Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: more reflections about that thing Our Glorious Elites would really rather us all forget.

Good news, folks: two federal judges stop the proposed Albertsons/Kroger merger in two separate cases. We'll see if we celebrate any such victories during TFG's second term, but just as we're getting a pro-monopoly President back, our federal judges finally seem more willing to actually enforce antitrust law. Albertsons has now called off the merger and, hilariously, sued Kroger for breach of contract.

America's five largest health insurance corporations have cleared over $370 billion in profits since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2009 – with the notorious UnitedHealth increasing its profits an absurd 400 percent as they deny about a third of their health care claims. I present this information in case you know anyone who's wondering why anyone might be so angry at a health insurance executive that he might kill him.

In a peripherally-related note, ProPublica reports that UnitedHealth has started to deny claims for necessary health care for autistic kids. If anyone says reports like this "pile on" UnitedHealth in the wake of its CEO's murder, challenge them by asking if denying necessary health care to autistic kids is moral. They will hate that. But the experience will be good for them.

In another peripherally-related note, too many "liberal" media outlets have indulged in abject hypocrisy about America's quite explicable reaction to the UnitedHealth CEO's murder. Long story short: a lot of them cheered on Daniel Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse and (even!) Trayvon Martin's murderer, but when a CEO who makes money denying more health insurance claims than anyone else gets murdered, they suddenly find their moral compass and start lecturing the "mob." No one needs these entitled enablers.

One year into Javier Milei's "chainsaw" approach to public spending in Argentina, poverty has more than doubled there. But I'm not sure we should be imagining what the Milei government "believes," as I'm pretty sure they only believe in the clarifying, purifying power of cruelty. And if "chainsaw" politics comes to America, as our incoming President and his advisors would like, too many Americans will love it, as long as it doesn't happen to them.

Finally, despite our efforts, our Senate fails to confirm current NLRB Chair Lauren McFerren to another term, which will allow the incoming President to shape our National Labor Relations Board to his liking, though that sure won't be to our liking. The vote was 50-49 with one Republican absent, which means two non-Republican Senators voted the wrong way, and I bet you just can't guess which two. Hint: their names rhyme roughly with Manshit and Shitema. Heckuva job, clowns! Enjoy your penniless oblivion!

Action: concerning fascism, unionization, and banksters.

Long story short: tell President Biden to do what he can to stop our next President from using our military for political purposes, tell Amazon and Whole Foods bosses to stay out of the way of their workers' unionizing efforts, and tell our FDIC to release the results of their probe of 2023 failed banks. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Civic Shout helps you tell President Biden to issue an executive order preventing Presidents from deploying our military within our borders for political purposes. Because our President-elect wants to do that! To protestors, to immigrants, to whomever won't suck up to him! Would our President-elect seek to undo that executive order once he's in a position to issue his own executive orders? It sure seems likely! But let's at least make him do it. And let's also consider the possibility that he'll pretend he "can't" do it, so he can continue to stoke right-wing rage against everyone who's not them! Seriously, what else can his kind do anymore?

More Perfect Union helps you tell Amazon and Whole Foods executives not to interfere in Whole Foods workers' efforts to unionize and bargain collectively for better pay, better benefits, and safer workplaces. Because since Amazon bought Whole Foods, Amazon has been trying to make Whole Foods more and more like Amazon warehouses – they make everyone work too fast, they push workers to the point of injury, and they spy on their workers. Hence Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia – who make $16/hour in a city where you really need to make over $22/hour to survive – want want to organize. Maybe the bosses ought to get the hell out of the way of that effort.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) release the results of their internal probe of the major bank failures of 2023. So we can maybe prevent what happened that time from happening next time! And if it reflects badly on banksters, who cares? Right-wingers love telling you that your real feelings about oppression and injustice are totally invalid, but then won't STFU about the "feelings" of banking executives who don't care about anything but their unearned millions or billions. As the 2024 election taught us, Americans have got to get their heads straight about this, too.

Action: concerning destroying bad government and creating good government.

Long story short: tell your Senators to reject the so-called Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, pass the PRESS Act, confirm as many federal judges as possible, and re-confirm Lauren McFerran to our NLRB. 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 Senators to kill the so-called Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, or, as Win Without War calls it, the Non-Profit Killer Act If we give Presidents absolute power to declare non-profit organizations "terrorist-aligned" and revoke their tax-exempt status, then our government could come for any of us, at any time. You think they'll stop at revoking their tax-exempt status? Next they'll designate any of their contributors "terrorist-aligned"! Hey, if I thought of it, then you know they thought of it. And not to belabor the obvious, but the next President will be an asshole, and assholes shouldn't get all the say about everything. Or anything.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to pass the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (or PRESS) Act, a bill so obviously-needed that our Republican-held House passed it earlier this year – and a bill so obviously-needed that our President-elect has demanded that our Senate kill it. The PRESS Act would make it a lot harder for our government to force journalists to give up their sources – an act which itself often means death for those sources. Could it be that our President-elect doesn't like the PRESS Act because it would keep him from oppressing journalists? After all, he is on a revenge bender against anyone who’s ever opposed him. Soon that could be everyone!

Finally, the Labor Force helps you tell your Senators to re-confirm National Labor Relations Board Chair Lauren McFerran, while MoveOn helps you tell your Senators to confirm as many federal judges as possible before TFG takes office. If our Senate re-confirms Ms. McFerran, TFG won't be able to appoint anyone new to our NLRB until late 2026, and if our Senate fills the 15 or so remaining federal judicial openings, then TFG won't be able to put at least that many knuckle-draggers on our federal courts. These will both be victories for the rule of law in America, and also for basic human decency and empathy. Yes, I said that last thing to trigger right-wingers.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, federal judges, and workers’ rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject another corporate tax cut, and tell your Senators to confirm as many federal judges as possible and re-confirm Lauren McFerran to our NLRB. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight yet another tax giveaway for corporations. The incoming President wants to lower the corporate income tax to 15%, when corporate taxes should go up, not down. Corporations want you to think they need lots of profits in order to hire more people, but that's the exact opposite of how it works! Corporations would replaces us all with mounds of dung if they could – but if you tax them hard enough, they'll spend more money on jobs and products because money you spend isn't profit, it's an expense! So brook no stupidity from right-wingers – or your Congressfolk! – about this. Corporations already enjoyed record profits mostly from inflation, so they surely don't need any more handouts.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Senators to confirm as many federal judges as possible before TFG takes office. Democrats have 51 Senators at present, and Republicans can't filibuster judicial nominations, so for once they have the upper hand, and can use it to actually help people. Yes, better judges help people! When we sue the incoming Administration for all the harm they do to us, we'd better have some judges who'll actually apply the law and listen to us, instead of judges who'll just make up legal arguments that benefit rich people. Those are the kind of judges the incoming President will appoint, and we have long seen the harm they'll inflict – from destroying abortion rights to declaring free annual physicals "unconstitutional." Bad judges hurt people, so let's keep them out.

Finally, the Labor Force helps you tell your Senators to re-confirm National Labor Relations Board Chair Lauren McFerran. NLRB terms run five years, not four, and don't run concurrently with Presidential elections, so re-confirming Ms. McFerran to our NLRB will prevent TFG from nominating anyone to our NLRB until late 2026! That's a boon, folks! Just like our recent NLRB ruling declaring "captive meetings" illegal is a boon! You don't need your employer tearing you away from your work just to lie to you about how "bad" unions are. And buying a couple pizzas on Friday doesn't make up for low wages, wage theft, worker safety violations, and worker abuse – but unions can protect us from all of that! And so can our NLRB, if good people serve on it.

Action: concerning Social Security, food for poor seniors, and confirmations.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Fairness Act and fully-fund the Meals on Wheels program, and tell your Senators to confirm as many judges as possible and re-confirm Lauren McFerran to our NLRB. 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 Alliance for Retired Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Fairness Act, which would allow good Americans to collect Social Security benefits and government pensions or pensions and disability plans from employers that did not collect Social Security taxes. Seems to me if you've earned all of these things, you should get them, without some boss somewhere pretending to worry about "double-dipping." No, they're pretending – all they really worry about is "saving money," which is all bosses worry about, since they have no vision for making money other than cutting pay and services to the bone. This is actual bipartisan legislation, by the way, the kind we're not going to see for a while, so let's get it done.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to save the Meals on Wheels program by fully-funding the Older Americans Act. Meals on Wheels delivers over 250 million meals to over two million seniors every year, but now virtually all Meals on Wheels programs report challenges to completing their work, and one in three programs report waiting lists of 90 days or longer, so clearly Congress needs to do more. I'm sure Meals on Wheels will be the target of much Musk/Ramaswamy meme-based ridicule in the coming months, but they're ridiculous human beings from whom no one should get guidance about moral or spiritual matters. I'd rather adhere to the Baltimore Catechism, which instructs us that "feed(ing) the hungry" is one of the seven Corporal Acts of Mercy. And our government should do the same.

Finally, MoveOn helps you remind your Senators to confirm as many judges as possible before TFG takes over, while the Labor Force helps you tell your Senators to re-confirm National Labor Relations Board Chair Lauren McFerran. Confirming judges ensures that at least some judges will listen to us over the next four or so years, while re-confirming Ms. McFerran to our NLRB ensures TFG won't be able to appoint anyone to that board until the end of 2026, meaning our NLRB, too, might listen to us a little better than the Insane Clown Posse TFG will install in our Executive branch agencies. Things will get very, very uncomfortable for good, decent, and moral Americans over the next four or so years, but that doesn't mean we should neglect the civilization we've built over the previous 250 years.

UPDATE. I experienced some mild annoyance trying to sign the MoveOn petition from the previous paragraph, but it worked on the second attempt.

Action: concerning government subversion, working families, and law and order.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to refuse to collaborate with our President-elect's plans to ram his Cabinet nominees through without Senate confirmation, tell your Senators to re-confirm Lauren McFerren to our NLRB and pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale 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.

Apparently President-elect TFG has been concocting a scheme – one blessed by our Constitution, apparently – to adjourn Congress indefinitely so he can ram his repugnant Cabinet nominees without a Senate vote, and he'd need the help of our House to do that. Could it be that nominating actual piles of dung to important government positions is a bad look? I was starting to think nothing, no matter how disgusting, was a bad look to Americans anymore. Anyway, Bowers News Media helps you tell your House Reps to do their damn jobs and foil TFG's plans to ram his Cabinet through without our scrutiny. (Senators work for us, after all. Right?).

The Labor Force helps you tell your Senators to re-confirm National Labor Relations Board Chair Lauren McFerren now. Why? Because then President-elect TFG won't be able to appoint anyone to our NLRB until 2026! (NLRB members get five-year terms.) And then our NLRB might actually be able to defend working families from corporate predators while TFG sets fire to everything else! Our NLRB recently outlawed "captive meetings," in which employers force employees to sit through anti-union propaganda. I've got a damn job to do, bossman; maybe stop interfering with it? Seems reasonable – to everyone but a boss.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would prevent private data brokers from selling our personal data to law enforcement, so that law enforcement can skip getting a warrant for that data. What kind of Kafkaesque hell is this, where our government can use our taxpayer money to buy our data so they can oppress us? It's so Kafkaesque, apparently, that our House has already passed the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act; we only need our Senators to act, and we will get ourselves some breathing room from government oppression. You may have heard that America elected an asshole to the Presidency again, so of course we’re worried about that.

Around the table: the continuing follies of our Big Baby President-elect.

Our big baby President-elect still plans to use our military against immigrants and protestors in contravention of our laws. Will our military refuse to obey illegal orders, as is their duty? Depends on whether or not our President-elect purges all the "disloyal" generals first, I suppose! See, all you suddenly tariff-skeptical voters? Actions have consequences, especially when they feel good.

Speaking of which, quite a few military observers absolutely hate our President-elect's pick for Secretary of Defense, noted misspelled white supremacist tattoo-wearer/germ skeptic Pete Hegseth. Recall that our President-elect also wants to get rid of "disloyal" generals and you might think nominating someone like Mr. Hegseth – a man who seems almost designed to provoke decent and competent people – was a mistake. But then a compliant "liberal" media could help him get away with it anyway, and given how they ran Joe Biden out of the race and "covered" that shitshow of a Republican campaign, they sure look awfully pliant.

