Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning government spending, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to hold on to their Constitutionally-mandated spending functions and not to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or food stamps. 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.

Bowers News Media helps you remind your Congressfolk that they, and not some extra-governmental "Department of Governmental Efficiency," initiate and approve all spending legislation. Our Constitution is pretty plain on that! Of course it could get even worse: our incoming President-elect could simply refuse to spend funds as Congress has appropriated, and use the Impoundment Control Act to demand that Congress rescind those funds. All so a bunch of assholes can ram through spending cuts to hurt hundreds of millions of good Americans and protect billionaires. How about we throw sand in those gears?

In a related note, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut Social Security or Medicare, while the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut Medicaid. They'll claim America's broke – hell, they'll make America broke! – and then claim we just "have to" cut programs that help tens of millions of Americans, instead of, you know, bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income that created the greatest middle class in history. Those 77 million self-absorbed Americans who hate being told they're wrong about anything will see very shortly that their pet monster only hurts people. I hope their pain is instructive.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen, not cut, food stamp benefits. Right-wing politicians have such a hard-on for cutting Medicaid and food stamps, don't they? It's like they know they're good programs that help a lot of people. They impose all these work requirements and felony requirements on them under the guise of "stopping fraud," but these things don't stop fraud but mercy. Seriously, what a leader would to is a) make sure everyone has what they need and b) put fraudsters in jail. No one seems to understand what leadership is anymore. And they watched Joe Biden for four years, so they have no excuse.

Action: concerning pollution, bogus spending commissions, and tax cuts for the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to repeal Biden Administration rules that benefit all of us, ignore the Musk/Ramaswamy cost-cutting commission, and let the bad parts of the 2017 tax "reform" expire. 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 Lever reminds us that the incoming Congress would just love to repeal as many Biden Administration rules as possible, so now would be a good time to call your Congressfolk and tell them to oppose any effort to repeal said rules. These include our EPA's lead pipe rule (which would result in cleaner water and less brain damage for our children) and methane emissions rule (methane, as you recall, packs a much bigger climate change punch than coal emissions). Republicans hope you don't remember that, you know, you hate pollution, and you like clean air and water and a non-burning planet. But will remind everyone if we have to.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to ignore the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency (or DOGE), particularly since such a Commission would have no Constitutional power to do a damn thing (since spending laws can only come from Congress). Even our President-elect says it will "provide advice and guidance from outside of government," which sure doesn't sound like big talk. And isn't it strange that our President-elect promised to put Elon Musk at the head of the DOGE – and then put Vivek Ramaswamy at the head of it, too? Putting two egomaniacs at the head of a commission sure sounds like a recipe for disaster! Still, we can't count on fantasies of realpolitik; we can only count on ourselves speaking out.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to let all the worst aspects of the 2017 tax "reform" bill expire. They weren't all bad – expanding the personal exemption was good, and we should expand it further – but even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and massive corporate tax cuts and tax cuts for the rich (all of which were bigger than any tax cut you or I got!) were terrible. These people don't need more tax cuts! They already have enough money! And cutting their taxes will mean one thing down the road: a manufactured "crisis" leading our government to try to take everything from us, like our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If we don't speak out, we can kiss all of that goodbye.

Action: concerning Medicare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare to cover long-term, home-based care, and to reject any of Project 2025's plans to privatize Medicare. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare so that it covers home-based, long-term care. We're all probably going to need it when we get old! But Medicare, despite covering health care costs that, you know, old folks have to pay, doesn't cover it, and don't let anyone tell you the private sector can just take care of it, because the crap-ass long-term private sector care costs six figures a year. Of course the situation is even worse than that – only Medicaid currently covers long-term care, and you have to spend all your money and sometimes even get divorced to qualify. No one should have to do all of that! It's cruel and evil! So let's get to stepping.

Social Security Works also helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Project 2025's nefarious plans for Medicare. Which are to make Medicare Advantage – the privatized Medicare health insurance plans that don't cover your needs and siphon off taxpayer money we'd better use to improve real Medicare -- the default option for all new Medicare enrollees, meaning that when you get old enough, they'll automatically put you in a crap-ass Medicare Advantage program that only delivers "advantages" to their executives. “Advantages” in the form of money they don't pay to cover your needs that they redistribute upward to themselves, in case I'm not being clear! So we've got to put a stop to that.

Action: concerning Social Security, clean air and water, and intravenous fertilization.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security by taxing the rich more, and pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and the Right to IVF 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 protect and expand Social Security by taxing the rich a lot harder than we’re doing now. Everything your right-wing uncle loves about America – good-paying jobs and benefits for working families, a neighborhood where you didn’t have to lock your doors at night – came about not because “we let big business innovate” but because we taxed the fuck out of the rich in the middle of the 20th century. And your right-wing uncle loves Social Security, too, even if he professes to “hate” socialism – and we could start taxing income over $168,600 into the system and make it pay out more in benefits. So how about we do all of that?

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and thus end tax breaks for oil and gas-producing corporations. Your right-wing uncle hates people on welfare, right? Then why doesn’t he hate big oil and gas corporations that get over $17 billion annually in corporate welfare from the taxpayer (including him!) when the three biggest oil and gas corporations in America made $85 billion in profits in 2023? Surely your right-wing uncle can think of better things to do with $17 billion – like, you know, fund infrastructure projects that create jobs. Your right-wing uncle should call his Congressfolk! But we should also do that.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to IVF Act, which would (as its title suggests!) protect intra-venous fertilization (or IVF) by establishing a statutory right to IVF access and compelling Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance corporations to cover IVF. You kinda have to do both, after all – as we are experiencing far more than we deserve right now, a “right” to health care means very little if you can’t actually afford health care. We’d be a lot better off if Medicare provided all of our health insurance needs; then we could apply pressure to keep costs down a lot more effectively than we can now. But this bill will do some good, so we should pass it.

Around the table: today with a mere 57% good news.

Our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) discovers that American oil corporations actually colluded with the Saudi Arabian government to raise gas prices, which accounted for about 27% of inflation in 2021 and cost the average American family $3,000 just last year. Not just in higher gas prices, of course, but also in the movement of pretty much any product, since trucks run on gas. But sure, let’s pretend gas price hikes were all about Ukraine and clean air and clean water regulation! And when right-wing morons say our FTC is “out of control,” remember that finding evidence of price-fixing collusion with foreign governments is what they mean by “out of control.”

Biden Administration issues rule requiring minimum staffing requirements in nursing homes for the first time ever. The rule also requires 80% of Medicaid funding to go to nursing home worker salaries, i.e., instead of already-overpaid and overfed executives. The rule will make it harder for big nursing home corporations to keep goosing up profits (and therefore executive and shareholder wealth) by cutting staffing so that nobody in a nursing home can get decent care. So remember that when right-wing morons claim that the Biden Administration rule will “hurt investors” and therefore “close nursing homes,” as if they have never heard of the concept of demand.

Ground breaks on the Brightline West high-speed rail line that would run from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and go as fast as 200 mph; planners expect it’ll be finished in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Now cue the thousands of right-wingers (many of them employed by television networks) who will utter the words “high-speed rail” with a snicker in the hopes that everyone else will just assume high-speed rail must be very silly. No, really, that’s as far as they’ll go to argue against it. The good news? People don’t take them nearly as seriously as they used to. January 6 can do that to a movement.

Biden Administration cancels over $6 billion in student loan debt for over 300,000 students who attended one of the many Art Institutes across America between January of 2004 and October of 2017. Now cue the thousands of right-wingers who will squeal HAHAHAHA ART STUDENTZ AREZ SOZ TEH STUPIDZ!!!!!, though of course the real problem here is that the Art Institute lied to its students about what their job prospects would be if they attended the school. Why, they even inflated average salaries by including that of Serena Williams, who attended an Art Institute for a few terms! But to a particular kind of law-and-order mindset, fraud isn’t really a crime when it happens to people you don’t like.

Here’s some great news from Ecuador: voters actually rejected their government’s attempts to re-integrate Ecuador into investor-state dispute settlement (or ISDS) systems, a feature of “free” trade deals which allows big corporations to run roughshod over a nation’s laws by claiming that, say, labor or environmental laws “cost them money.” Which, once again, suggests that when you ask the voters the right question, they tend to give the right answer – although politicians tend to ask the wrong questions on purpose, and asking 11 questions at once, as Ecuador did, can wear voters down (since voters also approved some pretty awful “security”-related initiatives). As an aside, which of these two fools do you want to represent you? is pretty clearly one of the wrong questions.

When I hear that Cigna threatened to fire a doctor who didn’t deny medical claims quickly enough, I’m compelled to ask: maybe finance people shouldn’t make all the decisions all the time at every single corporation? Or maybe private, for-profit health insurance corporations shouldn’t exist? And as for hand-wringing about “efficiency,” the article explains fairly clearly: “(m)easuring the speed and output of employees is common in many industries, from fast food to package delivery, but the use of these kinds of metrics in health care is controversial because the stakes are so high. It’s one thing if a rushed server forgets the fries with your burger. It’s another entirely if the pressure to act fast leads to wrongful denials of payment for vital care.” And dig the Cigna spokeshack claiming that “(e)ven if medical directors were incentivized to review more claims — which they are not — it makes no sense to suggest that this incentivizes denials; it would be far quicker to approve all claims.” And far more expensive to Cigna, they somehow failed to note. Lesson: corporate executives’ mammon-worship will always strangle good service in its crib.

Finally, another day, another reminder that no matter how many times you get crime hysteria from Republicans or your local news program, crime is actually going down. And now RNC spokeshack Anna Kelly says that USA Today’s reporting of these simple facts represent an effort to “gaslight Americans into believing that their lived experiences are wrong.” That should only persuade people who think their lived experiences are everyone’s lived experiences, a character flaw I find more pronounced in Trump votaries than in Americans generally. And those whose “lived experiences” consist only of seeing the same clips of violent crime over and over again on the news are the real gaslighting victims.

Action: concerning health care and working families.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Medicare privatization, reject nationwide abortion bans, and reject cuts to services working families need and use. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any plan to privatize Medicare. Because they’ve been talking about that – 0ut loud, too, like it wouldn’t be the most unpopular thing ever. You know what happens when private corporations take over government functions – they start out well, then they gradually start costing more money (which generally gets delivered upward to their executives), then they don’t even provide better services for the extra expense. That third stage is where we are with the notorious Medicare Advantage! So we remind our Congressfolk that what belongs to us must stay with us.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any nationwide abortion ban. Donald Trump supports a 16-week national ban – ha ha, he thinks that’s a “deal,” maybe he should ask Glenn Youngkin how well his proposed 15-week ban worked out for him – but, at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, abortion decisions should always be left between a woman and her doctor. Don’t right-wingers support leaving health care decisions between an American and their doctor? Or is that only when they’re fabricating lies about the Affordable Care Act? And not for nothing, but a national abortion bans would affect working families the most.

Finally, Coalition on Human Needs helps you demand that Congress reject any attempt to “cut deficits” on the backs of working families. It’s always the same damn thing with Republicans: squeal about the deficit whenever Democrats have any power after saying nothing about it when they run up deficits, and then demand cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, et cetera. Why not cut deficits by raising taxes on wealthy folks and corporations? Ha ha ha ha! Because they think wealthy folks and corporations are better than us little people! One day soon they’ll just come out and say so.

Action: concerning Social Security, AI porn, and affordable internet.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act and the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, and also tell your Congressfolk to renew the Affordable Connectivity 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.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act. Currently folks with a mere $2,000 in assets can’t get SSI benefits; you know how fast you can blow through $2,000, right? SSI limits literally haven’t gone up in over 30 years, though inflation has gone up almost 146% over that time. I don’t expect that argument to convince the folks who squeal STOP ALLZ TEH FRAUDZ NO MATTURZ TEH COSTZ!!!! But I don’t expect any reasonable arguments to convince haters, and I also don’t want haters to keep getting all the say about everything.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act. You’ve heard about people using AI to create pornographic images of Taylor Swift, right? Discerning consent among actors who actually make porn films is dicey enough; now imagine having porn of you, that you didn’t make, out there for everyone to see, with most folks either bad at telling what’s fake or unwilling to simply disbelieve anything they see. You’d hate to see people use AI just to make women’s lives worse; the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act will help put a stop to that.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to renew the Affordable Connectivity Program already. The Affordable Connectivity Program (or ACP) helps poor working families (including folks who receive Medicaid or food stamps) with $30/month ($75/month for folks living on tribal lands) to help afford internet. You’ve looked at your own internet bill, right? So you know that we could actually do more! But right-wingers want to end the program, claiming that internet access isn’t essential. Imagine saying crap like that not long after a year-plus of kids all having to go to school online! Again, let’s not let the haters get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning child labor, child care, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to toughen child labor laws, extend child care funding, and reject any “debt commission” to cut our earned benefits. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Child Labor Act. In the wake of child labor violations almost doubling over the last year, and Iowa actually passing a law to allow more child labor that violates federal law, the Stop Child Labor Act would increase penalties for violations, allow our government to put repeat offenders in jail, and let children seek compensation for the harm done to them. This is basic law-and-order stuff here, and let’s be honest: do we want our kids to have real childhoods like we always say we do, or do we want them to grow up in sweatshops? We can’t have both.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the emergency child care stabilization funding first offered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yeah, the pandemic is over (or, more precisely, “over”), but some three million-plus kids will lose access to child care if we don’t extend the funding, and I don’t know about you, but if it only costs $16 billion (out of some $6 trillion in total federal outlays) to get these kids the care they need, I do it without blinking. Congressional monsters may not feel the same way, but they’re supposed to do our will, not beat their chests about whom they hurt. Personal to folks who say just have one parent stay home: you’ve never done any household budgeting, have you?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to use a “debt commission” to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or food stamp benefits. That’s right, food stamps too! Nobody lives like Elon Musk on food stamps, and anyone, including me or you, might need them some day. And that’s right, Medicaid too! Medicaid is actually pretty popular, though it also has an unearned reputation as Something Only Those People Get. Social Security and Medicare I trust I don’t have to defend once again. But we have to defend them from our own leaders! And if we do, we’ll win.

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 monopolies, death panels, and robocalls.

Long story short: tell our DOJ and FTC to make corporations account for their aims when they propose mergers, tell our HHS Department to investigate death panel claims against HCA Healthcare, and tell our FCC to crack down on robocalls and robotexts (and tell our Senate to confirm a full slate of FCC Commissioners). Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) have proposed making big corporations account for their actions more precisely when they propose to buy another corporation. Naturally the big corporatists are whining about how much paperwork they already have to do, which may be enough to tell you that you should support the proposed changes. But as Matt Stoller explains further: big corporations don’t even have to answer questions like why they’re merging or who’s on their board of directors or who their competitors are or how much market share they’re proposing to gobble up, even though the answers to most of these questions would reveal that they’re trying eat their competitors alive and make themselves richer at civilization’s expense. We should at least make them commit such answers to paper; you can read the new proposal here, and you can leave a public comment about it here. Don’t believe the hype that these are “radical” changes, because only whiners would tell you that. Certainly don’t believe anyone who says “but we’ve always done things the way I’d prefer we keep doing them,” because anyone who says that commits the unpardonable sin of mistaking their life experiences for the entirety of human history. And, since corporate lawyers aren’t stupid, I’d say they’re committing that sin on purpose, which makes it twice as bad. Don’t let sin rule America, good peoples!

