Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning voting rights, taxes, and paid leave.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to Vote Act, expand the Child Tax Credit, and pass the Protected Time Off 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.

RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote for the Right to Vote Act, which establishes a “fundamental right to vote in elections for federal office” in law, per Sec. 2(a), and would prohibit any “diminishment” of that right unless it were “the least restrictive means of significantly furthering an important, particularized government interest,” per Sec. 2(b). The Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act still deserve our support, but the Right to Vote Act at least would give us a fighting chance in court every time right-wingers want to suppress votes. And all we ever ask for is a fighting chance.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Senators to expand the Child Tax Credit for working families now, without poison pill amendments. Even our Republican House approved a CTC expansion – one weighed down with corporate welfare, to be sure, but we’ll get no better out of this Congress – and yet some Senators want to pile on even more harmful and unpopular legislative initiatives they could never get passed on their own, so we need to stop that. Is this CTC expansion as good as the 2021 CTC expansion? No. But will it lift half a million children out of poverty? Yes, and that’s worth doing.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protected Time Off Act, which would guarantee two weeks of paid time off for all full-time workers, which they may use for any reason, including caring for themselves or sick family members. Would that be as good as the 13 weeks Sen. Gillibrand’s bill would have offered, or the four weeks off the 2021 Build Back Better Act offered at one point before the Sinemanchin Axis killed it? No, it would not – as Andy Reid might say, we can all count. But would it be better than the zero weeks some 20 million American workers currently have? Yes, it would. So we should take it, and then fight for more later.

Action: concerning taxes, AI, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit without poison pills, protect American workers from AI, and pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 that put $250 and $300 checks per child in working families’ bank accounts. You know, I feel like I don’t need to justify that action any further – fewer kids in poverty, more money for strapped working families, what else needs saying? – but it’s December, which means it’s end-of-year budgeting time, which means Congress will try to pass a bunch of noxious crap they’d never get through without it being an “emergency,” so go ahead and tell your Congressfolk to pass a CTC expansion with no poison pills attached! That means no corporate welfare and no more tax cuts for the rich – do the right thing, and nothing else.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect American workers from the spectre of Artificial Intelligence (or AI). We just watched the Hollywood actors’ union fight management’s attempts to replace them with AI-generated doppelgangers, but that won’t just happen to them – it’ll happen to any American worker who has a CEO who twirls his mustache at the prospect of replacing all his workers (and all their “costs”) with mounds of dung, and “any” includes you and you and you and I. Hell, it’s already happened, for real, at call centers all over the world. You ever try to fix a problem and wind up yelling “operator!” into the phone? Then you know what I’m talking about. Our economy needs more people in it, and fewer “big,” “bold” “entrepreneurs” who live to kill our jobs.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Insulin Now Act, which would extend the benefit Medicare recipients get – namely, their insulin costs capped at $35/month – to all Americans. What a shame that we have to stop big pharma corporations from charging literally an arm and a leg for insulin, and what a shame we have idiots like Herschel Walker telling us that if we just eat right we won’t have to use insulin, which will definitely not impress anyone born with diabetes (or those who are rationing their insulin while keeping spreadsheets about their calorie intake). And if anyone starts ranting about “price controls,” you have a number of good rebuttals. Like you say “price controls” like it’s a bad thing. Or 1973 called; it wants its right-wing talking points back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penny rants for October 27, 2023.

When I hear that nearly a quarter of Americans think “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” I again think that about a quarter of our electorate is batshit insane, and these folks have let themselves get led from one manufactured outrage to another over at least the past 20 years. And I think, again, that though three-quarters should be able to outvote one-quarter, we all know that another quarter or our electorate enables the insane quarter, either by imagining any Democrat is far worse or by thinking they can use the crazies to get things done. I’ll admit I’m amused to hear 57% of Republicans say “America’s best days are behind us” when Republicans spent those best days trying to turn them into these days, by setting wealth and corporate power “free” and slashing government spending that actually helped people. Maybe our pollsters should ask Americans how they feel about the disappearance of the 91% tax bracket and the end of big projects like ending poverty (or even just the interstate highway system!) when they ask if America’s on the right or wrong track. It might be illuminating.

From McKay Coppins’s new bio of Mitt Romney we learn that Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t care much about what’ll happen to her if/when she doesn’t get re-elected, because “I can do anything” (though she may be overestimating her career options) and because “I saved the Senate by myself.” Let us recall that she “negotiated” a bipartisan infrastructure bill by giving in to all of Republicans’ major demands, then killed her own party’s signature bill by refusing to raise taxes on the rich or let Medicare negotiate drug prices; then, when these positions became untenable, she permitted a 15% minimum corporate tax and limited Medicare drug price negotiation in exchange for keeping the notorious “carried interest” loophole (which allows banksters to pay a lower tax rate than bus drivers). So, some “savior,” there, and as for “sav(ing) the filibuster,” “save” is a weird word to describe a tool that’s only hurt good Americans for years. And dig her spokeshack comparing Mr. Coppins’ reporting to “a game of telephone.” I’d contemplate a defamation lawsuit if I were him.

We also learn from the Romney bio that the 47% video story apparently sent Mr. Romney into (per David Corn at Mother Jones, the reporter who originally broke the story) “an emotional tailspin and caused him to ponder dropping out of the race.” Hearing that he refused to blame anyone but himself for his troubles might seem refreshing – after all, Donald Trump never seems to take the blame for anything (or pass up an opportunity to blame others for his failures) – but, really, stepping up and taking blame is a basic skill of civilized people, and we should remember that Mitt Romney put himself in a tailspin of depression because he pandered to rich folks about poor folks. And we should also remember that that Republicans have learned nothing from that mistake. And almost certainly on purpose! After all, if you can just run people from one manufactured outrage to another, and thus keep them in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage, you don’t actually have to do anything.

Finally, on that note, meet your new U.S. House Speaker, four-term Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson! That was always the best play for Republicans – to tire everyone out with drama and then elect some relatively-unknown asshole – but this is the future, where Mr. Johnson has left records of his deeds and words all over the internet just like everyone else, and hopefully we all know by now that a soft-spoken asshole is still an asshole. And I said it was their “best” play, not a good play. Every single Republican Rep voted for this fool; folks like Don Bacon and Mike Lawler may have complained enough about their choices to fool their constituents, but what about folks like Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania’s 1st? He voted for the worst person for Speaker every chance he had and didn’t account for it to his constituents, so I suspect the good folks of Montgomery County (who just put a Democrat in the state House for the first time in forever) may not want to keep tolerating this drama.

Action: concerning Social Security and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits “behind closed doors” or cut IRS funding, and to bring back the 2021 Child Tax Credit expansion. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to create a Social Security commission that would meet “behind closed doors” to cut Social Security benefits for future retirees like us. If they have to “meet behind closed doors,” that means they want to do something we wouldn’t tolerate, and we wouldn’t tolerate cutting the benefits we worked for, fought for, and deserve to enjoy when we retire. Again, all they have to do is the thing they absolutely won’t do because of their rich donors – tax higher incomes. No “behind closed doors” rubbish, though. That’s the mark of a coward, and it’s also the mark of a fascist. But I repeat myself.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to gut increased IRS funding. Because it’s working exactly the way we intended it to work! Our IRS has answered more than two million more calls than in previous years and has already harvested $38 million from rich tax cheats, and given there’s a lot more fraud out there than that, their continued efforts should yield more bounteous results in the future. Don’t fall for the lie that our IRS will use that money to go after poor people, because news flash! They were already doing that precisely because they were underfunded! Jesus Mary and Joseph I hate stupid arguments.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021, which put $250 or $300 checks every month, per child in working families’ bank accounts. Child poverty more than doubled the year after 50 Republican Senators and Joe Manchin let it expire and let’s make sure we get those villains in the right order, so we should bring that back, so kids can eat and be clothed and other things they have every right to expect of their childhood. Again, brook no lies about “families using those checks to buy drugs,” at least not in the absence of evidence. Any sentence beginning “you just know” is not evidence.

Action: concerning Social Security, taxes, representation, and conversion "therapy."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security, reject any Trump tax cut extension, make our House of Representatives larger, and ban conversion “therapy.” 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 pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would tax income over $250,000 into the system for the first time, and would not only expand benefits by over $2,000 annually, but would start counting inflation the way it actually affects seniors, who can’t just switch to cheaper drugs or cheaper health care the way younger folks can (and who, ah, don’t buy a whole lot of fancy clothes or iPhones or TVs, either). Used to be half of America’s seniors lived in poverty; now 10% do, thanks to Social Security. That’s why right-wingers hate it. But they don’t get all the say about everything.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to extend the Trump tax “reform.” The income tax bracket cuts of that “reform” expire at the end of 2025, but while you may have saved, say, $1,500 annually from that tax “reform,” rich folks have saved several hundreds of thousands of dollars more, so when we say the Trump tax “reform” mainly benefited the rich, we’re not lying. Or being “jealous” – Jesus Mary and Joseph if money mattered that much to me I’d have more of it than a hundred Donald Trumps. Anyway, the rich need to pay more, and most Americans agree, so we should reject any extension of their unearned tax cuts.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to make our House of Representatives larger. This won’t “grow bureaucracy,” because when our House legislated about the matter, over 110 years ago, America had about one-quarter the population it has now, so yeah, more House Reps would actually serve good Americans better. And you’ve seen the size of some of these districts, right? I don’t just mean huge single-district states like Wyoming and the Dakotas, either – try imagining the task of visiting all of Arizona’s 2nd district, which at over 20,000 square miles is larger than nine states and D.C. So yeah, we actually do need more House Reps.

Finally, Cedar Key Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, which would, for once and for all, outlaw “conversion therapy,” the horrific snake-oil method by which folks purport to turn gay folks straight. “Conversion therapy” “works” through such “methods” as having gay folks re-enact childhood sexual abuse while not wearing any clothes, which our Surgeon General derided as unscientific two decades ago. So it’s actually not so great that 20 American states have banned the practice since then; something like that should be banned everywhere. The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act would do that – but only if we speak out about it.

Readings for March 1, 2023.

The MIT Technology Review tells us “Everything You Need to Know About the Wild World of Heat Pumps”. “Everything” may include the news that they work better at severely cold temperatures than you’ve heard. And if you’re wondering how you squeeze heat out of 25-degree air, well, long story short: the refrigerant starts out in liquid form, but has a very low boiling point (-15 degrees), so heating it even a little in a heat exchanger (and heating it with 25-degree air is surely heating it a little!) turns it into a gas; then putting that gas through a compressor it makes it considerably hotter, until its temperature reaches 100 degrees, and then it dumps off heat into your house via another heat exchanger, and in doing so turns back into a liquid, and the cycle begins again. And don’t let your right-wing uncle pooh-pooh it because it runs on electricity and thus equals fossil fuels, because that’s really only true in West Virginia (which gets some 97% of its electricity from coal), and you shouldn’t let the perfect murder the good.

Sonali Kohatkar at Znet instructs us that “Tipping Is Not a Reward – It’s an Insult,” and when you consider that tipped employees’ federal minimum wage is much lower than the standard ($2.13/hour, versus $7.25/hour), and that more than two-thirds of tipped workers are women, and that tipped workers are more likely to suffer in poverty than non-tipped workers, you’ll find it hard to disagree. When you find that other cultures think tipping is actually “rude” or “petty,” and you may find it even harder to disagree. And remember that tipping not only allows bosses to pay their workers less, but forces customers to evaluate their workers, when that’s surely a boss’s job. A male customer might decide not to tip a female worker who doesn’t respond positively to their come-on, which does not speak particularly well of tipping as an employee-evaluation tool. (No use responding that a boss could treat a female worker the same, because there are actually laws against that, and there are no laws against bad tipping.) It sure is amazing how much of what’s “just the way things are” in America don’t actually have to be.

Speaking of which: Steven Greenhouse at The Guardian explains how Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s have been able to avoid actual unionization at their stores, despite workers winning all those union elections. Long story short: because our laws don’t punish corporations for engaging in delaying tactics or other forms of union-busting. Naturally, the PRO Act would have fixed that, by giving corporations 120 days to negotiate a contract with a union representing their workers and forcing those negotiations into arbitration if they don’t meet that goal. Of course, even though the PRO Act passed our House, our Senate didn’t bring it up, since Republicans would have filibustered it as a unit. They still should have brought it up, and forced Republicans to go on the record as favoring endless delaying tactics after a successful union vote, a tactic of which I’m pretty sure even a lot of regular Republican voters wouldn’t approve.

Action: concerning racism, tax cuts for working families, and immigration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and codify DACA protections for “dreamers” into law. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: as you may know, the GI Bill helped a lot of WWII soldiers buy houses they wouldn’t have been able to buy otherwise, but racist enforcement of the GI Bill left most Black soldiers behind. No, really – when you’re Black and you fill out your application five times and your government loses it five times, that’s racism. But H.R. 5905/S. 3210, the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, would help fix that, by making survivors and direct descendants of WWII Black soldiers eligible for the GI Bill benefits their forebears were denied, the benefits that lifted so many Americans into the middle class for the first time. So this bill merits a phone call to your Congressfolk.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion that helped so many good Americans weather the pandemic and inflation in 2021. The CTC expansion deposited $250 or $300 checks (per child!) every month in working families’ bank accounts in 2021, and why aren’t Democrats running ads saying we cut your taxes and Republicans fought us? Regardless of their negligence in this area (or because of it!), we should get in our Congressfolks’ grills and make our will known, that the CTC expansion kept millions of kids out of poverty and we should bring it back so they can get back out of poverty. Why does anyone deserve poverty, after all?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to permanently enshrine DACA protections for immigrant youth into law. I’m speaking, of course, of the children who came here long before they were capable of remembering their birth country – and thus had literally no say in coming here, of course – and who have maintained a residence here and contributed to American society. I have just given at least three reasons why deporting them would be unconscionably cruel. We’re either a great nation or we’re not, and if we’re unconscionably cruel, then guess what? We’re not. So let’s not let such cruelty be our legacy.

Around the table: the plundering of public goods, and other evils.

Paul Rosenberg at Salon talks with Donald Cohen, co-author of The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back." You probably know the story pretty well by now -- how "efficiency" means "less service for you," for example -- so if you want to skip ahead to the "How We Can Fight Back" part: one, "debunk the idea that the private sector is always more efficient"; two, point out "the public things that are all around us," not just roads and streetlights, but also clean water, seat belts, and paint without lead; and three, demand more of our politicians than they're used to. My experience is they've lived so long on Easy Street they'll fold under mild pressure from the public. In the meantime, put the book on your Powell's wish list.

Surprise, surprise, Facebook is turning its "fact-checking" powers on memes and posts saying that corporate greed causes inflation. How long before water-makes-you-wet memes get similarly "fact-checked"? And while Agence France-Presse is the oldest state-owned news organ in the world, and a hell of a lot better than some of Facebook's other fact-checkers (cough The Daily Caller cough!), fact is Facebook didn't "correct" anything, but merely offered a counter-opinion and called it a fact. And now that they've done this, they're only helping to spread the corporate-greed-causes-inflation idea even more! You know, kind of like how Maus vaulted to the top of Amazon's best-seller list after that Tennessee school board banned it.

The expanded Child Tax Credit has been gone for almost two months now, and to no one's surprise, the monthly child poverty rate went from 12.1% in December to 17% in January. That's nearly 3.7 million more kids in poverty; put a face to any of them and then consider that Joe Manchin said (or, more likely, parroted what his big donors said) that people just spent their CTC money on drugs! This is just one more data point demolishing that notion -- I mean, if spending CTC money on drugs was that widespread, you wouldn't see child poverty go up almost five points in one month. When will our leaders get any better at leadership?

