redistribution, then what is? The Raise the Wage Act would hike our federal minimum wage to $15/hour over the next five years, and ultimately raise the minimum wage for tipped and disabled employees so that they get the same minimum wage as everyone else in six years. Just don't call it a "job killer," because the folks at the top are the real job killers.

Around the table: Democrats plan another mistake, plus somewhat better news.

Democrats plan a "magnum opus" of legislative provisions for their first bill, one that would address voting rights, campaign finance reform, and ethics. They've got the right idea, but as usual, they've got the wrong size: these all-encompassing pieces of legislation give Republicans too much space for prevarication (remember "death panels"?), and we can get more done with (and get more public support for) smaller bills. I think making H.R. 1 the Voting Rights Advancement Act would be the better idea, not least because we could put Republicans on the spot with it. After all, why do you oppose expanding voting rights? is a much more difficult question to answer than why do you oppose this big bill with all kinds of stuff in it? (Oh, and I'm also pretty sure they can't just overturn Citizens United with a bill.)

60 Minutes runs a lengthy report showing how European nations are actually doing more for their citizens' internet privacy than we are -- but doesn't mention that the FCC actually enacted privacy regulations in 2016, only to see Congress repeal them with a "resolution of disapproval" the next year. It's not like that was beside the point of the report! Anyway, Max Schrems's point about "forced consent" -- that it's wrong for a corporation to sell you a product and then say give us all your data, or you can't use the product -- should be attended by American jurists, maybe? It's not like there's no precedent in American law.

We could make too much of a U.S. District Court judge blocking further construction on the Keystone XL pipeline until our Administration does the proper reviews (and not just environmentally-related ones) as required by law, since our Administration could just show its work and OK I couldn't get through that sentence without spitting tea all over my keyboard. Also, too, if, per our Supreme Court, an Administration agency "cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past," well, that doesn't bode well for the FCC's net neutrality repeal, does it?

In other good news, our Administration announces that it will stop refueling Saudi planes bombing the bejeesus out of Yemen, though it will still aid the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen with weapons sales and logistical support. This is a good thing, though we'll need to pressure our Administration to do more, and I bet Mr. Khashoggi, now sitting comfortably in the beyond, finds his role in this matter rather amusing. Rep. Royce (R-CA) could use some education, however, lumping the Houthis in with al-Qaeda when the Houthis are some of the world's best fighters against al-Qaeda.

Finally, Axios/SurveyMonkey poll finds that 61% of Democrats think Republicans are "racist/bigoted/sexist," while some 31% of Republicans think the same of Democrats. For the record, I don't believe Republicans are bigots merely due to party affiliation -- in fact, I believe all of us are susceptible to bigotry (calling racism a "virus" that could be "activated" really was the smartest thing Nate Silver ever said), and better public policy, public policy that doesn't merely redistribute worker income upward to executives, would better ensure that fewer folks drink from the cup of bigotry.

Around the table: containing some good news about liberals reaching rural America.

George Lakoff, the author of Don't Think of an Elephant, advises us that relentlessly fact-checking our President's numerous big lies plays right into his hands. If you ever suspected that he seems to do better when everyone's talking about him, you'll find that point sympathetic. I wouldn't say fact-checking itself is useless, but I do agree that reporters would do better to focus on what he's actually doing, rather than what he's saying. Good luck getting lazy reporters to do that, though.

Ryan Grim and Briahna Gray at The Intercept describe several "insurgent" Democrats who are making inroads into rural areas the party has long written off -- by being actual liberals, as opposed to the center-right DCCC-approved candidates who dominate other races. In these areas of the country, folks respond positively to candidates who support clean water, Medicare-for-All, and a higher minimum wage. You and I have been saying this for years, of course, but it's nice to get some solid reporting behind it.

Three men convicted of trying to murder Somali refugees cite our President's anti-Muslim rhetoric and Russian propaganda in an effort to avoid life sentences. Now, did our President set the bombs in those apartment buildings? No, he did not -- the three assholes who are about to get life sentences did that. Getting hung up on who might have influenced someone to do something horribly wrong hurts our fight against evil. And while it's true, and irritating, that "(t)he speaker with the best bully pulpit in the world is never sanctioned for spreading fear and advocating harm," that doesn't justify giving his votaries lighter sentences when they commit crimes.

Fascist ascends to power in Brazil, and naturally our financial papers are creaming their pants over how good he'll be for "the markets." Yes, I imagine Mr. Bolsonaro -- who has said out loud that his political opponents should be exterminated and (like all small men) clearly hopes other folks will do it for him -- will greatly aid the effort of Our Glorious Elites to redistribute all the people's wealth upward to themselves, but Jesus Mary and Joseph they can't seem to mute their giddiness even a little. But selling off public works projects to cronies and hello, being a murderous fascist do warrant a bit more scrutiny than that.

