Thieves in the Temple.

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.

Around the table: meet the new boss, same as the old boss, part 873.

Jesus Mary and Joseph House Speaker wannabe Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) not only peddles the "corporations can't compete because of the tax rate" lie, but also says Democrats "can’t just be the party of redistribution of wealth." This gives right-wingers an opening to say LOOK EVEN TEH DEMOCRATZ!!!!, but American corporations are doing quite well, thank you very much, despite the 35% rate most of them can bribe their way out of paying. But doesn't Mr. Ryan know that Republicans are also "the party of redistribution of wealth"? Republicans just prefer to redistribute wealth upward.

President Trump plans to end President Obama's DACA program, which helps children of undocumented immigrants stay in America and contribute to society -- but will do so six months from now, ostensibly to give Congress time to "fix the problem." Or, perhaps, to give his CEO friends six months to get used to not having these folks around. Still, it's like King Solomon decided to just split the baby in half for real. And deporting folks who had absolutely no say in emigrating to the United States and wouldn't recognize their "home" countries at all remains cruel, but then "cruel" describes Donald Trump's main constituency.

In case you were wondering, no Donald Trump can't simply designate antifa a "terrorist" group. That'd be tough, in theory, because there's no actual hierarchy to the mulititudinous groups who call themselves antifa, but it's also impossible because the State Department can declare foreign organizations as "terrorist" groups, not domestic ones, and our government has no formal mechanism to designate a domestic group as a "terrorist" organization. And that's for the best! It'd too easy to dismiss the other side's arguments merely by brandishing scare words like "terrorist." It'd also be fair to ask exactly whom is "terrorized" by antifa -- from here, it sure looks like folks "terrorized" by antifa might really be terrorized by the quite reasonable fear that they can't actually win arguments on the merits.

Surprise, surprise, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt imposed a 20-month delay on implementation of EPA regulations concerning chemical plant safety not even three months before a plant damaged by Hurricane Harvey started blowing up. And these were the regulations the EPA put together after that big chemical plant explosion in West, TX that was all over the news in 2013! And you likely filed a public comment about those regulations! Why does it seem that the regulations President Trump hates the most are the ones that protect ordinary people the most?

Actual "fake news," er, satirical website runs story claiming a mosque also closed its doors to non-Muslim Hurricane Harvey victims, and gets gobs of attention, despite describing a mosque that doesn't exist and picturing an imam who was nowhere near Texas at the time. Too many fake news outlets are hiding behind "satire," and one day one of them is going to lose a lawsuit because a judge is going to point out that none of this "satire" is actually funny. And then they'll close up shop, and then they'll cast themselves as "free speech martyrs" or something, because self-pity does seem to be an endlessly renewable resource on the right.

Finally, Shaun Richman at In These Times presents "A New Bill of Rights for Workers: 10 Demands the Labor Movement Can Fight for and Win." I'll admit this list is a little mind-blowing -- I hadn't thought of "right-to-work" laws as a violation of the 5th Amendment's takings clause (i.e., its proscription against being "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"), nor had I thought of "scope of bargaining" restrictions as free speech restrictions. I also hadn't contemplated a national campaign against at-will firing, which would (as Mr. Richman says) actually make unions a lot more popular (just as the SEIU's assistance to fast food workers has done very well for their rep, though not increasing their membership).

Action: arbitration fairness, blockades, and unions.

Yesterday the House up and passed H.J.Res. 111, which is yet another "resolution of disapproval," this one aiming to nullify the Consumer Financial Protection's Bureau's new rule preventing banks from putting forced arbitration clauses into customer contracts. Remember: Congress does something quickly when they don't want people to know what they're doing -- I mean, what populist revolution awaits TEH FREEDUMZ OF TEH BANKZ TO KEEPZ TEH CUSTOMERZ OUTZ OF TEH COURTZ!!!!!!? They can call it "meddlesome government regulation" all they want, but I'd rather our government "meddled" in banksters' attempts to force you into an arbitration case they're likely to win, rather than a class action suit that gives you a fighting chance. And personal to those tempted to squeal TEH TRIAL LAWYURZ HAVE TOO MUCH OF TEH POWERZ!!!!!: did trial lawyers crash the economy in 2008, or did banksters? Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to tell your Senators you don't want banks to force you into arbitration if you have a grievance against them, and to reject H.J.Res. 111.

Meanwhile, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell the New York Times and the Washington Post to start covering Israel's blockade of Gaza, which has lately caused the citizens of Gaza to go without electricity for over 20 hours a day on average, which means no sewage treatment, no reliable refrigeration, no adequate hospital care, and certainly no air conditioning in, you know, a desert, in summertime. I know right-wingers who'd happily call a blockade an act of war, but they're strangely quiet about this particular blockade, possibly because "it's only Arabs." (Or maybe "it's only Muslims"; in these times, folks say such things out loud like they're civilized or something.) This blockade has been going on for over a decade, though, which is certainly long enough to learn that it's not bringing you the security you deserve if you're Israel. But if you didn't know it was going on, who can blame you, when our national papers of record have hardly covered it?

Finally, Jobs with Justice helps you tell Nissan to stop intimidating Mississippi factory workers who are mulling joining a union. You won't be surprised at any of the elements of this tale: managers pulling workers aside to gauge union support, management subjecting workers to anti-union films, managers even threatening to fire workers or just up and close the whole plant, all of which would be of some interest to the National Labor Relations Board if President Trump weren't staffing it with anti-labor types as we speak. Plus they bemoan the "interference" of the United Auto Workers! Clearly they must think "United Auto Workers" constitutes a cuss word, and the only thing the UAW might be "interfering" with is an automaker CEO's ability to redistribute more of his workers' hard-earned wealth upward to himself. More than a few car manufacturing corporations already locate plants in the South just so they can get away from unions, so let's help cut off that particular avenue of escape.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: time for another exciting round of "When's That Terrorist Attack Coming?"

Uh oh: Jonathan Chait figures out that the Trump budget assumes that $2 trillion in miraculous economic growth over the next decade will pay for both $2 trillion in tax cuts and enough growth in government revenues that the budget will balance -- but they can't both be true. The Administration's responses are even worse than I imagined they'd be, but let's not congratulate ourselves on the Administration's "$2 trillion math error," because that's exactly the kind of "mistake" evil people make when they're pretty sure circumstances (when's that terrorist attack coming again?) will cover them.

Administration Budget Director Mick Mulvaney insists that his President's multitudinous attacks on federal programs that actually help people actually show compassion for the taxpayer. Now here's why that's a pile of dung: anyone who pays taxes may, theoretically, need to avail themselves of the programs for which those taxes pay -- not just programs ensuring clean air, clean water, and working roads, but also programs like food stamps and Medicaid. In America, we should invest in each other, not redistribute income upward to the undeserving wealthy, as is Mr. Mulvaney's fervent wish.

Jesus Mary and Joseph why is anyone reporting that "Paul Ryan and the White House are barreling toward a tax reform show-down"? There will be no showdown -- only the drama they pretend to have so they can distract the people from the real evil they're about to do. We learn, at least, that the Republicans want to sell their "border tax" by saying it "ends the 'Made in America' tax," which is a pretzel of a notion to try and sell, and where were they when the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act came up for a vote? Filibustering it, of course.

Comcast sends cease-and-desist order to a pro-net neutrality website called Comcastroturf.com, saying the website's name is "confusingly similar to the (Comcast trademark) because it sounds the same, looks the same, and is spelled similarly to Comcast." The good news? If Comcast actually filed a copyright infringement suit against Comcastroturf.com, a judge would laugh it out of court in about 30 seconds. The bad news? Comcastroturf.com still couldn't sue under a federal SLAPP law, because it doesn't yet exist. Still, ain't nothing so pitiful as a big corporation that can't take a joke. Waaaaaaaah!

Finally, the Department of Labor decides it'll implement the 2016 "fiduciary rule" after all -- but activists wonder if the Trump Administration will actually enforce it. Like them, I suspect not -- but failing to protect pensioners from fund managers' selfishness (as the rule would do) would likely invite legal challenges, and trying to junk it as part of Mr. Trump's effort to randomly kill regulations would almost certainly invite more. Plus, sooner or later we'll get a President who'll enforce it, even if he's another center-right Democrat.

Action: fair budgeting, and worker rights.

I've got plenty of action alerts that'll help you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Trump budget: from Food and Water Watch, the Sierra Club, the National Women's Law Center, Americans for Tax Fairness, Social Security Works, Student Debt Crisis, and Moms Rising. Also, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you write your local paper to oppose the Trump budget. But, really, this demands a phone call, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone). You could tell your Congressfolk that slashing Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, anti-pollution enforcement, renewable energy funding, food stamps, public lands administration, and student loan programs is just plain evil -- or you could tell your Congressfolk that in a better budget like the People's Budget, one which would actually create jobs and advance our environment and make taxes fairer, we invest in each other, whereas in the Trump budget we invest in more corporate welfare handouts to Mr. Trump's rich friends.