Our President-elect can't stop whining and yelling as he says he'll seize the endowments of colleges "illegally" promoting DEI initiatives and give that money to "wronged" white people. You know DEI must be doing good, or else right-wingers wouldn't throw such tantrums about it! And would white people ever get reparations from Dear Leader? Of course not! That might make them happy, and the whole point is to keep them enraged!

Here's some good news, at least for the moment: our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) has ruled that bosses can't force employees to attend meetings about how bad unions supposedly are, since that's basically coercion. The bad news? The next President's NLRB could reverse the decision. The good news? That'll take a new case before our NLRB. The bad news? Big corporations no doubt already have a new case or 20 ready to file as we speak. BTW, no corporation has "First Amendment rights." Corporations are things, not people.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes says hell yes she's going ahead with her prosecution of the alleged fake electors scheme in that state in 2020. And since it's a state trial, Dear Leader can't legally stop it from happening, nor can he pardon any of the defendants if they're convicted – though, again, if Dear Leader manages to purge our military of "enem(ies) within," I suppose he could send troops down there to intimidate her.

Finally, It Begins: our President-elect "jokes" that he could serve a third term if our House decides "he’s so good we got to figure something else out." Not a joke, and not just because it's not funny. The 22nd Amendment to our Constitution is quite plain, and frankly Dear Leader's 75 million-plus supporters don't have the guts to force their will on the rest of us – but, again, if he reshapes our military in his image, he could serve additional terms until he's a brain in a jar. Remember, folks: once he's out of office, jail remains a very real possibility.

A few thoughts about the election.

First, we have some good news.

Missouri voters enacted Proposition A, which raises the state minimum wage to $15/hour and guarantees five to seven paid sick days annually from most private employers. Workers can get five days at employers with 15 or fewer employees; I'm pleased that Prop A didn't simply give big corporations the opportunity to pretend they're small businesses because they might have fewer than 15 employees at a particular location. Nebraska voters also voted to mandate private employers to provide paid sick leave; voters here mandated five days at employers with 20 employees or fewer and seven at larger employers. And while the tally isn't final yet, Alaska voters have apparently voted to mandate paid sick leave, raise the minimum wage to $15/hour by 2027 and a prohibit captive audience meetings at workplaces, so that your employer can't force you to sit through political or religious meetings if they don't actually relate to your job.

Massachusetts voters approved a law allowing "transportation network drivers" (i.e., Uber/Lyft drivers) the right to bargain collectively for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. And Nebraska voters weren't done, as they also repealed a state law using taxpayer money on private school scholarships by a 15-point margin. They weren't the only ones, either! Kentucky voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have permitted taxpayer money to flow to private schools. I am heartened that, even in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, good citizens like those in Nebraska and Kentucky agree with the common-sense notion that we ought to use public money on public schools (and certainly we should stop pretending that charter schools are somehow a way out of whatever problems we have in public schools, problems that do not result from CRT or whatever but from our refusal to fund them properly in the first place).

This year's pro-abortion initiatives met with some success, as voters in seven states expanded abortion rights at the ballot box, while voters in three others did not. The Missouri initiative, which guarantees a right to an abortion up until fetal viability in that state's constitution, will get most of the ink, largely because Missouri was the first state to ban abortion in the wake of the Dobbs ruling, but don't sleep on Montana voters, either – a 1999 state Supreme Court ruling locates the right to an abortion within the right to privacy, but precedents never change until they do, so enshrining abortion in the state constitution was a smart move on their part. I suspect initiatives like the ones that failed in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota might succeed in future years when some other Republican candidate is at the top of the ticket. (The one in Florida only failed because Florida required a 60% threshold for passage; clearly Florida politicians don't like it when good Floridians tell them what to do.)

Not every good ballot initiative succeeded, unfortunately, as Ohio voters rejected an amendment that would have created a bipartisan redistricting commission to start undoing decades of right-wing gerrymandering of that state's Congressional seats. Don't be too quick to blame Ohio voters for that – Secretary of State Frank LaRose wrote the amendment misleadingly in an obvious attempt to make it fail, and in any case Ohio Republicans have simply ignored previous directions from the electorate that would have compelled them to draw maps more fairly. What could they be afraid of? (Do go ahead and blame Ohio voters for replacing one of our Senate's finest human beings, Sherrod Brown, with Bernie Moreno, who clearly aims to threaten Tommy Tuberville for the title of "America's Stupidest Senator.")

I have little else to say about the national election. Somehow the whiny, traitorous asshole is back, so those Americans who want to threaten immigrants, beat up transgender folk, sling racial slurs, grab a woman's breasts in public, taunt Muslims on trains, and whine about all their clearly deserved rejections once again have a guardian angel who'll bless their every noxious urge. I pray that America survives another four years of this disgusting drama.

Action: concerning vote suppression, jobs, and electioneering.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate Florida's government for intimidating pro-choice voters and Elon Musk's SuperPAC for allegedly bribing people to register to vote, and tell Boeing's CEO to stop laying off workers and invest in them instead. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Civic Shout helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's anti-choice voter suppression tactics, including sending cops to the houses of folks who favor a ballot initiative that could enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution. On what probable cause? I kid, of course – those who know they're about to lose everything will do anything, law and order and morality be damned. America is full of law-and-order type who'll break the law and then say but my case is different! But this is only different in that it's overtly fascist to send cops to scare people into voting differently. So let's make sure he loses that vote – and let’s also hold him accountable for his fascism.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell Boeing's CEO to stop laying off workers and start investing in them instead. Let me guess: the Boeing machinist union strike is causing the layoffs! Because, after all, when you're already down workers, the obvious solution is to lay more off! They're really laying off workers, of course, so they can goose up stock prices and profits and indulge in more stock buybacks, none of which has anything to do with building planes that don't fall out of the sky. Would it be piling on to note that Boeing has gobbled up nearly $150 billion in corporate welfare handouts? No, it would not. Clearly Boeing needs us to help it see the light.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to investigate Elon Musk's SuperPAC for possible illegal electioneering. Apparently he's been paying Trump-leaners to register to vote in swing states, although these benighted folks are really getting a chance at a big payoff if they register; I guess that's how he'll claim it's not really a "payment," but a chance at a pile of money is still a bribe. We outlawed paying people to vote in the first place because the people with the most money can literally buy the outcome they want. Anyway, don't worry about exacerbating Mr. Musk's persecution complex; he'd find a way to do that anyway, and were he still so emotional, he could cry into his $200 billion.

Around the table: right-wingers behaving badly in public, part 733.

Former Republican Mike Lofgren recounts some of the friendships he's lost to Trump Derangement Syndrome (actual) over the years, reminding us, among other things, that "people who truculently parade their skepticism are actually the most gullible people on earth." The stories he tells won't surprise you, not if you've been living and breathing these last few decades; of course, for me the Rubicon was Tha Bush Mobb, not Donald Trump. One question: was the fellow who hated the Iraq War but embraced climate change denialism confusing symmetry with fairness – or was he embarking on his own quest to hold on to other friendships?

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, tells us "How Not to Get Shafted Out of Your Vote." First, check our SaveYourVote.org and make sure you're registered; second, vote in-person and early if you can (and avoid mail-in ballots); third, don't accept a "provisional" ballot, but "politely but firmly" demand a regular ballot and bring proof of your address (which could be an electric bill). Mr. Palast also cites 1-800-OUR-VOTE if you witness, or suffer, vote suppression at the polls. It's good to know that in 22 states (including Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan) have same-day registration, meaning that if you've been unfairly deregistered which will more likely happen to you if you're not white, you can demand a registration form (and thus a ballot) right then and there.

So how's Iceland's experiment with a four-day work week going? Quite well, thank you very much – lower unemployment and faster economic growth being just two of the boons Iceland has enjoyed. Of course you already knew that, but we would do well to remember that the only people who oppose a shorter work week are the overpaid executives who can't think past the next monthly report. So bold, they are! And don't ever believe the hype (directly counteracted by this article, I'll grant) that ZOMG HOWZ WILLZ WEZ EVAHZ RENEGOTIATEZ TEH UNIONZ CONTRACTZ!!!!! Right-wingers just love pretending that a minor bump is an insurmountable obstacle, and they only do it to gaslight you.

By now you've heard that former Trump Administration Chief of Staff John Kelly has called Mr. Trump a "fascist," which, like, duh, but let's look at his testimony that Mr. Trump used to say Hitler did some good things too "more than once." "Do an in-depth report on Adolf Hitler's term in office" used to be an exercise in some high schools, no doubt out of a misguided/evil desire to be "fair" to everyone. Remember that almost everyone does good things by accident! But if a guy kills six million Jews, you don't say you know, he sure had that economy humming for a while! about him unless you're an asshole.

Ho hum, MAGA hat-wearer punches Texas poll worker after poll worker tells him to remove his hat at the polling place. In other words, a right-winger responded to requests from a law enforcement officer to obey the law with violence; why, this is almost becoming a stereotype! Since the poll worker is a senior citizen, the right-winger – no, I'm not going to name him, why give him more attention than he deserves? – now faces a third-degree felony charge. I bet he gets all law-and-order about immigration, though I’d be happy to be wrong about that. I am almost certainly not wrong about that.

Finally, I bet you know someone who canceled their Washington Post subscription after that "paper of record" decided not to endorse a candidate for President this year, to get back to their nonpartisan roots yeah sure. While it sure seems like these newspapers are rushing to oblivion, I can't be too hard on them, because I never endorsed a Presidential candidate, either. So I'mma fix that: vote for Kamala Harris! And vote against every single Republican on your ballot! They've fucked shit up enough!

Action: concerning labor, campaign coverage, and worker safety.

Long story short: tell Marathon to bargain with striking workers, tell the New York Times to stop "sanewashing" Trump coverage, and tell our Department of Labor to enact a vigorous heat standard for workers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell oil refinery corporation Marathon Petroleum to bargain with striking workers. Whose contract ran out nine months ago, and who were working without a contract until it became obvious management wouldn't talk to them. Marathon made almost $10 billion in profits last year, and has indulged in $35 billion in stock buybacks just over the last three years, but can't break off any of that for the good folks who make their wealth possible – though they can pay scabs twice the going rate! Need I mention that oil refining is actually difficult work requiring workers of some experience and skill? I guess Marathon will find that out, but if they’d just deal fairly with their workers, they wouldn't have to.

Civic Shout helps you tell the New York Times, one of our "papers of record," to stop "sanewashing" their coverage of Donald Trump. Are they simply numb to the onslaught of obnoxious behavior from Mr. Trump or do they want to pretend this should be a race? It matters not, because civilized people treat assholes like, well, assholes; we don't just hand out respect to Presidential candidates (or Presidents!) unless they earn it. I mean, this is America, dammit! And our "liberal" media have called his claims the 2020 election was stolen from him the "Big Lie," so I must presume they are capable of calling out Mr. Trump's obnoxious behavior. Now all they need to do is start doing it.

Finally, More Perfect Union also helps you tell our Department of Labor to enact its heat standard for workers. Broadly, this standard would require bosses to make sure their workers don't die of heatstroke; more precisely, it would ensure workers have enough shade, breaks, and water, particularly since a lot of farmworkers don’t get the kinds of protections other workers get under the National Labor Relations Act. I suppose right-wingers will challenge the standard by saying that Congress expressed its intent by excluding farmworkers from that bill, thus making the DOL's standard "unconstitutional." But why would anyone want to put that kind of work before the Lord on Judgment Day? Defending the powerful sure ties a mind in knots!

Around the table: half of what you see, none of what you hear, part 982.

When we contemplate the fact that in many Republican-dominated states, folks can spy on/rat out their friends and neighbors on abortion-, gender-, and race-related matters without ever being held accountable for their intrusions, we would be right to wonder how right-wingers imagine that these acts adhere to conservative principles. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when conservatives could be proud live-and-let-live types. Of course, right-wingers would also need to explain why abusive assholes deserve so much power to make other people's lives miserable. And none of them should ever get to whine about "cancel culture" again, since they support a Cancel State.

Matt Stoller sees Michael Jordan's antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR as evidence that "(w)hatever happens in the next election, the antitrust revolution is unstoppable." I hope he's right, but he highlights the Jordan lawsuit because it's a private lawsuit – one neither Lina Khan nor Jonathan Kanter has anything to do with – and Mr. Jordan has filed it after decades of folks rarely filing such suits because of bad court decisions that make them hard to win. Now, with even Google losing an antitrust lawsuit, the climate may be significantly better. Anyway, Mr. Jordan's lawsuit alleges a lot of bad behavior from NASCAR that can't be explained away by blithely presuming that sports leagues "should" have monopolies.