After being the target of an apparent Democratic campaign to paint him as the "true conservative" in this race (and thus deprive the Republican of conservative support), the Libertarian candidate in Montana's U.S. Senate race suddenly throws his support behind the Republican. I'm sure that will annoy those Libertarians who've already voted for him, but I wonder if it'll annoy the rest of them, too -- one of the reasons you become a Libertarian is you don't like people trying to manipulate you, and I bet Montana's Libertarians are even more ornery than that. I could be wrong, though. We'll see soon enough!

Finally, because I know you were waiting for this with bated breath, Kanye West now says he's "distancing myself from politics" because he's been "used to spread messages I don't believe in." Yeah sure -- that whole "slavery is a choice" thing didn't sound like a guy being "used." More likely, he used our President to get some attention for himself, though I can't say our President deserves much better than that.

Action: concerning banksters, free speech, and product safety.

With the 10-year anniversary of the 2008 financial services armageddon having lately passed, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to break up the big banks via a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, which would make banks smaller by preventing them from indulging in the hifalutin investments that crashed our economy and will crash it again. As the first sentence suggests, we've already seen what happens when we don't break up the big banks -- and we're continuing to see what happens when we let banksters determine what our economy is going to look like, and it includes a lot of income redistribution upward from people who work to people who don't. But limiting the size of any institution that threatens to run roughshod over our freedoms is not some "radical" proposal, but one with a long history and precedent in America. You might even say a fundamental opposition to concentrated power created America.

Meanwhile, our Education Department would like to adopt a definition of "anti-Semitism" that would equate criticism of Israel or support of Palestine with anti-Semitism! All so folks can win civil rights cases against folks who do either one in an academic setting! Hey, that could be any of us, if we work in a school! Of course, Israel is not Judaism even if their far-right-wing government acts like they are, and when even the progenitor of the legal theory equating anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel says it can't be used in academic settings due to free speech issues, you have to wonder what our Education Department is really afraid of. Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell our Education Department's Office of Civil Rights not to equate pro-Palestinian activism or criticism of Israel with "anti-Semitism." Yikes, this from the Administration whose President said some Nazi wannabes are "very fine people."

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to ban poisonous paint strippers. A lot of paint strippers contain N-Methylpyrrolidone (or NMP) and methylene chloride, which cause respiratory problems and could lead to death; our EPA did propose a rule banning these paint strippers during the second Obama term, but you know what happened after that: a President openly hostile to regulations that protect good Americans happened. Walmart, Lowe's, and Home Depot have all lately banned these toxic products, but that ain't the boon it seems to be, as our EPA might use that as an excuse to declare that "the market has taken care of the problem," even though these three big corporations could all reverse their decisions tomorrow. And, ah, don't be the fool who retorts WHAT YOU THINK PAINT STRIPPERS SHOULD ONLY HAVE NICE CHEMICALS HA HA HA SNORT. Nobody should worry about dying because they use a paint stripper.

Around the table: R.I.P., *Village Voice*.

Uh oh: woman accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault while both were in high school, and Sen. Feinstein (D-CA), after some apparent dithering, refers the matter to the FBI. In a sane, healthy, and normal society, this allegation would finish his nomination; in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, I'm not even sure if this allegation gives some Democratic Senators (Heitkamp, Manchin, Donnelly, Jones) cover to vote against him. Of course, the right would no doubt prefer the story be about how Democrats handled it, and I bet our "liberal" media enables that narrative, since it's got drama and a penis in it. I'd be happy to be wrong about all of this, but I fear I'm not.

Speaking of sickness, immorality, and decadence, big pharma CEO says he had a "moral requirement" to jack up the price of a urinary infection drug by 600%. He also falls back on the old MUST! REWARD! SHAREHOLDERS! saw, and pretends that the choice we face as a civilization is either price-gouging or oblivion, which is what, class? A hostage situation, that's what -- don't prevent me from taking advantage of sick people, or the American economic system gets it! Gosh, how did businesses ever succeed in the days when you'd be ashamed to call price-gouging "moral"?

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says he could, theoretically, mind you, take on our President in an election and win, because he's "smarter." Of course he quickly backtracks, optimistically assessing that anyone other than a beltway insider was crying out for a Dimon 2020 campaign! Seriously, though, would Mr. Dimon be the first to crucify himself on his own pride against our President? No, he would not. (Also, too, he should check his I-earned-my-money routine -- even when comparing himself to the billionaire President who started out with a "small loan" of a million bucks from "Daddy" -- because all Jamie Dimon does, for real, is redistribute other folks' hard-earned wealth upward to himself.)

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), who's now what passes for a moderate Republican in the House, falls all over himself suggesting that staying in an orphanage might be better for kids than getting adopted by gay parents. Politicians ought to remember that high school kids are a) smart and b) not compromised by their employers, because they don't have them. I'm not sure this puts the kibosh on his re-election, though -- yes, New Jersey is one of the few states where being anti-gay is an electoral anchor around your neck, but Mr. Smith hasn't been as obvious about it as former Rep. Scott Garrett, one of the Republicans' few House losses of 2016. As persistent? Perhaps. But not as obvious.

