Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning birth control, animal cruelty, and autonomous weapons.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to make health insurance corporations cover over-the-counter birth control pills without prescriptions or co-pays, tell our government to stop hunters from going after wolves with vehicles, and tell our government to ban autonomous and AI weapons from the battlefield. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to mandate that health insurance corporations must cover over-the-counter birth control pills, with no prescription and no co-pay. After all, it’s safe and won’t be a controlled substance, so why would women need prescriptions? So someone can control them, I guess! But that’s not a good reason to do it. Personal to folks who claim “religious” “consciences” about the matter: I never demanded back my tax money used in the Iraq war, so you can sheathe that “conscience,” which is only meant to guide you anyway.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service to stop allowing hunters to go after wolves with vehicles. Even if hunters weren’t running over wolves with snowmobiles, it’s not very sporting, frankly, to give yourself such a tremendous advantage over your prey. I mean, they are trying to relive how their ancestors lived, are they not? Well, our ancestors didn’t use such high tech; I hope I never see the day hunters go after wolves with laser rifles. Personal to those who profess to worry about wolves eating cattle: we can’t solve problems with just any old solution.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to forbid robot fighter jets and/or any other autonomous weapon from the battlefield. Remember the Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon”? War was so easy for the aliens in that story – “targets” “destroyed” as if in a video game, with citizens willfully marching off to gas chambers afterward – that it went on for five centuries! Remember the Philip K. Dick short story “Second Variety”? The drones in that one started to wage war on humans – who are on the ropes when we come in – until ultimately starting to wage war on each other. Ultimately I bet autonomous weapons are like AI and bitcoin – scams for rich suckers. But why appease scam artists?

Around the table: from TikTok bans to bloodbaths.

Matt Stoller describes why “The TikTok Problem Is Not What You Think.” The article has a lot of great info (particularly on the Biden-led sea change in data privacy protection), but long story short: foreign corporations shouldn’t have so much personal data on American citizens, particularly when those corporations align so closely with obviously authoritarian governments, and TikTok abuses its users just as badly as Facebook does. Also, note well that China happily keeps American internet platforms out of their country and tries to control what foreigners say about China – just say something about Tianenmen Square in a TikTok video if you don’t believe me! No, I don’t want Steve Mnuchin owning TikTok either, but even that’s better than China controlling it.

Do people really not get that the Florida teenagers who used AI to create deepfake nudes of their classmates committed child abuse and child porn? People also really don’t get that the perps are too young to go to jail, but certainly they’re not too young to be shamed, and if they never get into their first-choice colleges as a result of their actions, I won’t shed a tear. In any case, might this be more proof that AI development is moving too fast with too little governmental oversight? Why, yes, I think it might! Don’t brook any nonsense like government doesn’t know enough about AI to oversee it, because that’d be like arguing that only banksters know enough to regulate banks.

From Johanna Richlin at The Conversation we learn that vaccine-skeptical mothers learned to be that way at least in part from all their bad experiences in the health care system. I’m reminded that 17th century poet John Dryden frequently aimed his ire at doctors, and of course we should empathize with women describing a health care system that injures them – you’ve heard that doctors will more likely tell women (especially Black and Brown women) that they’re just bellyaching? And yes, the mammon-worship endemic to our health care industry hurts us all. But what of the evil actors (i.e., Tucker Carlson, Andrew Wakefield, all the YouTube “influencers” who’ve hurt a lot of people but whom history will never remember) who have exploited this landscape?

Ho hum, ”liberal” media journalists actually read Robert Hur’s interview with President Biden over classified documents and suddenly discover that their initial reports on the investigation might have been a little overheated. We have all learned by now, I would hope, that reading is a good way to understand writing, but even after all these years of Donald Trump inflicting chaos and abuse upon good Americans, too many “liberal” media journalists still either cut corners or prefer sensationalism. Happily for Joe Biden, he delivered a State of the Union address earlier this month in which he did not appear to be the addled granddad our “liberal” media would seem to prefer.

Hard to believe, Harry, Special Counsel Jack Smith apparently put a Stephen Miller amicus brief about the Trump classified documents indictment through the woodchipper last week. In Mr. Smith’s telling, Mr. Miller apparently believes that “if a person illegally carries a firearm into a NARA facility or forcibly threatens a NARA employee,” then “NARA (would be) powerless to report that criminal conduct to the FBI,” and would have to “engage in notice-and-comment rule making to promulgate a regulation authorizing it to make such a referral.” But of course Mr. Miller doesn’t even intend to create a legal “precedent”, but merely to (in Steve Bannon’s immortal phrase) “flood the zone with shit” so the wheels of justice can slow down and maybe Donald Trump can win re-election before getting convicted of a crime.

Finally, I can’t wait to hear how right-wingers try to justify Donald Trump saying at an Ohio rally that there’ll be a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t get elected in 2024. Oh, he’s only joking (then explain how bloodbaths are funny!) and oh he’s only describing what will happen if he loses (it’s a good thing no one in human history has ever tried to influence history by pretending to predict it!). Seriously, though, if Trumpholes think Saturdays at the shooting range have prepared them for Civil War, they’re going to be very disappointed. The only people in America actually prepared to wage civil war are our soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of them just want the damn headaches to stop.

Action: concerning endless war, drug prices, and vote suppression.

Long story short: tell our government to start making peace in the Middle East, tell the Biden Administration to fight for lower drug costs, and tell our Justice Department to investigate AI robocalls in New Hampshire. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Win Without War helps you demand a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war, while Civic Shout helps you tell our government not to go to war with Iran. I’m old enough to remember right-wing “war on terror” bloggers not wanting to attack Iran after we attacked Iraq; maybe they got enough jollies from Iraq, but maybe they also knew that occupying Iran would be even harder than occupying Iraq turned out to be! But if we let the Israel/Palestine war get any worse – and it will, since Mr. Netanyahu wants to keep Hamas a player so he can keep power – then we might have war with Iran, and that’ll go so, so much worse than war with Iraq did.

More Perfect Union helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the most vigorous “march-in rights” rule possible. “March-in rights,” created by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980, would enable our government to “march in” and make cheaper drugs whenever big pharma corporations charge too much for drugs that taxpayer money helped create, which describes, like, almost all drugs all the time now. Big pharma corporations will want to open up loopholes so they can still charge an arm and a leg (so to speak?) for life-saving drugs, so now’s the time for us to stand up for our right not to get gouged over drugs we helped create with our hard-earned money.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to investigate AI-enabled vote suppression during the recent New Hampshire Presidential primary. You’ve no doubt heard that someone used AI to create a Joe Biden-sounding robocall urging people to stay home on primary day and “save” their vote for the November election? Well, that’s vote suppression simple and plain, and vote suppression is illegal simple and plain. Doesn’t matter the New Hampshire Democratic Presidential primary wasn’t “important”! This was surely a test run; next time it happens, it’ll really hurt America.

Action: concerning voting rights, judicial ethics, and endless war.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, and to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Yes, it’s back, and Congress should keep bringing it back until it passes. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore our Justice Department’s ability to reject state voting law changes, and our Justice Department could do that in any state or locality that’s demonstrated a pattern of voting rights abuses. That would close the hole in the Voting Rights Act our Supreme Court blew open in their notorious Shelby County v. Holder ruling. And it would help us restore the voting rights a lot of states have spent the last several years gutting.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would force our Supreme Court Justices to follow the same ethics rules every other federal judge follows. Is there a news hook? You bet there is! Paul Singer apparently paid for Sam Alito to go on a very expensive fishing trip to Alaska in 2008 when Mr. Singer had business before our Supreme Court. Long, long experience has taught us that we should not trust our leaders so much as make them do right by us; hence we do not “trust” Sam Alito that they weren’t really pals or that his First Class plane seat was just sitting there unused, we make sure he never does such a thing again. Why should this be hard?

Finally, the Secure Families Initiative helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq. That resolution is almost old enough to get itself blind drunk at a bar without getting carded, and all it’s good for is encouraging Presidents to fling us off into more stupid wars, so getting it wiped from our laws shouldn’t be a big deal. And let me state, at least one more time, that our Constitution mandates that Congress declares wars and Presidents conduct wars. And it doesn’t say Congress declares “police actions” or “authorizes military force”; it says war. There are some old words we’ve got to get back to using, precisely because they’ll make us fly right again. “War” is one of them.

Action: concerning endless war, stock buybacks, and judicial corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF, pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, and enact a code of conduct for Supreme Court Justices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your House Reps to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Tha Bush Mobb bullied Congress into passing that in 2002, and make no mistake: in bullying them, they were bullying us, and that’s a humiliation we can’t let stand anymore. And of course Presidents of both parties have used the 2002 AUMF to justify all manner of unconstitutional war-making since then, from bombings in Syria to assassinations in Iran; no President should be able to start and conduct wars without the permission of the American people through their representatives in Congress, because that’s tyranny. We still fight tyranny in America, right?

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would, among other things, quadruple taxes on stock buybacks. Stock buybacks used to be illegal because they concentrated shareholder power into just a few hands, and the recent Bed, Bath, and Beyond bankruptcy filing demonstrates pretty well why that was a stupid idea, as their executives plowed $12 billion into stock buybacks over the last nine years, meaning less money to invest in infrastructure and less money to pay the workers who gave their time and work only to get shafted. Remember: workers, not bosses, make the world go round.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a code of conduct for Supreme Court Justices, who are, somehow, the only federal judges who have no such code. As terrible as the Clarence Thomas/Harlan Crow drama has become – apparently Mr. Crow even paid for Justice Thomas’s grandnephew to go to private school, which is totally what Just Friends do! – we have also lately learned that Justice Gorsuch sold a house he’d been having trouble selling to the head of a big law firm that’s had business before the court mere days after being confirmed. If they can’t avoid the appearance of evil, we have to make them.

Action: concerning our "liberal" media and food safety.

Long story short: tell the New York Times to correct the record on Iran’s alleged nuclear program, tell your cable corporation to stop carrying the Fox News Channel, and tell our FDA to stop letting big food corporations add sesame to food just to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

FAIR helps you tell the New York Times to correct the record on our intelligence community’s findings on Iranian nukes, i.e., that we have not, in fact, proven that they are building them. Seem too much like inside baseball? I’ll bet the 2002 yellowcake uranium claim did, too, but it helped propel us into that stupid war with Iraq, the one where we accomplished nothing positive and helped create ISIS, and the one where numerous Americans felt perfectly fine accusing their friends and family of treason for opposing the war. Yeah, still sore about that, and if Donald Trump comes back to power, this stupid drama (did I mention stupid?) could play all over again in Iran. How about we strangle that drama in its crib?

Inequality Media helps you tell your cable corporation to deplatform Fox News, which is to say stop carrying it. This $787 million Dominion settlement sure couldn’t have come at a worse time for Fox News, as they’re about to renegotiate carriage fees with cable corporations, and the only channel that costs you more on your cable bill is ESPN. Thus it’s time, once again, to bust out the Big Stick of Bad PR. The good news? It works – popular pressure led both Verizon and DirecTV to stop carrying One America News Network. People who still want to mainline masturbatory rage can go to Fox Nation on the internet, but getting Fox on cable TV makes their bad habit harder to break, and we should help people break their bad habits.

Finally, the Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to stop letting big food corporations add sesame to their products just to avoid implementing stricter controls on allergens. Our FDA just started requiring that food corporations start telling you if their products contain sesame, but now these corporations are adding sesame to foods that didn’t have it before so they can avoid regulatory scrutiny! That’ll come as a big surprise to the million-plus Americans with sesame allergies. Don’t listen to the fool who says well they should just read the label then, like everyone reads every word on every label on everything they buy, and I'd lay money the fool who says that doesn't read any labels.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, endless war, internet privacy, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject yet more corporate welfare handouts, repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, do something useful about internet privacy instead of banning TikTok, and reject any effort to defund Medicaid or CHIP. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 866, which would, in its words, “enhance tax benefits for research activities,” and you know what that means: more corporate welfare handouts. “Research activities” are, by definition, expenses, which make them exempt from corporate taxes (since we only tax corporate profits!); why should corporations get to essentially deduct expenses twice? Oh, right – because all they care about is jacking up their stock prices, never mind the quality of their products or services, and they need an “incentive” to do the right thing. Actually they need laws that make them do the right thing, not handouts.

M Power helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious 2002 authorization to use military force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Didn’t we get out of Iraq, after all? Yes, we did, more or less, but all of our post-Bush Presidents have used the 2002 AUMF to justify all manner of appalling extralegal military intervention, and you may remember that the Iraq War didn’t go so well. Not just because it spilled American blood and squandered American treasure and killed hundreds of thousands of “liberated” Iraqis, but because the subsequent American occupation helped create ISIS, the terror organization that makes al-Qaeda look like a bunch of bureaucrats. So let’s have no more of that.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop posturing about banning TikTok and pass some internet privacy laws with teeth instead. Because there’s nothing uniquely awful about TikTok except its privacy issues, and if you fix the privacy issues, you don’t need to ban TikTok. Personal to the Republicans grandstanding about privacy now: y’all voted to repeal pretty good FCC internet privacy rules in 2017, and that makes you a hypocrite now. Maybe hypocrisy doesn’t matter to Republicans, but that fact doesn’t make me the weakling! Strong people hold to their values even when it’s inconvenient; they certainly don’t forget them for corporate money or whiners’ approval.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislation that would defund Medicaid or CHIP. Remember that time the New York Times found that Trump supporters actually liked Medicaid (but hated all the “those people” they thought were on it)? Maybe we had a chance to bond there, but never mind reaching out to masturbatory rage addicts – defunding Medicaid or CHIP is the wrong thing to do, both morally and fiscally. No deficit peacock ever struts around about defense spending even though you’ll find a crap-ton of waste and fraud there. So how about we stop making regular Americans pay for politicians’ mistakes?

Around the table: the time to call George W. Bush a liar was *always* now.

Michigan looks ready to repeal its notorious “right-to-work” law, a.k.a. the “right to work for less” law, because apparently there are no Kyrsten Sinemas in Michigan’s slim Democratic majorities. Right-to-work laws, as you know, starve unions of funding by enabling union workers to get services without paying dues, and Sonali Kohatkar has a good way of thinking about that: “(i)magine calling AAA and demanding its roadside benefits without paying the auto club’s modest yearly fee.” That’s perfect, right down to the word “modest” – my dues cost me around 35 cents an hour.

Fox News producer sues her employer for coercing her to “take the fall” when testifying in the Dominion defamation suit. She’s also suing over sexist and anti-Semitic commentary at the workplace, which, gosh, that is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! You suppose Maria Bartiromo, as notorious a right-wing shill as has worked in the “liberal” media these last few decades, will change her ways now that she’s discovered her employer thought she was utterly disposable? I kid, of course – I mean, she’s no Gretchen Carlson.

I’ll admit I was not hopeful about this Los Angeles Times opinion piece on “how to stop the polarization” in American politics, but the advice dispensed therein isn’t bad – helping right-wingers “communicate ‘what (they) are observing, feeling, and needing” sounds like a full-time job, but I agree that name-calling famous people is a hell of a lot better than name-calling your friends and neighbors, and I think it gives them the space to change their minds. I even think they appreciate being given that space, even if they don’t articulate it that way. I guess I’m still an optimist, then.

Some, ah, distinguished individual called in a bomb threat to a Tuesday hearing on New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million lawsuit against Donald Trump for allegedly inflating real estate asset values. Because take-your-country-back rallies take more work, apparently! This kind of soft terrorism actually makes me think more kindly of hard terrorism – folks who make death threats and bomb threats without intending to back up their words actually rank below mass shooters in my book, meaning they’re pretty much at the bottom of that book.

Jesus Mary and Joseph did Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) actually say he’s different from Donald Trump because his style of leadership includes “no daily drama”? Yes, he really did, and that’s hilarious, because he’s all about the drama! If calling everything you don’t like “woke” and banning books like it’s the 1930s and going after anti-racist education like it’s the 1830s and demanding menstrual records of teenage girls (and this is a not-at-all comprehensive list!) ain’t drama, then what is? Oh, almost forgot: come get your poll tax from me, Governor, if you can.

Finally, two former CIA agents with four decades’ combined experience in intelligence describe at some length how Tha Bush Mobb lied about their findings so they could sell the invasion of Iraq. I feel terrible for these two good Americans, who detail the many, many honest assessments our CIA gave to Tha Bush Mobb only to have them lie about it because they were going into Iraq and damn everyone else. But the Insider is wrong to say that now it’s “time to call George W. Bush a liar,” because that time was the fall of 2002. If you were paying attention and thinking for yourself then, you were calling him a liar.

Action: concerning free speech, endless wars, tax cuts for the rich, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Florida legislators to reject an anti-free speech bill,and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq War AUMF, repeal the Trump tax cuts for the rich, and pass the Social Security Expansion Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Free Press helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject SB 1316, which would require any blogger who writes about Gov. DeSantis or state legislators register with the state or face heavy fines. Can you say "poll tax," boys and girls? And how do they justify such a thing? By saying all we want to know is who our enemies are? Here’s who your enemies are, Florida: everyone who thinks for themselves. And that’s most of us in America. I’m serious; no more than a quarter of Americans are mindless drones lapping up whatever right-wingers spew forth. They get a lot more media coverage than we do, but to quote a famous philosopher: they do not surround us; we surround them. So let’s remind everyone of that.

The American Friends Service Committee helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that “authorized” the Iraq War. And while the 2002 AUMF, like the 2001 AUMF that enabled all kinds of madness in the “war on terror,” is worse than a wad of used toilet paper, every President since Bush the Lesser has used it to justify all manner of extra-legal military adventures – think Obama in Libya and Syria and Trump in Iran and Syria. We can’t bring back dead soldiers or dead Iraqis, or those whom ISIS has exterminated, but perhaps we can begin to earn their forgiveness by repealing the 2002 AUMF.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, which would include the tax cuts in the top tax brackets and the massive cut in the corporate tax rate. Republicans are doing the helicopter dance about “deficits” and “debts,” but they all voted for the Trump tax cuts, which helped make trillion-dollar deficits in America the norm. So if they won’t force the rich to pay more in taxes now – you know, because DEFICITZ BADZ!!!!!! – then why should we listen to them about a damn thing? And if Democrats won’t have guts, we’ve got to have it for them.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act. When right-wingers play offense, what do we do? Play offense! Nobody roots for the team running the prevent defense at the end of the game! And taxing rich folks to pay for expanded Social Security benefits is actually quite popular, as you would imagine, given that most Americans, as I’ve said, are pretty smart. What are right-wingers going to do, pretend that taxing the rich is dumb? Taxing the rich, more than anything else, made ours the greatest middle class in history after World War II. So take no BS about this matter.