Meanwhile, the city of London will review Uber's license to operate there at the very end of this month, so Sum of Us helps you ask Transport for London to reject Uber's license, and thus its ability to operate in London, unless and until it respects its drivers' rights, including the right to paid a decent wage for good work. As it happens, London is Uber's only foothold in Europe, largely due to good Europeans' agitation against it; Uber casts itself as the future of the economy, but it's very old-school in one fairly important way: it exploits the labor of its workers on its way to sky-high stock prices and executive compensation -- in short, it redistributes income from its drivers to its executives. And it doesn't have to be that way! Using cell phone apps to get rides is not at all evil in itself, nor is folks making money part-time with the resources they already own. But with its insistence on calling employees "contract workers," and thus avoiding those pesky minimum wage and safe workplace laws, Uber isn't encouraging innovation, but exploiting it. And we don't need to stand for exploitation.

Around the table: health care, cybersecurity, cable news, celebrity candidates, and the absence of protestors.

Former health insurance corporation official says insurers have been defrauding Medicare Advantage program for years. Our taxes fund Medicare Advantage, as you may know, but private health insurance corporations deliver the service; nobody could have predicted that privatization of a part of Medicare could possibly lead to the same kind of overcharging you routinely see with Medicare! The only thing a private corporation does "better" than our government? Redistribute income from regular folks to executives.

President Trump finally delivers on a promise to revamp our cybersecurity efforts -- and his Executive Order doing so basically repeats President Obama's efforts. But they're different, you see, because now Mr. Trump can put his name on them, and thus make them YUGE and BYOOTIFUL! You'll be so cybersecure, you'll get tired of it! You'll beg President Trump for another ransomware attack, you'll be so bored with all the security! The new order is apparently better than the order his Administration tried to write in February, but let's not grade Mr. Trump on a curve.

The Fox News (sic) Channel is apparently starting to slip in the cable news ratings, thanks in part to its pronounced apathy toward all the latest Trump scandals. But I'm not sure this would be so if a certain 8 pm ratings giant were still at Fox, and I'm not going to celebrate just because other bad cable news networks are starting to win by following the sensationalism (even if it just so happens to be running in the other direction for once). And Fox has largely replaced its Trump non-coverage with even worse junk news. So, yeah, this is still fecal all the way down.

Ryan Teague Beckwith at Time tells us how "The Rock's Presidential 'Campaign' Shows We've Learned Nothing." Mr. Beckwith is of course concerned that the "liberal" media keeps giving celebrities soft coverage that tells us nothing about what they'd be like in an actual leadership role, but I read Mr. Johnson's comments (particularly about "disagreement") and I see another way for Our Glorious Elites to foist a corporate center-right Democrat upon us. Yes, the Rock is better-spoken and more sympathetic than Mr. Trump, but let's not let that be the only bar he ever has to clear.

Finally, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross praises the utter lack of protests greeting Mr. Trump in Saudi Arabia, a country that arrests, beats, and kills protestors. I was tempted to slam him for his utter cluelessness about Saudi Arabia's bad habits, too, or about the fact that his Administration demands protest every second of every hour of every day, but the worst thing about his remarks is that he seems to think the absence of people with "a bad placard" in the street is a good thing, an opinion I'm sure he held, and voiced, during all those Tea Party protests in 2009. If he likes police states so much, maybe he should stay in Saudi Arabia.

Penny Rants for Sunday, April 16, 2017: hifalutin right-wingers, foolish liberals, and media "centrism."

Mr. Trump's OMB Director, Mick Mulvaney, has received a lot of well-deserved flak for saying he's against redistributing income from rich folks to poor folks and that deficits don't matter when cutting taxes, but you know what strikes me most about his words, as quoted in the link above? How freaking hifalutin he sounds -- when he suggests programs like Social Security and Medicare are "inefficient" and drops phrases like "wealth transfer" into his spiel, he sounds exactly like the smartypants egghead that is the cherished right-wing stereotype of liberals. And we live in a decadent time when folks get rich mainly by constructing elaborate income-redistribution-upward schemes, but we'll set that aside for now. Though Mr. Mulvaney sounds so "wonky" because he thinks right-wing politics plus the appearance of intelligence gives him an edge, Trump votaries still have to work harder to convince themselves that the Trump Administration is just-like-us when Trump mouthpieces sound like they think they're so much smarter than them.

Republicans dodged a bullet in a special House election in Kansas's 4th this past Tuesday, but you wouldn't know it from all the Jeff George Victory Laps they're doing over there, and I don't just mean President Trump, who acts like it wasn't a sign of weakness that Republicans had to drag their President into a special election in freaking Kansas. No, dig the arrogance of the winner, Kansas state Treasurer Ron Estes, who really should be parlaying his statewide office into a Senate gig, not a House gig -- "we really showed the pundits tonight"? Without the infusion of huge amounts of Republican money and effort, in a seat Republicans typically win by 30 points, Mr. Estes would have been toast. Democrats, for their part, are learning nothing from the experience. Their only path back to power in Congress is through Berniecrats like Mr. Thompson, just as the Republicans' only path back to power in 2010 was through the Tea Party, but Democrats don't want that, since it'll make sucking up to corporate donors at the altar of "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" harder.

National Democrats are, of course, banking (so to speak!) on a victory in Georgia's 6th, another deep-red Republican district (albeit one which went for Mr. Trump by less than two points) holding a special election. But what is the one thing we're constantly hearing about their nominee, Jon Ossoff? That he's raised a crapload of money, that's what. Because what energizes voters (particularly populist voters) more than hearing a candidate's raised a lot of cash? Democrats will lose this race. How do I know? Because Mr. Ossoff's still running ads saying he'll "work with anybody" and bring "high-tech" jobs to his district and fight wasteful spending. I suppose you win a red district by "sounding like a Republican," but you take it too far if you actually adopt Republican positions, or let Republicans set the terms of the debate. Case in point: his best ad (largely about foreign policy issues) doesn't mention his work exposing ISIS's sex slavery in Iraq. I'd have run that ad first, so that when Republicans fired back with ZOMG HE WORKEDZ FOR TEH AL JAZEERAHZ!!!!, they'd look like the petty fools they are.

"Liberal" media outlets are starting to declare that Mr. Trump's more recent flip-flops represent a "move to the political center." Ah, no: Mr. Trump isn't moving toward the "center," but toward the conventional wisdom of Our Glorious Elites, which isn't the same thing. Where's the center on health care, for example, if you judge by how the majority of Americans feel? Single-payer, that's where. Where's the center on bank regulation in America -- again, judging not by what the media and the political parties say, but what the people say? We might best describe the center as "people want banksters to stop hurting them for personal gain." Clearly our honeymoon with the "liberal" media is over; they've decided Mr. Trump is "normal" now, and they're ready to go back to pushing sensationalist drama and right-wing policy prescriptions for everything 24-7. The good news? It doesn't matter, and they don't matter -- the only people who matter are the American people, and, frankly, Our Glorious Elites need us more than we need them.

Action: Medicare-for-all, law and order, and consumer protection.

Congressional Republicans pulled the American Health Care Act from a vote last week, after it became obvious that it wouldn't get enough votes to pass. So how about we play offense, and use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing on a cellphone) to call our Reps and Senators and demand a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health care system? Rep. Conyers (D-MI) has introduced H.R. 676 again, and Sen. Sanders (I-VT) has pledged to introduce his own version of a Medicare-for-all bill in the Senate. If you think your Reps and Senators are just too far gone, you could remind them that Medicare runs extremely well, and you could also remind them that America spends twice the money per capita on health care that single-payer country Canada does -- and nearly three times the money that socialized-medicine country England does. My guess is that today's CEOs (whom too many of our Congressfolk imagine are their real constituency!) are not so devoted to "free" market economics that they'll pass up an opportunity to spend less money on health care than they do now.