Care2 helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to investigate allegations that HCA Healthcare has used, guess what, an algorithm to push hospice care on patients who actually stand a decent chance of recovering. Because those patients won’t make them enough money, basically! Right-wingers, that’s what a “death panel” actually looks like! And it’s far, far more likely to come from some private corporation than from our government! Note well that Wall Street banksters love HCA stock, which makes HCA suspicious pretty much automatically, and also that HCA once had to pay a $1.7 billion fine for defrauding Medicaid and Medicare (among other federal health care programs). As if to prove our decadence as a civilization, HCA’s CEO back then is now Florida’s junior Senator, Rick Scott. Let's fight the real evil, gang!

Finally, U.S. PIRG helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to crack down on illegal robocalls/robotexts. I’ve gotten no less than half a dozen of these irritants daily this past week, so I know they’re not doing enough, and so do you, I bet. Aren’t I on a damn do-not-call list? Why, yes, I am! But I guess these crooks just count on doing so much crime that law enforcement can’t catch them all. What a thing to bring to the Pearly Gates when you die! It’d help, of course if our Senate were to confirm a full slate of FCC Commissioners, which Free Press helps you do.

Action: concerning immigration, media, and health care.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to expand health care for DACA recipients, tell internet service-providing corporations to drop Fox News, and tell Merck’s CEO to drop his lawsuit against Medicare drug-price negotiation . Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

United We Dream helps you tell the Biden Administration to expand Medicaid and Affordable Care Act eligibility to DACA recipients, i.e., “dreamers.” You could say it comes down to if they’re here, don’t be so damn cruel to them, but it’s even simpler than that: DACA recipients left their home countries as small children because their parents immigrated to America, and we’d be cruel bastards to deny them access to health care simply because of a decision made long ago that they had literally no part in. No use squealing about terrorism, etc., at least not if you’re a proud member of the greatest nation on Earth. So many self-styled “patriots” have so little mercy; I wonder why.

Inequality Media helps you tell your internet service-providing corporation to get the Fox News (sic) Channel off their platforms. Fox News just paid out over three-quarters of a billion dollars to settle a defamation lawsuit, and quickly responded by gutting its hard news division, such as it had one, so even if you knew absolutely nothing about the trail of slime it’s left across the country we love over the last few decades, you would wonder why any cable company would carry a “news” channel that had suffered such a reversal (and responded by resolving to get even worse at news-gathering!). Our First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, but not an audience or a pile of money for that speech, so let’s keep up the pressure until they fold.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell Merck’s CEO to “drop your greedy lawsuit” aiming to end Medicare drug price negotiation before it even starts. Of course it’s even worse than a greedy lawsuit – it’s the very definition of a frivolous lawsuit, one that clogs up the courts and delays justice for all. And it’s filed by a rich corporation! There’s a lesson in there, somewhere. Anyway, don’t brook any cynicism from anyone about how Merck is just trying to protect its profits. Our Declaration of Independence speaks of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and none of that includes a “right” to price-gouge good Americans by overcharging them for the medicines they need to live.

Around the table: ChatGPT is "way stupider than people realize"! And other total non-surprises.

Now it can be told: an AI expert informs us that “ChatGPT is Way Stupider Than People Realize,” because “large language models are good at...saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be.” If you were one of the many teachers who easily detected your students farming out their essays to AI, you already understand this. Of course, if you’re a CEO desperately trying to cut jobs so you can pretend your corporation’s “efficient” and thus goose up your stock prices beyond what any moral or economic reality would justify, then your job depends on you not understanding this. (And sadly, “(i)t gives an answer with complete confidence, and I sort of believe it. And half the time, it’s completely wrong” might as well describe almost any politician you’ve heard of.)

Ho hum, Gov. DeSantis (F-FL) is putting his state workers’ pension funds into the grubby hands of underperforming hedge funds that donated to his campaigns because of course he is. After all, if you want to present yourself to rich right-wing donors as an electable candidate, you can’t just do the culture war stuff, you also have to do the grift! Meanwhile, public employees in Florida haven’t gotten a cost-of-living increase in 15 years! I’d say it doesn’t pay to make everything subservient to one man’s power, but a significant part of Florida’s population apparently doesn’t care, and deserves whatever horrors befall them. (My estimate that a quarter of the electorate is batshit insane applies nationally; surely some states have more batshit insane voters than others.)

Lo and behold, former Rep. Kurt Schrader (D?-OR), who did his damnedest to kill Medicare drug price negotiation even though over 80% of Americans strongly support it, has just gotten a job for a big pharma lobbyist. I wonder if that’s a good hire, considering that his name is now dogshit. I’ll never forget the why-am-I-here-don’t-waste-my-time-just-elect-me-already look on his face as he “debated” the woman who ultimately defeated him in the 2022 Democratic primary – or his whining afterward that the Republican wave of 2022 would begin in his district. His district did flip, but narrowly, and, ah, what wave? I would like to think the times are passing Kurt Schrader by, though big lobbying money might prevent him from realizing that for a little while.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that our Surgeon General says that social media can present “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” When you’re on social media, you always feel like you’re performing, and why do kids really need that sort of pressure? So they can handle it later? That’s like setting people on fire to prepare them for an eternity in hell. This is why sane people like us have been telling social media to avoid roping kids in. After all, our Congressfolk are about as hands-off about social media as they are about guns – or financial predators. (Our Surgeon General’s advisory does inform us that social media can help marginalized folks find each other and support each other. I have no doubt that’s true – until Elon Musk takes over!)

Ho hum, ”The U.S. Is Unhappy That Mexico Is Spending Money on Its Own Citizens.” One day we’re going to take a good, hard look at our history – and not just our history, but the history of every nation that ever ruled the Earth – and we’re going to find that even when we treated our own citizens well, we did it on the backs of nations that treated their citizens like dung. My hope is that when regular folks read sentences like “President Lopez Obrador’s federal budget for 2023 gives priority to social spending and signature infrastructure projects, rather than the investments needed to address bilateral issues with the U.S. such as migration, security, and trade,” they’ll see it for the whining it is. (AMLO has cooperated with the U.S. more on immigration, though I doubt he’ll ever get much out of that.)

Finally, because the news can’t be all bad, scientists at U. Mass-Amherst have developed technology that can harvest electricity from air moisture, even in the Sahara desert. All my peeps on the Eastern Seaboard are no doubt exclaiming at last! A use for all this damn humidity!, but this technology can work with any amount of humidity in the air, though I imagine it’ll be less effective in the desert. Now comes the part where the big corporations that fund scientific breakthroughs sit on the funding that could make this technology affordable and available to all. Have I mentioned that government funding would comprise an alternative to this reality? Yes, I believe I have.

Around the table: finally they admit greedflation is real! And other miracles.

Apparently the “fringe theory” of “greedflation” is finally “get(ting) its due,” now that even the Wall Street Journal thinks greedflation is real. Of course, nobody who’s been saying it for two years (whose number even includes several members of our “liberal” media) is “fringe” to anyone but a corporatist paid to ignore what’s right in front of their face. I only wonder whether Lael Brainard was being too circumspect in describing a “price-price spiral,” “where companies mark up prices far higher than the increases in their input costs,” because “greedflation” is a much easier way of saying that.

Judges have been slow to accept that they should enforce antitrust law, but Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge Leo Sorokin not only struck down the American/JetBlue “Alliance,” but excoriated the paid hacks who testified on the “Alliance”’s behalf. If, like me, you think even psychology is a more rigorous science than economics, you’ll find Judge Sorokin’s notes fairly affirming. You may also, like me, find the “economic consulting” gigs Mr. Stoller describes to be a kind of welfare-for-the-rich, a far more pernicious kind of welfare than food stamps could ever be. By the way, bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income would fix it. Imagine a world where it simply didn’t pay to lie about how money works!

Rick Scott thinks he’s so, so funny for saying Florida is “openly hostile” to socialists, though it’s no laughing matter that the actual travel advisories from the NAACP and the Human Rights Campaign that he mocked describe a burgeoning fascist state where you might actually die for being Black or gay, respectively. Also too, imagine being a guy who went to college on the G.I. bill. Now imagine being a guy who ran a hospital that defrauded Medicare and Medicaid so badly they had to pay a $1.7 billion fine. And now imagine being a guy who talks shit about "socialism" all the time. Actually, you don't have to imagine any of that: Rick Scott is all three of those guys! (And anyway, anyone who’s ever driven a car or used a library or called a cop is a socialist.)

I’m a bit perplexed at a Georgia Republican district chair seems to feel personally assaulted by all the globes everywhere that “brainwash” people into thinking the world isn’t flat, not just because people have known the world is round since long before Columbus, but also because globes are actually a lot less common now that we can get planetary images in so many other ways. Globes taught me everything about geography when I was a kid, but getting one in my 40s turned out to be a chore! Oh well, I guess some people never stop whining, and Georgia may finally be becoming a place where a woman like Kandiss Taylor can only get to 49% in a statewide election.

Good news, everyone: Texas Republicans failed to ram through their bill mandating that all state public schools commit the sin of idolatry by posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom. If you were among those who spoke out about this matter, congratulate yourself! Note well, however, that this is only one victory; the forces of religious folly have won plenty of times in Texas in recent years. Also note well that the ACLU’s statement about parental rights is not inconsistent with anything they’ve ever said about teaching Black or gay history in schools: the key phrase in “(p)arents should be able to decide what religious materials their child should learn” is religious materials.

Finally, Rep. Lauren Boebert (E-CO) apparently stonewalled cops after her son called 911 to allege abuse by his father/her soon-to-be-ex-husband, but I don’t celebrate this news at all. I might question the timing of its release (she just announced that she’s filed for divorce, while her son called 911 in December), and I do celebrate some of her other reversals, but I do not celebrate her acting like or being someone who felt she had to keep the family together by herself. And I also don’t blame her for trapping herself in a bad marriage! She married when she was 20, and I was pretty dumb at that age myself.

Action: concerning debt limit drama and idolatry in the classroom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end this debt limit drama without cutting the essential services we pay for, tell Republicans to stop trying to cut Medicaid, and tell Texas state legislators to reject a bill that would put the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. 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.

Concerning the debt limit hostage drama: Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to sign a discharge petition to lift the debt limit, while the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Senators to exchange no service cuts for a debt limit bill and Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators not to “negotiate with MAGA hostage-takers,” as they put it. Far too much media talk centers around how both sides are going to present whatever fiasco they manage to pass as a “victory,” and none of them ask when are the American people going to start winning? We’ll start winning when we make them lift the debt limit without hurting us. We're right and they're wrong, so we can do that.

In a related note, Civic Shout helps you tell Republicans to keep their grubby mitts off Medicaid in their debt limit drama. They only pretend to care about the debt when a Democrat’s President, and the only way they’ll cut the debt is to slash services that actually help people – services we pay for with our tax dollars, I feel compelled to mention again. Never do they consider, say, raising taxes on billionaires who don’t work for their money anyway, because there is no work that makes a man a billion dollars. There’s only scamming, and civilized people don’t reward scammers – nor do they balance budgets on the backs of folks less fortunate than they. Republicans are beyond disgusting.

Finally, Faithful America helps you tell Texas state legislators to stop trying to put the Ten Commandments in every public classroom. If your neighbor asks what’s wrong with this, ask them how they’d feel about putting up, say, the fourth Surah of the Qur’an. If they respond with any version of “well, my religion’s right and theirs is wrong,” then you might remind him that Jesus instructed us that we should not be like the “hypocrites” who “pray publicly.” And you might also tell him (as this clever Texas state legislator did) that putting up the Ten Commandments in public classrooms is idolatrous. In any case, next time his hedge trimmer breaks, maybe don't volunteer yours so quickly.

Action: concerning the debt limit, Oak Flat, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican debt-limit bills and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act and the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere 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.

You want action alerts against the Republican debt-limit bill? I’ve got ‘em, from Coalition on Human Needs, Moms Rising, and Daily Kos. They’re trying to justify their whole debt-limit drama by cutting services good Americans actually need, which is evil. The Moms Rising alert deals mainly with work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid, and some folks think that’s common-sensical, but they’re wrong: work requirements aren’t a good idea for a program that’s supposed to help you when you don’t have work. And finding and punishing fraud is a separate issue. How about we cut the budget of fighter planes that don’t fight?

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would pretty much do what its title says – save the Oak Flat region of the Tonto National Forest from the Rio Tinto mining corporation. Numerous Native Americans consider Oak Flat sacred land – I guess religious conscience only matters when it’s right-wing corporatists not wanting to cover their employees’ birth control! – and the mining would also poison and deplete the water there. Despite Native Americans' heroic efforts in keeping Rio Tinto out, the project still isn’t dead; that’s why we step up, as we have before, and we keep stepping up until our Congressfolk act.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act. Banning anyone who might counsel abortion from providing health care overseas (as the Helms Amendment does) hurts our efforts to get birth control and other health care to other countries, so let’s not let philosophical purity murder what works – and, you know, let’s not let it murder people, too. I suppose right-wingers will try to hide their sexist objective by yelling AMURIKA FIRSTZ!!!!! But unsafe abortions and maternal deaths – which the Helms Amendment surely causes – are an atrocity anywhere.

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 pollution, the minimum wage, abortion rights, and defense spending.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the TAP American Energy Act, raise the minimum wage to at least $15/hour, pass the EACH Act, and redirect more defense spending toward human needs. 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 Native Organizers Alliance Action Fund helps you tell your Senators to reject the so-called TAP American Energy Act, which our House passed late last week, and reject any efforts to fast-track dirty energy projects. This bill would defund renewable energy projects, weaken clean air and clean water regulations, and ramp up drilling on public lands; imagine being the politician who actually champions these things! But some Congressfolk have also proposed gutting the National Environmental Policy Act, which gives communities a way to protect themselves from pollution, so we must fight that, too.