I find the tale of how our President supposedly demanded that his architect remove braille signs from his building's elevators (in contravention of federal law) because "no blind people (were) going to live" there far more instructive than whatever came out in a book this week. If he was just screwing around with the architect, whom he also apparently called "weak," then he's a mean bastard, and if he actually demanded that someone else break the law on his behalf, then he's a coward. And his animus toward regulations "telling him what to do" (cf. all those health code violations at the "second White House," Mar-a-Lago) makes him the emotional equivalent of a 12-year-old boy.

Finally, on the occasion of the demise of the Village Voice after 53 years of greatness -- at the hands of yet another vulture capitalist who swore he'd revive it -- Art Forum treats us to remembrances of the Voice from some of its greatest writers, including Gary Indiana, Robert Christgau, J. Hoberman, and Greg Tate. Mr. Hoberman (I still remember his skeptical Schindler's List review!) calls the Voice "everything I loved about New York" and its writers "an indescribable mix of brilliant, talented, impossible people," and while I stopped loving New York long ago, I still love the work of at least two dozen of these impossible people (I hoped someone would mention Alisa Solomon, who used to be my go-to on gay rights). R.I.P., Voice.

Action: concerning data protection, corruption, and mergers.

Remember a year ago, when Equifax announced they'd been hacked, leaving the personal information of almost 150 Americans exposed? What do you suppose Congress has done about the matter since then? Go find an empty sheet of paper and hold it up, and you'll have your answer. Why, they even tried to cap class-action lawsuit awards to protect corporations like Equifax when they expose your data! But S. 2289, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would help protect good Americans from these little Equifax moments, by regulating credit corporations' cybersecurity, mandating annual inspections thereof, and instituting fines for non-compliance. I'd prefer jail time for these clowns instead of fines, but S. 2289 represents a better impulse after data breaches than "let's ensure no corporations get hurt!" Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans' data by supporting S. 2289.

Meanwhile, S. 3357, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, would engineer a wide swatch of reforms to our political system; some of these include keeping politicians from going into lobbying after they leave office, keeping lobbyists out of our government, getting more transparency out of Congress and federal contractors, and ensuring that regulations prioritize benefits to the people over benefits to corporations. S. 3357 would also make administrative law judges competitive civil service jobs, just like they used to be before our President reclassified them so he could pack immigration courts with his cronies. These and other reforms in S. 3357 will go some way toward ensuring that our elected officials don't spend all day ignoring the popular will and collecting perks from their big corporate donors. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support public integrity by passing S. 3357.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FCC to reject the proposed Sprint/T-Mobile merger, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Sprint and T-Mobile would like you to believe that they need to merge in order to better compete with AT&T and Verizon, but Jesus Mary and Joseph get bigger is not the solution to every problem. And that's not even to say these corporations haven't tried other things! But we know for certain that a bigger Sprint/T-Mobile corporation will not bequeath upon our civilization lower prices, more jobs, or better service. Why, gosh, I'm old enough to remember when economists said more competition resulted in lower prices, more jobs, and better service! I'm sure our corporate kingpins find all that "quaint," but they the only thing they're really good at is (everybody now) redistributing income upward from working people to themselves. And we deserve better than that.

Action: concerning Social Security, taxes, and drilling on public lands.

You've heard of the Republican plan to fund a paid family leave plan with Social Security benefits, resulting in you getting less money when you retire if you've ever used paid family leave? Now it's a real bill! It's S. 3345, with no text or summary presently available at Congress.gov, which could be because, hey, this is a bill that robs your future Social Security benefits if you want paid family leave now. After all, where on Earth else could we possibly get the money to do that? From that $1.7 trillion tax "cut" giveaway to the rich Republicans enacted in December, maybe? Or even from the infinitesimally small payroll tax that would fund an actual paid family leave bill, S. 337, where folks making $50,000 annually would pay $8.50 a month. $8.50 a month! I've seen single servings of coffee that cost more than that! So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Rubio rob-the-future-to-pay-now plan -- doesn't sound very conservative when put like that, does it? -- and Moms Rising still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 337, the FAMILY Act, since that's a real paid family leave bill.

Meanwhile, speaking of that Republican tax scam, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and reject any further tax-cuts-for-the-rich Republicans (or our President) might contemplate. The Senate's talking about more tax cuts like there's no time for that, but don't you believe it -- if the House puts together a bill quickly enough, they'll move heaven and Earth to give more welfare handouts to their cronies. The massive corporate tax cut did not, as our President suggested, put $4,000 in every family's paycheck -- but it did result in a lot of massive stock buybacks, which concentrates power in corporate executive hands, because, yeah, they just don't have enough power already. And that 4% GDP growth from last quarter? You're not seeing any of that in your paycheck, either. You see, this is why America can't have nice things like paid family leave -- because our government cares more about its cronies than its owners, i.e., the American people. We'll just have to learn 'em.

Finally, our Administration plans to auction off two million acres of public land in six Western states so that gas and oil drillers can pollute it create jobs wean America off foreign oil redistribute yet more of our wealth as Americans upward, to themselves. Hence WildEarth Guardians helps you tell our Administration to scuttle these plans. We could go on (and we have!) about how gas and oil drilling spoil clean air and clean water, etc., and spoil wildlife habitat, etc., and these are very important things, but gas and oil drilling also put public lands off-limits to those members of the public who love the great outdoors. Surely it was love of the great outdoors (I doubt he conceived of pollution the way we do now) that moved the first President Roosevelt to start establishing national parks and monuments in the first place. How far we've fallen from him to our current President, the Whiner-in-Chief, for whom now is all and the future is for losers.