Meanwhile, after Florida state Attorney Aramis Ayala declared that she would no longer seek the death penalty in any capital cases, Florida's ultra-right-wing Governor, Rick Scott, is trying to remove her from a high-profile murder case. You may well be wondering where state and federal law stands here, and happily Jordan Smith at The Intercept tells us -- the Florida law allowing a Governor to replace a prosecutor is rather broad and vague, while prosecutors typically have the discretion to seek sentences they deem appropriate (they'll have to defend their choices in court, after all). Also, the U.S. Supreme Court has not only found Florida's death penalty scheme unconstitutional, but has also ruled that state governments can't mandate the death penalty in laws. Yet Mr. Scott is, surprise, surprise, all hot to mandate the death penalty for someone, like he's afraid everyone will find out he's never gotten 50% in an election or something. So Color of Change helps you tell Mr. Scott to drop his crusade to replace Ms. Ayala.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell Congress and the President to stop their incessant attempts to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB has helped nearly 30 million Americans get their money back from scammers, and you'd think that would be popular, right? I mean, no one likes getting their pocket picked! But you'd be wrong -- American banksters, those utter parasites who do nothing for our country and who spend all their time figuring out how to redistribute your wealth upward to themselves, are hot to get rid of the CFPB, all the while yelling REGULASHUNZ BAD!!!! Of course, without the CFPB, we might never have known that Wells Fargo was opening up customer accounts (and charging the fees that come with those accounts) without their customers' knowledge, and I remember everyone, regardless of political ideology, being against that. It's enough to make you wonder if most politicians don't care about doing wrong, but only about getting caught doing wrong.

Oh, and the House plans to vote today on S.J.Res. 34, the anti-internet privacy bill; if you didn't call your Reps yesterday, you'll want to call them today.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, March 22, 2017: the battle to win hearts and minds in America.

New York Times house conservative David Brooks has won a lot of plaudits from the left for describing President Trump's budget thusly: "He wants to cut any part of government that may seem soft and nurturing, like poverty programs. He wants to cut any program that might seem emotional and airy-fairy, like the National Endowment for the Arts. He wants to cut any program that might seem smart and nerdy, like the National Institutes of Health. But he wants to increase funding for every program that seems manly, hard, muscular and ripped, like the military and armed antiterrorism programs. Indeed, the Trump budget looks less like a political philosophy and more like a sexual fantasy." That's entirely accurate, of course, but, ah, read the whole column in which this insight appears, which is called "Let Bannon Be Bannon!" It's bad enough that Mr. Brooks thinks that Mr. Bannon is a populist, that he has a coherent governing philosophy, that a coherent governing philosophy is automatically superior to governing by the seat of your pants, and that Mr. Trump is actually governing by the seat of his pants. But, really, would Steve Bannon have come up with something more nurturing than the "hard power" budget? I suspect the next houseplant that man grows will be his first. And I bet he tries to make it grow faster by yelling at it.

Cracked columnist Christina H. writes about "What Changed My Mind" about being a "Hardcore Conservative," by which she means she used to be a stereotypical far right-winger who'd call Democrats "Demoncrats" and assume that liberals were all oversexed. Her condemnation of Hollywood on that last notion (among so many others!) is entirely appropriate, but here's the sentence you really need to attend: "(w)e all know nobody likes to admit they are wrong, but did you know nobody likes to admit they were until very recently wrong?" And thus she reminds us that usually we change our worldview far enough out of sight that we can hide it, if only to save our own egos. She also reminds us that conversations we overhear are more likely to change us than conversations we've invested ourselves in, that the stories we tell while we're just shooting the breeze do a lot more to change us than well-constructed arguments do, and that the folks "on your side" can do more to change you than the folks "on the other side," which is true even though it's regrettable that we describe folks in terms of "sides" at all. This is all important information -- it may even be enough to make you feel comfortable with the idea that you do your best and God does the rest.

Matt Harbowy at Medium writes "On Transgendered Bathrooms -- Or, as Most People Call Them, 'Bathrooms.'" I think he's actually quite generous to say that the brouhaha over transgendered folks in bathrooms derives, at the legislative level, from "the fears and tortured psyches of legislators trying to 'imagine' (since they typically have no direct experience with homosexuals of either gender) what it means if you put either homosexual or transgendered individuals into...the single gendered bathroom of their own childhood" -- I say "generous" because I tend more toward thinking these legislators are merely manipulative and heartless. But it's true that gendered bathrooms at schools are little more than "an opportunity for male bullies to be out of the watchful eye of mostly female teachers and supervisors," and it's also true that converting multi-urinal and multi-stall gendered bathrooms into single-stall/single-urinal non-gendered water closets would pretty much end the controversy. I think this idea (which would only be marginally less "efficient" than gendered bathrooms are now, especially when these are hardly ever filled to capacity) is exactly the kind of thinking this country needs -- though our political class wouldn't want it, since the result would be less drama, not more.

Finally, I wasn't waiting for this, but Hillary Clinton says she's "ready to come out of the woods" after her Election Day loss to Donald Trump -- and of course she's preaching about Americans finding common ground. The Clintons virtually invented the sport of Democrats and Republicans coming together to give Republicans whatever they want, so one could be excused, I think, for feeling something less than enthusiasm at this prospect. Besides, we not only can "ignore, or turn a cold shoulder to someone because they disagree with us politically," we must -- shame and ostracization are the tools of civilized people, even if some folks wield them in an uncivilized manner. Still, as it happens, Americans do have a lot of common ground: we like privacy, we like our right to dissent, we like good pay for hard work, we like clean air and clean water, we like not dying from health care problems, we like good government programs that deliver what they promise for our taxes -- and we hate corporate crime, media consolidation, media sensationalism, and "free" trade deals that let corporations outsource our jobs and nullify our laws. Of course, none of this lends itself well to a "bipartisan" "consensus" among Our Glorious Elites who only want to redistribute more of our wealth upward to themselves.

Action: internet freedom, fair redistricting, and fuel economy.

The FCC's Open Internet order -- the one that finally enthroned net neutrality as a guiding principle of our internet, the principle that ensures that you, and not some corporation, get to decide where you want to go on the internet -- is a little over two years old now. But incoming FCC Chair Ajit Pai has not hid his jones for getting rid of it. He says he favors a free and open internet, but that's only because he knows better than to say "I want an internet where corporations get to feed you half a dozen items of junk news as pop-up ads so you'll have to wait five minutes to see the page you want to see!" And some folks still say any government intervention in anything equals tyranny and oppression, but of course, the government is our government, and is supposed to work for us, and government intervention has actually been known to increase freedom -- and for more people than just a Congressperson's big donors! The FCC's phone number is, of course, 1.888.CALL.FCC; I don't have a direct number for Mr. Pai, possibly because he really doesn't want to hear from you. Call anyway. We don't get anything from our "leaders" unless we demand it.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania state Senators Boscola (D-18) and Scavello (R-40) have introduced SB 22, which would amend the state constitution to abolish the practice of state legislatures redrawing districts every 10 years, and instead give that task to a five-member commission, four of whom would be the Majority and Minority party leaders in each house, while the fifth of whom would be a non-office holder and commission Chair selected by the other four (or by the state Supreme Court if the four can't agree on a suitable Chair). From here we have a fighting chance (and all I want is a fighting chance!) to get competitive legislative districts where politicians might actually have to serve their constituents to get re-elected, rather than a situation where incumbents can't be dethroned except in case of electoral catastrophe, and we don't want the kind of situation that causes an electoral catastrophe. And who likes the kind of gerrymandering that puts narcissists in power? No one -- except the narcissists who happen to have the power. Hence Common Cause helps you tell your PA state legislator to support SB 22, and thus support fair redistricting in Pennsylvania.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk and the EPA not to scuttle hard-won fuel economy standards enacted by the Obama Administration, then Consumers Union still helps you do that. Any right-winger who tells you that regulations mandating that cars get better gas mileage are "a burden on working families" really deserves a punch in the nose -- the Obama fuel economy standards ensure that working families pay less for gas than they did before, and no one thinks it's a "burden" to pay less for gas. I suppose right-wingers will also claim that TEH REGULASHUNZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!!!, but the next time they actually try to prove that claim will be the first. We know that regulations actually create jobs, not only for the people who have to (in this example) design more fuel-efficient cars, but also for the people who have to manufacture them. The only people who get "hurt" are the executives who can't redistribute worker wealth upward to themselves more easily. But they don't get all the say around here.

Action: free speech, clean air, whistleblower protections, and endangered species.

Hoo boy: the Arizona state Senate passes SB 1142, which would, get this, allow the state to seize the assets of anyone who plans or participates in a protest that could turn violent. Asset forfeiture is an unconstitutional blot on our nation's soul already, and it shouldn't be difficult to imagine how an agent provocateur, or a group of them, could make a peaceful protest go south right quick. But if you aren't being violent at a protest, why should we allow the state punish you? SB 1142's supporters want you to think that anyone who protests Mr. Trump is a paid provocateur -- a profound insult to our patriotism, and you're free to remind them of that! But folks who whine that we've-gotta-do-something-anything also expose themselves as weaklings. And if they don't like protests, maybe they should stop giving the people the back of their hand. SB 1142 goes to the state House now; state House Speaker J.D. Mesnard's phone number is 1.602.926-4481, and Majority Leader John M. Allen's number is 1.602.926.4916. You want more phone numbers? Here they are. Give 'em hell.

