Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning “terrorism,” Presidential nominees, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Senators to kill the so-called Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act and refuse to rubber-stamp our President-elect's nefarious nominees, and tell your Congressfolk to keep funding our IRS so it can keep going after rich tax cheats. 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.

Our House passed the so-called Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act last week – though with fewer votes than expected – so both Common Cause and 350.0rg help you tell your Senators to kill that damn bill. No President – especially the monster the American people elected earlier this month – needs the power to declare non-profits as "terrorist-affiliated" because he doesn't like them, but this bill would give him that power, so our Senate must kill the bill. Do not admit the "but the bill gives American hostages in Israel a break on the taxes they can't file" argument. They could have made that its own bill. You already know why they didn't.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senate to refuse to rubber-stamp TFG's awful nominees who will all hurt good Americans with their evil acts. I hope I'm being perfectly clear about how I feel about all of this! People tell me I hold back on my emotions a lot! We're telling our Senate not to be a rubber-stamp because a) a rubber-stamp is about all that'll get these clowns confirmed and b) our House may well be planning to make a motion to adjourn in advance of our Senate, which would (per Article 2, Section 3 of our Constitution) give TFG the authority to adjourn both Houses indefinitely. Your Senators need to hear from you that this is evil – and that no President should be so afraid of the popular will that he resorts to such evil.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop cutting funding for our IRS. Let it be known that nobody voted for TFG so that our IRS could have less funding; if that were true, surely Republicans would have done better in the 2022 midterms, when they whined about increased IRS funding non-stop. But more than that, we need to communicate as clearly to our Congressfolk as possible that we want to make rich people stop cheating on their taxes, and increased IRS funding collects $6 more in unpaid taxes for every $1 spent. Taxes pay for things we all need, after all! Even when right-wingers call that socialist! You know, there’s another name for cutting IRS funding: defunding the police. Go ahead and use their words against them.

Action: concerning the Israel/Palestine war, food stamps, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop further arms sales to Israel, reject food stamp cuts, and fully fund our IRS. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject further arms sales to Israel. Now Iran has gotten involved, a move pretty much predetermined the moment Mr. Netanyahu decided to kill as many Palestinians as possible without hurting Hamas, though of course, this being Iran, they waited a very, very long time. But that doesn't mean we’re all suddenly pro-genocide! And it sure doesn't mean "Donald Trump should be President"! He'll rattle his saber at Iran, but ultimately do nothing, because that’s what Mr. Putin wants. We'd do much better to force an end to the Netanyahu stratagem, and that'll only happen when we stop giving him weapons. Certainly let’s not count on Donald Trump to do that!

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to put families first and reject cuts to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (or SNAP), better known as food stamps. I'll keep saying "food stamps," I don't care! There's no shame in getting help from your government, since you fund your government. Why, food stamps are rather like insurance! But, of course, right-wingers want you to think we should be ashamed, because you don’t want to be Those People, do you? But we should not be ashamed! And we should not be cruel to those who've lost their job, or (more likely these days!) those whose job doesn't pay enough. Maybe we should go after corporate farm subsidies instead of hurting working families?

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our IRS's efforts to find and punish wealthy tax cheats. Somehow, Congressional Republicans have made this the hill they'll die on! But did all that whining about our IRS help them win the 2022 midterms? No, it did not: to review, Republicans lost a net of one Senate seat and we only knew they'd narrowly won the House after another week of vote-counting. But if we want to find and punish rich tax cheats, the kind who hire rich lawyers to get them off, then we need to fully fund our IRS. Why, it's almost like Republicans are objectively pro-rich tax cheat! They certainly don’t love the poor tax cheat.

Action: concerning the Israel/Palestine war and health care.

Long story short: tell Congress to stop arming Israel, tell a big pharma CEO to make his drugs more affordable, and tell PA state legislators to expand health care access. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop a $20 billion weapons sale to Israel. You have noticed, I trust, that Israel has, ah, expanded the war on Palestine into Lebanon by blowing up pagers? That turned out to be about as "surgical" as the November air strikes on Gaza. And it's also more evidence, if we needed it, that Mr. Netanyahu has no intention of eliminating Hamas or (even) securing Israel from their enemies, but only wants to create more crises that require the people of Israel to cleave to him. And we're helping him do that! So we should stop helping him do that.

More Perfect Union helps you tell the CEO of Novo Nordisk to stop price-gouging good Americans for weight loss drugs. If you know anyone who responds by saying well people should just stop getting fat ha ha ha snort, then, well, here are three things you can say: 1) one of those two drugs, Ozempic, helps diabetics, 2) our subsidization of high-fructose corn syrup has made our obesity problem much worse, and 3) "I can see you ain't missin' no meals." I'm guessing at the last one, but I bet I'm not wrong. Also too, they charge Americans for these drugs more than they charge the British. Which is another oblique argument for a Medicare-for-all health insurance system, I suppose.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Health Care Voices helps you tell your PA state legislator to help ensure that big health care corporations actually provide care for good Pennsylvanians. Specifically, you'd tell them to pass HB 2344, which will help good Pennsylvanians speak out against hospital mergers and closures that affect their community (right, former Hahnemann patients?), and HB 2339 would make hospitals publish prices and fees so good Pennsylvanians can know what they're getting into. These bills would make health care better, so they deserve our support.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, voting rights, and bankster bonuses.

Long story short: tell our government to stop arming Israel, tell our DOJ to investigate Texas's Attorney General for vote suppression, and tell our Federal Reserve to stop banksters from giving themselves big bonuses for their risky behavior. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our government to stop arming Israel's attempt to blow Palestinians out of existence. Yes, the terrorist attack of October 7 was evil, but so is the Israeli response, and because Israel is much more powerful than Palestine, the response will do more harm, almost as if Hamas intended that all along. And of course Benjamin Netanyahu has no intention of destroying Hamas – he needs an enemy so he can con good Israelis into clinging to him! Cut off his weapons and this house of cards will collapse.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to investigate Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for attempting to harass and intimidate voters. Which is against the law! Lately Mr. Paxton has threatened to sue Harris County and Bexar County over their plans to make sure eligible but unregistered voters get registration forms. Sounds like a frivolous lawsuit? It gets better – both counties have large Latin-American populations! No use arguing "prosecutorial discretion" when that "discretion" always seems aimed at non-whites.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell Fed Chair Jerome Powell to finalize rules prohibiting bankster CEOs from getting big bonuses for taking absurd risks with their customers' money. I'd say "finally finalize" if it didn't sound corny, but fact is the Dodd-Frank law authorized this rule almost 15 years ago, so our government's got to get to it! Otherwise we could have another bankster Armageddon like we had in 2008, and there might really be torches and pitchforks this time.

Around the table: the “free state of Florida,” and other absurdities.

How bad are union-busting campaigns these days? Compass Coffee baristas allege that their employers have hired nearly 125 new “employees” at seven locations to dilute unionization votes there. These “employees” include CEOs at other corporations – including one forced to pay $25,000 in back wages to five organizers they illegally fired – as well as friends and family of Compass’s CEO. Compass virtually stamped out previous organization efforts by, well, firing virtually all of their workers during the pandemic, but union organizers are back, because you can’t keep good people down. Hear that, Supreme Court? (As an aside, one Uber lobbyist’s suggestion that she was somehow misled into being hired is absurd. How do you know? By the phrase “Uber lobbyist,” which describes a class of person who typically does not need a barista job on the side.)

Shipt workers, frustrated by smaller paychecks, band together to prove their employers use algorithms to shaft them. The amount of work these folks had to do – along with a non-profit and a Ph.D. student – to prove their point is staggering, and I can’t help but point out that if, you know, these workers were organized they wouldn’t have to work as hard to protect themselves. I know, a lot of folks fall into this line of work, for some it’s not a primary source of income, and some even prefer what bosses like to call “flexible” work schedules, but Jesus Mary and Joseph do we really think corporatists don’t know all of this and exploit it? And should we really let them keep exploiting it?

Ari Paul rues that our “liberal” media – so concerned about the alleged anti-Semitism of opposing anything Israel does these days – has by and large missed (or, perhaps, “missed”) the story of anti-Semitism within the youth movement backing Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Could that be because our “liberal” media presents Ms. Meloni as a “pragmatist”? Yes, it could be. All of this is peculiar, since actual video of young morons sieg-heiling and celebrating Mussolini would be sensational in the manner of sensationalism our “liberal” media adores. Why, one might start to think our “liberal” media only likes sensationalism that makes right-wingers look better!

Washoe County, Nevada election commissioners refuse to certify a recount, presumably because it didn’t go the way they wanted it to go. After all, they didn’t exactly present a vast trove of evidence proving wrongdoing or incompetence! Although a “local activist,” with the unfortunate name of Robert Beadles, says “an artificial intelligence supercomputer” told him the election couldn’t possibly have gone the way it did. Mr. Beadles has been whining about nonexistent election fraud for years, and another name for “artificial intelligence supercomputer” would be Bullshit Machine.

Independent Presidential candidate/brain worm puppet Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says he “won’t take sides” on various 9.11 conspiracy theories, but I will! No, Tha Bush Mobb didn’t plan and execute 9.11 – seriously? Him? Plan a thing like that? It is to laugh! Besides, that’s not how power works anymore – the powerful see nothing but opportunity in failure, and they never see opportunity in success, plus they break everything, point out how broken everything is, and then posit themselves as the only people who can fix it, as if they weren’t the ones who broke it! Also, if Saudi Arabia did the deed, I think we’d know it by now; it’s hard to keep secrets like that, even in totalitarian states – and also in states like ours, where we’re all so damn proud of what we know.

Local media find Florida’s new “Welcome to the Free State of Florida” signs generating “mixed reactions” among the locals, but sadly we don’t learn as much about that as we deserve – just reactions from one liberal citing book-banning and one right-winger who almost certainly calls himself an “independent” talking about “people stuffing stuff down our throats,” and I’d lay money that “stuff” is deserved shame over his neanderthal opinions. Meanwhile, enjoy your freedoms, Florida – the freedom to die from COVID, the freedom to get run over by right-wingers, the freedom to lose your home to climate change, the freedom to get bullied if you’re gay and/or trans, the freedom to throw tantrums just to keep other people from reading books, and the freedom to die in mass shootings perpetrated by whiny young men, all because your government prefers the drama of a “Free State of Florida” sign to providing the services you pay for with your taxes.

Finally, a Republican strategist thinks Joe Biden – still being put through the ringer over a two-week-old debate performance – is actually in a “commanding position politically” against Mr. Trump, and though I wouldn’t blame you for thinking this is a false flag, it also rather resembles the truth. Incumbents are hard to dislodge anymore – why, you’d have to badly mismanage a pandemic to lose re-election these days! – and, as better minds than I have pointed out, the alleged “dementia” of Joe Biden (I’ve had family members with dementia, and he ain’t like that, period, end of, full stop) sure hasn’t manifested as chaotic governing. Economy still adding over 200,000 jobs a month, inflation down and wages still outpacing it, antitrust enforcement still vigorous and effective, wars in Palestine and Ukraine managed about as well as possible without American bloodshed – yeah, that’s some “dementia,” there.

Action: concerning endless war, air pollution, and Supreme Court corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to promote peace in the Israel/Palestine conflict, reject attempts to repeal soot standards, and pass the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency 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.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict and hold President Biden to his word about withholding weapons as long as Israel commits human rights abuses there. President Biden’s declaration about that was, admittedly, astounding – few American politicians have been more pro-Israel than he – but our State Department’s recent finding that Israel hasn’t met the bar for human rights abuses is, sadly, less so. All that means is we need to keep holding our leaders’ feet to the fire. Because Israel’s government wants Hamas around and kills Palestinian civilians to keep them around.

Earthjustice helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject yet another “Resolution of Disapproval,” this one aiming at the Biden Administration’s new soot standard. We’ve all seen enough soot-in-face jokes on TV to know that soot ain’t something you necessarily want in your face, and we definitely don’t want it in our lungs – yet big polluting corporations and their lackeys in Congress stand ready to hunt down any standard that would protect us from soot in our air. Congress’s priorities sure are strange. You’d think protecting us from pollutants making us sick would be their job.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act. Not that we’ve never had corrupt Justices before, or that corruption is strictly speaking a partisan matter – you’ll recall that Justices Kagan and Sotomayor were landlords helping to decide the fate of COVID-era renter protections – but the various ethics imbroglios affecting Justices Thomas and Alito remind us that our laws don’t hold our Supreme Court to the same ethics standards as other federal judges. Surely we don’t think they’re too big to fail? In America, nobody should be too big to fail.

Action: concerning the “war on terror” and housing policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject attempts to expand the “war on terror” and invest more and better in housing policy. 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 Senators to reject S. 4136, which would allow our Treasury Secretary to suspend the tax-exempt status of “terrorist-supporting” organizations. So, to review: our government calls organizations “terrorist” (or “terrorist-supporting”) without even defining these terms and aims to injure them without due process, all of which is a way of saying they can’t win arguments and they don’t respect law and order. S. 4136 supposedly aims to go after “terrorist-supporting” Palestinian organizations, but you can see them using it to come after you, right? Yes, you can. So it’s time to communicate our will to our Senators.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in housing policy for-real for-real. Before President Reagan’s massive housing cuts in the ‘80s, we didn’t have a homelessness problem in America; now, with landlords extorting renters and banksters sucking up as much of the available housing supply as they can, we’ve got a homelessness problem like we’ve never had before. The housing policy increases we demand are hardly bank-breaking – our government routinely wastes more money on the F-35 fighter plane – and these hand-up-not-hand-out public investments will save lives and help good Americans live better lives. So let’s do it.

Action: concerning violence against protestors and sensationalist media coverage of Donald Trump.

Long story short: tell California government officials to investigate the police response to violence by counter-protestors against protestors, and tell big media corporations to cover Donald Trump with more journalism and less sensationalism. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell Los Angeles’s District Attorney and California’s Attorney General to investigate the LAPD’s, er, unbalanced response to violent protestors on May 1, when pro-Israel counter-protestors threw chairs and sticks and set off fireworks and chemical sprays against a pro-Palestine encampment while the police hid for five hours. It sure is incredible how often violence against protestors, whether perpetrated by the state or by counter-protestors, goes unpunished. It’s enough to make you think most law-and-order votaries really don’t care about anything but hurting their enemies. And America ought to do better than that.