Action: concerning the Supreme Court, immigrants in the Army, and offshore drilling.

Our President has nominated D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice Kennedy's retirement. I've received numerous emails exhorting me to tell Republicans to follow the "McConnell Rule" and refuse to consider the nomination until after the people seat a new Congress, but amused as I'd be to attack Mr. McConnell's bald and abject hypocrisy, and aware as I am that literally the only reason we have the President we have is the patently-undemocratic Electoral College, I will not be induced into hypocrisy myself; I called for hearings on Mr. Garland, and the Senate should hold hearings on Mr. Kavanaugh as well. But nothing prevents us from using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) and calling our Senators and telling them to vote the Kavanaugh nomination down. For Judge Kavanaugh will do a lot of damage if the Senate confirms him -- among so many other things, Judge Kavanaugh has written that Presidents should be immune from criminal prosecutions while in office, which is exactly the sort of thing that warms our President's heart, and chills ours.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the AP's report that our Army is kicking out immigrant enlistees without warning or justification -- immigrants who had enlisted in part so that they could get on an expedited path to citizenship, no less! -- Win Without War helps you tell our Defense Secretary, James Mattis, to stop these discharges and investigate previous ones. We've offered an expedited path to citizenship to immigrant enlistees for over a dozen years now (that's right, right-wingers, you can't blame TEH OBUMMERZ!!!! for this one, either), but now, in the name of "zero tolerance" of immigration, we're going to break this promise, too, because AMURIKA!!!!! Mr. Mattis -- who could be getting fired over Twitter soon, being the last remnant of sanity in our President's foreign policy apparatus -- has shown courage in the face of our President's ball-swinging before; with our counsel, he could do so again. (BTW, right-wingers: none of these immigrants are slackers "taking advantage" of our good nature, because nobody thinks putting themselves in the way of bombs and bullets is an "easy" way to get citizenship more quickly.)

Finally, our President has issued an Executive Order loosening regulations put in after the Deepwater Horizon Spillageddon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, like we have no damn memory of anything at all. Because they "kill jobs," I suppose our President will say if he ever gets around to deciding he ought to justify what he's doing, but of course that'd be a lie -- clean air and clean water regulations create jobs for people who help corporations comply with them; what they don't do so well is redistribute income upward to oil and gas drilling bosses. Our President believes bosses are his only real constituency, but in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, becoming a boss doesn't even demonstrate superior talent at managing people or making good products or streamlining processes anymore -- it only demonstrates superior talent at corner-cutting, employee-screwing, and job-killing. Also, you know, the American people are the boss of the President, not the other way around. Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to halt all offshore drilling off America's coasts.

Around the table: in which bad people who do bad things get ostracized by their neighbors.

Hours after a federal court told Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin that he could not impose work requirements and deductibles (among other obstacles!) upon Medicaid, Gov. Bevin guts dental and vision benefits for Medicaid recipients. Another court will probably strike down Mr. Bevin's actions, but he'll cause a lot of damage in the meantime, to people who suddenly can't get health care because he's a drama-loving asshole. We'll see if he can get a clean cup of coffee anywhere in the state after this.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon reveals why voters believe all our President's lies about MS-13: because of decades of "lurid but false urban legends about how a cousin's friend's friend's sister heard about random gang violence aimed at strangers." When I hear that MS-13 has a mere 10,000 members in America (what army has ever conquered a country this size with a force that small, an army also scattered and aimed almost entirely at other immigrants!) I am reminded, as I often have been over the years, of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode in which an Admiral nearly turns the Federation over to fascism based on fear of the Dominion threat, and a Dominion operative reveals to Capt. Sisko that there are exactly four Dominion operatives on Earth at that moment. DS9 spent the '90s warning us about this kind of thing, and we've spent the subsequent two decades ignoring those warnings.

Jesus Mary and Joseph Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) might feel emboldened enough by Joe Crowley's loss in the NY-14 Democratic House primary to make another run at Nancy Pelosi's caucus leadership position. Ms. Pelosi is as corporatist a Democrat as they come, but recall that Rep. Ryan voiced his support for corporate tax cuts last fall, even saying that Democrats "can't just be the party of redistribution of wealth," never mind that Republicans are the party of redistribution of wealth upward. Then again, we learned all we needed to learn about Mr. Ryan when he abruptly became pro-choice on the day he announced his last challenge to Ms. Pelosi. I'm pro-choice myself, but gosh, your values aren't worth anything if they don't inconvenience you every once in a while.