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour – or more. An astounding 52 million workers make less than $15/hour presently, and they all deserve a raise. Don’t tolerate any foolishness from folks who claim that folks who make less “don’t work hard enough”; in my experience, the folks who claim that made a lot more money when they were working minimum wage jobs. No, really: $2/hour went a lot further in 1969 than $7.25/hour does now. Right-wingers love pretending inflation doesn’t exist – until they want to beat up on Joe Biden.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the EACH Act, which would overturn the notorious Hyde Amendment, which has kept taxpayer money from funding abortions for 40 years. Some folks no doubt think that’s a reasonable compromise, but it’s really not, and not just because Roe v. Wade isn’t there anymore (so there’s literally nothing to “compromise” with!). Folks who have money will always be able to get abortions regardless of whether or not they’re legal, but folks who depend on Medicaid won’t, and as taxpayers we should ensure that everyone can access the safe and effective health care they need. And remember: if you think abortion is immoral, don’t get one.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to spend less on weapons and more on human needs. No, you can’t justify spending literally any amount of money by saying “we have to defend ourselves.” We already spend more money on defense than the next nine nations on that list combined; we’re spending far too much money enriching defense corporation executives and not enough on the things that actually defend and strengthen a civilization – things like education, health care, and housing. If we can’t defend ourselves for less money, maybe we’re not the greatest nation on Earth. Maybe we’re just the most arrogant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning banking regulation, health care, junk fees, and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the TABS Act, reject any proposed cuts to Medicaid and CHIP, and pass the Junk Fees Prevention Act and the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (or TABS) Act, which would replace our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s independent funding mechanism – a mechanism good enough for other banking regulators – with the whim of Congressional funding. You’d think with all these bank failures, our Congressfolk would understand that we actually need a strong CFPB, but up is down in their world. I’m sure they’ll use this as a bargaining chip in debt limit “negotiations”; they might even succeed. But to hell with what they want, because they’re supposed to negotiate with us.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any proposed cuts to Medicaid or the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP). Again, to hell with what the deficit peacocks want! Medicaid and CHIP help a lot of good Americans, and they sure in hell ain’t breaking our budget’s back. Now, throwaway defense spending and low taxes on the rich? Those things are breaking our budget’s back. But Medicaid and CHIP are popular across the political spectrum, probably because even right-wingers have to use it! If you come to rely on something, you’ll hate the politicians who take it away, and you’ll punish them. Right, Sam Alito?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Junk Fee Prevention Act, which would vastly reduce the harm junk fees – like ticket fees, airline fees, and “early termination” fees – cause good Americans. Who likes junk fees that far outstrip whatever expense a corporation incurs to fix a problem or make something convenient? Nobody but the people who collect those fees, that’s who! And they ain’t a majority of a damn thing in America! OK, they may be a majority of bad people, but let’s not deal civilization yet another body blow because a majority of bad people demanded it. I have a feeling our descendants would not want that to be our epitaph.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would quadruple the stock buyback tax that only corporations will ever have to pay. Stock buybacks used to be illegal, and for good reason – not only do they concentrate corporate power in a few hands (and concentrated power in a few hands should concern all Americans regardless of ideological predisposition), but corporations tend to spend more on stock buybacks than on, you know, new equipment. Everyone needs to buy that every once in a while! And if they won’t do the right thing, then our government’s gotta step in on our behalf. This ain’t hard.

Action: concerning child labor, health care, immigration, and product safety.

Long story short: tell Iowa state legislators to reject a bill that would loosen child labor laws, and tell your Congressfolk to defend Medicaid and CHIP and pass the DREAM Act and the Sunshine in Product Safety 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.

Care2 helps you tell Iowa state legislators to reject Senate File 167, which would loosen child labor laws so that corporations could put 14-17-year-olds to work in such carefree childhood vocations as demolition, mining, and meatpacking. Perhaps even worse, the bill would let corporations off the hook in civil suits for any kids they neglected, sickened, injured, or killed at the workplace! Because trial lawyers bad! No: putting kids to work in dangerous occupations is bad, though maybe it’s not as snappy a bumper sticker slogan. Look, either children are the future, or they’re just another workforce for fat-cat bosses to use and discard. They ain’t both. And if we have any say about it, they ain’t the latter.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to defend both Medicaid and the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) from Congressional debt-limit hostage-takers. Maybe they won’t get Social Security and Medicare cuts and then again maybe they will, but we need to put them on notice about Medicaid and CHIP as well. Medicaid is less popular than Social Security and Medicare, because of the absurd perception that it only helps lazy people, but it’s no less important than any of the other programs they’ve taken so much flak about cutting. And Republicans already let CHIP expire once, so they don’t care about kids, and why should they keep getting away with that?

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk pass the DREAM Act, which, as you no doubt remember, would help immigrant children whose legal standing in America has lapsed, but who’ve met certain standards of service and education, to remain in America (and keep contributing to American culture) rather than get deported back to the countries they’ve never known. Because that’s cruel! And to those who reflexively respond AMURKIA FIRSTZ!!!! to everything because they can’t argue their way out of a paper bag: the DREAM Act would help, at most, some 1.9 million folks out of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in America, so this is not so damn much to ask.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sunshine in Product Safety Act, which would let our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) warn the American public about dangerous products without having to get permission from the corporation that manufactured the dangerous product first. Yes, you read that right! Currently we can’t spread the word about dangerous products lest we hurt some corporation’s fee-fees! That’s because Congress amended the Consumer Product Safety Act to give corporations an effective veto over product safety announcements in 1981. Still we deal with the bitter fruits of the Reagan Revolution. This is why we fight.

Action: concerning railway safety, abortion rights, antibiotic abuse, and school lunch nutrition.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to improve railway safety and protect abortion rights, tell Walmart to get antibiotic abuse out of its meat supply chain, and tell the Biden Administration to improve school lunch nutrition standards. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both Food and Water Watch and Demand Progress help you tell the Biden Administration to a) reinstate the braking rule the Trump Administration repealed and b) make hazardous transport restrictions stronger so that trains carrying five cars of flammable carcinogens don’t pollute the air and water of good Americans. Like how Transportation Secretary Buttigieg pretended b) simply didn’t exist while saying his hands were tied on a), which itself wasn’t even true? So much for those Presidential ambitions! Seriously, though, he’s got to start doing a better job, not for the sake of his own career, but for the sake of the American people, who deserve better than to live in fear of trains spewing filth.

Civic Shout helps you tell President Biden to take all lawful executive action that he can take to protect abortion rights from right-wing state legislatures. President Biden did issue an Executive Order back in August, but it didn’t do a lot – it didn’t protect a woman’s right to get legal and effective abortion medication across state lines, it didn’t guarantee that Medicaid would fund a woman’s trip across state lines to get an abortion, and it didn’t lock down the privacy of folks’ personal data when they get abortions. It made moves in all of these directions, but our Administration needs to do more, lest more poor women die because right-wing legislators like making their balls swing.

Penn PIRG helps you tell Walmart to get the antibiotic abuse out of its meat supply chain. You know why: overusing antibiotics on nominally healthy farm animals – to make them meatier, and to help them endure their squalid living conditions – makes antibiotics less effective when actually sick people or animals need them, and thus makes more superbugs. Didn’t we just close down a country over a superbug? Anyway, Walmart is now the biggest grocer in America, controlling over a quarter of the market, and they’ve also made no commitment to getting antibiotics out of their food chain. Hence we bust out the Big Stick of Bad PR. Hey, it’s worked before, and it can work again.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell the Biden Administration to adopt the most vigorous school lunch nutrition standards possible, which will only help the many poor kids who might not get a good breakfast or lunch except at school. Then get ready for the right-wing rubbish about “apples getting thrown away” and “districts unable to keep up with the standards,” which are just code for “we want more Pepsi machines in schools so we don’t have to fund them with taxes.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Republicans are objectively anti-children’s health, objectively pro-childhood obesity, and objectively pro-childhood diabetes – which last item also makes them objectively pro-high health care costs.

Action: concerning abortion rights, health care subsidies, and bad airline corporations.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to codify Roe v. Wade in law, extend ACA subsidies, and expand Medicaid, and tell our Transportation Secretary to start punishing airlines that abuse their customers. 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.

Left Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to codify Roe v. Wade into law, now that our Supreme Court has struck it down. Think of all the girls and women who won’t be able to get the health care they need now – women who survive rape and domestic abuse, women whose fetuses have no organs, women who created half a dozen fetuses through in vitro fertilization, women who won’t survive their pregnancy because of a placental abruption or an egg lodging in their Fallopian tubes, but also women with cancer who get pregnant and whose doctors can’t treat the cancer because their fetus won’t survive the cancer treatment. All the right’s holier-than-thou blustering can’t stack up to that.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies and expand Medicaid, so that 15 million Americans will still be able to afford health insurance. The American Rescue Plan Act expanded subsidies, but they’ll expire September 30 unless Congress acts, and given Republican/Manchinean/Sineman intransigence, it looks like Congress won’t act, though they could very easily extend the subsidies and fund them without raising taxes on anyone but millionaires. Who gets ACA subsidies and Medicaid? Why, the poorest among us, of course! And yet politicians still cut these programs and then retreat to their yachts. Unless we act, of course.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to use his lawfully-granted power (until our Supreme Court takes it away, I suppose!) to punish big airline corporations that abuse their passengers. Of course airline corporations got a lot of COVID relief money to keep folks working, and of course they used that money to cut workers, which has helped cause all the delays that have been in the news. Secretary Buttigieg can put aside burnishing his “bipartisan” bona fides in advance of his 2028 (2024?) Presidential run and fine airlines that delay flights more than three hours and schedule flights without enough workers. But he’ll only do that if he hears from enough of us.

Action: concerning taxes, health care, pollution, and pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich, help more Americans get health insurance, fund conservation and energy efficiency efforts, and pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to strengthen and pass the Millionaire’s Surtax from last year’s Build Back Better Act. The Millionaire’s Surtax would tax income above $10 million at an additional 5% (making an effective tax rate of 42% on that income) and tax income above $25 million at an additional 8% (making an effective tax rate of 45%). But some of our Senators want to lower those rates, when they should be levying such surtaxes on income above $1 million. It is a "Millionaire’s Surtax," after all! Most Americans want higher taxes on the rich, so our Senators should do our will, not the will of their biggest donors, who do not outnumber us.

Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Senators to keep expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies so that three million more Americans can continue to have health insurance. Our House already passed legislation to keep these subsidies going, so all our Senate has to do is pass that very same bill, easy-peasy. They need not attach poison-pill amendments or complain about the cost or say "just get a job" or say "I just can’t get there"; they need only pass the bill. It’s not like constituents who need the subsidies are "lazy." It’s more like the health insurers charging whatever they like just because they can are lazy! There. I said it, and I'm glad.

NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to close the Medicaid coverage gap, where two million Americans make too much to get Medicaid but not enough to get Affordable Care Act subsidies, and so don’t have health insurance. Sounds pretty absurd, right? Like the Medicare "donut hole" and the Social Security payroll tax ceiling, the gap exists because Congressfolk negotiated to win votes on the bills that created these programs, and given that exactly zero Republicans voted for the Affordable Care Act, this gap should seem even more absurd. Close the gap, and two million more Americans don’t have to lie awake at night wondering if they can make ends meet.

Stand.Earth helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 425/S. 1639, which would help fund conservation and energy efficiency programs. President Biden has lately invoked the Defense Production Act not just for baby formula but also for renewable energy products like tariff-addled solar panels; right-wingers will squeal TEH BLACK HELICOPTURZ!!!!!, but President Biden has done the right thing with lawful authority already granted to him by our Congressfolk. Now they just have to reauthorize a program that (among other things) helps buildings get more renewable-friendly, which also makes them less pollution-friendly and saves money. Who could be against all of that? Besides a hysterical right-winger, I mean.

Finally, the National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would force workplace bosses to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant workers, like more sit-down work and more bathroom breaks. Anyone who’s ever had an enlarged prostate should be able to understand how a woman carrying something considerably larger in her abdomen needs to pee more, and a boss who "just can’t find" sit-down work for a pregnant employee probably isn't trying hard enough. With great power comes great responsibility, right? And to right-wingers telling hysterical stories about what pregnant workers will be able to "get away with," you need only say this: read the bill.

Around the table: in which we identify the *real* extremists.

Surprise, surprise, an Anti-Defamation League study of 450 murders committed by domestic extremists in America (like the Buffalo murders earlier this week) concludes that right-wingers commit about 75% of them. (By their tabulation, Muslim extremists commit 20% and left-wing extremists commit a mere 4%.) "(T)he American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left," the article says, but that only means right-wingers will simply redefine "murder" until it includes things like not inviting right-wingers to your barbecues or shaming your right-wing father-in-law for watching Tucker Carlson. I've even heard right-wingers call such things "a kind of death"! You know what's "a kind of death"? Death.

Researchers at Brown University and Microsoft AI Health inform us that if every American adult had gotten vaccinated, we could have saved well over 300,000 lives. Against over 1 million dead, that's a sizable amount. An earlier Kaiser study put that number at 234,000 -- by not counting folks who'd died while vaccinated-but-not-boosted -- and I put more persuasive power in that figure, since not getting boosted was more likely not a matter of ideology. Still, that's more than one out of every five deaths. And the other side's argument is all waaaaaaah personal choice you can't tell me what to do stop the steal!

When I hear that "Online data could be used against people seeking abortions if Roe v. Wade falls" -- a perfectly explicable outcome, since most folks turn to the internet for information about reproductive health care! -- I am reminded that the FCC passed pretty good data privacy rules in 2016, but Congressional Republicans nullified them in 2017 with a quickness, because if it's an instance of government helping you, then Republicans must shit on it. Also too, law enforcement can search your cellphones without even getting a warrant because legislators either don't understand technology or go out of their way not to understand it because big campaign donors don't want them to.

Ho hum, Mississippi, the state that aims to end Roe v. Wade via its 15-week anti-abortion law, also just so happens to be the worst state in the Deep South for providing health insurance coverage to low-income women. Medicaid recipients get only 60 days' worth of post-partum care in Mississippi (though the Affordable Care Act allows expansion of that care to one year), though at least one study found that over 80% of post-partum health care costs come after 60 dats. Why, it's like that was the whole idea! I'd look for big corporations to pressure to pull out of Mississippi, but there ain't hardly any there to begin with; Republicans really are going to run that state into the ground, which will hurt all the good folks who live there.

Buried deep in this excellent Steven Rosenfeld piece about Pennsylvania's Republican nominee for Governor, Doug Mastriano is a description of the first Josh Shapiro attack ad against him, and it's like the ad's makers rolled up as much Democrat weakness as humanly possible into one ad, which you don't even know is an anti-Mastriano ad until the end! Look, here's how to attack Doug Mastriano: call him weak for refusing to accept the 2020 election results and doing his damnedest to overturn them. Republicans love wearing Democrat epithets, from "deplorable" all the way to "ultra-MAGA," as badges of honor; let's see Mr. Mastriano work that alchemy with the word "weak." I'd say I hope it makes him melt down in public, except that public melt-downs aren't the career-enders they used to be. Just ask our former screamer-in-chief, Donald Trump.

Finally, maybe the Buffalo shooter could evade any plagiarism charges Tucker Carlson might level against him, but the part of their collaborative work I can't stand is this anti-diversity argument from Mr. Carlson: "Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?" Ahem: civilization is not a marriage or a military unit; these two institutions are parts of civilization, and insisting that the whole of civilization be exactly like any of its parts is small-minded. Even 15 years ago I thought Tucker Carlson was doing the best he could as a conservative; now I think he was just fronting, and his current fascist-worship was the endgame all along.