Ho hum, "liberal" media articles about the recent port strike quoted more investment banks, big ag lobbyists, and wine importers than union leaders. I would be ashamed of having such priorities! But I suspect our "liberal" media are, er, not ashamed, as they are so thoroughly captured by the corporate world; only people who make lots of money matter, their editorial decisions say to us. Maybe that's why the port workers accepted a short-term settlement that didn't address automation; in a less toxic business-reporting environment, they might have held out for everything they wanted, and if they had, they'd have won a big victory for all workers. (Also too: are union leaders ever as "rich, corrupt, and incompetent" as a bankster? Reader, the answer is no.)

In the middle of this article about how two right-wing billionaire pastors are turning Texas into a haven for Christian nationalism you will find this nugget about one of them describing how he "discover(ed)" his "charitable side": "part of our reward will be being invited into people’s homes (i.e., in heaven) to reciprocate for things we did for them in this life, and we’re supposed to make that part of our investment calculation." In other words, you give to others so that they give back to you! His weird phrasing (charity as an "investment calculation"? Seriously?) is a dead giveaway, but what happened to doing good works because good works help people?

Ho hum, the LAPD raids a medical lab after "deducing" that its "higher-than-usual energy use" must have meant it was hiding "unlicensed" marijuana – and a cop loses his rifle to a highly-magnetized MRI machine. No use saying "not all cops" or whatever, because the character flaws that led to this debacle – mistaking a stupid idea for a clever one, needing to prove a point or justify a budget, making up excuses to soothe one's conscience – plague all of us. Granted, not all of us would have gotten our rifle stuck in an MRI machine (after he emptied it! At what we may never know!), but we all still need to be better than our flaws – particularly if we're armed officers of law enforcement.

When I hear that Melania Trump has apparently offered a fairly emphatic defense of abortion rights, writing that "(i)t is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government," I still think that's all just right-wingers foisting more drama upon us. Republicans are objectively suffering at the ballot box because of their decades-long opposition to abortion – opposition that's had real-world consequences, including death, since our Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade – so they have to win contestable elections by conning people into thinking they're somehow nuanced on the topic. See, Mrs. Trump is pro-choice! Republicans aren't as bad as you think! I want to believe her advocacy is sincere, and I know it won't be useless even if it's not, but we all know how right-wingers operate by now.

You've been hearing that the President has been "using FEMA money" on "illegal immigrants"? Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post reminds us that the President who actually did that was Donald Trump! But wait, there's more! Mr. Trump did that in defiance of Congress's will as expressed in spending legislation, whereas the Biden Administration spent FEMA money (including money for FEMA's Shelter and Services program, which occupies a sliver of FEMA's budget) as directed by legislation — legislation the Republican House blessed. None of this will ever convince a Trump votary, of course, because rage is a hell of a drug.

Finally, another day, another scientific study demonstrating that social media content moderation actually has a “bias" against stupid and obnoxious content and not a “bias" against conservative content. Of course, if right-wingers don't seem to know the difference, perhaps that's because they purvey most of the stupid and obnoxious content! You know, I remember being younger and complaining about censorship all the time, but then I became a man and put away childish things, while too many of today's right-wingers prefer to whine about rejections they deserve. People who spew noxious crap and act like an asshole deserve rejection! It ain't that deep!

Action: concerning striking workers and financial predators.

Long story short: tell port CEOs to accept striking portworkers' demands, and tell your government to protect us from financial predators in the green lending industry. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell port CEOs to accept portworkers' demands. 45,000 port workers went on strike this week to protest low pay (no, really, only $20/hour for that work?) and automation (ho hum, corporations making billions in profits want to give as many jobs as possible to robots). On occasion, legitimate, life-improving technological progress forces people out of work, but robots ain't that – robots will screw everything up while CEOs make even more money forcing the world to accept incompetence. These CEOs deserve to fail – but they won't, unless we pressure them to give in to their workers' demands.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell various federal agencies to protect good Americans from financial predators in the green lending industry. Lending programs that help folks deal with pollution and climate change are relatively new – which means they probably have a disproportionate number of scam artists, since new areas of our economy tend to get the necessary regulatory scrutiny much later than more established ones. And you know right-wingers stand ready to declare the green lending industry "unreliable." Their hell will be just as hot as ours, but why should any of us live in hell?

UPDATE. Port strikers have reached a tentative agreement with management, one that would raise pay 62% over the next five years but does not address automation. Go ahead and send your message anyway, amending it as you need to. Once you win, you need to keep fighting to keep your wins, and big bosses need to know we’ll do that.

Action: concerning labor, food safety, and pollution.

Long story short: tell Boeing to give its workers a fair contract, tell our FDA to keep lead out of cinnamon, and tell our EPA to keep nurdles out of our water. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Boeing that their striking machinists deserve a fair contract. Our "liberal" media have been telling you that Boeing workers went on strike after rejecting a proposed 25% pay hike. Surprise, surprise: that's not the whole story. Boeing workers are hunting far bigger game: they aim to challenge the entire corporate culture at Boeing, the culture that puts mammon above safety and quality, the culture that puts shareholder “value,” executive pay, and stock buybacks above planes being safe to fly. This could be a watershed moment in our history, like Reagan breaking the traffic controllers' union but in reverse, because if the Boeing workers win, they'll show the world that we can beat the culture of mammon, and workers all over America will suddenly find themselves more powerful than they've been in about half a century. So, yeah, we should help them do that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to limit lead found in cinnamon. This has been in the news lately, as all manner of food poisoning tends to be; one quarter-teaspoon of cinnamon contains more lead than anyone should ever have in a day, and lead leads directly to brain damage and maldevelopment in children, so our FDA should do at least as good a job as the state of New York, which limits lead to one part per million in spices. Oh, at the risk of piling on, the Project 2025 agenda would make sure our government could never keep our food safe again, so we must act now.

Finally, PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban corporations dumpling nurdles into our clean water. Nurdles! They sound so cute! Reader, they are not: used to make virtually any plastic product, they find their way into our oceans and not only kill animals who literally starve to death with bellies full of them and that is a cruel, cruel death, but they can find their way into our own bodies as well, and wreak havoc on our health. Again, not to pile on, but Project 2025 would prevent our EPA from keeping such things out of our water, so we must act now.

Action: concerning banksters, school lunches, and jobs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to roll back so-called "Earned Wage Access" loans. "Earned Wage Access" schemes promise to give you some of your paycheck before payday if you need it, but then slam you with 300% interest rates and usurious junk fees, meaning they're just another payday loan. No use arguing that these loans give good Americans more "choice." In a civilized society, there should be no "choice" to be some rich bankster's prey.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to limit sugar (and calories from sugar) in school lunches. The "added sugar" part of our food labels is a relatively recent development, and our USDA's proposed sugar limits would be the first-ever. But of course big sugar corporations don't want this to happen! We first started adding sugar to food to conceal that food's spoilage; hundreds of years later, we’ve made it a mania, and no CEO's "right" to more unearned money can change that.

Finally, More Perfect Union also helps you tell Stellantis to honor its contractual promise to re-open the Belvedere, IL plant it closed in 2021. The United Auto Workers (or UAW) union fought Stellantis (owner of Jeep and Chrysler) tooth and nail to get the Belvedere plant reopened, but now Stellantis's CEO wants to delay reopening until 2028 – after the UAW contract expires. So clever! Thus it’s time for the Big Stick of Bad PR to come out. Shame still works, or Donald Trump wouldn’t call it a tool of totalitarianism.

Action: concerning the death penalty, monopolies, anti-union propaganda, and abortion.

Long story short: tell Alabama’s Governor to commute Rocky Myers’s death sentence, tell our FTC to block a proposed fertilizer merger, tell Delta to stop subjecting its employees to anti-union propaganda, and tell big corporate pharmacies to dispense abortion drugs. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell Alabama’s Governor to commute Rocky Myers’s death sentence. Because Alabama no longer has a death sentence (Mr. Myers received his in 1994), because his lawyer abandoned him without giving notice and thus prevented Mr. Myers from exercising his right to an appeal, and because the case against him has always suffered from recanted (and possibly coerced) testimony. These aren’t mere “technicalities” – any one of these things should prevent us from killing a man. Yes, even if he’s actually guilty of murder! Maintaining a civilization is hard, as is anything worth doing, and all the folks who claim they’re “tough on crime” ain’t the tiniest bit tough at all. They’re whiners, frankly.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to block the proposed merger of Koch Ag & Energy Solutions/Iowa Fertilizer Company merger. And yes, that’s “Koch” as in “brothers,” but that’s only icing on the cake – the merger would kill jobs and raise prices like all mergers do and would also reduce options for small farmers trying to grow the food we all eat. I know, I know, a foreign chemical corporation owns the Iowa Fertilizer Company now, but where is it written that our only choices are “a foreign corporation owns it” or “the Koch brothers own it”? I’d rather the employees owned it! That’s not outlandish – even Ronald Reagan supported employee-owned corporations.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell Delta Airlines to stop its union-busting tactics. These include (and you won’t find very many surprises on this list) “anti-union videos and leaflets in break rooms, meetings with new hires that discourage unionization, managers telling workers to remove their union pins, and taking union fliers from workers’ personal belongings” but hey, there’s an idea! Let’s stuff every single worker’s backpack with, like, 200 union fliers! You best believe the underpaid flier-confiscation technicians will complain to their bosses right quick, and then maybe join the union effort. In the meantime, why let Delta tilt the playing field even more in their favor?

Daily Kos helps you tell big corporate pharmacies (like Walmart, Costco, and Safeway) to dispense abortion medications. Almost a supermajority of abortions in America now occur via medication, meaning almost a supermajority of abortions in America now can occur, at least in theory, without some idiot screaming in your face that you’re going to hell. It might be better to have legislation mandating pharmacies to do this – particularly since the Comstock Act still sits out there like a bomb waiting for Sam Alito to set it off – but the Big Stick of Bad PR also works, particularly when most people agree with its use, as most Americans will do about abortion drugs.

Yes, I heard that the greatest President of my lifetime just dropped out of the race after being hounded by Democratic leaders and our “liberal” media for the last few weeks. The challenge for us now? Same as it was before: to demand what we deserve from our leaders, and since we Americans are basically a good lot, regardless of how politicians and corporate executives act, we still deserve what our civilization has always promised us, and which the New Deal era came closest to delivering: freedom from want and fear and bigotry, freedom to dream bigger and accomplish bigger, freedom to create and sustain communities, freedom to maintain and nourish a heritage that we can pass down to our children and our children’s children. I’ll fight for all of that to my last breath, and I bet you will, too.

Action: concerning “free” trade, cruelty to animals, and cruelty in credit reports.

Long story short: tell our government to make fair trade deals, protect elephants from trophy hunting, and keep medical debt out of credit reports. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Biden Administration you don’t want their proposed Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (or APEP) to be like all those “free” trade deals of years gone by. Yes, the Biden Administration is actually taking comments on it! And if they didn’t want to hear from us, they shouldn’t have asked us to speak. Among the things you’ll ask an APEP to do: get rid of the investor-state dispute settlement (or ISDS) systems that put money before law and order, and raise labor and climate standards in Latin American nations. The main reason our big corporations relocate there, of course, is so they can pay workers in dung pellets and make them work like slaves! So we’ve got to fight that, same as we fight cruelty everywhere.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ban all imports of trophy Amboseli-West Kilimanjaro elephants. Because they deserve better than to be hunted to death for sport! And if we ban their import, we can dry up the market for it in Africa! And who hunts an African elephant? Not someone who needs food or shelter, that’s for sure! No, it’s always some no-work-doing bazillionaire who’s never had to struggle to earn a damn thing in his life. Putting down an elephant in its reproductive peak just because it has hundred-pound tusks is damn sure not a way to earn the respect of anyone who matters. Yet, because money, it’ll still happen – unless we tell our government to make sure it doesn’t happen.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to follow through with their plan to ban credit reporting corporations from using medical debt in their scores. There’s more to this, of course, than just preventing your credit score from taking a hit just because you got hit by a car or got cancer: our CFPB’s proposed rule would also ban debt collectors from using medical devices as collateral – I mean, folks want to keep using their wheelchairs and prosthetic arms, right? And not for nothing, but a lot of medical debt reporting is just plain wrong, and why should someone else’s mistake literally cost you an arm and a leg? “Money” is not an adequate reason, for that or anything else.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: today, with upwards of 29% good news!