Uh oh: Media Matters finds even more racist dung nuggets in Republican NJ-2 House nominee Seth Grossman's past. I have to say I didn't even know American Renaissance was operating anymore! But the really stunning revelation here is that Mr. Grossman's act is a bit behind the times -- his no-I-really-do-care-about-minorities and we-can't-say-what-we-think-out-loud-anymore-because-we're-not-free act comes from a time when you had to mask your racism a little better, but a certain President has proven you don't have to do that anymore. Mr. Grossman's act would do better in a state other than New Jersey, of course.

Finally, the Washington Post reports on the public shaming certain Administration figures face. Much of it without cuss words -- I mean, "(y)ou ought to be ashamed of yourself! Go look in the mirror!" is a perfectly civilized thing to say in public! Still, to hear Sean Spicer say that "(w)hen we went out, the goal was not to make a spectacle" is to laugh -- people in this Administration do nothing but make a spectacle out of themselves every minute of every day. And Mr. Scaramucci sounds like the kind of fellow who'd complain about your "meanness" if you yelled at him for smearing his feces all over your walls. Isn't there a point at which, if you're that worried that someone urinated in your $80 sushi plate, you need to at least wonder if maybe the problem's you?

Around the table: the real lesson of the PA-18 special election, and other stories.

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times reminds us how little the Republican tax "reform" is doing for workers. Mr. Hiltzik reminds us that if corporations were serious about using their tax cut largess to make workers' lives better, they'd have given permanent raises, not bonuses that disappear almost as fast as they appear. And he also reminds us that Pfizer could reap immense rewards (not just of money, but of prestige) if they actually found a good treatment for Alzheimer's and Parkinsons, difficult as that's proven to be. And that's perhaps more emblematic of our times -- Our Best and Brightest corporations, which our laws supposedly need to "set free" from "regulatory burdens," constantly choose the easy way out when given the chance. And the easy way out now tends to be more lucrative, which is not how it should be in a civilized society.

Ho hum, the Treasury Department projects that our budget deficit will go up to nearly $1 trillion this year! And none of the President's votaries, who wouldn't stop whining about the Obama deficits, will complain about this one, because TEH TAX CUTZ!!!!! Which, as demonstrated in the above paragraph, are doing such great work for America.

Also ho hum, we learn that none other than OMB/CFPB director Mick Mulvaney was the one who approved the Labor Department's disastrous decision to bury the study that said their now-abandoned "tip-stealing" rule would actually result in bosses stealing their workers' tips! I presume one day Mr. Mulvaney will realize he's gone all-in on the wrong side, and suffer appropriately for it. I kid, of course -- Mr. Mulvaney will get wingnut welfare from Fox News forever after all the harm he's done our country. (If only we could buy our cable channels a la carte! Then there might not be any media wingnut welfare to give!)

Here's something genuinely surprising: the Senate Intelligence Committee, currently dominated by Republicans, says (among other things) that we should conduct elections with paper ballots. You and I have been saying this for close to 20 years, but I'm not going to be annoyed about that, or about the fact that their concern isn't machines disappearing votes but Russian meddling -- it's the right prescription, and I didn't think they had it in them to even say so. Now let's see if they actually help fund paper ballots at the state level.

Speaking of things you and I have known for 20 years, Paul Krugman at the New York Times instructs us that the entire Republican program is a "bait and switch" -- they promise all kinds of things to voters, but what they deliver is nothing more than "upward redistribution of income" from workers to bosses. But his analysis is valuable, because it confines itself to the PA-18 election, in which the Republicans tried "three different bait-and-switch strategies" -- roll call! Tax cuts are great! Tariffs will bring back the steel jobs! Democrats hate God and America! -- that failed to deliver victory for Mr. Saccone in a district the President won by nearly 20 points. But, you know, it isn't that the voters are "wising up" (the voters are actually plenty wise already!) so much as that Democrats like Conor Lamb -- who ran against the tax cuts and Obamacare repeal, and who ran for expanding Social Security -- are giving voters someone to vote for, and that's a thing that might even overcome whatever war the President plans to start the last week in October.

Finally, a Dane County Circuit Judge tells Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker that he must hold special elections to fill two vacant state legislature seats, even if he's really, really afraid Republicans will lose both, as they lost a Republican-held (and rather grotesquely-gerrymandered) seat less than two months ago. And who was the gay-humping, baby-killing, flag-burning, socialist-loving Governor who appointed this judge? I won't tell you his name, but his initials are "Scott Walker."

Around the table: concerning working families, corporate taxes, health care, financial regulation, and public lands.

Thinking about picking up Uber or Lyft as a side job? Well, think again: an MIT study finds that Uber and Lyft drivers, once they're done paying all the costs like gas and insurance and repairs that Uber and Lyft don't pay, make a median income of $3.37 an hour. The paper's co-author says "(t)his business model is not currently sustainable," though perhaps he's too polite to say that this model doesn't actually aim to sustain itself per se, but rather aims to redistribute income upward from workers to executives and shareholders.

Ho hum, American corporations spend over $200 billion in stock buybacks over the last two months. But the President's votaries will go to the polls with BUT TEH THOUZANDZ DOLLARZ BONUZEZ!!!!! on their minds, even though some of them would react badly to the news that corporations mainly use their big tax cuts to consolidate their power so that they're less accountable to their shareholders, of whom there are generally many fewer after a stock buyback.