Action: concerning surprise bills, maternity coverage, drug policy, factory farm waste, the right to repair, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop interfering with enforcement of the No Surprises Act, make a full year of postpartum Medicaid coverage permanent, pass the MORE Act, force reporting of factory farm waste, and pass the Agriculture Right to Repair Act and the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to abstain from any interference (including lawsuits) their brethren might be contemplating against the enforcement of the No Surprises Act. The No Surprises Act essentially empowers the Executive branch of our government to stop "surprise" billing by medical providers -- you know, the kind where your doctor and your surgeon are in-network, but somehow your anesthesiologist isn't and now you owe $10,000? The Biden Administration announced fairly vigorous rules earlier this year, but naturally some of our Congressfolk, from both parties, are trying to scuttle them, all saying things like "the rules go too far" and "we need a light touch here." What's more unpopular than a surprise medical bill? The bankster who benefits from it! Isn't that enough of a reason for these Congressfolk to STFU on this matter?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to make permanent the 12 months of post-partum Medicaid coverage. Before the American Rescue Plan Act, Medicaid post-partum coverage ended after 60 days, but though the physical aftermath of a birth might be dealt with by then, the mental side might not be -- post-partum depression is a thing, after all, no matter what right-wing male punditoids say. (I don't need to gender-equivocate here, because the opposition to Medicaid post-partum care has not developed enough that our opponents rush out women who say toughen up, girls!) And, actually, it's not all about mental health -- it's also about poorer Americans who can't just take a day off to go to the doctor, and who thus need more time to get the care they need. Now I'm just waiting for Joe Manchin to say families just spend their extra Medicaid coverage on drugs.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell House Speaker Pelosi and House Majority Leader Hoyer to schedule a vote on H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. The MORE Act would essentially legalize pot (by removing it from Schedule I, where it's never belonged anyway) and would also expunge marijuana convictions, which would help a lot of folks injured by our "war on drugs." And no I don't care that Democratic leadership might be afraid Republicans will attack them for being "soft on crime" if they pass the MORE Act! Nobody says Republicans are "soft on crime" when they pass bills allowing banksters to steal more of your money and allowing polluters to befoul your air and water! Let's ensure that's the conversation we have every time someone tries to complain about crime.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that our EPA can enforce reporting of factory farm waste. You may well be asking yourself: self, why can't our EPA enforce factory farm waste reporting already, using its authority under the Clean Air Act? And that's a reasonable question to ask! The reason they can't, as it happens, is because unscrupulous Congressfolk, doing the bidding of big ag donors, constantly slip riders into other bills defunding any EPA effort to enforce rules on factory farm waste! So our EPA makes lawful regulations and then Congressfolk starve them of the money they need to enforce them? Why, you might well call that defunding the police! Hey, enforcing lawfully-made regulations ain't no different from enforcing the law.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 3549, the Agriculture Right to Repair Act. S. 3549 will do as its title suggests: make it easier for farmers to repair their equipment when it breaks down, when a broken tractor, for example, could mean thousands of dollars in lost income if it doesn't get repaired right away. And with big corporations abusing intellectual property rights to keep tools, software, and manuals away from farmers, farmers can only go to a narrow, corporate-approved number of repair techs, so they can't get what they need fixed right away. Our FTC has made helpful noises about the right to repair lately, but some corporations won't do the right thing until we make them. So let's make them. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and power is evil when wielded to do wrong.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) blocked consideration of the Postal Service Reform Act last month, even though our House passed the bill by an actually bipartisan 342-92 vote, and the Senate version of the bill has 14 Republican sponsors. But now that Mr. Scott got caught advocating tax hikes for folks just trying to make ends meet, how does his obstruction look? This bill would remove the crushing mandate (for prepayment of retiree benefits decades in advance) placed upon our Postal Service by Congress in 2006; it wouldn't get us, say, postal banking, which was a feature of post offices until the late 1960s, but getting rid of the mandate would represent significant progress.

Around the table: Joe Manchin is wrong, wrong, wrong! And other, less obvious observations.

The Lancet says the COVID-19 pandemic may end as soon as March -- given that by then a "large proportion of the world will have been infected with the omicron variant" -- and though of course the coronavirus will stay with us, it won't wreck our lives as badly. "The impacts of future SARS-CoV-2 transmission on health," they write, "will be less because of broad previous exposure to the virus, regularly adapted vaccines to new antigens or variants, the advent of antivirals, and the knowledge that the vulnerable can protect themselves during future waves when needed by using high-quality masks and physical distancing." I figure a two hundred year-old medical journal probably knows better than I do, and definitely knows better than any five dozen internet "influencers" one could name.

The Kansas government wants state legislators to approve a $4 billion slab of corporate welfare so it doesn't lose out on a big project -- but offers scant details. A lot of state legislators are acting like they have no choice but to pass the legislation, so that Kansas doesn't "lose out" on big corporate facilities, but if they're acting like hostages, that's a sign they can't win the argument on the merits. Also, too, if it looks like dung, and it smells like dung, you don't have to taste it just because the Kansas state government says it's meatloaf. Looking for a more politically pragmatic argument? Look up "Foxconn" and "the end of Scott Walker's career as Wisconsin Governor."

When I hear that a supermajority of Americans do not want our Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, I'm reminded that I think the American people are actually pretty wise -- just like I am whenever I confront polling about Medicare-for-All and raising taxes on the rich. I know a lot of smart folks who disagree with me about that, and I don't really blame them, since our media constantly push the worst people in America in our faces until we forget all the good folks we know. It's really our media's fault that people watch Tucker Carlson and listen to Joe Rogan; the notion that they're somehow the best American civilization has to offer is a profoundly offensive notion.

When I hear that Joe Manchin says he's ready to start a big spending bill from scratch and will talk with anyone who'll listen, I wonder how many good Americans still want to talk to Joe Manchin. I mean, he led us on for eight months on Build Back Better, so I don't know why any sane and rational person would trust him now. Is he going to spend another eight or ten months making demand after demand and then, after Democrats give in to all of them, suddenly throw up his hands at some imagined slight and say I've tried but I just can't get to yes? It's a question worth asking! And it's also a question worth answering in the affirmative, so we don't waste all of 2022 like we wasted all of 2021. He needs to be shamed and shunned, just like Kyrsten Sinema does, and that's true even though we can all count to 50.

I've also got a bone to pick with Mr. Manchin's suggestion that he does what he does because the rural folks he represents are so much different from urban folks. I mean, even if his constituents would rather hold hands and pitch woo than make a party out of loving, that doesn't mean they turn up their nose at paid family leave and a Child Tax Credit expansion like he does. Polling also tells us that rural folks, even the ones who identify as conservative, like a lot of liberal policy initiatives, like Medicare-for-all, taxpayer-funded community college, and treating-not-imprisoning drug addicts. So folks like Joe Manchin are just pretending they're speaking for them, and what is that, class? Drama, that's what, and not particularly good drama at that.

Finally, suggesting Black folks aren't American wasn't actually the stupidest thing Mitch McConnell's said lately -- the stupidest thing he's said lately was when he responded to a question about what a Republican majority would prioritize with "(t)hat is a very good question, and I'll let you know when we take (the majority) back.". So the party that makes such a drama about hating post-modernism acts awfully post-modern; what a surprise! Look, here's what they're going to do: they're going to yell and scream about crime and vaccine mandates and critical race theory, and while you're watch that, they're going to try to cut taxes on the rich, outlaw class-action lawsuits, cripple Medicaid, privatize Medicare and Social Security, and defund all the parts of government that still help good Americans. They're sure as hell not going to run that ad! Sadly, Democrats won't, either, because it'd be uncivil.

Action: concerning Medicare drug price negotiation, climate change, Medicaid, the filibuster, and federal corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, fight climate change, plug gaps in Medicaid coverage, end the Senate filibuster, and protect Inspectors General as they expose government corruption. 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 legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Daily Kos and Drug Prices Are Too High help you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. The latter action alert starts off saying "Shame on you, Senators Menendez and Sinema!" And that's entirely appropriate -- Sen. Menendez botches the art of argument in trying to avoid saying big pharma corporations control his actions, and Sen. Sinema creates chaos by opposing something 80% of Americans want. Newt Gingrich used to say if 70% of Americans want something, they should get it. I'm sure he has excuses ready for why Americans shouldn't get this thing they want, but doing their constituents' will is a Congressional representative's job. So let's do our job, and communicate our will to those representatives, as often as we need to.

Daily Kos helps you demand that the Build Back Better Act make the historic climate change-fighting investments we need to make. Because as much as we need health care and higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, we also need a planet to live on, and pretty much everyone who doesn't imbibe rage-addled masturbatoria from right-wing news channels wants solar power and wind power to be a big part of our future. And don't fear Joe Manchin suggesting he'll leave the Democratic Party if he doesn't get his way (which is no climate change-fighting legislation). If he leaves the party over this, he becomes the villain -- not to our "liberal" media, which loves drama more than truth, but to anyone who's actually watching. And that's more people than it used to be.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to plug the "Medicaid gap" between states that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and states that haven't. No reason why poor folks in 12 American states should be left out, after all, except that the Affordable Care Act left that loophole open for our Supreme Court to notice, which is a stupid reason to let people get sick and die. Thanks to certain drama- and chaos-addicted Senators, the Build Back Better Act stands poised to do a whole lot less about health care than we have demanded (which is, now that I think of it, the reason Democrats haven't been pushing what's in it -- they'd rather run on what they pass than what they promise!). But plugging the Medicaid gap would help a lot of good Americans in states with reactionary legislatures who don't listen to them.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster in order to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Republicans filibustered that bill yesterday, because chaos, but we still must do our duty to communicate our will to our Senators, and, if need be, tell them how to do our will. Making the filibuster a talking filibuster -- i.e., one that Senators would have to keep going by actually talking for 12 or 24 or 48 hours straight, rather than just signaling that they don't want to end debate and then going out to the dinner or the theatre, which action ends debate -- remains my preference. But you know what? If Senators don't want to work for their chaos and obstruction, then I say take their toys away from them. Because I think I speak for most of America when I say we're done.

Finally, the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Senators to do more to fight federal corruption. You go to swing states and you don't find millions of people committed to "bipartisanship" or "right-sizing regulations" or whatever -- you find people who hate government corruption and hate that politicians don't do enough about it. But if we give our Inspectors General the tools they need to investigate and expose government corruption, then they'll be able to expose a lot more of it. Hey, it's not for nothing Donald Trump tried to replace them all when he became President! If they were bad at exposing corruption, after all, he would have let them hang around. And indeed, in 2020, he did replace a bunch of them with "acting" IGs he hoped would do his will, and not the American people's. So let's put a stop to all of that.

Around the table: more thoughts on the end of empire.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch -- possibly the world's best reporter on the Middle East -- says "It is Government Weakness, Not Taliban Strength, That Condemns Afghanistan" -- as in the Afghan government's "weakness and unpopularity," which his Afghani contacts describe as "no better than a gang of racketeers gorging themselves on US aid money or on juicy supply and construction contracts." Also, despite the $2 trillion-plus outlay, "Afghan soldiers were often short of food, ammunition, fuel and could not even get defective weapons replaced," in large part because "the American aid money never made it past the sticky fingers of US consultants and security companies." The story won't end here, though, because Afghans don't like the Taliban any better than they like the Americans.

Philippa Rizopoulos at TruthOut reminds us that privatization of Medicaid and Medicare also stands in the way of getting to Medicare-for-All. Medicare Advantage, an "innovation" of George W. Bush, now has over 40 percent of American seniors in its grip, and worse, nearly 70 percent of Medicaid recipients get their care, such as it is, from Medicaid Managed Care Organizations (or MCOs), and these developments don't lead to better care, or even cheaper care. They do lead to shifting networks, reduced benefits, and rejected claims, and they also lead to public programs bearing the burden of private corporations, just like with charter schools. Best to expand Medicare to include everyone, and all care, not least because we'd save money.

Does the fall of Afghanistan into Taliban hands again make you wish we'd "done more"? Here's a reminder from Alice Speri at The Intercept that "(t)he biggest al-Qaeda plot the FBI claimed to have foiled in the years following the 9/11 attacks involved no weapons, no plot, and no al-Qaeda." You say that's not precisely relevant? Perhaps not, but consider that we "did more" for 20 years in Afghanistan, throwing away over $2 trillion to get no further than the status quo, and consider, also, that "doing more" in Iraq helped al-Qaeda establish a presence there they didn't have before, and then helped birth ISIS. Maybe "doing more" shouldn't be our first impulse, particularly at those times we're trying to prove we're "right" about terrorist threats.

Uh oh: Minnesota GOP Chair Jennifer Carnahan faces calls to resign after one of the state party's big donors (and a close friend and fellow podcaster of hers!) gets indicted for sex trafficking. And just as the folks who squeal about "voter fraud" ignore all the Republicans who get caught committing it, the QAnon crowd will promptly ignore this scandal precisely because it implicates Republicans. In each case, you'd think right-wingers would take an opportunity to appear "independent," but they don't -- blunt force is their only strategy, in both argument and action. (And just like the rest of them, Ms. Carnahan issues a statement that's 60% about how badly she thinks she's been treated. That's how you know she's a Trumphole -- everything's a drama, and they're always the star.

In case you were wondering how Fox News's biggest stars were spinning our defeat in Afghanistan, both Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham focus on Afghan refugees, with Mr. Carlson calling them "invaders" coming to "your neighborhood." "Fuck you" was my immediate reaction to this news, but after I'd given the matter more thought, I found myself saying is this the best they can do? America may have stopped being a great power today, and all these clowns can think to do is bash immigrants who ain't even here yet? That'll be a hell of a footnote to the history of this war, if anyone's around to write it.

Finally, I read President Biden's Monday remarks about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, and I note that while his repeated insistence that "one more year, five more years or 20 more years" wouldn't make a difference is absolutely correct, it's also absolutely calculated to impress independent voters (as is his relentless blaming of the Afghan government and military), which might just make up for "the buck stops with me" most emphatically not impressing them. I don't want to bash the guy who actually got us out of a war, but I do also wonder how he didn't get heard about this matter during those eight years he was Vice President.

Around the table: once more into the breach.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times proposes a national strike fund, like the various GoFundMes that pop up for groups of striking workers. As Gomez Addams would say, capital idea! That fund would have a big target on its back from Day One -- from state and corporate hackers and from frivolous lawsuits -- but anything worth doing is hard. And, as Mr. Nolan says, "If the Frito-Lay workers in Kansas had had a little more money to carry them through, perhaps they could have won something better than, basically, the working conditions of a factory worker a century ago."

Amanda Marcotte says the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" "is likely the last nail in the coffin of any hope that Manchin or Sinema would seriously consider filibuster reform," which would prevent Congress from passing the For the People Act and thus likely doom America to rule by Republicans for the foreseeable future. But I don't imagine Sens. Manchin and Sinema are really "thinking" about whether or not to reform the filibuster; I think they've made up their minds, and the only thing that'll change their minds is relentless public pressure, since even a U.S. Senator will go to great lengths to avoid becoming the most unpopular person in America.

Establishment Democrats start using the Republicans' vote against the American Rescue Plan -- which increased funding to local police departments -- against them in midterms, essentially saying Republicans are the party that actually "defunded the police." Good to see Democrats have some smarts after all! And good, also, to see them tying Republicans to the January 6 attempted coup in this manner! I guess I'd still prefer they use that vote against the American Rescue Plan to run Republicans want to take your Child Tax Credit checks away ads, but hey, if Democrats actually look fierce about something for once, I'll take it.

In case you were actually wondering, Republicans who blame Nancy Pelosi for January 6 are legitimately full of crap. Basically, Republicans have alleged that Ms. Pelosi, as House Speaker, has all kinds of powers she doesn't actually have, or did things they have no evidence she actually did. Even the one person Ms. Pelosi did appoint to his job, the House Sergeant at Arms, was first appointed by John Boehner, then by Paul Ryan. Also, too, you first blame the people who attacked the Capitol for attacking the Capitol! This whole accountability thing seems to trip up nominal conservatives an awful lot.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) praises Medicare and Medicaid on Medicare's birthday, then promptly calls for Americans to "reject Socialist health care schemes." Elise Stefanik would kill Medicaid and Medicare with her bare hands if she could, but in the meantime wants you to think that programs everyone pays into so that seniors and poor folks can go to the doctor are not at all socialist. ("But I said Socialist, not socialist! See? Big difference! Another libtard owned!") But remember, if you drive roads, call police, visit the local library, or draw a Social Security check, congratulations! You are a socialist.