I'd love to think that yet another substantive investigation into the shaky ethics of Ryan Zinke while he was Secretary of the Interior could scuttle his chances of winning back a Montana House seat (Montana has two House seats now, so he wouldn't be winning back his old one per se), but Montana's state legislature has gerrymandered those two seats pretty well, and Democrats can always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as they're so good at doing. Still, I'm old enough to remember when the appearance of corruption ended careers; how about we go back to that?

When I hear that Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) is very, very upset that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) didn't tell him he would endorse someone else for the 2022 open Senate seat, I'm compelled to say waaaaaaah. Rep. Long's long list of complaints (and his long list of "liberal" media outlets to which he's airing these complaints) can't be a good look to Republican primary voters. But Mr. Hawley's been shrewd here -- his endorsee, Rep. Vicki Hartzler, is a stealth Trumphole, not like Eric Greitens and Mark McCloskey, who are overt Trumpholes but who also have more formerly-closeted skeletons on the rampage. Lucas Kunce could beat her, but as I've said, Democrats are so good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory they'll jam someone "safer" down the throats of good Missourians.

Finally, Pennington, NJ Starbucks worker Sara Mughal describes "How We Turned the Tables On Starbucks Union-Busters." Long story short: Starbucks workers across the land talk with each other and compare notes, and at their mandatory anti-union propaganda meetings they bring a crap-ton of questions so that even the managers get exasperated with answering after a while. They're finding out what I found out a long time ago: our opponents don't have any good arguments! And once you figure that out, the only way they can beat you is to cheat, by, oh, hypothetically now, firing workers for trumped-up wrongdoings.

Action: concerning Build Back Better, worker rights, drilling near neighborhoods, probation "reform," and prosecuting Bolsonaro.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a vigorous Build Back Better Act, tell Kellogg's and Starbucks to give their workers fair contracts, tell California to prohibit oil and gas drilling in neighborhoods, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a probation-related bill, and tell the International Criminal Court to prosecute Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First up: let's call our Senators and tell them to pass the Build Back Better Act more or less as the House passed it -- plus let's make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, roll back the Trump tax cuts on corporations and on the top tax bracket, limit SALT repeal to workers making less than $400,000, and let Medicare negotiate drug prices on all its drugs. And enough of inflation as a fear stick! "Government spending more" does not mean "more inflation," no matter how much right-wingers want you to think so! You know what's driving inflation? Corporations charging you more! And brook no BS about "how much the bill will really cost" or whatever rubbish report Sen. Graham cajoled our CBO into creating. Joe Manchin is not stupid enough to "fall for this" -- more likely, they're all acting out the drama that'll enable him to vote against the bill. West Virginia residents can counter this by calling Sen. Manchin and communicating their will. Telling him they're on to the drama wouldn't hurt.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Kellogg's to give their striking workers a fair contract or else you'll continue to boycott their products. They're hiring permanent replacement workers as we speak, but that doesn't mean we should concede defeat, and anyway those replacement workers sure are in for a shock! Kellogg's actual workers are striking right now partly because of the notorious two-tiered salary system one could say is designed to pit worker against worker, but also because of 16-hour work days and forced overtime. Kellogg's last contract offer (which workers overwhelmingly rejected) purported to address the two-tier system, but would only allow 3% of workers at each plant to ascend to the top pay tier annually, meaning workers would have to wait nine years to get the pay they deserve! Keep that in mind when Kellogg's rolls out its propaganda about all the pay increases they offered.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell Starbucks to negotiate fair contracts with its workers in Buffalo who have voted to join a union. Nobody's worried that Starbucks coffees will be too expensive if Starbucks treats its workers fairly, are they? Because that is to laugh! Admittedly today's CEOs are so clueless they might well put that line out, but I've been at so many Starbucks branches that don't hire enough workers to handle the volume, plus Starbucks messes with its workers' schedules just as much as any other non-union corporation. It's well past time we recognized that work is work, that no worker is "worthless" merely because they work a service job. Unions should have led us in this direction a long time ago, frankly! But the time to do the right thing is always now.

Vision CA helps you tell the government of California to stop oil and gas corporations from drilling where good folks live. Gov. Newsom has proposed a 3,200 foot setback for drilling -- meaning corporations couldn't drill within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, and hospitals -- but only to new drilling wells; you would want existing wells to obey the 3,200 foot rule, too, right? After all, they pollute just as much, if not more, than new wells. This is an instance where "grandfathering" bad wells in will hurt people. Also, you'll urge California to ban new permits within setbacks until the rule takes effect, which will have the effect of getting drilling corporations used to the ban, since we care so much about their feelings these days. More important, of course, are the good citizens of California who deserve clean air and clean water.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state Senators to reject SB 913, a probation "reform" bill that will, in the ACLU's words, "trade one bad system for another." SB 913 would, on balance, make it easier for folks on probation to get sent to jail, when the whole reason behind probation is to offer an alternative to putting everyone in jail, plus it would make it easier for poor people to be sent to jail, by keeping people on probation indefinitely if they haven't paid restitution. If the words can't do the time, don't do the crimehave formed on your lips, I would hope you'd say that to corporate criminals if you say it to the imaginary Black folks in your head, and besides, keeping people on probation forever until they've paid a fine is a very good way of tripping people up so they go back to jail again, which would be a private prison corporation's wet dream. And they already have too many of their dreams realized at our expense.

Finally, Avaaz helps you tell the International Criminal Court to open a prosecution against Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, not necessarily for all of the awful stuff he's done (a Brazilian Senate committee recommended he be indicted over his mishandling of the COVID pandemic), but particularly for his actions against the Amazon and against the indigenous folks who defend it. The Amazon has lost the equivalent of 3,000 football fields per day during his nefarious rule, and he has encouraged a lot of illegal logging and mining in the Amazon, plus violence against the good folks who live there, all of which may well meet the ICC's "crimes against humanity" standard, particularly when you consider that the Amazon rain forest would be the world's best defense against climate change if we'd just leave it the hell alone. Treating the world like your personal piggy bank should have consequences, but it won't if we don't demand it.

Action: concerning workers, pollution, broadband, social media, immigration, and postal banking.

Long story short: tell John Deere to treat its workers right, tell our EPA to regulate PFAS chemicals as vigorously as possible, tell our FCC to expand broadband access, tell our government to break up Facebook already, tell our President to end the notorious Title 42 deportation policy, and tell our U.S. Postal Service to expand its pilot program offering postal banking. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell big farm manufacturing corporation John Deere to treat its workers better. Ten thousand heartland workers are striking as we speak, and when your right-wing neighbor tells you that the UAW negotiated a contract with John Deere on their behalf, tell them it must have been a pretty crappy contract if over 80 percent of the workers voted it down. Remind him, also, that John Deere's CEO gave himself a 160% raise in 2020 and ask him when the last time he got a raise that big. And no, CEOs don't deserve that kind of raise because they "take risks" -- like the "risk" they'll only get tens of millions to go away if they crash and burn the company? And certainly not for "good performance," for that's only possible with workers. Who deserve better.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous PFAS rules possible. They don't call PFAS "forever chemicals" for nothing -- they're in virtually everything, they never break down, they get into your body, and they cause all sorts of health problems. Our EPA will take public comments on exactly how to regulate PFAS, and of course the big plastic corporations will fill their ears with well-spoken nonsense, so we've got to get in our EPA's ears right quick. And don't brook any silliness from your right-wing uncle about how "this is a job for Congress," not when a) Congress has already authorized the EPA to regulate pollutants through legislation and b) Republicans in Congress will block any legislation that does actual good for the American people.

Civic Shout helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to expand Americans' access to broadband. How can a federal agency do that? Again, "with the authority Congress has already invested in it via law" is the short answer to the sniveling of right-wingers, but to get to brass tacks, our FCC could expand the Emergency Broadband Benefit to folks making 200% of the federal poverty line; currently that number is 135% (it's not 100%, as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has reminded us, is that the federal poverty line has always been laughably low). Our FCC could also reinstate the net neutrality order from 2016, and thus reclassify broadband as a telecommunication service rather than an information service. We've all learned how much of our lives we need to conduct over the internet, so leaving low-income folks out is a recipe for disaster.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to end the cruel Title 42 immigration policy that supposedly turns back immigrants because they're a pandemic risk, but you know that's absolute rubbish if you've witnessed all these Americans reboot the pandemic in recent months! Dr. Fauci has said much the same thing lately -- that immigrants are obviously not causing the spike in cases since the beginning of July -- and yes, I'll take the word of the trained epidemiologist about that over the guy who drives a Hummer with a blacked-out American flag on the back and wears "Fuck Your Feelings" T-shirts to the Home Depot, no matter how much "research" he's "done." You just wish Democrats would stop embracing right-wing policy prescriptions. It sure doesn't get them any right-wing votes!

Demand Progress helps you tell our government to break up Facebook already. Even if Facebook weren't going out of its way to help Nazi wannabes find each other, even if it did nothing to stop Donald Trump's lyin'-ass lies, even if it did nothing about Instagram's toxic effect on young girls, even if it weren't complicit in the genocide of Myanmar's Muslim population, one would still want to ask why Facebook needs to own WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. Because that right there is evidence that Facebook is a monopoly we need to break up. Today's judges tend to ask whether the monopoly raises prices for consumers and nothing else, but this blind mammon-worship is yet another feature of the Reagan Revolution that we need to obliterate if we want to remain civilized people. We can start this work by breaking up Facebook.

Finally, Black Lives Matter helps you tell our U.S. Postal Service to expand its pilot postal banking program beyond the four states in which it's currently operating. While Postmaster General DeJoy thinks the way to Postal Service solvency is through making good Americans pay more for worse service, folks who are less evil know that allowing our Postal Service to offer the basic banking services it offered up until the late '60s, in areas of America where banksters don't like to go because they can't make stupid money there, is a far better way to help our Postal Service get on a better financial footing. Getting rid of the absurd pre-fund-benefits-85-years-in-advance mandate would do even more, of course, but Jesus Mary and Joseph is it so much to ask that good ideas succeed in America?

Around the table: from the Pandora Papers to Trumphole whining.

When I hear that the "Pandora Papers" reveal the "illicit financial activities of the super-wealthy from 200 countries," I'm tempted to say that this is starting to get repetitive -- not that many years ago the Panama Papers told us the rich cheat on their taxes like mad, and even if these are the "Panama Papers on steroids," I'm starting to feel a little like our "liberal" media has already forgotten about it. Just so happens Joe Biden continues to talk about going after tax evasion, but you still have to get Sens. Manchin and Sinema to sign on, and Sen. Sinema, in particular, seems impervious to outside counsel, even though, you know, taking counsel from your constituents is your job as a Senator.

Not long after Joe Manchin gloated about wanting to means-test everything, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reminds us that "means testing" really means failing to deliver services for good Americans who need them because they haven't jumped through the right flaming hoops. And good on her for saying it means "more bureaucracy, red tape, and waste," because that's the only argument a lot of independents will hear. She also reminds us that America "doesn’t even measure poverty accurately to use for a means test" -- among other things, we concoct models in which working families all have a spouse who stays home and looks after the kids all the time, which hasn't been the norm for as long as I've been alive.

Surprise, surprise, a Lancet study finds that more than half of all police killings have gone unreported over the last 40 years. The study also finds that Black folks are 3.5 times more likely to die at the hands of police than white folks, which maps pretty well onto that Harvard study from last year finding that Black folks die 3.23 times more often at police hands than white folks do. Still, all some folks have to say about that is I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!!, which is an illogical response, mainly because folks who criticize the police aren't necessarily being "unsupportive." I'm going to bang that particular saucepan until I die -- "support" does not mean "jackboot lockstep agreement."

You probably already knew that quoting the Bible out of context, or misquoting it, isn't a particularly new phenomenon, but it's still great to have a little historical context -- the next time right-wingers burn down a church that doesn't agree with them because they misheard or misinterpreted something and flew into a rage about it, I guess it'll be of some comfort (though not much!) to know that Protestants did the same thing to Catholic churches in Pennsylvania in 1844 all based on hearsay. The cynical would note the similarity between the two events and throw up their hands, but "cynicism is evil" is another saucepan I'll spend my whole life banging.

Our Department of Justice directs our FBI to address the "disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence" against teachers and school board members, and, well, duh! If you tell a teacher or school board member that you know where they live, you're making a terroristic threat and thus breaking the law! And no, having feelings about politics doesn't alchemically transmute a terroristic threat into "free speech"! (I don't know if I'd go talking about "domestic terrorism," though. Isn't being an asshole lawbreaker enough?)

Finally, former Vice President Mike Pence whines to Fox News that our media keeps focusing on the January 6 attempted coup to attack Trump supporters, to wit: "They want to use that one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believed we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration in 2016 and 2020." "(T)hat one day"! Like they weren't shitting the bed every other day, too! Look, if you supported Donald Trump, you enabled this disgusting act with your actions every day, and I don't care if you were honest or peaceful about it, or if you just wanted more judges and tax cuts -- I want nothing to do with you. They tried to destroy our country! We should be hearing about "that one day" every damn day, until they learn how to feel shame again! Seriously, I don't ask for that much.

Action: concerning abortion, financial predators, taxing the rich, Medicare, and tax cuts for working families.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women's Health Protection Act and the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, fund the budget reconciliation bill with higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, expand Medicare coverage to include dental, vision, and hearing care, and make the EITC and CTC expansions permanent. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Daily Kos, Ultraviolet, and Moms Rising all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. You hate how Texas has basically outlawed abortions, and how our Supreme Court has done nothing to stop them? Then we need to pass the Women's Health Protection Act, which would stop abortion bans at the state level, not to mention all the other roadblocks (the finding of "heartbeats," forced ultrasounds, forced bad medical advice) states love putting up so that women can't take care of themselves. If we don't want our civilization to turn women into breeders again, if we don't want women to be forced to carry fetuses without organs or fetuses that develop problems that threaten the mothers' lives or the fetuses of rapists or abusive partners, then we need to pass the Women's Health Protection Act.

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2508, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act. Payday lenders can't prey on our soldiers like they used to, because our laws give our soldiers extra protection, via lower interest rate caps and the like; the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act would extend those protections to everyone in America. Because why not? If it helps our soldiers get back on their feet, it can help anyone else get back on their feet. Payday lenders will hate this, but that's OK, because I hate payday lenders and all their evil works. Forcing people into 300% death spiral loans is not a "living." This is America! Payday lenders should do some real work! They should build something, or serve someone, or make people's lives easier. But seriously, this worship of mammon is going to kill us all.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the rich and corporations pay their fair share of taxes to fund the budget reconciliation bill. Corporations and rich folks don't want to pay as much in taxes, so they should just get their way? Nobody would let you or I get away with that! Certainly they shouldn't get more say about that than the American people do -- Representatives are supposed to represent their constituents, after all, and they're not supposed to let the whining of big corporations and rich folks drown out the will of their constituents. Their constituents tell us, in poll after poll after poll, that corporations and rich folks should pay more. We just have to be loud about that.

Pursuant to the aforementioned reconciliation bill, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices in the budget reconciliation bill. After all, if they're going to cave on tax hikes, they're going to need money from somewhere, and letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices is a pay-for. Per the right-wing Mercatus Center, Medicare drug price negotiation would save the taxpayer $84 billion annually, working out to $840 billion over 10 years, and thus working out to about a quarter of the reconciliation bill's $3.5 trillion price tag. That doesn't mean we won't hear from "moderate" Democrats that "we can't afford to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices," but that's stupid, and anyone who repeats it deserves ridicule and shame. And if they're in office, they deserve defeat.

Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include dental, hearing, and vision care in Medicare, and without copays. After all, seniors have ears, eyes, and teeth, too! And they're not all gazillionaires, either! A lot of them live on their Social Security checks, after all! It's unconscionable that we've had Medicare almost 60 years and it's only covered drugs less than 20 years (and, as I said above, we can improve that service dramatically!) and we don't cover ENT care at all. Some fools quickly retort that Medicare Advantage does cover all of that, but Medicare Advantage is private health insurance that sucks taxpayer funding out of Medicare (just as charter schools suck public school funding!), and dental, hearing, and vision care shouldn't be "advantages," they should be services all seniors can get.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansions permanent. Because they help working families at lower incomes make ends meet, that's why! The CTC expansion is delivering $250 or $300 checks into bank accounts every month, and the EITC expansion now delivers almost $1,000 more annually into the pockets of workers who make less than $21,000 a year (the cap used to be $16,000/year). These tax cuts don't help banksters who don't need an ounce of help stealing money from us, they help working families. If you have personal experience deciding whether to feed your children or feed yourself, you might want to describe that to your Congressperson. They all have their stupid ideologies, but their stupid ideologies are no match for your real lives.

Action: concerning evictions, Democrats, Medicare, taxes, whistleblowers, and prisons.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction moratorium, tell "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to kill the reconciliation bill, tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass the False Claims Amendments Act, and end slavery in American prisons. 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.

Now that our Supreme Court (by the expected 6-3 margin) has ruled the most recent Biden eviction ban unconstitutional, the Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction ban at least through December. Right-wingers will continue to shriek about TEH LANDLORDZ!!!!!, but landlords can weather bad times better than renters, and anyway that's beside the point -- the point is that our government enacted renter relief in the American Rescue Plan Act that hasn't gotten to renters yet, so it would be evil of us to let people get thrown out in the streets before we've made sure they got all the help they could get. That won't convince right-wingers, but nothing does anymore, except DIDDLEZ MY RAGEZ GLANDZ!!!!!

Now that our House has passed the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint, the National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell the notorious "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to sabotage it. Remember: when they say "the price tag's too high," what they really mean is "we don't want rich people and corporations to pay more taxes," even though wanting rich people and corporations to pay more taxes is the majority position in poll after poll after poll and it ain't even close. We could have better Medicare, lower drug prices, paid family/medical leave, better jobs for care workers, and real tax relief for real American working families, except that for some Democrats, big donors are more important than anything. They need us to remind them whom they actually work for.

Speaking of lower drug prices, the aptly-named Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to give Medicare the power to negotiate its own drug prices. It isn't just a good idea, it's a funding mechanism! Seriously, even the right-wing Mercatus Institute told us a few years ago that letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would save the taxpayer over $80 billion annually; times that by ten and you've got $800 billion, which all by itself is more than one-fifth of the aforementioned reconciliation bill's $3.5 trillion price tag. Also, it is a really good idea, since Medicare is the biggest buyer of prescription drugs in America and can use its leverage to reduce drug prices for everyone. We deserve good things from our government, but we won't get them unless we speak out.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The American Rescue Plan Act helped deliver $250 or $300 monthly checks to mailboxes and bank accounts all over America, so of course some right-wing Democrats want to end it; I guess they're just more comfortable going hat-in-hand to some big donor who didn't earn his millions or billions than they are running on, you know, actual accomplishments. If they really want to choose the guy who gilds the plumbing in his 19th vacation home over the kid who got lifted out of poverty, they can go right ahead. But we have to speak out so that if they choose unwisely, they'll get hurt at the polls. And anyone who puts big donors over poor children deserves that hurt.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2428, the False Claims Amendments Act. The original False Claims Act helps our government go after federal contractors (among others) who defraud the taxpayer; and the qui tam provision (literally hundreds of years old, don't let anyone tell you any differently!) has helped numerous whistleblowers get a part of what our government is able to recover; S. 2428 would strengthen anti-retaliation provisions and prevent judges from setting an arbitrarily higher standard for proof in fraud cases. Despite this bill's bipartisan sponsor list, the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" didn't include it, even though it would raise revenue. But that suggests that we need to be more vocal about it.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end slavery in American prisons. Specifically, you'd ask Congress to amend the 13th Amendment -- which allows slavery "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" -- and then apply our minimum wage laws to prisoners. We'll see how lucrative private prisons are after that! If you're thinking if they didn't want to be slaves they shouldn't have committed crimes, you're making a number of errors in your thinking: one, that any slavery is tolerable, anywhere, at any time; two, that anyone who commits a crime thinks like that; and three (and perhaps most important), that we're only supposed to punish prisoners, not rehabilitate them. So let's not hold ourselves hostage to cruelty.

Around the table: in which the whole concept of negotiation seems to perplex some Democrats.

Sen. Sanders (I-VT), upon being told "moderate" Democrats might try to shrink the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, says "I already negotiated," adding that "(t)he truth is we need more" and "(t)his is, in my view, the minimum of what we should be spending." It's good to be reminded that when you ask for more than you want, you get more of what you want, even if Democrats like Sen. Kaine seem befuddled at how all of that is supposed to work. Now all we need to do is clog up our Reps' and Senators' phone lines so that the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis doesn't move the goalposts again.

Steven Rosenfeld, about as good a writer on voting rights issues as we have, notes that a lot of Republicans are starting to come out against the Arizona "fraudit" of Maricopa County votes. More important, though, is Mr. Rosenfeld's speculation that when the Cyber Ninjas finally release their report -- which they were supposed to do this week but couldn't, reportedly because three of the "fraudit" leaders got COVID -- the "fraudit" will not merely "revive debunked conspiracy theories" but "find small administrative problems 'that could be twisted into appearing to be evidence...of voter wrongdoing or voting irregularities,'" in the words of an American Oversight report. I sure am looking forward to another few months of people who never knew anything about how we count votes in 2019 breathlessly sharing every single report of a suitcase moving somewhere they didn't expect in 2020.

With our Supreme Court striking down President Biden's attempt to extend the eviction moratorium, we learn that state and local governments have distributed a mere 11% of the money the American Rescue Plan Act allotted for helping folks withstand getting evicted. State and local officials cite the possibility of fraud as a reason to go slowly, but that's a little like saying you didn't pull the baby out of the fire fast enough because you were afraid you'd break its arm. Anyway, I think state and local officials aren't going fast enough because Republicans run most states, and they want the eviction assistance program to fail, so that Joe Biden gets blamed for it right before the 2022 midterms. Hey, it's not like Republicans can run on their superior ideas!

Republicans are already trying to make the Afghanistan withdrawal and all its problems "Matter in the Midterms,", but what is the "biggest hurdle" in them accomplishing this aim? The calendar currently says 2021, that's what! Which leads one to suspect that Mr. Biden -- who thus far hasn't budged on his August 31 deadline for getting the hell out, and if a Republican was similarly unmoved by circumstances, you know they'd be calling you "traitor" for criticizing him! -- is the real political animal here. Or maybe we shouldn't give him too much credit, since he really only had a choice of two different calendar years to withdraw from Afghanistan in the first place.

Yes, that was Donald Trump's former spokeshack going on Fox News to say that "when President Trump was President, you didn't see crisis after crisis. You just didn't see it." She adds, "I shudder to think about what COVID would have been like under Joe Biden," though Joe Biden's worst day for COVID cases is still January 20, and that was still only two-thirds as bad as Donald Trump's worst day. Anyway, remember when Bush Mobbers went on TV in 2009 and said you never had a terrorist attack while George W. Bush was President, no, sir? Well, this is even worse gaslighting. But I don't think Americans have forgotten how awful the Trump Administration was, or how he did actually have "crisis after crisis," most of which he manufactured, whether through his incompetence or through his insatiable thirst for drama.

Finally, notorious former Blackwater/Xe CEO Erik Prince offers to evacuate folks out of Afghanistan -- for $6,500 a pop! You've heard by now that around half of all Americans can't scrounge together $400 in an emergency; now consider that the poverty line in Afghanistan is around $700 annually, and that a little less than half (in the Asian Development Bank's conservative estimate) of Afghans sit below that line, and you'll start to think that Mr. Prince is only trying to get two kinds of people out: 1) rich people and 2) people he can make into slave workers. No wonder people say he has no soul!

Around the table: Missouri gets crushed by COVID, and other tragedies.

It ain't just Florida and Texas: the even-more-contagious Delta variant of COVID-19 is hitting some parts of Missouri hard -- particularly the unvaccinated parts. Hospital workers report seeing more young people in ICUs now than before, and they're sicker than the folks who got hospitalized last year. The nurse who said "(i)t feels worse this time because I've seen it before" broke my heart, but I can't help but feel angry at the COVID patients who let bad people tell them lies about "the science." Particularly the ones who spit in your eye when you tell them they have COVID.

David Eichenthal, until lately mulling a run in Tennessee's very red 3rd House district, suggests that Democrats could win in places like Tennessee's 3rd if they explicitly woo the "pro-democracy Republicans." Like James Carville, I have been wondering why Democrats don't tie Republicans to the January 6 travesty every day. Mr. Eichenthal indulges in some "no liberal could win here" pablum (to which Matthew Hildreth's report from November of 2018 might provide a corrective), but he also says Democrats have to connect with rural voters (which, like, yeah) and that "poverty is tragically one issue that bridges the urban-rural divide," which sure sounds liberal. I'm also pleased to hear him toss around phrases like "standard 10-point plans" with the vitriol they deserve.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says he would "go to war for the principles Chick Fil-A stands for." Let me be the first to say: no, he most certainly would not. A man who says "I'll go to war over (insert name of absurd drama)" is a peacock among hawks, and you'll never hear a real warrior brag about his hunger for war. Particularly a war over Chick Fil-A! Everyone does chicken nuggets and waffle fries now, and I can make my own sweet iced tea.

Ho hum, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who lives under threat of impeachment for corruption in awarding vaccine contracts, says he doesn't have faith in the same voting system Brazilians have used for over a quarter century (and which delivered his 2017 victory!) and now says he might not even let that election happen. And in some dank room at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump says why couldn't I do that? I sure hope good Brazilians get rid of this cancer on their soul, and soon.

Abortion providers file suit in federal court to block Texas's new abortion law -- you know, the one that actually empowers anyone to sue anyone who might have helped an abortion happen! -- and I wish them the best of luck. Texas legislators, such as they are, imagined that a million frivolous lawsuits would help them dodge constitutional questions, but they neglected to deal with the issue of standing, as in "how can any of these morons prove they've personally been harmed by an abortion they didn't have?" Even our Supreme Court would agree with me about that, I think.

Finally, a January 6 seditionist whom we will not name unfurls this gem to the Washington Post: "We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government." In her relatively-unventilated mind, "overthrow(ing) the government" is somehow less odious than burglary or property damage, but then, she probably thinks of those latter two things as something Black people do. Perhaps not coincidentally, I usually think of whining and refusing to face the truth as something white people do.

Action: concerning COVID relief, impeachment, the filibuster, and keeping big tech out of our government.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Let's call our Reps and Senators and tell them, once again, to pass a vigorous COVID relief bill. Ignore the pablum from the chattering class about how the Biden plan isn't "bipartisan" enough! As far as I'm concerned, Republicans sacrificed their "right" to "bipartisan" consideration once they spent two months trying to overturn an election and then enabled a coup, and in any case they should listen more closely to their actual constituents, who support a $15/hour minimum wage and $2,000 monthly checks and funding for states and localities more than those who "represent" them want us to think. And if you're anxious about funding the bill, we could tax millionaire income at 91%, tax capital gains and corporate profits over $1 million at 55%, and tax million-dollar estates at 55%. We could also tax billionaire wealth, as Sen. Warren (D-MA) proposed even before billionaires made out like bandits in this pandemic! (Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax, regardless of whether it's part of a pandemic package or not.)

While you've got your Senators on the phone, tell them to convict Donald Trump of his impeachment charge, and prevent him from ever running for or holding office in America again. We all saw what happened on TV in real time, but nonetheless I'd like to note that two far-right former Congressfolk have made an excellent case for Mr. Trump's conviction. In a Roll Call op-ed provocatively titled "Republicans, If This Isn't Impeachable, What Is?", former Reps. Barbara Comstock of Virginia and Charles Boustany of Louisiana cite (among other things) the numerous actual threats Mr. Trump, his son, and his supporters made on January 6, plus they directly address the cowardly argument that it'd be "divisive" to convict him: "Some say we must move on. But it is clear that Trump and his mob still aren’t moving on. Trump, his family and supporters continue to threaten political revenge and have shown no remorse for their actions. Angry Trump supporters continue to make dangerous threats." See, it can't just be us who act civilized all the time -- it's a burden all civilized folks must bear.

Hate to make this phone call to your Senators extra long, but go ahead and tell them to end the filibuster, too. I know, I'd also prefer to make the filibuster an actual talking filibuster, and if that's what Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema really have in mind I'll give them all the credit in the world, but I doubt they're that slick, and I've been advocating the talking filibuster for over a decade now, and I know I'm not the only one, and I know all the alleged parliamentary geniuses in Congress can see the problem just as well as I can, and yet they do nothing about it, so we might as well speak the language that they understand. Don't brook any silliness about the "sanctity of the institution." What, exactly, is sacred about the filibuster? Sorry, Russell Kirk acolytes, but just because we've been doing it a certain way forever doesn't make it "sacred." The best the filibuster does for us is make it easy for Democrats to oppose bad bills when they're in the minority. That's not playing to win, though -- that's playing not to lose. And you don't value "the sanctity of the institution" over, you know, justice.

Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), No Big Tech helps you tell President Biden to reject putting big tech corporation lobbyists into positions in our government. Folks all over America are done worshiping CEOs, and even the politicians are starting to catch on, yet big tech CEOs still seem to wow politicians with their alleged smarts. But what have these Big Brains at Big Tech have gotten us? Easier ways to consume more art, and what else? Do we have a cure for cancer? No. Do we have a renewable energy grid? No. Do we have research bases on the moon and Mars? No -- though we do have "space tourism" for the wealthy. Do we have a cure for poverty? No -- though we do have big tech CEOs claiming we can retrain coal miners to write code like people can be so easily contorted. Even Tesla's electric cars sure are taking their sweet time coming down to the price a working family can afford. So how we get people in government who know what they're doing?

Action: concerning Social Security, defense spending, and our Post Office.

One of the consequences of nearly 40 million Americans losing their jobs during a pandemic? They'll pay less into Social Security this year, and thus get fewer benefits when they retire. But H.R. 7499, the Social Security COVID-19 Correction and Equity Act, would help improve that situation by increasing benefits by 2% across the board, increasing the "special minimum benefit," and expanding benefits for (among other vulnerable folks) grandparents who are raising grandchildren. So, to sum: politicians like Sen. Ernst of Iowa would get Congress "behind closed doors" to cut Social Security benefits, and politicians like Sen. Rubio would rob Social Security benefits to pay for paid family leave -- while others, like Connecticut's Rep. Larson, would put Social Security on a sounder financial footing while increasing benefits. Gosh, I wonder which approach is better? Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families' retirement by passing the Social Security COVID-19 Correction and Equity Act.