The incomparable Michael Hiltzik notes that the current Administration will spend $33 billion more next year to cover almost nine million fewer Americans, which might strike fiscal conservatives, if any remain, as unconscionably stupid. In a related note, the Genius-in-Chief told the CPAC crowd that his Administration is bringing out "tremendous plans" "at a fraction of the cost that are much better than Obamacare," though he's actually bringing out expanded short-term plans that are cheap because they cover almost nothing -- and siphon off younger, healthier folk from the bigger pools, which makes their health care more expensive. Why does our President tell us cheaper equals better? Because that's how he's made money his whole life.

The equally-incomparable David Dayen reminds us that Republicans and Democrats can't agree on gun control in the wake of the Parkland mass shooting, but can "come together" on gutting financial regulations. Well, that's what "bipartisanship" is all about, after all: Democrats and Republicans coming together to give Republicans whatever they want. Over two-thirds of the biggest banks in America will benefit from "loosened" regulations, with the help of at least three Democrat Senators up for re-election in 2018; why folks like Jon Tester don't figure that "bucking the party" and "bucking the banksters" could actually be the same thing I'll never understand.

Finally, a Project on Government Oversight report finds that our government has been routinely screwing Americans out of royalties when corporations drill for oil and gas on public lands. Our government used to charge about $40 in royalties for ever dollar they do now; how would you feel if that was your money? Oh, wait: it is your money. One of the tricks they use, apparently, is to declare a certain tract of land or oceanfloor "non-viable," and then act all surprised, I guess, when some low-bidding corporation drills the crap out of it and makes a killing. They say if we charge what it's worth we'll kill jobs, but it won't -- it'll only deprive a few corporate executives of some unearned money. Besides, we're the boss here.

Action: fighting efforts to destroy food stamps, Medicaid, and Social Security.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop trying to impose work requirements on food stamps and Medicaid, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. To the folks who say imposing such requirements will induce poorer folks to get work, I have two things to say: 1) slap yourself, and 2) the whole point of food stamps and Medicaid is to give people a hand up when they need it. As it happens, our economy has become so insane that most folks getting food stamps and Medicaid are already working, because their bosses don't pay them enough so they can make ends meet. Maybe instead of telling tall tales about the "laziness" of the poor, we can restrain the rich from redistributing everyone's income upward to themselves? Or pass higher minimum wages, since that's a rising tide that actually does lift all boats? Or would doing these things cut too deeply into right-wingers' need to be in a state of rage all the time?

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject the scam of a "paid family leave" plan offered by Sen. Rubio, then CREDO still helps you do that. Why would we ever reject a paid family leave plan, since we've been fighting for one for years? Well, because Mr. Rubio's plan would take from Social Security to fund it, and we've never fought for weakening one earned benefit for another. This is nothing more than a plan to injure the Social Security benefits you worked for, paid for, fought for, and deserve. And America is a great country that deserves better than our leaders taking the people's will hostage in order to do evil. Also, too, drawing money out of Social Security now cheats today's seniors, now -- meaning that Mr. Rubio also intends to pit senior against new parent. Of course, pitting American against American is how Our Glorious Elites keep their power. The good news? If we resist them, we'll take their power away.

Around the table: vampire elites fear sunlight, and other truths.

Theo Anderson at In These Times suggests, and I hope he's right, that economic populist candidates on the left "don't need the establishment anymore." Admittedly, similarly rosy assessments drew on a rather narrower body of information (a city council race here, a special state election there) than the Virginia and Alabama elections have since furnished. And I rather suspect that anyone who adapts the small donor model can either outraise corporate-funded candidates or fool corporations into wasting even more money on candidates no one really likes.

Ho hum, Durham County (NC) aims to require 48 hours' notice before "spontaneous" protests. In a sane and moral society, proposing such a thing would end the career of whomever proposed it -- how "spontaneous" can you be if you give two days' warning, after all? -- but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, it may take a few days for good Americans to say what do you have to fear/ and you really want your Confederate statues so badly you're willing to urinate all over the First Amendment? before county officials back down.

Good Iranian citizens take to the streets to protest their country's government -- at great risk to themselves, I should add! -- but our "liberal" media uses the event as an excuse to talk to the same morons who always want America to drop a crapload of bombs to "liberate" other countries. These "experts" don't indulge in a whole lot of let the Iranian people decide their own fate, I notice! Think that might be a way of suggesting they're "incapable" of doing so? I suppose I am a bit amused that Our Glorious Elites didn't see these protests coming, just like they didn't see the 1979 revolution coming.

Louise Matsakis at Wired tells us why we should be skeptical of folks squealing ZOMG TEH RUSHINZ WILL DESTROYZ TEH INTERNETZ BY CUTTING TEH UNDERWATER CABULZ!!!!! "One of the estimated 428 undersea cables worldwide is damaged every couple of days," she reminds us. "Nearly all faults aren’t intentional. They’re caused by underwater earthquakes, rock slides, anchors, and boats." Even if someone could cut literally every one of these cables at once (which is what it would take, since cutting one cable merely causes traffic to be re-routed through another one), that still wouldn't affect internet transmissions within nations. Lesson: fight the real enemy -- like, say, Mr. Pai's FCC, which would actually take your internet freedom away from you.