The PRO Act may not be very close to passage nationally, but the PRO Act has passed in Vermont, and will not only outlaw those forced propaganda meetings corporations like to make folks attend like they don’t have enough work to do, but will let domestic workers organize and let public workers form a union via card-check. There’s a lesson here for all Americans – don’t strap yourself too closely to Democrats, and fight for what you actually want, and you might more easily get Democrats to go along with you. I mean, they can put their finger to the wind just like anyone else. Come to think of it, didn’t New Deal legislation pass pretty much because the politicians were following the people’s lead? Why, yes!

Study published in The Lancet predicts that worldwide life expectancy will increase by almost five years by the year 2050, from around 73 now to around 78. Why? Because we have more non-communicable disease these days than communicable. Say, remember that time we all had to wear a mask all the time so we didn’t accidentally kill each other? Turns out that’s a habit that helps people live longer! And think how much better we’d do if we adopted better ventilation practices in public buildings! But it’s also going up because, well, a lot of nations have a lot of room to grow their life expectancy. What will be a drag on life expectancy? The fact that a lot of us are too fat because we eat too much crap.

Team Trump sends a cease-and-desist letter to the makers of the movie The Apprentice. Can you say “diaper-loaded brat,” boys and girls? How about frivolous lawsuit? And why don’t Republicans defend the free speech rights of the filmmakers? Because the only lawsuits they find “frivolous” are lawsuits that make corporations pay for the harm they do to good Americans, that’s why. In a peripherally-related note, GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.

Tim Cushing at TechDirt tells the story of what happened to a couple of cops who literally tortured a Fontana, CA man into confessing to a murder that never occurred. The “suspect” actually called the cops for help because he thought his father had disappeared; turns out his father had taken public trans to visit a relative and a female friend, but the cops decided he was dead and decided the son was the killer, pretty much without thinking very hard about it, or at all. You’ll really love the part where they threaten to euthanize his dog if he doesn’t confess, and then bring the dog into the interrogation room. Sadly, these cops didn’t lose their jobs but the city paid almost a million bucks in damages to the tortured citizen (four years later!), which of course came out of his and everyone else’s taxes. Who bellows I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!! after hearing that story? Someone you should straight-up eject from your life, that’s who.

Donald Trump endorses primary challenger to Rep. Bob Good (E-VA), which is probably the death-knell for the otherwise noxious right-wing incumbent. And also an opportunity for Democrats, if they have the sense to recognize it: Virginia’s 5th Congressional district usually votes Republican in federal and state elections, but not by absurd margins, plus the 2020 election saw 400,000 out of 580,000 potential voters actually vote. So a lot of these 180,000 folks might be persuaded to turn out against the Republican – by an actual populist Democrat who won’t let the party’s consultant class dominate their messaging. I’m not sure I see that individual among the Democratic primary candidates, but I’d be happy to be wrong.

Despite all the bad PR they’ve received for their, ah, unique educational “reforms,” Florida’s government continues to leave a trail of slime wherever they go, now putting together training materials that lump “cancel culture” “victims” in with Josef Stalin murdering three-quarters of a million political dissenters. When they lecture us about “the dangers and evils of Communism,” and then equate the quite deserved shame of garden-variety racists with the imprisonment or murder of actual political dissenters, they’re telling you that shame is only for right-wingers to use against you, never for you to use against them. What has two thumbs and won’t eat Florida blueberries until they stop being fascist? This guy!

Finally, Louisiana passes law reclassifying abortion drugs mifepristol and misopropol as “controlled dangerous substances.” People have been using these drugs safely for decades, and the fact that some asshole somewhere may have misused it – if the bill’s sponsor’s “personal story” isn’t some made-up sack of dung – doesn’t change that. Let it be known that having a Democratic Governor for two terms hasn’t changed Louisiana politics one little bit, so be wary of supporting weak “centrists” (or “the only people who can win”) in red states. The only liberal who can really win in a red state – which is to say, win an election and be of some utility to the people of that state – is a populist.

Action: concerning hedge funds, health care, and worker organizing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, the Right to Contraception Act, and the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. You like that, banksters? Just wait until you all get to Ayn Rand Heaven and she calls you looters, too! Not just her, of course, but the good Americans who work at Red Lobster, as well. The Stop Wall Street Looting Act would force banksters to take care of workers first during bankruptcy proceedings, stiffen penalties when they break the law, and prohibit dividend payouts from an “acquired asset” for two years. Oh, the bill would also treat “carried interest” as income — you know, like it actually is — and thus end that particular tax-cut-for-the-rich. So, yeah, Congress should do all of that, because it’s the right thing to do.

Both UltraViolet and the National Women’s Law Center help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to Contraception Act. Because Clarence Thomas explicitly said our Supreme Court will be coming for that! The Right to Contraception Act would generally prevent governments and corporations from impeding anyone’s access to contraception, and would only allow said governments and corporations to defend such an impediment only on the grounds that it actually doesn’t impede access to contraception. In other words, it wouldn’t let them claim BUT OURZ RELIGIZZ CONSHENCEZ!!!!! After all, your conscience is for you, not for everyone else. Why is it so hard for wannabe fascists to understand that? Oh, wait, that question answers itself.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act. You recall how Mercedes workers told us that they were constantly being pulled into anti-union propaganda meetings (“hey, we’re a family here!”) during that unsuccessful union drive? And how Oregon Labcorp workers reported (during their successful union drive) that they, too, got pulled into these propaganda meetings – and they really resented it because they were already understaffed and overworked? Well, the PRO Act would put a stop to a lot of these shenanigans, and let workers unionize, if they want, on a more level playing field. Level playing fields are sort of why we’re America, right?

Around the table: yes, Donald Trump will take your birth control away! And other obvious truths.

Good news, everyone: Oregon Labcorp workers have overwhelmingly voted to unionize. You’ll recognize Labcorp as one of the two big biometric testing chains in America (along with Quest Diagnostics), and if you’re at all acquainted with the forces aligned against workers described in paragraph 5 (staffing shortages, absurd schedules, private equity parasites constantly demanding cost-cutting and “upcoding”), you’ll find it easy to imagine why Oregon Labcorp workers want more of a say in their work lives. Something I haven’t emphasized enough: these anti-union propaganda meetings take workers away from their work – which workers resent even more when they’re already overworked.

Karl Bode at Techdirt reminds us that thanks largely to local governments, Utahns in 21 cities now enjoy good, affordable community broadband service, upon which 18 internet service-providing corporations compete and actually offer fairly low prices. Of course the big telecom corporations tried to sue UTOPIA out of existence, but failed; they might have done better, you know, building the infrastructure themselves and providing the service at a low price, but then they’d have to stop being parasites. And this solution – governments build the network, private corporations provide services on it – is a moderate solution. I can’t help but note that Utah is one of the most Republican-dominated states in America, and yet UTOPIA has thrived here. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.

Our “liberal” media has spent way too much time trying to “figure out” why Donald Trump said he’d take our birth control away and wouldn’t take our birth control away on the same day, but Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us that we don’t have to “wonder” what he’d do – we can just look at the “giant pile of receipts from Trump's four years befouling the White House.” His Administration cut funding for family planning clinics that offered birth control at low or no cost, resulting in 1,000 clinics shutting down or cutting services – mostly for poor folks, because cruelty – and they also gutted the Affordable Care Act mandate that insurers offer birth control at low or no cost. Result: more abortions, more sexually-transmitted diseases, and no confusion about whether another Trump Administration would hurt people or not. Of course they would! What fuels them, other than your pain?

Matt Stoller discusses why the Biden Administration seems to “Hate Its Own Agenda.” “Millions of people saw news about the banning of non-compete agreements by the government, actions against banks via regulation of credit card fees, bans on junk fees, antitrust actions against Google, Apple, airlines, book publishers, and meatpackers,” he writes, yet good Americans “don’t connect it to the Biden Administration,” and the reason for that, apparently, is that the Biden Administration goes out of its way not to discuss it. And well beyond simply refusing to comment on ongoing lawsuits, which is reasonable – they praise big corporations, like, a lot, and won’t even criticize them when they’re laying people off, all of which makes Americans think the Biden Administration isn’t doing anything about their problems. If it were me, I’d be wearing a cap saying I KILL MONOPOLIES everywhere I went. And the consultant class would throw tantrums about it, but regular Americans would love it.

From the “Praise the Lord someone said it exactly this way!” file: Jon Stewart explains that “Trump is the real ‘cancel culture’ – emphasis on ‘cult.’” Long story short: right-wingers constantly complain they’re being “cancelled” every time someone criticizes them, which is whiny and weak, but the only thing that really gets a right-winger cancelled is standing up to Donald Trump. Choice bit: clips show Mitt Romney and Will Hurd getting booed for criticizing “the Boy King” and Mr. Stewart says “Yes, the woke mob shouts you down.” Hey, it’s not my fault it’s so easy to turn right-wingers’ folly back on them. But it is our “liberal” media’s fault that they don’t do it anywhere near enough. We can’t rely on Jon Stewart to save us forever.

Finally, L. Brent Bozell IV, who comes from a long line of L. Brent Bozells, gets almost four years in jail for his role in the January 6 attack on our democracy. Of course his father and grandfather – Joe McCarthy speechwriter/police officer attacker L. Brent Bozell Jr. and Media Research Center founder/constant whiner about violence on TV L. Brent Bozell III – were major players in the conservative movement, in the sense that they were constantly forcing it rightward, particularly on the sort of social issues that keep energizing the feedback loop of masturbatory rage in which right-wingers have trapped about a quarter of all Americans. So the conviction and sentencing of Bozell the Fourth constitutes a sort of full circle for the conservative movement in its autumn years.

Around the table: we find good news wherever we can! And don’t shrink from the bad.

Good news: our Supreme Court rules that our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism is-so Constitutional, with Justice Thomas (is this an election year?) writing the majority opinion, ruling that our CFPB’s funding mechanism – our Federal Reserve system not only funds it, but determines funding levels – has ample precedent in American history. Not least because Congress delegated this authority via legislation, I would think. Naturally Justice Alito, he of the upside-down flag flying in front of his house just after the January 6 insurrection, called our CFPB’s funding mechanism “unprecedented” in his dissent.

More good news! The Biden Administration has proposed reclassifying marijuana from Schedule I – reserved for the most dangerous drugs with the least medicinal utility – to Schedule III. Thus pot would still be illegal at the federal level, but the crippling restrictions on medicinal research would no longer apply, and the tax burden on marijuana businesses would also fall. You should know that the organization Smart Approaches to Marijuana – from whence came the article’s content-free argument against the proposal – opposes both legalization and research, which I would think rather reduces the number of “smart approaches” available to them.

I find good news even in this bad news: unionization effort at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Tennessee fails by a fairly sizable margin, after Mercedes indulges in the kind of relentless anti-union propagandizing that the PRO Act would restrict if Congress would pass it. But Mercedes also made sizable concessions to workers, including ending a two-tiered wage system, making temp workers permanent, and starting a new bonus system, although I wouldn’t blame you for seeing that $700 “performance bonus” they handed out last month as a bribe (and one that works too often on good Americans trying to scrape through another week). But if a corporation treats its workers better out of fear of unions, then unions are still doing their job. And the only thing that’ll keep things moving forward at Mercedes is the continued threat of unionization.

When I hear that a Georgia state law taking effect this July could actually make that state’s voter challenge process even worse than it already is – keep in mind that a mere six professional right-wingers have challenged 90,000 voter registrations in Georgia – I start to think that this stupidity won’t end until liberals start challenging right-wing voter registrations the way right-wingers challenge Black and Brown voter registrations. We wouldn’t have to challenge 90,000 of them, either, before they cry uncle. And then the professional centrists will clutch their pearls about how uncivil liberals are, but it won’t matter, because we will finally have justice.

Uh oh: a Spectrum News report alleges that “millions” of good Texans’ tax dollars got diverted to an out-of-state charter school network founded by Houston’s Independent School District Superintendent, and perhaps not coincidentally, his corporation’s Colorado schools are all struggling, one of them closing down with $5 billion in outstanding bond debt. And yet he apparently gets to Hoover up Texas taxpayer money; nice work if you can get it! I know a lot of folks who fall for the promise of charter schools because their public schools are so awful, but we should make our public schools better, not divert public school funding to someone’s crony private schools that could be even worse.