The National Campaign for Justice also helps you tell big media corporations to cut with the sensationalism and get with the journalism when covering Donald Trump. Jesus Mary and Joseph does anyone really think he isn’t falling asleep in court on purpose, so he can generate coverage of that and not all the ways he’s planning to destroy democracy if and when he takes office again? Right-wingers always pretend to be stupid or addled, not just so you think they’re harmless, but so the media chase the sensational pretense and not the story about the harm they’re really doing! And again, America ought to do better than that.

Action: concerning Israel, pollution, and price-gouging.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restrain Israel’s behavior in its war on Palestine, reject the pro-polluter Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, and pass the Price-Gouging Prevention 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.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk that “U.S. support for Netanyahu’s war must have limits.” Civilized people set boundaries, right? Friends set boundaries, right? And “don’t use our money to kill Palestinian civilians” really ought to be a boundary we set; that’s what Kids Today are saying with their encampments, and a dirty little secret about America is that Kids Today Are Never Wrong. The bad news? Old men don’t listen to Kids Today very often. The good news? Old men are also tired of reflexively doing whatever Israel wants regardless of the consequences. So I see opportunity to do good works here.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, which would let our government give away public lands to big mining corporations in perpetuity and with no oversight. So I guess the “clarity” they’re looking for is all about government clearly doing nothing on behalf of its owners, the people! We don’t keep polluters off public lands to make ourselves feel good; we do it to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink and bathe with and the land we use for farming, recreation, and other forms of enjoyment. And letting bosses do whatever they like? That’s not America.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Price Gouging Prevention Act, which would empower our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to go after corporate price-gouging as an “unfair and deceptive” practice – saying something is worth more than it really is is a lie, after all, and corporations using their size to bludgeon people into spending more money is even worse than a lie. Good peoples, this is why we have government – to protect us from big corporate actors that would squeeze every dollar out of us if they could! The “free” market ain’t free unless we’re all free.

Action: concerning voting, monopolies, and protest.

Long story short: tell our government to ensure safe and secure mail-in voting, reject the proposed Capitol One/Discover merger, and break up the Ticketmaster monopoly, and tell Columbia University to right the wrongs it did to pro-Palestinian protestors. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Save the Post Office helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors, the USPS Inspector General, and the Postal Regulatory Commission to force our Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots safely and securely this year. Because you can’t count on Postmaster DeJoy to do it! He’s been busy raising prices, cutting services, and slashing jobs, and that’s not exactly the combination that ensures mail-in ballots get where they need to go, is it? Of course, he cares little about the Constitutionally-mandated service he runs – he wants it all privatized, ideally for his cronies. But if our government won’t fire him, then they need to rein him in.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Justice Department to stop the proposed Capital One/Discover merger, while More Perfect Union helps you tell our Justice Department to break up the Ticketmaster monopoly. If Capital One buys Discover, it’ll have even more power to charge higher interest rates, and it’s already charging the highest in the industry. And Ticketmaster already has the near-monopoly power to charge high prices, saddle buyers with junk fees, and bully smaller venues and artists into accepting whatever terms they impose. Why, this all sounds like a job for our government! Which is why we must speak out.

Finally, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell Columbia University to fix the mess they caused when they used the NYPD to clear out a student-created protest encampment, which would include amnesty for the 100-plus protestors arrested. Protestors demanded that Columbia divest from Israel; this is not exactly a loony-tune opinion in America – you know, the way “Biden stole the election” is a loony-tune opinion in America – so why bring out the big guns? Because our elites, even those in academia, are very slow to recognize shifting winds, and cling to their wrong-headed ways; what can we do but help them see that the winds are shifting?

Action: concerning government spying, the Israel/Palestine war, and postal banking.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop warrantless spying on Americans, end arms sales to Israel, and pass the Postal Banking 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 Demand Progress and Free Press help you tell your Congressfolk not to renew Section 702 of the USA PATRIOT Act. Section 702 authorizes our government to collect data on Americans without a warrant, and as we’ve recently learned, Elon Musk’s corporation – X, the Corporation Formerly Known as Twitter – has actually been selling user data to our government; do we really want our tax dollars going to big corporations so our government can spy on us more? No, we do not. But Congress will discuss this very matter this week, so we must communicate our will in numbers they can’t deny.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop selling weapons to Israel. As I said yesterday, a lot of Americans are thinking Israel might be wrong for the first time; their indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians has provoked President Biden – one of the most pro-Israel politicians who ever served – into telling Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that he may condition future weapons sales on Israel’s human rights conduct, which is good, but Congress ought to force his hand by stopping weapons sales entirely. Ignore folks who say selling weapons incentivizes better behavior, because such statements defy logic.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Postal Banking Act, which would enable our Postal Service to offer basic banking services (checking, savings accounts, small loans) like they used to as late as the late ‘60s. That’ll enable our Postal Service – which receives no taxpayer funding despite our Constitution explicitly making the mail a federal job – to get more revenues, but even more importantly, it’ll help good Americans who live in rural and urban areas where banksters won’t dare go to get basic banking services again. And that’s worth doing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Boeing, Israel, and AI deepfakes.

Long story short: tell our government to nationalize Boeing and stop selling weapons to Israel, and tell big tech corporations to stop people from using AI to hurt other people. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell the Biden Administration to nationalize Boeing. That’s right, our government should just take ownership of Boeing, because how could our government possibly run that corporation worse? Boeing used to care about building good planes, but now all they care about is making money, and if anyone shouts TEH SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! at this idea, kindly remind them that American taxpayers (via the Department of Defense) are already Boeing’s biggest customer and thus deserve more say in how it operates. Also maybe remind them that they drove roads and drank tap water and used electricity and breathed clean air today.

Demand Progress helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop selling arms to Israel as long as they’re committing genocide in Palestine. I actually think President Biden has handled this whole thing about as well as one can – especially given that he’s one of our most pro-Israel Presidents ever – but you don’t let up when you get some of what you want, you demand more. Hey, it always works for right-wingers! And our pressure has (finally!) driven a wedge between American politicians and the reflexively pro-Israel lobby, and has even prompted Sen. Schumer to condemn Mr. Netanyahu, so again, we need to keep up the pressure.

Finally, Ultraviolet helps you tell big tech corporations to stop people from using AI to create non-consensual deepfakes and thus harm other people. Is the genie out of the bottle here? Hell no! It should be laughably easy to limit folks’ access to AI apps, or to certain AI app functions, so it should be laughably easy to limit the harm AI apps can do. And not for nothing, but women bear the brunt of that harm, with their images used non-consensually in over 95% of all internet deepfakes. So don’t brook any folly from tech bros who call themselves “founders” and “indispensable men” but act all helpless when asked to stop the harm their products cause.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 983.

The incomparable Rick Perlstein describes the literal fascist origins of the right-wing Revisionist movement that now controls Israel. Read the whole thing; it’ll be as illuminating as it is heartbreaking, and Mr. Perlstein has received a lot of hate mail for this article – from liberals, one would think, though one always has to wonder these days how many are really right-wing agents provocateur. I presume that after fascism led to, you know, the Holocaust, Revisionists learned to mask their fascism a little better. And when you reaad about the, ah, memorabilia some folks have in their houses, you might even think the Revisionists’ post-Holocaust methods vaguely resemble sports teams’ methods of inducing loyalty among the locals.

Ho hum, Google will soon lay off thousands of workers even though its parent corporation, Alphabet, made record profits last month. The shills will say that Alphabet is making all that money, not Google, and while they’re circle-jerking over that, I’ll retort that people often think other people’s jobs are less essential than their own, and I’ll also retort that corporations own other corporations mostly to avoid accountability for their evil and that corporations owning other corporations should be illegal. Corporations want to be “people” but still want to own other “people”? The stupid, it burns!

When I hear Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI) say that our Supreme Court “manipulate(s) facts in cases that benefit Republican special interests” and “the justices deliberately ignore() facts gathered by Congress and insert() their own conclusions,” you may be reminded of our Court’s ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, in which the web-designer plaintiff filed suit against Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws before she’d ever designed a website and that the “request from a same-sex couple to design a website” very likely never even existed. Did our Court fail to find out these facts before ruling – or did they simply not care? I kid, of course; it’s that they don’t care.

How does one interpret Gov. DeSantis’s sudden concern that maybe book-banning has gone too far in his state? He wants you to think he really does weigh all the facts before making decisions or whatever, but he really doesn’t care about that – he got attention being a book banning supporter and a critic, and getting attention coming and going is a right-wing politician’s sole reason for existing. Remember, he is also the guy who “refuted” criticisms of his state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law by saying it only applied to young children – and then he expanded it to include all students. Maybe don’t listen to anything Ron DeSantis says?

Ho hum, anti-vaxxers publish putatively peer-reviewed article claiming that COVID vaccines kill way more people than they save, etc., but the online medical journal that published it has now retracted it. So when someone comes at you with this was peer-reviewed!, you come back with the journal that published it retracted it. Of course, anti-vaxxers don’t really care about all of that; all they care about is repeating the lie and hoping to catch folks unawares. In the meantime, if someone bold-faces entire sentences and uses more than one exclamation point at a time, maybe don’t listen to them. Also, maybe don’t listen to tech bros, ever, about anything.

In a peripherally-related note, I should be happier that a CNN reporter “cornered” Rep. Jim Jordan (E-OH) over the now-discredited FBI informant whose testimony, such as it is, has powered the Biden impeachment effort, but Jim Jordan doesn’t care; he was just trying to repeat the same “four fundamental facts” about the Biden impeachment effort over and over again. Know what those four facts are? No? Well, maybe you can’t just repeat any old thing, then! And as much as I want reporters to stand up to folks like Jim Jordan, I still wonder if the CNN reporter just played a role in a drama here. Our “liberal” media have sucked for a very long time, you know.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (E-AL) supports both the Alabama state Supreme Court’s ruling that embryos are people and the in vitro fertilization the ruling now essentially outlaws (since IVF creates many more embryos than babies). His rhetorical contortions are even worse than the first three paragraphs suggest, but unlike the aforementioned anti-vaxxers or Jim Jordan, his game isn’t repetition – claiming he supports IVF but also supports the most-extreme-pseudo-anti-abortion-position-this-week that just so happens to make IVF illegal is just his way of hoping people hear what they want to hear. In a hyper-saturated media environment, this isn’t a bad bet – and when you have literally nothing else to offer as a public servant, it may be your only bet.

Finally, we’ve reached that point in our history where the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual convention features a speaker who says out loud “Welcome to the end of democracy! We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it” and replace it, of course, with a theocracy. Tell your Republican friends, if you still have any, that this is what they’re voting for, whether they think so or not. They’ll need to hear that more than once, because even though Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo rightly finds it significant that 40% of South Carolina Republicans still went out of their way to tell Donald Trump they don’t want him to be the nominee, almost all of them will still “hold their nose” and vote for him in November – unless we can get to them first.

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 endless war, health care, and public banking.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to do all they can to get a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war, and pass both the EpiPen Act and the Public Banking 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.

Demand Progress helps you demand an immediate cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war. Pleased to see someone else refer to it as exactly that, since that’s exactly what’s happening – even the Iraq War’s most fevered supporters never called it the “U.S./al-Qaeda war,” and not just because that would have been absurd. But with the International Court of Justice lately saying that some of Israel’s actions might qualify as genocide – and with that court continuing to consider South Africa’s genocide complaint – I would think we have some momentum here. But we’ll only turn that momentum into good works if we speak out now.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the EpiPen Act. You recall how Mylan jacked up the price of EpiPens 500 – to around $600! – between 2009 and 2016, and controlled 90% of the EpiPen market back then? Well, the EpiPen Act would cap the price of two EpiPen doses at $60, or one-tenth of the price that made Mylan so much money, like any corporation should profit like that off a drug that people with anaphylactic allergies will die if they don’t have. Right-wingers love squealing about “price controls,” but I think most Americans would look a lot more sanguinely on the concept now – particularly with regard to live-saving drugs.

Finally, Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Public Banking Act, which would more easily allow states and localities to open public banks like North Dakota’s, which has helped good North Dakotans weather recessions and depressions for over a hundred years. You may have noticed several members of the Squad – Reps. Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Omar – among the bill’s sponsors. Our “liberal” media concentrates far too much on their alleged anti-Semitism and not a whole lot on their actual populism; one has to wonder why that is. It’s because media outlets are objectively pro-bankster. That’s the reason. Also sexism.

Around the table: evil shows its ugly gnarled face, part 748.

First, some good news: our Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division has successfully stopped the proposed JetBlue/Spirit merger in court, thus guaranteeing that Spirit will still be able to offer lower prices to airline passengers. Because you know JetBlue was going to end that! And you know that because Spirit executives said so! The Antitrust Division literally hadn’t stopped an airline merger in over 40 years, so this is, as our President might say, a BFD. Personal to the corporate executives and the business press who can’t stop whining about this stuff: c’mon, fellas! Bootstrap yourselves! Oh, and Joe Biden: how about running for re-election on good works like this one?

And now some bad news: the Bernie Sanders resolution that would have required our State Department to report on Israeli human rights violations in Gaza failed by a 72-11 margin, and though some observers say “hey, it got 11 more votes than it probably would’ve gotten last year,” it still only got 11 “yea” votes out of 100. (If you really want to bright-side this vote, you may note that 17 Senators missed the vote entirely. How did they really feel about it? Surely they would have shown up to protect Israel, right?) The only Republican who backed the resolution was Rand Paul of Kentucky; I’m tempted to say he knows how to count as well as anyone else, but not without mentioning that he almost single-handedly made the USA PATRIOT Act significantly less repulsive in 2016.