Meanwhile, the Sanders-Markey-Warren amendment to the defense authorization bill would divert $74 billion away from defense spending and toward investing in communities with a high poverty rate. I hate to sound like a broken record (full disclosure: I do not actually care whether I sound like a broken record), but we already spend more on defense than the next eight countries combined, and for what? For foreign soldiers to use improvised explosives to flummox our efforts? Too many folks think power is all about whom you can hurt, but it's really all about whom you can help, and civilizations that don't get that die. And they deserve to die! We've been going backwards for almost my entire lifetime, and if we keep going down this path, we'll eventually join Babylon and Assyria and all those other nations history classes barely cover anymore. We can take a small step toward avoiding this collapse by letting Win Without War help us tell our Senators to invest less in weapons systems and more in people.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our U.S. Postal Service. You'll be telling your Senators to do this again tomorrow when you tell them to pass the HEROES Act, but our Congressfolk often need extra reminding about what's important. Our Post Office performs essential services for its owners, the American people -- and will be particularly important this coming Election Day, when a lot of good Americans are going to be mailing their votes in for the first time, so as to avoid getting COVID-19 from waiting in line for hours on end. (Have you seen that meme on Facebook that goes "I wait in line for Walmart, etc., so why shouldn't I wait in line to vote?" Stupidest. Argument. Ever. Like COVID-19 isn't even happening! Have I mentioned how much I hate stupidity?) Of course right-wingers like our President want to privatize our Post Office, which would be an utter disaster, as privatization efforts are. Tell your Congressfolk to save our Post Office, and we can avoid such a disaster.

Penny Rants for Monday, April 27, 2020: special "Our Glorious Elites still suck" edition!

When our President demands that our Post Office "raise the price" of its services "four times" or he won't approve any more funding, you have to remember that our President is demanding that our Post Office raise prices on us! He wants good Americans like you and I to pay more to send a letter though the post! The fact that our Post Office delivers good services so cheaply (despite all of our government's attempts to destroy it, I should add) is what makes it "a joke" to him -- it's just not serious, to him, unless some boss or other can parade his unearned wealth around. Consider, also, that "rais(ing) the price four times" is all that can make private mail-delivery corporations like UPS and FedEx competitive with our USPS -- they handle a fraction of the mail our USPS does, and frankly, they're not that much faster, not anymore. When right-wingers want to mismanage everything into oblivion to prove that "the private sector does it better," you should remember that when they do that, they are taking food out of your mouth. And how do you treat people who do that?

Right-wingers have their excuses for our President's apparent endorsement of injecting/ingesting disinfectants late last week, but they pale before the simple fact that calls about possible exposure to household cleaners more than doubled in New York City the day after. I have long hoped that our President would single-handedly destroy the Presidential bully pulpit merely through his bad behavior, and then folks would never trust what our President says again, as our Founders always intended. But I never imagined people might literally poison themselves first. We'll certainly never look at the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" the same way again. (As an aside, if we take his claim that "I was asking the question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen" at face value -- and when has divining his One True Intent behind his actions led anywhere other than rank absurdity? -- then you must conclude that a guy who would do that "just to see what would happen" is an evil bastard. And how do you treat evil bastards?)

Ryan Grim at The Intercept evaluates new evidence supporting Tara Reade's sexual harassment and assault complaints against then-Sen./now somehow presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden. As Mr. Grim reminds us, "(f)or Baker’s statement (denying that Ms. Reade had ever filed a complaint with Mr. Biden's office about his conduct) to be true, Reade would have had to have lied to her friend, brother, and mother about having complained to Biden’s office. There is no obvious reason Reade would make up a story to those closest to her about the Senate office not taking Biden’s harassment seriously, while at the same time resisting pressure to go to the press." Now might be a good time to remind everyone that Mr. Biden hasn't actually sewn up the nomination yet, and no one's advanced a sexual harassment/assault complaint against Sen. Sanders. (No, complaints of harassment and insensitivity against some of his campaign workers aren't the same thing, even if our "liberal" media did more pearl-clutching about that than they've done about Ms. Reade's accusation.)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Pat Robertson agrees with a viewer that God sent this pandemic to America as punishment for abortion, gay marriage, and anti-Israel sentiment. Oh, but not just that, his remaining defenders will say -- he also said "we have abused the poor," which most right-wingers consider a duty, not a sin. But listen to Mr. Robertson describe abortion -- "we have taken the life of the innocent, slaughtering them by the tens of millions, children made in the image of God" -- and then listen to him hesitate before saying "we have abused the poor" and then quickly turn to describing how the pandemic has ravaged us, and you might come to one of two conclusions: a) poverty just doesn't get his anger up like abortion does, or b) he threw "we have abused the poor" in there just to stave off criticism that he's just another heartless evangelical. But he's not very good at the latter -- does anyone remember him speaking out about the necessity of fighting climate change in 2006? No? Well, now you know all the good that did -- and maybe (especially since he's a denier again) all the good he intended it to do.

Action: concerning voting rights, facial recognition, youth incarceration, and cash bail.

Pennsylvania legislators are mulling SB 421, which would enact a number of necessary voting reforms at the state level: it would fund new state voting machines that would actually leave a paper trail; it would move the state voter registration deadline from 30 days before an election to 15; it would extend the deadline for absentee ballots from 5 pm on the Friday before the election to 8 pm on Election Day; and it would allow any voter to vote by mail for the first time. None of these sound particularly sexy, I suppose, and we've fought for more vigorous reforms in Pennsylvania before (i.e., same-day voter registration), but this bill will improve good Pennsylvanians' access to the voting booth, and nothing prevents us from fighting for more vigorous reforms later. And by "later" I might well mean "the day after the bill passes"! Legislators imagine they can earn reprieves from the voters' will, but they can't, ever, because doing the people's will is their job. So both Common Cause and the ACLU help you tell your PA state legislators to support voting rights by passing SB 421.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell big corporations Hilton and Unilever to stop using facial recognition technology in their hiring. This facial recognition technology is actually worse than the Rekogition technology developed by Amazon, which has a tough time telling black folks apart -- the HireVue AI system Hilton and Unilever use purports to analyze diction, facial movement, and speaking voice to tell bosses whom they should hire, but as a science, well, it's about as good as those 300-question "integrity tests" they used to give out in the '80s. Job interviews are highly stressful and artificial situations, after all, so you're not learning much about an applicant if you put the tone of their voice and their eye movements under a microscope -- except that interviews make them nervous, which, like, no shit, Sherlock. Hate to pile on, but the development of this technology represents yet another confession by managerial types that they don't know how to do their job. Seriously, if you need another AI "breakthrough" to help you hire good workers, maybe the problem's you!

In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk and state Governors to stop the practice of putting kids in jail. You hear people say how kids are so much worse than they used to be, but your parents and grandparents said the same thing, and good kids (who comprise the vast, vast majority of children!) don't get a whole lot of ink from our sensationalist media. And all of that's not even the point! Here's the point: civilized people understand that kids can't make adult decisions, so those kids who go so far haywire that they commit rape or murder represent a profound failure of all their adult caretakers (their parents, their teachers, their community leaders), and what they need most from the adults in their lives is help. You know what they don't need? Being thrown in adult jail with prisoners who'll prey on them physically, emotionally, and sexually. That doesn't help them; it only helps tough-on-crime cowards feel better about themselves. And that feeling doesn't last, either, so they keep looking for opportunities to "be tough." It's a damn vicious cycle, and we should break it.

Finally, speaking of tough-on-crime cowardice, Daily Kos helps you tell your local district attorneys to end cash bail. We know why: it hurts the poor, it wastes taxpayer money, people don't flee over nuisance crimes, and cash bail makes the accused pay for alleged crimes when we should only make the convicted pay for actual crimes. Yes, I hear some police officers say they feel hamstrung by the absence of cash bail, but police officers tend to see bad people everywhere because they tend to deal with people at their worst, so maybe we should take their resistance with a grain of salt on that basis. And maybe we should also examine the experience of our own work lives! We all tend to resist any change to our procedures at work, even if they're good changes. And then, once they work, we tend to forget we ever resisted them! Would it be piling on to mention that slashing cash bail offenses in Philadelphia is actually working? No, it would not.

UPDATE. SB 421 is now Pennsylvania law, as Gov. Wolf signed the bill on October 31. Kudos to you if you pressured your state legislators to pass this bill.

Around the table: law and order! And other things this Administration only pretends to care about.

Joshua Cho at FAIR finds our "liberal" media more than willing to link California utility shutdowns to wildfires but not to what's driving the increase in wildfires, i.e., climate change. Because newspapers and TV shows wouldn't dare offend the ignoramuses who think climate change is a Chinese hoax! Seriously, there comes a time when you must dare to offend stupid people.

Surprise, surprise, an Environmental Working Group study of EPA data reveals that folks in low-income areas are far more likely to drink polluted water. Don't necessarily think it's just urban areas, either -- a lot of low-income folks live in rural areas, too. If the urban poor and the rural poor ever get together, Our Glorious Elites will have to change their underwear several times a day.

Ho hum, HUD officials admit to Congress that they "knowingly" missed a deadline to release hurricane reconstruction funding to Puerto Rico, and further admit that they had "no statutory authority" to do so. They went on to say, however, that HUD didn't release the funding because of all the "corruption" in Puerto Rico; of course these people know corruption when they see it. Because they all look in the mirror, amirite?

Also ho hum, our Department of Education gave out almost $11 million in student aid to for-profit colleges they knew didn't have the accreditation required to receive federal student aid. A DOE spokeshack apparently didn't feel like trying very hard to respond, citing a supposed lack of "context," just like all right-wingers do when they can't win the argument on the merits. Law and order!

CNN's Jeffrey Toobin regrets "blowing" the Hillary Clinton but-her-emails story "out of proportion." Would it make him feel better to know that she didn't lose because of the email story? She lost because she's another center-right Democrat, and history tells us center-right Democrats only win the Presidency when the economy is in the crapper. Maybe that wouldn't make him feel better, now that I think about it.

Finally, buried in this wide-ranging PRRI poll is the finding (scroll down to Fig. 9) that 26% of Americans approve of our President to the point where nothing he could do could earn their disapproval. The poll finds our President with a 39% approval rating generally, meaning 13% of Americans approve of him but could change their mind. In any case, the 26% figure maps well onto my oft-repeated saw that 25% of our electorate is bat-guano insane.

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?

Action: concerning H.R. 1, the Mueller investigation, and being behind on your rent as a "felony."

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Reps to vote for H.R. 1, the For the People Act, which would enact reforms in the areas of voting rights, redistricting, and campaign finance, then NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, provides a toll-free number, 1.888.496.3502, with which you may call your Reps. (Alternately, you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone.) H.R. 1 would essentially codify a lot of good bills we've supported in the past into law. These bills include the Voting Rights Advancement Act (which would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew into the Voting Rights Act), the DISCLOSE Act (which would mandate disclosure of the identities of big donors), the Fair Elections Now Act (which would create a public campaign finance system), and the Redistricting Reform Act (which would make states redraw Congressional districts via more independent redistricting commissions). All these reforms are worthwhile, so let's get to calling our Reps.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell our Justice Department to publicly release the findings of Robert Mueller's Special Investigation into possible collaboration between our President's 2016 campaign and certain foreign individuals. I've never been very focused on Russia, partly because the ideas we support here transcend partisan politics and particular politicians, but mainly because once we tell law enforcement to do its job, it's up to law enforcement to do its job. But certain members of our Administration seem reluctant to account for their works to their bosses, the American people, and we must discourage such reluctance at every opportunity -- particularly when even GOP House Rep/notorious Administration stooge Devin Nunes (R-CA) says that disclosure of the results of investigations into alleged Clinton Administration wrongdoing set a precent for disclosure of this investigation. And it's really, really not a good idea to fight against accountability to the people.

Meanwhile, did you know that, in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, you can get hit with a felony charge of "criminal theft" if you fall even one month behind on a rental payment? Because of big corporate reluctance to hire folks and/or pay them enough to live on, anyone who pays bills these days knows how hard it is to make ends meet, and you don't need a felony charge hanging over your head when you're trying to figure out how much of the rent you can pay while still making some progress on that electric bill. Those of you who think everyone should just pay all their bills all the time should honestly account for how often you've been able to do that yourself -- and then you ought to fight for bills like the Raise the Wage Act that would give more people the ability to meet their bills. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania district attorneys to stop putting people in jail for the "crime" of being poor. Regardless of what pop culture might tell you, nobody "chooses" to be poor.

Around the table: our Supreme Court does a good thing, plus a lot of other people do bad things.

Our Supreme Court unanimously rules that states and localities must adhere to our Constitution before they can indulge in asset forfeiture shenanigans. To be sure, their ruling won't end asset forfeiture, but it will give defendants a way to argue that seizing their property without being able to convincingly tie them to an actual drug funding network violates our 8th Amendment protections against excessive fines. Maybe one day we'll be able to get our Supreme Court to recognize that seizing property without convicting someone of a crime is itself an excessive fine, but the arc of history surely bends toward justice even when it looks less like an arc and more like a plank.

I'm not sure saying that our "liberal" media have been busy lately "erasing" the positive effects of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela gives us the whole picture, because it sure seems to me that our "liberal" media have never acknowledged these gains! The Chavismos have definitely reduced poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and even racism; does that make it OK for the late Mr. Chavez to have demanded (and received) "rule-by-decree" power in 2000 and 2007, for example? No, of course not. But painting the works of the Bolivarian revolution the way our "liberal" media do sure doesn't tell us the whole story, and not least because they all forget to mention U.S. sanctions on Venezuela as the main contributor to Venezuela's economic woes.

Another day, another report showing big corporations getting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax rebates despite making hundreds of millions (or billions) in profits. And another day, another "expert" asserting that corporations should never pay more taxes than they owe because they're supposed to please their shareholders, when the issue is actually that we don't make them owe enough in the first place! Seriously, that statement has almost everything I hate about right-wing argument in it -- the gaslighting, the changing of the goalposts, the tacit admission that they can't win on the merits.

Surprise, surprise, our President talks tough about stopping migrant smugglers while undermining actual efforts to do that. Typical. To be sure, this state of affairs results (at least in this Administration) from overzealousness in one area (deportation) resulting in neglecting another (attacking smuggling rings), but when a man spends so much time talking about how super-awesome he is, you do tend to be less forgiving of his faults, and who could blame you? Besides a ragehead, that is.

When you encounter a poll indicating that Sen. Mitch McConnell's poll numbers are seriously underwater just 20 months before he goes before the voters again, you may remember we were at this point in 2013, also, and he went on to paste his opponent -- you remember his opponent, Alison Lundergran Grimes, the one who refused to say whether she voted for Barack Obama for President? Lesson: if Democrats won't put up someone people will want to vote for, then Mob Boss Mitch will cruise to another term, no matter how little Kentuckians seem to like him.

Finally, with his Administration's own climate change assessment and intelligence community having the temerity to tell him things he doesn't want to hear, our President is putting together another climate change panel, to be headed up by an unregenerate climate change denier who has said -- sit down for this one! -- that the "demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler." Just like! Remember how we kicked carbon dioxide out of our schools, segregated it into its own ghettoes, boycotted and vandalized its shops, made it wear yellow Stars of David, and then froze its property and assets when it tried to leave for other lands? When they say a little learning makes a man dangerous, this must be what they mean.