H.J.Res. 36, the "resolution of disapproval" that would roll back the Obama Administration's rules curbing methane emissions on public lands, passed the House, but still awaits Senate approval. If you're scratching your head wondering why anyone would think more methane emissions on public lands would be a goodthing, well, you're not alone. Methane emissions, as you know, pack a bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions do, and "flaring" them on public lands not only pollutes those lands, but it represents energy that could be captured and used, and it represents royalties from capturing that energy and using it that the public could be earning. Since it is, you know, our land. But that's our Republican party -- objectively pro-pollution, objectively pro-wasting natural resources, objectively pro-wasting taxpayer money, as long as these things distribute more of your money upward to their big donors. So, yeah, H.J.Res. 36 warrants a phone call to your Senators today.

Meanwhile, Republicans aren't content with just unleashing more pollution -- they're also aiming to gut the Securities and Exchange Commission's whistleblower program, which has, over the last few years, recovered billions of dollars -- taxpayer dollars, I might add -- from fraud artists. If you're scratching your head wondering why anyone would want to make it harder to catch corporate criminals -- well, actually, you've already figured out that it explains itself. Any big campaign donor -- especially in an age that not only doesn't reward work but seems to hold contempt for work -- might be a corporate criminal, and we can't have any sunlight shining on that, or else some of these Congressfolk might actually lose their jobs. Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell Congress and the President that to reject any attempt to gut SEC whistleblower protections. After all, Congress may pretend it didn't happen, but we all remember that banksters crashed our economy in 2008, and though they feel no shame over that, we're not about to let it happen again.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to gut the Endangered Species Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Now that we have a bill (H.R. 717, the so-called Listing Reform Act, always they burn down your house and call it "reform"!), we can guess at the specific aims of Endangered Species Act destruction: H.R. 717 would mandate that government agencies count the financial costs of protecting endangered species, and would even let more unscrupulous government agencies (uh, like the ones we have now!) put "lost" oil and gas profits or "lost" local tax revenue ahead of any other consideration! Because that's the civilization they want -- one that makes every decision not just based on money, but based on short-term gains. That all doesn't sound very conservative, does it? I mean, wouldn't an actual conservative would insist on taking the long view? Of course, our President and our Congress aren't conservatives -- they're reactionaries. But reactionaries don't get all the say. Not in my America.

Around the table: Charles Grassley gets an earful at a townhall, and other tales.

Julie Chinitz at the OurFuture blog tells us the Republicans' real aim in pursuing Obamacare repeal is to gut Medicaid. We shouldn't think of Medicaid as being "for other people" the way we do, since we're all a few bad days at work away from needing it. And a lot of Trump voters, as you know, rather like Medicaid, and it works pretty well, which is undoubtedly why Republicans want to sacrifice it to (as Ms. Chinitz puts it) "a redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle-income to the rich."

President Trump plans to deport anyone who crosses the Mexican border back to Mexico, regardless of where they actually come from. Doesn't he know that those brown people he hates also sometimes hate each other? I kid, of course; the man doesn't care. Plus he plans to deport anyone who's committed a crime, but he's going to include "crossing the border" as a crime, meaning when he tells you he'll be discerning on this matter, that he's lying. I guess all I can say is good luck with that.

Surprise, surprise, ProPublica and USA Today find that the Orlando (FL) school district stashes low-performing students at charter schools -- and then doesn't count them as dropouts when they drop out of those charter schools. Remember, when you read about matters like this, that the hysteria over "Our Failing Schools" was largely manufactured by the right, and that "alternative" schools are largely a way of funneling taxpayer money to some politician's cronies.

Now this is funny: an Iowa pig farmer tells Sen. Charles Grassley at a townhall that repealing the Affordable Care Act would "create one big death panel." You may recall (as Mr. Peterson clearly does!) that Mr. Grassley was the Senator pushing those death panel claims back in 2009. I presume Mr. Grassley will ignore his constituents on Obamacare, since that's the price Republicans extract from him for actually doing decent oversight at other times.

Finally, Donald Trump's getting attention for finally denouncing anti-Semitism, but his statement that "I hope they catch the people" responsible for recent bombing threats against Jewish community centers. "I hope they catch the people"? Not we will catch those responsible and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law? I guess if Dear Leader isn't emotionally-invested in something, he doesn't swing his balls about it.

Around the table: Presidential tantrums and small business truths.

Ho hum, Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post finds over a dozen claims made by President Trump at his recent Florida rally to be utter crap. Mr. Trump takes credit for jobs corporations were already bringing back, he pretends refugees come here "unvetted" when their vetting actually takes years, he pretends statistical outliers in Arizona and Chicago are trends -- if Mr. Obama had done these things, the flaming-dog-poop crowd would be howling. (And note well that he misses an opportunity to praise his Vice President for an actual decline in Obamacare premiums in Indiana, where Mr. Pence was until lately Governor. Think that's an accident?)

Dean Baker at TruthOut views a Congressional plan to deny states the right to allow private-sector workers to join public pension funds as "More Republican Handouts to the Rich." Mr. Baker has had pretty incredible message discipline recently, and he's right that most Republican policy initiatives seek only to redistribute income upward to their rich cronies. Sadly, the Obama Administration Labor Department's ERISA ruling enables Republicans to look like they're protecting worker retirement security, which makes you question Democrat motives, if not Democrat common sense.

Two Huffington Post writers make a point after my own heart: that while the President "distracts the public with his angry tweets," Congressional Republicans are rolling back federal regulations with the Congressional Review Act. Funny how that works, eh? It has long seemed to me that the CRA might actually be unconstitutional -- agencies have to write regulations to fit specific legislative aims, after all, and what if Congress strikes a rule that actually does that? In the meantime, we should again question Democrat smarts/motives if they finalize so many regulations within the 60-day window within which Congress can pass a CRA resolution.

Upwards of three Seattle-area restaurants institute a "minimum wage surcharge," apparently a reaction to Seattle's new $15/hour minimum wage. Because, as we know, these are the only three restaurants in the entire area! Plus, if they're not collecting sales taxes on their little surcharges, they're also breaking state law. It's enough to make you think that accepting the people's will, which clearly supports a decent minimum wage, is much better than throwing a tantrum about it.

Finally, we learn that a veterinarian co-op can help small business vets overcome a great many obstacles. Larger, corporate veterinary chains can pay less for supplies and machinery in bulk, but co-ops can give independent vets a lot of that bargaining power, too. Co-ops can also provide educational opportunities and a sense of community (that last item helped along by social networking, which, again, suggests that social media have gotten a bad rap in the "fake news" era). I wish them the best of luck.

Action: "right to work," the Endangered Species Act, and FBI harassment of protestors.

Bad news, folks: H.R. 785, the National Right to Work (sic) Act, would amend the National Labor Relations Act and the Railway Labor Act to permit workers to refrain from paying dues to their union -- while still receiving the benefits of being in a union. H.R. 785 would thus hamper unions' ability to actually bargain for better pay and working conditions and redress grievances with employers. Folks love to say why should I be compelled to pay for something, apparently unaware that they pay for a lot of things with their taxes for which they'd otherwise choose not to pay -- like the Iraq War, for instance. And I have never argued for a check-off box with which I can simply "choose not to pay" for things I don't like, because I understand that I have representatives for that. But President Trump's spokeshack, Sean Spicer, has indicted that he'd like to see a "right-to-work" bill passed because it would be in "the best interest of job creators." Sadly, when he said "job creators," he didn't mean you, though you, with your buying power, are the greatest job creators in the history of the planet -- he meant the executives who bend over backwards to destroy jobs so they can redistribute worker income upward to themselves. I think H.R. 785 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators.

Meanwhile, the Senate has begun to hold hearings on how best to destroy the Endangered Species Act. Of course, they don't call it that, because if they said "we want to destroy the Endangered Species Act," they'd be very unpopular and might risk losing re-election even in heavily-gerrymandered districts, so they say they're "modernizing" the Act. But tell them you'd like to "modernize" the Constitution and see how they react! Too often we hear from ESA opponents that it just costs too much money to save species from oblivion; where do we begin describing what's wrong with that? By reminding folks that a whole lot of good works in America cost money? By comparing ESA enforcement with, oh, just to pull an example out of the air, the cost of the B-35 fighter jet that Lockheed has tried to get combat-ready for literally a quarter of a century? By asking "costs whom," and invariably coming up with the answer "corporate executives"? By reminding folks that America is the can-do country and whining about the cost of being civilized isn't very American? Really, there are so, so many places to begin. I think the Endangered Species Act also deserves a phone call to your Reps and Senators.