“With Donald Trump's Iowa landslide,” writes Amanda Marcotte at Salon, “evangelicals reveal who they really are.” Yes, evangelicals really are fascists who see this patently un-Godly man as their best hope for gaining absolute power over the rest of us! Of course, right-wing evangelicals have revealed who they really are many, many times over the years – as Ms. Marcotte patiently and meticulously recounts! – but maybe we need all the reminders we can get. I will say that I don’t think regular Americans are falling all over themselves trying to reintegrate these evangelicals into the human community; I think only our “liberal” media tries to do that.

At the risk of diddling right-wing rage glands, ProPublica presents evidence that a solar energy project in Washington state isn’t respecting local indigenous cultural sites enough. Of course, the point of this article, I would think, is not never do renewable energy ever ha ha ha you stupid liberals, but rather do renewable energy right, and you shouldn’t have to run roughshod over folks’ rights in order to do the right thing. And generally, treaties with Native American nations already protect the right to continue ancient cultural practices, which makes this, guess what, a law and order issue as well.

Ho hum, Tucker Carlson’s still out there hawking viciously stupid crap about COVID vaccines, to the point that over one-third of Americans actually think the COVID vaccine has killed thousands of good Americans; now, most of those folks are actually insane, I’ll grant, but I’m bummed that lies about COVID vaccines have some appeal to the merely cynical among us. Hate to sound like a broken record, but Democrats can counter all of this insanity by providing good services to Americans without letting rich people whining about it. Joe Biden’s been the best at that in my lifetime, but that hasn’t exactly been a high bar to clear.

Finally, Nikki Haley actually says “we’ve never been a racist country” in an interview, and while her longer answer is actually considerably better – get-less-racist-every-day isn’t just pablum, and only a cynic or a liar would claim that the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act simply don’t represent progress – it’s still well worth it to note that “we’ve never been a racist country” is utter horseshit one could refute with a cursory investigation of American history. And the people who call everything racism are still more my people than the folks who want to scrub racism from history because it hurts their feelings. “We’ve never been a racist country” obviously aims at the latter, but of course their hearts are spoken for.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, Social Security, and workers’ rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to investigate human rights abuses in Gaza, reject any attempt to cut Social Security benefits, and stop trying to dump on exploited workers. 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.

Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand that our State Department investigate human rights abuses by Israel in Palestine. They shouldn’t be hard to find! Israel spent weeks indiscriminately firing missiles into Gaza before putting boots on the ground “looking” for Hamas, and now you can’t drink the water in Gaza and Israeli soldiers say things on video like “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza,” which probably reminds you of, you know, everyone who’s ever dehumanized an enemy. All of this, so Mr. Netanyahu can win another election when his current governing coalition collapses in six months or so. Seriously, Italy’s a more stable government now!

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a Social Security “commission.” Most politicians talk about the “crises” that “demand” we cut Social Security benefits for the good Americans who earned them – what a bunch of cowards these politicians sound like! (Of course, they’re liars, not cowards, and a liar is many orders of magnitude worse than a coward.) But why not tell them to expand Social Security funding instead? Billionaires have enough money to wipe their asses with these days, so it’s not like “we’re broke.” I mean, you and I may be, but America’s most certainly not.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.J.Res. 98, which would overturn a Biden Administration rule that protects working families. The rule would stop corporations from abusing their employees’ “joint employer” status; if you don’t already know what happens with that, you can probably guess by the name – a “joint employer” will spend all its time passing the buck from one to to the other so no one ever has to deal with a worker grievance or bargain with employees in good faith. The rule is a good work, but of course Republicans have to shit on it. So let’s not let them do that.

Action: concerning Social Security, Medicare, and the Israel/Palestine war.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any Social Security/Medicare “commission” and demand a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war. 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.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to create a Social Security or Medicare commission. Because we all know a better way to describe a Social Security or Medicare “commission” would be a Social Security or Medicare death panel, and unlike the “death panels” right-wingers whined about in 2009, these would be real death panels, dedicated solely to taking food out of our mouths. And the reason they’d create a death panel, instead of just putting things up to a vote? Because we’d stop that damn vote, that’s why! Also because they hate democracy. But mainly because we’d kill that death panel dead!

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war now. No, I won’t call it the “Israel/Hamas” war, because I know who the real targets of this war are: the good citizens of Palestine. You know, just like the real targets of the October 7 attack were those Israeli citizens who’d be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause! Yes, this issue is full of suck, but that fact doesn’t justify letting Mr. Netanyahu kill civilians indiscriminately. It’ll take “many more months” to destroy Hamas, he says? What a lie! He wants Hamas around forever! Otherwise, Israeli voters might fire him!

Action: concerning drug prices, fake war images, and food safety.

Long story short: tell our government to fight high drug prices, tell Adobe to stop selling fake AI war images, and tell our government to improve food safety. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to take on big pharma corporations and their absurdly high-priced drugs. Specifically, you’ll ask HHS to enact the most vigorous “march-in” rules possible, so that when big pharma corporations overcharge for drugs our taxpayer money helped create – which, ha ha, is most drugs, because big pharma corporations are such socialists! – then our government can “march in” and license the drug to another corporation which’ll make it more cheaply. Because medicine shouldn’t be the kind of thing that costs an arm and a leg! Literally!

Win Without War helps you tell Adobe’s CEO to stop peddling fake AI-generated images of the Israel/Palestine war that have somehow made their way to our internet. Selling fake war images should pretty much strike everyone as, you know, wrong, but our big corporations are such cultural relativists, such postmodernists, and every right-winger who says corporations should be allowed to do whatever they want is thus also a cultural relativist and a postmodernist. I don’t find these terms offensive myself (OK, maybe “postmodernist”), but I know right-wingers do, and they deserve some of their own.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to improve food safety standards and practices. Because food poisoning always makes the news, and FDA officials say that existing food safety practices can’t prevent intentional food poisoning (as apparently happened with WanaBana products recently), so clearly they’ve got to up their game. And one more time: the existence of food poisoning does not prove that “government is bad” or “regulations are useless”; it merely proves that anything worth doing is hard work. We don’t shrink from hard work, do we?

Action: concerning banksters, bombing civilians, and executive pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to close bankster tax loopholes, stop using taxpayer money to bomb Palestinian civilians, and curb excessive CEO pay. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act. You know how banksters pay a lower tax rate than nurses and bus drivers? That’s because our laws allow them to declare the money they make managing other people’s accounts as investment income, and, as you know, our laws have taxed investment income at a lower rate than regular working families’ income since Tha Bush Mobb’s notorious second tax “reform” law. I always say income is income, but I know a few like-minded folks would want the first few grand of investment income taxed at a relatively low rate, as a way of encouraging working families to invest more. But not millions of dollars! That’s just getting over, and we shouldn’t allow rich people to get over.

MoveOn helps you tell our government to stop funding Israel’s bombing of civilians in Palestine with our tax dollars. Key phrase is “of civilians” – no one wants Hamas to flourish, but Israel’s mostly bombing civilians in Gaza, and that’s exactly the sort of thing helps Hamas flourish! I’d say it’s almost like that’s the whole idea but I’m pretty sure it is the whole idea. Imagine being Benjamin Netanyahu, finishing first in nail-biter elections but having to cobble together coalitions that collapse every year, which means more nail-biter elections. If your hold on power is that tenuous, what do you need most? An enemy. Or, you know, good works that make people want to vote for you. Anyway, we don’t need to support mass murder of civilians with our hard-earned money.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to do more to curb excessive CEO pay, particularly in the health insurance industry. Health insurance premiums outstrip inflation (yes, even 2021-22 inflation!) every year by absurd amounts, and what’s one big reason for that? The 10 highest-paid health insurance corporation CEOs earning over a billion dollars between them last year, that’s what! But do they earn that money with better services and better care? That is to laugh! We can curb CEO pay in lots of ways, like bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income. And if they call that “class warfare,” just remind them that their high costs wage actual class warfare on us every day of our lives. All so they can make more money than they’ll ever spend, money they can’t take to the Pearly Gates.

Readings for November 7, 2023.

Ho hum, Factcheck.org finds that the Republican Israel-funding bill doesn’t actually offset its cost with budget cuts as advertised. You already know the reason: cutting the increase in IRS funding actually results in considerably less revenue coming in and therefore larger deficits. Whatever happened to spending money to make money? Indeed, our Congressional Budget Office says the bill would actually increase the deficit by about twice as big as the bill’s size. Still, Republicans have a total hard-on for protecting rich folks from getting audited: I wonder why. And dig Mike Johnson’s rhetorical hostage-taking: “I think if you put this to the American people and they weigh the two needs, I think they’re going to say standing with Israel and protecting the innocent over there is in our national interest and is a more immediate need than IRS agents.” What would the people say if he’d made them choose between Israel and corporate welfare handouts? Of course we’ll never know, because he’ll never ask, because he’s evil.

David Swanson claims that our military has trained over 30% of all mass shooters in America, and though finding a military background for 40 of 127 mass shooters doesn’t complete the picture, I’m inclined to agree – it’s a lot easier to kill a lot of people when you’ve been trained to kill a lot of people, after all. Also, our “liberal” media don’t face this problem any better than they face police brutality: “statistically, virtually all veterans are not mass shooters. But that can hardly be the reason for not a single news article ever mentioning that mass shooters are very disproportionately likely to be veterans. After all, statistically, virtually all males, mentally ill people, domestic abusers, Nazi-sympathizers, loners, and gun-purchasers are also not mass-shooters. Yet articles on those topics proliferate like NRA campaign bribes.” We’d respond to this news, I would hope, by maybe not getting into so many Iraq-type wars in the future, since those wars send so many shells of people home.

Economist Hal Singer, who says he supports the Biden Administration’s “economic policies generally,” still explains the many ways it’s failed working families. Chiefly, he reminds us that higher Fed interest rates mean higher credit card interest rates (21 percent, up from 16 about a year and a half ago), higher student loan interest rates (almost six percent, about double what it was three years ago), and higher mortgages (almost eight percent now, when three percent loans were plentiful as late as 2020). What could Mr. Biden have done instead? Use the “bully pulpit” to shame corporate “greedflation” practitioners, or impose price controls, or have our government manufacture products like insulin, or go after price-gougers more aggressively (and appoint judges who don’t have their head up their ass about such things, I could add). So, a lot of wasted opportunity, there. It’s just Joe Biden’s dumb luck (and ours!) that our Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and Republicans can’t govern their way out of a paper bag.

Around the table: a bankster heads to jail, and other, more expected developments.

Lookee here, Virginia’s Republican Governor is sending out tax rebates the week before an election. Mandated by law, of course, but I’m sure the timing of the rebates is a complete accident. In other news, monkeys fly out of my butt. Good news: all those rebates Donald Trump handed out in 2020 didn’t help him win re-election, so it may not help Republicans running for office in Virginia this year, either. It might hurt them, actually – people don’t like thinking they’re easily bought.

In a related note, Virginia’s government has apparently underestimated how many voters they’ve unjustly unregistered – they said it was 270, but it was actually almost 3,400. They can blame “software glitches” all they want, but we all know that Republican governments screw up on purpose so they can “prove” “government doesn’t work” and then you go along with their plan to privatize everything. If 3,400 doesn’t seem like a lot of voters to you – many other states deregister many more voters, after all – remember that every vote counts! Particularly to governments that do better at suppressing votes than at governing!

D.C. Attorney General files lawsuit against 14 local landlord corporations, claiming they colluded with Texas-based rental pricing corporation RealPage to keep rent prices artificially high in our nation’s capitol. From the ProPublica report on RealPage from last year, you may remember that its flacks said, out loud, that rental agents had “too much empathy” which would make you spritz your coffee all over your keyboard if you had that kind of sense of humor. Apparently, though, this lawsuit has testimony from a worker at one of the landlord corporations named in the suit, that “of course” they colluded to raise prices – “it’s the entire reason landlords used the software,” he said. So, it could be a winner – unless they get a judge who subscribes to the numerous stupid arguments defending monopolies.

Ha ha ha independent Presidential candidate/anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says that under him our National Institutes for Health would be taking “a break” – “for about eight years,” and hey, dream big there, buddy! – from studying infectious diseases. Luckily for us, he’ll never be President, and the anti-vax crowd will never be that big. But I’d lay money that Donald Trump, who needs every vote he can get, will soon say this “break” was his idea all along.

When I hear that the Biden Administration wants to be able to approve arms sales to Israel without Congressional notification, I can only ask why such sales would ever need such secrecy. They’re acting like the American public are wholly behind Israel in their current war with Palestine, but of course we’re not, even given Hamas’s evil October 7 attack. In any case, at least one observer calls the attempt “an insult to Congressional oversight prerogatives,” which is a fancy way of saying they’re trying to keep us from knowing what they’re doing, which surely never predisposes us kindly toward our government.

“Republicans May Have Found a Winning Election Strategy,” Newsweek announces, but the key word in that formulation is “may,” because the “winning” strategy turns out to be getting Republican voters to vote early – a strategy they’ve had trouble embracing after Donald Trump told them not to – and though I suppose it could make a difference, early Republican votes still account for only around 40 percent of the votes (versus, say, 51%) in seven swingy Virginia state legislative races, and you’re supposed to win elections by getting more total votes, not just more early votes. Anyway, I’m glad to see Republican voters giving up their irrational fear of early voting; maybe they’ll be better able to give up some of their other irrational fears.

Finally, some good news: a New York jury convicts the unfortunately-named Sam Bankman-Fried of defrauding investors and customers of some $10 billion, and since Mr. Bankman-Fried (no, I won’t refer to him by his initials, he’s not FDR or LBJ or even OBJ) was a “star” in the world of bitcoin, this verdict should make people realize that bitcoin isn’t so hard to understand that we just can’t prosecute fraud cases relating to it. Why, it’s almost like bitcoin votaries want you to think it’s hard to understand! And, of course, they’re not new, either – folks have been mystifying how economies work since time immemorial. And I shudder to think what’s become of their immortal souls.