Around the table: rageheads gonna rage, part 374.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches a New York Times columnist alleging that certain opinions about free speech and identity politics are somehow "taboo," when in fact the Times ventilates these opinions all the time. This stratagem is as old as time itself: pretend your critics are way, way more powerful than you are, even though you have all the megaphones. And if the only defense you can muster for your arguments is that you have "free speech," then you're admitting you can't win the arguments on the merits! Our Glorious Elites: if they don't have everything, they act like they have nothing. I'd say they should try actually having nothing for a minute, but that'd probably send them into an even deeper spiral of self-pity.

David Cooper at the Economic Policy Institute studies the trajectories of the Wisconsin and Minnesota economies since 2010, and finds the Minnesota economy performing better for working families in just about every way. More jobs, more growth, higher wages, less poverty -- think Gov. Walker's 2018 Democratic opponent, whomever that may be, could maybe use all that information in a campaign ad? The inclusion of the word "Democratic" in the previous sentence should suggest the likelihood of that event.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will shut down its student loan office. Which is the natural outcome of returning some $750 million to bilked students and helping put the notorious Corinthian College out of business -- if you're objectively pro-financial predator, that is. CFPB head Mick Mulvaney says he wants to scale the bureau back so that it does "only what is required by law," but how much do you want to bet his efforts to do so have already violated existing law? I mean, it does seem like that's the Administration way: do whatever you want, even if it's illegal, and dare America to stop you.

It begins: a group of "deplorables" set up a billboard warning "liberals" to "get your guns if you try to impeach" our President. Absent undeniable evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors I'm inclined to let the man twist until 2020, but threats of violence are, as you know, not First Amendment-protected speech. And we've still got almost six months until Election Day; you think the threats will ratchet up a bit? Of course they will -- what else can a ragehead do but diddle his rage gland and let his mouth write checks his ass can't cash?

Finally, our intrepid Attorney General says the "ACLU effect" -- i.e., what happens when the ACLU speaks out about law-and-order matters -- caused a spike in Chicago homicides in 2015 and 2016. The trouble with that theory, of course, isn't just that Chicago ended its "stop-and-frisk" practices in 2015 without an actual ACLU lawsuit, but that the murder rate went down in 2017 without Chicago going back to stop-and-frisk! Seriously, though, what a scaredy-cat Jeff Sessions is. If you're that afraid of dissent, perhaps you need to go live in an actual police state.

Around the table: concerning American poverty, tax reform, an ambassadorial Trumphole, and the "liberal" media.

U.N. poverty monitor tours the United States for two weeks and releases a scorching report on our government's apparent attempts to make America the "world champion of extreme inequality." Moreover, no excuses: "(t)he persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power. With political will, it could readily be eliminated." We are the can-do country, after all, so I see no reason to doubt him.

Ho hum, a gaggle of CEOs interviewed by Yale say the passage of the Republican tax "reform" bill won't induce them to "immediately make large domestic capital investments,", though that was, supposedly, the point of cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. But despite their many other criticisms of the bill, a majority of those CEOs surveyed said they thought it should pass! That would constitute some serious cognitive dissonance, unless we admitted the possibility that their main motivation is greed.

Speaking of which, be wary of claims that ZOMG TEH CORPORASHUNZ ARE SPENDINGZ TEH TAX CUTZ ON TEH PEEPULZ!!!!, particularly where Wells Fargo is concerned. Wells Fargo said it would raise its minimum wage to $15/hour and invest $400 million in communities next year, but raising the minimum wage would comprise a mere 2% of Wells Fargo's expected windfall from the tax bill -- and a Wells Fargo spokeshack has also come out and said these moves had nothing to do with the bill! You might well suppose the Fight for 15 movement had more to do with Wells Fargo's decisions than most "liberal" media organs report.

So, this didn't go well: Dutch reporter asks incoming U.S. Ambassador to Netherlands (and former U.S. Rep.) Peter Hoekstra about his statements accusing Muslims of creating super-violent "no-go zones" in the Netherlands, and he not only calls reporting on such statements "fake news," but once confronted with video evidence of the statements, he denies even using the term "fake news"! Wow, he and our President sure are made for each other. I wonder what Mr. Trump thought of Mr. Hoekstra's racist ad that he ran during the Super Bowl in 2012.

Finally, Adam Johnson at FAIR questions whether journalists "who served as message-carriers for Republicans’ claims that the deficit was an urgent issue" should apologize for being "taken in," now that Republicans just passed a tax "reform" that adds more than a trillion dollars to out national debt. In describing Republican "concerns" over the deficit, I might have used the term "whining" instead of "moaning," but that's about my only criticism of Mr. Johnson's article, which takes us through the bad old days of deficit hand-wringing and "liberal" media uh-huhing about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: tales of rage and hubris -- and hope.

Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept reminds us that the evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election is really quite scant at present -- amounting to nothing more than anonymous leaks to the "liberal" media. That's not to say that we won't find out more, or even that we won't find out we were totally played by Russia's government, but we've had many, many years to learn to be more skeptical (remember when George Tenet said the WMD case against Iraq was a "slam dunk"? Good times!), and calling anyone who disagrees with you a "Russian stooge" is really not how civilized people act.

In a related note, former U.N. Ambassador/complete asshole John Bolton insinuates that this whole Russians-hacking-the-election-thing might be a "false flag" operation coming from the Obama Administration. I was going to say, "imagine what a right-winger would say if you called 9.11 a 'false flag' operation," but I don't have to -- any deviation from Dear Leader Bush's vision was a treasonable offense to his votaries back in the day. And that's some cojones Mr. Bolton's got there, saying the Obama Administration has "politicized" the CIA, after Tha Bush Mobb purged all those CIA personnel at the beginning of his second term.

From the "Don't Look Now, But" file: Emma Grey Ellis at Wired tells us that "Thousands of Invisible Oil Spills Are Destroying The Gulf." The big spills (like Deepwater Horizon) get all the ink, but actually we suffer around 30,000 oil leaks annually (that we know of, that is -- our Coast Guard kind of relies on an honor system for oil leak reporting), and that means less clean air, less clean water, and more health problems. (By the way, after you read this article, you'll know what to say when some right-wing gaslighter comes along and says oil leaks are natural and have been occurring forever -- that those leaks are so slow that nearby life forms have evolved to adapt to it, and anyway, that's no damn excuse for the far more massive pollution perpetrated out of greed.)

James Fallows at The Atlantic reminds us that Donald Trump's victory in the Presidential race is not, as his spokeshack put it, a "historic" "landslide" or "blowout." Mr. Trump's electoral vote margin ranks a mere 46th out of our 58 Presidential elections, and his popular vote share -- 46%, in case you missed it the first 221 times I said it -- outpaces only two elected Presidents. I recall Rutherford Hayes being called "Old 8-7" by contemporaries, because of the narrow vote on the Commission that awarded him 20 contested electoral votes; why not constantly call Donald Trump "The 46% Man"? He'll get angry, but everything gets him angry. And this is one hornet's nest I think we should prod, over and over again, because we're stronger than he is.

Finally, Zenobia Jeffries at Yes! magazine profiles a Detroit woman who's trying to turn her block into a "solar-powered ecovillage." One that provides important resources for her community, too, like after-school meals and homework help for local kids. I'll admit that buying up distressed properties and turning the area into a renewable-energy hub has long been quite attractive to me, and I wish Ms. Harris the best in her endeavors. After all, who's going to do it if we don't? Big corporations ain't gonna do it, and big government ain't gonna do it, either, until we make it impossible for them not to.

Around the table: Standing Rock, millennial voters, affordable housing, defense spending waste, and the Governor's race in North Carolina.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' has delayed the easement permit that would enable the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, pending an environmental study, but Kelly Hayes at TruthOut reminds us that this fight is far from over. "(W)hile it's true that environmental impact statements can in fact take years to complete," she says, "no attention to detail -- either legal or environmental -- should be expected under a president-elect who has promised to govern in the style of an autocrat." But Republicans typically overestimate the public's impatience with environmental regulations, and so we have another opening.

Another day, another "liberal" media article blaming young folks for Donald Trump's win. Mr. Obama may have done better, but folks 18-29 went for Mrs. Clinton by a 19-point margin, whereas folks over 45 went for Mr. Trump by at least 7 points, and of course the "liberal" media won't blame seniors voting against their own interests. Frankly, though, in an election where the "winning" candidate only got 46% (his total seems to be going down all the time!) and lost the popular vote by 2.5 million votes, you could argue almost anything was the deciding factor -- maybe, even, that Bernie Sanders (or someone else at least as inspiring) wasn't the Democratic nominee.

Buried somewhat in this news item about Ben Carson's nomination as Housing and Urban Development Secretary is Mr. Carson's opposition to putting affordable housing in "wealthier neighborhoods." He's upset with that, and not redlining? Also, n.b. his general opposition to government programs for the poor: "(w)e the people have the responsibility to take care of the indigent...it's not the government's job." Always they pretend our government is some alien thing that couldn't possibly derive its power and authority from us and couldn't possibly belong to us -- certainly it couldn't work on our behalf! Why would they want us to think that way, I wonder?

Department of Defense buries internal study finding at least $125 billion in "administrative waste," thinking, apparently, that Congress would use their findings to cut their overall budget. But it seems to me the Pentagon worried over nothing! Democrats are so weak they won't do anything that could be seen as being "weak on defense," and Republicans are no doubt already drafting their statements that the Pentagon understands the problem and should be allowed to fix it on their own. (Oh, and don't wait for Sen. McCain to do something about it. He'll condemn it, and that'll be far from worthless, but he won't do anything else.)

Finally, and I do mean finally, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory concedes his race to Roy Cooper, and Tom Jensen at PPP reminds us that sustained and organized liberal opposition to Mr. McCrory's reactionary policies may have done the most to finally bring him down. Mr. Jensen cites the state's Moral Monday movement in particular for keeping these issues out front, and while their work is obviously very important, I wish it had more effect down-ballot, as Republicans still enjoy huge majorites in the state legislature. I doubt 2018 will present very much opportunity to change that in North Carolina -- but I'd be pleased to have Moral Monday prove me wrong.

Action: fighting for voting rights, Medicare, and clean water.

First things first: Eclectablog reports that the Michigan legislature is trying to ram through three-count-'em-three vote suppression bills during their lame duck session. The state House Elections Committee quickly passed all three bills last week, and now the entire Michigan House could vote on them any day. HB 6066 would make people who don't have Voter ID fill out a provisional ballot, and then makes a voter jump through bureaucratic hoops to get their vote counted. HB 6067 and HB 6068 permit the state to conduct records checks on behalf of poor voters, but good luck with that if you were born out of state, because the bills won't mandate that the state assist poor voters with more expensive out-of-state record checks. These bills aren't about "securing the vote" from phantom vote fraud artists; they create fraud, simple and plain, by restricting poor folks' access to the polls. And since, in America, being poor frequently also means being a person of color -- a fact I'm sure is not lost on the Michigan legislature -- these bills are also racist bills. You can contact members of the Michigan House here and members of the Michigan Senate here. Don't worry that you're not a constituent -- this could happen in your state any day now, and a soon-to-be-reinvigorated 5-4 right-wing Supreme Court majority surely won't rescue you.

Meanwhile, if you thought Donald Trump was going to protect Medicare from the privatize-everything-and-make-it-suck crowd, guess again: his nomination of Georgia House Rep. Tom Price as the next Department of Health and Human Services Secretary pretty much says it all, as Mr. Price has salivated over the prospect of destroying Medicare perhaps since he was in the crib. Mr. Trump just couldn't find anyone else to take over HHS? Were none of the nation's 254 Republican Governors available? This is why you don't "give him a chance" -- he's already telling you what he wants to do. But it doesn't matter what he wants: it matters what we want, and thus Social Security Works and CREDO help you tell Congress and the President-elect that "no one voted to destroy Medicare" and that they should expand, not destroy, programs like Medicare and Social Security. If you're still not convinced that Donald Trump will destroy Medicare, remember that he said during the campaign that he didn't want to cut Medicare benefits. He could easily let Congress turn Medicare into a voucher program -- with our government cutting checks to seniors so they can buy more expensive private health care -- and say I kept my promise: we're giving you the same benefits!

Finally, the good residents of Flint, MI still don't have consistent access to clean water after their "emergency manager" caused all that lead pollution -- but a mere two hours' drive away, Nestlé plans to siphon off 100 million gallons of groundwater annually so they can sell it, all for the promise of creating some 20 jobs. How many times must I tell these pimps! Never give away what belongs to the public for the promise of a few jobs, when you could embark on a real job creation program not by giving away more goodies to corporations, but by closing all the tax loopholes they enjoy now so they'll choose to create jobs as an alternative to having all their profits taxed! And certainly never give away clean water, when clean water is the foundation of all good health care in America! Nestlé, by the way, will pay about $200 a year to (almost literally!) suck at the public teat, so the government of Michigan can't even claim they're getting a massive amount of money to spend for the public good. So Sum of Us helps you tell the Michigan Department of Environmental Protection to protect clean public water and block the Nestlé deal. Would it be piling on to mention that a Nestlé spokeshack happens to be married to Gov. Snyder's former Chief of Staff? No, it would not.

Around the table: more lessons from the election, plus bonus EPA oppression of activists.

Joan C. Williams at the Harvard Business Review describes "What So Many People Don't Get About the U.S. Working Class." It is a really eye-opening article, and I won't be able to summarize all its necessary insights, but here are some: white working class folks "resent() professionals but admire() the rich," white working class men retain more traditional notions of manliness than most Democrats understand, and white working class folks aspire to middle-class jobs and pay, not minimum-wage jobs and pay, and see the poor as a drain on them. Of course, the right Democrat could remind people that rich folks aren't necessarily successful at anything useful -- they're just very good at redistributing workers' wealth upward to themselves.

If you've got a few minutes, check out this story of a Mississippi environmental activist apparently ramrodded into jail by our government. Tennie White got 40 months for allegedly falsifying three lab test results, but you might well come away from the story thinking she got 40 months for being a thorn in our government's side as they dragged their feet making certain local corporations clean up their mess (and these messes are worse in Mississippi than almost anywhere else). Note well, also, that this was Mr. Obama's EPA ringing her up -- though I suppose Mr. Trump's EPA will ring a lot more of them up.

Daniel Golden at ProPublica writes about how the problem of "legacy admissions" to colleges has only worsened over the last decade. The most famous legacy admission in America right now might be Trump advisor Jared Kushner, who got into Harvard the year after his father made a $2.5 million donation to the school, and Mr. Golden's 2006 book found this phenomenon quite rampant at America's universities; now fewer legacy admissions get in, but they still get in at a higher clip than the general population. So the next time someone complains to you about affirmative action, you can trump (so to speak!) them with legacy admissions. (Hate to pile on, but this is also yet another argument for the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income: if we have fewer folks with too much money to begin with, we should have fewer legacy admissions as well.)

Peripherally-related to the item from the other day in which Rick Perlstein warns us against making casual connections between past and present, Robert Borosage presents "Lessons from the Reagan Years" as we "Tak(e) on Trump." I agree that Democrats shouldn't "accomodate" Mr. Trump for short-term gain in 2018, not necessarily because there'll be no short-term gain in 2018 under any circumstances, but because you don't fight a radical by appearing "sensible" and "reasonable." Of course, these days you barely even have Republican moderates -- the Republican moderate caucus in the Senate when Mr. Reagan took office was two dozen strong; today, that "caucus" is Susan Collins of Maine, who rarely bucks leadership.

Finally, Paul Krugman says that "a bit more populism" won't solve the Democrats' problems with white working-class voters. Problem is, Mr. Sanders's proposal to "stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry," isn't a "bit" more populism for Democrats, it's a lot more -- Democrats don't stand up to any of these actors because they're afraid of losing their money. Also, while his pessimism about the "liberal" media actually covering "changed policy positions" is understandable, it's not the attitude that helped get rid of slavery, either.