Finally, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force has apparently been questioning Standing Rock protestors, which of course was not at all intended to intimidate the Water Protectors, not at all! Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell your Senators to question FBI Somehow-Still-Director James Comey about the questioning of peaceful protestors. You'd think the JTTF would have more to do than find folks protesting our government and pretend like they're terrorists, but apparently they don't, for they've also apparently harassed Keystone pipeline protestors, Black Lives Matter protestors, School of the Americas Watch protestors, Occupy Wall Street protestors, and Tea Party protestors. OK, I made up that last one -- seriously, Tea Partiers? They're certainly no threat to the status quo! -- but they've messed around with the others. It's enough to make you think our government wants terrorists to strike, so they can use that as a pretext to harass all those good Americans who risk their lives and livelihoods in order to make us a more perfect union.

Around the table: from health care lies to dystopian imaginings.

Julie Chinitz at the OurFuture blog offers "Five GOP Health Care Buzz Phrases You Need to Inoculate Yourself Against." These are: "block grant for Medicaid" (better described as "destroying Medicaid"), "health savings accounts" (better described as "tax shelters for the rich") "high-risk pools" (a.k.a. "high-premium pools,") "per-capita caps for Medicaid" (i.e., "putting limits on your health care"), and "premium support" ("destroying Medicare" or "making seniors' health care cost more"). Seems Democrats could run about a thousand ads against this crap; guess how many they'll actually run.

In a related note, Margot Sanger-Katz at the New York Times comes up with at least two other ways to describe Republican health care proposals: they'd "redirect money from poor to rich," and they'd "chang(e) the winners and losers." I prefer "redistribute" to "redirect," but I'm glad to hear some version of it from our Paper of Record. And it wasn't that long ago that Republicans complained about government "picking winners and losers." What really upsets them is the prospect that government might prevent them from picking their cronies to be the winners.

Janine Jackson at FAIR finds some dirt on Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch: he not only ruled against a cancer survivor's request to work from home while her workplace was besieged by a flu epidemic, but he also said that laws and rules protecting the disabled shouldn't "turn employers into safety net providers for those who cannot work." That's pedantry at best and cruelty at worst, and it's not too much to ask that our next Supreme Court justice come to us without these faults.

Thea Riafrancos and Daniel Denvir write about "moving past" identity politics. To me, the sword that slices the Gourdian knot of identity politics is the fight for economic justice -- anyone can identify with it, no one needs to feel left out by it, and attaining it also makes fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia a lot easier. Of course I find the whole notion of "throwing blacks overboard so we can attract white voters again" to be quite stupid -- it's as if evil people want us to think that's the only choice. But we Americans can make our own choices. That's why we rock.

Cade Metz criticizes Mark Zuckerberg for offering "A World Divided By Facebook" "More Facebook." Always they blame the wrong people! Facebook hasn't divided our world -- Our Glorious Elites have divided our world, and they've divided it a lot harder as their moral and intellectual bankruptcy has become more and more obvious. If you think Facebook is unprecedented in its ability to spread lies, then you've never heard of a whisper campaign, and if you blame Facebook for "help(ing) Americans construct parallel factual universes," then you've never heard of Fox News.

Finally, David Frum describes how Donald Trump could "Build an Autocracy" in America. I don't see the "familiar expansive magic" of "big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits" as a sure thing -- surely he remembers the, ah, mixed economic record of his old boss, George W. Bush -- but Mr. Frum does a great job imagining the banality of an American autocratic state (and most dystopian thinkers shrink before that task!) as well as describing how incrementally this autocratic state could creep up on us. These are Interesting Times, so I guess I'll have to say it: David Frum's article is essential reading.

Around the table: arts funding, "free" trade, voter "fraud," Standing Rock, and triumphs for the residents of Richmond, CA.

What's "The Irony of Trump's Attack on the National Endowment for the Arts," according to Henry Godinez at TruthOut? Why, the fact that so much NEA funding goes to the very same distressed rural areas that support Mr. Trump, of course! Which I imagine is all part of the plan -- take from rural Americans, blame Democrats, enrage rural Americans further, rinse, repeat. If you are a rural American, of course, you might want to say something to your Reps and Senators about it.

Dean Baker reminds us Our Glorious Elites are having a very, very hard time coming to grips with the fact that the American people understand full well what "free" trade deals do to us. Hence the lies about automation, the booga-booga about China, and the bait-and-switch where Our Glorious Elites talk about American support for "trade" as a way of suggesting Americans support "free" trade, which is a bit like trying to prove Americans all love bestiality by saying Americans all love sex. Also, too, Americans hate "free" trade because it's the most obvious way politicians try to "redistribute income upward."

Ari Berman says the Trump Administration's utter lies about "voter fraud" "Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression." I know what you're saying: will lead to? But "voter fraud" hysteria leads to bills outlawing same-day registration and tightening Voter ID requirements, all while we're waiting for someone, anyone, to win a lawsuit against the Interstate Crosscheck database, which I presume is inevitable if someone will but file it. (Oh, and "(t)his morning, on this show, is not the venue to lay out all the evidence" should have ended Stephen Miller's political career, but it won't, because ours is a sick, immoral, and decadent society led by a sick, immoral, and decadent Administration.)

American military veterans join the fight against the Dakota Access pipeline, by literally standing between Native protestors and the governments that aim to remove them. Will right-wingers assault the patriotism of these brave veterans? I kid -- of course they will, because when you're morally and intellectually bankrupt, all you have left is to defend the "leader" of your "team," no matter whom you insult in the process.

Finally, because it can't all be bad news, a blue-collar California town stands up to Chevron and builds a better future for itself. The Richmond Progressive Alliance -- an actual populist coalition, versus the fake ones running our government at present -- has been around for a dozen years; its victories include getting a supermajority on the city's Council and leveraging a threat to use eminent domain to force banksters to renegotiate mortgages into solid rent controls for working families. I wish them luck in their future endeavors -- particularly against Chevron, which makes residents because of its own laziness.

Around the table: for whom are "free" markets free? And other matters.

Republican-dominated North Carolina state legislature suddenly calls emergency session and strips the incoming Democratic Governor of many powers. Give the good folks of North Carolina credit, though -- they were out protesting in enough force, on very short notice, that they made their will known (and a few got arrested). This is the kind of power grab a political party executes when it can't win arguments anymore. And we'll be seeing a lot of this kind of crap at the federal level fairly soon.

Ho hum, another election setback, another "liberal" media "analysis" suggesting Democrats should move to the right -- this time by giving up on black folks to win white folks back. Instead of, you know, getting white voters to turn their anger away from folks of color and toward their real enemies, the corporatists and their lackeys in politics and media -- which, to be frank, doesn't seem that big a chore to me. Also, too, what was Mr. Trump's "winning" percentage of the popular vote? 46 percent, a smaller percentage than three of the last four Republican Presidential nominees (and he barely outpaced the fourth, John McCain in 2008), which means his "ideas" on appealing to white voters aren't that persuasive.

Dean Baker, in an excerpt from his new book provocatively entitled Rigged, reminds us that "free" markets are really only free for the folks making the most money. He also punctures the repugnant argument advanced by wealthy "free" marketeeers and "free" traders, that folks who want to hold on to their manufacturing jobs "don't care" about alleviating poverty in the rest of the world. As if those are the only two choices! The folks making these arguments could pay themselves less, or corporations could stop meddling in the affairs of the rest of the world and thus allow the world's workers more say in their lives. That's at least two more choices. (Kudos, again, to Mr. Baker for referring to "income redistribution" as it actually happens in the world -- that is, upward, from workers to Our Glorious Elites.)

At long last, a coalition of good Kansans has come together to vigorously oppose the mindless tax-cutting program of Gov. Sam Brownback. But I'd sure go a lot harder than they do! That top income bracket shouldn't start at $40,000 a year, even if that's what it used to be -- it should start at a considerably higher income and be at a considerably higher rate. And sales taxes, frankly, shouldn't even exist -- taxing consumption always hurts the people who have to consume (i.e., the poor) more than the people who don't (i.e., the rich). Still, it's always good to see people coming together to make taxes fairer.

20 state Attorneys General file a lawsuit against six pharmaceutical corporations for price-fixing. The suit centers mainly around two generic drugs, one antibiotic and one anti-diabetic, with prices for the former drug over 90 times higher in April of 2014 than they were just six months earlier. Prices don't go up like that because of "free" markets, despite the "free" marketeers crowd telling us that giving corporations whatever they want keeps prices down, when five seconds of thought would tell you it doesn't. The even better news? This particular lawsuit might only be the first price-fixing lawsuit over generic drugs. I wish them the best.