Around the table: why we need Hell, part 744.

I hope they’re right that “A Four Day Work Week is Closer Than You Think,” though I hasten to point out that most of the studies done on the matter get done outside the United States, and that those studies tend to concentrate on white-collar work (blue-collar work still exists, you know!). But I also hasten to point out that a four-day work week is also a job creation scheme, since (again, more so in blue-collar jobs) there’s still going to be the same amount of work to do. (In case you were wondering, workers made the same pay for fewer work days in these studies.)

Ho hum, our Fed Reserve Chair, having lately justified bailouts for Silicon Valley Bank because of the “systemic risk” its failure supposedly poses, approved a merger between SVB and Boston Private Bank and Trust by claiming the resulting behemoth posed no “significant risk” to our banking system. Of course now he’s promising a “thorough, transparent, and swift review” of the whole issue, but I presume the resulting review will only be swift. At least we have anti-monopolists at our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for as long as Congress allows us to have that.

French President Macron tries to unilaterally raise that nation’s pension age from 62 to 64 – a matter the good citizens of France have been protesting in the streets for two months now – and as a result faces a no-confidence vote in Parliament. He thought he had a hostage situation ready to spring on them: don’t oppose my will, or you’ll get a Le Pen government! And it may work, but his actual duty – to adhere to the people’s very obvious will – remains undone.

From the “What an Understated Headline” file: ProPublica reports that “Wealthy Executives Make Millions Trading Competitors’ Stock With Remarkable Timing.” I can see why a major news organization would put it that way – the information comes from that leaked trove of IRS files ProPublica acquired in 2021, which won't alone prove to a judge and/or jury that the timing was more than “remarkable” – but we’re not schmucks, and we also realize that stronger laws against insider trading and executives serving on multiple corporate boards would help stop this, ah, remarkable phenomenon. So would not worshiping at the altar of the stock market the way we’ve done for the last 40-odd years.

The Iraq War turns 20 today, and Jon Schwarz at The Intercept asks, of the war’s architects, “Where Are They Now?” Short answer: doing quite well, just like they don’t deserve, even Judith Miller, who I guess is the Useful Idiot of this clown car since her water-carrying couldn’t keep her out of jail. You’ll also learn that Donald Rumsfeld’s last vacation home was once the home of Edward Covey, “notorious for breaking unruly slaves for other farmers,” and that Ms. Miller’s last piece for the New York Times had a hilarious title – hilarious, at least, until you remember how many people it helped kill, maim, or torture.

Finally, and this also risks being a ho-hum, right-wing “activist” who dressed up as Julius Caesar at school board meetings to make some kind of point about transgender kids actually had a long, long history of bad and criminal behavior. Much as I want to say he’s paid his debt to society and that arrests and accusations aren't convictions, I also want to say that his trajectory from armed-standoff-with-cops (for which he served 17 years in the big house) to incoherent transgender protestor suggests that he's spent most of his time on Earth lapping up whatever the right’s dealers of masturbatory rage serve up at the moment. In a civilized society, you have to pay your debts and you have to do better in the future.

Action: concerning voting rights, defense spending, health care, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, cut defense spending, lower prescription drug prices, and strengthen the food stamps program. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would authorize our Justice Department to pre-clear any voting rights changes from any state or locality with a history of vote suppression – and not just certain Southern states, as the original Voting Rights Act mandated (and which mandate our Supreme Court struck down in 2013). Granted, most of the states and localities suppressing the vote the hardest are still in the South, but this bill would restore the teeth our Supreme Court knocked out of the Voting Rights Act. And we all need that bill to have some more bite again.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the People Over Pentagon Act. We spend as much money on defense as the next eight countries on that list combined, and how did that do for us in Iraq and Afghanistan? I’ll tell you how well it did: it proved the old conservative saw that you can’t just throw money at a problem! But, as any liberal will tell you, you can improve good Americans’ lives by spending tax money wisely, and ensuring that defense contractor CEOs can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home while depriving good Americans of, say, paid family/medical leave or health care funding definitely isn’t wise. But they’ll keep doing it, until we make them stop.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. I guess with Eli Lilly’s announcement that it’ll cap insulin prices, our Congressfolk will say it proves that “only private sector action creates lasting change.” But, ah, insulin is just one drug, other big pharma corporations haven’t capped insulin costs, and without our FTC’s announcement of action against the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (or PBMs) that jack up prices as much as or more than big pharma greed, Eli Lilly might not have capped those costs, either. Of course I mention that FTC action because it proves government can help create lasting change in America – but only if we demand it.

Finally, Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, otherwise known as food stamps. Because weakening it is a stupid idea! Yes, I, too, have heard stories about folks getting food stamps when they’re not supposed to, but that’s a separate issue from ensuring everyone who needs them can get them. No, really, fraud is always a separate issue. You’re supposed to stamp out fraud and bring fraudsters to justice! That’s the law-and-order position! But you’re not supposed to let the mere presence of fraud make you throw up your hands and stop doing the right thing. That’s what bad people want, and why should they get all the say about everything?

Action: concerning voting rights, endless war, racism, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, repeal the Iraq AUMF, and pass the Justice for Black Farmers Act, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Do you remember how our Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act unfairly targeted Southern states for additional federal scrutiny – but also said Congress could fix the bill by ensuring that any state or municipality could face that same scrutiny? This bill does that! And right-wingers will whine that “it’s not needed” (which, like, duh) or “the South has changed” (also duh, in addition to being literally irrelevant to the bill). But they’re walnuts in the batter of eternity. We, on the other hand, are eternity, as long as we do good works.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to finally and for once and for all repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that authorized our adventure in Iraq. Come March 20, that mistake will be 20 years old, and at least three U.S. Presidents have used the Iraq AUMF to justify other stupid military adventures. Plus, you know Our Glorious Elites would love to party like it’s 1980 and wage war on Iran – Barack Obama actually solved this problem, but then Donald Trump pissed all over it, and now Joe Biden can’t (or won’t) fix it. That just makes it that much more urgent that we get this war-making tool out of the hands of this President and all future Presidents.

The Union for Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Justice for Black Farmers Act. Anyone who whines that we gotta do even more for Blacks? clearly doesn’t understand just how deeply we’ve injured Black Americans at virtually every opportunity, and so it goes with Black farmers trying to get land. If you know anything about redlining, if you know anything about how our government systematically shut Black folks out of every program meant to help good Americans, you won’t be surprised to find that Black farmers also face a long history of discrimination. And you won’t hesitate to help them, either. Unless you’re a troll, I guess.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) already. President Biden has now nominated Ms. Sohn three times to help do the very important job of keeping big telecom corporations from telling you where you can go and what you can do on the internet; he’s been admirably steadfast about this matter, and his steadfastness should find its reward here, not merely because doing the right thing should always find its reward, but also because the utter nonentities who oppose her are walnuts in the batter of eternity who shouldn’t get all the say about a damn thing in America.

Around the table: good people fight bad people, part 842.

This article’s headline reads “People Return to Offices, Productivity Plunges,” and though I would warn against worshipping at the Altar of Productivity, I’m quite glad to hear someone in our “liberal” media finally blaming bosses instead of workers. And when I hear that bosses are installing “productivity-tracking software” on their workers’ computers, I am reminded, yet again, that the good boss inspires more productivity while the bad boss acts like a damn fascist trying to control what he can’t control.

Right before midterm elections, we pick up another victory over monopolists, as a King County (WA) Superior Court Commissioner granted a temporary restraining order preventing two banksters from essentially looting the grocery chain store corporation Albertsons in advance of its proposed merger with Kroger. The banksters in question – the private equity corporations Cerberus Capital and Apollo – made the tactical error of making their looting, ahem, dividend recapitalization, a part of the merger, which puts the entire proposed merger in danger, if our government will be aggressive enough. And they might!

Ho hum, right-wingers push another activists-are-the-real-fascists narrative by saying the hundreds of writers and Penguin employees who spoke out against Justice Barrett’s $2 million book deal are the real “censors,” the real “book bann(ers),” and the real “cancel culture” practitioners, though we all know right-wingers are the actual censors, book banners, and cancel culture practitioners – as right-wingers themselves prove by calling for the “firing” and “blacklist(ing)” of everyone who has (so far unsuccessfully) protested the future Barrett book! Anyway, do publishers have a First Amendment obligation to publish every single conceivable manuscript? No, they do not. The end.

When I hear that Texas Republicans have been trying to suppress the vote by confiscating smartphones, looking over voters’ shoulders in voting booths, and going around to voters’ homes to tell them they’ve voted illegally when they haven’t – and I think that last item merits a slander lawsuit! – all I can say is that this is where the feedback loop of masturbatory rage leads. I’m also reminded that William S. Burroughs used to say all a junkie wants is junk – not food, not water, not sex, just junk – and today’s rage-addled right-winger is little different than a junkie. I guess that should call for more compassion on my part, but rageheads do a lot more harm than junkies do.

Elon Musk has run Twitter for a week and already he’s fired a bunch of employees after failing to give them the notice required by law, and now they’re suing him. These bazillionaires all think they’re so great – too great for our laws, apparently! – when in reality they trip over their own dicks more than you or I ever will. And though one hates to say bad things about someone who popularized the electric car, note well how that electric car hasn’t gotten any cheaper over the last 10 years. I’m old enough to remember when the Toyota Prius was too expensive for working families, but I’m also old enough to remember when it wasn’t anymore.

Whoa Nelly: the Republican candidate for North Carolina’s 13th U.S. House District actually wants to create “a community-level review process outside the jurisdiction of the federal government” that would evaluate whether a woman can get an abortion because of rape or incest, and though his campaign thinks that’s a compromise position (you know, from NO ABORSHUNZ EVAHZ!!!!), Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall had another name for it: a “rape panel,” which I expect will stick, though “Star Chamber” wouldn’t be a bad name for it, either. Think it might be much easier to, gosh, I don’t know, let the woman and her doctor decide the matter without state interference? Think that’d be a more small government solution than any “rape panel” would? Barry Goldwater would have said so.

Finally, Emily Oster at The Atlantic thinks we should “declare a pandemic amnesty” so we can all “move forward,” and, ah, no. There is no equivalence between yelling at someone who got too close to you on a hike in April of 2020 and the millions of Americans who simply wouldn’t get a vaccine in 2021 out of rage – the former may have hurt your feelings, but the latter reignited the damn pandemic. The author doesn't explicitly mention these latter folks, probably so we'd all avoid making the comparison I just made. I lump those latter folks in with all the other folks I’ll never forgive, like (for example) the Iraq war hawks who called me “traitor.” Don’t worry, God’ll sort me out in the end.

Action: concerning endless war, taxing the rich, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal Iraq War authorization, tax billionaires a lot harder, and pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Win Without War and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). Yes, it’s still on the books, though the Iraq War has been over for more than a decade and both Presidents Obama and Trump have abused it to launch more unwise and unconstitutional military adventures. No one calls them “wars,” of course, since wars kinda have a bad name now. Why do wars have a bad name now? Why, mainly because of the Iraq War, which the 2002 AUMF authorized, a profoundly evil war George W. Bush and his votaries used to tar all their political opponents as traitors. If you want to stop that from ever happening again, then raise hell about the 2002 AUMF.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire Minimum Income Tax. Billionaires made out a lot better than the rest of us during this pandemic, not because they’re “better people” or because they “worked harder” or because they “contributed more to society,” but because when you start out with billions of dollars, it’s much easier to make billions more, particularly when our civilization acts like “letting the rich do what they want” is not only a good idea but the only idea. A half-century ago we had only one billionaire, and (not coincidentally!) a much fairer America, and the Billionaires Minimum Tax will help us get that America back.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would outlaw state-level “right to work” laws, which we might better describe as “right to work for less money, fewer benefits, and fewer protections from bosses’ whims” laws, even though I suppose that's not as snappy "Right to work” laws allow workers to work in union shops without paying union dues, but no one who joins a union simply doesn’t know that dues fund the many services a union provides, and not for nothing, but the higher salary workers make when they're in unions tends to outstrip dues. Certainly that's been my experience for a few decades now.

Action: concerning taxes and war.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion and make it permanent and pass a wealth tax on the ultra-rich, and tell your Senators to repeal the 2002 Iraq War AUMF. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion (from the American Rescue Plan Act) and make it permanent. That CTC expansion put $250 and $300 checks (per child!) in good Americans’ bank accounts every month in 2021, which sure did help when inflation shot upward, but Congress let it lapse at the end of 2021 – or rather, 50 Senate Republicans and Joe Manchin let it lapse at the end of 2021. Working families sure could have used it last year, and they sure could use it now, too. And frankly bringing it back should be a no-brainer – even for a Congress that all too frequently demonstrates it hasn’t a brain in the building.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on the ultra-rich, and with a quickness. A recent Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) report told us what we all kinda knew already, that the richest one percent of Americans have increased their wealth by almost $30 trillion over the last 30 years; meanwhile the rest of us worry about getting slammed with surprise medical bills and wonder how much of the rent we can get away with not paying this month. So yeah, we’ve gotta change that, and it sure ain’t like taxing the rich harder polls badly! I guess all that’s left is for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) to intone for the 211th time that she won’t raise taxes on the rich because working families small businesses tough times Arizona I’m a maverick.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to repeal the notorious 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq, which the last four Presidents have all used to justify all manner of military misadventures that have spilled our blood and treasure for the greater glory of American defense corporations. Sorry, in the absence of a strategy at least somewhat moored in reality, I must assume that’s why it still happens, and if we take away this AUMF, there’ll be less of it. And not to pile on, but that’s five words they’re using to say “wage war.” Why don’t they just say “wage war”? Couldn’t be a profound lack of courage, could it?

Around the table: centrists, right-wingers, and liars still suck, part 833.

Factcheck.org issues an expansive report “Correcting Misinformation About Dr. Fauci,” which has unfortunately proven to be an Augean task. Read the whole thing, since he’s going to be a Republican villain in this year’s midterm elections even though he deserves better – and, more importantly, we deserve better. Even when he said (in February 2020) that “right now” COVID infection risk was “low,” he was, strictly speaking, right – and he’s always acted with more honesty and integrity than all his critics who pretend to mishear what he’s saying or cast aspersions upon his motivations with no evidence other than the rage they want to provoke in others.

Had you been thinking that the Sinemanchin axis hasn’t done much to foil President Biden’s appointees in a 50-50 Senate? Turns out they’ve just been picking their spots, with Sen. Sinema, in particular, personally scuttling the appointment of an Elizabeth Warren ally to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sounds like an unimportant office, right? It’s not: it helps federal regulations get written more quickly and efficiently, so I guess this is another reason corporations call Sen. Sinema “heroic.” Now would be a good time to remind everyone that if she goes into lobbying after her Senate term, as some expect, it won’t be because of her relationships with Democratic Senators, since those are all in flames. It’ll be because of her relationships with Republican Senators. Have you seen her photographed with anyone else? No, you have not. There’s a reason for that.

Ho hum, Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters has been scrubbing his campaign website of any claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election, even though he’s trafficked in such claims plenty of times. That’s what you’d have to do, I guess, if you know (and if I know, I’m sure he knows) that election denialism turns off independent voters. Still, he said it, so Mark Kelly should run ads about it. Note well, also, that Mr. Masters will have a much tougher time “scrubbing” his remarks about privatizing Social Security, which exist on tape, and therefore the internet, and therefore forever.

BFD that more Pennsylvania Republican politicians have endorsed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro, because Republican voters don’t listen to their “leaders” anymore, not when Dear Leader Trump (or his Chosen One, Doug Mastriano) speaks. These Republicans know that as surely as I do, and they also know that the more outspoken Republican support Mr. Shapiro gets, the more he’ll feel pressured to move rightward. I don’t even think these Republicans would be unhappy if Mr. Mastriano wins! In any case, I hope Mr. Shapiro understands that his high-profile Republican supporters don’t hold many cards here.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph now right-wingers are harassing children’s hospitals in at least five cities for supposedly performing gender-affirming surgery on trans teens which they’re not even doing. I’d say have they no shame?, but really, that ship sailed when they started calling everyone who opposed the Iraq war a “traitor.” Just imagine the worst thing a human being can do, and in a few short years (or months!) you’ll see a right-winger proudly doing it. I’m not even anxious to blame social media for spreading lies about children's hospitals, because assholes only care about setting other people off, and it doesn’t matter with what.

Finally, did I say just two days ago that maybe Mehmet Oz’s Senate campaign isn’t going as badly as we all think? Well, scratch that: Mr. Oz tells a radio interviewer, in re recent attacks on the health of his opponent, John Fetterman, that “(t)he campaign’s saying lots of things. My position is – I can only speak to what I’m saying.” Few Americans care about the difference between what dark money groups say and what candidates say, so they sure ain’t gonna care about the difference between what candidates say and what their own campaigns say. And if there really is a difference, then the candidate doesn’t know what he’s doing! It’s his own campaign! These Trumpholes always strut around when things go well and then act so powerless when they screw up; I’m sick of it.

Around the table: when robots talk, and other horrors.

While even “liberal” media outlets like CNN and the New York Times apparently don’t want to shill for Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro – despite all the “good” he’s done American corporations with his “reforms” – Fox News has proven it’s up to the task. Hilariously they’re using booga-booga about China as a reason to support Mr. Bolsonaro, when Brazil spend four times as much on Chinese goods as Americans do – and that number’s actually gone way, way up since Mr. Bolsonaro took office. Sadly, Glenn Greenwald has slipped further down the rabbit hole at almost as rapid a pace. I know, the guy who literally broke the Sergio Moro corruption story! But obsession with censorship über alles has ruined many a good thinker.