Around the table: now with *even more* whining from racists!

The Washington Post takes great pains to assure us that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren aren't actually "real" progressives. And here's why: their "free" trade opposition hurts the poor in foreign lands (why isn't the welfare of the Vietnamese the responsibility of the Vietnamese people and their government again?), and also because they're not anxious enough to cut Social Security and Medicare I guess is how I can possibly put what the Post says, and also because some wealthier folks would benefit from tuition-free college, as if we couldn't possibly write legislation differently. I've sort of liked the Post the last few years, but I think they just convinced me not to subscribe.

If you're impressed with Donald Trump's wish to rebuild American infrastructure, the incomparable David Dayen at The New Republic tells you why you should "beware" his actual infrastructure plans. Long story short: handing out tax breaks to investors so they'll build projects that stand to make lots of money is a bad way of funding projects (i.e., fixing bridges and water pipes) that people need, but that don't make investors rich. Also, too, it's corporate welfare, and will pretty much lead to public resources getting privatized, which just about always leads to worse services at higher costs.

Alice Speri at The Intercept describes the long career of Donald Trump's choice for Attorney General, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions -- the artist formerly known as Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, and when you read the article, you'll see why he didn't want you to know he was named after a Confederate General. Mr. Sessions couldn't get a District Court judgeship during the '80s because of his long trail of racist actions and utterances, but he wasn't a U.S. Senator then. He is now, which is why I think his comrades won't be too upset about confirming him, no matter how embarrassing his past and present stands are.

Speaking of which, Richard Spencer, the man who coined the phrase "alt-right" to rebrand racists, calls Mr. Trump's election "the first step...towards identity politics for white people." And again I must ask: how is this not whining? How is it not whining to demand the same kind of "identity politics" other folks need precisely because white folks tell them they're not worth anything? How is it not whining to imagine that you're oppressed simply because your opinion as a white person doesn't count for everything anymore? Oh, and he likes to call himself an "identitarian" rather than a white nationalist -- so he's politically correct in addition to being a whiner.

Finally, Paul Waldman at the Washington Post suggests that "Paul Ryan's Plan to Phase Out Medicare is Just What Democrats Need," i.e., a "specific controversy around which they can organize and potentially notch a win." I like Mr. Waldman, but enough with the sports talk already! And what about what we the people need? We the people need a Medicare that works well for us when we need it after we've paid into it all our lives, and we don't care about Democrats "notching a win" if we don't win.

Around the table: zombie myths on poverty and voter fraud, among other follies.

Justin Miller at The American Prospect reminds us that voters in four states will consider minimum wage hikes on Election Day. Ballot measures are the wave of the present here, since anti-minimum wage Republicans dominate state legislatures just as surely as they dominate our Congress. And in 2014, you may recall, state-level minimum-wage hikes did pretty well in four dark-red states, despite the Republican wave, and despite the onslaught of Henny-Penny-the-sky-is-falling from rich corporate groups and their lackeys in Congress.

Neil deMause at FAIR catches New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof calling for more government intervention on poverty, but still bemoaning the amount of big-screen TVs poor people seem to have. Why is it dumb to do that? Partly because a lot of poor folks these days have only been poor since the banksters crashed the economy in 2008, partly because "the stresses of poverty," not a lack of "financial literacy," leave poor folk with nothing but bad and less-bad financial decisions to choose from -- and partly because the major costs folks have these days are constant. A big-screen TV can be a one-time cost, but your electric bill, your rent or mortgage, and your health care are all ongoing.

Seen that video supposedly depicting ballot box-stuffing by Democrats in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Arizona? Turns out that video actually uses footage from also-easily-found-on-YouTube clips showing ballot box stuffing in Russian elections. Of course, when you're watching a video supposedly depicting ballot box fraud and the video has no sound, you ought to be a bit suspicious right there. Then again, our paper of record apparently had no suspicions about that first James O'Keefe video from 2009 despite the video's obvious edits, so maybe all that training a lot of journalists get in post-structuralist literary theory isn't as useful as we're supposed to think.

This sure seems like good news: McDonald's will settle a labor-law violations lawsuit employees at a California franchise brought against the parent company. Which would give you the impression that McDonald's has accepted the NLRB's declaration that plaintiffs can hold McDonald's liable for abuses committed by its franchises -- except that McDonald's has not admitted to any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, meaning its efforts to fight the NLRB's declaration (and a subsequent court ruling saying employees can hold McDonald's liable if they believe McDonald's is their employer) will no doubt continue.

Finally, the incomparable Digby reminds us that FBI Director James Comey, who informed Congress last Friday that the FBI had begun investigating a series of emails that might relate to Mrs. Clinton's use of a private email server, has always been a "partisan hack." The avalanche of details is quite impressive, but I had actually forgotten that his "heroism" in fighting Tha Bush Mobb's warrantless wiretapping program wasn't actually heroism, and I'm glad to be reminded of that. And again: would a President Hillary Clinton finally realize, unlike her two Democratic predecessors, that "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" is actually very bad advice?

Around the table: revealing more secrets of Donald Trump's "success."

Adam Haslett at The Nation says Donald Trump has "trashed our political culture by weaponizing shame." For those of us who still think shame is an important tool to ensure more people don't turn out like Donald Trump, it's an unexpectedly good article: first he diagnoses the emotion "driving our present politics" not as anger, but shame, and then describes how Mr. Trump first "induces" shame in his votaries, then essentially excuses them from confronting it by "publicly shaming others instead." The rest of it draws that necessary line from the rise of tabloid journalism and "reality TV" in the West to the "domestic variation of what Naomi Klein described in The Shock Doctrine" that Republicans today practice as "politics." This article is so good it might actually get me to read a National Review writer again (the one whose name is J.D. Vance, of course).

Speaking of Teh Donald, a Newsweek investigation finds that Mr. Trump has used Chinese steel in two of his last three big construction projects, despite the availability of perfectly good American steel. This, also, could represent a week of campaign ads for Hillary Clinton -- but the problem (and I mean this literally, that it's a problem) is that Mr. Trump's hypocrisies are so YUGE that ad campaigns can barely contain them. Inveterate "free" trader refusing to use American steel in his buildings; "self-made man" taking nearly a billion dollars in city tax breaks over 40 years, and also taking a six-figure 9.11-related federal grants away from small businesses that actually needed it -- there are so many that I honestly can't think of any more right now. Of course, the internet is a big place, so someone's probably done a more comprehensive list. The future is good for some things.

Speaking to one of Mr. Haslett's objections in the article to which today's first paragraph links, Stephen Wolf at Daily Kos explains why Hillary Clinton hasn't been branding Donald Trump as the logical extension of Republican extremism he appears to be. Long story short: voters apparently aren't all that convinced that Mr. Trump is that logical extension, and they start to resist campaigns when they link Mr. Trump to national Republicans too assiduously. And why should they be? Most folks just aren't as obsessed with politics as we are, and the "liberal" media upon which they rely for their information have not only treated Mr. Trump as sui generis, but have consistently helped move the center further right in accordance with Republican wishes. Kudos to Mr. Wolf for making clear that Donald Trump isn't the ideological godson of Barry Goldwater, but rather of Richard Nixon's racist Southern Strategy.

In case you missed that Vice Presidential debate from Monday night (how can I sleep if I'm screaming at the TV), Adam Johnson at FAIR tells you what you didn't miss. As it turns out, you didn't miss a series of hard-hitting questions about "climate change, poverty, abortion, healthcare, student debt, privacy, LGBTQ rights or drug policy," though you did miss more hand-wringing about Social Security's "insolvency" and more prompting about how much we ought to bomb the crap out of Syria. So, yes, I'm now even more pleased with my decision to practice good sleep hygiene. Why, I think I only got up to go to the bathroom once.

Finally, because it can't be all bad news all the time, Spencer McAvoy at In These Times describes how some public unions are pushing back against their pension investments getting managed by hedge fund banksters. Hedge funds, as you know, don't do significantly better than other investments, but they sure do ding their investors for hefty fees and commissions. But working families across our great nation are fighting to reestablish the central tenet of pension fund investment: you want your investment to be there, not "outperform" someone else's investment, as if life is nothing more than a sporting event.

Around the table: what we call "popular" Our Glorious Elites call "marginal," and other lessons that bear repeating.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches the New York Times arguing that British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has "marginalized his party" with his positions on re-nationalizing energy corporations, spending on poor working families, and Israel-Palestine relations -- except that all of his positions just so happen to be popular with British folks. Remember when the "liberal" media consistently told us opposing the Iraq war was a "hard-left" position -- even though the majority of Americans opposed it? Remember when Barack Obama slammed the "sanctimonious" "purists" who opposed extending Bush Mobb tax cuts for the rich -- even though the majority of Americans agreed with those "purists"? If Our Glorious Elites tell us a policy position is marginal, that's almost a sure sign that it's not so much marginal as popular.

Dean Baker evaluates another "free" trade supporter's arguments that the Trans-Pacific" Partnership will "help the world's poor," "boost growth" and "open Asian markets more," and finds them wanting. Key points: the TPP will likely only boost growth by two-hundreds of one percentage point over 15 years -- that's less than one-fiftieth of our weak economy's GDP growth over the last three months! -- and Asian nations, far from "ma(king) most of the concessions," stand to gain the most from loosened trade restrictions. And what will be the cost to "the world's poor" of the expanded "investor-state tribunal," when corporations can simply exact tribute from their government in a secret court, and prevent their government from enacting laws to protect them from those corporations?

The Washington Post notes that Democratic leaders have largely pulled their spending from the Ohio Senate race, in which former Gov. Ted Strickland is taking on Republican incumbent Sen. Rob Portman -- and suggests the party isn't confident that Mr. Strickland will prevail. Which is an entirely reasonable conclusion -- and probably the correct one! -- but I wonder if such machinations are actually part of a long possum game on Mr. Strickland's behalf. Note well that Mr. Strickland, left for dead in his 2010 gubernatorial re-election effort, actually only lost that race by two points -- and that Republican groups pulled their spending first last month, which, if a possum game were to continue, would necessitate a similar Democratic pullout. Consider, also, that 2016 (unlike 2010) should see Presidential election turnout, and that Donald Trump may yet prove toxic at the top of the ticket. Again, I could be wrong, and admittedly Mr. Strickland hasn't done a good job either raising money or campaigning, but I think the various chess moves support either theory at this point. (The Colorado Senate race, also covered in the Post article, probably is what it looks like -- though, really, who'd have thought Michael Bennet could ever be a formidable incumbent?)

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman begins investigating possible antitrust violations in a state program that helps schools keep EpiPens on hand. Also, two U.S. Senators (Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota) and one House Rep (Tammy Duckworth of Illinois) have written the FCC and the DOJ, respectively, suggesting that the New York program might also violate federal law. But, please, right-wingers, keep telling us how "free markets" always operate in the best interests of consumers -- even, presumably, the ones who have to pay hundreds of dollars more for life-saving medication than they would have under a government that actually enforced strong antitrust legislation.

Finally, Al Gore advises us not to vote for third-party candidates in 2016, adding wryly that "in my experience it matters a lot" in re issues such as climate change. Yes, Barack Obama's EPA has done a pretty good job while George W. Bush made climate change denialism mainstream, and I firmly expect that a Hillary Clinton EPA would similarly outperform a Donald Trump or a Mike Pence EPA. Still, Mr. Gore's comments efface the real problem with two-party politics: that Democrats run solely on the fact that they're not the ogres Republicans are, and when they do that, they perpetrate just another rhetorical hostage crisis --- vote for me, or the country gets it! I'm no great Jill Stein fan, as it happens, but Democrats had better hope a more formidable progressive third-party candidate never comes along, or they'll be the burnt toast they presume the Republican Party will be.

Around the table: health care mergers, terror deaths, high-performing economies, white supremacists, and poor folks with a purpose.

Good news: the Department of Justice has joined with nine states to block two proposed health insurance corporation mergers, the Anthem/Cigna merger and the Aetna/Humana merger. Attorney General Lynch may be a bit sanguine about how competitive the private health insurance market can be -- health insurance being pretty much a necessity, private corporations will always have some hostage-taking power in re pricing -- but she's certainly right to say the aforementioned mergers will make that matter worse.

A FAIR survey finds the "liberal" media gives a lot more coverage to European terror deaths than Middle Eastern terror deaths -- like, 19 times more coverage. We could always use a reminder that ISIS kills plenty of Middle Easterners -- as ISIS kills anyone who doesn't march in jackboot lockstep with their reactionary agenda -- because, after all, Middle Easterners are people too. I say this out loud because a huge chunk of Americans (not a majority, but still too many) think Middle Easterners are animals.

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times notes that even as right-wing groups call California "bad for business," California has a pretty "smoking hot" economy. California has gained more jobs over the last 12 months than any state bar Florida, and leads the nation in GDP growth. Mr. Hiltzik goes on, with hilariously understated results, but just remember that the state where the Arthur Laffer Clown Car has the most influence -- Kansas -- remains a slow-motion train wreck.

Speaking of "too many Americans," the AP suggests that the white supremacy movement has a more "clean-cut" face now, and they get to cheer Donald Trump from inside the convention hall. Of course, cleaning up well has always been essential for hard-right assholes -- I'm old enough to remember how much plastic surgery David Duke got once he decided to run for state office. And I still think what really makes the Republican establishment mad is that white supremacists get to say out loud what they can only say to their friends. But, really, white supremacists want to be called "Europeanists" now? So how do they get to say liberals are politically correct?

Finally, Jack Shuler at TruthOut profiles the Newark Think Tank on Poverty, a community organization largely made up of folks suffering from poverty. Newark, Ohio -- "a red city in a red county" -- is "a microcosm of the American economy" in that it had its manufacturing base stripped away in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but no jobs in any other field ever came back. But the Think Tank organizes the poor into a fighting force that has already gotten the state of Ohio to "ban the box" asking about job applicants' criminal records for public jobs and has also gotten the city of Newark to "ban the box" entirely -- which is certainly a better use of their time than figuring out how to deliver their members' votes to Democrats. The best part is when members testify how the Think Tank has kept them out of jaii, away from drugs -- and filled with purpose. I wish them luck as they evolve.

Around the table: poverty, guns, racism, brain science, Presidential elections, and an unlikely "savior" for Republicans.

"It's Not Just Climate Change Anymore," writes Rebecca Vallas at TalkPoverty. "Meet the Right-Wing Poverty Deniers." But, in truth, these have always been with us -- they depend on their ability to shift the context of an argument faster than you can catch them doing it. Saying someone isn't poor because they own a refrigerator, for example, would only begin to make sense if we still relied on industrial ice manufacture to preserve food. But please, right-wingers, continue to ignore the massive amounts of wealth your paymasters accumulate without working or providing any real service to Americans.

Courtesy Michael Fumento at The American Conservative, we get this necessary reminder: that "A Good Guy with a Gun Runs, Too." Maybe "runs" is too strong -- but a "good guy with a gun" will play dead at a mass shooting, since that stratagem often keeps you alive, and will also refuse to shoot back because too many innocent people stand between him and the shooter, and will also, occasionally, shoot the wrong person. All these cop shows we watch -- where protagonists almost always shoot precisely and make the right decision under pressure -- do little to help us understand these realities.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that the "liberal" media has long ignored the racist group peripherally-linked to the murder of British Labour MP Jo Cox. It's not like the National Alliance is a fringe group, either -- it began as Youth for Wallace, as in Presidential candidate George Wallace, who won five states in 1968. And I'm old enough to remember when The Turner Diaries was the most famous/notorious underground book in America, yet the "liberal" media hardly cared that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had copies of its pages in his car. Of course, Mr. McVeigh wasn't a Muslim, hence the lack of interest.