Finally, continuing with our “nice work if you can get it!” theme, Robert Reich reminds us that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav somehow made almost $50 million last year despite his corporation losing $3 billion and his stock prices being a third of what they were two years ago. So he’s failing even by the yardsticks he would prefer you use to measure his performance! Measure him by, for example, CNN’s commitment to actual journalism (Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, an arrangement that by the way should not exist) and he’d come off far worse. And luckily Fran Drescher’s there to remind us that his corporation cries poor when it’s time to pay their workers, but not when it’s time to pay the boss. A mere 50.8% of shareholders approved his pay package; one does wonder how management twisted the arms of that last 0.9%.

Around the table: in which Volkswagen workers have a much better week than Tesla owners.

Good news, everyone: Volkswagen workers at that corporation's Chattanooga, TN plant have voted to join the United Auto Workers union. Workers have lost two elections at this plant before (in 2014 and 2019), but won this one; perhaps that pandemic has reset good Americans’ minds in more ways than one. Of course Tennessee’s politicos opposed unionization; dig Gov. Lee’s blathering that “(w)e’ve seen plants close that made the decision to go union so I hope that’s not what happens here.” Nice job; be a shame if something happened to it! What’s going to happen to it now? Better pay, better benefits, and better working conditions, that’s what. I am pleased to see that right-wing hostage-taking doesn’t always work.

Bad news, everyone: some 30,000 good Americans died waiting for their Social Security disability status to be determined. Did they all die from bureaucratic negligence? Of course not. But one person dying from bureaucratic negligence is too many, and the solution isn’t what right-wingers say it is – LET TEH MARKETZ DO ITZ!!!!!, when ha ha, big corporations will screw you over far worse than your government ever will. No, the solution is to process these claims a lot more quickly, which means more staffing and therefore more funding. Which, no, does not mean more taxes for you. We’ve got millionaires and billionaires we could be taxing a lot harder.

Emergency rooms in deep-red states have been turning pregnant women away since the fall of Roe v. Wade – despite the Emergency Treatment and Medical Labor Act (or EMTALA) making such negligence illegal. Some mothers have lost their babies because of it, which nobody could have predicted! Of course our Supreme Court will strike down EMTALA when they get around to it, intoning, again, that “abortion should be left to the states.” And I’m sure they’ll also be very sorry for all the pain that causes, but everyone who prizes ideology above people says that, and I’m old enough to be very tired of it.

Starbucks fired baristas who were organizing a union, our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) ordered them to rehire them – and now Starbucks wants our Supreme Court to overturn that decision. Starbucks’s case is absolute horsedoodle – they actually claim they didn’t intimidate the workers because the store unionized anyway and that giving them their jobs back somehow constitutes an “extraordinary remedy.” Sadly, I can see this Court agreeing, and delivering a real pretzel-logic argument to do so. On the bright side, no matter what our Court does, all the money Starbucks lost won’t come back.

Our “liberal” media needs to be a lot less credulous when covering Donald Trump’s so-called “middle-class tax cut” proposals. Increasing the standard deduction and cutting marginal rates for “middle-class households” would be good policy, of course, but Jesus Mary and Joseph a payroll tax cut is not a “middle-class tax cut,” but a big corporate tax cut designed to hurt middle-class folks later in life, when Social Security and Medicare aren’t there for them because the payroll taxes that fund it never got collected. And you know any middle-class tax cuts will only come with another big tax-cut-for-the-rich.

Finally, buried in this account of the massive 4,000 Tesla cybertruck recall because of accelerator pedals that stick to the floor is the news that “Tesla has reportedly stopped development of a cheaper vehicle option so it can focus on self-driving robotaxis.” And this is why we don’t “leave it to the free market” – given the choice of serving the public with cheaper cars and indulging their vanity, the Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurs who run the “free” market will choose vanity every time, particularly if they’re already so rich that they’ll escape accountability for every evil they do.

Around the table: now with approximately 29% good news!

Connecticut State Superior Court judge upholds Public Utilities Regulatory Authority’s order reducing Aquarion water bills by 11% – Aquarion wanted a 9% rate hike – and boy does he sound pissed: between “(i)t bears repeating that PURA possesses broad regulatory authority and equally broad discretion in setting rates” and “PURA is permitted to make its own factual determinations and is not required to accept evidence presented by Aquarion,” it sounds like he had to stop himself from writing how dare you waste my valuable time over and over again for 100 pages. Naturally Aquarion responds that keeping it from raising prices now means will only force it to raise prices in the future. Those who create rhetorical hostage situations deserve their own circle of Hell.

New York state settles with two Republican operatives for $1.25 million over their robocall campaign to keep Black voters from voting by mail. The playbook – telling Black voters that voting-by-mail means getting “tracked” for credit card debt and outstanding warrants – won’t surprise you, and though our FCC also fined them over $5 million, I really wish the state hadn’t settled on this; I really want folks like Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl to get jail time. And were they to emerge with a newfound zeal for getting better treatment and rehabilitation for prisoners, all the better!

When I hear that agents and brokers are switching good Americans out of their Affordable Care Act plans and into new ones without their consent, all I can say is: nice work if you can get it! Seriously, our civilization lets too many people who don’t do a damn bit of work just hurt good Americans over and over again. Getting defrauded in this manner means, among other things, not being able to see your doctors because now because they’re in a different network. Would it be piling on to to mention that if we expanded Medicare to include everyone, we wouldn’t need so many middlemen? No, it would not.

You may be familiar with most of the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) “playbook” on fighting and busting unions – “right-to-work,” prohibiting dues deductions from paychecks, like that. But you may not know about a new ALEC model bill called the “Uniform Worker Classification Act,” which, according to them, “ensures that the 80% of workers who prefer their independent contractor status are able to keep it, rather than being forced into traditional employment models.” You know, because California makes corporations to classify gig workers as “employees” (who get benefits) and not “independent contractors” (who don’t). I bet that 80% figure (if it’s not, you know, made-up) is about as useful as the 75%-prefer-their-private-health-insurance canard – people usually “prefer” the status quo until hard times find them and they learn how the status quo actually hurts them.

Mississippi state legislators can’t seem to pass a bill that would bring back ballot questions, even in the weak form (requiring supermajorities to pass, leaving abortion and the state constitution untouched) they obviously prefer. The 2021 state Supreme Court ruling – which held that ballot questions are unconstitutional, since the state constitution requires them to get signatures in five Congressional districts and Mississippi now only has four – may be the worst court ruling I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty in my lifetime. In the meantime, the legislature seems to telling the good people of Mississippi to go fuck themselves. I wish I could count on them paying for that with their jobs.

Jesus Mary and Joseph now Disney asserts it has a First Amendment right to fire Gina Carano for her social media posts. No, a corporation doesn’t have a First Amendment right to do a God damn thing, because a corporation is not a person, period, end of, full stop. And in the absence of a collective bargaining agreement that protects employees from being fired for their speech, Disney would already have the right to fire her for her speech. We’ve never had First Amendment rights at our jobs – though, as I’ve just suggested, we could organize and get them, or at least get some protection for our political speech, however noxious it might be. As long as we still have the right to organize! Louisiana Republicans are about to take that away from public sector workers as we speak.

Finally, the Oklahoma state House has overwhelmingly passed a bill criminalizing the “intentional or reckless” spread of sexually-transmitted diseases – which could make literally everyone in Oklahoma a felon! I’d think “intentional” would be hard to prove – though admittedly so many folks treat emails and texts like they’re not written records these days! – but “reckless” might be too much in the eye of the prosecutor, especially given that the bill doesn’t define “reckless.” Think any good Oklahomans will get tested for syphilis or chlamydia or the like if this bill passes? No, you do not. The state Senate hasn’t passed the bill yet; maybe they’ll at least pretend to be shamed by the media coverage. Seriously, though, Republicans can’t offer solutions unless they punish good people who don’t deserve it.

Around the table: a good week for evil, though not for junk fees.

Our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) passes rules preventing big telecom corporations from throwing a bunch of surprise junk fees in their “all-in” subscription plans. That the FCC’s two Republican Commissioners of course voted against it should remind us that Presidential elections matter – we may find the Biden Administration working a bit too slowly on junk fees for our taste, but there’s no way a second Trump Administration would have done a damn thing about them. And pay no mind to the corporate whining at article’s end – it’s “micromanagement” to make corporations stop lying to us about their prices? Pimps, please.

Hard to believe, Harry, but women are apparently ditching birth control pills after getting bad/wrong advice about them from social media. Even if birth control pills caused weight gain (they don’t) or infertility (ditto), we would do well to stack that up against the very real threat of far more easily getting pregnant and being forced by the state to give birth. Too many folks hear one thing that surprises or impresses them and think they know everything after that; if we weren’t all so susceptible to the sin of pride, we’d make better decisions and we’d suffer a whole lot less.

Ho hum, an educational nonprofit plans to expand its deployment of an AI “teaching assistant” to thousands of students next year. Why, that doesn’t sound at all like part of a plan to replace unionized public school teachers with unpaid robots that never get sick or go on vacation! And Thomas Jefferson is literally the father of American racism, so playing up his alleged hatred of slavery means even less than the on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand argument the AI tool makes. Machines are good at washing clothes and keeping food cold, not teaching kids. But their continued deployment will enable more Americans to congratulate themselves for knowing things when they don't.

Hedge fund corporations move into the autistic services field, and surprise, surprise! Autistic service centers start delivering worse service before closing down en masse. Banksters really do ruin everything – why, they even cause or enable abuse of autistic children, no doubt by breathing down everyone’s neck to CUTZ ALLZ TEH COSTZ!!!!! But let’s not let pass that chains of autistic service corporations shouldn’t exist, either, because the downward pressure to cut-costs-no-matter-who-gets-hurt comes from that direction, too. The solution to most problems in America is small businesses creating jobs, not big corporations creating “efficiency in markets.” I can barely type that phrase without throwing up.

Ho hum, NBC News wonders why the public thinks the crime rate is going up when it’s going down, which is a little like Donald Trump wondering why people think he shouts so much. The public think it’s going up because our “liberal” media always cover it like it’s going up. They’ve done better reporting actual facts about crime lately, but they still cling to local crime stories like grim death, reporting on them repeatedly over days and weeks, showing the same clips over and over again until it’s like all you see on the news is crime. How bad is it? Last week one of my co-workers saw a story about an arrest for a recent SEPTA bus shooting and asked if another shooting had happened. I’m pretty sure that’s a feature, not a bug.

Finally, another day, another right-wing punditoid opining that New York seizing Donald Trump’s property so he can pay off $450 million-plus in civil fraud judgments would “create the greatest victimhood of 2024” and “elect Donald Trump.” My immediate response would have been: so, you’re saying we should not enforce the law? As for “let’s not talk about whether it’s justified or not” – Jesus Mary and Joseph that is literally the only thing we should talk about! Americans hate political “analysis” because they hate having their lives reduced to a horserace, but our “liberal” media punditoids have nothing else to offer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Social Security, taxing the rich, and workers’ rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strengthen Social Security, start taxing wealth, and better protect workers’ right to organize. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits, not cut them. They pretend they can go “behind closed doors” to create their Death Panels to secretly cut Social Security benefits, but expanding Social Security benefits is something they actually can do, by raising the cap on income taxed into the Social Security system, as Civic Shout helps you tell them to do. Currently income over $168,600 doesn’t get taxed into Social Security at all, meaning Elon Musk would be done paying his annual Social Security taxes literally four minutes into the year. So let’s do something about that.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Reverse Community Harms (or OLIGARCH) Act, which would at long last start taxing wealth in America. The OLIGARCH Act would create four tax brackets for wealth, the highest of which would assess an 8% tax on wealth over 1,000,000 times the median household wealth. Rich folks will act like it’s a 100% tax on everything they have – Donald Trump said as much in 2019, with little correction from our “liberal” media – but don’t believe their hype. This tax will do nothing but good.

Finally, Cedar Key Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act. You’ve heard about Starbucks workers joining unions – but you haven’t heard about any contracts they’ve signed. Why might that be? Why, it might well be because Starbucks simply won’t talk to these workers, because our laws don’t punish corporations when they do that. The PRO Act would start to fix that problem, plus it would outlaw state-level right-to-work-for-less laws and coercive anti-union propaganda meetings. These would be good works, and we should encourage our Congressfolk to do them. But they won’t, unless we speak up.