Finally, Liza Bayless at Yes! magazine describes the efforts of Lankenau Hospital in southeastern Pennsylvania to feed its patients with food grown on an on-campus organic farm. Lankenau sits in Montgomery County, but gets a lot of patients from Philadelphia County, ranked dead last in good health outcomes among 67 Pennsylvania counties in 2011 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, so clearly they saw the need for a more preventive approach. Lankenau has provided food for 400 patients so far, often giving food to patients as they're waiting for appointments and leading in-services on preparing it. Seems to me they're planting a seed, as it were, from which future food-education efforts will sprout forth.

Around the table: the death of Democratic populism, explained! And other things, also explained.

Matt Stoller at The Atlantic takes us back to the time "Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul" -- specifically, the time the "Watergate babies" that came into Congress in 1975 overthrew a populist anti-bank committee chair who had been in Congress for nearly half a century. Mr. Patman, a Texas House Rep, pretty much exemplifies all the contradictions about populism during the New Deal era -- he, like many populists and progressives of the era, was, at various times, a segregationist and a Vietnam War supporter, but his fierceness against bankster capitalism and corporate monopoly power remains unmatched by any member of Congress today, including Sen. Warren. Of course the whippersnappers who helped overthrow him also helped turn the Democratic party into the party of social liberalism, which essentially meant that economic populists were abandoned by both parties. Read the whole thing, though -- it's a marvelous history lesson, one that (as all great history lessons do) suggests what we can do about it if we only do it en masse.

Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals panel rules unanimously that torture is so unlawful that it's "beyond the power of even the president to declare such conduct lawful." You'd think a lot of right-wingers would applaud this decision, given that it declares the primacy of law and order over any faux-serious debate about military tactics, and restricts Presidential power just as the Founders intended, but instead they'll probably just yammer on about activist judges and that speech Jack Bauer gave on 24.

Dean Baker at TruthOut talks about the need to "retake the English language" when talking about "free" trade. He's made these points before, but he hasn't made them quite so clearly -- that it's literally impossible to call a trade pact a "free" trade deal if it codifies all sorts of policies, like expanding patent and copyright protections, that actually restrict trade, and a trade pact can hardly be a "free" trade when tariffs are already historically low. Also, too, "(t)he real story here is that the TPP is a deal about redistributing more income upward. It's imposing more competition on those at the middle and the bottom while maintaining and increasing forms of protectionism that benefits those at the top."

One more note for those whippersnappers supposedly thinking of voting for Gary Johnson: Gary Johnson doesn't like net neutrality. He can't really tell you why, either: his answer (from a 2011 interview) essentially boils down to government does it, so it's bad. Refuse to do anything because of "unintended consequences" and guess what? You will never do anything, because everything has unintended consequences. I know what the fully-intended consequences of opposing net neutrality are, though: that corporations, not you, will control your internet experience. It's bad enough they control your cable TV experience, though if we passed a strong a la carte cable packaging bill, we could change that.

A former porn star accuses Donald Trump of inappropriately kissing her, with Mr. Trump retorting, "I'm sure she's never been grabbed before." Why he recast her accusation as "grabbing" rather than "kissing" is unclear, unless he thought it made a better zinger, but no porn star deserves to be grabbed or kissed without their permission merely because they've done the deed in a movie -- using what happens under a contract to describe consent is moronic. (As an aside, why is he saying he'll sue all these women if he becomes President? Why not now?)

Finally, notorious cartoonist Jack Chick, purveyor of short, primitively-drawn religious tracts that have inspired mirth and scorn from young folks for decades, has died at the age of 92. Mr. Chick's little pamphlets, which religious folks have often distributed for free, rail against the occult, Catholicism, Communism, Islam, drugs, and homosexuality, among so, so many other things, and though of course I disagree profoundly with his notion that your only choice is either to believe in Jesus or go to hell, I must admit that he had a fierceness about him I can't help but admire -- a fierceness he could turn on himself occasionally, it seems. I'd be glib to say I'd feel differently about him if he'd taken over the world, because that was never going to happen -- he wasn't good enough at disguising his aims, possibly because he never tried. R.I.P.

Around the table: banksters, "treason," soda taxes, the Supreme Court, and sexual harassment.

Certain sexual harassment-recent events have dominated the news cycle the last week-plus, as you know, but Wikileaks' latest dump of hacked DNC emails shows Hillary Clinton making far too nice with banksters in thoser six-figure speeches she's never wanted to talk about. How one could possibly have witnessed the banksters crash our economy in 2008 and still suggest that "the people who know the business best should tell us how to regulate it" is mind-boggling -- I mean, that level of spiritual corruption should really pay a lot better than six figures. And banksters don't know how to do anything but redistribute our wealth upward to themselves. Let's have them work in a farm or a factory or a hospital or a group home for five minutes and see how they do.

Conservative borough councillor starts petition to make opposing Brexit a treasonous offense. Oh, splendid -- another moron who equates disagreement with treason! Though of course we Americans would recognize this petition as noxious simply because our right to give our counsel to our elected representatives is inviolate, the fatal problem for this effort in England is that the Brexit vote was legally non-binding, and thus defying that vote does literally no injury to the popular will, regardless of whether or not the British government would dare defy the Brexit vote. Britain may have a wider expanse of treasonous offenses than we do -- including adultery with the king or queen or with the king or queen's partner, or otherwise interfering with the line of succession -- but at least these have some history behind them; all this clown's petition has behind it is self-pity and insecurity.

Ho hum, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola have, in recent years, donated millions of dollars to health-focused groups -- but have also spent millions of dollars trying to defeat legislation actually aimed at curbing our soda intake. I'm no fan of soda taxes myself -- they hit working families the hardest, and we really should be going after the corn subsidies that make soda sell for the same amount of money it did 35 years ago -- but the behavior of Coke and Pepsi is noxious. They actually offered CHOP $10 million if the city government dropped its push for a soda tax! And they spent nearly $40 million defeating a federal push to institute a soda tax in 2009! Think maybe they could have created some jobs with that money?

Sen. McCain suggests that Senate Republicans would unite against any Hillary Clinton nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, then walks his remarks back a few hours later, saying through a spokeshack that of course he'd evaluate every nominee on the merits. Even if a Democrat wins Louisiana's open Senate seat (which, in a jungle primary with at least two Republican candidates at each others' throats, could actually happen), they have no shot at a filibuster-proof majority, so only shame will keep Republicans from blocking the next Supreme Court nominee until a Republican wins the Presidency again, however long that takes. But this sure sounds like an unforced error for John McCain, one I presume his opponent -- Democratic House Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who really should be doing a lot better than she is right now -- will exploit.

Finally, Buzzfeed finds a 2013 radio interview in which Donald Trump, Jr., suggests that women who "complain" about sexual harassment aren't tough enough. Where to begin with this? With the casual equation of a locker room with a workplace? With the notion that sexual harassment is "basic stuff"? With the male predilection for being "tough," when merely not-being-a-prick will get you through most workdays? With the absurd belief that coming forward about sexual harassment isn't tough? Or with the suggestion that "teaching kindergarten" isn't tough, or isn't a real job in a real workforce? That's the problem with these Trumps -- they fling so much crap at you it's hard to get around it. And they're probably proud of it, too.

Around the table: why the white working class votes right, and other puzzles.

Theo Anderson at In These Times describes sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild's work answering the question "Why the White Working Class Votes Conservative." Long story short: these voters aren't deluded about the harm untrammeled corporate power can cause, but they consider government an even greater evil, since they perceive that government handouts go to "the people who get ahead without putting in the hard work." And then "(t)he result is a vicious cycle of dysfunction. Anti-government anger leads to deregulation of industry, which is then free to inflict more havoc, which intensifies the sense of loss and anger, which is then directed primarily at the government." (As an aside, I don't agree that Thomas Frank doesn't delve into "the lived experience of conservatives"; actually, I came away with more respect for right-wingers after I read it.)

Frank Stricker at Counterpunch asks whether we can really bring back all the factory jobs we've outsourced. Short answer: no. Somewhat longer answer: we won't bring back 31,000,000 factory jobs, but creating 10,000,000 more jobs would get us closer to full employment. How do you do that? You spend taxpayer money on physical infrastructure work and on public education. "Neither candidate has made a major commitment in these areas," he concludes, and you can see why neither would make a move to invest in public education -- they'd fear losing big donor money from the charter school crowd.

Sarah Anderson at OtherWords notes that even though Presidential candidates from both parties bash fat-cat banksters, they present very few effective solutions to the problem. Why, it's almost like that's the idea! Even the Obama Administration's CEO pay reporting requirement doesn't have "real teeth" in it, she writes, because it doesn't (for example) link CEO pay practices to government contracting. That could be something the next President tries to do (if that President's name is Clinton, of course -- you think Donald Trump would even think of something like this?), though we'll hear nothing but nanny state and violates our rights from the pro-bankster waaambulance. Even though the Obama Administration hasn't done enough to curb their power, you'd still think they'd have shame by now.