Researchers find that implanting neural stem cells in a rat's hippocampus enables the rat to regenerate brain tissue, suggesting that, perhaps, a similar treatment could help reverse brain degeneration in people. Relatively immature neural stem cells appear to bear the trauma of implantation better than more mature neurons do, and thus do better once in the hippocampus, to the point where they even divide to create new cells. The good news? Future researchers likely won't have to reach into your brain to get these cells, but will be able to create them from a mere skin biopsy. I wish them luck.

Creator of model which has accurately predicted every Presidential election outcome since 1992 says you might want to ignore his model's prediction for 2016 -- which has the Republican candidate winning, 51% to 49%. Mr. Abramowitz suggests that his model really only works when the parties "nominate mainstream candidates who will be able to unite the party," which does not describe at least one of the two putative nominees, but he underestimates, I think, how quickly the "liberal" media can turn the outlandish into the mainstream. The election is still over four months away, after all.

Finally, the New York Times finds none other than the original Bush Mobber, George W. Bush, on the campaign trail to help Republican Senate candidates in trouble. One is tempted to say, "who the hell thinks that is going to work?" But it's not supposed to work to save the Senate for Republicans -- it's supposed to move the center further right, as the man who fought endless stupid wars in the Middle East becomes the "moderate" as far as relating to Muslims! (And hearing that Mr. Bush possesses "timeless conservative values" makes me want to puke, for who has done more injury to conservatism than George W. Bush?)

Around the table: various Republican follies, plus that "Stairway to Heaven" lawsuit.

Donald Trump thinks people who see-something-but-don't-say-something should be "brought to justice" with "big consequences." I guess I should commend him for resisting saying "YUGE CONSEQUENCES!" How Presidential he's becoming! The Fifth Amendment is just an irritation to Donald Trump, and American legal precedent holds that we pursue obstruction of justice charges against people who lie rather than people who keep their mouths shut, which, again, places this nominal "conservative" against tradition, against precedent, and against the Constitution. Still, this Trump flatugasm will resonate with the chronically-frustrated, who are, after all, his only real constituency.

So, it's mid-June turning to late-June, and Hillary Clinton is conducting an advertising blitz while Donald Trump, well, isn't. For First Read, this raises the question "How long will she have the battleground-state airwaves to herself?" Which, in turns, raises the question "why do you assume she'll have the battleground-state airwaves to herself, when Donald Trump can fart into his Twitterphone and the entire "liberal" media will drop everything to cover it?"

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee blog sets the record straight about the real origins of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Long story short: it mostly went after liberals from the beginning (including the "Hollywood Anti-Nazi League"), particularly those groups (including Communists) who fought for black civil rights in the 1930s. As guilty as I feel about not knowing the whole history, I feel compelled to repeat that Mr. Gingrich's distortions would remain utterly unpersuasive even if they were true.

Greg Kaufman, writing at TalkPoverty, takes us on a tour of Racine, WI, which sits in House Speaker Paul Ryan's district and gives the lie to his recent "anti-poverty" statements. More than one-fifth of its residents sit in poverty (and that statistic cuts across racial lines), and it has the highest unemployment rate in the state. "How do you take away half of our manufacturing jobs and then say poverty is some moral failing?" one resident asks; how indeed! So we'll be seeing Democrat attack ads based around the poverty and hardship in Racine, right? Don't hold your breath.

Finally, the "Stairway to Heaven" lawsuit -- filed by a trustee of Randy California's estate -- now heads to court. As you may know, the first part of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" sounds rather similar to a Spirit song called "Taurus," from the latter's self-titled 1968 album. There are more than a few differences between the chord progressions, though, so I think Messrs. Plant and Page should beat this one -- though I also think George Harrison shouldn't have lost over "My Sweet Lord," and I probably march alone in that parade.

Around the table: the FBI whines about privacy, and other absurdities.

The FBI wants to exempt its massive database of biometric data (mostly fingerprints and facial photos) from public scrutiny under the Privacy Act. This would prevent citizens from challenging both their presence in this database (which comprises information from convicts and suspects), as well as challenging the accuracy of that information. Why the exemptions? The FBI says it doesn't want investigations "compromised" by people learning they're being investigated, which has to be one of the whiniest excuses I've ever heard. Among the many major troubles with the database: it doesn't always distinguish between convict and suspect, and when a suspect is looking for a job, that might be a big deal.

Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that a law enforcement request for cell phone location information does not require a warrant. While their reasoning has ample precedent -- the "third-party doctrine" holding that folks who "knowingly and willingly" surrender information to a third party have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" regarding that information -- I think you could argue that folks don't surrender cell phone location info "willingly" if they have to do so just to use a cell phone and get service; that, in fact, they're being compelled to surrender that info. And if we're not yet at the point where we could no longer consider a cell phone a luxury, we're getting there.

Kate Cox, writing at the Consumerist, plunges down the rabbit hole of your average Verizon Wireless bill. How does your bill inflate by 50% or more? Certainly because of the monthly charge on the phone itself, which most folks know by now is not really "free," but also via such innovations as the "smartphone line access" fee (amounting to $20 per phone per month on some Verizon bills!) as well as various "service" and "administrative" charges. The "regulatory" charge, I suppose, is there to make you hate the FCC. Just in case you thought we were just picking on Verizon here, Ms. Cox will be going through other big telecom cell phone bills in future installments, and they promise to be as bad or worse.

Jill Richardson, writing at Otherwords, explores the myth that poor people are all lazy cheaters. Versus, you know, held down by a system where the most powerful people run roughshod over the rest of us. Though many Americans think of themselves, in Will Rogers's words, as "temporarily-embarrassed millionaires," you'd think this myth's power would get weaker as more and more of us face the year-in-year-out reality that we're just treading water at best. Sadly, most folks split that particular knot by assuming that those other poor people are the lazy cheaters.

Finally, we learn that Donald Trump has a profound conflict of interest as a Presidential candidate -- that he owes upwards of $100 million to a foreign bank that has had skirmishes with out government's regulators. In a sane and healthy society, this would be a crippling revelation -- a man that far in debt to foreign banks will have his strings pulled by those banks sooner or later, particularly when they want absolution from his Administration for some wrong they've done to Americans. But don't hold your breath waiting for the "liberal" media to say this revelation "disqualifies" Donald Trump, since this isn't, strictly-speaking, a horse-race issue. I guess I won't be too sad if the eventual Democratic nominee runs a bunch of campaign ads about "Donald Trump, the debtor-in-chief."

Around the table: more follies concerning presumptive Presidential nominees.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has repeatedly criticized Donald Trump and has refused to endorse him for President, has been telling Republicans in private to support him. And has also apparently said he still won't endorse Mr. Trump because it wouldn't help him; if you thought maybe he wouldn't endorse him because he thought he'd make a bad President, no one could blame you. This hypocrisy is unworthy of the first Senator to condemn the torture at Abu Ghraib.

Jim Naureckas, who's been on a pretty amazing run at FAIR lately, takes issue with the "zombie idea" that Bill Clinton "brought Democrats back to life" after a string of electoral failures. I agree that Democrats running to the right tends to result in Republican victories downballot, but to be absolutely fair, the Democrats were in their death throes in the South, and their elephantine House majorities (and Senate majorities, for that matter) never showed a party united in New Deal liberalism -- Southern Democrats tended to vote more or less like Republicans, which helps explain how Ronald Reagan got right-wing legislation through a Democratic House, as well as how Barack Obama had to pull teeth to get center-right legislation through a Democratic House.

Paul Krugman reminds us that the Clinton economic boom happened mainly for "reasons unrelated to politics," namely "that American business finally figured out what to do with computers." Also, raising taxes on the rich didn't prefigure disaster but more job creation, just like in Mr. Obama's second term. Sadly, "we can’t count on another spontaneous surge in technology-driven private investment to drive job creation," though I'd point to renewable energy and 3D printing as technologies that could be similarly creative in a second Clinton administration -- at which point too many people will believe that the Clintons are magic.

Another day, another heavily-linked Paul Buchheit op-ed chronicling the fall of the American middle class. Saddest indicators: more than half of Americans don't even have $1,000 in savings, less than one-third of folks aged 25 to 34 own homes, and current 40-year-olds in the poorest 1% can expect to live 15 fewer years than similar folks in the top 1%, though I bet the latter groups isn't all that upset about it. Of course, very little of this makes your average "liberal" media newscast, since there are Kardashians to follow around.

Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 7-1 ruling, overturns the sentence of a black man sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Georgia nearly 30 years ago. If it's 7-1, from this court, some pretty rank stuff must have happened, and indeed, prosecutors not only actively tried to keep blacks off the jury in this case but left a paper trail -- at one point referring to three black potential jurors as "B#1, B#2, and B#3" -- and that's a slam dunk even for Chief Justice Roberts, who shows off what's either dry humor or obsessive literalism in his majority opinion. (Do I even have to tell you the one dissenter was Justice Thomas, who thinks showing the proper deference to state judges trumps justice?)

Around the table: will evangelicals flock to Trump? And other burning questions.

More than 60 years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling, a Governmental Accountability Office report finds the nation's schools increasingly segregated by race and income. The number of segregated schools has more than doubled over the last decade and a half, meaning these students have less access to Advanced Placement classes, less access to college, less access to opportunities for a better life, really. But I wish the article had explained why this segregation is happening (cough redlining cough) rather than just let the Dept. of Education yammer on about grant programs and a "new urgency" to fix the problem.

Surprise, surprise, the "liberal" media point to one New Jersey hedge fund manager moving to Florida as an example of how high income tax rates "force" millionaires to leave certain states for certain other states. Say it with me: one anecdote does not create a broad trend!New Jersey is still home to an admirably progressive income tax code despite Gov. Christie's best efforts, and most folks who move out (ahem!) actually wind up paying higher state income taxes wherever they go, but doing research and finding out the facts is hard work, and the "liberal" media hates hard work more than any imaginary welfare queen. The punchline: this hedge fund manager has apparently moved to Florida because his mother and sister live there.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), whose son is transgendered, cuts an ad in Spanish decrying the mistreatment of transgendered folks via "bathroom bills." Frankly, as a Republican Latina, she has a terrific opportunity to reach a lot of people who might otherwise settle for the bathroom jokes you've likely seen on Facebook, so good for her for taking it. And don't waste your time telling me that she only opposes mistreatment of transgendered folks because her son is one, as if we should only learn things by conducting thought experiments.

Joshua Holland, writing at The Nation, explains "What Everyone Gets Wrong About Independent Voters." Long story short, from the subtitle: "Most independents are just partisans who are turned off by partisanship," and the swing voter is a dying breed, though if it's "around 5 percent of the electorate," per the penultimate paragraph, then it's still enough to swing a close election, which is the kind of election we're going to have for the foreseeable future. Of course, the way to get someone to vote against their interests is to appeal to their independence -- Americans won't do evil unless they think they have to, and even then it still has to feel like their idea.

From the "Shoulda Seen This Coming" file: confronted with the reality that video evidence is easy to come by these days, South Carolina police agencies are now suppressing it, when they can, apparently to protect their officers. This is much easier to do with a body camera or a dashboard camera than with a citizen shooting footage on a cellphone -- but even the latter generally has to be publicly released before police departments will act. And no, the alleged "War on Cops" is not an excuse -- if you really value law enforcement, and public service, you'd punish officers who do wrong. (As an aside, this is a tremendous piece of reporting -- Radley Balko has really outdone himself, and that's saying a lot.)

Finally, Bill Berkowitz, writing at TruthOut, wonders if Christian evangelical voters will "walk down the aisle" with presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump. And concludes that they likely will, rather than vote for Hillary Clinton -- as one source puts it, "(i)t may not be a warm embrace, but a side hug will do." And n.b. what I said in the fourth paragraph above: evangelicals, like everyone else, will have to feel like they have no other choice than to vote for Mr. Trump, and it has to feel like their idea (which I think Ralph Reed reveals in the fourth-to-last paragraph, with all that malarkey about "forgiveness" and "mercy").

Around the table: the failure of welfare "reform," and other lessons.

Gordon Long interviews America's Greatest Economist, Michael Hudson, about how "Wall Street Has Taken Over the Economy and is Draining It." Not incidentally, he resolves the are-our-elites-stupid-or-are-they-evil question thusly: "The successful error of monetarism is to force countries to have such self-defeating policies that they end up having to privatize their natural resources, their public domain, their public enterprises, their communications and transportation, like you’re seeing in Greece’s selloffs. So when you find an error that is repeated, it’s deliberate. It’s not insane. It’s part of the program, not a bug." Also, there'll be a new Michael Hudson book in three months' time, with the promising title of J is for Junk Economics.

George Will sounds the alarum against a Donald Trump nomination. But he never fully explains why he thinks Mr. Trump is "the most anti-conservative presidential aspirant" in Republican history -- all we really learn is that "conservative essentials" "includ(e) the manners and grace that should lubricate the nation’s civic life," but those aren't conservative values, they're civilized values. In other words, Mr. Will would have been more accurate to describe Mr. Trump as the most "anti-civilization presidential aspirant" in history.

Retro Report wonders how well the Clinton Administration welfare "reform" of 1996 has gone. Long story short: ending "welfare as we know it" worked OK during the years of the internet bubble, but when jobs (and then, in 2008, nearly the entire economy) disappeared during Tha Bush Mobb years, not so much. And then states used the welfare money they got from our federal government to plug other, unrelated holes in their budgets. And it got worse from there, until now 46 million Americans are in poverty, with about half of these making less than $10,000 annually, which doesn't cut it anywhere in America. Total time of video: 13 minutes, 24 seconds.

Shaun Richman, writing at In These Times, describes "The Legal Argument That Could Overturn Right-to-Work Laws Around the Country." As one legal scholar says, right-to-work laws "compel() one private party to provide benefits to another private party with no compensation" -- which is to say, the union has to provide services to workers who don't have to pay dues to the union under right-to-work. Stick around for the part where Mr. Richman describes a time when unions actually competed for the same workers in the same workplaces -- and agency fees didn't exist.

Finally, the Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan -- poet, priest, and lifelong activist against war and economic injustice -- has died at the age of 94, his advanced age perhaps testifying to the utility of doing good works regardless of how Our Glorious Elites receive them. He's most famous for participating in the burning of hundreds of draft cards in Maryland during the Vietnam War; I suspect Our Glorious Elites are glad he's better known for that than for declaring that poverty, racism, greed, and militarism were all outward expressions of the same injustice. Also n.b. that he was a Gerard Manley Hopkins fan, which always recommends a person. R.I.P.

Around the table: nuclear winter, voter ID, dark money, Confederate "heritage," and a victory against coal pollution.

The most recent RetroReport video covers the theory of nuclear winter and how it affected nuclear arms issues, particularly during the Reagan Administration. Scientists are more likely to think the effect would be more like "nuclear fall" now than nuclear winter, but when even a drop of a few degrees across the planet could wreak havoc on food production (and, ah, indirectly lead to more war), that's not exactly a comfort. Time of video: 11 minutes, 58 seconds.