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 junk fees, safe airways, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our FTC to fight junk fees, tell our FAA to protect our airways better, and tell our FTC to stop big oil corporation mergers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to take the most vigorous possible action against junk fees. Remember: folks who oppose FTC action want you never to know what you’re really paying for something until it’s too late, and why would they want that? So they can steal your money more easily, that’s why. And when right-wingers say big government regulations never work, a) remember they’re full of soup and b) ask them if never getting a transparent price is OK with them, because chances are they’ve been hurt by junk fees, too. I hope these rules do us some good before the 2024 election, because you think Donald Trump will protect us from junk fees? That is to laugh – that man is the human junk fee.

Civic Shout helps you tell our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) to start taking air traffic safety a lot more seriously. And if that means they have to use whatever lawful authority they have to ensure that we have enough air traffic controllers who get enough time off and don’t work themselves to the bone, then we’re just going to have to do that! I know “workers having enough rest and time off so they can stay sharp” is such a quaint concept – one that hinders big corporate CEOs from redistributing even more income upward, that’s for sure! – but air traffic controllers kinda have to be on their game all the time, especially with a New York Times report telling us that safety issues at airports are on the rise. So let’s make our government do the right thing.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our FTC to stop the proposed Chevron/Hess and Exxon/Pioneer mergers. I keep saying “proposed” because I don’t want people to think that they’re done deals just because our “liberal” media reports on them like they’re already done deals – I mean, that would be tremendously disrespectful of our input, don’tcha think? And not only are they not done deals, the Biden Administration has taken antitrust policy seriously for the first time in about eight Presidents. Another reason we’ve got to tell them to do the right thing: because ten thousand corporate hacks will tell them to do the wrong thing, and spread their BS about how some monopolies are good for people. As anyone who’s paid for anything lately could tell you, they’re not.

Action: concerning health care, taxes, and labor.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect women’s health care, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support legislation that protects women’s health care, including abortion and birth control. Polling consistently tells us that most Americans support abortion and birth control, which is yet another reason I don’t give up on the American people, even if their leaders are monsters. And supporting abortion and birth control is the right thing to do! No one salivates at the prospect of aborting a fetus, but the far worse thing to do is to re-create a society that values women only as breeders, and that’s where the pro-life movement aims to go. No use brandishing the word “religion” at me, either. Last I looked, both Judaism and Islam agreed with me, and they’re religions, too.

NETWORK, the Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021. You remember, the one that put $250 and $300 checks per child in working families’ bank accounts every month? Seems to me if Virginia’s Republican Governor can schedule tax rebates to hit voters’ mailboxes the week before Election Day, Democrats could have reminded them of the $250 and $300 campaign ads that hit working families’ bank accounts every month. Sadly, they’re still too weak to do that, let alone keep those actual tax cuts coming, but that’s why we’ve got to tell them what to do all the time.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, which would make it a lot easier for American workers to organize and bargain collectively for better pay and working conditions. We’re seeing how well unions work for good Americans even now with the United Auto Workers’ recent victory over Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, a victory that includes 25% pay raises over the next 4 ½ years and the reopening of a Belvedere, IL plant that had employed 1,200 workers. The PRO Act would, among other things, make it a lot harder for corporations to force workers to attend anti-union meetings, so Congress needs to get that done.

Action: concerning executive pay, nursing homes, and junk fees.

Long story short: tell President Biden to ban corporations that pay their CEOs too much from federal contracts, tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to strengthen their proposed nursing home patient-to-staff nursing home ratios, and tell our CFPB to stop credit card corporations from assessing onerous fees. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Inequality.org helps you tell President Biden to stop giving out federal contracts to corporations that pay their CEOs excessively. Yeah, President Biden can do that, because Congress has given him that power through legislation! And if Congress wants to keep him from doing that, they can take his power away. In the meantime, about half of all corporations feed at the taxpayer trough, so really, the least we can do is insist that if they pay their bosses bajillions of dollars while paying their workers in dung pellets, they can’t get taxpayer largesse anymore. As fate would have it, the big automaker corporations currently facing lengthy strikes by their workers have taken hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars these last few years, so how about we, as a famous philosopher used to say in another context, just say no?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) to strengthen their proposed patient-to-staff ratios for nursing homes. Which receive some $90 billion in Medicare and Medicaid funding annually, in case you were wondering how our government gets to set such ratios. Remember, that’s your money going to help seniors get the care they need! So let’s not leave it up to the big nursing home corporations, and certainly not to the bankster hedge fund corporations that have been gobbling up nursing homes and “cutting costs,” which always means cutting care. You didn’t think it meant cutting executive pay or hedge fund manager commissions, did you? It never means that to a worshiper of mammon. Thankfully we non-worshipers of mammon also get a say, so we should use it.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to limit credit card late fees to $8. Because credit card corporations don’t need any more than that to pay the cost of processing late fees, that’s why! And also because $40 late fees, if borrowers don’t pay them, just get added to the borrower’s balance and thus become considerably larger. And, ah, you’ve seen your credit card’s interest rate lately, right? Credit card interest rates average over 21% today, versus about 16.25% in 2022 and 14.6% in 2021. That effect of higher Fed interest rates most assuredly doesn’t benefit working people (though other effects – like the obliteration of the low- or no-interest loans for rich folks that keep working people from buying homes – most assuredly do). So onerous late fees get a lot bigger a lot faster. And if they don't reflect a corporation's actual costs, then they're junk fees, simple and plain! Thus we tell our CFPB to keep them down.

Action: concerning Social Security, saving our Postal Service, workers' rights, and school lunch debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, let our Postal Service offer more services, pass the PRO Act, and pass the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act . Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act. Currently, folks who get SSI benefits, who most assuredly do not get rich from their maximum monthly payments of $914 per month, can’t have more than $2,000 in savings (and just $3,000 for couples) or they’ll lose their benefits. Presumably, I don’t have to tell you how quickly you can go through $914, or how easily you can lose $2,000 (or $3,000) to the slightest mishap. The SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act would at least raise those limits to $10,000 per person (and $20,000 per couple, thus eliminating the “couple penalty”) and would also exclude retirement benefits from calculating those limits. Let right-wingers whine about fraud or “people getting free stuff.” Standing up to cruelty is a basic skill of civilized people.

Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would permit our Postal Service to offer more services. The Postal Service Reform Act allows our Postal Service to offer limited fishing hunting licensing services, but they could do so much more, particularly for otherwise underserved rural communities – they could offer basic banking services, obviously, but they could also offer vehicle charging, parking lot wi-fi, grocery delivery, and checking on seniors. Now, about that last item, you just know right-wingers would love to squeal TEH BIG BROTHURZ CHECKINGZ ONZ TEH SENYURZ!!!!! Just remember that these are the same people who willingly bought Alexas and cellphones, and thus allowed private corporations to spy on them pretty much with impunity. I’m so sick of right-wingers yelling “big gummint” whenever we might get our government to do good things.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would outlaw most corporate union-busting and give teeth to law enforcement when it goes after such corporate interference with worker organizing. You might even say that folks who oppose the PRO Act are objectively pro-defunding the police, or objectively anti-law and order. If folks come at you with unions make workplaces worse when you tell them they should support the PRO Act, come right back at them with so you think it’s OK for corporations to force their workers to sit through anti-union propaganda when they’ve got work to do? And if they respond it’s their money ha ha ha snort, ask them how shareholders should feel about them pissing it down the drain on anti-union propaganda, which is very expensive.

Finally, RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act, which would pay off the over $250 million of school lunch debt “accumulated” by good Americans. I put “accumulated” in quotation marks for many good reasons: one, our taxes should pay for school lunches, so nobody goes hungry, and two, it’s bad enough we blame adults for their poverty before we ever blame their bosses for refusing to pay them enough, but how bad is it, then, that we blame children for their parents’ poverty? I mean, you’d have to be a special kind of cruel to do that. Sadly, quite a few educators are that cruel, going so far as to publicly shame kids who don’t get caught up on the school lunch debt they shouldn’t even have to begin with. If we did more for those kids, we’d certainly give those educators a chance to be better versions of themselves.

Readings for October 3, 2023.

So you’ve heard that our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has sued Amazon for monopolistic practices. You already know Amazon’s a monopoly if you’ve ever uttered the phrase “just get it on Amazon,” but our FTC’s complaint is a bit more complex. I’ll try to summarize: Amazon leverages its Prime service to trap small businesses into using its platform exclusively, and because they have nowhere else to go, Amazon can charge them whatever onerous fees they like, fees that now amount to half of Amazon’s revenue. There’s even more to it than that, but note well that it’s not necessarily about customers like us, but rather the customers who use Amazon to help sell their wares. I’m old enough to remember when it seemed like you could cut out all those pesky middlemen like publishers and advertisers and just reach out and find people on the internet. I was naive, of course – not solely because I didn’t fully grasp that there’d be new middlemen like Amazon, but that’s the only reason that’ll help you make this world a better place.

Billy Periggo at Time describes “What the Luddites Can Teach Us About Artificial Intelligence.” Reminding us that the Luddites weren’t anti-machine but anti-exploitation, Mr. Periggo – drawing heavily on Brian Merchant’s new book Blood in the Machine – explains how big corporations will use AI to make films that are plainly inferior to what today’s artists make, just as factory owners in the early Industrial Revolution made goods that were plainly inferior to what the day’s artisans could make. The factory owners ultimately muscled those artisans out of the market despite the Luddites’ best efforts, but it looks like the writers’ union has protected themselves from a similar outcome – for now. In any case, “if new technologies erode wages and increase wealth inequality, it’s a result of a political choice by the owners of that technology, not a result of the inevitable and unstoppable march of progress.”

Readings for September 25, 2023.

We’ve heard enough about how subsidized economic development too frequently turns into corporate welfare for the undeserving rich, but is anyone doing it well? Good Jobs First finds two-count-’em-two American cities who are – Wichita, Kansas, and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Wichita’s Industrial Revenue Bond program is as transparent as they come, meaning that folks can learn whether corporations keep their wage and job promises when they take taxpayer money, while Grand Rapids spends a mere $14,000 per job, versus over $100,000 per job in nearby Lansing, and attracts over $30 in private investment per subsidized dollar. Hey, it’s only two examples, but it’s a beginning. Warning: the Wichita deep take link doesn’t work at this writing.

Sonali Kohatkar explains how the long-standing cooperative arrangement between Kaiser Permanente and its unions is about to fall apart, with the unions voting to strike at the end of this month. Long story short: Kaiser Permanente now acts more like a big corporate health care provider than the Medicare-for-All provider it occasionally seemed to be like, and the COVID pandemic put a strain on all hospital workers, to the point where they’re most definitely not content with half-measures. Will Kaiser Permanente come to its senses in the next few days? Probably not. Will its many satisfied customers ever be so satisfied again if they don’t? Certainly not. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere, admittedly a lesson few corporations know anymore, though all of them used to know it, or they’d face oblivion.

ProPublica reports that Massachusetts has several thousand subsidized apartments vacant despite having a 180,000-plus waitlist for folks who need housing. I’m going to say the big problems are that the state doesn’t tax the rich enough to fund programs like these, and (in a surely related note) they don’t hire enough people to vet applicants and fix apartments. I’m not sure centralizing applications state-wide (versus applying locally) is the root of all problems like some say, but the state should either develop a system that reaps the benefits of both (centralization reduces favoritism, while local authorities know their potential tenants better) or concede that favoritism simply isn’t as bad a problem as, you know, people with cancer living out in the street. If I can identify these problems, I’m sure they can, and they can almost certainly solve them better than I can, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning workers' rights, Social Security, and school lunches.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, tell Republicans you will not stand for raising the Social Security retirement age, and tell your Congressfolk to make school lunches free for all children in America. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you to tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, so that corporations won’t be able to walk all over workers trying to organize for better pay and working conditions quite as much as they are now. Folks could only oppose the PRO Act if they think “right-to-work” means something other than “right-to-work-for-less,” or if they think it’s perfectly OK for bosses to simply refuse to negotiate with workers who’ve already voted to organize. And why should such folks get all of the say about everything? Hell, why should they get invites to our cookouts?

Social Security Works helps you tell Republicans we will not permit them to raise the Social Security retirement age. That’s the big solution of “sane” Republicans like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott – none of them will, for example, start to tax income over $160,200 into the system, which would alleviate the shortfalls that are always a few decades off because right-wingers love to cry about “imminent” Social Security “insolvency.” They do it so you’ll be demoralized and fight them less, but don’t let them gaslight you into inaction!