Finally, Donald Trump has reportedly called the police officers who testified before Congress "pussies" in numerous private conversations over the last few months. Thus continues his upside-down world, not just one in which actual courage is "weakness" and snake oil salesmen are "the best people," but one in which folks who have actually been through hell are "weak" just for admitting it. He must be chomping at the bit to slam Simone Biles -- or complain about how it's not "politically correct" anymore to do so. May a million people poop in his funeral casket.

Around the table: in which we discover yet another path to dystopia.

Uh oh: Chicago police get caught altering AI-generated data that could have sent a man to jail for a murder he didn't commit. ShotSpotter sensors detected a "percussive sound" they initially classified as fireworks a mile away from a shooting -- but then one analyst changed the classification to "gunshot" and another changed the location so that it would fit a police hypothesis, which anyone will tell you is not how you do science. If analysts can alter data to frame citizens so easily, then the technology that created the data shouldn't exist. Naturally, over a hundred American cities use it, and none of them seem to have vetted the technology. Dystopia: it ain't just about autonomous killer drones.

Surprise, surprise, states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act saw a sharp drop in medical debt. I suppose right-wingers will respond that TEH DEBTZ WENTZ UNDERZ INZ TEH OTHURZ STATEZ TOOZ!!!!!, but actually it went down only a tiny bit, comparatively. There is a difference between "gone down 44 percent" and "gone down 10 percent," after all, and the folks who worry less about getting necessary but expensive medical care no doubt appreciate it. And remember what we learned in early 2017 -- Trump votaries actually like Medicaid. There's a solution in there, somewhere.

Sen. Sinema (D?-AZ) said the other day that the reconciliation bill's price tag ($3.5 trillion) was too high, but Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo suggests we not put too much stock in that, since she'll still vote to start moving on the bill. I'm old enough to remember how Blanche Lincoln helped Republicans filibuster the Employee Free Choice Act, and how Ben Nelson tried to take the entire Affordable Care Act process hostage in order to get goodies for his home state of Nebraska. How did all that work out? Ben Nelson went from America's Most Popular Senator to "too unpopular to run for re-election" in less than two years, and Blanche Lincoln got absolutely buried in 2010. Maybe the same fate awaits Ms. Sinema in 2024. I mean, people don't actually like drama, in my experience.

Texas Deputy Attorney General Aaron Reitz slams gymnast Simone Biles for pulling out of the Olympics -- until his boss, Ken Paxton, chastises him in public and releases a sympathetic statement supporting Ms. Biles, which eventually provokes an apology from Mr. Reitz. Mr. Paxton's statement supporting Ms. Biles suggests that he actually has a soul, but I don't want to give him too much credit, since it never even occurred to me to be as much of an asshole as Mr. Reitz was about the matter. You can't take sports so damn seriously.

Pennsylvania state Sen. Dan Laughlin (R-49) all but says his party's "fraudit" of the 2020 election results is a clown show. "The current attempt to discredit the 2020 election results runs headlong into an unmistakable truth," he says. "Donald Trump lost Pennsylvania because Donald Trump received fewer votes." You can almost hear the impatience! And it does help to remind everyone that Republicans actually did pretty well in Pennsylvania in 2020 other than in the Presidential race, which Mr. Biden only won 50-49, if memory serves. But if Mr. Laughlin winds up being a crappy governor like Tom Corbett, I'll quickly forget this moment on the side of the angels.

Finally, Capitol police officer Michael Fanone, nearly killed defending our nation from Trumpholes on January 6, received at least one threatening phone call during his Tuesday testimony, and it's a pretty awful call -- the part where the caller said he "wish(ed) they would have killed all you scumbags, 'cause you people are scum" struck me as particularly lame. Seriously, deploying the word "scum" twice in six words! These people need to work harder at their threats. Or, perhaps, they should do some deep breathing, read a good book, go to a public park, travel to a new place, whatever ventilates their heads without hurting other people.

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare expansion, paid family leave, Medicaid expansion, and big telecom cruelty.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, expand Medicare, provide paid family/medical leave, pass a bill that would let individual counties and localities accept the Medicaid expansion where states won't, and pass the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act; and attend a rally in favor of the For the People Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Voting Rights Act used to have a list of states that needed to pre-clear their voting law changes with our Justice Department -- until our Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, ruled that discriminated against Southern states (which comprised most of that list!). The Voting Rights Advancement Act would amend the Voting Rights Act so that any state or locality with a record of suppressing the vote would have to pre-clear their voting law changes. Don't brook any silliness about how "the South has changed" from the likes of Mitch McConnell -- the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would fight vote suppression everywhere, not just the South. So let's get to it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve and expand Medicare, by lowering the eligibility age to 60 and adding hearing, vision, and dental coverage. As they say, seniors have ears, eyes, and teeth just like everyone else, so there's no reason Medicare shouldn't cover them! And though I'd rather lower the eligibility age to zero, lowering it to 60 would be a good first step. I can already hear right-wingers whine how are you going to pay for it? If we pass it as part of the next reconciliation bill, we'd get tax hikes on rich folks and corporations to help pay for it -- plus we could let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, which even the Mercatus Center has said would save Medicare about $84 billion annually. (Toward that end, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3, which would let Medicare negotiate prices for most of the drugs it buys.)

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk you want our government to provide paid family/medical leave to all our workers. That is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of the American Families Plan, so we might as well tell Congress we want it, lest they think the American people care more about whatever manufactured outrage right-wingers want to flood the zone with today. And though asking HOWZ WILLZ WE PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!! does get tiresome, just so happens Sen. Gillibrand's previous family/medical leave bills have already answered that: with a payroll tax that would cost workers making $50,000 annually less than $9/month. Nine dollars! And that's not even how I'd do it! See, this is why I get tired of people who whine about paying for things.

Both Daily Kos and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would let counties and cities sign on to the Medicaid expansion even if state governments won't do it. What would be the opposing point of view there? That "states' rights" are too important? Gosh, that would be a tired argument! States that have refused the Medicaid expansion didn't do so because of some serious policy disagreement, but merely out of cruelty. No, a desire to "stick it to Obama" counts as cruelty; I mean, the result is the same. And if Congress doesn't have a moral obligation to fight cruelty, then why do we have a democracy to begin with?

Both Color of Change and Free Press help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which would stop big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners when they talk to their families on the phone. Is it right that we would take advantage of prisoners and their families in this way? Is any cruelty OK if it makes you look "tough on crime"? And don't be the fool who says well, don't commit a crime, then, since we all know that contact with families helps folks in prison stay out once they get out. Also, too, there's a pandemic on, which means less face-to-face contact with families, which means more phone contact. Like I said, it's cruel, and that means we must change it.

Finally, Deadline for Democracy will be holding rallies all over America this week helping you tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act; here's where to find one. You just enter your zip code and find the event nearest you. Some two out of three Americans support the For the People Act, but Republicans Senators just keep on with their propaganda that an end to gerrymandering, campaign finance disclosure for big donors, 15 days of early voting nationwide, same-day and automatic voting registration, and an end to racist caging practices somehow all constitutes a "Democrat power grab." As usual, Republicans doth project too much -- they're the ones doing all the power-grabbing, and the For the People Act would make it harder for them to do it! So let's get out there, in force, and remind them who they're supposed to serve.

Action: concerning taxes, health care, chemical safety, public transportation, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the American Rescue Plan's Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, fight big pharma price gouging, pass the PFAS Action Act and the Freedom to Move Act, and keep bigger, heavier trucks off our roads. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion from the American Rescue Plan permanent. The CTC expansion provides an extra $300/month to parents of children under 6 and $250/month to parents of children between 6 and 17, and I can tell you from experience that an extra $250 a month goes a long way. I guess all the Republicans who voted against it but will still try to take credit for it will argue that it was only supposed to last a year anyway, but, ah, are children going to stop having needs after this pandemic is over? The CTC expansion is good policy that'll cut child poverty in half in America, and would cost a mere $109 billion (out of some $4 trillion-plus in federal expenditures) in 2021, and when was the last time our government spent $109 billion to do people some good, instead of just throwing it away on corporate welfare? That would be a habit we would want to help them cultivate.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big pharma corporation price gouging. Surely our Congressfolk know we all hate big pharma price gouging -- diabetics who spend more on insulin than they do on their rent or mortgage certainly know it more acutely! -- but we still have to tell them we expect them to do something about it, and even though the Social Security Works petition doesn't get into many specifics, there's still space in the comments for you to get into specifics. Like, say, allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, which even the right-wing Mercatus Center says would save over $80 billion annually. And $80 billion in lower costs for the taxpayer could help pay for a lot of better things -- like expanding Medicare.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PFAS Action Act. The House passed the PFAS Action Act last term, and even though that bill attracted two dozen Republican votes in the House, Mob Boss Mitch wanted no part of it in the Senate, which meant two more years of "forever chemicals" that never break down and which scientists have linked to cancer and reproductive issues in our water. The PFAS Action Act would require PFAS manufacturers to clean up their own messes -- which seems as unprecedented in our politics as it doesn't in our parenting! -- and would require our EPA to limit the amount of PFAS chemicals that can appear in our water. That would cause a lot of non-stick pan makers and firefighting foam makers to make their products differently, but c'mon! This is a can-do nation!

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Move Act. What would the Freedom to Move Act do? It would offer grants to states and localities so they can offer fare-free public transportation -- it is public transportation, after all! -- and also so they can build out more public transportation to underserved urban and rural areas. The bill would authorize $5 billion in grants annually, which one could fund almost entirely by repealing oil and gas drilling subsidies! Those are big, big private industries that don't need taxpayer help, after all, but public transportation by definition belongs to us, and everyone who wants to use public trans should be able to. I am irritated to find any of these are controversial matters.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep bigger, heavier trucks off our highways. But bigger, heavier trucks can haul more, says the tiny little Satan sitting on my right shoulder, and thus save money! Yeah, Satan always loses me at "save money." Bigger, heavier trucks can haul more, that's true, but bigger, heavier trucks can also overturn more easily and they can also use more gas and pollute more easily and they also damage our roads and bridges more easily, so there has to be a point where having the biggest, heaviest truck actually costs us all more money, even if it allows some trucking executive to gild the plumbing in his 14th vacation home. And no one's advocating hauling goods in Geo Smart cars. Satan was just about to tell me they were. But I'm so on to Satan.

Around the table: cryptocurrency and other mysteries explained!

Robert Verbruggen at the National Review compares the trend of Republican-run states refusing enhanced unemployment benefits to those years Republican-run states refused the Medicaid expansion. In that they're both unpopular? Why, no! He thinks refusing enhanced unemployment benefits is an "opportunity" for Republicans! That's cynical horserace-speak, of course, but it also ignores the plain reality that folks notice when they're making less money. He can't even bring himself to evaluate the possibility that employers can't find workers because they won't pay more, and says on two occasions that he wished the research was better, which does beg the question then why even write the article? Almost refreshing, it is, to find so-smart-they're-dumb types somewhere other than the Democratic Party.

Ho hum, Republican Congressdolts are still promoting the Big Gummint relief they all voted against. This ain't a matter of simply informing your constituents what help our government offers, as one spokeshack hilariously tries to spin it, but a matter of bragging about it like you didn't do your damnedest to kill it, as Rep. Malliotakis (R-NY) does in calling one slice of that bill an "achievement()" of hers even though she, like every other Republican in Congress, voted "nay." Just wait until they run re-election ads talking about the things the American Rescue Plan did (and, if we're lucky, the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan) like they voted for any of them! I hope Democrats have the minimal courage to point that out; otherwise, they may find a Republican House that refuses to certify a 2024 Biden landslide.

President Biden announces he'll support waiving COVID-19 vaccine patents so more people can get vaccinated, and the big pharma corporations respond with their usual assholery, with one CEO saying the move will "disadvantage patients by undermining existing incentives to develop vaccines and therapeutics for future pandemics," by which I guess she means she's smarter than you because she knows more big words than you and can string together endless prepositional phrases. I kid, of course -- the waiver really won't "undermine existing incentives," not just because it'd be an emergency waiver that would end when the pandemic ends, but also because the primary "existing incentive" -- dead people don't spend money on health care -- ain't going away.

Julie Hollar at FAIR instructs us that "In Media Framing, Trans Kids Are Problems to Be Solved -- Not People With Rights." Which means a) not letting very many trans people speak, even in stories that purport to be about them, and b) swamping trans people beneath a "debate" that's all about the drama. When I read that our "liberal" media finds trans issues "vexing," I'm reminded how often they used to present AIDS as an issue that mainly affected heteros struggling with how to feel about it, rather than the folks suffering and dying from it.

Bank of England Governor says that cryptocurrency has "no intrinsic value" and that folks who invest it in should be "prepared to lose all (their) money." Don't understand cryptocurrency? That's because they don't want you to understand it! In a world where we can use an ATM almost anywhere on Earth and can pay bills without writing and mailing checks, it's hard to see why a thing like cryptocurrency needs to exist. Except, of course, so some people can con other people out of their real money.

Finally, the lawyer for one of the January 6 seditionists has advanced the argument that his role in the attempted coup was really kinda Fox News's fault, because his client did almost nothing but watch Fox News for the previous six months. I actually don't think "watching Fox News non-stop" is an addiction, certainly not the way, say, alcoholism is, so my response to all that would be ah, no, asshole, you're on your own. I mean, we can't just stop blaming people who do evil merely because Satan whispered repeatedly in their ear.

Around the table: "law and order" in its proper perspective, part 223.

One more time, from Carey Shenkman and Ahmed Mohamed at TruthOut: "After Capitol Breach, More Domestic Terrorism Laws Aren’t the Answer." The authors remind us that plenty of laws already exist, but typically our governments use these laws to crack down on Muslims and anti-racism protestors, not actual seditionists. And just as our brethren on the right (but not all of them!) applauded the USA PATRIOT Act after 9.11, we shouldn't applaud new laws that constrain our enemies after 1.6, because that always comes back to bite ya.

Surprise, surprise, among Donald Trump's last-minute pardon spree were "at least seven doctors of health care entrepreneurs" who committed massive Medicare and Medicaid fraud. One was a nursing home CEO who used part of the $1 billion he bilked from American taxpayers to buy a $360,000 watch (in case you were fixated on Joe Biden's Rolex!), and you could be forgiven for your skepticism that he really "has been devoted to prayer and repentance" or "is in declining health" at the ripe old age of 52. Law and order!

Uh oh: Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) told the Twitterverse that he met with the "Stop the Steal" seditionists on January 3, and that it was a "great meeting" and that they should "keep fighting." He deleted the twittering the day after their attempted Capitol coup, of course, and said a bunch of tepid things about the importance of law and order that I'm sure he'd have said much more passionately if the seditionists had been blacks or hippies. Plus, by way of excusing their actions, "it comes out of frustration." I'm plenty frustrated with our government, as you may have noticed, but I have attempted exactly zero coups.