Physicist Vandana Shiva reminds us that we don't need genetically-engineered "golden rice" to deliver Vitamin A. You may well take issue with Dr. Shiva's list of foods that can give you your RDA of Vitamin A, a list that includes "one carrot" and "one mango," by saying, well, you can't grow carrots and mangos wherever you like. But the truth is only that you can't grow these things en masse wherever you like, and growing food the corporate way is not the only way to grow food. Big ag corporations hate crop diversity, because it's harder than just growing the same thing for acres on end, and because it doesn't redistribute income upward to executives like growing the same thing for acres on end does.

Ho hum, big dirty energy corporations paid for meetings between their representatives and Republican Attorneys General in August of 2015, and there they collaborated on a plan to sue the Obama Administration to stop the EPA's Clean Power Plan. It's not the collaboration that upsets me, of course -- it's the massive six-figure donations the Republican Attorneys General Association, and though it may not upset John Roberts that these corporations weren't stupid enough (as far as we know!) to spell out what they wanted in exchange for what they were giving, we'd be schmucks to pretend it's just coincidence. Didn't Donald Trump tell us that politicians who take big donations "do whatever the hell you want them to"?

Finally, James Hohmann at the Washington Post asks if President Obama "squandered an opportunity" by nominating Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. The matter is actually far more interesting to contemplate than I expected -- NOW's President, for example, says that if Mr. Obama had appointed, say, a black woman instead, not only would the liberal wing of the Democratic party have been more galvanized in support, but right-wingers would have attacked her "viciously," thus exposing the real aim of the Republican Party. I'm not sure Republican aims can be any more exposed than they are, and I'm certainly not opposed to a Justice Garland -- moderates tend to drift leftward once they're on the Supreme Court. But Mr. Hohmann collects the most evidence yet that the Garland nomination is just another example of Barack Obama playing 13-dimensional chess with himself.

Action: battling drug price-gouging and climate change denialism.

By now you've heard about Mylan, the corporation that has raised the price of the live-saving medication EpiPen by over 400 percent since 2007. Mylan's CEO, Heather Bresch -- who happens to be Sen. Joe Manchin's daughter, so maybe she can help him out when he loses his 2018 re-election bid -- has been callous enough toward the outrage directed at her corporation that the notorious "pharma bro," Martin Shkreli, clearly sensing a soul mate, has defended her. Ms. Bresch's salary, of course, has also gone up dramatically since 2007, by over 600 percent; if you drew a direct line from the price hike to the salary hike, I wouldn't blame you. Hate to pile on, but Mylan is now also a foreign corporation, having "moved" to the Netherlands in one of those "corporate inversions" that enable big corporations to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. So, no use talking to Mylan any longer -- now it's time to talk to our government, and CREDO helps you tell the Obama Administration to stop big pharma price-gouging of life-saving medications.

Meanwhile, MoveOn helps you tell Enterprise, the auto rental corporation, to dissociate itself from the American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC. Enterprise is the biggest car rental corporation on Earth, and if you live in the Philadelphia area, you also know (and may use) Enterprise CarShare, which used to be Philly CarShare. There are plenty of reasons a corporation would want to disassociate itself from ALEC -- ALEC has promulgated more reactionary legislation (which often gets introduced verbatim into state legislatures) than any other organization over the last quarter-century or so. However, given that ALEC's second most fervent desire these days (behind redistributing worker income upward to CEOs, of course) is fighting any efforts to save our planet from climate change, Enterprise (which has made specific commitments to fight climate change) might well be embarrassed. Plenty of corporations have pulled out of ALEC over the last few years specifically over their climate change denialism; if we make enough noise, we may be able to get one more to do it.

Around the table: tabulating important developments for working families.

Victoria Law at TruthOut tells us why the Department of Justice's decision to end its contracts with private prison corporations doesn't actually "end" private prisons, even at the federal level. The DOJ's decision has no influence on the Department of Homeland (sic) Security, which does a lot more business with private contractors than DOJ does -- now housing over 60 percent of its immigrant detainees with private corporations, including the Corrections Corporation of America, which was about to go belly-up before DHS started handing out these contracts. The DOJ statement that private prisons "simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs and resources" is worth repeating, but their reform remains a very small one.

California residents will vote this fall on Proposition 61, which would prevent state agencies from paying more for prescription drugs than the Veterans Administration does. Why is this important? Because the VA, unlike Medicare, can actually negotiate drug prices, and thus pays less for the drugs veterans need than Medicare and most state Medicaid agencies. If Prop 61 passes, California would become the first state to put a cap on drug prices -- and California, as you know, is a pretty big economy with a lot of people in it. The good news? Polling shows supermajority support for Prop 61. The bad news? That probably won't be true after big pharmaceutical corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars fearmongering the people about it.

Richard Eskow at the OurFuture blog finds the "Fix the Debt" crowd is back to their old tricks. These include fearmongering and restricting options. An example of the former is the TV ad depicting disappearing bridges and teachers, as if the CEOs behind "Fix the Debt" don't already accomplish such disappearances with their income-redistribution-upward schemes, and an example of the latter is a "handy" calculator tool with which you can "figure out" how to "fix" Social Security which naturally makes you jump through hoops to actually try to raise revenues rather than merely cut benefits. At some point, such desperate arguments have to backfire on its progenitors. Doesn't it?

Northern California District Judge allows wage-theft lawsuit against McDonald's to proceed, even though McDonald's argues that franchise owners are responsible for any wage theft. I'm not thrilled with the "ostensible agency theory" (seems to me corporations either do right or wrong whether plaintiffs believe they are or not), but I'm far less thrilled with the whole point of the franchise model -- to avoid responsibility for wrongdoing, even if you're forcing franchise owners to do wrong.

Finally, domestic workers win important protections in Illinois with the passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The bill essentially amends four other Illinois state laws so that domestic workers can enjoy their protections, which now include a minimum wage, sexual harassment and discrimination protections, and a day of rest out of every seven. I'll confess I'm a bit shocked that Gov. Rauner, as insensitive a man as has ever been elected Governor, signed the bill; perhaps he knows a lot of domestic workers.

Action: deep sea mining, and "planned obsolescence."

Nautilus Minerals, a Canadian mining corporation, plans to build a deep sea mine near Papua New Guinea, from which it would extract gold and copper as early as 2018. Other deep sea mining projects promise to harvest rare earth minerals commonly used in computers and smartphones. But you already know how mining on land pollutes ecosystems; what do you suppose mining in the ocean would do? Nautilus's SOLWARA 1 mine would operate near a rich and diverse ecosystem, and it would also operate near coastal communities whose economies depend substantially on what their fishers bring home -- and with a giant mining complex in the sea, they'd very likely bring home a lot less. So Avaaz helps you tell various actors, including Papua New Guinea's government and potential Nautilus investors, to abandon the SOLWARA 1 project. Would it be piling on for me to say that an actual conservative wouldn't go upending ecosystems he doesn't understand just for the sake of making more money -- or even for fulfilling a perceived market need that could well be rendered moot by future technological developments?

Meanwhile, speaking of "future technological developments," Sum of Us helps you tell Apple to end its practice of "planned obsolescence." Have you ever resisted downloading the "latest" system upgrade because you're afraid of what it'll do to your iPhone or iPad? Well, you're not alone: among many other problems, the "latest" upgrades tend to slow down your machines so that you'll, you know, be tempted to buy the newest machine -- which isn't very "green" of Apple, you know, since those "obsolete" machines are going to wind up in landfills. And though most folks are actually fairly resourceful and can get along for a very long time with what they've got, Apple doesn't even let you "downgrade" back to your old system anymore. Sure Apple has every right to try to make its hardware and software better, but "better" doesn't mean the same thing to all of its customers. And don't be the one who claims that Apple can't possibly support all that ancient software that someone might be using. Of course they can! It's just that the solution would be to create jobs for technicians, and how's a CEO supposed to redistribute income upward to himself that way?

Around the table: helpful reminders about forced arbitration, CEO pay, and the actual relationship between good government and freedom.

The Consumerist lists 87 corporations that force you into binding arbitration in their customer contracts, thus "Taking Away Your Right to Sue." Spoiler alert: you'll recognize most of them -- and you can't get too far away from most of them, since they're so huge. Comcast and Charter both have forced arbitration clauses (with class-action bans!), and guess which two corporations now hold a virtual monopoly on American broadband cable services? Oh, and you want to go to Walgreen's instead of CVS? Well, they both have forced arbitration clauses, too. (Maybe you're lucky and you still have a Rite-Aid nearby -- or you live in North Dakota, where big-box pharmacies can't operate as such.)