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk that school lunches ought to be free for all children in America. What’s that you say? You mean they’re not already free? By God, what do our taxes pay for, then? Those are all legit questions, but school lunches actually cost money, which fewer Americans have now after half a century of our “leaders” sucking up to big corporate power, so now the especially small minds in government resort to lunch shaming in order to get working families to pony up overdue school lunch bills. No civilization should put up with that – and no civilization should let it get that bad, either.

Action: concerning labor, law and order, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell your Senators to confirm Gwynne Wilcox to our NLRB, and tell your Congressfolk to end qualified immunity for police officers and ban cyanide bombs from our public lands. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gwynne Wilcox to our National Labor Relations Board. Ignore anything right-wingers say about how our NLRB is waging a “war on employers” or something – they’re just shilling for their big corporate donors, as always, and those big corporate donors would vastly prefer to pay their workers in dung pellets and then prevent them from ever organizing for better pay and working conditions. If they stonewall the Wilcox nomination, our NLRB won’t have a quorum of members to get things done. That’s what right-wingers want. Don’t let them have it.

Both the Daily Kos Liberation League and Defending Rights and Dissent help you tell your Congressfolk to end “qualified immunity” for law enforcement officers. “Qualified immunity,” a doctrine born entirely of a Supreme Court decision, gives police officers too much immunity from wrongdoing, by requiring the circumstances of their wrongdoing to be exactly the same as previous instances of wrongdoing before we can do anything about it. That makes them too protected from accountability. Do we want anyone too protected from accountability? Particularly if they have the power to arrest us and shoot us?

Finally, the Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell Congress to outlaw cyanide bombs on public lands. Cyanide bombs supposedly aim to kill predators, but truth is they’re indiscriminate killers – they maim and kill animals that don’t do any harm to the circle of life, plus they maim and kill people, too. Civilized people don’t accept that as the eggs we must break to make an omelette. I trust I don’t have to argue this point any further.

Around the table: the drama, it burns! Part 399.

Here’s some good news: a Leon County circuit judge has struck down Florida’s last gerrymander and told the state legislature it’ll have to do better. Right-wingers will appeal, but they’ll have to come up with something better than “Florida’s state Constitution violates our federal Constitution,” which argument sure doesn’t sound very states’ rights of them, does it?

Don’t get too excited that3M will pay $5.5 billion for selling defective earplugs to our soldiers, because that suit has 300,000 plaintiffs, working out to less than $18,500 each and that’s not counting the lawyers’ cut, and might we say hearing loss (not to mention betrayal!) is worth more than that? Anyway, file that under “Why We Shouldn’t Privatize Shit, Part 2399” and "The Private Sector is So Not Better Than the Public Sector, Part 3884."

It’s heartening to hear that most Americans – even most Republicans – support unions and strikes, but remember that those numbers will go down the minute corporate propagandists go on TV with their they get goodies you don’t get rubbish. The obvious answer to that is well, then organize for more goodies, and also punish bosses who refuse to negotiate.

When I hear that wannabe Nazis marched through a Florida park chanting “we are everywhere,” all I can say is no, you’re not. The article doesn’t note that there were no more than 50 marchers in that “terrifying” video. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to Nazis, of course, but how about we stop giving them the big dramas they want?

Be careful reading stories telling you that TEH EPA IZ REMOVINGZ PROTEKSHUNZ FORZ TEH WETLANDZ!!!!!, because our EPA is literally only complying with our Supreme Court’s will. That information should be in the headline, not just the lede. It’s not in the headline because our “liberal” media are lazy, stupid, or evil. But I repeat myself.

Finally, billionaires are having trouble building a “new green city” in Northern California because they’ve pissed off all the locals. This article is way, way too credulous, so I’ll say it: they want to build a “new green city”? That is to laugh! Billionaires just want to build a city that redlines Black and Brown out of it. They also want to be able to abuse the help with impunity.

Action: concerning striking workers, encryption, and free tax filing.

Long story short: tell Hollywood to meet actor/writer demands and end their strike, tell Meta to encrypt Messenger chats already, and tell our IRS to ensure that all good Americans can file their taxes directly for free. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell big Hollywood corporate executives to end the writers/actors strike by meeting their demands. Don’t let the occasional Seth MacFarlane or Adam McKay lead you to believe the life of a Hollywood writer is cush – the vast majority of Hollywood writers have just as much trouble making the bills as you or I, while the vast majority of Hollywood executives make millions of dollars, and want to replace all their writers and actors with AI as we speak. Of course, as Simon Pegg has pointed out, AI only imitates other folks’ work and has nothing of consequence to say on its own. Also too, all workers are important. So let’s get in these bosses’ grills.

UltraViolet helps you tell Meta to install end-to-end encryption for all Messenger chats like it said it would. While Meta fiddles, good Americans go to jail for having abortions or helping their family members get abortions – and Meta enables it all by turning over their data to law enforcement! If Meta had to turn over a bunch of data it couldn’t read and cops couldn’t read, that’d help good Americans struggling against our Supreme Court’s right-wing tyranny. You might say this isn’t particularly a law-and-order stance, but I reserve that phrase largely for banksters, polluters, and fascists, not for folks just trying to muddle through, and certainly not for folks offending right-wing wannabe tyrants. Shouldn’t we get more say than wannabe tyrants?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Internal Revenue Service (or IRS) to support direct, free tax filing for all Americans. Our IRS will start a pilot program for direct, free tax filing next year, but this ain’t rocket science, particularly since our IRS already has all the information it needs to do your taxes and we hardly need all the private, for-profit tax-filing corporations standing between us and our obligations to our civilization. I’m sure right-wingers will get around to saying that private tax-filing corporations are job creators, but I suspect most Americans will find that as unconvincing an attempt at hostage-taking as I do.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, worker rights, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase Medicare and Social Security funding, protect worker rights, and protect abortion rights. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would help improve Medicare and Social Security funding by taxing income over $400,000 into both systems, applying payroll taxes to investment income, and closing a loophole that hedge fund banksters use to avoid paying into the systems. These are all much, much better ideas than “going behind closed doors” and cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits without the people hearing about it. After all, you worked for it, you fought for it, you paid into it, and you deserve to enjoy your benefits when you get older.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would stiffen penalties for corporations that refuse to let their workers collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. The main problem with labor law in America is corporations can break it without paying for it, but that’d change with the PRO Act, which would make refusing to negotiate with unions, intimidating workers, and propagandizing them in mandatory meetings a lot more costly. And what’s the alternative? Letting corporations get bigger and richer and hoping that wealth will “trickle down” to workers? Hopefully we’ve seen by now that doesn’t work.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject a national abortion ban, while UltraViolet helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion Justice Act, which latter bill would keep abortion between a woman and her doctor. Strange how all the right-wingers who demanded that Obamacare stay out of the whole patient-doctor thing are all too ready now to get between women and their doctors. OK, I guess it’s not “strange” per se – the right-wing desire to turn women back into submissive breeders explains the “strangeness” away. It’s still hypocritical, though. Is it too much to ask that hypocrites don’t get all the say about everything?

Action: concerning child labor and pollution.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to enforce child labor laws, and tell our EPA to enact vigorous mercury and tailpipe emissions rules. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell the Biden Administration to enforce federal child labor laws against the states that would destroy them. Iowa’s new law is justly notorious, allowing younger kids to work more hours at more dangerous workplaces, but a lot of states want to do the same thing; I guess right-wingers “blame” higher wages for that, but those wages are the result of millions of Americans taking stock of their lives during the pandemic and deciding they wanted more from their jobs than the back of their bosses’ hands. So naturally they turn to child labor! Their efforts deserve humiliation then oblivion, so let’s get our government to deliver that.

Moms Clean Air Force helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous mercury emissions rules possible. As with lead, no amount of mercury is safe (just ask Zombie Isaac Newton!), but coal power plants still belch it out. No use going all TEH WAR ON COALZ!!!! whenever we contemplate limiting mercury emissions; one would think a coal corporation would constantly refine its processes to deliver energy more efficiently and pollutes less! But one would also realize that coal corporations, like all the others, mainly try to goose up stock prices at the expense of every other aim, and that’s why our government has to step in on our behalf and make them do the right thing.

Finally, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous passenger car and truck tailpipe emissions rules possible, so that we pollute the air less and save good American car-drivers money. Passenger cars and trucks account for well over half of all vehicle-caused climate emissions, and if you can go farther with less power, you’ll spend less money as well as pollute less. And why would anyone oppose these things? Are folks really objectively pro-pollution? Well, some are objectively pro-more money for rich folks, and that leads them to be objectively pro-pollution, whether they see that or not. Of course, they don’t get all the say about everything in America – if we speak out.

Thieves in the Temple will be off all next week, so everyone, enjoy your holiday!

Action: concerning discrimination, workers' rights, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Equality Act, the PRO Act, and the Medicare for All 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Equality Act. The Equality Act, as you know, would prevent landlords, banks, and governments from discriminating against gay, transgender, and queer folks, which sounds like something we all ought to support, regardless of the right’s fearmongering about “boys in girls’ locker rooms” like boys will literally become girls just to grope some teenage T&A. But let’s also contemplate state governments conducting “underwear inspections” of kids to make sure they’re not trans and note that the Equality Act would also help us prevent schools from becoming state-mandated child molesters.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Wondering why Starbucks won’t negotiate with all their workers who voted to unionize? Because the price for failing to negotiate is a slap on the wrist! The PRO Act would change that, by setting deadlines for corporations to negotiate with a fair contract with workers, and getting our government involved in those negotiation if need be; the bill would also stiffen penalties for intimidating workers and forcing them to attend anti-union propaganda meetings. Most times when employers break the law, they don’t have to pay a dime; the PRO Act would change that, so Congress should pass it.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare for All Act, which would put everyone in America on Medicare and ensure we pay a lot less for our health care. As I’ve said before, levying an employer-side payroll tax (i.e., one not paid by workers) totaling the money corporations already pay for private health insurance would fund Medicare-for-All just fine, and even cover the 30 million Americans without health insurance. But just wait until you hear that CEOs at the seven biggest publicly-traded health insurance corporations took home over $330 milllion last year! I wonder how many surprise medical bills that could’ve paid for! Needless to say, we won’t have that problem with Medicare for All.

Readings for May 16, 2023: special "AI's creators still suck!" edition.

Naomi Klein surveys the AI landscape and concludes that tech CEOs are “kidding themselves” that AI will “benefit humanity.” Benefit their continuing efforts to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, maybe! “There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshaled to benefit humanity,” she writes. “But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.” They’d also have to happen in a world where big corporations had any respect for data and the folks who create it, which, of course, they do not. Also too, it’s a bit rich for Our Glorious Elites to say “AI will solve the problems” that Our Glorious Elites could already have helped us solve, if they but had the will.

In a related note, Alex Pareene at Defector reminds us that “The Computers Are Coming for the Wrong Jobs.” AI “is well-suited at the task of blandly rewriting copy, which makes it the perfect employee of the sorts of content mills that exist to aggregate and rewrite tech or entertainment news,” but not so good at, you know, any kind of expression that requires an understanding of language, which certainly includes the kind of scriptwriting that big corporations seem to think is so easy for some reason. (No use telling me most big Hollywood scripts follow the same template these days, because, as we all know, those templates come and go.) Also, “AI as it currently exists – that is, “large language model” programs like ChatGPT – only appears ‘free’ or even ‘cheap’ because it is being heavily subsidized by investors and tech companies that hope to eventually pass along the costs of training and operating these programs to clients like, say, large film and television studios.”

While we’re still on the subject of scriptwriting, turns out the Hollywood writers’ strike “shows how to fight back” against corporations wanting to “replace” you with AI. They’re demanding that studios not replace them with AI, and if they can hold out, they’ll get what they want – and they’ll teach the rest of us that we can protect our jobs, too, since corporations are coming after all of them, not just the ones that produce words. And don’t be heartened by the notion that big entertainment corporations just want to generate scripts with AI and have humans rewrite them so they don’t suck, because studios pay less for rewrites than for original writing. Anyway, don’t watch any scab- or AI-written entertainment; it won’t kill you to give, say, Mad Men another go, and remind yourself what real writing is like.