Right Wing Watch runs down the various "prophecies" about that Trump second term that did not come to pass. Because he lost by seven million votes, I feel compelled to say with the Italics Hammer. I sure do hope our "liberal" media do a better job keeping these people out of mainstream discourse. I'm old enough to remember when folks who predicted an apocalypse that never arrived were actually ashamed to show their faces in public again.

Been thinking that maybe the whole QAnon conspiracy theory can fit any piece of data into it, and is thus utterly useless as a theory? Well, here are a few more examples of that -- and don't fixate on the folks who feel "betrayed" because their man didn't arrest all the Democrats, because they'll get over it in a couple of days and go right back to being batshit. Also, too, how stupid is it that we're saying the phrase "the best is yet to come" is "popular in QAnon circles"? "The best is yet to come" is one of the oldest phrases anyone knows! What's next, QAnon's appropriation of "yes" and "no"?

Finally, Julie Hollar at FAIR reminds us that "Media Allow Republicans to Use ‘Unity’ as Tool of Division." "Unity" is the new "bipartisanship" -- just as calls for "bipartisanship" actually mean "capitulating to Republicans," calls for "unity" mean "capitulating to Republicans." Ooh, and Joe Biden didn't put a Republican in his Cabinet! Next up in the New York Times: Quislings deserve affirmative action!

Penny Rants for Sunday, December 13, 2020: special "everyone who sucked last year still sucks" edition!

From the "We Kinda Always Knew This, But It's Good to Have Confessions" file: a lengthy Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting investigation finds that Monsanto and BASF introduced their versions of dicamba knowing it would damage competitors' soybean crops, and they released these products because they wanted to eliminate their competitors. It gets better: Monsanto deliberately undertested their dicamba product (since they couldn't control dicamba's drift onto other farms), and when they did test it, they tested it under conditions that were nothing like what actual farmers face every day. BASF even told folks that their dicamba wouldn't necessarily be safe even by applying it strictly according to the label. In a sane and moral society, Monsanto and BASF would be so broken by lawsuits they'd go out of business. In this sick, immoral, and decadent society, however, Republicans claim these failures require more of the "free" market medicine that enabled them in the first place -- and Democrats remain so hypnotized by the "promise" of "technology" that they sit on their hands.

Another day, another reminder that a crap-ton of full-time workers at fast-food and retail corporations don't make enough money to stay off of federal assistance like food stamps and Medicaid, this time from a Government Accountability Office (or GAO) study. And here you thought if you work full-time, you should be able to provide for your family and guide your children to a better future -- let alone be able to provide for your family without having to rely on government assistance. Which you've already paid into with your taxes, so don't blame yourself or imagine you're some kind of leech; that's what they want you to think -- and right-wingers are so quick to say just get a better job like they're not busy trying to outsource all the good American jobs so that American executives can gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes. Oh, and here's the kicker: our GAO did this study before the pandemic hit; one can only imagine how much worse it is now, with over 14 million more uninsured and our U-1 unemployment rate still close to 7 percent (the more instructive U-6 rate, which counts part-timers who want to work full-time and unemployed folks who've given up, is 12 percent).

Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post lists every single Republican House Rep and state Attorney General who signed on to that ridiculous Texas lawsuit aiming to overturn our election, saying "they are laying the predicate for a contentious new phase of American democracy, if it can continue to be called that, in which election results -- after appropriate recounts and audits and certifications -- are no longer accepted. Instead, they merely open the door for a second phase of legal and political guerrilla warfare in which no tactic, no lie, no baseless claim is off-limits." Note well that these Republicans' loyalty to our soon-to-be-ex-President will most likely go unrewarded, not just because there'll always be a crazier right-winger to swordfight (just ask Scott Tipton!), but also because it only takes one deviation from Dear Leader's Holy Will to become a permanent outcast (just ask Bill Barr!). I did wonder -- because unlike these Republicans I do have the capacity for shame -- if we bore any blame for talking about Voter ID and Interstate Crosscheck, but no, we don't, not just because we always had evidence, but because we always said vote suppression happened before the vote.

Around the table: in which liberals did not "almost lose" the election for the 443rd time.

Looks like I spoke too soon: the two Republican Wayne County (MI) officials who certified the vote totals have now changed their minds and want to "rescind" their votes. I should never have underestimated the right wing thirst for drama! And yes, when officials see the same "problems" in suburban districts as in urban ones but only want to certify the results in the suburban ones, that's drama, and it's not good drama, either. And they can sign all the affidavits they want, but they can't "rescind" their votes. Voting is like that.

When I hear that Joe Biden would rather not investigate our soon-to-be-ex-President's many alleged criminal acts, I sympathize to a point -- I do not wish the Biden Administration to be all about our soon-to-be-ex-President; I'd rather it be all about the American people. Still, when you smear feces all over our house, we should hold you accountable for it, through the Administration that replaces you. And I sure hope Mr. Biden isn't thinking of interfering with the state of New York's investigations into our soon-to-be-ex-President.

I was never a big "Green New Deal" fan -- it was a non-binding resolution, and I always preferred bills like the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, which would actually do the things the Green New Deal resolution merely aspired to do -- but turns out 92 out of 93 House Green New Deal co-sponsors won re-election in 2020. That includes three out of four in competitive House districts, with the fourth currently leading his race by almost seven points with about 85% of the vote counted. Who thinks "let's create jobs building renewable energy infrastructure" is a loser? Only the long-time Democratic pols who are used to losing.

A Government Accountability Office (or GAO) report documents how big corporations like Walmart and Amazon pay their employees so little that they require public assistance like food stamps and Medicaid -- as in nearly six million Medicaid enrollees and nearly five million food stamp recipients who worked full time. And there's Sen. Bernie Sanders telling Walmart to "get off welfare," which Democratic politicians still can't see is winning messaging that resonates with broad sectors of the electorate.

Another day, another Republican (this time former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, he sure was a big help winning Ohio, wasn't he?) claiming that "the far-left...almost cost" Joe Biden the 2020 election. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is exactly right in her response, of course (i.e., that the "far left" won Georgia -- Georgia! -- for Mr. Biden), and moderates lose elections not only because they don't excite people, but also because they don't fight for popular things like (hate to beat a dead horse) renewable energy and Medicare-for-All.

Finally, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that we can't "meet Nazis halfway." Yes, her feelings are pretty much my feelings, and I feel compelled to remind folks that you couldn't "meet halfway" with Tha Bush Mobb, either, once they said everyone who disagreed with their palpably stupid case for war with Iraq was a traitor and a weakling. And let's not try too hard to "understand" Nazi wannabes, either, as our "liberal" media outlets are inexplicably still trying to do -- hate doesn't require a whole lot of navel-gazing, and if Nazi wannabes have legitimate grievances, they sure ain't the grievances they're airing.

Around the table: now with even *more* dastardly deeds done under cover of a pandemic!

Hoo boy now our Administration is trying to get Venezuela to agree to a "transition plan." Venezuela had an election over a year and a half ago, but that matters little to the President who somehow got into office with only 46% of the vote. I guess this is the "good cop" half of their strategy -- charging President Maduro with drug trafficking being the "bad cop" part -- but dig Elliot Abrams, somehow this Administration's Venezuela "expert," saying he wants people in charge "who can work with the other side," which is always code for "people who can capitulate to right-wingers." And dig Secretary Pompeo's statement that Venezuela's crisis is a "man-made crisis." Indeed, this crisis was, to a large degree, made by the evil men in Washington, D.C. who imposed sanctions upon Venezuela. Maybe the people of Venezuela will have something to say about all of this, as they did when Tha Bush Mobb tried to overthrow his predecessor.

Margaret Flowers at TruthOut reminds us that "The US’s Wave of Hospital Closures Left Us Ill-Equipped for COVID-19." The American population has gone up by about 50% over the last 45 years, but the number of hospital beds has gone down by over 50% over the same period, and "down" is the wrong direction to go in, obviously. And, as you might imagine, rural hospitals tend to close down even faster than urban or suburban ones. What's to blame? Greed, as usual. What would be a good solution to greed? Why, Medicare-for-All, of course, which would push the private health insurance system out and make it more accountable to you, as your government's owner! Don't be the one who complains about "wait times"; folks in rural areas wait until after they die of preventable issues because they have no hospitals. Here, as elsewhere, the "free market" has not provided.

If you've been crushing on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo because, unlike our President, he projects the image of someone who knows what he's doing, let Ross Barkan at The Nation remind you that Mr. Cuomo helped set his own state up for this mess by letting big corporations close and consolidate hospitals and trying to slash Medicaid funding. Hey, you know what might solve the problem of having "too many people" on Medicaid? Why, Medicare-for-All health insurance, of course! Let me know if you think I'm beating a dead horse here. Not that it'll change what I'm doing.

In the wake of the CNN CEO claiming that he broadcasts all of our President's crapshow briefings because it showcases how "tough" his network's questions are, Neil DeMause at FAIR reminds us that "limiting" our President's time on-screen "Isn't Censorship, It's Journalism." Journalists are supposed to get at the truth, after all, not merely be stenographers to power. And you know, I was about to be generous and say they've simply forgotten the fact that they already don't broadcast every single possible piece of news that could be broadcast, so it's hard to call every single choice not to broadcast something "censorship." But they've got as much or more semiotic training than I do, so I'm going to go ahead and assume they're just pretending to be stupid, so they can better serve evil.

Speaking of how you actually do journalism, Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker interviews a "contrarian" whose questionable coronavirus theories have informed our Administration's "thinking," and refutes said "contrarian"'s misstatements in italics right after he makes them. Easier to do in print than on TV, I suppose, but then that recommends print over TV, doesn't it? Every damn journalistic outlet should do what The New Yorker did here; we can even call it "doing a New Yorker" if they like. (As an aside, theorizing that viruses "evolve" from strong to weak is only a cut above Todd Akin's insane ramblings about "legitimate rape." Plus, Mr. Epstein does what they all do when someone calls them on their BS: he starts yelling.)

Finally, some news you can use: Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos helps you "cut the cord" with your cable service provider so you don't subsidize Fox News's disgusting behavior anymore. You may not watch Fox News, but you're still paying for Fox News as part of your cable package; it's $20/year, but that's more than the other sucky cable news channels get, and since at least 93 million households still get cable TV, which means Fox News gets over $1.8 billion just from being part of your cable package, and though their advertisers are deserting them in droves, they're still making all this passive money from you. Don't give it to them! You'll be happier and richer.

Action: concerning bad budgeting, human rights, and gerrymandering.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our Administration's skewed budget priorities, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Don't believe folks who say our President's budget doesn't cut Medicaid, food stamps, and Social Security disability programs, because his budget does these things, and the fact that neither House of our Congress wants to hold hearings on his budget doesn't matter -- the time to communicate our will to our representatives is always now, and don't think Congress wouldn't pull a bait-and-switch and pass this nefarious budget if we weren't watching, because of course they would. And regarding SSI, don't believe right-wingers when they sling around anecdotes about someone they heard or thought played up their back pain into SSI like that justifies $75 billion in cuts over 10 years. To amend Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and "let me just tell you three stories."

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Apple to stop enabling China's awful human rights abuses, then Sum of Us still helps you do that. You'll want to get cracking on that one, since their annual shareholder meeting is happening as we speak, and you want to make sure they can see us wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR. Apple has garnered plenty of good PR by standing up for encryption in the United States, but they're helping China spy on activists' phone calls and text messages by refusing to sell (encryption) apps on the App store in China. No doubt they'll argue that China will just "disappear" anyone who downloads such apps, but China can't put everyone in a concentration camp at once, though they'll try. Just as South African anti-apartheid activists instructed us that divestment couldn't make their lives any worse, I bet Chinese human rights activists would prefer having the ability to shield their communications from their government.

And finally, Pennsylvania residents, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to pass the anti-gerrymandering bills HB 22 and 23, then Fair Districts PA still helps you do that. HB 22 would amend the Pennsylvania state constitution to permit the creation of an eleven-person redistricting commission to handle the drawing of legislative boundaries; this would take the from the the state legislature, which has proven it can't handle it, such Rorschach-blot districts (excluding sides of streets and single houses, even!) do they draw. HB 23 would attend the nuts and bolts of the creation of the commission, the selection of its members (four voters from each of the two major parties, plus three more unaffiliated voters), and the criteria by which it can redraw legislative districts. If we can pass these bills, we'll be closer to a world in which voters actually pick their representatives, instead of representatives picking their voters.

Action: concerning our nation's budget, law and order, and dangerous baby products.

You've no doubt heard by now that our President has put out a budget that would, guess what, cut Medicaid, cut Medicare, cut Social Security, cut food stamps, cut housing assistance, cut job training funding -- but jack up funding for defense, since spending more than the next eight highest-spending countries in the world combined somehow just isn't enough. Even Republicans in Congress act like the President's budget is a dead letter -- retiring Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, announced last week he won't even hold a hearing on the budget, but that doesn't mean we can't weigh in anyway! And we must weigh in -- our President has decided to weigh in, after all, on "his priorities," so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject our President's budget and fight for our priorities. Mr. Enzi is correct to note that "Congress holds the purse strings, according to the Constitution," but our laws require that our President submit an annual budget proposal; it's a real, legal thing that happens, so we, the American people, must attend to it.

Meanwhile, you've also no doubt heard by now the tantrum our Administration threw over its Justice Department prosecutors recommending seven to nine years in prison for Administration crony Roger Stone, the subsequent hullabaloo resulting in the resignation of four prosecutors in the Stone case (I feel their pain, but I wish they hadn't quit, since now our President will replace them with four new cronies) and over 2,000 former Justice Department officials demanding the resignation of Attorney General Barr for his interference in the matter. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our House Judiciary Committee and the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate our Justice Department for possible wrongdoing. Yeah, I know, look how well the impeachment investigation worked out. But this won't go before a Senate full of Administration lapdogs: this will go before a hostile House committee and an Inspector General mandated by law to be independent. Maybe our President will fire all the Inspectors General -- he's already tried! -- but let's at least make him humiliate himself before the people.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban inclined baby sleepers, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Do it quickly, though, since our CPSC's comment period ends in eight days. Researchers have linked, at this time, the inclined sleepers to 73 baby deaths and over a thousand baby accidents and injuries to the inclined sleepers, and remember, 73 is the number of babies we know about. Manufacturers touted the sleepers as a way to rock babies to sleep faster and keep them asleep longer, but the sleepers allow babies to roll onto their stomachs while rocking, and then they suffocate because they can't get back on their back. Babies also suffocate when their heads fall forward (their heads tend to be disproportionately heavy) in the sleeper, or when their faces roll into the product's sides and they rebreathe carbon dioxide-filled air. We all know parents are exhausted (indeed, it's almost like our economy wants it that way) but we also need to get rid of products that kill their babies.

Action: concerning impeachment, Medicaid, and pollution.

The Senate votes today on the two impeachment charges against our President, so now's the time to call your Senators and tell them to convict and remove him from office. (You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers; you may want to check out their websites, too, in case you can't reach their Washington numbers. I've programmed all of my Senators' phone numbers into my phone.) Republicans have been admitting for months that our President did wrong, but they're also saying it doesn't rise to the level of an impeachable offense. While I don't presume that this is the most impeachable offense he's committed, nor do I presume this is the worst thing he's done in office, just picture how Republicans would have reacted if President Obama had refused to release Ukraine aid money Congress had already mandated he spend unless the Ukranian government concocted some sort of investigation into Mitt Romney. They'd have howled like banshees! Their commitment to the rule of law may be entirely situational, but that doesn't mean ours has to be, nor does it mean we must remain silent.