Good news, everyone! Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down key parts of Idaho's "ag-gag" law as unconstitutional. I'm startled to learn that Idaho passed this law after an undercover operation at a dairy corporation uncovered, among other things, sexual molestation of animals by dairy employees. You'd think legislators wouldn't want to be caught in the position of making it harder to uncover sexual molestation of animals by food processing corporation employees. And you'd think more of them would start to get disgusted with having to serve evil all the time. Sadly, this is a little like turning around a cruise ship.

Finally, we learn that worker-owned cooperatives are making a stand against "platform" monopolies like Uber. (A "platform" monopoly controls data in a particular economic sphere -- i.e., Amazon is a platform monopoly in online sales.) You'll not only be reminded that over a third of America gets its banking services via a credit union and over a tenth gets electricity from a co-op, but you'll also learn about no less than eight co-ops making a difference -- including Ace Hardware, which likely has a store near you, and has actually expanded over the past year, unlike other corporations closing stores as they redistribute worker wealth upward to themselves. Why, it gives one hope!

Action: EPA budgeting, medical marijuana, and GMO labeling.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Reps and Senators to oppose any appropriations bill that would cut EPA funding, then Environmental Defense Action still helps you do that. Don't listen to current EPA Administrator Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt tell you that he can streamline his department and save the taxpayer money, because the EPA doesn't have enough money now to catch polluters. And the EPA's job is catching polluters, not coddling them -- catching them ensures we have clean air and clean water, after all, while coddling them just allows more dirty energy CEOs to redistribute more worker income upward to themselves. But the Trump Administration's "Hard Power" budget wouldn't just cut funding on climate change research and state and local air quality monitoring -- it'd also cut funding for things like stopping runoff pollution and protecting our water and our soil from underground storage tank leaks. Really, they're going all out to destroy our government's ability to protect our air and water. So we must go all out to stop them.

Meanwhile, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2920/S. 1374, the CARERS Act, which would ensure that more good Americans get access to medical marijuana. Among other things, the CARERS Act would repeal our federal government's prohibition of medical marijuana, ensure VA doctors can give advice about medical marijuana to our veterans, ease some of the federal restrictions on marijuana research, and protect medical marijuana where it's legal from overzealous federal officials like our Attorney General, who has a thing for stamping out all pot everywhere, for some reason. The Drug Policy Alliance also reminds us that giving folks medical marijuana (despite its reputation, you're not likely to get physiologically addicted to pot) might keep them from going on opioids, which has a considerably higher probability of addicting folks, and an astronomically higher probability of killing them. So, if you don't have medical marijuana, one big reason is big pharma CEOs who get rich off opioids. But they don't get all the say around here.

Finally, you may recall that the "compromise" on GMO labeling Congress passed last year mandated that our Department of Agriculture gets to create a national GMO labeling standard -- which I don't imagine would be any better under a Democratic President than a Republican one, given the corporatists Democratic Presidents have typically installed at agriculture, though they'd probably go to more effort to string us along. Anyway, we've got the President we've got, and we've got the Agriculture Secretary (former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue) we've got, but we've also got the duty we've got as American citizens to make our will plain and unmistakeable, and so Just Label It helps you tell our Department of Agriculture to mandate strong GMO labeling standards. And we want none of this QR code stupidity, where you'd need a smartphone and a special app and an internet connection to establish whether the food right fricking in front of you has any genetically-modified ingredients in it -- we want clear labels, on all of our food. It really isn't too much to ask.

Around the table: gerrymandering, drug treatment, corporate taxes, the "liberal" media, and "respecting" our President.

Steven Rosenfeld says that between gerrymandering and Voter ID, "Republicans have a starting-line advantage...of 10 percent" in state and federal legislative elections. Sadly, we have no data yet describing advantage Interstate Crosscheck also delivers to Republican candidates, who do seem to keep winning despite the relative unpopularity of their ideas. Of course, Democrats could put a stop to all of this, by actually standing up and delivering for voters, but they're too busy sucking up to their big donors and polishing their civility trophies to do that.

David Dayen at The Intercept describes how Google tried to keep fraud artists from exploiting drug addiction treatment seekers and wound up making the problem worse. Big drug treatment corporations were gaming Google's ad system to trap patients in expensive and ineffective care (which makes those patients repeat customers, big corporations are so clever!), so Google stopped all drug treatment center ads, which has the unfortunately effect of keeping patients away from small (and good) treatment centers, which then go out of business. So, essentially, they used a sledgehammer when a ball-peen hammer would have done the job -- oh, and also failed to do the job.

So I'm reading about how "Oklahomans Turn 'Oilfield Prayer Day' Into a Protest Against Big Oil," and I must admit I had a hard time getting past the notion that ZOMG Oklahoma actually has an "Oilfield Prayer Day"? After all, when you cut taxes for oil corporations and then can't even keep schools open five days a week, the completely logical response is to have a "day of prayer" for oil corporations! Oh, and get the Department of Homeland (sic) Security to designate certain protestors as "domestic terrorists." Supply-Side Jesus surely smiles on Oklahoma.