Finally, this Associated Press report warns that AI-generated ad content could be far worse than deepfakes and memefarms. “Sophisticated generative AI tools can now create cloned human voices and hyper-realistic images, videos and audio in seconds, at minimal cost,” they write. “When strapped to powerful social media algorithms, this fake and digitally created content can spread far and fast and target highly specific audiences, potentially taking campaign dirty tricks to a new low.” Indeed, the Republican National Committee has already created an ad full of AI-generated images (which they identified as AI) of boarded-up storefronts and crime waves coming from Brown people, but at least two can play at that game. Just wait until I get around to creating an AI ad showing what America would be like if Republicans took over; I bet Congress would ban AI in campaign ads with a quickness!

Action: concerning noncompete agreements and health care.

Long story short: tell our FTC to ban noncompete agreements, tell President Biden not to let 15 million Americans lose their Medicaid coverage, and tell our government to force nursing homes to disclose their ownership. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban noncompete agreements in employment contracts. Noncompete agreements keep workers from getting jobs elsewhere – under the notion that if you get a job with a competitor, you’ll reveal all your former employer’s trade secrets! Of course there are already laws to deal with people who reveal trade secrets, and besides, most workers covered by noncompetes now are truly working class – they’re baristas, janitors, fast food workers, home care workers, and the like; one wonders exactly what their big corporate employers think they'll “reveal.” Of course it’s all venal, and we should fight venality whenever it rears its ugly head.

Roots Action helps you tell President Biden not to let folks who’ve been getting Medicaid due to the COVID emergency lose their health insurance. As Roots Action reminds us, this is yet another problem we wouldn’t have if Medicare covered everyone, like it should! But in the meantime, let’s not let 15 million good Americans lose their Medicaid because the COVID emergency is over (or, perhaps more precisely, “over”). Personal to those who say we can’t help everyone: ah, if we can help billionaires keep more of their unearned wealth, we can help our friends and neighbors get the health care they need – not least because all of us pay for it later if they don’t.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) to force nursing homes to disclose their owner’s identity, not least because we have a lot of bankster-owned nursing homes whose residents die of COVID at a higher rate while their executives make millions of dollars. For speculators like hedge funds, everything exists to be bled to death, but these are our parents and grandparents and friends and neighbors suffering due to the bankster mania to cut all costs to zero, so we should at least know which “private equity” fools we’re dealing with. And if they feel “bullied,” they should take their billion-dollar ball and go home.

Action: concerning health care and worker rights.

Long story short: tell big health insurers to keep covering cancer screenings, tell our Department of Health and Human Services to reduce the price of Xtandi, tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to force nursing homes to disclose their ownership, and tell Starbucks to negotiate with its unionized workforce. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell big health insurance corporations to keep covering cancer screenings and other forms of preventive health care at no cost. If you want to reduce costs in the long term, you cover preventive care now, but of course big corporations don’t care about anything but the short term, and now that the most anti-Obama judge in the land has struck down the Affordable Care Act’s preventive care plank, big health insurance corporations may be tempted to stop covering it, particularly if they’ve got another monthly stock price target to meet. Thus we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR once again.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to, ah, reconsider its decision to let Astellas Pharmaceuticals charge $189,000 per dose for its prostate cancer drug, Xtandi. Are you the one who says ah, don’t worry, insurance will cover it? I sure hope not, because even though health insurers will generally cover most of the cost, “most,” here, leaves folks paying about $10,000 per dose, for a life-saving drug. You and I don’t have that kind of money lying around! And guess what else? Taxpayer money helped develop this drug! So we should get more say in this matter.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) to require that nursing home corporations disclose their owners, particularly if those owners are the hedge fund corporations that even Donald Trump once said “get away with murder.” “Get(ting) away with murder” may be a bit too literal in this case, since the science tells us that private equity-owned nursing home residents get worse care than residents at other homes. You’ll ask for stricter reporting requirements as well; CMS seems sympathetic to all of this, but you know how it is – they’ll fold under big corporate pressure unless we deal out some pressure of our own.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell Starbucks’s incoming CEO to stop union-busting and start negotiating with the workers who’ve unionized, as our laws require them to do. Even though workers at over 300 Starbucks locations have unionized over the last year-plus, Starbucks still won’t negotiate with them, still fires organizers, and still drags workers off to anti-union propaganda meetings, and though our government might not punish any of that, all of it is immoral, and all of it makes Starbucks less popular, which means all of it will cost them money over the long term. Shame our Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurs don’t see the long term as well as the rest of us. So we have to make them.

Around the table: down with right-wing rage!

You need only remember one thing about all of the Murdoch empire’s recent assertions that trans people are causing all the mass shootings now: to paraphrase Neil Gabler, three incidents of chicken pox don’t make an epidemic. Now, the vast super-majority of angry white men mass murdering people? That’s an epidemic! While it’s sad to see right-wingers still doing the just-let-me-tell-you-three-stories shtick all these years later, it’s even sadder that trans hatred will be the gateway drug to right-wing masturbatory rage for some of your friends and neighbors once they suffer a few reversals in life.

Now speaking of actual drugs, our FDA approved naloxone, the drug that can reverse opioid overdoses, for sale over the counter this past week, giving the lie to right-wingers who constantly tell us that our government can’t ever do anything right. And while drug abusers may not have the presence of mind to use such a drug, their loved ones more likely will. No this will not become some “get out of death card” that will “cause more people to become drug addicts.” That’s not how drug addiction works, except in the rage-addled minds of right-wingers.

When I heard that outgoing Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, whom nobody likes, opined before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that Starbucks has never broken our labor laws! – at which point Sen. Sanders reminded him that he was under oath – I wondered if maybe our labor laws were so bad that there was actually a chance he might be right! Alas, even though our labor laws are pretty bad, he was still not right. I guess his next defense will be that he really doesn’t believe Starbucks ever actually broke the law, which is exactly the kind of post-modern sleaze right-wingers only ever tolerate from CEOs. Our best and brightest entrepreneurs, ladies and gentlemen!

Ho hum, a right-wing judge who’s struck down Obamacare before has struck down the law’s mandate that health insurance corporations cover preventative care for free, because what’s a judge for, except to cut down laws that actually help good Americans? Possibly this ruling will go down in flames just like his last one did – though our Supreme Court has gotten a lot worse since then, I’m pretty confident they’ll at least narrow its scope – but it doesn’t matter that an employer’s “conscience” tells them they’d be promoting homosexuality or promiscuity if they covered PrEP, because HIV can infect anyone. Gosh, even Nancy Reagan knew that.

Former Trump Organization employees told New York Times columnist Maggie Haberman that they “were really happy” over the Big Man’s indictment, which is easily the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! Seriously, if you’ve ever worked for a bad boss – and I’d say the chances are close to 100% that you have! – you know this to be true. That’s before we even consider all the contractors Mr. Trump has stiffed over the years.

Finally, a jury finds Minnesota Republican operative Anton Lazzaro guilty of five counts of sex trafficking minors, plus one count of conspiracy. You can’t help but think it’s always it’s the right-wingers who accuse liberals of sex trafficking kids – but it’s always the right-wingers we find actually sex trafficking kids. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.

Action: concerning child labor, pollution, railway safety, and paid family/medical leave.

Long story short: tell our Department of Labor to stop big corporations from using child labor, and tell your Congressfolk to reject the TAP American Energy Act, pass the Railway Safety Act, and enact a national paid family/medical leave program. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Care2 helps you tell our Department of Labor to stop big corporations from using child labor in America. Thought we had that debate already, didn’t you? Thought we were past that, didn’t you? But I think we’ve seen over the past 20 years that there’s no pillar of civilized behavior Republicans won’t destroy to please their corporate paymasters. The question, of course, is whether a Democratic government will bend to their will – which, let’s be honest, has totally been their M.O. for all these years! – or do our will. The answer is the same as always: Democrats will do nothing until we make it impossible for them to do nothing, so we’ve got to get in their grills here just as we do elsewhere.

Environmental Action, People’s Action, and the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 1, the so-called TAP American Energy Act, which would allow more fossil fuel drilling on public lands, reverse all of the renewable energy initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act, and weaken clean air and clean water regulations. Public lands, renewable energy, clean air, and clean water are all actually popular with good Americans, which must be why Republicans are so hot to shit on them that they’ve actually made this bill their signature bill of this Congress. So let’s stop their latest attempt to inflict their stupidity and venality upon us.

Real Populists helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Railway Safety Act. With Transportation Secretary Buttigieg acting like his hands are always tied even when our laws say they’re not, our Congressfolk have to act, not that they’re all that anxious to do that, either. Why act when you can just look like you’re acting, after all? But even a few noxious Republicans have voiced support for ensuring rail cars have two-person crews (which the bill would mandate), and given how much the East Palestine derailment was in the news, it really shouldn’t be a heavy lift to demand stricter regulations on chemicals and bigger fines for breaking those restrictions. But if we say nothing, they'll do nothing.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid family/medical leave legislation. With the House in control of drama-addicted Republicans, and with the Senate’s Democratic majority once again limited by whatever Joe Manchin wants to do, chances of getting paid family/medical leave legislation is low. We should still demand it! Why let them tell us what’s possible? Virtually every other nation on the planet has it, so we should definitely not let them tell us what’s possible! Plus it would be relatively inexpensive – the Kirsten Gillibrand bill would have taken a mere $8 per month out of your paycheck if you make $50,000 annually. Eight dollars! So let’s not let fools dictate reality to us.

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.

Around the table: down with Drama Kings!

Good news on abortion rights from another red state, as the Oklahoma Supreme Court rules that the state constitution guarantees a right to an abortion “at any point in the pregnancy” when a doctor finds “with a reasonable degree of certainty” that denying the abortion would “endanger the woman’s life.” It’s a narrow right, to be sure, but it expands the only right offered by state law, which only allows abortion when a woman is in “actual and present danger” of dying. Personal to those who think the doctor’s determination is a loophole women will drive a Mack truck through: ain’t you the folks who say government should never get between doctor and patient? Or did you just mean you, and not “those people”?

University of British Columbia researchers find a way to get rid of the notorious PFAS “forever chemicals” from our water. The UBC process not only promises to get rid of 99% of all PFAS chemicals but obliterate them as well, via “special electrochemical and photochemical techniques”; destroying the chemicals would rid us of the problem of “more highly toxic solid waste that will be another major environmental challenge.” So maybe the big corporations will cajole our EPA into loosening standards well before the technology becomes widely-available? Hey, if I thought of it, I’m sure they did. In the meantime, I wish the UBC researchers the best of luck in solving an extraordinarily difficult problem.

From the “It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Guy!” file: big advertisers still haven’t returned to Twitter, almost six months after Elon Musk took over, at least in part because they have little confidence Mr. Musk can’t/won’t keep Twitter from becoming, to borrow Mr. Musk’s own phrase, a “free-for-all hellscape” where racists and other bigots run rampant. I think Twitter’s reputation as a not-free-for-all hellscape before Mr. Musk bought it is rather overstated, but let’s not set the bar too low here. And I’m not of the mind that we should just let big corporations eat each other – the law may not recognize Twitter (and other social media sites) as publishers per se, but that’s what they are, and that would make content moderation literally job one at Twitter, regardless of Mr. Musk’s distaste for that task.

Ho hum, now Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) wants to expand Florida’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” law to all the higher grades as well as the lower ones. Remember when your right-wing friends said “it’s not for all kids, it’s just for the really young ones who hardly understand sexuality anyway”? Now we know that they were either stupid or lying, neither of which is a good look, and anyway we ought to just go with “lying,” since the facts don’t justify giving right-wingers the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, Governor, come get your poll tax, if you have the guts.

Speaking of the Drama Kings, both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have now said that Mr. DeSantis would not be Mr. Trump’s running mate if Mr. Trump secures the Republican Presidential nomination in 2024, which should surprise no one, since both men are residents of Florida and Article II, Section 1 of our Constitution prohibits the President and Vice President from living in the same state. (The 12th Amendment, which largely rewrites the relevant part of Section 1, maintains this prohibition.) So, how about we never speak of this possibility again? No, not even to goad right-wingers into dreaming of the impossible; they do that enough anyway.

Finally, from the “Dystopia is Here Now!” file: clothing corporation Levi Strauss & Co. will use artificial intelligence-generated avatars in order to “increase diversity” among its models! And here you thought diversity was about helping real people get more opportunities to succeed in life, but not to the corporations that would never pay any worker any money if they could get away with it! I have to infer all of that, because Levis says it can’t fulfill its diversity obligations using just real people without explaining why. I mean, it's not like corporations can't find Black actors or models, as you know if you watch almost any TV.