Meanwhile, you may know that our President has decided to let states accept federal Medicaid funding in block grants, and you may also know that this has been a long-desired goal of the far right in America. Why? Because the far right hates Medicaid, of course -- it helps poor working folk get health insurance and therefore health care, so the right hates it as it hates all government programs that actually help people. And turning Medicaid funding into block grants would give states "flexibility" in how they spend it -- meaning they might not even spend it on health care! This block grants scheme would also limit funding to states, meaning that if folks need more health care than the block grant would fund, those folks would be SOL. Luckily, this block grant program is an option for states, not a mandate -- though it sure won't be an option for poor working folk! We expect a lot of states would leap to accept this "option," but we, the residents of those states, have a say about that. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell states to stop our government's attempt to destroy Medicaid by refusing the "option" to accept Medicaid funding as a block grant.

Finally, as part of its mad drive to destroy all regulations that actually help good Americans, our Administration has proposed to "streamline and clarify" the process by which our government enforces the National Environmental Policy Act, and you can guess what that means -- it means "streamlining and clarifying" science and public input out of the process, by reducing public commenting on decision-making processes that might cost some corporate executive some money, and by preventing government agencies from taking climate change into their decisions. Every time this Administration changes a regulation they make it worse, and the only thing that's stopped them from doing far more damage so far? Us, that's what. No, really, us -- when the courts strike down an Administration regulatory proposal, they often cite the numerous public comments this Administration routinely ignores in pushing that proposal, and believe it or not, clean air and clean water actually remain fairly popular with the American people. Hence both WildEarth Guardians and the Union of Concerned Scientists help you tell this Administration to scuttle yet another plan to ruin clean air and clean water regulation.

UPDATE. Senate acquits our President by 48-52 on the abuse of power charge (Sen. Romney of Utah being the only Republican to vote with all 47 Democrats) and 47-53 on the obstruction of Congress charge. Sen. Collins voted to acquit, saying our President had "learned a lesson" from the experience; I shudder to think the "lesson" he's learned is that he can do even more of whatever he likes. But we'll keep instructing him otherwise, as is our duty as citizens.

Action: concerning religious freedom, health care, and pollution.

Avaaz helps you tell big pension fund corporations to divest from China's long-term effort to oppress its Muslim Uyghur population. What do the big pension funds have to do with the Uyghurs? They invest in big tech corporations that provide China with surveillance tools including (sigh) facial recognition software and DNA testing. And what do the Chinese do to the Uyghurs? Oh, you know, imprison them in internment camps, ahem, re-education camps, and inflict torture, rape, forced sterilization, and forced labor, among other things, all as part of a "people's war on terror," a phrase I hope dies a horrible and humiliating death one day. Investing in anything China does is dicey enough -- China's government is really the worst of capitalism and the worst of Communism rolled up into one monstrous entity -- but investing in detainment of citizens for religious reasons should make pension funds run away in horror. And they will, if enough of us speak out -- and if we can help cut off this money-flow, China will have a tougher time keeping them going, and we will save lives.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4996, the Helping Medicaid Offer Maternity Services (or Helping MOMS) Act, would give states the option to offer one year of post-birth Medicaid coverage to both mother and child; the bill has 11 Democratic House sponsors and 8 Republican ones, which might make it actually bipartisan! Of course Medicare-for-All would make this problem moot, but this bill will still do a lot of folks a lot of good, and if a few Republicans get re-elected because they're able to tout their support for expanding health care coverage for poor mothers and children -- and doing so effectively, too, since most health complications relating to pregnancy occur within the first 100 days after childbirth -- that's not too high a price to pay for progress. Of course, a state could just say no and say 60 days of coverage (which current law mandates) is just fine, and if state-level politicians want to run on denying health care to poor mothers and children, I say let 'em. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand health care to poor mothers and children by passing the Helping MOMS Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state Assembly still plans to take up the notorious SB 790, which would commit all manner of foul deeds against our clean air and clean water, even though we've told them many times to reject the bill, so Penn Environment helps you tell your state Assemblyfolks to protect our air and water by rejecting SB 790. SB 790 would, among other nefarious acts, prevent localities from protecting themselves from gas and oil drillers (now there's small-government conservatism for you!), let oil and gas corporations replace any water they pollute with unsafe drinking water, weaken state standards for reporting oil and gas spills, and allow the state to spray drilling wastewater on state roads to keep dust down. They're not trying to help corporations pollute because of "burdensome regulations" -- they're trying to help them pollute because they care more about big donors than their bosses, i.e., you. That only means we have to remind them, again and again and again if we have to.

Action: concerning poverty, corruption, monopolies, and privatization.

Our Office of Management and Budget (or OMB) would like to calculate poverty using the "Chained CPI" measurement, which would essentially redefine inflation downward and thus redefine poverty upward. You may remember Chained CPI from the Social Security debates of the past decade -- Chained CPI portrays inflation as lower than it really is, by assuming that once an item's price rises a certain amount, consumers will simply switch to a cheaper item. Already sounds like a scam, doesn't it? And just as the last Administration mooted using Chained CPI to calculate Social Security benefits -- which doesn't work, because seniors have a lot of fixed costs and can't just "switch to what's cheaper" whenever they like -- this Administration wants to use it to claim that not so many folks are struggling, which means fewer of those who are actually struggling will get federal benefits like Medicaid. Hence the Coalition on Human Needs (among other good government groups) helps you tell our OMB to reject its plan to take health care away from more good Americans.

Meanwhile, S. 1393, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, would (as its title suggests) make it against the law for Congressfolk to trade stocks. If that sounds extreme to you, consider how often Congressfolk ever do the people's will versus how often they seem to do some big corporation's will, and then recall that corporations trade stock and people don't. Americans are getting a constant reminder from our President of how much they hate corruption, and they generally figure that Congressfolk will do what pleases them before they'll do what's right, but really, why should we put up with that? And folks who say we can "trust" Congressfolk to trade stock and do the right thing are ignoring the evidence of their own eyes -- and they're making about as bad an argument as saying cable news guests can take money from big corporations and still pontificate "objectively" about matters that concern their paymasters. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore some faith in our democracy by passing the Ban Conflicted Trading Act.

In other news, our FCC has given its blessing to the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger -- even though we all know this merger, like all other big corporate mergers, will reduce competition, raise prices, concentrate economic power in fewer hands, and cause a lot of people to lose their jobs -- but our Department of Justice can still step in and stop the merger, so Free Press reminds you that you can still call our DoJ, at 202.804.1389, and tell them to block the proposed merger. Our DoJ -- led, such as it is, by William Barr, who is, among so many other things, a man who believes corporations know best about everything -- probably won't want to block the merger, but again: it doesn't matter what they want, it matters what we want. One day, we will live in an America where all Americans really believe that, and communicate their will to their representatives in government until they cry uncle. Until then, we just have to keep reminding folks that we really do have the power -- if we use it.

Finally, our President, who has repeatedly assured us that he will pick the "best people" to work in our government, somehow thinks Barry Myers should lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA runs, among other things, the National Weather Service, which has done such a great job over the years that Jim Freaking DeMint defended it while in the Senate. And, ah, what did Mr. Myers do for a living until recently? Why, run AccuWeather, a private weather forecaster which has long salivated at the prospect of either crippling or buying out the National Weather Service! Putting Mr. Myers in charge of the NOAA is real fox-in-charge-of-the-henhouse territory; that's a cliché, I suppose, but this Administration is so terrible you can cut them down with little more than cliches. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject Mr. Myers's nomination to the NOAA. Don't believe the hype that since Mr. Myers has answered the conflict-of-interest charge by resigning from Accuweather, because he sold his stock to his own family at a very large discount; what does that look like to you?

Around the table: legislators try to thwart the people's will, part 273.

Utah's voters approved a Medicaid expansion in November, so naturally state legislature are working to subvert their will via a scaled-back Medicaid expansion. With a bill that would be more expensive and cover fewer good Utahns, no less! I'm reminded that South Dakota's voters approved a campaign finance reform initiative at the polls in 2016 only to see their legislators repeal it in 2017. Legislators all over America seem to think they know better than their bosses, the people; I wonder how long the people will put up with that.

If, indeed, the "total mess" at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya really does turn into another Benghazi, don't expect our Congressfolk or our "liberal" media to take a critical attitude toward this Administration the way they did toward the Obama Administration. Certainly don't expect them to look into whether privatizing our security services at our embassies is really a good idea (spoiler alert: it's not), not when it's far easier to demonize workers striking over wage theft.

Our Supreme Court rejects an Alabama death row prisoner's request to be executed with an Imam at his side, because the prisoner took too long to make his request, or something. Alabama prisons employ Christian chaplains who can fulfill such requests for Christian death row prisoners, but the state claims having an Imam with a prisoner presents "unacceptable safety concerns," because of course they do. How many times must I tell these pimps! Everyone has rights! And yes it is civilized to allow even a man who raped and murdered an underage girl to die with a modicum of dignity! Doing so shows that we're a civilization worthy of outlasting our rapists and murderers! It's sad that I have to say any of this out loud.

This Venezuela coup must not be going so well, because now our Secretary of State says we're in Venezuela because Iranian terrorists have "active cells" there. But if that were significant, or even true, wouldn't we have heard about it weeks ago? Continually this Administration takes weeks to come up with these kinds of excuses for what it does, which I guess would be heartening, if our "liberal" media didn't just lap it all up.

Finally, Matthew Yglesias explains "Why Millions of People Are Getting Hit With a Surprise Tax Bill This Year," i.e., why folks aren't getting the refunds they've come to expect. Long story short: our federal government has withheld less tax money this year than in previous years years, which might actually qualify as a good work, though of course that wouldn't justify all the tax "reform"'s multitudinous evil works. But I still find it hilarious that the 2017 Republican tax "reform" stands to become even more unpopular by this April, and that this President may well go down in history as the one who "raised our taxes." It might even be as hilarious as the Obama Administration actually designing a tax cut so that good Americans wouldn't notice it.

Around the table: time for another exciting installment of "when's that terrorist attack coming?"

As we count the cost of our ongoing government shutdown, I feel compelled to ask: when's that terrorist attack coming? I mean, our President could be hunting really big game here -- not just the right to strut around for years saying you should have given me that wall so I could have prevented that terrorist attack, but also expanded "emergency powers" legislation enabling him to do whatever he likes, whenever he likes. Hey, if I thought of it, you know he has. Just remember: if terrorists (or whomever!) do attack, the first thing out of our mouths should be our President failed -- the President who won't read intelligence briefings and won't staff a functioning State Department, and who also struts around like he alone knows everything.

Third Circuit Court of Appeals refuses to reinstate court order preventing the Republican National Committee from engaging in the kind of "ballot security" measures that just so happen to suppress minority voters, and Rick Hasen foresees "supercharge(d)" vote suppression in 2020 as a result. I do find it interesting that Mr. Hasen's Republican lawyer acquaintances would "bristle" at the kind of things the RNC used to do, but the RNC got in trouble (in part) for caging voters, and what's Interstate Crosscheck if not caging? Things like Interstate Crosscheck and Voter ID don't necessarily come at the end of a gun or a fist, but I'm not sure that's progress. It certainly ain't enough progress.

Ho hum, our President thinks he can unilaterally turn Medicaid into a block grant program though even many right-wing analysts disagree that he can do that. So I guess the Tea Party is right now taking to the streets to protest this AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!!!, right? I kid, of course. I'd be more confident that this latest attempt to subvert the rule of law will die in court, except that Tha Bush Mobb successfully imposed spending caps on two states back in the day, albeit spending caps so high those states had no chance of hitting them. And that's why I always say George W. Bush is worse than our current President.

I agree with Charles Eisenstein at Yes! magazine that "(p)eople are not going to be frightened into caring" and thus doing something about climate change, though I doubt most folks would find "deep and active care for the planet com(ing) through experiences of beauty and grief" to be useful advice. I do agree that the best climate change messaging is pro-clean water, pro-clean air, and anti-pollution messaging rather than TEH PLANETZ IZ GOINGZ TO DIEZ!!!! messaging; I even agree that local efforts to defeat the effects of climate change can do better than big centralized nationalized ones. But the main reason climate change messaging isn't working? Because we're not all saying "let's kick climate change's ass!"

Finally, because you deserve some good news, yet another ag-gag law goes down in federal court, and this time it's Iowa's. You may wince at the court's reasoning -- that our First Amendment protects lying, since someone who takes a job at a factory farm so they can do undercover reporting on animal treatment is lying -- since similar reasoning has also, at times, protected media outlets that lie. But of course our First Amendment not only protects lies, but efforts to expose those lies. (And dig the pork lobby's we-never-intended-to-infringe-on-your-rights-sucker act! As if corporations have literally no other way to "conduct our businesses and care for our animals" than to procure unconstitutional tools for dealing with undercover agents!)

Around the table: the computer is to blame! And other follies.

Philadelphia City Council passes a vigorous fair scheduling law, mandating that larger employers give workers 10 days' notice of their upcoming work schedule. This bill takes aim at the many big chains operating in the city, not small businesses -- unless folks think a "small business" has 30 stores and 250 employees. Hopefully our NLRB gets the message we've been sending them about not letting big corporations pretend to be small businesses by pretending their franchises are independent "small businesses."

Wells Fargo improperly denies loan modification requests to almost 900 people, forecloses on nearly 550 of them, and then blames a "computer glitch" for all the trouble. This all sounds eerily like that scam where you fall behind on your mortgage payments, your bankster says they might be able to modify your mortgage, and while you're waiting for their decision, they take your home from you. Well, Wells Fargo tried blaming its employees in their account-opening scam, so now they're blaming their computers. And they say corporations don't learn from their mistakes!

Study finds that between 65,000 and 115,000 New York City residents would be pushed into poverty if our Administration forges ahead with its plan to widen the definition of "public charge" to include just about anyone who ever got public assistance, ever. These would be the folks who would avoid getting assistance via food stamps or Medicaid so that their later attempts at, say, securing a green card wouldn't go awry. But this story has a happy ending: our Presidents' many votaries get to diddle their rage glands over TEH IMMIGRANTZ GETTINGZ ALL TEH THINGZ!!!!!

Anthropologists warn us to avoid stereotyping Amish attitudes toward our environment. We might be tempted to think of them as natural environmentalists because they "live simply" or "live in nature," but Amish folks tend to regard nature as "a manifestation of God’s handiwork, created for the benefit of humans," and as something "temporary" and not necessarily to be regulated by our government. Even the most "temporary" of things could last lifetimes, of course, and the Amish man who pooh-poohs biodiversity by saying the Amish "privilege humans" posits the only alternative as "we should just open the doors and let in all the flies," when surely Creation offers us more diverse options than that. It sure does seem they're taking it in the ear from Big Ag corporations as much as every other small farmer, though.

Finally, in case you were wondering why Vice President Pence's Chief of Staff, Nick Ayers, declined to take the same job with our President Who's So Desperate to Finally Once and For All Get Rid of John Kelly, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reminds us that Mr. Ayers is a very wealthy man who made most of his millions in dark money advertising. If Mr. Ayers has indeed rejected our President's job offer so he can run a dark money group ostensibly dedicated to our President's re-election, as at least one news outlet has said, I guess that would explain our President's relatively sanguine public reaction, for whom does the grifter admire but another grifter?