Action: concerning endless war, our earned benefits, and Congressional corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to call for a ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict, reject any Social Security/Medicare/SNAP benefit-cutting commission, and enact a stock-trading ban for members of Congress. 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 call for a ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Israeli politicians talked big about revenge at the beginning, but we’re a few weeks in now and that big ground campaign hasn’t materialized, though they’ve kept on pounding Gaza with air strikes, which are of course nowhere near as “surgical” as they tell you; why, it’s almost like the whole idea is to kill as many Palestinians as possible without actually damaging Hamas very much! After all, Israelis might not keep Mr. Netanyahu around without an enemy to hate. If that analysis strikes you as a bit Machiavellian, just ask American right-wingers how well actually achieving the goal of overturning Roe v. Wade has worked out for them. A ceasefire wouldn’t just be good for the citizens of Gaza, it’d be bad for a Netanyahu’s government; if you made me pick I’d pick the former, but I sure wouldn’t complain about getting both.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the creation of a commission designed to cut Social Security, Medicare, or food stamp benefits. Because that’s all the “fiscal responsibility” this super hard-right Congress can stomach! Always they want to cut the benefits that don’t actually break budgets but do actually help good Americans, but never do they want to cut defense spending or corporate welfare, and of course raising taxes on the rich and on corporations is verboten among our political “leaders.” You should be aware that some of our erstwhile “centrists,” like Kyrsten Sinema and Mitt Romney, also approve of the notion of cutting our earned benefits “behind closed doors.” But the whole point of America is not to let politicians do anything behind closed doors to begin with, and that’s why we fight.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to prohibit members of Congress from owning stock in any corporation at any time. Don’t like it? Then don’t be a Congressperson! Go be a regular rich person or whatever! Public service means something! Or, at least, it should, and it should also mean something that roughly three out of every four voters, meaning roughly 75%, think we shouldn’t allow Congressfolk to trade in stocks, since they’ll almost certainly have to vote on a matter affecting the corporations they invest in sooner or later. Newt Gingrich once said that if 70% of the American people want something, they should get it. What Rube Goldbergian contraption of an argument would he deploy to get out of that? No doubt it would provoke this response: “so, if 70% of the American people want something, they should get it, except for banning Congressfolk from trading stock?”

Readings for October 24, 2023.

Why is America “out of ammunition,” according to Matt Stoller? Let’s cut to the chase: it’s monopolies, which our Department of Defense does next-to-nothing to fight, or even discourage. Despite the wars going on in Israel and Ukraine, “today government cash goes increasingly to stock buybacks rather than actual armaments,” which proves, once again, that banksters ruin everything. How bad is the problem? “(T)here are just two people in the Department of Defense who look at mergers in the defense base,” Mr. Stoller writes. “You couldn’t staff the morning shift of a small coffee shop with that, and yet two people are supposed to look at the estimated four hundred mergers plus going on every year among defense contractors and subcontractors.” But hey, it’s not like we won World War II by breaking Alcoa’s aluminum monopoly when they couldn’t produce enough fighter planes. Oh, wait: that is actually a big reason we won World War II.

Wondering how Tha Bush Mobb felt about the current Israel/Palestine war? Inae Oh at Mother Jones reveals that, surprise, surprise, they favor genocide against Palestinians – but now Tha Bush Mobb’s rank-and-file are more prone to turn on their Personal Lord and Savior! After George W. Bush opined that Israel shouldn’t be “consumed by rage” as it obliterates Gaza, his former spokeshack Ari Fleischer – remember when we thought they couldn’t get any worse than Ari Fleischer? What innocence we had! – goes on about how nobody said Americans shouldn’t be “consumed by rage” after 9.11, though I think many Americans have learned a lesson or two about that after all these years. I was about to say Mr. Fleischer forgot that all of Mr. Bush’s “buts” are as meaningless as they ever were, but more likely he was just obeying the fundamental Republican urge of this era: to create drama.

Action: concerning genocide, government shutdowns, and school lunch debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to prevent genocide against Palestinians, stop this interminable government shutdown drama, and cancel school lunch debt. 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.

Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to do what they can to stop Israel from committing genocide against Palestinians. Don’t let folks interpret this call as anti-Semitic, or even as dismissive of Israeli losses – I mourn all the dead; every life taken by terrorism represents one fewer chance at a better world. But if we can’t oppose genocide, then what good are we, really? And justifying the genocide of Palestinians by pointing to Hamas’s evil is, logically, rather like justifying a genocide of Americans by pointing to our right-wing domestic terrorists. Indeed, Mr. Putin used similar reasoning to attack Ukraine. Want a good rule for living? Don’t be like Vladimir Putin.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk not to let our government shut down, again. You know what government shutdowns mean – parks close, checks don’t go out, no food stamps for folks who need it, air traffic controllers work for nothing if we’re very lucky – and since our government belongs to us and exists only to do our will, then politicians are defying our will if they let it shut down without funding it properly. I do not give one rat’s hind quarter if Republicans still haven’t elected a House Speaker by then, because work is work, and duty is duty. These preening, drama-loving "representatives" make almost three times what I make, but I earn every cent, unlike them.

Finally, RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act, which would (as its title suggests) cancel the $260-plus million in school lunch debt that somehow encumbers our nation’s children in the richest country on Earth. Seriously, we can’t call ourselves a civilized society if we won’t feed kids because they can’t afford school lunches which our taxes should already pay for. I’m happy to report that in five American states taxes do now make school lunches free for our children, but can we at least alleviate the suffering of those who don’t have that yet? And can we at least stop shaming our kids for something that’s not their fault at all? We don't use shame just because we can, after all.

Around the table: don't let evil get you down, part 875.

Here’s an incredible story: the mainstream Israeli media is raking Binyamin Netanyahu over the coals for failing to anticipate the biggest terrorist attack on Israel Hamas had ever managed, and I say good for them, because, really, you shouldn’t get to say only I can protect you and then utterly fail to do that. Imagine if American media outlets had castigated George W. Bush for failing to anticipate 9.11 in advance; even 22 years later they’re too scared to do that! And now they’re also afraid to do that to Mr. Netanyahu, and he’s not even an American politician.

In a related note, Maariv poll shows Israeli public support for the Netanyahu axis absolutely cratering, and though voters’ apparent preference for the Benny Gantz axis ain’t much better, this finding is the precise opposite of what most of us who lived under otherwise improbable sky-high George W. Bush approval ratings would expect, and which only reinforces my conviction that Donald Trump threw Mr. Netanyahu under the bus the other day because he knows as well as I do that Mr. Netanyahu’s done. But it also reinforces my general optimism about the human race – genocide, it turns out, is not popular.

When I hear that our IRS has audited Microsoft to the tune of almost $30 billion, I feel compelled to say that this is why we passed the Inflation Reduction Act, for though this particular audit is a decade in the making, it began before Republicans in Congress started slashing our IRS’s budget due to bogus charges of bias. When you see how Microsoft did it – channeling profits through a Mexico warehouse it owned that merely burned software onto CDs – you probably won’t even be impressed with their chutzpah. Imagine being the guy who defends that sort of thing!

When confronted with the horror of the right wing’s “Project 2025” program – which would (if Mr. Trump wins the Presidency in 2024) replace virtually everyone in the Executive branch with Trumpholes so he doesn’t have to face any accountability for what he’s done anymore – I realize that one way to put their program is that they would defund the police. I mean the police who go after corrupt politicians, but I wouldn’t even put that descriptor in an ad; I’d just say defund the police over and over again, because these haters don’t deserve the gift of nuance.

Did late night “sensation” Greg Gutfeld really say we shouldn’t have elections anymore because the fact that January 6 protestors got longer sentences than Philadelphia looters “proves” that “elections don’t work”? Why, yes, he did. Pssst: they got longer sentences because trying to nullify the will of the American people with violence is actually a worse crime than looting. So let me guess how he deals with the backlash: I was just joking. HA HA HA NO MORE VOTING HA HA HA! Seriously, why can’t right-wingers STFU about the Philly looters? They sound like people who don’t have a leg to stand on. Worse, they sound like people who know they don't have a leg to stand on, and don't have the guts to admit it.

Finally, Amanda Marcotte reviews the trouble Republicans are having finding a new Speaker of the House after deposing the last one for whatever reason. I heartily approve of the layups she takes here – “So much for fascist order and discipline,” “Calling this a ‘clown show’...is unfair to the skill and training of actual clowns,” “Aren't far-right movements supposed to make the trains run on time?” – but hang on, also, for more trenchant observations like “authoritarian movements valorize assholes, mistaking cruelty for strength and showboating for passion.” By the end we will be reminded that the only thing fascists excel at is murder.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, Social Security and Medicare, and food labeling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop enabling Israel’s occupation of Palestine, reject any Social Security/Medicare-cutting commission, and pass the Food Date Labeling 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 Jewish Voice for Peace and Roots Action help you tell your Congressfolk to stop enabling the Israeli occupation of Palestine. No use saying Hamas started it, and not just because it would take forever to unwind the you-started-it thread – it all comes back to one nation having the power to exterminate another, which Israel can do to Palestine mainly because of our support. No less an authority than Amnesty International has declared Israel an “apartheid regime,” and it’s beyond sad to hear Israel’s Defense Minister call Palestinians “human animals” as if no one had ever called Jews that. We don’t want extermination on our conscience, I trust.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a “closed door” commission so Congress can cut Social Security and Medicare benefits without oversight by the American people. That’s their whole argument: the cuts “need” to be made, so we have to give Congress more power to do it. But it’s horseshit – all we need do is start taxing income over $160,200 into the system, and we won’t need any “commissions” to make “hard decisions” about our earned benefits. No, they’re not “entitlements”! Our government didn’t give them to us out of the goodness of their hearts; we fought for them, and we’ll keep fighting for them, because you have to fight for the future every day in this life.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Food Date Labeling Act, which would streamline our food labeling system so that we throw away perfectly good food a lot less than we do now. Say goodbye to “sell by,” “freshest on,” and “expires on,” and say hello to “best if used by” and “use by,” the former of which tells you when food starts to deteriorate and the latter of which tells you how long you can eat that food. A staggering 40% of the food we make in America ultimately goes to waste, which in turn means we waste a lot of water and energy, too, not to mention there are starving kids right here in America; the Food Date Labeling Act will help us, as they say, waste not and want not.

Action: concerning pollution, apartheid, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell our EPA to limit carbon dioxide pollution from existing power plants, tell President Biden to withhold military assistance from Israel until it stops oppressing Palestine, and tell our BLM to stop using cyanide bombs on animals. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon dioxide pollution standards possible. Our EPA has proposed limiting CO2 pollution from existing plants for the first time – Obama-era limits only addressed new plants, you may recall – and that is, as a famous philosopher once said, a BFD. Of course the big polluting corporations will flood our EPA with comments about KILLINGZ TEH JOBZ and STRANGLINGZ TEH INNOVASHUNZ!!!!, so we’ve got to remind our EPA that fighting pollution reduces health care costs for everyone, creates jobs for folks who implement the new standards, and helps corporations innovate their processes. I think that does it.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to withhold military/security funding to Israel until it dismantles its apartheid system in Palestine. Hey, Jimmy Carter said it almost 20 years ago! And he actually brokered a peace deal between Israel and Egypt back in the day, so he might know what he’s talking about. You don’t have to believe Mr. Carter, of course – you need only note that Israeli forces are bombing a refugee camp in the West Bank as we speak. Who bombs a refugee camp? Two kinds of people: one, someone actually trying to create terrorists, and two, someone whose sense of self-preservation has gone so wrong they commit atrocities. If Israel is the latter, we can work with that.

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to ban the use of cyanide bombs in animal control. Yes, we really do that, and it’s as awful as it sounds: the notorious M-44 cyanide bomb lures coyotes and foxes in with a sweet aroma and then shoots out a deadly poison leading to a long and painful death. And of course it’s not even as discriminating as all that, for it also lures in other animals and gives them that same painful death sentence. If a coyote attacked your dog or your child, you still wouldn’t be a civilized person if you wished for such an execution. Civilization demands more of us than that, even in our most inconsolable pain.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, internet freedom, and factory farms.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Palestinian Children & Families Act, reject the STOP CSAM and EARN IT Acts, and pass the Farm System 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.

Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Palestinian Children & Families Act, which would prevent our government from giving aid to Israel if Israel then uses it to detain and torture Palestinians, demolish their homes, or annex their land illegally. This really isn’t so much to ask, and does anyone really want to be the person who says if they need the money to hurt people, we should give it to them? You know, versus let’s make sure our taxpayer money doesn’t do evil? Because Israel is doing evil in Palestine, and if we don't want to remember them as folks who, having had evil done to them, did evil to others, we should pass this bill.

Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject both the STOP CSAM and EARN IT Acts, which aim to fight child sex trafficking, but which will more likely prompt ISPs to censor all sexual material. How? ISPs voluntarily make 99% of all reports of child sexual exploitation at present, but passing these bills would require them to get warrants to search their own data (since they’d be acting on our government’s behalf), meaning they’ll simply censor any sexual content on their servers so they don’t have to report at all. More censorship and less law enforcement – what a terrible idea! But if we speak out, we can stop it.

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, which would enact a moratorium on new (or expanded) factory farm construction and phase out factory farms completely by 2040. That’s 17 years, which is plenty of time for a big corporation with lots of money to wind their factory farms down! As we discussed yesterday, factory farms pollute our water and crush small farmers with impunity, but those aren’t the only two reasons to oppose them – by cramming too many animals into too small a space and pumping them full of antibiotics, they also help create superbugs. So we’ve got to pass this bill, no matter how much big ag whines about it.

Around the table: featuring foolish right-wingers and wise citizens.

Did a Florida school board really remove a movie about the first six-year-old girl to integrate into a previously all-white school because of one complaint from one parent who has admitted that she hasn’t seen the whole film? Yes, they did. Right-wingers have spent the last couple of decades claiming that liberals are weak, but only right-wingers are so frail they can’t bear to hear that racism exists. Get these people out of your life while you still can. If they can’t handle the most obvious truths about our nation’s history, why would they be there for you when you need them?