A University of Chicago Institute of Politics Poll informs us that one out of every four Americans feels so “alienated” from our government they think it “may soon be necessary to take up arms against it,” but let me be the one to tell you that this information is not that startling if you’ve long thought, as I have, that about 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane in the first place. It’s just that back in the day they wanted to put Iraq war opponents in jail for treason, and today they think they need to take up arms against their government. It’s not even much of a devolution, frankly, and if you’d asked folks this question in, say, 2004, I think the only reason that number would have been lower was because you had a Republican government then. Strange, isn't it, how liberals talk about changing government while right-wingers talk about burning it all down?

It’s easy to dunk on Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) for voting against protecting gay marriage at around the same time he was toasting his own son at his son’s gay wedding. And Mr. Thompson seems like a good guy – his resume includes decades spent as a physical therapist, a firefighter, and an EMT – so we’re better off saying that he’s the sort of Republican who should be forcing his party to do better. But I don’t have the power, I guess he’d say, and setting aside the fact that he’s in line to be Agricultural Committee Chair if Republicans take the House, the first power you have, as a civilized person, is the power of shame. It’s a great power, if we would but use it.

What do you call it when a long-time advisor to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán breaks with him over his latest speech decrying all the European “people of mixed race”? Same thing you call it whenever right-wingers fight: drama! I mean, I really do like to think the best of people, but right-wingers have spent decades making positive noises about courage without delivering any actual courage, and the evidence does pile high after a while. (Don't object with "but Liz Cheney," for reasons including, but not limited to, the fact that for every Liz Cheney there are a hundred Jeff Flakes who talk a good game but do nothing.) In any case, I’d lay money that Zsuzsa Hegedüs will soon go back to work for the Master Race in some other capacity.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of overtly anti-democratic BS that has crept into mainstream political discussion lately, let me sum up “mysterious” and “complex” concepts like “neoreaction” in three words: you don’t count. Seriously, if you’ve grown up your whole life believing that anyone can make it in America (or that anyone should be able to make it in America), you shouldn’t take up with statements like “all organizations – irrespective of size – are best managed by a single executive” even after Joe Manchin scuttles the 135th attempt at Build Back Better. Here’s another five words about wishing for strongmen: boys do that, not men.

Finally, Ohio Senate candidate/pretend redneck J.D. Vance has caught a lot of well-deserved flak for saying that folks shouldn’t leave violent marriages for the sake of the children will no one think of the children! And I guess some folks easily fooled by robot talk will find his “defense” of marriage convincing. But Mr. Vance presents a false dichotomy: he posits only two possible worlds, one in which you “stay with your abusive spouse no matter what,” and the other in which “people change spouses like they change underwear,” and a great nation needs not submit to these false choices. Besides which, neither choice describe America as it actually is – the divorce rate, for example, is considerably lower now than it has been in decades, maybe because real Americans navigate all these issues better than Mr. Vance wants you to think.

Action: concerning taxes, animal abuse, and endless war-making.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits, pass the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, and repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits. Yeah, gas prices have been coming down for about a month – too late for June’s inflation figures, you may notice, but maybe not too late for July’s, which come out on August 10 – but big oil corporations are still making far too much money “dealing with circumstances” that they might better deal with by eating some profit and being good to Americans. Of course, the powerful don’t do that, unless we make them. And then they whine about how “onerous” our laws are! But when we make them do the right thing, we make good things happen. History always shows that.

The Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7398, the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, which would, as its title suggests, make it illegal to conduct a wildlife killing contest on public lands. The bill specifically excludes invasive species, in case your right-wing neighbor was going to launch that objection without reading the bill, as they often do, but a wildlife killing contest strikes me as merely an excuse for testosterone-addled men to be cruel, and we really shouldn’t be giving them more opportunities to do that. Especially on public lands, where protected species don’t all walk around with signs around their necks.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq War Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). Why bother after all these years? Because Presidents still use it to launch illegal and unconstitutional war efforts, like former President Trump’s assassination of Iranian General Soleimani, and you give a President a weapon like that, they’re going to use it sooner or later. And bad people will use and abuse bad laws, and the 2002 Iraq AUMF is a profoundly bad law that did profound evil. That Mr. Bush ever asked for it, and Congress ever passed it, still deeply offends me, and it’s not the kind of thing you just “let go” of, not if you want to stop it from happening again.

Action: concerning birth control, student loan debt, and endless war-making.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation protecting birth control, tell President Biden to abandon means-testing for student loan debt forgiveness, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq war AUMF. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a law protecting birth control from our Supreme Court. You know, like they failed to do with abortion. Nonetheless, Civic Shout’s petition shows cunning! A lot of politicians will happily voice their opposition to abortion – but how many will happily voice their opposition to birth control? I mean, sure, the far-right ones will and there are far too many of them in Congress, but they’re not a majority, at least not yet. And birth control is considerably more popular, after all. Why, a lot of men favor it! At least for their women, they do. And recall, Justice Thomas has already put it down in writing that he’d overturn Griswold!

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden not to erect stupid barriers to student debt relief. Like means testing! Look, our IRS already knows how much money you made last year, so making folks jump through bureaucratic hoops so they can get the relief they deserve is just a way of ensuring that folks don’t get that relief. Also, don’t get evicted or get in an abusive relationship, or else the application likely won’t find you! And don’t count on our Department of Education getting funded well enough to handle all the paperwork it’ll have to process. Recall that Republican Presidential candidates typically promise to disband the department entirely.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq. That mistake is now almost old enough to order a beer legally! And Presidents still use it for reasons wholly unrelated to the Iraq War – former President Trump, for example, used it to justify our assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, which almost brought us to war with Iran. So it was a bad idea in the first place, and we misuse it and bring ourselves to the brink of war – anything else? Oh yeah: our Constitution invests the power to declare war solely in our Congress, so letting Presidents go to war whenever they want contravenes our laws in addition to our morals.

Action: concerning taxes, climate change, endless war, and Medicare premiums.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich for-real for-real, pass real climate change legislation, repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, and reduce absurdly high Medicare premiums. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Word on the street is Senate Democrats are straining to water down tax hikes on the rich in the House-passed Build Back Better Act, so call your Senators and tell them to stop that shit. I mean, we all pay our damn taxes; when will the folks who make millions of dollars an hour start paying their share? And yes, by every conceivable measure, their fair share is a lot larger than ours! That’s how it’s supposed to be! That’s how we built the greatest middle class in history! And that’s not “punishing success” – rich CEOs succeed only on the backs of millions of good Americans who work for them! Seriously, if Elon Musk had to grow his own food, he’d be knocking on every door in your neighborhood with his hands out.

With our Supreme Court dealing yet another body blow to our government’s ability to keep big corporations from hurting good Americans in West Virginia v. EPA, the Climate Reality Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to act on climate change – as in, explicitly give our EPA the authority to curtail it. You may have thought our EPA already had that authority – even the late Justice Scalia said so! – but our literal-when-we-want-to Supreme Court disagrees, and they’re out to destroy everything we’ve fought for, until our government is powerless to do anything but spy on us. Yes, that’s the endgame! And we Americans have shed too much blood and spent too much treasure to let that happen. Our Congressfolk need to know that.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 AUMF that authorized war with Iraq, but which other Presidents have used to authorize all sorts of unconstitutional warmaking thereafter, including but not limited to former President Trump’s assassination of General Soleimani in 2019. Call the 2002 AUMF yet another humiliation visited upon good Americans in the wake of the “war on terror,” a “war” which may one day prove to be even more injurious to our great nation than the “war on drugs” has been. Yes, even though the “war on drugs” now exists almost entirely to put Black and Brown folks in prison! The 2002 AUMF is old enough to vote for stupid people now, so it’s well past time to send it to a much-deserved oblivion.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell the Biden Administration to lower outrageously-high Medicare premiums, preferably by rebating the overcharges to seniors before the midterms. Yeah, there’s some political calculation in there – yes, I said “some” because it’s also the right thing to do – but you know the other side only calculates; it’s why they’re irredeemably decadent and morally bankrupt. And Medicare really screwed up by deciding to cover the expensive-and-not-terribly-effective Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm – and then did the right thing by only covering it for seniors in clinical trials. But Medicare still needs to do another right thing by reversing the premium hikes that covering Aduhelm caused in the first place.

Action: concerning the Espionage Act, marriage equality, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act, protect marriage equality, and lower prescription drug prices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so that our government can’t use it to silence journalists and whistleblowers. You know, like they’re trying to do to Julian Assange for the crime of exposing American wrongdoing during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That embarrassed a lot of American elites, but embarrassing American elites ain’t no reason to use anti-spying legislation to silence journalists. And silencing whistleblowers? Who expose corruption at great personal cost? Anyone who says they love America should be ashamed of doing such a thing. Allow me to believe that shaming still works in America.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to codify marriage equality in our laws before our Supreme Court uses its dastardly “deeply-rooted rights” notion to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges. Because you know they’re just itching to do it – why, Justice Thomas said they should do it in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization which overturned Roe v. Wade. Hence we need our Congressfolk to act. It’ll take a while for a case to reach our Court that could outlaw gay marriage, but don’t let that make you complacent. Whenever our Court takes our rights away, it always seems like it’s too soon.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices already. Feel free to tell them exactly how in the space for comments – like, by letting Medicare negotiate drug prices, or capping insulin prices, or fining big pharma corporations when they raise prices faster than inflation. People like all of these ideas, and would it kill our Congressfolk to do some things that people actually like, and actually want them to do? As Drug Prices Are Too High suggests, it might even help them in the midterms this November.

Around the table: on "solutions" and drama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: in which someone actually proposes saddling all elections with an Electoral College.

This FactCheck article does a pretty good job summarizing our recent baby formula issues. I'm reminded that when you hear "should immigrant babies get formula before American babies?" that a better question would be: so babies don't deserve formula merely because they're immigrants? And if the answer is "well, not before our babies do," then ask why the Greatest Nation on Earth should have to choose. Marcus Aurelius would shake his head at all of that.

Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate wants to bring the Electoral College to Colorado statewide elections! Why a man would think "doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials" is a winning message is a bit of a mystery. If he were to somehow succeed in this nefarious plan, I can't say for sure our Supreme Court would strike it down, even though precedent commands it. Perhaps Sam Alito would say one-person-one-vote isn't a deeply-rooted enough right.

An anti-price-gouging bill aimed at oil corporations -- not the Windfall Profits Tax Act, but not a bad bill -- barely passed the House, with four House Democrats joining all Republicans in voting against it. Naturally Democrat anti-bill arguments were all hostage-taking: if we fight price-gouging, what will we do when we need more oil later? Why, you could argue against almost anything that way! If we put this CEO in jail for butchering his secretary and drinking her blood and eating the flesh from her bones, what'll we do when we need his leadership later? Of course, a truly great nation wouldn't need to answer that, because a truly great nation would train its people up into greatness. Clearly we've failed there with folks like Rep. Kathleen Rice, last heard helping to scuttle efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times tells us that the Amazon Labor Union victory in Staten Island, NY, requires organizers to recognize that "all of the time unions spend arguing with one another over who has the right to organize which workers, in which industry, at which company is one gargantuan waste of time." You'd think unions would already have thought of that, being on the ropes for the last 40-odd years as the share of union workers in the economy has dwindles from around 33% to around 10%, but then being on the ropes against an economy that seems to grow more diabolical by the day may make you inclined to cling to what you've been doing and tell yourself you just need to do it harder. Still, as Mr. Nolan says, "(b)uilding multi-union coalitions requires unions to recognize the futility of arguing over jurisdiction, and instead do the opposite: combine forces and organize without freaking out over who gets to put their label on the end product."

When I read David Brooks telling us that liberals need to stop looking down on right-wingers and pretending that only they have a monopoly on understanding right and wrong, I am tempted to replace the word "liberal" with the word "right-winger" everywhere in that op-ed and guess what? It works about as well that way; liberals certainly have no monopoly on believing their way is the only way. David Brooks apparently didn't hear any right-wingers calling Iraq war opponents traitors 20 years ago, let alone right-wingers constantly calling liberals weak since time immemorial, and that's the kind of blind spot that'll never help you ingratiate yourself with your new Democrat friends. (And those of us who do not imagine a wall between what Mr. Brooks calls the "moral freedom" ethos and the "you are not your own" ethos won't be persuaded, or even enriched, by the last 36 paragraphs. We certainly won't be convinced that the conservative worldview's "existential()...crisis" is a recent phenomenon. That carcass has been stinking up the joint for years.)

Finally, a right-winger actually tells Congress, under oath, that "places like Washington, D.C." use fetuses to power street lamps. As with right-wing efforts to call everyone who doesn't beat up a gay person a "groomer," I think legal remedies already exist to redress such absurdities. Never mind that she actually said that under oath; anyone can pretend they thought what they said was true as far as they "knew." No, someone with standing to sue needs to sue her -- someone with decision-making power in the D.C. utility grid, perhaps? And no, her saying "places like Washington, D.C." won't give her wiggle room; everyone knows what she meant. Playing whack-a-mole with these lies won't save us, but getting the liars to pay in a court of law might.

Action: concerning anti-war protestors, law and order, pipeline safety, climate change, mercury emissions, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell the Russian government to stop hurting antiwar protestors, tell the Biden Administration to actually lead on trying Mr. Putin before the ICC, tell the Biden Administration to give up its fascination with "carbon capture" technology already, tell our EPA to bring back strong mercury emissions rules, and tell Travelers Insurance to stay away from Arctic drilling projects. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Roots Action helps you tell the Russian government to stop hurting Russian antiwar protestors. The news is full these days of stories of Russian citizens spouting pro-war propaganda, but there's a reason for that: the Russian government arrested all of its anti-war protestors and detained them! In America, our government just laughs at you when you protest them, but in Russia as in many other nations, you could lose your freedom, your livelihood, or your life. They probably count themselves as "civilized" because they don't just shoot them dead in the street! But it takes more than that to be civilized. And not for nothing, but if you've ever been called "traitor" for opposing the Iraq war, then Russian anti-war protestors are your brothers and sisters, and they need your help now more than ever.

Win Without War helps you tell the Biden Administration to lead the effort to put Vlad the Bad on trial at the International Criminal Court for war crimes against Ukraine. I don't need to recount the various war crimes Mr. Putin has committed against Ukraine; you can see them on the TV and on the internet. But despite what Mr. Biden has said, apparently off the cuff, our government generally doesn't have any appetite for prosecuting war crimes at the ICC, lest someone one day prosecute our leaders for war crimes! That's why we've got to speak out, and make no mistake, we're not just fighting Mr. Putin here; we're also fighting a future Donald Trump Administration (or a worse one!) when it enables our troops to commit rape and torture and mass murder in some foreign land to distract from some other evil they're committing against the American people.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell the Biden Administration that "carbon capture" technology is not a climate change "solution." What's wrong with "carbon capture," which aims to trap carbon emissions and store them? It never captures the amount of carbon they say it will, and big corporations use it as an "energy source" only to get more oil out of the ground. Carbon capture proponents will say it should be part of an "all of the above" energy strategy, but stupid ideas should never be a part of any strategy, ever. And if enough of us tell our government to scuttle its carbon capture dreams, our government will eventually have to explain to a federal court why they ignored us. Our recent experience in this area has suggested that wouldn't go well.

Environment America helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous mercury pollution rules possible. Environment America's email missive puts it most succinctly: "When power plants burn coal, mercury is released up the smokestack. That toxic mercury then rains down into our soil and waterways, poisoning fish and threatening our health. Mercury pollution is linked to increased risk of neurological illnesses and nerve damage. Kids are especially vulnerable to the impacts of mercury and can suffer severe developmental issues." Our EPA had a pretty good mercury rule once, and it cut mercury emissions by 85% between 2012 and 2016; I bet you just can't guess what happened next. Well, he's gone now, so now it's time to undo all his evil works.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell Travelers Insurance to refuse to insure oil and gas drilling projects in the Arctic. Because drilling in the Arctic is not only fraught with danger -- the inevitable oil spills are harder to clean up in that frigid region -- but because drilling in the Arctic will threaten actual, thriving industries, like Alaska's famous salmon industry. And oil drilling ain't just about digging a hole and shoving a well into it; it also involves clearing trees, paving roads, and running pipelines, all of which disturb and destroy ecosystems. And not for nothing, but given that Alaska already pumps out a ton of oil and more Arctic drilling doesn't promise that much more, think maybe big corporations just want to ruin protected areas? And should we encourage that kind of immaturity?

Action: concerning taxes, defense spending, forced arbitration, the Grand Canyon, gray wolves, and marijuana policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a budget more like the Biden budget but with less defense spending, tell your Senators to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Grand Canyon Protection Act and reject the Managing Predators Act, and tell your Senators to pass the MORE Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to use the Biden budget as "a roadmap to lower costs, invest in our future and unrig our tax system." You'll find things to like in the Biden budget plan -- the return of the expanded Child Tax Credit, paid family/medical leave, and higher taxes on the rich and on corporations -- but you could also tell your Congressfolk you'd take the Biden budget plan over Rick Scott's "Rescue America" plan, which would raise taxes on lower-income Americans and sunset Medicare and Social Security after five years. People care about making ends meet; the Biden budget addresses that, and Rick Scott's masturbatory rage-addled screed about "wokeness," the only Republican proposal on record, doesn't.

However, Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk you think $813 billion on defense in the Biden budget is way too much. Hey, might as well meet it head-on! Saying you want a budget that taxes the rich harder and helps working families more doesn't require that you accept that we spend even more money on weapons. They're selling it as "keeping pace with China," but China's military budget doesn't comprise even 31% of Mr. Biden's proposal, and what has Mr. Putin's little adventure in Ukraine reminded us? That massive military power not only doesn't guarantee victory (though, of course, our adventure in Iraq should have reminded us of that!), but it's an anchor around a civilization. Bigger guns and higher walls testify to a civilization's insecurity. So let's be more secure.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Congress has, commendably, ended forced arbitration in re sexual harassment complaints, but should end it for all contracts; the FAIR Act would do that, though the bill would still give consumers and workers the choice to use arbitration to settle a dispute if they'd like; I mention that because this bill's opponents will almost certainly lie about that. I expect folks would rather take offenders to court than to arbitration, once they learn you almost never win in arbitration -- and that corporations can then turn and sue you in arbitration and win! Again, how much of that "average $5,000 arbitration award" do you collect if you lose?

Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1052/S. 387, the Grand Canyon Protection Act, which would remove a million acres of Grand Canyon-area land from ever being considered for any sort of drilling or mining project ever again. Keeping drilling and mining projects away from the Grand Canyon -- which you really do have to see to believe no matter how many photos of it you've seen already -- should be a no-brainer, but though our House passed similar legislation last term, the McConnell Administration wouldn't even bring it up for a vote. We've got another chance to do it again, and this time, the notorious Kyrsten Sinema is the bill's main Senate sponsor! Let's see if she can work that bipartisan getting-to-yes magic for which she's so famous!

Environmental Action also helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 286, the Managing Predators Act, since it would remove gray wolves from the endangered species list in certain states. Thanks to our Endangered Species Act, gray wolves have come back from near-extinction, but they've only recovered about 15% of the range they used to have, and now they face death wherever they are. So naturally this bill would let four states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wyoming) treat gray wolves as if they have no Endangered Species Act protections, and would let all the other states set wolf population goals, as if none of them would ever set an absurdly-low population goal just so it can kill more wolves! Seriously, when they say Congressfolk don't know how to make laws, this is what they mean.

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Senators to pass the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. And Matt Gaetz voted for that bill, too! We live in an age of wonder! Sadly, Democratic Senators have made cowardly noises about the bill -- it's not exactly what they want, you see, though you would think that's why Senatorial debate even exists. We know their real problem, though: Republicans will say they're soft on crime. Like Republicans ever say anything else! Here's what they should do: pass the MORE Act, which most people want done anyway, then remind everyone that Republicans all rejected the American Rescue Plan Act which included more funding for cops and hate the Biden budget that would include more funding for cops. You're welcome, Democrats.

Around the table: from student loan holidays to the next Manchin drama.

President Biden extends the student loan payment holiday through the end of August. Presumably he could order another one in late August as a midterm-booster -- recall that time Republicans called a vote on war with Iraq before a midterm! -- or he could decide to forgive a mere $10,000 in student loans per person and count the money unpaid during the payment holiday toward that amount. That would seem awfully anticlimactic, but it would have served as a pretty good 30-month stimulus. Personal to those who find this debt holiday "inflationary": you still think corporations aren't inflating prices on purpose?

Eric Blanc at Jacobin talks to Amazon Labor Union organizer/night shift worker Angelika Maldonado about "How We Beat Amazon." I'll admit I was a little stunned to see how many Amazon workers told organizers you don't even work here (although they did!) just because Amazon bosses told them that! I guess you don't know everyone in a large warehouse -- recall that almost 5,000 workers voted in the union election. The winning formulae, apparently, include a) talking to everyone you can on their breaks and b) coming in on your off-time and talking to everyone you can on their breaks (which our laws allow, as long as you're not actually on the clock).

Hard to believe, Harry, but Republican-run states and cities generally have higher murder rates than those run by Democrats, and if you're suspicious that the Third Way study tabulates murder from 2020, which was not exactly a typical year, note well that similar studies have found the same results in Southern (and thus almost exclusively Republican-run) states for at least a decade. I think "crime waves" are largely a right-wing invention, but I'd rather have data in hand about other crimes before declaring victory over Republican crime hysteria. I'd also, you know, like to see things like pollution and bankster predation routinely included in crime data.

I don't like to merely tabulate Republican hypocrisy, but even I was astounded at the level of chutzpah Donald Trump's sons evince by complaining that Hunter Biden is "mak(ing) millions off (his) father's presidency." The Trump family took, on average, five trips requiring Secret Service protection per day, and mostly to "promote Trump Organization businesses," per Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. At the risk of violating Godwin's Law, the Trump kids accusing Hunter Biden of profiting off his father's presidency is like Adolf Hitler complaining about other people's anti-Semitism.

When I hear that accusations of pedophilia and "grooming" are "the new Red Scare," I think that's about right -- nothing puts the chill in someone like the thought that their child could be sexually molested. But will right-wingers be smart enough this time to avoid libel or slander charges? Because that would chill this particular stratagem right quick. I'm not sure Rep. Greene could escape those charges in calling Sens. Romney, Murkowski, and Collins "pro-pedophile," and I sure as hell would like to see Mitt Romney, for example, get all Jack Palance on her and say prove it.

Finally, Democrats now say they'll meet Joe Manchin wherever he is on a massive reconciliation bill, and they'll do it by Memorial Day. At last they're calling his bluff! Are they finally learning? Or will they be caught flat-footed, again, when he says but I want this to go through committees? My money is on Joe Manchin dragging this out precisely so that it'll fail and doom Democrats' hopes of surviving the midterms, all so his absurd notion of "bipartisanship" will survive. One thing's for sure, though: one way or another, his tenure as One True Great and Real American President will be over the day after Election Day.

Action: concerning Medicare, forever chemicals, border walls, war-mongers, methane emissions, and Fox News.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to end a Trump-era Medicare privatization scheme, tell fast-food corporations to get "forever chemicals" out of food wrappers, tell our government to abandon the "digital border wall," tell the Washington Post to stop publishing op-eds by aging war-mongers, tell our EPA to crack down on methane emissions from factory farms, and tell big corporate advertisers to abandon Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Biden Administration to end the Trump-era program that allows private insurers to pay for some Medicare patient care. Without telling them, I might add! C'mon, you know Donald Trump: if it were such a great idea, he'd never STFU about it! He surely wouldn't have hidden it! Sadly, the Biden Administration seems to be doing just that, having (after a public comment period that I'm sure didn't go well for them) renamed the DCE program (for "direct contracting entities") as ACO REACH, and yes that is an acronym. ACO REACH won't be as odious a program as DCE was, but as one observer said, "you don't slap a band-aid on a tumor and call it cured," and whatever they call it, DCE will remain the tumor that threatens to spread the cancer of privatization to all of Medicare.

Consumer Reports helps you tell fast-food corporations Arby's and Nathan's to commit to getting the PFAS chemicals out of their food wrapping. Doesn't matter that you just throw it out when you're done with it, because they don't call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for nothing -- you find them in just about everything anymore, they don't break down into safer elements, and scientists have linked them to cancer. And not for nothing, but the longer you let your cheese fries just sit in that wrapper, the more PFAS you'll likely have in your food. Chick-fil-A and Burger King have lately committed to getting the PFAS out of their food wrappers, following McDonald's and Wendy's; now Arby's and Nathan's need to follow suit, lest we one day get to the point where we can't get PFAS chemicals out of our products and our bodies.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our government to abandon plans to form a "digital border wall." That's got to be better than Donald Trump's vanity border wall, right? Not so much -- the "digital" wall relies partly on facial recognition technology, and as we know, facial recognition technology has the hardest time recognizing the non-white faces that would comprise the bulk of would-be immigrants to the U.S. Also, the "digital" border wall uses drones, which I'm sure will never turn on us. If we must have fewer immigrants to the United States, then we must do three things: 1) make all jobs in America good-paying jobs, 2) stop interfering with other nations' efforts to do same, and 3) stop letting corporations make all the decisions in America. That'll make wisdom and compassion much easier.

Win Without War helps you tell the Washington Post to stop running op-eds from discredited war-mongers. The news hook here? On the eve of the possible resuscitation of the Iran nuclear deal, Post ran a John Bolton op-ed, as if Mr. Bolton hadn't orchestrated its destruction by President Trump. Mr. Trump, for his part, delivered perhaps the only guilt-free laugh line of his Presidency the day he said if he'd listened to John Bolton we'd be on World War V by now! He also pushed that war in Iraq, and if you're thinking maybe we should let bygones be bygones after almost 20 years (!), just remember that no one who pushed that disaster paid for their evil works, which included smearing half of America as "traitors." "Forgive and forget" works in our personal lives, but it just enables politicians.

Food and Water Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to start cracking down on the climate change emissions coming from factory farms. This was a big joke to right-wing hotheads a decade ago, but farms pump out more than a third of all methane emissions in America, and not through flatulence but through industrial production. Joke'll be on them when they realize that our EPA can-so regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, and can-so regulate it on factory farms. They won't do it, though, unless we tell them to do it, and given how much factory farms already get away with by threatening higher food prices, our EPA really won't want to do it, unless we get in their grills about it. And we may have to do it more than once, and we may have to do it in court.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. No, that's not "censorship"! Governments censor, but our First Amendment doesn't guarantee a "right" to be paid by advertisers, just as it doesn't confer protections against activism or criticism. Why, I'd call it "starving the beast," and if Fox News has to get by with MyPillow and Snuggy ads, that's just the churn of civilization. We don't have to tabulate every awful thing Fox News has ever done to deserve shame and shunning, I trust, though demonizing the half of Americans who opposed the Iraq war as "traitors" does stick in my mind. If you want to meet corporate executives halfway, though, I suppose you could tell them they should abandon Fox because Fox sucks up to Vlad the Bad, and that's a bad look these days.

Around the table: of refugees, bioweapons, and "terrorists."

Everyone wants to help out Ukrainian refugees, but Julie Hollar at FAIR reminds us that "civilians in other conflicts" are "much less newsworthy" -- "particularly when they’re victims of the US." Hence Ukrainian civilians get on TV a lot, but Iraqi civilians didn't get much screen time back in the mid-2000s, nor did Serbian civilians a mere half-decade earlier, nor do Syrian civilians today; you just have to wonder if there's a connection, despite TV journalists intoning that "the pain of war is borderless." And when you read about how our "liberal" media tripped all over themselves back in the day avoiding saying that American forces were attacking Iraq, you'll be reminded of how they trip all over themselves today avoiding saying that American police officers shoot people.

When I hear that Russian biologists have informed us that Russian/QAnon claims that America is sponsoring bioweapons labs in Ukraine are utter bunkum, I'm reminded of when former U.N. inspector Scott Ritter said Iraq had no WMD in 2002, when he had at least three very good reasons to say the opposite. These Russian biologists are all very likely to find themselves dead or in jail soon, so let's not squander their good works by forgetting them, or by, say, giving more oxygen to the amateur epidemiologists who told us COVID wasn't real or masks choked you or vaccines killed 50,000 people.

Michigan's biggest energy providing corporation makes big bucks while shutting off electricity to many, many more homes than any other similar corporation in the state -- and also charges the highest prices in Michigan, and though it wouldn't be fair to say the state of Michigan rubber-stamps their rate hikes (generally, DTE gets about half of what it asks for!), I sure do wonder how the state allowed any energy-providing corporation to get so big, let alone fail to take into account whether good Michiganders can even afford these rate hikes. I mean, capping bills as a percentage of income will help, but how about some good old-fashioned trust-busting?

Senate Republicans apparently plan to attack President Biden's Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, for her work defending "terrorists" at Guantánamo Bay. Perhaps conscious that most Americans now think Guantánamo Bay was a total fraud, they're working on shortening their argument to "she kept defending terrorists," which should be enough for folks who already fight anything touched by Biden-nature. But as you're mindful of how many innocent people got sent to Guantánamo over the years, and how often our government held them for decades without even charging them, then really, Guantánamo was horseshit is the only response you need deliver.

When I hear that One America News Network has sued AT&T for breach of contract after AT&T simply didn't renew their contract, I'm tempted to yell frivolous lawsuit! from the mountaintops. OAN's argument has (at least!) four prongs, which is already a bad sign. First, it alleges a conspiracy between AT&T's (Black, Democratic) Board Chair and plaintiff-against-OAN Dominion Voting Systems, and good luck finding the smoking gun emails for that one! Second, it suggests that AT&T should have continued their relationship past 2022 because OAN had had an "exclusive advertising agreement" with AT&T through 2024; you've heard of the Commutative Property of Contracts, of course? Why, no, you haven't. Third, it alleges that AT&T didn't enforce a non-disparagement clause by preventing some of its other properties' celebrities from criticizing OAN; calling that a "reach" would insult actual reaches. Fourth, it alleges that AT&T is "imped(ing) the right of American television viewers to watch the news media channels and programs of their choice," a charge that should make every early-2000s blogger laugh hysterically. Gosh, these big corporations will say just anything to avoid the obvious truth: that good Americans succeeded in agitating for AT&T to dump OAN. Why would they want to occlude that truth, I wonder?

Finally, Ohio Republican Senatorial aspirants Mike Gibbons and Josh Mandel got into it in a debate hosted by FreedomWorks last Friday night, after Mr. Mandel accused Mr. Gibbons of outsourcing Ohio jobs at roughly the same time Mr. Mandel was fighting in Iraq. The timeline Mr. Mandel presents is more than a little tenuous, but Mr. Gibbons really stepped in it with his response -- think "I personally didn't buy the stock" will resonate with anyone? Will "I wish I'd made millions off of Chinese Petra"? And that was before the big confrontation, when Mr. Gibbons told Mr. Mandel he had no experience in the private sector and Mr. Mandel responded "I've done two tours in Iraq! Don't tell me I haven't worked!" Bad behavior in public is never good, but I think all this will help Mr. Mandel on primary day -- he orchestrated it all pretty well, though not perfectly (Mr. Gibbons didn't actually say Mr. Mandel has "never worked," but, as they say, if you're explaining, you're losing), and getting in other people's faces isn't exactly something that repels Trump votaries, is it? I guess we now know why Donald Trump is hedging his bets in this race. Josh Mandel's no great prize, of course -- he's already lost a Senate race, to Sherrod Brown in 2012 -- so all Tim Ryan or Morgan Harper has to do is, like Mr. Brown, offer Ohio voters something of value.

Around the table: no more placating Joe Manchin, please!

Here's an interesting wrinkle on the subject of tax-preparing corporations that offer "free" filing but make you jump through flaming hoops to get it: TurboTax manufacturer Intuit gets class-action lawsuit over its free-filing feature dismissed, forcing plaintiffs into arbitration -- but a Chicago law firm is paying for thousands of arbitration claims against Intuit, which will cost Intuit millions in legal fees and might force a settlement! I have to admit, that's some good aikido, there. The writer compares this tactic to "guerrilla warfare," which, after all, is how underdogs win. Didn't we learn that in Iraq? Isn't Mr. Putin about to learn that in Ukraine? By the way, Intuit also faces challenges from state prosecutors and federal regulators over allegedly forcing folks to pay for tax-filing when they could have had it for free.

After a CBS reporter foolishly laments what's happening to Ukraine because it's "relatively civilized," Zeb Larson at Teen Vogue argues that we too easily declare some nations "civilized" and others not, and thus we effectively erase whole suffering populations. I remember folks who opposed the Iraq war in the mid-2000s still describing the area as "full of savages" who had "never had peace" -- mainly out of intellectual frustration, I'd bet -- but every nation has doctors, lawyers, engineers, poets, and peacemakers, and while folks like the Taliban make it hard to see that, all you need do is talk to a handful of individuals from so-called "backward" nations and you'll never think of them as "uncivilized" again. I shudder to think that so many Americans don't even have my meager experience in this area.

When you read about Hershey's efforts to thwart an organizing drive at its Stuarts Draft, VA factory, you'll notice a lot of familiar tales -- the corporation making record profits and touting its "efficiency," its insinuation that it could be a better friend to the workers than some union ever could, its jacking up prices and blaming it on "inflation," worker complaints about a two-tiered pay system and being forced to work 72 days in a row and never seeing their family. And, of course, there's also the corporation's sudden zeal about resolving certain long-standing complaints lodged by their workers, which only proves that the threat of unionization works. I wish the Stuarts Draft workers luck in their attempt to bargain for a better work life.

Twitter bans Missouri Republican Rep./2022 Senate candidate Vicki Hartzler from its service for an anti-trans tweet, and that's bound to kick-start her campaign! Now she can tout herself as someone victimized by cancel culture, and you know how Trumpholes love their self-pity, even if it's more like Twitter was her publisher and didn't want to publish her venom anymore because it gave Twitter a bad name. If she gets the nomination -- and all the other candidates really have so many problems! -- she can keep this seat for Republicans, as long as establishment Democrats do what they do best and snuff out Lucas Kunce's campaign. Heaven forfend they nominate a candidate who can win -- and whose stance against monopoly power, particularly as it relates to defense spending, now seems awfully in tune with the zeitgeist in America.

Jesus Mary and Joseph Joe Manchin has presented a framework for a major bill "he can support," though he knows full well that other Democratic Senators oppose prescription drug pricing reform and tax hikes on the rich! Why, it's almost like he's designed this effort to fail! You know, just like the last one, which infamously ended with him declaring he couldn't even vote for his own counterproposal, this after Democrats gave him everything he wanted! I presume he wants to stretch this out to October before he finally declares he just can't support what he originally proposed, which will demoralize the Democratic base and let the fascist party formally take control of Congress. Y'all've noticed I've stopped beating the drum for Build Back Better, right? That's because we can't give this drama king any more attention.

Finally, the Arizona state Senate censures one of their number, Sen. Wendy Rogers, after she fantasized about hanging her enemies at a racist conference and called the Ukrainian President a "globalist puppet" of George Soros, "globalist" and "George Soros" being code words now for "hating Jews." Ms. Rogers, of course, remains defiant, and says the censure violates her "free speech rights," though she has no comment on whether the censure might represent her colleagues' free speech rights. Could we finally be seeing a sea change in American politics, where folks start shaming those who habitually transgress our norms and mores? I'm not hopeful. But I'll happily accept proof that I'm wrong.

Around the table: why Russia will lose the war, and other truths.

Ho hum, states are rushing to cut taxes, using money from the American Rescue Plan Act as an excuse, though that money was a one-time expenditure. They'll use any excuse to cut taxes! And remember: when they cut taxes, usually they cut taxes a lot for their cronies and only a little, if any, for regular folks. At least the Nebraska Senate is currently filibustering one of the more nakedly pro-wealthy tax cuts out there. Some of these states have proposed cutting sales taxes, and I approve of that in a general sense, but most of them have not addressed how they're going to raise the resulting shortfall, and every state but Vermont, you may recall, has passed balanced-budget amendments to their constitutions.

Kamil Galeev argues, convincingly I think, that Vladimir Putin will lose his war with Ukraine. Long story short: Russia's more concerned with strutting its stuff than doing the hard work victory would require. Long story somewhat longer: Mr. Putin wanted to basically blitzkrieg the hell out of Ukraine without planning very much for what would happen if that didn't work -- and his blitzkrieg wasn't going to work, since he didn't even plan that well. There's even more to the story -- Russia made its military more efficient until the mid-2010s, when it turned to making its military look more impressive, and Ukraine basically went in the opposite direction. And hate to sound like a broken record, but a lot of this will sound familiar to those who followed our adventure in Iraq closely.