Adam Johnson at FAIR points out that the "liberal" media, when discussing relations with Iran, tend to use the same stock photos of Iranian women walking past an anti-American mural. And here you thought the big newspapers all employed photographers, who could take real photographs of real Iranians! Of course, newspapers are anxious to cut any job that doesn't directly redistribute income upward to executives, hence a lot of reporters take their own photos now, and newspapers rely on stock photos more. And thus we have yet another emblem of the sick, immoral, and decadent society we've become.

Finally, Russian President Vladimir Putin says Americans ought to "respect" their President. Of course a demagogue would say that (and about a fellow demagogue who only got 46% of the popular vote, no less!), but Vladimir Putin really doesn't know America at all, because here in America, we regard the right to criticize the President as a birthright. Besides, how about Donald Trump earn some damn respect? Is that so much to ask?

Action: tax "reform."

President Trump finally released the broad outline of a tax "reform" plan, and it's an even bigger turd sandwich than we thought. We knew it would repeal the Estate Tax and the Alternative Minimum Tax, we knew it would slash corporate taxes, we knew it would deliver a massive income tax cut for rich folks and a piddling tax cut for working families, and we even knew it would raise taxes on certain middle class families in collapsing seven tax brackets down to three. But wait, there's more! The Trump tax plan would get mortgage interest deduction reform exactly wrong -- the home mortgage interest deduction gets abused by folks who buy up craploads of buildings just so they can take the tax break, but the Trump plan would actually only offer that deduction to folks who pay more than $25,000 annually in mortgage interest, meaning working families wouldn't be able to take it anymore and slumlords still could. Any reasonable person would try to accomplish the exact opposite in a reform proposal, but not our President -- his mortgage deduction proposal is perhaps the most despicable tax policy proposal I've ever seen, and anyone who supports it would be, in a sane and moral world, too ashamed to show their face in public.

But none of this has stopped Mr. Trump from claiming that the tax cuts wouldn't benefit him, which, thankfully, seems to more and more Americans to be the offensively absurd statement it actually is -- why, even our paper of record seems to have no patience with tax cut stupidity anymore. Mr. Trump peddles the same lie that repealing the Estate Tax "helps family farms," when the next family farm he finds that was ever destroyed by the Estate Tax will be the first, and he also peddles the lie that corporations just can't compete with other countries and their lower tax rates, but corporations have soaked up nearly all of the increase in income from this economic "recovery" and buy enough corporate welfare tax breaks that they pay a much lower effective tax rate. And I'm sure his minions in the right-wing media will peddle the lie that "everyone will get $1,600." That'd be based on the Tax Policy Center's finding that the average tax break will be $1,600, but averages don't pay the mortgage, and if I get a tax break of $40 and someone else gets a tax break of $3,160, that doesn't mean $1,600 flows into my bank account.

It gets worse. The Senate Budget Committee has drafted a budget proposal that includes the tax cuts, but doesn't offset about $1.5 trillion (over the next decade) of their cost. They're imagining that the Magic Unicorn Power of Tax Cuts will goose up the economy such that they'll collect an extra $1.5 trillion in revenues, but when they don't -- no, it's not even an "if," it's a "when"! -- they'll use the resulting shortfall as an excuse to cut budgetary programs that actually help good Americans, like food stamps, like Medicare, like Medicaid, like Social Security. And of course the House is, as we speak, putting together a budget proposal that would allow them to "fast track" such program cuts. You might call this rule-by-incompetence, but assessing their competence gives them far too much credit: they mean to do us harm, because doing us harm is the way they keep their power. Their plans represent nothing more and nothing less than a massive income redistribution scheme from working families to rich folks, and civilized people cannot, and must not, suffer such evil.

So of course we should be clogging up their phone lines with our will that they must not pass the Trump tax plan, that nearly every aspect of it is evil, that supporting it is absolutely toxic and will bring them down if they're up for re-election next November. But we should also, of course, argue for the world we want. If we bring back the 91% tax bracket and close corporate tax loopholes so that corporations actually pay 35%, executives won't pay themselves outlandish sums and won't let profits sit in corporate coffers to be taxed away, so they'll spend that money hiring people to make stuff. I know that's what'll happen because that's what did happen in the middle of the last century, when we created the greatest middle class that ever walked the Earth. And if we imposed a one percent tax on all Wall Street trading (a.k.a. the "Robin Hood tax," or the "Wall Street sales tax"), we'd raise hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and then we could actually, for example, develop a renewable energy grid in America, one built by, among others, all the fossil fuel workers who would be displaced. We could find other tax policy items to support -- I post about them all the time here -- but let's get our Reps and Senators on the line and make our will known about this matter, right now. Good luck, and God bless.

AUTHOR'S NOTE. See also my tax "reform"-related action alert from early September, which focuses more on the corporate tax angle than today's action alert does.