From the “Good News About Abortion From Red States” file: a Teton County, Wyoming judge has blocked that state’s abortion ban, ruling that a state constitutional amendment cooked up by right-wingers in 2012 to harness hysteria over the Affordable Care Act actually prevents the state from banning abortion. That amendment declares that Wyoming citizens have “the right to make their own health care decisions,” and though Wyoming legislators claim that abortion isn’t health care, you can guess how persuasive that is. You think right-wingers will start putting the brakes on their drama now that it’s bit them in the ass? I kid, of course – they have nothing to offer the electorate except drama.

When I hear that Republicans ought to get behind Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin because he’d be “a non-hostile alternative to Trump and a compelling centrist challenge to Biden,” I leap to say he’s not a centrist! Do centrists ban books, try to ban abortions, kill mask mandates, repeal protections for transgender kids, or put Andrew Wheeler in charge of regulating air and water? No, they do not. But this article is somehow even worse than its tagline – it acts like Mr. Youngkin should be proud of his ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth, rather than ashamed of it. And this is why people hate our "liberal" media – all they care about is the horserace.

In the wake of yet another school shooting, this one in Nashville, Tennessee, Rep. Tim Burchett (E-TN) says Congress is “not going to fix” the problem and adds that “I don’t see any real role that we could do other than mess things up.” Also, “as a Christian,” he thinks America needs a religious “revival,” one that electing ever more “religious” people to Congress somehow hasn’t achieved! If you took this flatugasm as an honestly-offered assessment, which I wouldn’t advise, you would still have to ask why anyone would want to be part of a body of legislators they profess to hate so much.

Finally, because the news can’t all be bad: Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has announced he’ll “pause” on his plan to kneecap Israel’s judiciary. The Netanyahu plan would reduce judicial review of the nation’s laws and give Parliament added power to overturn Supreme Court decisions, while also giving Mr. Netanyahu final say over judicial appointments, which I’m sure has absolutely nothing to do with his own pending corruption trial. This pause happened only after tens of thousands of good Israelis took to the streets in protest, the nation’s main union called a general strike, and soldiers threatened to avoid reporting for duty. They’ll all still need to work to make that pause permanent, but never let anyone tell you that speaking out doesn’t work.

Action: concerning mask mandates, Israel and Palestine, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Travel Mask Mandate Repeal Act, stop funding Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, and pass the FRESH START Through Bankruptcy Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Travel Mask Mandate Repeal Act. Tired of wearing masks on public transit? Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t – me, I still like not getting sick! – but this bill represents yet another Republican attempt to go after an ant in the kitchen with a sledgehammer and not only miss the ant but destroy the refrigerator, because it would repeal all mask mandates and ensure only Congress can enact new ones. These clowns are about to crash the economy over nothing, so I sure wouldn’t trust them to do the job our CDC obviously does better even if you’re not completely happy with it.

The American Friends Service Committee helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop funding Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – if nothing else, Israel has more than enough funding and arms to keep stoking the cycle of violence there without our help – and Progress America helps you tell President Biden to fight the Netanyahu agenda, which includes enabling far right-wing racists and hamstringing courts. Most Presidents, Democrat or Republican, make noise about standing up to Israel every once in a while, and none of them ever do. And now the fascists are poised to take control of Israel! There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. And we have to make our government learn it.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the FRESH START Through Bankruptcy Act, which would let folks discharge their student loan debt via bankruptcy after 10 years. Currently student loan debt is the only kind of debt that bankruptcy can’t help fix, which should help convince you that our bankruptcy system – “reformed” by Tha Bush Mobb in 2005 – is broken. Don’t let folks tell you this bill will induce “laziness” on the part of our youth – old folks have been calling young folks lazy since time immemorial! – because students can still get in trouble for not paying their loans during that decade they can’t declare bankruptcy.

Around the table: right-wingers pretending to be moderates and iconoclasts, part 763.

Politico’s new "contrarian" owner sent out an email to his fellow executives asking them to “pray” for Donald Trump’s re-election in late 2020 – then not only denied he sent it, but once confronted with evidence of the email’s existence said that yeah, he might have meant it “as an ironic, provocative statement.” Because if there’s one thing people love having explained to them, it’s irony! And are his politics “hard to pin down,” really? He loves the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich “reform” of 2017, he worries about “cancel culture” and “identity politics,” his response to anti-Semitic attacks is to fly an Israeli flag like there’s literally no other way to show solidarity with Jews – c’mon, I’m not a schmuck.

When I hear that folks experience “crisis fatigue” because of all the news they consume, I feel compelled to ask if we’re experiencing “crisis fatigue” as much as we’re experiencing sensationalism fatigue. I’m sure crisis fatigue is a real thing that real people suffer, but I don’t think the sheer volume of tragedy we read about is the only problem we face when trying to make sense of the world – right-wing news sources, in particular, love ramping up the drama. I’d also like to know if folks who read news experience less crisis fatigue than folks who watch the news.

President Biden endorses a bill in the California state legislature that would help farmworkers organize more easily for better pay and working conditions – a bill California Governor Newsom apparently intends to veto. You’d hate to think Joe Biden endorsed this bill (fairly persuasively, too) merely because he knows Gavin Newsom will veto it, but you can’t rule it out. The good news? It doesn’t matter: when the President endorses a good idea – and letting farmworkers unionize is a good idea, regardless of the cowards who’ll say it’ll “cause inflation” – it makes a difference.

Tamara Pearson at TruthOut charges the corporations building wind farms in Mexico with stealing, dividing, and destroying Indigenous land – in addition to using carbon credits to keep polluting and giving the clean energy they produce to Americans, rather than locals – and, yeah, I’d have to say this is the wrong way to fight climate change. I would also remind everyone (especially certain think tank morons who provide sound bites to the Wall Street Journal) that respecting the rights of Indigenous folks does not mean no one can fight climate change, ever. We need to stop listening to folks who hold such rigid dichotomies, not least because they’re not even being honest about it.

When I hear that Republicans are trying to soften their stances on abortion in the wake of our Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization being unpopular, all I can say is they are too fucking late. Does anyone think that the Democratic Party’s two-year effort to create hard-hat jobs will erase the common stereotype of them as out-of-touch latte-swilling liberals? No, they do not, so Republicans ain’t gonna reinvent themselves as abortion “moderates” in just two months. When you spend four decades screaming at the top of your lungs, you should expect folks’ opinions of you to harden.

Finally, ads about guns featuring Mehmet Oz skeet-shooting sure are funny – go skeet-shooting, and get ready for revolution against the liberal elites! – but Mr. Oz’s apparent endorsement of second-cousin marriage from 2014 should put a couple more nails in the coffin of his Senate campaign. I sure hope John Fetterman – eager to bash Mr. Oz for living in New Jersey or pretending to shop for groceries – bashes him hard for this, because no sane person thinks it’s OK to marry your second or third cousin, even if your resulting children will be much less likely to have hemophilia.

Action: concerning discrimination, political spam, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell PayPal to allow Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to use their service, tell Google to scrap its plan to allow political campaigns to fill our email inboxes with junk mail, and tell your USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell PayPal to stop discriminating against Palestinians in Israeli-occupied areas. PayPal operates in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank, but only serves Israelis there, which insures that Palestinian small businesses in the occupied areas can hardly operate. I guess PayPal thinks they’re “fighting terrorism,” but so much of the “war on terror” seems to harm regular folks rather than terrorists; why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea! And we do tend to think of Those Other People as “terrorists,” while blinding ourselves to the evil we do; I think we should avoid doing that here.

Both Win Without War and Civic Shout help you tell Google to scrap its plan to fill our email inboxes with political spam. Our FEC told Google they can do that, so now we have to tell Google how hoppin’ mad that’ll make us if they do that. If you’re on the fence about this, consider that this all started when Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida claimed that Google was automatically sending his fundraising emails to customers’ spam boxes because he's a Republican waaaaaaah – when the whole thing was actually his fault! I hope Val Demings runs a hundred ads saying Marco Rubio filled your email inboxes with spam. You know how good he is on his heels.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. Even the reconfigured Board seems to like him, but that only means we tell them again and again and again until they do our will like they’re supposed to. I may not have mentioned enough lately that all of Mr. DeJoy’s plans to slash services, raise prices, and fire workers – for what else does a CEO know how to do except make things worse? – will result in more life-saving medications not getting to Americans who need it, since our USPS delivers most mail-order medications in America. That’s intolerable, and it’s why Mr. DeJoy has to go.

Action: concerning abortion, equality, ethics, power, health, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to codify abortion rights protections into our laws, pass the Equality Act, ensure Supreme Court Justices adhere to ethics standards, pass the Palestinian Children and Families Act and the PASTEUR Act, and confirm Alvaro Bedoya to our FTC. 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.

Avaaz helps you tell Congress to codify abortion rights protections into law. The easiest way for Congress to do that, in theory, would be for our Senate to pass the already House-passed H.R. 3755, the Women's Health Protection Act, but they've already refused to do that. Sen. Schumer says he'll bring it up for a vote again, so that (if nothing else!) everyone will see how their Senators voted, which could be a big deal on Election Day 2022, though I can't say for sure. One thing I can say for sure: it won't end here! If the leaked ruling overturning Roe v. Wade turns out to be the actual ruling, it will give our Court a pretext for going after gay marriage, birth control, and anti-sodomy laws, too. We'll have a very busy time fighting for what we already had, and we'll have to keep fighting for them. Which we'll do, because duty is duty.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act, which would protect gay, transgender, and others from discrimination. Because right-wing state legislatures have been attacking these folks just as surely as they've attacked voting rights and abortion rights the last year and a half! And, as I've said, it'll soon be open season on rulings like Obergefell Griswold, and Lawrence, so we've got to codify protections against discrimination into our laws. Gay and transgender folks don't deserve to be fired, frozen out of apartments and homes and loans, or hounded out of public restrooms merely because they are who they are, so let's stop politicians from enabling all those evil things. And quickly.

In a related note, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure our Supreme Court Justices follow the Federal Judge Code of Conduct. Once there was a time we could convince ourselves that it'd be somehow uncivil to make the highest Court in the land adhere to the same standards as all other federal courts, but no more. And I'm not the only person who thinks so! Polling has told us for years that more and more Americans look at our Supreme Court as a political body, with its own policy aims; Justice Alito's leaked draft sure hasn't helped that look! Neither has Justice Thomas's wife's actions in support of the January 6 coup, or Justice Thomas's alleged poobahs with Gov. DeSantis; it ain't just about Justice Thomas, though. All judges must bow to civilization.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2590, the Palestinian Children and Families Act, which would start to extract some accountability from Israel in exchange for American aid. The government of Israel continues to oppress the Palestinian people -- lately in the form of separating families and detaining Palestinian children in prisons where they're more likely to get COVID -- and yet we continue to give them military aid, apparently out of a belief that "support" means lockstep agreement with every policy. Support doesn't mean that, and neither does friendship. And Israel is the far more powerful actor here! Being the far more powerful actor means you must not use your power to oppress others, even if that oppression looks like "security." It never is.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Up-surging Resistance (or PASTEUR) Act, which would help fund the antibiotics of the future. And we're gonna need them! We presently use seven out of every 10 antibiotics not on sick people or sick animals, but on nominally healthy feed animals, and that means more superbugs and more of a possibility that we'll bring back the days when the next cut on your hand could kill you. All so big ag executives could make more money! (They'll say it was so we could have cheaper meat, but is that really a lot better if you can't survive a cut on your hand?) I'd spend directly on making antibiotics, rather than grant money to corporations to do it, but we can fix that later. We need action on this matter now.

Finally, today's as good a day as any to a) call Senate Majority Leader Schumer (here's his contact info) and tell him to schedule a vote on President Biden's nomination of Alvaro Bedoya to our Federal Trade Commission, and b) call your 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) and tell them to confirm Mr. Bedoya. Mr. Bedoya's opposition to government spying and expertise in digital privacy issues would be enormous assets to our FTC, plus he'd provide a likely third vote in favor of more vigorous antitrust prosecutions; perhaps for this last reason he couldn't get through the Commerce Committee (which deadlocked on his nomination twice), and required a discharge petition to get his nomination considered by our full Senate. But now they must act. We deserve no less.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, Amazon rainforest oil, heavy metals in foods, airline refunds, and fairer pay for flight attendants.

Long story short: tell Israel to end its apartheid against Palestine, tell California to stop importing oil from the Amazon rainforest, tell our FDA to vigorously limit heavy metals in foods, tell our DOT to force airlines to give refunds for cancelled flights, and tell airline corporations to pay flight attendants fairly for all the work they do. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to end his nation's apartheid against Palestine. I hate to use that word, but for close to 50 years the word has had a meaning in international law; per the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid refers to certain crimes "committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime." That's the Israel/Palestine relationship in a nutshell, and if you're only thinking of the bad things Palestinians do, recall that Israel holds all the power in this relationship. You have heard, perhaps, that Mr. Bennett would be even less sympathetic to this call than his predecessor. Duty calls nonetheless.

Stand.Earth helps you tell California to stop getting oil imports from the Amazon. Now, you can think of a very good reason to stop buying Amazon oil right off the top of your head -- because the Amazon rain forest is the best carbon emissions sink we have on Earth, and what do you think oil drilling will do to all of that? But if you're a regular reader of this blog, you know there's another damn good reason to boycott Amazon oil: because that irredeemable asshole President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil wants to completely destroy the Amazon (and the numerous indigenous folks who live there) by turning it into money he and his cronies will never live long enough to spend. You certainly wouldn't want to enable him! So save the planet, certainly, but also poke Mr. Bolsonaro in the eye. He deserves no better.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to set vigorous limits on heavy metals in food. Consumer Reports has lately found high levels of heavy metals such as lead and arsenic in almost one-third of popular herbs and spices, and if you're like me, you put that stuff in your food without even thinking about it! And this is like a lot of things: do it once and you'll probably get away with it, but do it many times and you'll have serious health issues. And so will your children -- they're even worse at just "getting the lead out" of their bodies than we adults are. Our FDA doesn't actually plan to consider this question until 2024. I don't need to tell you what else might happen in 2024 that ensures it never gets done. So let's prod them into doing the right thing now.