Samuel L. Boyd at The Conversation discusses "Why Translating 'God's Law' to Government Law Isn't Easy." The answer has nothing to do with woke mobs or deep states, of course, and more to do with the fog of passed time: what we, in retrospect, conceive of as "laws," like the Code of Hammurabi and a lot of laws described in the Torah, weren't actually laws -- Hammurabi issued plenty of decrees at odds with his Code, and how many folks during the time of Deuteronomy stoned their kid to death for drinking and rabble-rousing? Not when there was choring to be done on the farm, I bet! In addition, folks may have come up with the concept of a code of law that comes from God, as in Exodus, in order to fight the Kings who oppressed them with their laws. Folks who insist on punishing transgender folks as often as they draw breath won't be swayed by any of these notions, but the folks who would see Leviticus more as a book about universal precautions will. Note well that the latter crowd is considerably larger than the former crowd.

When I read that "Activists push Biden to Expand Renewables for Energy Independence From Russia" -- and entirely reasonable plan we would already have implemented if not for the intransigence of Joe Manchin -- I'd still be happier to read "Americans push Biden to expand renewables," not just because that's generally true of how Americans feel, but also because I'd like us all to think of ourselves as activists, since that's what defending democracy and defending civilization requires. I'd like us all to think of ourselves as activists even though some Americans only discovered their love of activism because they didn't want to wear masks at Costco. I'd also prefer to read that "big energy corporations push Biden to expand renewables," since they're the biggest obstacle to a more renewable energy grid. The article's still very good, though, namely for its lengthy refutation of the notion that fracked natural gas will solve our energy problems. I mean, gosh, you've got sun and wind everywhere.

Our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) finds, after analyzing over 70,000 blood samples, that over 140 million Americans, including a majority of our nation's children, have had COVID through late January. That's way more than official reports give -- Worldometers.info counts a little over 80 million infections total in the United States, which doesn't even mean 80 million people infected -- and it also maps on to The Lancet's finding from January that official sources have way, way underreported COVID infections.

Finally, President Biden delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday night -- it was a good speech, a little heavy on solutions, if anything -- but Republicans didn't waste any time acting like idiots about it. Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) boycotted it because he'd have to take a COVID test beforehand, and because "I only take a test if I'm sick." Why, it's like he hasn't learned after two years that some 40 percent of all COVID infections come without symptoms! I spy something that's going to wind up in Val Demings's campaign ads; she might even call it "Where's Marco?" Meanwhile, Reps. Boebert (Q-CO) and Greene (Q-GA) heckled Mr. Biden while he was talking with a "build the wall" chant; if Democrats have any brains/guts at all, they'll run at least the photo accompanying the story in campaign ads. Ain't nothing an independent voter likes less than a person shouting on TV.

Around the table: more thoughts about Ukraine, oil, dark money, and stupid right-wingers.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch reminds us that Vladimir Putin "Has Gambled Everything on His Snap Invasion of Ukraine" but "Now His Political Survival is in Doubt." "So why did Putin do it? Explanations that he has gone mad or plans to rebuild the Soviet Union are propagandistic. More convincing as a reason for him taking this present extraordinary risk is hubris, which is an occupational disease among those who have been too long in power -- 22 years in Putin’s case." I actually thought Russia would roll over Ukraine fairly quickly and then get worn down by years of guerrilla war, but now I'm not even sure Russia will do that well. Even George W. Bush could claim MISHUNZ ACCOMPLISHEDZ!!!!! for a few minutes.

In case you've been caught short by Mr. Putin's claim that his real aim is to fight "neo-Nazis" in Ukraine who practice "genocide," Jeffrey Veidlinger at The Conversation will set you straight. Long story short: Russians have more free speech rights in Ukraine than they do in Russia, and the neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine today have virtually no electoral power. I guess Mr. Putin is hoping you'll remember there were pogroms in Ukraine in the 19th century and that many Ukrainians collaborated with the actual Nazis, but these facts don't exactly make Ukraine unique (and the Ukranian pogrom occurred while it was part of the Russian empire, maybe that's a cautionary tale!). Besides, if Mr. Putin really wants to punish the sin of Nazi collaboration, why isn't he invading Norway or France?

If you've been thinking how refreshing it is that our "liberal" media has learned to hate imperialist wars, Jeff Cohen at Common Dreams will bring you back to Earth with the reminder that our "liberal" media never refer to American imperialism, except in quotation marks meant to be ironic. I'm still a bit puzzled that folks aren't thinking of the Iraq war when they think of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia has deployed 190,000 soldiers to take over a nation of 44 million people living on a little over 600,000 square miles; America deployed 150,000 soldiers to take over a nation of a little over 25.5 million folks living on a bit less than 440,000 square miles. The numbers ain't that different; I guess some Americans just want to forget it all, particularly that part where they called folks like me who opposed the war traitor.

When I heard that nationalizing the fossil fuel industry might be a good way of controlling inflation, I thought, well, with all the corporate welfare they already get, this isn't such a bad idea. We would (per Robert Pollin, who makes a lot of good suggestions in the article) spend about $350 billion buying a controlling interest in the three biggest oil corporations, but that's a one-time cost, of course, and it'll save the taxpayer a lot years down the line! I also remembered that the Trump Administration imposed (and the Biden Administration has, sadly, continued) imposed economy-crippling sanctions on Venezuela essentially because they had the same idea. Does that mean that if we nationalized the oil industry in America, our government would impose sanctions on itself?

You won't be surprised to learn that dark money is funding women's groups opposed to the nomination of Judge Jackson to our Supreme Court. I hope, after all these years of pretending the exception to the rule destroys all rules, we've learned not to devour every perceived irony as if it were manna from heaven. Women against women? Big whoop! The world's a big place, with lots of places for Teh Stupid to hide! I'm about as tired of hearing that right-wing judges always respect "the rule of law" while liberal judges are all "activists." Have they read some of these decisions coming from Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh? If it's not "activist" to ignore precedent, or to go on a fishing expedition for a precedent that fits your conclusion, I don't know what is.

Finally, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) spewed this forth on Twitter this past Sunday: "You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets." The rest of the Twittersphere roasted him, but I would like to point out that incoherence is a step up for this guy -- just five years ago, he was a first-term House Rep yelling that we "kill" "all" "radicalized Muslim suspects." To think this dude was a police captain and he still said, out loud, that we should kill suspects! And now he's a Congressdolt. I hope no one uses him as an example of "how people rise on merit in the Republican Party."

Around the table: book banning book banning book banning book banning!

Daniel Larison, writing at Common Dreams (which is odd!), asks "Could Western Media Hysteria Lead to War With Russia?" There are so many laugh lines in this article I think I'd actually get tired of highlighting them, but the depths to which our "liberal" media will sink to keep this drama going is no laughing matter. How many folks will try to tell me tomorrow at the water cooler that our withdrawal from Afghanistan, or China's possible interest in taking over Taiwan, are "causing" this "crisis," even though folks who argue that can't argue it for shit? If Mr. Putin really tries to annex the Ukraine, it will become his Iraq, and his rule will be yet another cautionary tale to future generations. And though I'd hate to see good Ukrainians suffer either fighting his rule or living under it, let's not expend yet more blood and treasure just to keep him from destroying himself.

In a related note, Donald Trump goes on some dude's podcast to assert that Vladimir Putin is "very savvy" to go into those eastern, pro-Russian areas of the Ukraine, but why is he "savvy"? You'll never learn from Mr. Trump -- he just keeps repeating the same point over and over again, and his votaries will call that "logic" or "analysis," and worse, our "liberal" media will pass it along as such without calling the Emperor out for being naked and swinging his balls in our faces as he does every time he opens his mouth.

A CDC report informs us that scientists have found an extraordinary number of ticks in a Pennsylvania park tested positive for deer-tick virus -- 92% of the 25 sampled, almost four times higher than reported anywhere else in America, ever. Scientists aren't finding this level of deer-tick virus in other areas of the state, so we may find out it's something unique to Lawrence Township Recreational Park. But deer-tick virus is about five times as lethal as COVID, and as the planet keeps warming, we're going to have a lot more ticks. I wouldn't say deer-tick virus will be the next pandemic, at least not yet, but we ought to keep an eye on it.

In my hurry to lambaste Sen. Rick Scott for proposing higher taxes on a hundred million Americans, I forgot to remind everyone that the whole idea that 47% of Americans "don't pay taxes" and need more "skin in the game" is complete bullshit. These people who "pay no taxes" all pay payroll taxes, Medicare taxes, state taxes, sales taxes, and in some cases city wage taxes, and previous studies found that folks in the lower economic brackets actually pay a comparable percentage of their income in taxes when you figure all those things in, so feel free to tell everyone that Republicans want to raise taxes on the people who can least afford it, because it's absolutely true no matter how many Republicans try to distance themselves from the Scott platform in the coming days.

When I hear that 65% of rural voters view Democrats "unfavorably" -- with 48% of voters viewing them "strongly" unfavorably -- all I can say is that it doesn't have to be this way! Polling has also told us that rural Americans like things like Medicare-for-All, taxpayer-funded community college, and treatment for drug addiction rather than incarceration; seems like Democrats could make inroads in rural America by actually fighting for these things, as well as fighting for the small farmer who'd otherwise get trampled by big ag. The article makes other good points -- support for rural hospitals and expanding rural broadband would also get Democrats a long way with rural folks -- and I'll concede that rural voters are more hostile to "defunding the police" particularly when it's put like that, but I'd discard the finding about immigration. Nobody cares about immigration unless they're already regularly-enraged -- which, again, fighting for the things mentioned above would fix!

Finally, a CBS News/YouGov poll tells us that 80% of Americans oppose banning books "for discussing race and criticizing U.S. history, for depicting slavery in the past or more broadly for political ideas they disagree with." It really should be 100%, but 80% suggests that opposing book banning should be a layup for Democrats, until we remember that 80% of Americans also support Medicare drug price negotiation, and Democrats can't deliver that even when they don't have a filibuster to stop them. Then Republicans reframe the issue as "parents' rights," and Democrats give up, instead of saying by "parents' rights" you really mean "book banning." Seriously, they should make "book banning" their two favorite words for the next eight months, though I can't shake the feeling that they've already psyched themselves into losing Congress.

Around the table: the Ukraine *still* could be Russia's Iraq! And other truths.

Patrick Cockburn instructs us again that "Putin is Playing a Strong Hand on Ukraine" "as Long as He Doesn't Invade." British and American officials are creating a lot of drama here, but the former Ukrainian defense minister tells us that the 127,000 soldiers along the Ukraine's borders "is not enough for a full-scale offensive." That sounds right, once you consider that the area of the Ukraine is over 600,000 square miles, whereas the area of Iraq is a little over 437,000 square miles, and you recall Gen. Shinseki telling us in February of 2003 that 150,000 troops in Iraq would be nowhere near enough to occupy that nation -- a matter about which he was entirely correct! Further reports from both the Ukraine and France should obliterate British and American drama about the matter once and for all, though I know they won't.

Alex Pareene may not be entirely serious in titling his latest missive "Abolish States," but he does point out a lot of problems with contemporary "states' rights" conservatism If we can even call it conservatism! "States' rights" was always "a fig leaf for Jim Crow and 'massive resistance,'" true, but states also act like the federal government they profess to hate when they restrict the will of local governments. Mr. Pareene gives many examples of this nefarious phenomenon, and you can no doubt think of more; Pennsylvania residents need only remember the state legislature's efforts to stop municipalities from banning fracking during the Tom Corbett era. Why, if I had a dollar for every time I said "now there's conservatism for you!" back then I might be able to quit my day job. Professing a dedication to "federalism," as right-wingers do, doesn't wipe such hypocrisy away, of course; you either believe the smallest body of government should make the most decisions, or you don't. (I do happen to believe that! I also believe it can't happen without a strong federal government restraining wealthy/corporate power.)

When I hear that some QAnon followers can be brought back to the fold of civilization by Wordle, I find it fairly easy to resist glib statements like "you're just replacing one addiction with another," and not just because an addiction to Wordle is far better for you than an addiction to QAnon. I will admit that I've largely failed to apply the great truism of drug addiction treatment -- i.e., that you have to fill a patient's life with nurturing human connections so they don't turn back to drugs -- to folks addicted to various forms of right-wing rage. I still think we need to shame and shun such people, and I also think one person can't single-handedly re-fill someone's life with healthier obsessions, but clearly I need to develop more supple strategies.

I've long wondered why Donald Trump doesn't grab onto Ohio Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel with both hands, and apparently I'm not the only one. I'd assumed that Mr. Mandel was perhaps too obsequious in his Trump-worship and that it actually put the big man off, but apparently Mr. Trump thinks Mr. Mandel is "a charisma-free weirdo and dork" (not exactly an absurd judgment) and has also talked a lot about Mr. Mandel's sex life (a matter about which Mr. Trump should show more restraint). I'm a little puzzled that Mr. Trump hasn't also called Mr. Mandel a loser -- after all, he ran for Senate in 2012 and lost by six points despite tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions buttressing his run -- but then perhaps he's hedging his bets in case Mr. Mandel emerges as the winner, at which point he'll pretend nothing described in this paragraph happened.

Anthony DiMaggio, writing at Salon, says that his research indicates that Dominion Voting Systems has a "strong case" for defamation against the Fox News Channel. Long story short: Fox News presented evidence-free stories about alleged voter fraud concerning Dominion, refusing to air Dominion's more evidence-based rebuttals, and Fox News viewers believe that voter fraud is rampant to a much larger degree than consumers of any other media outlet, which suggests that Fox's anti-Dominion reporting actually did defame the corporation. That's almost all one would need -- one would still have to prove "actual malice," but even that isn't necessarily about proving intent, but more about proving recklessness in publishing false information. Any Fox News workers write emails protesting that these reports weren't good enough to air? Any Fox News bosses respond that they didn't give a rat's hind quarter? That's the kind of evidence Dominion could win on. (Yes, I know corporate "personhood" is an issue here, but I'm going to go ahead and file that under "goose/gander.")

Finally, GM workers in Mexico vote overwhelmingly for an independent union to bargain collectively on their behalf. An "independent" union, you say? Apparently employer-friendly unions dominate the Mexican labor movement, and you could easily imagine how they might not be working in your best interest, I would think. A 2019 labor reform law requires all union workers to vote on their existing contracts by next May, which provides an opening for workers to get real representation at work; at present, only two dozen union shops have thrown out their union, but the GM plant at Silao is the largest shop to do so to date. I wish them the best of luck -- and I wish all Mexican workers the best of luck in overcoming all their obstacles to justice, so that one day American corporations stop looking to Mexico as a way of depriving Americans of their well-paying jobs.

Action: concerning war, education, student loan debt, violence against protestors, payday lenders, and social media.

Long story short: tell your government to avoid another senseless war, this time in the Ukraine; tell Florida state legislators to reject the "Don't Say Gay" bill, tell President Biden to forgive student loan debt, tell our Justice Department to fight anti-protestor laws at the state level, tell our FDIC to fight payday lenders, and tell Facebook to release its human rights assessment in re hate speech in India. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Do we want yet another stupid war, whose proponents will constantly accuse us of treason when we don't support it because it's stupid? No, we do not! Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk and your President to stop warmongering and fearmongering about the Ukraine/Russia crisis. Also, World Beyond War helps you find an anti-war protest near you. If Russia invades the Ukraine, they will quickly find themselves bogged down in the same sort of decades-long quagmire like we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet Western nations still go on about the "threat" to world peace if Russia invades. Don't worry that plenty of Trumpholes also oppose a war in the Ukraine; I welcome their help and their activism. Plenty of conservatives opposed the Iraq War, after all, not that you knew that from watching cable "news" at the time.

Change.org helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject HB 1557/SB 1834, the notorious "Don't Say Gay" bill, which would (among other things) prevent Florida school teachers from bringing up homosexuality in class "in the primary grades." The bill's sponsor says that's grades K-3, and goes on to lament that all third-graders need to learn about in school is reading and math, but guess what? All of my 3rd grade classmates back in the day knew what "gay" was, even if they didn't actually know what sex was. Right-wingers pretend kids aren't ready for that stuff, but they're not just wrong about that, they're insulting those kids. And it's never too early to learn to not alienate other people just because they're different from you. Next they'll say kids can't hack masculine and feminine articles in Spanish.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to release the memo detailing his authority to forgive student loan debt, and then forgive up to $50,000 of that debt per student. His office prepared that memo almost a year ago; I wonder why we haven't seen it yet! By which I mean, of course, that it tells us something he doesn't want us to hear. He promised to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt on the campaign trail, then told us he doesn't really have the authority to do that, but since our federal government holds most student loan debt, I really doubt that's the case. Why would we forgive student loan debt? Because we promised them a secure and lucrative life if they went to college, and they don't have it! We broke a promise to those students, so we ought to make that right.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to fight anti-protest laws at the state level. Because those laws violate our rights, that's why! Even if you're blocking a road, you don't deserve to get run over! That's something those anti-vax truckers are going to find out about next month when they come down to D.C., amirite? Of course, states aren't passing anti-protest laws because of right-wing protestors; they pass them because of Black Lives Matter protestors and anti-Trump protestors and climate change protestors, and we know this because of the timing. In Tennessee you can't camp out at the state Capitol or else you'll be convicted of a felony, which would then deprive you of your right to vote; in Georgia, folks can threaten protestors with violence with immunity. We have to stop all that stupid crap.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) to stop letting payday lenders use banks as a front for their usurious loans. Because it's illegal in addition to being immoral! The Trump Administration actually allowed payday lenders to evade state interest caps by essentially laundering their loans through banks from states without interest caps; even after courts overturned their rule, the Trump Administration let those payday lenders keep at it! Now our FDIC has a chance to actually enforce the law, but we still ought to tell them to do it, lest some future Trump Administration try this kind of crap again. If our FDIC enforces the law and keeps good Americans out of runaway debt, we can truly say they've helped drain the swamp.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to release the full internal human rights report assessing hate speech on Facebook in India. They did it in 2020, but they're not releasing it, and although that's kind of a way of saying Facebook bears a lot of responsibility for Muslims in India fearing they're going to get beaten up or killed, you'd still like to see that responsibility broken down to cases. Facebook has already taken some well-deserved PR hits over its facilitation of hate speech in Myanmar (helping to bring about an ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims there), and hell, its algorithms in America help Nazi wannabes find each other without folks even creating or administering a group! Facebook should come clean; I mean, if they've done nothing wrong, they've got nothing to fear.