It is always good to be reminded that CEOs make 276 times what the typical worker makes. Good news, though -- just 15 years ago, that statement would have read "376 times"! (Bad news, though -- the biggest gains on the graph occur during Bill Clinton's Presidency.) But you know what else it's good to be reminded about? That most Americans think that ratio is around 30 to 1 -- and would vastly prefer a ratio of around seven to one. I keep telling folks Americans are good people -- and, with effort, we can correct our countryfolk's mistaken impressions about how bad the income-redistribution-upward scheme is in America.

Dean Baker, writing at TruthOut, wonders if Uber will "go under" because of its unwillingness to expand to areas of America that might actually regulate it with some vigor. To which I say: we can only hope! Seriously, though, Uber objects to municipal requirements about fingerprinting and background checks. That's not very big and bold of them, is it? And since they pulled out of Austin, TX, six new companies have filled the gap. Competition! It's the American way! And it only came about because the good citizens of Austin forced their government to do something. Which means the way to more freedom might just be a more active government. I apologize in advance if that statement has caused any right-wingers' heads to explode.

The Koch brothers say they won't help Donald Trump win the election, but Adele M. Stan at AlterNet reminds us that the Koch brothers already are helping Mr. Trump -- by using their vaunted ground game to help downballot Republicans. "It’s as simple as this: If you get voters to the polls in order to vote for the Senate or House candidate of your choice, chances are good they’ll vote for the presidential candidate who appears on the same ticket. The Koch network’s favored candidates are, of course, all Republicans." I guess this is yet another reason why Gary Johnson is not an option for the Koch brothers (you know, in addition to "the Koch brothers only talk a good game about criminal justice reform and staying out of dumb wars.")

Finally, some bad news: U.S. District Court Judge throws out lawsuit from third-party Presidential candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein aiming to get them into Presidential debates. Sadly, the judge's case looks sound -- the plaintiffs couldn't reasonably establish exactly what their "injuries" are, and when the plaintiffs argued that the Commission on Presidential Debates's 15 percent polling threshold for debate inclusion denied them their First Amendment rights, the Judge reminded them that the First Amendment protects them from their government and that the CPD is a private entity. I'm pretty sure someone thought of that back in the day, anticipating this very lawsuit.

Action: transparency in elections, and fishery management.

Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a couple of bills that would help restore freedom and transparency to our elections. S. 6, the We the People Act, would combine the efforts of previous Congressional bills that would have forced disclosure of campaign contributions and slowed the revolving door between Wall Street banksters and our government; S.J.Res. 5 would amend the Constitution so we could reverse the deleterious effects of recent Supreme Court decisions vastly increasing the amount of money that flows into our elections; S. 1538, the Fair Elections Now Act, would institute a public campaign finance system for federal elections whereby small donations could be matched with federal funds; and S. 1659, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, would force Justice Department pre-clearance of voting rights law changes in states or localities which have demonstrated a clear pattern of vote suppression. Who could possibly oppose these things? Congressfolk who worship only at the altar of mammon, that's who -- and sadly, that's most of them. But they want to be good people, so we should speak out and try to help them be good people.

Meanwhile, Congress has the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in its sights. Why? Because the Magnuson-Stevens Act manages U.S. fisheries very well, keeping fish populations from collapse, rejuvenating some species, and reducing "unintended bycatch" (when fishing concerns accidentally catch fish they don't actually intend to catch). You can see where this is going, right? Some Congressfolk, it's true, want to destroy anything about our government that actually works well and works on behalf of the American people, but many more Congressfolk have more mundane aims in mind -- reducing protections for fish opens up waters for the big agricultural and fossil fuel corporations who'd like to "save money" by polluting fish habitats. But well-maintained fishing populations also means a well-running fishing industry -- and jobs for people who work in it -- whereas gutting those protections only means that CEOs redistribute more worker wealth upward to themselves. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to gut fishery conservation laws.

Around the table: attaching a dollar figure to the harm caused by banksters, and other revelations.

UMass-Amherst economist says that banksters wind up costing the average American household well over $100,000 over the course of a lifetime. Not just with credit card late fees, ATM fees, and overdraft fees -- and, for poorer families, with payday loans -- but with a lot of retirement funds, whose managers have limited or no fiduciary responsibility to work on your behalf, and who charge exorbitant fees for funds that perform little or no better than the stock market does as a whole. What are banksters good for? For redistributing your wealth upward -- to themselves.

National Labor Relations Board upholds appeal of earlier ruling permitting the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America to endorse a boycott of Israel. The Israeli legal center bringing the original suit (and the appeal) cited labor law preventing unions from encouraging workers at "neutral employers" (that is, employers not involved in a dispute between the union and its workers' employer) to stop work or go on strike in arguing that unions also could not encourage workers to "cease doing business with Israelis and Israeli companies." If it seems like a bit of a leap from one to the other, well, you're not alone. And now I'm rather interested in rolling back the law preventing unions from encouraging other workers to go on strike, as it seems a plain violation of their First Amendment rights.

New CFPB rules mandate that debt collectors now have to make some effort to prove that debtors actually owe them any money. New rules would make debt collectors limit their number of weekly contacts, notify debtors when statutes of limitation have passed on old debts, and get a whole lot more information about your supposed debt than just your phone number -- among many other absolutely needed reforms (though not all the reforms we'd like, of course). But please, Republicans, keep mouthing off about how the CFPB is just another "bureaucracy" preventing honest businessfolk from making money, when it's actually a tool to keep banksters from running roughshod over our lives.

University of Zurich study suggests that internet trolls are more obnoxious, not less, when they're using their real names. But only in limited contexts, it seems to me -- the study looked at comments on online petitions, where you have to give your real name but can request the petition manager to withhold your name from public exposure; the study doesn't look at, for example, Facebook or Twitter comments, though it seems to me you'd more likely find obnoxious behavior there than on online petitions. So clearly, this subject needs further research.

Finally, 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals strikes down North Carolina's Voter ID law, finding that the state legislature went very far out of its way to "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision." Gov. McCrory of course replies with the whole you-need-ID-to-buy-Sudafed-so-you-should-also-need-it-to-vote, as if he's never, ever heard anything anyone has ever said about the matter. And no Republican appeal of this law will ever survive Supreme Court scrutiny, not when your legislature not only goes very far out of its way to find out exactly how many non-whites their law will hurt and not only enacts that law anyway but writes all of their doings down.

Around the table: "Obama's Vietnam," and Trump's latest unforced error.

Dean Baker at TruthOut wonders if the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" will prove to be "Obama's Vietnam." Mr. Baker's thesis is a tad obscure -- Mr. Obama now pushes the TPP to "preserve American credibility," the same reason we gave for staying in Vietnam -- but it's sure a lot better than wondering if Afghanistan is "Obama's Vietnam" (versus, say, "Bush's Other Vietnam"), as Newsweek did some years back. But n.b.: "The classic story of gaining from free trade by removing trade barriers doesn't really apply to the TPP primarily because we have already removed most of the barriers between the countries in the pact." Unless, I suppose, one considers "I can't redistribute as much worker wealth upward to myself as possible" a barrier, as many of Our Glorious Elites apparently do.

Leaked DNC emails prove that top Democrat officials were certainly biased against Bernie Sanders, just as he always said -- so the "liberal" media instantly converts that fact from "conspiracy theory" to "no big whoop." They're "no big deal" now because politics is mean, though they were just saying that politics is not mean in precisely this way! You may smell the faint odor of "liberal" media coverage of the Downing Street memos, which the "liberal" media first ignored, and then said were no big deal because everyone knows Bush lied us into war, although everyone knew that with virtually no help from the "liberal" media. (But n.b. that the FBI is actually looking into foreign involvement in the DNC email leaks now.)

Iranian government destroys more than 100,000 satellite dishes because they "deviate the society's morality and culture" and cause "increased divorce, addiction and insecurity." Obviously I'm not unsympathetic to the notion that media is disruptive and decadent, but I suspect the "foundations" Gen. Naghdi values are the ones Iranian society has built on top of women. And if 70 percent of Iranians use satellite dishes despite facing a fine that exceeds Iran's poverty line, I'd say it's a bit late to close the barn door.

Finally, Donald Trump defends Roger Ailes from the multitudinous charges of sexual harassment that have helped end his career at Fox News by saying that "some of the women that are complaining, I know how much he's helped them." Because everything in life is a simple negotiation, even the law and order of which Mr. Trump professes to be the One True Defender! Seriously, Mr. Trump's post-convention bounce is over -- there aren't that many men in America who are this much of a neanderthal, but there are that many women who've suffered at the hands of one.