US PIRG helps you tell our Department of Transportation (or DOT) to force big airline corporations to give cash refunds for cancelled trips. Airlines have cancelled at least 20,000 flights just since Christmas Eve -- it wasn't that long ago! -- and I don't care whether that was because all of their workers had the omicron variant or not; if you can't provide a service you promised to make, you need to make it right, particularly when you're sitting on a mountain of cash with which you can make it right. It's a shame we even need to tell our Department of Transportation to do this! Big airline corporations should care enough about you to do it on their own! Of course, they're just another sector of our economy that thinks it's so indispensable it can do what it wants. But they ain't bigger than us.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Change.org helps you tell big airline corporations to pay flight attendants for the time they spend helping folks board the plane. It wasn't that long ago I was on a plane, so I remember the flight attendants being right there when I boarded, and to hear they make as little as $2 an hour for that even though they're supposed to be there was more than a little sickening. People think flight attendants don't do anything if they're not handing out peanuts and booze, but a lot of work goes on that either folks don't see or folks take for granted. I don't even take saying hello to me as I board a plane for granted; I don't know if I could greet a hundred people in a row nicely. If we are in that era where service is the main things folks have to sell, then folks ought to at least be well-paid for it.

Around the table: featuring more garden-variety Congressional corruption.

Surprise, surprise, Business Insider finds nearly 50 Congressfolk have violated the STOCK Act -- law and order, people! -- while almost 75 held stocks in the three big COVID vaccine-manufacturing corporations in 2020, over a dozen have invested in big defense contracting corporations, and another dozen or so Democrats who pride themselves on their greenness have invested in big fossil fuel corporations. In order to influence these corporations' decision-making toward the good? I kid, of course -- you and I might more credibly make that claim than the people we charge with policing these corporations. Searchable database coming Friday, apparently.

From Mike Ludwig at TruthOut we learn that the third-biggest source of methane emissions in America (after fossil fuel and agricultural operations) is the American landfill, and not even our EPA can tell us how much methane our landfills belch forth. Which is to say, their way of measuring landfill emissions is two decades old and doesn't actually measure emissions at the source. The good news? Our laws mandate that our EPA review its emissions-measuring model (and update it as need be) every three years, but guess which American President didn't bother complying with the law? That means a forthcoming lawsuit will likely force our EPA's hand here. Also too, the Biden Administration has committed to fighting environmental racism, and most landfills are guess where? Near Black and Brown neighborhoods, of course. You probably didn't really need to guess.

The New York Times finds that some of the worst of the internet lies can be found in politicians' fund-raising emails, but I have to say I was taken aback by the news that Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) sent out a fundraising email saying the Build Back Better Act has Medicare-for-All in it. Maybe right-wing media have trained some of his constituents well enough to have a stroke when they read the words "Medicare for All," but, ah, is he aware how broadly popular Medicare-for-All is with conservatives and liberals? All I'm saying it that particular untruth might have backfired on him, which, sadly, makes it the exception to the rule. (As an aside: if Republicans are going to fundraise off the lie that our Justice Department wants to "label parents terrorists," when are Democrats going to fundraise off the actual death threats spewed forth by some of these parents?)

Ho hum, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) approves of federal disaster aid for Kentucky after tornadoes devastated the state, after a decade of opposing federal disaster relief for other states. I was about to say "so he'll respond by saying he always opposed deficit disaster relief those other times and not the principle of federal disaster relief," but his spokeshack's statement to Newsweek didn't even try that, instead saying leave us alone, we're suffering and grieving today. And, you know, I'm willing to discuss taking the money from somewhere else! Somehow I think Mr. Paul would oppose taking it from corporate welfare tax breaks, though.

The headline reads "Trump Says Netanyahu 'Never Wanted Peace' With the Palestinians," but the article (based on an interview with Mr. Trump) actually goes rather deeper than that: Mr. Trump apparently liked both Mahmoud Abbas and Benny Gantz, and really, really didn't like Mr. Netanyahu's attempts to annex even more of Palestine in early 2020, though if you were tempted to call no-shit-Sherlock on his claim that Mr. Netanyahu was just "tap(ping) us along," I wouldn't blame you. And though my initial reaction to the headline was "I think he's right!", my next reaction was "then why did you enable him?" History may yet record that Mr. Trump was little-if-any worse than the last five or so U.S. Presidents on Israel/Palestine policy, though that's a hell of a thing to bring to the Pearly Gates.

Finally, a right-wing pollster puts out a poll finding that two-thirds of West Virginians oppose the Build Back Better act, but I doubt Joe Manchin has been "listening" to that finding so much as rejoicing that all his hard work linking the Build Back Better Act to inflation has finally paid off! Just a few months ago 70% of West Virginians approved of the Build Back Better Act; I'd still trust that finding more than this one, since that one wasn't created by two months of media hysteria over inflation (and flew in the face of general negative or non-coverage from our "liberal" media). Also, too, most West Virginians like paid family medical leave; I wonder how they feel about the fact that their senior Senator killed it.

Action: concerning communication, occupation, saving our Post Office, robotexts, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's FCC nominations, tell Amazon and Google to stop fueling the Israeli occupation of Palestine, tell President Biden to fire Louis DeJoy already, tell our government to stop robotexts as well as robocalls, and tell our EPA to regulate "chemical recycling" as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's two FCC Commissioner nominees. They're both good -- like a surprising number of Mr. Biden's first-term nominees! -- and at the FCC they'll have their work cut out for them. Without five Commissioners, we won't be able to reinstate net neutrality, and thus our FCC won't be able to force internet service providing corporations to, well, provide service during times of trouble. Like, you know, a pandemic, when literally everyone needs internet service! Or a wildfire -- you recall how Verizon throttled California firefighters' attempts to communicate with each other in 2018? We have no reason to put up with big telecom corporations' attempts to abuse us, but we're on our own fighting it if our government doesn't punish them when they do wrong.

No Tech for Apartheid helps you tell Amazon and Google to stop helping Israel occupy Palestine. They're both invested in Project Nimbus, as it happens, which provides cloud computing services to the Israeli military -- which makes them much, much better at occupying Palestine and oppressing Palestinians. But over a thousand Google and Amazon workers have demanded that their bosses back out of this project, which makes them courageous -- I mean, folks get fired for less in this "free" market system! But though this kind of technology is spreading, we can still win this battle. We got Microsoft to stop funding facial recognition technology in Israel last year, and this year we got Amazon to stop selling facial recognition technology (at least for now). So it's time to bust out The Big Stick of Bad PR. They're afraid of it because it works.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire Postmaster General DeJoy -- or, more precisely, fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom so he can get another USPS Board of Governors member in there who will fire Mr. DeJoy. Mr. DeJoy, you recall, tried to deliver the 2020 election to Donald Trump by slowing down services knowing full well our Postal Service would be doing more ballot-delivering than ever before; he also raised prices and cut services, and I'm old enough to remember when that kind of thing would get you fired in the private sector. Also, reports of his corruption have multiplied in recent months. Remember when he told Congress "get used to me"? That sassiness works a lot better from folks who don't try to shit all over everything. Dude's got to go.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our government to fight robotexts. Our Supreme Court, in an otherwise little-noticed decision earlier this year, dramatically narrowed the reach of the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act, saying that law only prevents a certain kind of robo-dialing that few robodialers actually use anymore, blasting open a loophole that now allows robodialers to spam you with texts, and guess what didn't exist in 1991? Our Supreme Court apparently loves to prove that a literal mind can be quite a curse, and often to the rest of us. You know what's on our side, though? People absolutely hate unwanted phone calls, so why would folks like unwanted texts more? Of course, first we have to make an absolute stink about it; otherwise our government will just figure everything's alright. Silence is assent, as Sir Thomas More would say.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to regulate "chemical recycling" in the most vigorous manner possible. And if that means "by outlawing it," who am I to complain? Proponents say "chemical recycling" (or melting down plastic into fuel) will help us avoid the worst effects of climate change, but they say the same thing about nuclear power, too, and it's about as cogent an argument. They want to melt down plastic, which already pollutes, and then use it as fuel which will also pollute? This isn't a solution to the pollution problem; it's a solution to the "some CEO doesn't have enough money to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home" problem. Which isn't a real problem! The real problem is the climate change "solution" that actually causes more climate change, and that's what "chemical recycling" is. So let's fight that.

Action: concerning health care, working families, slaughterhouse emissions, FDA regulation, Israeli occupation, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell big pharma CEOs to stop putting their own needs ahead of the world's needs, tell Hello Fresh you support its workers' unionization efforts, tell our EPA to issue strong slaughterhouse emissions standards, tell President Biden not to appoint a big pharma CEO and lobbyist to head up our FDA, tell Amazon and Google to end their support for Israel's occupation of Palestine, and tell AT&T to cut all ties with One America News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell big pharma CEOs to put people, not their own profits, first, and ensure everyone has access to COVID vaccines. No sense arguing that's not their job or they're only accountable to their shareholders, not when COVID could come back to bite us again and again and again, and overwhelm hospitals again and again and again, because vaccines aren't available in some part of the world. Oh, and putting profits above everyone and everything? Not civilized behavior. Seriously, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. The First Epistle to Timothy instructs us that "the love of money is the root of all evil." Big pharma CEOs putting their own profits above the health of the planet? That certainly qualifies as "the love of money."

Public Citizen helps you tell HelloFresh you support their workers' attempts to unionize and collectively bargain for better pay and better working conditions. HelloFresh has made over $2 billion in profits in the burgeoning meal kit business, but their workers put up with COVID outbreaks in cramped working areas, have their bathroom breaks times, can't hardly get a damn glass of water, and face anti-union propaganda at the workplace disrupting their work because of course they do. The PRO Act would clamp down on all of these things, but until our Senate deigns to pass it, we'll just have to get the Big Stick of Bad PR out for HelloFresh. They ain't been around so long they can just ignore it -- or us.

Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous slaughterhouse pollution regulations possible. Our EPA is mulling these rules as we speak, so if we speak out, we leave a paper trail that the courts can't ignore, if it comes to that. It should come to that less now that Joe Biden is President! Presidential elections do matter for some things, after all. Don't let anyone gaslight you about FOODZ PRICEZ GOINGZ THROUGHZ TEH ROOFZ!!!! if we demand that factory farms pollute less. No one will be sitting around a campfire in a hundred years saying yeah, sure, toxic farm pollution killed off all the fish and made our water undrinkable, but at least food was a little cheaper for a while!

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden not to appoint a big pharma CEO/lobbyist to run our Food and Drug Administration. We have just seen what happens when our FDA does the bidding of big pharma corporations, in their hasty approval of aducanumab for treating Alzheimer's disease, even though our FDA's own advisory board reviewed the scant evidence of its efficacy and recommended against approval; I would prefer not to have more of that. The particular executive/lobbyist on Mr. Biden's short list, Michelle McMurry-Heath, just so happens to oppose lowering drug prices. We've got enough of those people in our Senate; let's not have them in our FDA as well.

No Tech For Apartheid helps you tell Amazon and Google to pull out of Project Nimbus, which would provide cloud computing services for the Israeli government and military, and thus make them a vital part of occupying and oppressing Palestinians. Almost 800 workers at both corporations have already leveled this demand at their bosses, and their courage demands we join them. And remember: you don't have to unwind the entire history of the region until you figure out who committed the first injury before you decide what you do today. You need only remember that Israel is way, way more powerful than Palestine, and still treats every living Palestinian like a convicted terrorist. And all those nations that hate Israel sure ain't going out of their way to stop them.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut ties with the fascist news network One America News, which is still pounding the absurd notion that Donald Trump won an election he lost by seven million votes, and whose on-air "personalities" tell us that we who recognize that fact should all be executed for treason. Like any of them have the guts! If AT&T were to withdraw financial backing from OAN, OAN would probably flounder, but hey, that's the genius of capitalism, is it not? If OAN is so great, and the demand for its "news" so undeniable, they ought to be able to survive without a big corporate sugar daddy! And if not, then we wouldn't have to put up with their drama anymore.

UPDATE. Now President Biden is reportedly leaning toward former FDA Administrator Robert Califf as his choice; I remember that being a bad idea at the end of the Obama years, and I can't imagine it's suddenly become a better idea now. Public Citizen has this alert as well.

Action: concerning essential services, taxes, credit, divestment, and facial recognition software.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, tell Democrats to stop coddling corporate lobbyists and raise taxes on the rich and corporations already, tell Congress to ensure we can all get good credit reports, tell General Mills to divest from Israel, and tell Uber and Lyft to stop using facial recognition software on drivers and consumers. 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.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4979, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act, which would (as its title suggests) provide relief to good Americans behind on their water, electricity, and internet bills. If you read that and think when does it end? -- "it" being "government assistance during a pandemic" -- just remember that a) a lot of them didn't have jobs for a significant period during this pandemic and b) large corporations get to run up considerably larger water/electricity/internet bills without suffering any of the consequences. It can't be only the "little people" who suffer from bills piling up. Not in our America, at least. And yes, internet is an essential service, as evidenced by all the Zoom meetings at our jobs and all the Zoom classes our kids had to do for school this past year-plus.

Daily Kos helps you tell Congressional Democrats to stop listening only to the big corporate lobbyists trying to defend their unearned tax cuts and Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund the Build Back Better Act with higher taxes on the rich and on corporations. Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a "billionaire's income tax." Most of the Democrats have listened to us on these matters, but their majorities in our House and Senate are slim, so it only takes a few (cough Joe Manchin Kyrsten Sinema cough) to stomp their feet and say "no," regardless of what their actual constituents think. No, corporations, and corporate lobbies, are not constituents, not least because they're not people. Call me old-fashioned, but I think people should count more than things. (Oh, and I'm fully aware that the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" didn't get a vote in the House last night, and I have no opinion on that -- rather than get mired in the weeds of Democrat "strategy," we need to press them with our will.)

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure all Americans can get free, accessible, and secure credit reports. What's that, you say? You thought our laws already provided for free annual credit reports from each of the three major credit reporting bureaus? It does, but our laws do not prevent corporations from charging you for that information! Just to illustrate how confusing it all is, the only government-authorized website to get free credit reports is annualcreditreport.com; if a website has the word "free" in it, chances are you'll be forking over money for your "free" reports! Furthermore, some credit reporting corporations -- including two affiliated with two of the big three agencies -- may give you credit scores lenders won't actually use! It's a damn shame we have to use credit reports at all in a civilized society, so let's at least make sure they work for us.