Around the table: the Ukraine could be Russia's Iraq! And other truths.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch informs us that "(t)he essence of the crisis in Ukraine is that Russia can gain many benefits from its unspoken threat to invade, but none at all from actually doing so." When you hear that "Russian troops might be able to capture Kyiv in a week" but not keep it, you may well be reminded of our adventure in Iraq -- right down to the part where apparent Western efforts to "stoke a phony crisis" in the Ukraine resemble how Western intelligence got Saddam Hussein's WMD holdings dead wrong. So the next time you hear media histrionics about the Ukraine, take a deep breath.

Florida legislators are actually trying to limit the scope of future ballot initiatives there, mindful of the fact that Florida has a $15/hour minimum wage and has restored voting rights to some felons, which Florida legislators would never have done on their own, no matter how much good Floridians agitated about it. Limiting the people's say in their government and their own lives -- yeah, that'll go over well! When we hear from Florida legislators about this effort, they'll of course deny that's what they're doing -- they'll brandish words like "reform" and "streamline," because they know they're doing evil, and they know their constituents know it, and what choice will they have? Besides, you know, not doing evil.

A.B. Stoddard at The Bulwark says Republicans are winning the new culture war over vaccines -- and says "(i)t's time for Democrats to stop worrying about alienating the unvaccinated and start explaining to the rest of the country how the unvaccinated -- and the Republicans who coddle and truckle to them -- have screwed the rest of us." Yes, I agree that President Biden should have done that already. I'd add that he also needs to blame the big actors driving all the controversy -- i.e., the dark money groups funding anti-vaxxers. Folks who won't get vaccinated deserve our scorn, but they don't operate alone -- bad people with a lot of unearned money enable them.

Uh oh: somehow-former Dolphins head coach Brian Flores sues the NFL and three of its clubs for racism in conducting head coaching searches -- and texts from Patriots head coach Bill Belichick help his case. The key takeaway here is not that all Brians look alike to Mr. Belichick, but that he apparently learned that the Giants would hire Brian Daboll before they'd even interviewed Mr. Flores, rendering the latter's interview a token one, and I doubt the Giants can explain that away without alleging that Mr. Belichick lied. And if you're thinking Mr. Flores's charges of "bad faith" can't stick, just remember that year everyone interviewed Falcons Special Teams Coordinator Keith Armstrong though no one had any intention of hiring him -- and remember, also, how many teams have lined up to give Josh McDaniels second chances, although he's a demonstrably worse head coach than Mr. Flores.

Finally, I hate to celebrate the failings of others, but I'm sure going to do that here: daily cable "news" viewership "fell off a cliff" in 2021. Of course, they "fell off a cliff" compared to their record numbers in 2020, but still, this is cause for celebration. The article wonders whether folks are just tired of all the COVID and all the politics, but does not, sadly, evaluate the thesis that people are simply sick and tired of all the drama and cowardice and venality inherent in cable "news" programming for the past several decades. Not likely, you say? C'mon, let a man dream of a world in which everyone is as sick and tired of cable "news" as he is.

Around the table: featuring yet another Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate!

As Connecticut-based hedge fund manager David McCormick readies a Pennsylvania Senate run as a Republican, the burning question is: will Trump votaries support a bankster for Senate? I kid, of course -- Trump votaries will "hold their nose" at his profession, particularly since he doesn't have a Jewish-sounding last name, and in any case I'm sure Mr. McCormick will quickly disavow his year-old statement blaming Mr. Trump for the January 6 attempted coup. Still, look out for Jeff Bartos, who instigated Sean Parnell's disgrace; he's currently running around 3 percent in polling but is sitting on a lot of money I'm sure he'll deploy the last two weeks of the race. If he wins, Donald Trump will endorse him as if he'd never endorsed anyone else, and then the votaries will be pacified.

Ho hum, JP Morgan Chase has resumed suing its credit card users for falling behind on their payments. What's that, you say? So what? Well, Chase hadn't been doing that for 10 years, after our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found they were filing "flimsy" suits which not only too often said customers owed more than they actually did, but which also relied on actual robo-signed affidavits (rather than billing records!) as "evidence." And now they're doing lawsuits-with-affidavits again. You might almost call these frivolous lawsuits, though the tort "reform" crowd, strangely, never talks about them. If Republicans take back either chamber of Congress in November, you'll never get that crowd to STFU -- and all they care about is stopping lawsuits that help those good Americans wronged by big corporations.

When I hear that folks from 14 to 49 are generally having less consensual sex now than they did a decade ago, and I see that researchers offer a lot of possible reasons, like increased social media use, "rough sex," lower incomes, more drinking, and (even) more binge-watching, I find myself asking about two other possibilities: increased awareness of sexual abuse and more widely-available pornography. Do people have less sex if they're wary of being caught-out as a harasser or an abuser -- or, conversely, are potential partners more wary of such folks than they used to be? Also, does all the porn one can get today help folks satiate their curiosity about other people's bodies -- a curiosity you might have had to resort to actual sex to satiate not too many years ago?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) slams New York's new Mayor, Eric Adams, for referring to "low-skilled workers" as folks who "don’t have the academic skills to sit in a corner office." "The suggestion that any job is 'low skill' is a myth perpetuated by wealthy interests to justify inhumane working conditions, little/no healthcare, and low wages," she says, and she's absolutely right, and didn't they say Eric Adams would be a "different" kind of Democrat? By putting the guy in the "corner office" above the barista and the waiter, he's revealed he's just like all the others who look down on folks who don't happen to be entrepreneurs. Remember when folks looked down on manufacturing workers? Now that they're gone, we lionize them! And by the time we get to lionize baristas and waiters, there may not be any jobs left.

Chip Gibbons at Jacobin reminds us -- and we shouldn't have needed the reminder! -- that Dick Cheney certainly should not have gotten the warm reception he got from Democrats on January 6. Seriously, you have to do more than just be against attempted coups to be a good guy in America -- and waging war on Iraq, warrantless wiretapping, torture, and unconstitutional detainment (just to cite things he did as Vice President; Mr. Gibbons also tabulates his nefarious works during his decade in Congress) certainly don't make you a good guy. Why, whenever he thinks of how he managed to steal the 2000 election, I bet he looks at those January 6 rioters and says these guys are pikers!

Finally, Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) now apparently doesn't even support his own proposal for restructuring the Build Back Better Act. Not only does he get to explain to those good folks in West Virginia why they can't have paid family leave, lower taxes for working families, and lower prices for drugs and child care, but he has further isolated himself as The Villain of all these proceedings, which could complicate Democrat efforts to throw the 2022 midterms -- voters will less likely blame all Democrats if they can blame one Democrat. If Kyrsten Sinema is the galaxy brain she thinks she is, she'll convince Mr. Manchin to vote for the bill, since he got everything he asked for, but she's not, so she won't.

Action: concerning jobs, war, refugees, voting rights, police violence, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to pass the reconciliation budget blueprint, tell your Congressfolk to repeal the "war on terror"-era AUMFs, tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap on Afghan refugees, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, eliminate qualified immunity for police officers, and pass the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: call your House Reps and tell them to vote in favor of the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint the Senate passed a few weeks ago, the budget blueprint that will enable all sorts of good things to happen in America -- higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, a stronger care-based economy, and paid family/medical leave for all workers, just to name a few. A few "moderate" Democrats are trying to take the bill hostage, but theirs is the calculus of cowardice -- the result of their actions, which may also be the aim of their actions, will be to scuttle both the reconciliation bill and the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" at whose altar they kneel. If they do that, they will lose not only their own seats, but the House and Senate -- and this time, they'll lose them to Republicans who openly identify as fascists. So brook no silliness from your House Reps about "the difficulty of raising taxes in an election." You know what's harder than raising taxes in an election? Winning elections in a fascist state when you're not a fascist.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs) that started the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and thus end our "forever war." Some people, and by some people I mainly mean people on the right side of the political spectrum, just aren't happy unless we're at war. Put six beers in them and they'll say war is the way to remake the world! Helluva job they did in Afghanistan, if so. War isn't the way to "remake the world," it's the way to redistribute income from taxpayers into defense contracting CEOs' pockets. You may note that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) has sponsored these AUMF repeals, as she has done in the past, and you may remember that Rep. Lee was literally the only "nay" vote against the Afghanistan AUMF. If I were her, I'd wear an "I WAS RIGHT" baseball cap from now until the day they put me in the ground. But first, let's have her being right about that count for something.

In a related note, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap for Afghans fleeing from the Taliban, so that more of the 300,000-plus Afghans who helped our military during the war effort can get out. You've already heard famous right-wing blowhards warn us about the coming "invasion" of Afghans, but this should be pretty simple to figure out from a moral perspective -- we did this to them, by invading their country, toppling their government, and promising them we would make their lives better. Now the government we toppled is back in power like the last 20 years didn't happen, and right-wingers expect we'll put racism above letting the Taliban murder the folks who helped us? So much for being the "guardians of morality." Let's not let them make all the damn decisions around here.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Remember when our Supreme Court knocked the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder? H.R. 4 would put those teeth back. In the aforementioned Shelby County v. Holder, our Court held that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states by forcing them to pre-clear their voting law changes with our Justice Department -- but our Court also held that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass Constitutional muster. God only knows if that's true anymore, what with Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the Court now, but H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of voting rights violations to Justice Department pre-clearance. And with so many states trying to suppress the vote as we speak, we need H.R. 4. So brook no silliness about "how the South has changed," because this is about America.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk and the Biden Administration to prioritize ending "qualified immunity" for police officers when they execute Black folks without even charging them with a crime. I put that last phrase in there because it gives some people pause -- folks will "support the police" without thinking very hard about what it means, but they generally will not support "killing people without charge." A few will, believe it or not, but then every generation has had to deal with crazy people. Without getting too inside-baseball (I've done that in other posts about this matter!), "qualified immunity" restricts your ability to sue a police officer for a wrongful death, and restricts that ability way, way beyond the bounds of common sense -- to the point where parents of teenage kids shot by police can't get the justice they deserve. So let's get our government to do the right thing here.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Postmaster General DeJoy's response to USPS funding shortfalls? Raise prices and lower services. The Postal Service Reform Act's response? Stop forcing our USPS to pre-fund retiree benefits for employees who ain't even born, get postal retirees into Medicare, and allow our USPS to offer additional services like postal banking -- though the bill doesn't specify postal banking, so you may want to say that you want that in the bill when you talk to (or write) your Congressperson. Virtually all of our USPS's problems can be traced to the pre-funding of retiree benefits, and in my experience, our Post Office continues to deliver exemplary service even with all the crap they have to put up with, and services that work you want to keep working. So let's keep our Postal Service, and let's help it thrive.

Around the table: what to do about dystopia, part 869.

Edward Snowden proposes a two-step response to begin dealing with the dystopia promised by the Pegasus Project: "ban the commercial trade in intrusion software," and hold corporations liable for investing or producing it. If you make it illegal, after all, you can hold people liable for making it. If we do these things, we won't eradicate spyware like Pegasus -- which, as you may recall, can turn on your iPhone's microphones remotely and listen in on what you say -- but we will make it a lot harder for spyware to do damage. As Mr. Snowden suggests, this is the same logic that operates behind vaccination.

In a peripherally-related note, Sara Morrison at Vox explains "how police can get your data -- even if you aren't suspected of a crime." Long story short: they can get it from a third-party data broker (the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would fix that), or they can use "reverse search warrants," which should be illegal. Should we be "happy" that our police don't have access to Pegasus yet? This sorry state of affairs is yet another reason we don't leave important questions to corporations. Trouble is, our legislators think only corporations know anything about anything!

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: ISIS supporters have glommed on to the Trump-friendly social network GETTR, posting videos of beheadings and the like. Well, they always said ISIS understood the social media landscape better than anyone! And they'll find plenty of sympathetic souls among the whiners who've left Facebook and Twitter because their friends shame them for saying obnoxious crap. GETTR's guru shrugs off the ISIS influence, but "free speech" still doesn't cover terroristic threats, nor does a private media corporation have any obligation to publish literally anything.

ICU doctor confesses that what her unvaccinated COVID patients tell her leaves her "surprised, disheartened, but most of all, angry," and who can blame her? You risk death taking care of COVID patients, you endure all the loneliness and all the supply chain shortages, you update your own living will, and now some YouTube University graduate lectures you about how intubation is the real killer? I'd slap a pimp if they did that -- which is yet another reason why I'm not a doctor. My patience with the unvaccinated is short, and I don't even encounter very many of them in my travels.

In a related note, Dartmouth University sociology professor Brooke Harrington writes about the "anti-vaccine con job" and reminds us that folks who've been so thoroughly conned can't just switch on a dime. And I would say the con is significantly longer than "anti-vaccine con job" suggests -- almost 20 years ago, for example, the same damn people all fell for the Iraq War Con Job. Apparently only other right-wingers can reach them, which I guess is good in the short run if it helps us get the upper hand on COVID again, but can they even reach them? Or have decades of right-wing yelling and screaming created a group of Americans who won't listen to anything that doesn't diddle their rage gland?/p>

Finally, California restauranteur Tony Roman hangs sign outside restaurant demanding that potential customers show "proof of being unvaccinated." In that spirit, I'd like some proof that Tony Roman hasn't fucked a goat. I mean, I don't want to associate with goat-fuckers, so I'm entitled to demand official documentation about that fact from other people. See how easy this game is? In the meantime, I urge folks to avoid dining at Basilico's Pasta e Vino in Huntington Beach, not least because for all you know you might run into a goat-fucker.

Action: concerning monopolies, "fraudits," private militaries, paid family/medical leave, expanding Medicare, and expanding broadband.

Long story short: tell President Biden to enact vigorous anti-monopoly regulations, tell PA state legislators to reject another election "fraudit," and tell your Congressfolk to outlaw government use of private militaries, enact paid family/medical leave, expand Medicare coverage, and build out broadband. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

President Biden, as you may know, issued an Executive Order late last week requiring Executive branch agencies to fight corporate monopolies a lot harder than our government has done for the last 40 years, but, as you know, the devil is always in the details, so Public Citizen helps you tell Biden Administration agencies to enact the most vigorous anti-monopoly regulations possible. Good anti-monopoly regulations wouldn't just mean cheaper hearing aids, though that's no small thing; it could also mean an end to early termination fees that keep you from choosing a different internet provider, an end to cellphone corporations "locking out" independent computer repair stores, and an end to "non-compete agreements" that keep workers in one place forever -- not to mention an end to big pharma price-gouging and big telecom mergers. We should fight for these things, and we should remember that the big corporations and the corrupt politicians who fight against them are evil.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators you don't want them to conduct a "fraudit" of the 2020 election like Arizona's doing. Like Arizona, Pennsylvania has already conducted multiple audits of the 2020 election's accuracy, so let's oppose any one Senator's efforts to waste taxpayer money just to do a "fraudit" that might tell sore losers what they want to hear. And don't believe the argument that "people have questions about this election," because they don't. What some people have are the same lies Donald Trump has been feeding them for over eight months, which other Republicans have repeated and amplified. And I'm tired of right-wing rage making all the decisions around here.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban any state or federal government use of private military. The news hook, of course, is South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who really must be completely unworried about re-election, using a Tennessee gazillionaire donation to fund a state National Guard adventure at our Southern border over 1300 miles away. Needless to say, this is a bad idea, regardless of how you might feel about immigration -- an army answerable only to a gazillionaire, rather than the American people who pay the taxes to fund said army? I wish I could say it was unprecedented; the use of mercenaries is as old as the hills, and you likely remember how many Blackwater mercenaries, who were paid much better than our soldiers, operated in Iraq. So this is a cancer we need to cut out.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to put paid leave in the American Jobs Plan. Yeah, I know what President Biden and 20 Senators negotiated, but they're supposed to negotiate with us, not each other. And things like paid family/medical leave, investing in child care programs, and making the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent are actually pretty popular -- a lot more popular than Republicans saying no to everything or insisting on investing in "real" infrastructure or thinking we're going to pay for it with more smoke and mirrors. Seriously, nobody would run through a wall for any of that, which is why Republicans constantly try to enrage and distract people with whining about transgender folks and critical race theory. If we make our voices heard above the din, then the din will lose. It's that simple.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare in the American Jobs Plan. Again: who cares what the politicians want? Lowering the Medicare age to 60 would be a good first step in lowering that age to zero, as we must eventually do, and expanding Medicare to include vision/dental/hearing is also the right thing to do. And you know expanding Medicare coverage also creates jobs. After all, who's going to be providing all that extra care? Robots? At the risk of piling on, the poverty rate of seniors before Medicare was a lot higher than it is now; what a shame that too many seniors continue to vote for the right-wing politicians who would take all of that away from them.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act in the American Jobs Plan. You recall how much time you had to spend on the internet just to do work this past year? And how much time your kids had to spend on the internet just to go to school this past year? And do you find, every time you get your cable bill, that you're paying more and more for less and less? That's why we need the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act -- it would not only help build out the high-speed broadband we all need more and more, it would help small communities create their own broadband systems that would compete with the big telecoms who constantly overcharge you and give you lousy service. Ask the good folks of Chattanooga, TN how much better off they are with that city's municipal broadband network, and you'd be even more eager to imagine a world without Verizon and Comcast dictating terms to you.

Around the table: enough of the damn drama, part 988.

Our Supreme Court just loves to save the best for last: they strike down California's big donor disclosure law, claiming that it exposes said big donors to harassment and intimidation, and they uphold a pair of Arizona voter restrictions, claiming that they don't oppress minority voters the way plaintiffs (and the Ninth Circuit) said they do. Remember when our Court said campaign finance disclosure ought to compensate for the problem of letting people donate whatever they like? That might have been BS, just like it was when Mitch McConnell said it over 20 years ago. And they're apparently prepared to wait until legislators are stupid enough to write down WE HATEZ TEH BLACKZ!!!!! directly into their laws before acting on vote suppression. Or maybe not even then! I guess those unorthodox 6-3 decisions were just to put us off our guard.