Action: concerning war, media, and immigration.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the war in Afghanistan. Their latest email missive informed me that some folks who were pre-teens when the war began in 2001 just got elected to Congress, which I found a bit sobering, but these new Congressfolk are considerably less emotionally-invested in this war than the folks who started it, and now (at last!) they get a bigger say in whether we keep that war going. Which we shouldn't, not least because we got Mr. bin Laden years ago. The forces of evil will try two tactics: 1) ZOMG TEH TERRURIZTZ WINZ!!!!!, and 2) let's privatize the Afghanistan War. Both arguments are moronic -- respectively, fearmongering is a way of announcing that you can't win the argument on the merits, and if we're going to fight wars, we should fight wars, rather than let mercenaries bleed the taxpayer. And taxpayers will be paying out the wazoo for bad results, if past privatization efforts are any indication.

Meanwhile, Media Matters's latest email missive opens with this blunt and completely accurate statement: "Fox News is a malevolent and destructive force." One almost (I said almost!) longs for the day when Fox's on-air "talent" went to some lengths to hide their racism, but now, with President Bigballs as their Personal Lord and Savior, they don't even have to do that anymore. And since we can't buy cable channels a la carte in America, we can't directly hit Fox News where it hurts (i.e., in their pocketbook). But we can tell Fox's corporate advertisers to stop sponsoring Fox News, which Media Matters helps you do. Do not tolerate any guff that boycott efforts like these "hurt free speech." Fox News punditoids have an inviolable right not to be imprisoned for their speech, but they have no "right" to six- and seven-figure TV jobs. Our First Amendment protects us from our government -- not from advertisers, not from activists, and certainly not from viewers.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) that their proposed expansion of the definition of "public charge" will unfairly punish immigrant families, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. As you may know, we've always kept immigrants out if we can establish that they'll become a "public charge," or someone completely reliant on the taxpayer, but HHS has proposed calling anyone who has ever availed themselves of Medicaid or food stamps a "public charge," which would make a lot of folks who work and contribute to society (not to mention pay taxes!) into "public charges." Our Administration is basically trying to deport as many immigrants as possible, which is a stupid way to make policy. And either "public charge" means something or it doesn't; our Administration obviously prefers meaninglessness and nihilism. But we don't have to put up with any of that.

Horror and hope, 2018 edition.

First, the good news. Colorado and Michigan voters passed ballot initiatives creating redistricting commissions for their states; Utah voters also mulled the matter, and with 95% of the vote counted at this writing, the "yes" votes have a narrow lead. Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah voters passed ballot initiatives expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while Maryland and Nevada voters approved same-day voter registration. Florida voters restored voting rights for some ex-felons by a 25-point margin, while Massachusetts voters banned gender identity discrimination by a 40-point margin; Michigan voters legalized recreational marijuana, while Utah voters legalized medical marijuana. So a lot of so-called "purple state" and "red state" voters approved good policy on Election Day -- which they've done a lot in recent years, often over the wishes of their elected representatives -- and that's always a good thing. And the election results broadly instructed us that our President's support for avowed white supremacists remains an anvil around the Republican party's neck. In a nation where too many of us still have too many private racisms, we shouldn't over-congratulate ourselves for that, but at least those morons walking around in their Hitler T-shirts whining about how "oppressed" they are received no mandate whatsoever from the voters this week.

And now, the bad news: for the third consecutive even-year election cycle, Republicans outperformed the polls, such that Democrats took back the U.S. House, but flipped fewer seats than estimable organizations like the Cook Political Report and Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball predicted they'd flip, and Democrats lost seats in the U.S. Senate, which likely guarantees Justice Thomas's retirement in 2020 and makes taking back the chamber later that year a much longer shot. Democrats flipped seven Governor's offices, but flipped only six state legislative houses, gaining around 350 legislative seats, which actually isn't that impressive (America has almost 7,400 state legislators). These gains at the state level will make a right-wing Constitutional convention considerably more unlikely, but they don't assure better redistricting next decade, let alone better policy -- for example, while I'd love to savor Scott Walker's defeat in Wisconsin, and I will, Republicans still have huge majorities in both legislative chambers there.

How did Republicans outperform the polls? By running on their record of good works animated by good policy and skillful communication with voters? Ah, you know me better than that by now. Republicans won, to some extent, with the vote suppression tactics (gerrymandering, Voter ID, Interstate Crosscheck, and the like) that have characterized Republican stamp-out-the-vote efforts since 2012. Obviously we should fight vote suppression wherever we find it (and we have fought vote suppression tirelessly at this blog). But the main reason Republican politicians seem harder to kill than zombies? Democrats just don't seem to have a clue. Republicans all over America have run this vote suppression scheme three times now, and Democrats have been caught flat-footed each time; the higher turnout this midterm no doubt delivered them the House, but we deserve the credit for that, not them.

And this apparent cluelessness goes deeper than their inability to win races on the ground -- they don't seem to have a clue about what to do when they have power, either. When they have power, they piss it away trying not to offend corporatist donors and trying to "build bipartisan consensus" with a party that deserves oblivion. We used to get mad at Tha Bush Mobb for insisting that they "create reality," but the truth is the Democrats do the same thing -- they piddle away the mandates the voters give them, and when Republicans storm back into power, Democrats tell us the landscape is difficult and all they can do is play for time. Well, since we're talking about time, this state of affairs describes the last 38 years of American politics. And how did that era start again? With the 1980 Republican Presidential candidate who decided he was going to change the landscape! I know changing the landscape is an easier task, logistically, when you have big corporate power behind you, as Mr. Reagan did, but surely if this is the greatest democracy on Earth, it's not that big a lift for those enterprising Democrats who can get the American people behind them.

So change is absolutely possible -- if we demand it. Now, you will not find very many echoes of my theses in "liberal" media analyses. They'll proclaim that Democrats ran too many far-left candidates and should have run more "electable" candidates who could "win" (again, in this self-fulfilling prophecy of a "landscape"). Never mind that for every Kara Eastman the pundits can cite I can find an "electable," "mainstream" Democrat who also got the silver medal on Tuesday. Never mind that the Democrats' Senate losers on Tuesday were all "electable" "compromises" with the "harsh realities" of the political "landscape." The fact is this: when you do no good works with your power, people won't work that hard to keep you in power -- and this is as it should be! We beat up on our fellow Americans for not being more engaged with politics, but the sickness, immorality, and decadence of our political class is a far bigger and far more urgent problem. If you fix the latter, you will fix the former. I know it's a big task, but only the big solutions last. And this humble blog will continue to help you push the big solutions on your representatives -- until they have no choice but to follow the popular will, regardless of their party or ideology.

Action: concerning government spying, antibiotic abuse, and cruelty to immigrants.

You may have heard that our military is trying to figure out if they can predict mass protests (i.e., against our President) from social media activity beforehand. Before we get into figuring out exactly which Philip K. Dick short story our government is trying to make into public policy this time, let's step back: why would our government want to know about protests beforehand? I can think of only one reason: because they don't want any good Americans to protest! And I'm sure they felt exactly the same way when Tea Partiers were making asses of themselves in our streets and on our public lands! Hence Free Press helps you tell Congress to pimp-slap any Administration effort to obstruct lawful protest in America using surveillance. Seriously, if they want to figure out when the protests are coming, all they have to do is note when they're about to do something that's going to hurt good Americans. Seems easier to just stop hurting Americans than to do all this hifalutin spying.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell Darden Restaurants to get the antibiotics out of the meat it sells at its restaurants. Darden, as you may know, owns Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, LongHorn Steakhouse, and the Capital Grille, among others; in total, Darden runs over 1,700 restaurants serving 400 million guests in North America annually, so it's got reach. And its shareholders have, in each of the last three years, put forward a resolution demanding that Darden meats stop relying on animals pumped full of antibiotics; the most recent iteration of that resolution got 40 percent. Add the Big Stick of Bad PR to shareholder pressure Darden's already getting and we may yet get Darden to rid its supply chain of antibiotic-drenched meat, and thus Darden could help us avert a world where antibiotic abuse in feed animals renders antibiotics useless for medical use, which would also be a world in which the next cut could kill us. So let's get to wielding that Big Stick.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration not to distend the definition of "public charge" so it can deport more immigrants later, then the National Women's Law Center and the Union of Concerned Scientists still help you do that. We've always tried to prevent immigrants from coming to America if it seems likely they'll become a "public charge," or someone who'll depend entirely on taxpayer assistance, but our Administration would dramatically expand the definition of "public charge" to include anyone who's ever used food stamps or Medicaid, when a lot of good Americans fall on hard times and need to rely on those services sooner or later. I guess it's asking too much for a President who was literally a millionaire before he was eight years old -- and not through his own hard work, but through his father's sketchy inheritance schemes -- to understand that hard-working people face hard times every once in a while. But we're happy to teach him otherwise.

Around the table: describing our President's plan to win the midterms.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) writes a USA Today op-ed saying that his Republican counterpart, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has essentially "made the case for a Democratic Senate" by promising to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits and giving another go at Affordable Care Act repeal. It's nice to see the Democrats' leader in the Senate saying all that stuff out loud, rather than mouthing yet more pablum about how we all have to work together, but it would make more of a difference now if Democrats had spent 2009 and 2010 doing good works with their near-total power, rather than telling everyone we had to try to get along with the same Republicans who had just got done almost ruining our country.

Surprise, surprise, our President has indulged in a lot of hysteria over a purported "caravan" of would-be immigrants descending on our border, but our Administration's agencies have, wouldn't you know, taken approximately zero action to actually deal with such a thing. After all, the best course of action in the face of a crisis is no action, so you can blame other people for it, let the crises keep happening, keep blaming other people, and stoke your votaries into a state of rage! And they say our President isn't a real Republican.

Of course, when our President has a saucepan he's going to bang a hole in it, so naturally he says this "caravan" has "unknown Middle Easterners" in it. Suggesting that our Southwest border is a secret conduit for Middle Eastern terrorists is an old argument, of course -- remember when Tom Cotton rode his claims of ISIS/Mexican drug cartel collaboration all the way to a U.S. Senate seat in Arkansas? Good times! -- but too many folks still have a problem telling the difference between something they've heard and something that is, as well as the difference between a suspect and a criminal and the difference between something we "just know" and something we can actually prove.

But fear isn't the only arrow in our President's quiver as the midterms approach -- he's also got lies! Our media call his sudden tax cut proposal a "mystery," given that Congress would have to pass another tax cut and won't be back in session until after the elections, but it's really not a mystery at all, if you assume he just says whatever he thinks will get him the most attention without worrying about whether he'll actually do it. He's hoping to drive turnout in favor of Republicans, with the help of his votaries who'll moronically intone HE CUT YOUR TAXES! I'm feeling charitable, so I'll suppose, this once, that our media's problem in decoding the ploy has to do with its sheer nakedness.

At least one other observer thinks this "middle class tax cut" "plan" will backfire on Republicans, since it'll remind voters that Republicans have already passed a tax "cut" that went mostly to rich folks and corporations. I can see where Mr. Newmyer's coming from, but he clearly hasn't anticipated our President saying I WANT A TAX CUT FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS BUT THE DEMOCRATS WON'T LET ME!!!!!, at which point we'll all be talking about this new BS tax cut, and not the tax "cut" they already passed that we all see through. I mean, you don't expect him to tell the truth about Congress being out of session and legislation taking time to pass, do you?

Finally, Rick Hasen at the Harvard Law Review blog describes just how much worse it could get for state-level redistricting efforts. Voters in several states are trying to pass ballot initiatives that would taking redistricting away from (highly self-interested!) legislators and give it to independent redistricting commissions, and even though our Supreme Court just said (in 2015) that such a process would be part of the legislative process and thus Constitutional, you can just imagine the newly-emboldened five-member right-wing majority (led by that compulsive literalist, John Roberts) overturning that precedent and saying that a legislature either is a legislature or it isn't. (If our Court doesn't want to appear too partisan, I suppose, it could rule that a legislature could cede its redistricting responsibility to an independent commission through law.)

Action: concerning vote suppression, immigration, education, and gas mileage.

You've no doubt heard by now that Georgia's Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, has refused to process over 50,000 voter registration applications because liberals -- or maybe because blacks, as the Associated Press has found that these registrations come disproportionately from black folks. A Kemp spokeshack says the Secretary is using "exact-match" criteria which would put a voter registration on hold for something as small as a hyphen dropped from a last name. Just like Interstate Crosscheck, which catches voter fraud through vigorous matching of folks with the same middle names and Social Security numbers! I kid, of course -- Interstate Crosscheck isn't so rigorous, but hey, whatever gets the job done. Who's running for Georgia Governor this year? Well, Stacey Abrams is one, and the other one, let's see here, wouldn't want to get his name wrong -- oh, yes, Brian Kemp! What a coincidence! Color of Change helps you tell Mr. Kemp to process the damn applications already. I mean, if he's really the best candidate, he should be able to win without tricks, right?

Meanwhile, our Administration, always looking for ways to diddle the rage glands of its votaries, would like to make it much, much harder for immigrants to gain citizenship if they've ever relied on public assistance. We have always tried to prevent folks from immigrating to America if it seems likely they'll become "public charges," or folks we'd have to completely support forever, but our Administration wants to make immigrants into a "public charge" if they've ever used Medicaid or food stamps, which a lot of good Americans have to use at some point or other. If someone said out loud that six months on food stamps makes you a hopeless "taker," we'd call that person a narrow, or even cruel. What would we then say of a government that held this position? We'd certainly say they don't give people enough of a chance to make something of themselves, when we as Americans assume that anyone can make something of themselves. The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell our Administration to reject yet another cruel immigration proposal.

In other news, people who think technology is the answer to every conceivable problem (and, ah, people who think technology is a good way of diverting taxpayer money away from public schools and into the coffers of private corporations) have been pushing online pre-K schools as a way of "helping" underprivileged kids, but I bet I don't even need to tell you why that's bunk: because if there's one thing kids need even less than junk food, it's screen time, and if there's one thing that today's "bright," "bold" "innovators" don't seem to get, it's that kids need real-life interaction with other kids and with adults in order to grow. Well, soda taxes funding universal pre-K doesn't seem so bad now, does it? (Full disclosure: soda taxes are still bad.) But seven states now run a "pilot" program involving online pre-K, and you can guess where that's going to end up even if it doesn't do these kids any damn good: "we're broke, so we have to keep doing it." Hence the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell your state education committees to fund real universal pre-K.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to stop trying to roll back our Clean Car Standards, then the Environmental Defense Fund still helps you do that. Stronger fuel efficiency standards means lower prices at the pump and less pollution in our air -- so what's the problem our Administration has with all of that? None of that makes oil CEOs richer, that's what, and if you've been attending our Administration's doings, you know that the only people they think deserve any say about anything in America are bosses. Forget you and your desire to pay less for gas and breathe clean air! Our EPA knows they don't have a leg to stand on, of course, or else they'd never have argued for lower fuel emissions standards by claiming that higher standards cause people to drive more and thus put them at a higher risk of car accidents. I mean, that's a cluster bomb of stupid right there. And we Americans deserve better than that from our public servants.