Sum of Us helps you tell General Mills to pull out of Israel over its continued occupation and oppression of Palestine. Hey, divestment worked in South Africa, even though they said it wouldn't! I was one of those who said it wouldn't, that it would hurt the South Africans it intended to help, but actual South African activists put me right: it can't get any worse for us than not having any rights to begin with, they told me. And Palestinians are in the same boat today, as Israel takes their land, tears down their homes, and punishes anyone who speaks out. Sorry, folks, that's apartheid, even though they're doing it out of fear. What, fear should excuse evil? No, it should not. I should also point out that their fear is completely unjustified by the facts -- Palestine can't win a war with Israel, and look at all the other nations in the Middle East totally not coming to Palestine's aid.

Finally, Fight for the Future helps you tell Uber and Lyft to ban facial recognition software for drivers and users. Uber and Lyft have been partnering (Jesus Mary and Joseph "partnering" has got to be one of my least favorite words!) with a corporation called Alfi, which makes tablets for vehicles that scan your face and then show you ads based on what it finds. It even tries to tell how you're feeling to show you ads! You walk in with a "sad face," you might get anti-depressant ads! If you walk in with a scowl, do they show you an ad for Fox News or OANN? And once they've got your face, and all the data that could go with it, what will they do with that information? Anything they want, since very few laws even address biometric data. Maybe, just maybe, you don't want screens in your face guessing what you might buy all the time. It's not so damn much to ask. Hell, I remember when that was everyday life! So tell them no.

Action: concerning torture, immigration, Palestine, our Postal Service, and women's health.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to stop police torture of protestors at Line 3, tell the Biden Administration to stop deportation flights to Haiti, and tell Congress to pass the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, the Postal Service Reform Act, and the Women's Health Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Justice Department to stop police from torturing protestors at Line 3. Ever heard of "pain compliance"? Sounds a lot like "enhanced interrogation," doesn't it? "Pain compliance" describes the practice (not that you'd want to practice this) of inflicting searing pain on pressure points until the person you're inflicting the pain upon cries uncle. If Enbridge is resorting to torturing protestors, they must be having trouble getting everyone on board with their plan to transport tar sands oil over Midwestern water tables. And if Enbridge has to pay county cops to do it, well, maybe the Line 3 pipeline has become too toxic. So to speak.

Both Amnesty International and Moms Rising help you tell the Biden Administration to stop its deportations of Haitians. The recent news hook, of course, is the Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) officers nearly running down Haitian asylum-seekers on horseback, a sight President Biden condemned -- before resuming flights of said asylum-seekers back to Haiti. Hey, did something happen there a month ago? Oh, right, another earthquake. And has something been happening there for 200 years? Why, yes, Western nations including the United States have been treating Haiti like toilet paper, all for having the gall to win independence from France. All these nations were perfectly OK with forcing Haitians to actually pay reparations to former slave-owners. How's that sound, Larry Elder? How about we not be cruel bastards this one time? It'll make the next time easier.

Roots Action 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. It doesn't make a clever acronym, but it would prevent American taxpayer dollars (i.e., your money) from going toward actions that violate international law, such as detaining and maltreating Palestinian children, seizing and destroying Palestinian property (including homes), and annexation of Palestinian territory generally. You really don't have to trace back who-did-what-first in this matter; you only need realize that Israel is a lot more powerful than Palestine, and even worse, acts like they're besieged and beleaguered, which guarantees they'll do a lot worse to Palestine in the future. And that's not something you want to pay for.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Can you believe there are folks who have "lost faith" in our Post Office? Such folks are largely unaware that the reason our Post Office has funding issues is that our laws mandate that it pre-fund retiree benefits 85 years in advance, a mandate our laws ask of literally no other federal agency, and certainly of no corporation. That means cut services and cut jobs, almost as if Congress planned it that way back in 2006. Lift the mandate and it'll be like lifting a 300-pound weight off the Post Office's chest. Our Postal Service workers will breathe easier, certainly. We can have more of them, too! And postal banking! But first, let's cut the cancer out.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. Republicans won't vote for it (apparently not even the pro-choice ones like Susan Collins, what a good little drone she is!), because it'll actually get rid of all the heartbeat bills and the forced ultrasound bills and the six-week abortion bans and the forced bad medical advice bills that states have passed in order to make it hard for women to get abortions when they need them. Yes, women do need them, if pregnancy puts their life or health in danger, or if their fetus has no organs. And women should get them when they want them, too, lest the state force women into the role of breeders-and-nothing-else again.

Around the table: lies, damn lies, and Democrat establishment theories about winning elections.

They're all saying that Jake Ellzey's six-point win over Trump-endorsed Susan Wright in the U.S. House special in Texas's 6th demonstrates the "limits" of a Trump endorsement, but I say it demonstrates nothing of the kind. Both candidates are cut from the same pro-Trump cloth, and Mr. Trump's endorsement of Ms. Wright always seemed half-hearted. And this election was still All About Trump, as Mr. Ellzey proved by reaching out to the district's Democrats at the last minute. My advice? Jana Sanchez has repeatedly proven she can't win that district, so the establishment should get behind Shawn Lassiter in 2022. But establishment Democrats never learn -- you don't win tough races with the "electable"; you win with the fierce.

House Minority Leader/Speaker wannabe Kevin McCarthy says that "(t)he threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state." And once again, this is complete projection! Republicans want a "permanent pandemic state," as they've already shown us by a) trashing vaccines and b) not getting them when it would have made a difference, and Republicans can only win when they foment chaos and drama. Welcome to another exciting edition of "I Never Thought I'd Hate a Republican House Leader More Than That Last One."

Ho hum, our "liberal" media can't get enough of bashing ice cream corporation Ben & Jerry's for refusing to sell their wares on the West Bank. A lot of folks are very pro-boycotting when folks boycott something they hate, but when folks boycott things they like, they're suddenly all WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH FREEDUMZ!!!!!! Which is, naturally, what they say when folks boycott Ben & Jerry's. And, you know, boycotting actually has an honorable history; these idiots probably would have been tut-tutting the Montgomery bus boycott back in the day. And as we learned from Colin Kaepernick, some folks' attraction to non-violence seems very issue-specific. Now please excuse me while I go get some Peanut Butter Fudge Core.

I laughed out loud when I heard that some Missourians are actually wearing disguises when they go to the doctor to get their COVID vaccine! After all, I've got a reputation as an asshole to uphold! All I can say to folks wearing Groucho Marx glasses to their COVID appointments is that if you want to get the vaccine and your friends don't want you to get it, maybe you need new friends. And chances are somebody will want to be your friend! Not everyone is as fed up with Teh Stupid as I am, and plenty of people have more compassion than I do.

George P. Bush, after all that sucking up he did to Donald Trump, has failed to secure the coveted Trump endorsement in the Texas Attorney General race; the winner, such as he is, is incumbent Ken Paxton. One supposes there's only so much sucking up you can do to the Bigly Man before even he gets grossed out by it, as Josh Mandel will find out in Ohio. I'm a little surprised that he's puffed up Mr. Paxton, though, since Mr. Paxton failed to get the election overturned, and you know how well the Bigly Man takes failure. Possibly he finds Mr. Paxton, who's been under federal indictment on securities fraud charges almost since he's been in office, a kindred spirit.

Finally, what did we learn from the first day of the January 6 hearings? "What We Already Know," says William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut, "It Was a GOP Riot." Trigger warning: paragraphs six through 11 describe some of the Capitol police's testimony, which will, among other things, remind us that right-wingers' support of police is very, very issue-specific: they support them when they execute Black folks without even charging them with a crime, but not so much when they oppose Capitol rioters. And they accuse liberals of similar issue-specificity without evidence. For example, anyone who reads my writings on the issue and says "he wants to abolish the police" can't read worth a damn.

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 jobs, voting rights, net neutrality, the filibuster, arms sales to Israel, and vaccine waivers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Biden/Manchin capitulation on the American Jobs Plan, tell PA state legislators to reject another absurd election "audit," tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules, tell President Biden to support ending the Senate filibuster, tell our government to stop funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and tell President Biden to support COVID vaccine waivers at the WTO. 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.

In light of the Senate parliamentarian's ruling that Democrats can use reconciliation once more this year, not twice, and Joe Biden's utter capitulation to Republicans on corporate taxes, and Joe Manchin's announcement that he won't support a jobs bill done through reconciliation, and general Democratic "anxiety" about raising taxes, it's time, once again, to call your Congressfolk and make demands for a real jobs plan. These demands would include: a 55% corporate tax bracket on profits over $1 million, the creation of a public broadband network, the creation of public electricity utilities that run entirely on renewable energy, and every last lead pipe and tottering bridge and broken road in America fixed. Seriously, we must not be held hostage to "the best they could do." Democrats deserve to lose their majorities after this debacle, but I suppose there's time to change their minds, if we do it loudly enough. But we'd better step up, because we're not going to have a country anymore if we don't.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to reject any effort at a 2020 election "audit," particularly one spurred by Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-33). It's not enough to say "you want another stupid "audit" by people who can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground?" It's not even enough to say "You lost! Get over it! Accept the results!" It's not even enough to point out that Sen. Mastriano was there on January 6. No, these "audits" are part of an attempted coup by Donald Trump, who swears he'll be "reinstated" as President in or around August. So you can go ahead and tell your PA legislators they will be accessories to this attempted coup if they allow this "audit" to happen. Only weak people think Donald Trump won that election. And weak people shouldn't get all the damn say about every damn thing.

In the wake of the news that nearly four out of every five comments filed on our FCC's net neutrality repeal in 2017 were faked by big telecom corporations, Daily Kos helps you tell our FCC to reverse said repeal and reinstate the 2016 Open Internet Order that made net neutrality the law of the land. Net neutrality, as you know, forces internet service providing corporations to serve up all files with the same urgency, which means you, not some corporation, get to determine what your internet experience is like. We don't have a fifth FCC Commissioner yet, and that doesn't help us get net neutrality back, but if we establish our will now, our FCC will have a harder time defying it later.

Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to support ending the filibuster. Earlier he said he'd support making Senators work a lot harder for it, and that's far from worthless, but our Senators pooh-poohed that, since it involved doing actual work for your obstruction, so it's time for President Biden to put the squeeze on them. Maybe he thinks calling out Sens. Manchin and Sinema while commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre was squeeze enough -- and, again, that was no small thing -- but they didn't seem to get the message. And if they won't listen to him, we should make them pay the price of not listening to us.

Both Freedom Forward and Daily Kos help you tell your government to stop funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can get bogged down in all the who-started-it if you like, but you cannot deny these two things: 1) Israel has way, way, way more firepower than Palestine and with great firepower comes great responsibility, and 2) all those nations that supposedly want Israel "wiped off the map" or whatever ain't exactly rushing to Palestine's aid. We don't need to give Israel any more weapons; they seem to have plenty of ability to defend themselves - and do indefensible things to others. It's not for nothing that I hear, unprompted, from co-workers, that Israel is becoming what they most hate.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to follow through on his support for a World Trade Organization (or WTO)-sanctioned COVID-19 vaccine waiver, which (contrary to the absurd proclamations of big pharma corporations) would help more folks all over the world get the vaccines they need. Don't get complacent about the dropping infection and death numbers in the United States (which are still only a little lower than they were this time last year!), because the rest of the world needs help, too, and every day we prioritize intellectual property rights over human life, not only do people die, but the COVID virus gets a little more time to mutate into something that'll bite us in the ass again. Once again, the compassionate is also the pragmatic.

Around the table: the harder they come.

Good news, everyone! our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) has enacted a rule outlawing the inclined baby sleepers that have killed at least 50 babies. That we know of, that is! These sleepers defy American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations for baby sleepers (i.e., that babies should sleep on a firm, flat, stable surface without restraints or soft bedding), though I suppose if Donald Trump had gotten wind of it, and saw an advantage, he'd be doing to the AAP what he's trying to do to Dr. Fauci. Anyway, if you agitated against the proliferation of inclined sleepers, you deserve a big fat Buffalo chicken cheese steak, or whatever it is you give yourself after a job well done.

What's "The Secret Behind Amazon's Domination in Cloud Computing" per Politico? Amazon hires former government officials to show them the ropes, that's how, which (as we remember from healthcare.gov's bumpy rollout) has more to do with how you fill out forms than how good your product is. So, for one thing, that's not very bootstrappy of Amazon, is it? And, for another, maybe we could imagine a much better world of cloud computing except that monopolists like Amazon game the system and impose their will on the rest of us. Anyway, add this to the reasons we try to stop the revolving door between government and industry.

Ho hum, NYC police seemed far more eager to crack down on protestors than to crack down on looters, and if you stand ready to say well, that makes sense, looters are dangerous, try and remember that being a police officer is supposed to be dangerous -- if you're working for the police and expect every day to be donuts and coffee, you're more than a bit deluded -- and think a bit more carefully about the politics of letting looters run relatively rampant. I mean, if they put down looting, where would Fox News get all its footage? Certainly you'll want to fully confront the notion that protestors are actually more dangerous -- to powerful people -- than actual criminals.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name, says he's still undecided on whether he'll run for a third term in 2022 -- but also says he's "more panicked today" about the state of the nation than he was when he first ran in 2010. Uh, that means he's running, folks. He has until June 1 to file -- and what a shame we couldn't get that info from the Journal Sentinel! It does seem newsworthy! Instead, we got another list of things Ron Johnson is wrong about; I guess I shouldn't be too mad about that, since it's a pretty long list, and thus a decent reference.

Our FBI is investigating Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for campaign finance associations. If Donald Trump were still blogging, I guess he'd squeal TEH WITCH HUNTZ!!!!!, but setting the aside the profound insult to those who died at Salem, one must ask oneself whether maybe our government is investigating Mr. DeJoy because his actions merit it. In other words, maybe our government's working for us, for once! And if this is the thing that finally gets that one fellow on our USPS Board of Governors to cut bait on Mr. DeJoy, well, who am I to complain?