Jennifer Rubin, one of the Washington Post's many never-Trumpers, suggests that Republicans want the infrastructure fight to be "all about process" because the actual infrastructure projects are popular with Republican rank-and-file voters. But of course, this could all be drama: Republicans pitch a fit over the "bad faith" of Democrats, and then Joe Biden, to "reassure" them, gives up the reconciliation bill Democrats will pass afterward. Or maybe Kyrsten Sinema steps up to say she just can't in good conscience support whatever reconciliation bill Democrats come up with. No one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like the Democrats, and there are still a million ways to lose this thing -- unless, of course, we make that impossible for them.

In a related note, Republicans are now fixating on the IRS funding provision as a reason to oppose the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal." After all, no one cares when Republicans go back on their word, but the mere appearance of going back on your word is of course fatal to Democrats! Hilariously, Sen. Graham wonders aloud how much good $40 billion more would do, when the first sentence of the article reminds us that everyone involved in the "deal" (including Sen. Graham) agreed that $40 billion would harvest about $100 billion in otherwise-undetected tax evasion. That's not the kind of stupidity that can stand very much sunlight. Right?

But if you're looking for a sign that Democrats actually do know how to do politics, the House plans to vote on removing Confederate statues from our nation's Capitol early next week. Republicans could be impaled on the horns of a trilemma here: if you want to be the objectively pro-Confederate statue Congressperson, you go right ahead, and if you want to alienate Trumphole voters by voting to remove them, you go right ahead, and if you don't want to take a stand either way but just want to complain about Democrats playing politics, you go right ahead. I'll admit that Kevin McCarthy's response -- "all the statues were Democrats" -- made me laugh.

You may have heard that a certain former President's corporation now faces charges of fraud (and its CFO faces charges of grand larceny) in New York state, and Donald Trump responds in, apparently, the only way he can, by saying that the charges are part of a "political Witch Hunt by the Radical Left Democrats" that is "dividing our Country like never before!" "Never before"? It's like we never fought a Civil War! Could this incessant whining be the reason 54% of the electorate in 2016 and 53% in 2020 voted for someone, anyone, other than him? (Ransom note-style caps, by the way, come from the original text, as always.)

Finally, Bush the Lesser Defense Secretary/Iraq war hawk Donald Rumsfeld has died at the age of 88. You know, I used to be sad when my enemies died -- sad when Ronald Reagan died, sad when William F. Buckley, Jr., died, sad when Antonin Scalia died, even -- but not now. Could it be that my enemies used to be formidable but have gotten so, so much more stupid and venal over the years? Could it be that I became a man and put away childish things like "respecting your enemy"? I suppose it could be both, but I'm pretty sure it's at least the former.

Action: concerning jobs, drug prices, endless war, broadband access, payday loans, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Biden/Republican infrastructure "deal," tell our President to put the brakes on a rule preventing our government from forcibly lowering drug prices, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, expand broadband, clamp down on payday lenders, and end the filibuster. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs; for the Biden-related alert, see the second paragraph below.

First things first: tell your Congressfolk to reject the "bipartisan" "infrastructure"/"jobs" "deal" negotiated between 20 Senators and President Biden last week -- either call them or let Food and Water Watch help you email them. No one in America should care if this is something our President wants, or moderates want, or Republicans want; all we should care about is if it's what we want, and I would assert that it's not. And that's not just because Republicans are pretending that the separate reconciliation bill even Joe Manchin wants to do is some kind of "betrayal." It's also because the "deal" would privatize public assets to build other public assets -- that's called "asset recycling," which is just a 10-dollar way of saying "privatization." And if Democrats agree not to do a separate reconciliation bill in order to "keep their word" or appease Republicans, then they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. Of course, we don't deserve the fascist storm that'll follow, so let's try to head all that off by communicating our will to our Congressfolk in an unmistakable manner.

President Biden plans to move forward with a rule that would prevent our government, for the first time in over 40 years, from seizing drug patents when big pharma corporations charge usurious prices. If you remember Mylan charging hundreds of dollars for EpiPens and numerous corporations charging so much for insulin that diabetics now risk death in rationing the drug, you will scratch your head at the idea that our government should not step in and stop that shit cold, but, sadly, when Joe Biden was a Senator, he worked very, very hard to keep our government from "interfering" in absurdly-high drug prices. Maybe he needs a phone call about this matter! 1.202.456.1111 is the number, and here's the White House contact page. (If I get a separate action alert about this matter -- which seems likely, now! -- I'll share it.)

Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 256, which would repeal the nefarious authorization to use military force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Our House passed this bill, and not only that, 49 Republicans voted in its favor! Maybe I shouldn't make too much of that -- a lot of our Best and Brightest didn't do the right thing in 2002 when it really, really mattered, and a lot of the folks who just voted yea on H.R. 256 (Boebert, Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar, Greene, Issa, Jordan, McClintock, Schweikert) are still clowns, but at least now people like Mob Boss Mitch will have much less room to say well, this isn't bipartisan enough for me to permit to get to a vote. Oh, and if you're upset because "they're doing this to a Democratic President," please step away from this blog, because it ain't for you. And your values ain't shit if they don't inconvenience you once in a while.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. And don't brook any nonsense from your Congressfolk about it, either! Broadband internet is an essential service, or does Congress forget how many votes it took or hearings it held over the internet this past year? Certainly you don't forget how much work you did, or how much school your kids did, over the internet this past year! Note well, also, that H.R. 1783/S. 745 would prevent states from pre-empting localities within states from offering their own public broadband! After all, preventing localities from such matters of self-determination has always seemed not particularly conservative to me.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called "Fake Lender" rule promulgated by the Trump Administration. The Senate has already passed a resolution repealing the rule; now the House must follow suit. So what does the "Fake Lender" rule do? It lets payday lenders avoid state caps on interest by letting them essentially launder their loans through out-of-state banks! Woe unto the young buck who came up with that idea! That dude will find himself (do I need to gender-equivocate here? I suspect not!) at the Pearly Gates describing how he helped payday lenders trap even more good Americans in 300% revolving debt, and I think St. Peter's going to give him quite the side-eye. You know what you can take to the Pearly Gates? That you told your Congressfolk to stamp out this idea like the cockroach it is!

Finally, NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby and boy how I have missed saying that! helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster into the trash heap of history already. Yes, I supported keeping the filibuster around and making Senators talk through it all the way to the beginning of this year, but I'm done -- our Senators will never do the necessary work of a civilized society until we make them. And they just filibustered the beginning of debate on the For the People Act last week! The beginning of debate! No, I don't want to hear about lessening procedural "choke points" as a "compromise," because the Senate will not do it. If I may borrow a metaphor from Better Call Saul: if a chimp has a machine gun, you don't just hope he'll learn how to use it -- you take it from him.

Action: concerning endless warmaking, drug prices, Israel and Palestine, immigration, discrimination, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Iraq AUMF, and pass the Lower Drug Prices Now Act, the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, the American Dream and Promise Act, the Equality Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 256, which would repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) Congress passed to permit George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq in 2003. Finally! 2003 was 18 years ago, which means the Iraq War AUMF is now old enough to vote and to believe at least one doomed relationship from high school was gonna last forever, and like that doomed relationship, the 2003 AUMF ain't doing anyone any good now. Of course, Presidents still use it to launch unilateral wars in defiance of our Constitution and the popular will, so it not only doesn't do anyone any good, it does only evil. So we should wipe it out of our legal code.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Prices Now Act. If you thought letting Medicare negotiate more of its drug prices was a good idea before -- and chances are you did, since you're a person with a brain who doesn't let their ego completely dominate them -- you'll think it's an even better idea now that our FDA has approved Biogen's Alzheimer's drug that'll cost $56,000 a year. Some analysts say it'll double Medicare drug spending, and though I doubt it's that dire, Biogen's drug is basically the big thing in Alzheimer's treatment right now, so there'll be a lot of it out there, and that will drive up Medicare's drug prices. So let's give Medicare the power to lower drug prices, which means Medicare will spend less of our taxpayer money.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2590, the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act. OK, it's a long title and doesn't make a cute acronym (cue Benny Hill trying to pronounce "DHRPCFLUIMO"), but it would prevent Israel from using our taxpayer dollars to oppress the Palestinians. And "oppress" is the right word! Never mind who did what first: Israel clearly has superior power to Palestine, and Palestine's alleged allies aren't exactly stepping up to help them. And at the risk of saying something radical, everyone in this region is a human being, and deserves basic human rights.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act. Remember when President Obama essentially created the DACA program, to protect some immigrants who came here with their parents (and thus had no choice in their emigration) from deportation to a nation they wouldn't recognize and likely couldn't even speak the language of? Remember how Republicans all said this is Congress's job? Now guess how many of the bill's 175 co-sponsors in the House are Republicans. That's right, none. And this bill shouldn't offend them: it doesn't offer blanket "amnesty" to all immigrants who came here as children, and sets standards for whom our government can help. And here you thought these Republicans were all about boundaries! But no, civilized people are all about boundaries, and there ain't no intersection with "Republican politicians" on that Venn diagram.

The Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Because it's not even close to what right-wingers say it is! It won't "assault your religious liberties" unless you think "religious liberty" is all about discriminating against gay and transgender folk, which isn't how I've experienced religion at all. And it won't let boys dominate girls in basketball or softball or field hockey, either, nor will it allow boys to gang up on girls in girls' locker rooms. Seriously, right-wingers fixate on the most absurd end results of a bill these days, and why? Because they can't argue with the things the Equality Act would actually do, like prevent landlords from discriminating against gays. The only way they win is if they make you think their "reality" is actually reality. And it's not.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Public Citizen helps you tell them to do both. We have been reminded, over the past few weeks, that actual bipartisan majorities of Americans support these bills, be they conservative, moderate, or liberal, so don't brook any silliness about these bills not being "bipartisan" enough. You know what the politicians mean by "bipartisanship"? Democrats and Republicans coming together to do whatever Republicans want. And we deserve better than such rubbish.

Action: concerning endless war, public trans, government spying, corruption, voting rights, and polluter welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Iraq war AUMF, create zero-emission public trans, release COINTELPRO files to the public, and pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act, the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that "authorized" war with Iraq and which all subsequent Presidents have used to fight unconstitutional wars all over the world. I put "authorized" in quotation marks because only Congress can authorize war, and they have to go through the trouble to declare war, not "give the President power to fight wherever he pleases." This is one of the reasons we broke off from England, folks! And Presidents have been abusing the AUMF for over 18 years now. Which means this mistake's old enough to vote, and it's damn near old enough to drink! So let's kill it already.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you demand that Congress pass legislation creating a zero-emission public transportation system. Yeah, we keep telling our Congressfolk what we want from this jobs bill, but they keep ignoring us -- so perhaps we should change tactics and demonstrate that the people want public transportation that doesn't choke the world with pollution. It's not so much to ask, right? Right-wingers act like people who like electric buses are weak. Of course, they then go around whining endlessly about how everyone thinks they're racist, but that's beside the point. The point is, having a livable planet in 30 years isn't "weak." Even if a few oil and gas executives don't get to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Which is what right-wingers really favor, whether they'll admit it or not.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2998, which would release all of our FBI's COINTELPRO files to the general public. I guess this bill's opponents will argue "bygones!" and "look forward" and "saying any part of our past wasn't absolutely perfect is treason!" But COINTELPRO went after protestors and activists ranging from anti-war and civil rights organizers to the Ku Klux Klan. Hey, maybe that's how you get right-wingers to support H.R. 2998! I kid, of course -- today's racists know well enough to disavow any love for the Klan. And yet our most recent departed President's campaign slogan was a Klan slogan from the '70s! So, again, learn about the past, and we can make a more perfect union in the future.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2662, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. "IG" stands for "Inspector General," and you may recall, particularly during 2020, how much maneuvering that irredeemably corrupt President did just to avoid the scrutiny of Inspectors General, who spend all their time investigating waste and fraud and abuse of power. You may even remember that Mr. Trump had to be talked out of firing all of them at the beginning of his term! Well, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act would place more limits on a President's ability to fire IGs and allow IGs to subpoena folks who've left our government if they can shed light on wrongdoing. It's bad if all that stands between us and oblivion is an Inspector General. But, ah, it's a lot worse if they're not there, or if they're a Presidential lackey.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Public Citizen helps you tell them to do both. I know, I know, One True Real and Great American President Joe Manchin has expressed a preference, but he ain't the boss of us. And, toward that end, Daily Kos helps you sign up and call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator to vote for the For the People Act. 79% of them support the For the People Act, after all! And if he's going to write 299 stupid paragraphs about why he won't, at least we can get his constituents to embarrass him.

Finally, both the Sierra Club and Food and Water Action help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. Our government shovels $15 billion annually toward oil and gas drilling corporations that don't need it; how would you feel about that if it were your money? Oh, right: it is your money. The bill would also prohibit federal funding (which is, again, your money) toward fossil fuel R&D and/or international fossil fuel projects. Solar and wind power aren't pie-in-the-sky technologies anymore -- walk around your neighborhood and count the roofs with solar panels if you're unconvinced. Also attend the ridiculous stories you hear about wind turbines; if wind really didn't work, wouldn't they just tell you that?

Around the table: yes, Virginia, there are world leaders even worse than Donald Trump was.

Supreme Court rules -- by a 6-3 margin whose six votes evenly split between nominally liberal and nominally conservative Justices -- that our government must inform immigrants of all details of a deportation process in one document, a purely technical ruling that may result in thousands of long-term immigrants avoiding deportation. It's a fascinating ruling -- Justice Gorsuch actually seems to have interpreted the law here, as has Justice Barrett, who came off in her hearings like she would never ever interpret a law ever, which made me say more than once then what are judges for? Naturally Justice Kavanaugh, the most evil Justice, and Chief Justice Roberts, the most literal Justice, joined the dissent, which says, rather inaccurately, that the Gorsuch ruling defies common sense. (As an aside, when we hear that someone, particularly someone of color, got pulled over for a "busted tail-light," we'd do well to assume the police busted the tail light themselves.)

Idaho passes law banning any sort of "critical race theory" in public schools, even though such theory helps us understand how pervasive racism is. I'm pleased to see a crap-ton of Idaho students protesting the legislation at the state Capitol, but I'm displeased, of course, to watch the Idaho legislature completely ignore them. Right-wingers piss and moan about "cancel culture" and then they actually cancel critical race theory? Gosh, they should just try to prove it wrong, and if they can't, well, they should just be grown-ups and concede the point. I know you don't see people on cable news shows do that, but it is what civilized people do. And I don't want whiners who can't accept that America's ever done any wrong ever in my damn foxhole. They're the kind of people who'd hear a squirrel skittering and leave my ass to die.

Some folks are asking "where's Joe Biden's Tea Party," especially given that Barack Obama already had Tea Party rallies to put up with by mid-April, but I'd say the movement's already here -- a mix of Trumphole and QAnon, and their persistence suggests that the next big right-wing "movement," a term I use with some trepidation, won't have to seem "new" and "fresh" like the Tea Party surely did to the vast number of inattentive Americans, and that the absence of such "newness" and "freshness" serves a larger Republican strategy to stay under the radar until 2022. Of course, Americans ain't as inattentive as they used to be, either. (Also, not to pick on the article, but the ACA wasn't "big" or "bold" legislation; if the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan pass, they'll both more easily qualify.)

Alexis Grennell at The Nation argues that "Just Because Cuomo Deserves Due Process Doesn’t Mean He Shouldn’t Resign." Yes, finding people guilty of crimes should be hard -- though it shouldn't be as absurdly difficult to find someone guilty of sexual harassment or rape as it is -- but while you have an inalienable right to defend yourself from accusations, that fact doesn't confer upon you an additional "right" to keep your Governorship while you defend yourself from those accusations. It sure doesn't help that Gov. Cuomo held former Attorney General Schneiderman (he had be investigated and resign!) to a tougher standard than the one to which he now holds himself (oh, a resignation would just hinder an investigation, never mind exactly how).

Chris Christie goes on Fox News to say Donald Trump deserves an A for his Presidency, but also says, and I quote, "(t)here were some things that happened specifically at the end of the presidency that I think had some things that clouded his accomplishments." That's some real straight talk, right there! And "an A, except for trying to overturn an election and then inciting an insurrection" is rather like giving Herbert Hoover "an A, except for the Depression" and George W. Bush "an A, except for 9.11, the Iraq War, the FISA Amendments Act, and the Great Recession."

Finally, when I hear that Brazil is having a lot more trouble getting aid from the rest of the world over its COVID troubles than India is, I'd be tempted to say waaaaaaaah!, because Brazillian President Jair Bolsonaro is now the biggest asshole among world leaders, so much so that even other assholes (cough Boris Johnson cough) can't stand him. But I can't be so evil about that, because good Brazilians are dying thanks to Mr. Bolsonaro's failure to lead, or be human. Every awful thing Donald Trump did to kill 400,000 good Americans, Jair Bolsonaro has done bigger and worse, and now Brazil may ultimately lose more of its citizens to COVID than we will -- and Mr. Bolsonaro will be able to cheat his way to re-election more easily than Mr. Trump could.

Around the table: Republicans spread rubbish about the infrastructure bill, and other total non-surprises.

FactCheck reminds us that Republicans are fairly consistently "underestimating" how much of President Biden's American Jobs Plan actually consists of what we'd reasonably call infrastructure spending. Long story short: it's not "6 percent" like they're all repeating like a bunch of robots, but by Sen. Thune's own limited standards it's more like 17%. And everything FactCheck names sounds like infrastructure to me, so really it's more like 65%. I include the $400 billion for long-term care for the aging, for example, since investing in facilities that take care of us when we're older does sound rather like building things our civilization can use.

When I hear that our "liberal" media still calls a thing "divisive" if people like it but Our Glorious Elites don't, I'm reminded that our "liberal" media called "opposing the Iraq war" an "extreme" position even after polls informed us that 60% of Americans held that position, and that the sainted President Obama called those who criticized his 2010 capitulation to Republicans on tax-cuts-for-the-rich "sanctimonious" and "purist," even though well over half of Americans, even then, wanted the rich to pay more in taxes. So this is an old trick, but one that's working less and less, I think. And let's say this one more time: "Every single Democratic incumbent in a swing district who endorsed Medicare for All won reelection in 2020. The same cannot be said for those that did not endorse it."

We mentioned last week that colleges have used the pandemic as (another) excuse to cut their departments, but I'm pleased to note that unions at CUNY and Rutgers have been pushing back, albeit when those universities actually tried to violate contractually-promised pay increases. But that's why we have unions, and it's why we should have more of them. It's also why right-wingers constantly go on about "union dues," when you'll generally make a lot more money in salary at a union shop than you'll pay in dues. I mean, what else they got? "Unions hold back progress" sure ain't working for them, being, as it is, demonstrably wrong.

After a lot of pushback from liberals, President Biden decided to lift the Trump Administration's draconian cap on refugee admissions after all. I guess our "liberal" media will talk about how he "caved" to the left, as if doing the people's will is itself "capitulation" (no, I don't think "the people's will" was ever "try to keep out all refugees"). But perhaps Mr. Biden realized -- unlike President Obama, notoriously known as the "Deporter-in-Chief" during his tenure -- that acting like a right-winger on immigration matters will garner you the appreciation of exactly zero right-wingers.

In a related note, certain right-wing Republicans planned to start an "America First Caucus," devoted, apparently to maintaining "a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions" oh the hell with it waaaaaaaaah. You can always tell when someone's blind to their own privilege: they think the fact that they don't get all the say about everything means they get no say about anything. Naturally one of the ringleaders now denies the whole thing, and just as naturally blames the media for reporting on the matter accurately.

Finally, the interwebs are agog with a clip in which Pat Robertson opposes police shooting Black folks to death without even charging them with a crime. He says a lot of the right things, but he keeps cutting himself off, too; possibly he's trying to avoid saying something he thinks will alienate his audience, and possibly he's angry police shooters put him in this uncomfortable position where he has to say he's "pro-police" while also saying you'd better be able to tell the difference between a gun and a taser. I do feel like I have been describing how to split that knot -- it starts with "stop making our police the Swiss Army knives of our civilization."

Around the table: the dirty secret about the Republican agenda! OK, it's not much of a secret.

Sonali Kohatkar tells us "Why Republicans Are Betting the Farm on Attacking Transgender People." Long story short: they're trying to stoke rage in voters, and besides, what else they got? And note well that anti-transgender bills are "not being requested by constituents," in one observer's words, but you hear people talk about how much they don't like transgender people solely because it's "in the news" -- and it's only in the news because Republicans push these bills! Gosh, how do such things happen?

Republicans are circulating a memo on Capitol Hill calling the Biden infrastructure plan a "slush fund," but that's easy to counter: is my job a "slush fund"? Is my house a "slush fund"? Is clean water a "slush fund"? Is my kid's school a "slush fund"? Is high-speed internet for everyone a "slush fund"? Is the bridge I take to work a "slush fund"? Is retraining my coal worker uncle a "slush fund"? One could go on.

In a related note, Lindsay Koshgarian at TruthOut reminds us that the Biden infrastructure plan could very easily be funded given the amount of money our government pisses away on wars and tax cuts for the rich. Why, after you confront $6.4 trillion we've spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that have made everything in the Middle East even worse, plus the $2.3 trillion budget gap the Trump tax cuts will cost through 2027, you may come away from this article wishing the Biden plan was bigger! Might as well spend trillions of dollars on stuff we use, after all.

Ho hum, law enforcement officers allege that an antifa activist shot at them first -- thus presumably justifying their shooting him to death -- but their investigation may have left a few things out, such as the fact that the activist in question had a gun with a full clip on him at time of death, or the witness testimony that contradicted the witness testimony cited in their investigation, or the utter dearth of body camera or dashboard camera footage. Indeed, police may even have led an eight-year-old witness upon whose testimony the investigation relied heavily. Still, BUT ANTIFA! is likely to become the BUT HER EMAILS! of the new decade. Seriously, just try talking to a right-winger about January 6.

Finally, Sen. Cornyn (R-TX), noting that President Biden doesn't go on cable news programs, wonders if he's "really in charge." Jesus Mary and Joseph what if he's not going on cable news programs because cable news sucks? I mean, I wouldn't want to go on TV with a bunch of shouty know-nothing assholes either, and everyone's been pretending cable news is far more important than it really is for decades now; if our President wants to shame them by refusing to grace them with his presence, I'm all for it. Besides, Joe Biden ain't supposed to be "in charge" -- we are.

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making, worker fairness, workplace violence, stupid nukes, and stupider Congressfolk.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to repeal the 2002 AUMF authorizing war with Iraq, pass the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Pregnancy Fairness Act, fight workplace violence, reject new sea-launched nuclear missiles, and censure Rep. Gosar and strip him of his committee assignments. You can find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page), but I'll also provide email/petition tools for all of these alerts below.

Both Win Without War and the Project on Government Oversight help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 256, which would repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force (or AUMF) Against Iraq. The Iraq war killed hundreds of thousands, displaced tens of millions, cost trillions of dollars, helped birth (in ISIS) something even worse than al-Qaeda, and of course Presidents have used it, and will use it, to justify even stupider adventures. And not for nothing, but it probably also cost Joe Biden Iowa and Ohio, if not also Florida and North Carolina, in 2020. I'm serious: Donald Trump looked like the anti-war candidate to a not-insignificant number of folks in those states. It's amazing how many supposedly politically-adept people still don't grasp the intensity of our feeling against that war. Well, we'll keep telling them.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Reps to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1065, the Pregnancy Fairness Act. These bills would help women in the workplace, the former by giving women more tools to fight pay discrimination, and the latter by forcing employers to provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers at the workplace. I say "reasonable" with the Italics Hammer because right-wingers love pretending that any progress, on anything, anywhere, will obliterate all boundaries everywhere. The bill would force bosses to give pregnant women more bathroom breaks; it would not force bosses to let them spend their entire shift in the bathroom. I mean, duh. As for Sen. Rubio's plaint that the former bill is just a sop to "trial lawyers": we wouldn't need so many trial lawyers if bosses would just pay their women workers what they've earned.

Prevent Workplace Violence helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1195, the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act. Why? Because it's a lot worse there than anywhere else! And also because right-wingers will probably find a judge who'll say the worker safety laws we've got don't apply to violence in the workplace. And also because corporations can ignore OSHA's 2015 guidelines without penalty, because they're guidelines. You shouldn't let guidelines do the work of regulations -- governments tend to cast this as a compromise with corporations, but then the corporations whine about how guidelines always become mandatory sooner or later. But we don't let corporate whining stop us from doing what's right.

Win Without War helps you tell your Reps to pass H.R. 1554/S. 595, the Nuclear SLCM Ban Act. SLCM stands for "sea-launched cruise missile," and if there's anything we don't need more of, it's a nuclear weapon, particularly one that even both Presidents Bush wouldn't green-light. Neither would President Clinton nor President Obama. So why are we even talking about it? Because of President Trump, of course, whose "bold thinking" led him to embrace a weapons system nobody else would, without asking, apparently, if everyone else had reasons for rejecting it. We already have way too many nukes on seacraft, and certainly we shouldn't be putting nukes alongside non-nukes. So, yeah, let's strangle this weapons system in its crib.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Reps to censure Rep. Paul Gosar and strip him of his committee assignments. I have no patience with folks who still associate with white supremacists -- who openly want to destroy our government, and sure did help try that on January 6 -- and anyway Republicans stripped former Rep. Steve King of all his committee assignments in 2019, so it's not like this is unprecedented punishment. Rep. Gosar (E-AZ) has walked back his support for white supremacists, but only when confronted by media outlets, and then not on Twitter, so let's not believe that line of BS. Maybe he thinks, like Rep. Greene of Georgia, that getting punished will just make him stronger. But in a thousand years no one will remember the name of either one of them.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, the right to organize, paid sick leave, and the global gag rule.

Have you heard that Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) told an oil corporation executive, to his face, that he shouldn't lie to her that oil and gas corporations don't get special treatment in our federal tax code? More of our Congressfolk should do that! And they should also do as Rep. Porter did, and list the precise benefits big fossil fuel drillers get from our tax code! Just so happens Rep. Porter has introduced H.R. 1517, the Ending Taxpayer Welfare for Oil and Gas Companies Act, which would (among other good works!) raise royalty rates paid back to the taxpayer by the fossil fuel corporations when they drill on public lands. Too many right-wingers get away with saying we have to lower these royalty rates "to create jobs," but what they're really saying is that we have to bilk the taxpayer out of money we deserve "to create jobs" -- only so the executives can pocket the extra money and not create the jobs! H.R. 1517 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators today. They'll never see it coming, and we know how well they do with things they don't see coming.

Meanwhile, H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, passed the House earlier this week, not long after Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) exhorted his Republican colleagues to "stop talking about Dr. Seuss, and start working with us on behalf of the American workers," a statement that's as good a springboard to a Senate campaign as any. Only five House Republicans voted in favor of the PRO Act, and you can name four of them (Alaska's Don Young, I'll admit, was a mild surprise), and that doesn't bode well for its passage in the Senate, where Republicans will be able to filibuster the bill. If we make them talk through their filibuster, of course, they might wind up embarrassing themselves! And please understand by "might," I mean "will." So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Senators to help out American workers by passing the PRO Act. The PRO Act will help workers like those brave Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, AL, organize for better pay and better working conditions, and why shouldn't we help them do that? Because prices might go up a few pennies? Gosh, don't be that person.

In other news, we should celebrate the passage of the American Rescue Plan, but good Americans still don't have paid sick leave and paid family leave, unless, of course, they belong to a union, and their union bargained and won those things -- or if another employer tried to forestall unionization by granting those things to their workers pre-emptively! Seriously, some bosses do treat their workers well out of the goodness of their hearts, but they're rarer than a T-206 Honus Wagner card, so I wouldn't lay money on that happening if I were you. And, hello! There's a pandemic happening, which increases everyone's need for paid sick leave, to take care of both themselves and their families! Hence Moms Rising helps you tell our government we need a national paid sick leave program, post-haste. We're about the only rich country on Earth that doesn't have one, and that's nothing to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. They're going to say there's "no money" to do that, what with this $1.9 trillion bill we just passed, but they're full of soup -- CEOs still make millions of dollars, and corporations make billions in profits, so the politicians can do it if they just have the will.

Finally, H.R. 656/S. 142, the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (or HER) Act, would prevent our President from keeping taxpayer aid out of the hands of foreign non-governmental organizations (or NGOs) just because they provide abortion -- if abortion is legal in the United States and legal in the nation(s) the NGOs operate. This is what the "global gag rule" is all about; Republican Presidents institute it early in their terms, while Democratic Presidents rescind it early in theirs. But shouldn't the taxpayer get a say over where their money goes? right-wingers ask. Strange how they never asked that question when Tha Bush Mobb was using my taxpayer money to attack Iraq against my express wishes! But this is why we have representative government -- if every taxpayer had veto power over every spending initiative, nothing would get done, and even worse, we would never learn how to live together in a community or a civilization. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote women's health and freedom by passing the Global HER Act.

Around the table: the whackjobs have always been with us! And other necessary reminders.

Rick Perlstein and Edward H. Miller at The New Republic remind us that right-wing whackjobs have always been an integral part of the right-wing counter-revolution of recent decades. Like you, I did know about a lot of the things this article discusses (the John Birch Society, R.J. Rushdoony, William F. Buckley, Jr.'s own virulent racism), but I did not know about a lot of other things that have eerie contemporary parallels. Does laetrile remind you of hydroxychloroquine? Do the Birchian "Insiders" remind you of the Trumpian "Deep State"? Do Jerry Falwell's gay child-recruitment fever dreams remind you of QAnon's child-sex ring? Does the "SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE" '70s bumper sticker remind you of today's Thin Blue Line flag? It's breathtaking, and more than a little consoling, to have all of this evidence in one place. Seriously, this is if-you-read-one-article-this-year territory here.

David Swanson reminds us why President Biden does not require a new "authorization to use military force" (or AUMF). Some folks would find most of the six reasons described herein to be "naive" -- some people are so proud of their cynicism, but cynicism is evil, and our Bible lists pride as the first of the seven deadlies -- but, really, the fact that our Constitution gives Congress, not our President, the authority to declare war should be enough. Even if it is also true that "(y)ou do not end wars by authorizing wars" and "(a)nyone who’d seen the damage done by recent wars would not authorize another goddamned thing" -- and, hate to pile on, that "(w)ar is illegal."

Sonali Kolhatkar reminds us "Why Big Pharma Shouldn’t Have Any Control Over COVID-19 Vaccines." "Because taxpayers pay for vaccine development" and "because governments have to force Big Pharma to do the right thing" are the two most obvious reasons, with "big corporations turn good people against each other" lurking underneath, as always. Ms. Kolhatkar's aptly renders the travails of "vaccine hunters" -- who often find themselves in long lines trying to score "leftover" doses -- as the "vaccine Hunger Games."

Ho hum, the New York Times slams the Brazilian "Car Wash" judicial scandal -- in which a candidate for President got thrown in jail right before an election, thus enabling the ascension of that irredeemable asshole, Jair Bolsonaro -- without examining its own shoddy reporting about the matter over the years. As with the Iraq War-era Downing Street memos -- which our "liberal" media downplayed because "everyone knew" what was in them, though everyone certainly didn't know about what was in them from "liberal" media reporting! -- now the Times claims "it has long been known" that Brazilian Judge Sergio Moro acted unethically and illegally, but you sure didn't "know" about it from the Times! That's some real Orwellian stuff, right there. (Hate to pile on, but "it has long been known"? When you use the passive voice, you might as well hang a sign around your neck saying "I am hiding something from you.")

When you confront Sen. Lindsey Graham's latest attempt to describe his relationship with Donald Trump, you wonder how anyone could spew forth such word salad and still keep getting re-elected. I mean, his rationalizations aren't just stupid, they're obviously stupid, and Ms. Levin correctly says they "sound() like someone rationalizing staying with their abuser." Of course, you probably already know why folks like Lindsey Graham keep getting re-elected: when national Democrats won't use their power for good, any gibbering idiot can get elected on the Republican ticket, and a lot of them make Lindsey Graham sound like a Mensa member, just as Lindsey Graham surely made his forebears sound a lot better back in 1994. That only means we have to stay on our elected leaders, especially now that they probably think that once this COVID relief bill passes, they won't have to work for the next two years.

Finally, Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) says he won't allow Democrats to use budget reconciliation to pass an infrastructure bill, since he's sure he can get at least 10 Republicans to sign on to one and "I am not going to get on a bill that cuts them out completely before we start trying" to talk to them. He sure does enjoy being Thee One Real True and Great American President, doesn't he? But here's the real question: why would anyone want to talk to Congressional Republicans? They block even the mildest reforms, they manufacture the most absurd outrages, and hello! They just tried to overturn the 2020 election, with violence. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Republicans may have 50 Senators, but as far as I'm concerned, they have zero.

Action: concerning COVID relief, saving our Post Office, private prisons, and Iran.

The House passed a COVID relief bill on Saturday morning; now it's time to tell your Senators to do the same. Tell them they must include the $15/hour minimum wage in the bill, even if it means overruling the Senate Parliamentarian. I don't particularly want to do that, but let's be realistic: Republicans will do it next chance they get, and blame Democrats for it. And we should still work on Sens. Manchin (D?-WV) and Sinema (D?-AZ) about their particular unwillingness to pass the $15/hour minimum wage; their phone numbers are 202.224.3954 and 202.224.4521, respectively. Most Americans want this minimum wage hike, and more than half of Republicans want it, and ain't no way all the Republicans who don't want it all live in Arizona and West Virginia. Sens. Manchin and Sinema should stop adhering to the conventional wisdom on "how to represent a conservative state." You represent a conservative state the same way you represent the will of any other state: by doing the will of its people. And again, ain't no one in America going into the voting booth in 2022 saying thank God Democrats preserved the sanctity of Senate procedure at great cost to all of us!)

While you've got your Senators on the phone, you'll want to tell them to confirm President Biden's three new nominees to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors. President Biden nominated them not too long after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told a House Committee to "get used to me," so maybe now we won't have to get "used" to the big-time Republican donor who tried to foul up voting-by-mail and whose solution to all the problems Congress has created for our Post Office over the years is to cut back on delivering mail by air, which will make every day like the most recent holiday season, when packages took as long as a month and a half to get where they were supposed to go. Seriously, saying you can't serve the public because you don't have the money is un-American -- we can stop forcing our Post Office to pre-pay pension and health benefits at a scale we demand of literally no other government agency or corporation, or we can let our Post Office offer banking services again (which Daily Kos helps you do), and people like Louis DeJoy won't have their excuses anymore.

Meanwhile, President Biden has ordered our Justice Department to stop using private prisons, but hasn't ordered our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) to do so, and our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) operates under the auspices of DHS, hence Amnesty International helps you tell DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to release all detained immigrants and stop ICE from using private prisons to detain folks. Private prisons obey the profit motive, after all, and if abusing prisoners makes them more profits, they'll do it! Doesn't matter, necessarily, that private prisons also have to obey government regulations concerning the safety and health of detainees -- private prisons can ignore those regulations and dare our government to stop them, and if someone dies in neglect, well, a government fining a private prison won't bring that person back to life. That person is someone's mother, father, sister, brother, son or daughter, too -- not a faceless warrior in a "caravan." Generally, these folks run from oppression, and we're Americans, so we need to live up to our heritage, not cut it down out of wrath and sloth.

Finally, you've no doubt heard that President Biden proved he's just like all the other Presidents by ordering air strikes against Syria, presumably against Iran-supported militias -- so Win Without War reminds us that, hey, we can avoid firing missiles by rejoining the Iran nuclear deal, which they help you tell Mr. Biden to do! President Biden was Vice President when the Obama Administration negotiated that deal, after all, and it worked -- until President Trump, determined to piss on anything with the Obama name on it, withdrew America from the pact for no good reason. (And then put John Bolton in charge of our NSA, which, in retrospect, may not have been the best way to cure Mr. Trump's jones for war with Iran, since it clearly didn't get us there.) Seriously, war with Iran won't be as easy as war with Iraq was -- Iran has a lot more people to control! -- and war with Iraq, as it turned out, wasn't that easy and gave us ISIS, almost like that was the whole idea. We can avoid such miserable foreign policy choices by going with the diplomacy that's proven to keep Iran from developing nukes, and that's the Iran nuclear deal.