Upon hearing that Israeli finally-soon-to-be-ex-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fears that his "overthrow()" "will cause a collapse of the global right-wing," all I can say is we can only hope! But, in my experience, right-wingers always find someone worse -- plenty of sympathetic folks think that, in soon-to-be-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, they already have. And really, right-wingers will be strong everywhere for as long as we liberals let them walk all over us. I think there's a solution in there, somewhere.

Action: concerning taxes, vaccines, occupations, detentions, and our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pay for the American Jobs Plan with corporate tax hikes and not "user fees," tell your Congressfolk to beef up IRS enforcement so we can catch more tax cheats, and tell our President to fund world vaccine efforts, stop funding Israel's occupation of Palestine, close the Guantánamo Bay detention center, and replace one more member of our USPS Board of Governors. 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 (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pay for the American Jobs Plan by taxing corporations, not working people. Because that's what "user fees" are -- they're basically a damn sales tax, and we should outlaw all sales taxes anyway, because they always hit working people harder than wealthy people, and taxes should hit wealthy people harder, not so much because there's more money there as because wealthy people will take away all your rights if they become too powerful. You know, like they're doing now! And definitely don't tolerate any Republicans who say "only the people who use the roads should pay for the roads," as if corporations don't use roads.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk they need to fund our IRS properly so they can catch more wealthy tax cheats. This is basic law and order stuff here -- imagine your government saying we can't pay for cops, so we're just going to let the burglaries keep on happening. You wouldn't tolerate that, would you? Well, why would we tolerate the loss of $1 trillion annually simply because Congress has starved it of money the last decade? That's $1 trillion that rich folks and corporations have essentially burgled from us! We shouldn't have to! Congress should do their damn jobs! And now I'm over my exclamation point quota for this paragraph.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Biden Administration to invest $25 billion in vaccine development around the world. Because you can kill it here, but if you don't kill it there, too, it's gonna come back here and kill you, and very likely in mutated form. Hopefully we don't need the argument put any more pragmatically than that! And $25 billion out of over $4 trillion in annual federal spending not only isn't a lot, but would get you a lot more than you paid for it. Unlike, say, defense spending, where outspending the next eight highest-spending countries combined actually hasn't brought us any more security. Odd how little real security actually costs.

Speaking of which, MoveOn helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop funding Israel's continued oppression of Palestine. How often to I hear Israel is becoming that which it came into existence to fight these days? Quite often! And I'd probably think differently about Israel's actions in Palestine if I were convinced they really were alone against an entire world, but which of their Middle Eastern neighbors is standing with Palestine right now? Judging by the imbalance in the death tolls, I'd say none of them. And that means Israel has been captured by the folly that any fight is a good fight, and all fights must be fought to the death. It's always sad to see folks become what they most hate. And true friends don't enable it, as we have for decades.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to close the Guantánamo detention center already. Guantánamo remains a stain on our national soul, and if you're not getting the stains out of your soul, you're not living a moral life. And no, it's rubbish that Guantánamo's detainees will all "return to terrorism." Most of them never were terrorists to begin with! How do I know? Because if they were, our government would have convicted them of something over the last 20 years, that's why! "Too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release" was a particularly noxious Obama-era fecal blast. We would laugh at Vladimir Putin saying that -- but we tolerate it here, too. And we shouldn't.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to oust another USPS Board of Governors member, Ron Bloom, and replace him with someone qualified and more likely to fire Louis DeJoy. But I repeat myself! President Biden can replace Mr. Bloom because he's already served on the Board past his term, and Mr. Bloom has incomprehensibly endorsed Mr. DeJoy, when Mr. DeJoy deserves only shame and shunning for the "work" he's done. He tried to steal the election for Donald Trump! You don't just "get along" with people who do that! And now he's about to take a Post Office that was running pretty well and ensure that it runs badly, for "cost-cutting" reasons, of course. If that's what our "best and brightest" entrepreneurial minds do, well, then, they're not our "best," are they? They're more likely grifters, in fact. And we deserve better.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, voting rights, the filibuster, public lands, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell our government to do the right thing about the Israel/Palestine conflict, tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, write a letter to the editor advocating that we end the Senate filibuster, and tell President Biden to reverse Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments and forgive student loan debt. You can 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 Congressfolks' phone numbers and/or use the links in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

First things first. MoveOn helps you tell President Biden to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict and an end to Israeli evictions of Palestinians, while Demand Progress helps you tell our government to stop funding Israeli occupation of Palestine and Avaaz helps you tell world governments to sanction Israel for its actions. You don't need to know "who started it" to support these petitions; you only need to know how it is -- one nation is way more powerful than another, and brutalizes the other. And of course you should also be suspicious when you notice that the violence has buoyed the electoral fortunes of the Israeli Prime Minister who can't win an election outright but somehow stays in power.

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. You've no doubt heard that New Great and Bounteous One True American President Joe Manchin likes the latter bill but not the former, but who cares? We want both! We want both the bill that would help us end partisan gerrymandering and force big campaign donors out into the light and the bill that would restore the Voting Rights Act! Why should we have to settle just because Joe Manchin's the 50th vote?

Speaking of all of that, Common Cause helps you write a letter to the editor of your local paper advocating that we end the Senate filibuster. I used to advocate for fixing the filibuster, so that the Senators who would use it would actually have to work for it by explaining, at considerable length, why they oppose campaign finance disclosure or ending tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs overseas (to name just two popular initiatives they've filibustered over the years), but fuck that: Senators have abused this power, so they get nothing from now on, and Mitch McConnell's threats to slow down Senate business to a crawl if they get rid of the filibuster are irrelevant. Remember when Sen. Bunning (R-KY) singlehandedly stopped any further unemployment insurance considerations in 2010? Yeah, he wasn't running for re-election. Anyone who stops a popular bill because he wants a proper quorum to turn on the lights in the Senate building won't get re-elected, either. If we have anything to say about it, that is.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to roll back Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. When Trump votaries contemplated the phrase "drain the swamp," do you think the phrase "by chipping away at national monuments so that gas and oil drillers could pollute it" followed naturally in their minds? I would say not! Folks love their national monuments a lot more than Our Glorious Elites would like you to think, and they're actually not all that emotionally invested in big corporate CEOs making even more money from gas and oil drilling. Tell them "it's for the jobs" and you may get most of them to pause -- but tell them "that's what they want you to think," and then explaining exactly why that's what they want you to think that (i.e., as in the previous sentence above), will win most of them right back. Too bad our "liberal" media never thinks to do that. Hey, we can't do everything. That's why we live in a civilization.

Finally, both the ACLU and Daily Kos help you tell President Biden to cancel at least $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower. You've heard folks say they can't retire because they still have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt? Well, it's not actually the kind of thing that deserves the response well you should have thought of that before taking on all that debt ha ha ha snort, because our society has been telling everyone for years they have to get a college degree if they want to survive, and when you go telling people that, you either have to deliver on that or make it right if you don't. And forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt will make that right for a lot of people. Personal to those who'd be jealous: go gripe with God about when you were born, and God will you the same thing I will, that every damn thing in the world ain't about you.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, broadband, the Middle East, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk that "going big" on the infrastructure/jobs bill is more important than "going bipartisan"; tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax, make broadband internet more accessible to all, and stop Israel from oppressing Palestinian children; and tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a slew of pro-pollution bills. Use the tools in the upper-right corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's (and PA state legislators') phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the American Jobs Plan "big, bold, and green" -- and reject weakening it just to get Republicans on board. Not just because Republicans tried to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, either. Fact is, we've got a lot of problems in America that we can address by a) raising corporate taxes and then b) spending that money on projects -- like rebuilding sewer lines and building out renewable energy -- that'll make this nation greater. When everyone has clean water, we'll be greater. When everyone uses energy that doesn't kill the planet, we'll be greater. And when everyone has a job helping accomplish these things, well, you get the idea. Even if Republicans don't.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax. It's a piddling little tax, frankly -- two percent on assets over $50 million, and then three percent on assets over $1 billion -- but it'd raise a lot of money (upwards of $250 billion annually), and frankly these billionaires made out like bandits during this pandemic. Naturally, with all their money, they can buy more time with folks like Joe Manchin and tell tall tales about how "dangerous" it would be to raise taxes on the rich right now. But according to them, there'll never be a good time to do that. Can't raise taxes on the rich because the economy's bad! Can't raise taxes on the rich because the economy's good! All we have is our voices, so we'd better use them.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All (or AAIA) Act. We've all seen, I would hope, how integral broadband has become over the last year, thanks to the pandemic, but if you live in a rural or urban area or a reservation, you don't have the access the rest of us have, thanks to big telecom corporations refusing to build out into areas where they can't make money hand over fist! The AAIA would, among other good works, better-fund the FCC's Emergency Broadband Benefit program and pre-empt state laws that forbid municipalities from offering their own broadband services. Which are excellent wherever they're tried; just ask the good residents of Chattanooga, TN.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation 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. The bill would keep our government from spending taxpayer money on Israeli oppression of Palestinians, including putting kids in military detention, demolishing homes, and grabbing more Palestinian territory. We're already violating international law by doing all of that! And most Americans would prefer we didn't enable their behavior. And no, you're not an "anti-Semite" for not wanting your taxpayer money to hurt other people. Even American Jews have been hearing that for years! Best to define "anti-Semitism" as, you know, things that hurt Jews, not things that merely interfere with Israel's political aims.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to reject five objectively pro-pollution bills. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but these bills (HB 72, 139, 288, 939, and 950) would hamstring our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) from issuing clean air and clean water regulations, mainly by granting the legislature additional powers to stonewall those regulations. All for the greater glory of gas and oil drilling corporations! The law already grants our DEP the power to issue regulations; if you don't like the regulations they issue, you leave public comments, which our DEP has to take into account in making a final decision. You don't demand tenth, eleventh, and twelfth innings in a game you lost in the standard nine.

UPDATE. The Sierra Club link in the final paragraph above no longer directs you to the five-bill action alert, possibly because the state House has now passed all those bills; calling your state Senators about the five bills would be the only option left, and the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page would help with that.

Action: concerning corporate power, law enforcement, and Israel/Palestine policy.

Dig this: Tyson Foods managers at its Waterloo (IA) plant not only "explicitly directed supervisors to ignore symptoms of COVID-19, telling them to show up to work even if they were exhibiting symptoms of the virus," but actually started a pool to bet on how many of their workers would get sick. That's as good a reason as any to remind President-elect Joe Biden that the American voters did give him a mandate this month -- that mandate being "don't run the country like that guy did! -- and thus Public Citizen helps you tell President-elect Biden not to hire big corporate types for key jobs in his Administration, including Agriculture Secretary and OSHA administrator. After all, if they're capable of betting on how many of their workers will get sick, they shouldn't be in charge of anything, let alone "building back better" from a pandemic and a crippled economy.

Meanwhile, H.R. 7848/S. 4360, the Counselors Not Criminalization in Schools Act, would end federal funding for putting police officers in schools, and would replace those police officers with folks actually trained to deal with mental health issues, since we typically don't train police officers to do that. And we shouldn't! Should we train coal miners to write code? No, we shouldn't; mining coal and writing code use entirely different skills sets, and, in a like manner, enforcing our laws and dealing with folks with mental health issues use entirely different skill sets. Some folks used to respond "cops just need more training" when they contemplate these issues -- I used to say the same thing! -- but we'd do much better deploying folks already trained to do the job. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out students and police by passing the Counselors Not Criminalization in Schools Act.

Finally, our Secretary of State plans to formally designate the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (or BDS) movement as anti-Semitic -- which also means they'll create a blacklist of groups who support BDS. How many times must I tell these pimps! Opposing Israel's actions against the Palestinian people, and working to change them, does not make you anti-Semitic! It's like these people have no idea what anti-Semitism is like -- nothing from this Administration about assholes threatening American Jews or defacing Jewish graveyards, but they sure have plenty to say about good folks who disagree that keeping your boot on Palestinian throats is either a humane policy or an effective one! And how else do you change behavior of foreign countries, particularly when your own government will never make such an effort? Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell our State Department to abandon this foolish effort to injure free speech.

Action: concerning good House bills, clean water, and anti-Semitism.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, our Senate just put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, which is demoralizing, but we have to be like Nick Foles and just bounce back up -- and when our Senators see us do that, they'll fear us the way they should.

Meanwhile, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) contemplates updating our Lead and Copper Rule (authorized by the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1991), which limits pipe corrosion as well as the amount of lead and copper at the tap -- and with this EPA, you know which way they want to "update" the rule! That's right, they want to update it so that it allows more lead in your drinking water, even though lead causes brain damage in everyone who ingests it, which (not to give our EPA any ideas!) is why we don't allow lead in gas emissions anymore. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to make the Lead and Copper Rule stronger, not weaker. Like, for example, let's get the lead out of the service lines that connect houses to water mains, since that's usually the biggest source of lead water contamination, and those lead service lines still serve over nine million homes and businesses. And some of those customers are child care centers, so, like, let's do that now. It would create jobs for people who refit the lines, after all. Even though right-wingers will call that "socialism" as they drive roads, call cops, and use libraries.

Finally, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell our government to stop calling organizations "anti-Semitic" merely because they advocate for Palestinian rights. Why? Well, partly because it's not true, and partly because the resulting PR hit from being called "anti-Semitic" can be very damaging (just ask Jeremy Corbyn!), but also because calling organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International "anti-Semitic" is a profound insult to all those who suffered and died -- and who continue to suffer and die -- from real anti-Semitism. And it is a bit rich to watch this Administration pretend to be concerned about anti-Semitism after openly cultivating supporters from the ranks of America's Nazi wannabes. We are, all of us, friends of Israel, and we are, all of us, fully aware that being a friend doesn't mean blindly supporting whatever our friends do, but calling them out when they do wrong, so that they (and we!) can be better friends. But too many folks call people who don't agree with them "anti-Semitic." We should stop listening to such people, since they act like they don't understand that civilization is actually pretty hard work.