Ari Berman and Michael Waldman discuss, at length, how voting law changes (including Voter ID laws and the Supreme Court's invalidation of a critical part of the Voting Rights Act) could affect the 2016 elections. I'd say "good to know someone else has noticed," but I always hope I'm wrong about the worst. Among the things you may not know: Texas's Voter ID law considers a concealed-carry permit "valid ID" but not a college student's ID, wonder why that is. Mr. Waldman's book, The Fight to Vote, looks like a good one.

In a peripherally-related note, Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut reviews Jane Mayer's book, Dark Money, which describes the decades-long plan by America's überwealthy to deform democracy along corporatist lines. Among the many items of note: the extent to which the Koch brothers literally funded the Tea Party movement, a fact missed by most of the "liberal" media at the time, though not missed by you or I. If Occupy had had that kind of money, the Democrats would have retaken the House in 2012.

Gov. Bryant of Mississippi has declared April "Confederate Heritage Month," which sadly is not in and of itself unusual in the South, but his declaration omits any mention of slavery, which actually is unusual. Hip revisionists are wrong -- the South seceded not over "states' rights" but over the "right" to own black folks, and President Lincoln fought the Civil War not just to reunify America but to end slavery. Naturally, Gov. Bryant's spokeshack says the Governor "believes Mississippi’s history deserves study and reflection, no matter how unpleasant or complicated parts of it may be," without mentioning that the Governor left the most "unpleasant" part of that history out.

Finally, Nick Engelfried, writing at Waging Nonviolence, describes "How Montanans Stopped the Largest New Coal Mine in North America." You'll recognize much of the story -- big government agencies plotting "coal sacrifice zones," coal-hauling railroads running through lower-income areas -- plus lots of direct action, including protestors chaining themselves to desks, sit-ins at the Montana state capitol building, protests and blockades on the rail lines themselves, and the 100,000 public comments activists were able to gather opposing the Otter Creek Mine. External factors also helped (China's declining coal demand, Arch Coal's bankruptcy), but what's the shame in that? Good Montanans did a good job helping to protect their air and water from pollution.

Around the table: zombie lies about "religious liberty" and Voter ID.

Andrés Sepúlveda, currently serving time for various crimes relating to the 2014 Colombian Presidential election, tells Bloomberg BusinessWeek how he conspired to rig multiple elections in Latin America for nearly a decade, working arm-in-arm (until the end, and that's why he's in jail!) with a man known as the "Karl Rove of Latin America." Mr. Sepúlveda's major insight: "voters trusted what they thought were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media more than they did experts on television and in newspapers" -- which make sense, since establishment media don't earn anyone's trust -- and that such "spontaneous expressions" could be fabricated with ease and (importantly!) with little money. But at the risk of beating a dead horse: elections are a lot easier to rig when candidates don't inspire any confidence that they'll work for (or even try to work for!) the people. Hence his statement that he's "100 percent sure" this Presidential election is being tampered with is hardly surprising -- and it shouldn't scare us. (I doubt he's reformed, by the way.)

This is not a happy story: the NYC chapter of Habitat for Humanity took over $20 million in stimulus money to renovate abandoned buildings in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood -- but wound up helping push residents out of apartments there, and even into homelessness, in order to acquire the buildings in the first place. Stimulus demands are partly to blame -- Habitat NYC had to buy properties on the open market, rather than from the city, which doesn't sound like a welfare handout to big developers at all! -- but Habitat screwed up in choosing Bed-Stuy, which despite its high foreclosure rate didn't actually have very many vacant properties since rent-regulated tenants lived in them. Having embarked on this path, but finding the law in their way, Habitat NYC made other moves that, well, made the whole thing look less like incompetence and more like corruption.

We learn from Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut that over the last few years, more and more colleges have been applying for, and receiving, Title IX exemptions -- which allows them to keep hoovering up taxpayer dollars while discriminating against whichever students seem to offend their "deeply-held religious beliefs." So, one more time: a university's "right" to be exempt from non-discrimination laws is not greater than a student's right to be protected by non-discrimination laws. Sadly, the law doesn't give our government much leeway to say stop yer whining and do the right thing already. I think it should be simple: take taxpayer money, follow the taxpayer's rules.

Ho hum, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS), who said a little over a week ago that considering the Merrick Garland nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was his "job," now says he's looked into Judge Garland enough to know all he needs to know and no longer supports holding hearings on his nomination. And I'm sure all those Tea Party threats to primary him in his upcoming election (yes, he's up this year!) had nothing whatsoever to do with it. And naturally, Sen. Moran is one of the few members of the Senate's informal Tea Party caucus! The swordfighting never ends on the right.

Finally, Fox and Friends's Steve Doocy assures us that Voter ID laws are "fair because when I go to CVS, I got to get out a driver’s license if I’m going to buy Benadryl." I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Mr. Doocy wasn't born in a poor hospital or outside a hospital back in the pre-World War II era such that he'd have no birth certificate, or that he's never been poor enough to have to choose between paying his bills and spending hundreds of dollars to replace lost official documentation he'd need to vote, or that he's never lived in a rural area where the state closed down all the DMVs so he has to take a day off from work to get a driver's license he may not use for any other purpose. Which reminds me: talking only to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker about the matter isn't exactly "fair and balanced."

Action: patent trolls, money bail, and cage-free eggs.

Congress didn't pass comprehensive patent reform legislation last year, but S. 2733, the VENUE Act, would only allow plaintiffs to bring patent infringement suits in judicial districts where defendants actually work and/or where they have allegedly committed the infringement. The VENUE Act would also mandate that both parties have "a regular and established physical facility" "not primarily for the purpose of creating venue," which would close the loophole patent trolls exploit, where they go fishing for a judicial district that seems more sympathetic to patent infringement claims than others -- like, say, the Eastern District of Texas, which hears almost half of all patent-infringement suits in America. We need further reforms to stop patent trolls from filing these frivolous lawsuits that don't protect property but merely extract tribute from folks who actually make stuff, but the VENUE Act would do some good. The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell the Senate to begin reforming our patent system by passing the VENUE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4611, the No Money Bail Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The No Money Bail Act would do pretty much what it sounds like it'd do -- it would prevent our federal government from extracting money for bail in federal criminal cases, and would also cut off certain federal grants to states that continue to use money bail. But if we can't demand money for bail, I can already hear right-wingers saying, how are we going to protect the public? Oh, gosh, I don't know -- maybe by doing police work? If the state suspects you of a crime, but doesn't have enough evidence to detain you and can't prove you're a flight risk, why should you have to pay to go free? Particularly when money bail hits the poor a lot harder than everyone else? I look forward to the day we stop punishing drug addicts and start treating them, because then a lot of the problems with our criminal justice system will fall away. Until then, we argue for the right thing, and we demand the right thing.

Finally, a lot of supermarket chains (including Kroger, Food Lion, and Target) have moved toward cage-free eggs -- meaning that the hens who lay the eggs don't live in tiny cages -- but Publix hasn't, and they have more than 1,100 stores in six Southeastern states. Egg-laying hens typically live in "battery cages," so named because of the arrangement of cages more or less like battery cells, but you could be excused for thinking a different kind of battery goes on, because these hens live absolutely miserable lives: often crammed eight or 10 to a cage the size of a filing cabinet drawer, these hens suffer from many of the same problems other factory-farm chickens do (dirty conditions, increased illness, no space even to stretch their wings), plus others -- they live in the dark and have their beaks trimmed, so they don't peck at or cannibalize other birds, though, of course, they wouldn't do these things if they weren't living in those damn cages! So Change.org helps you tell Publix to get with the times and move toward cage-free eggs.

Around the table: politicians failing upwards, and other curiosities.

William Greider describes "How Trump Dog-Whistles the Business Establishment" as far as corporate tax amnesty. You won't be surprised: Mr. Trump pretends that the profits corporations pushed offshore to avoid paying taxes in America are "stuck" there, because "the politicians can't get along," when of course we know that corporations could bring those profits back over whenever they like -- they'll just have to pay real American taxes on it, which of course they're trying their damndest not to do. Of course, "politicians getting along" is also code, because we know that when they "get along," that's usually when they're screwing us the hardest.

Dean Baker explains "How to Fight Poverty Through Full Employment." Long story short: when everyone's working, wages go up, not just because everyone can pump money back into the economy but because employers will compete for workers by paying them more. Raising interest rates, of course, doesn't just make buying a home and refinancing a mortgage that much harder, but redistributes income upward to banksters, and they have enough money already. Other ideas for attaining full employment: more public investment (if only!), cutting trade deficits (ditto), devaluing the dollar (not gonna fly), reducing the work week (workers might balk in the short term, but would benefit in the long term).

California's Attorney General makes public a few thousand pages of testimony in that state's lawsuit against the notorious Corinthian Colleges, and you may not be prepared for some of the revelations. Corinthian specifically sought out kids with "low self-esteem," advertised learning programs that didn't exist, lied about job placement numbers, told students they could transfer Corinthian credits to other schools when they couldn't, persuaded homeless kids to take on loans, led students to get loans at a bank Corinthian with which it had a relationship, and even pulled kids out of classes if they hadn't paid up. I find it very difficult to imagine being able to live with myself if debt were my product.

Alabama Governor shuts down Birmingham's $2.85/hour minimum wage hike -- then gives four of his cabinet members raises averaging over $70,000 annually. Because of the great job they did in getting a budget passed, right? The budget that closed over 30 DMVs after enacting a tough Voter ID law that makes you go to the DMV to vote? How did this guy win re-election in 2014 again? Oh, right -- he faced a one-term House Rep elected as a Democrat in 2008, who bolted to the Republicans mid-term, lost his 2010 House primary with his new party, and then came crawling back. And Democrats nominated him for Governor! Now that's a deep bench!

Finally, from the "Do We Need to Look Up 'Represent' in the Dictionary?" file: Mississippi House Rep writes back to a critical constituent, insisting that because she's not a "native" of Mississippi and because "most" of her neighbors agree with him and not her, he "couldn't care less" about her opinion. Most politicians hide their contempt for democracy better than that; I guess he'd call it "shooting from the hip," though it may be coming from a little lower than his hip, amirite? Upon further questioning, Rep. Oliver asserts that the mere fact that the citizens keep returning folks like him to government means they agree with him. Setting aside the many elements of a rigged system that might explain that phenomenon more precisely: Karl Oliver is yet another politician who thinks the people only have a voice on Election Day!

Around the table: experimenting on poor children, and other horrors.

Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, catches the Washington Post featuring a video "experiment" where poor children, faced with the choice of a nice present for themselves or one for their parents, choose the one for their parents. Phrases like "cheap emotional pornography" and "shallow moralism" describe such "experiments" quite adequately, but we shouldn't forget that videos like these are usually the brainchild, as it were, of marketing corporations, and why do we tolerate the "liberal" media giving over news space to marketers again?

Debbie Nathan, writing in The Nation, explains "The Real Reason Sandra Bland Got Locked Up." Long story short: "Texas has no state income tax, and money for social services must come from somewhere. Gouging people with traffic tickets and criminal convictions is an easy way for the state, counties, and municipalities to collect lots of money." Defenders of the pay-as-you-fee state will tell you that the people who commit the crimes should be shouldering more of the burden, and I won't say I'm immune to that kind of moralizing, but I thought we asked criminals to pay for their crimes, not for politicians' lack of courage in explaining that taxes pay for things we all need, and forcing citizens to pay hundreds of dollars for an "improper lane change," while letting big corporations hold states hostage to bigger and bigger welfare handouts, is hardly just.

Why did the FBI hound Pete Seeger all those years, according to David Corn at Mother Jones? Because he wrote a letter, as an Army private in 1943, protesting a Californian American Legion proposal to deport all Japanese-Americans (even if they were citizens!) upon war's end -- and the Legion, of course, promptly passed that letter to the FBI. Later, the FBI learned that Mr. Seeger had joined the Communist Party (he didn't stay long) and that Woody Guthrie's guitar said "this machine kills Fascists," which the FBI seems to have taken personally for some reason. All this while Mr. Seeger was trying to get into the fight against Hitler! The FBI did seem to get the upper hand on him during the '50s, but more than seven decades after that first letter he died a beloved hero, with President Obama calling him "America's tuning fork."

At least one Washington Post fact-checker has given up the game, because there's too much anti-factual crap out there on the internet. You can insulate yourself from it fairly well if you avoid clickbait and avoid corporate-sounding domain names with that extra ".co" or ".net" or whatever at the end, but note well the NBC.com.co founder (who has nothing to do with NBC, see how that works?) who flat-out says he "specifically tries to invent stories that will provoke strong reactions in middle-aged conservatives." We're a truly sick, immoral, and decadent society if we cannot shame such a man into silence.

Finally, Ronald Reagan's daughter, Patti Davis, says her father would be "so appalled" by the current Republican candidates for President. I think she's right, and we liberals do find ourselves beginning a lot of sentences with "at least Reagan didn't" these days. Recall, however, that no less a personage than Ayn Rand called Ronald Reagan "the representative of the worst kind of conservatism."

Around our table: Howard Stern vs. Roger Waters, Jeb Bush vs. the truth, and other battles.

Howard Stern slams Roger Waters for boycotting Israel, pointing out that Mr. Waters lives in "America, a country that was founded on white people coming in and obliterating the native population," and asking, therefore, "why don't we all just leave?" That would be a trenchant criticism if Mr. Waters had actually demanded that Israelites themselves leave Israel, which he has not. Acting like any criticism of Israel is an existential threat is the kind of thing I don't tolerate from right-wingers, so why would I tolerate it from anyone else?

Sen. Sanders announces plans to revive the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have allowed workers to form a union using a card-check process instead of a secret ballot election, but he's calling it the Workplace Democracy Act. Which is wise, since the "liberal" media covered the Employee Free Choice Act so, so badly (often, back in the day, I felt like I was literally the only person in America debunking the zombie IT KILLZ TEH SECRET BALLUTZ!!!! claim). Once I get an action alert, you'll hear about it.

Speaking of Bernie Sanders, there's Jeb Bush flogging that ZOMG 18 TRILLYUNZ IN NEW SPENDINGZ!!!!! figure. He knows that number's been thoroughly debunked, right? Of course he does, and he doesn't care. "The Olympic gold medal for most promises made in the year before an election" is an effective meme, though. I can only hope he gets bad advice from his handlers about it.

And we now hear testimony from numerous combat veterans and federal agents that it takes more to foil mass murderers than being "a good guy with a gun." I welcome any expert testimony that shatters this notion we all succumb to sooner or later -- that we can be heroes in exactly the manner of fictional movie characters and fictional first-person video game characters. It takes more to be a hero than one well-placed shot. One might start by helping to change the world from a place where frustrations constantly beset us into one where we have the economic power we used to have as late as the 1970s, which is, luckily, the work we do at this blog every day.

Paul Theroux decries "The Hypocrisy of 'Helping' the Poor" -- the hypocrisy of big corporate titans helping the poor, that is. These are the "grotesquely wealthy American chief executives" who "made their fortunes by impoverishing whole American communities, having outsourced their manufacturing to China or India, Vietnam or Mexico." And then he tells you about his three-year tour of the Deep South, where some small towns have annual tax bases literally smaller than what a CEO makes in a few calendar days, where community organizers never hear from the Clinton Foundation. This is the kind of thing that would make me wish I had a lot of money -- if I didn't already know that the process of getting a lot of money would hopelessly corrupt my soul.

Finally, we check in with So Much to Read, where Erica Avery has nine new book reviews. She's wry as ever: about a book called The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, she notes that "'unspeakable' is a tall order." And I, too, have often wondered (particularly when contemplating the Eisenhower era) if I'd find "stifling conformity and obligatory self-effacement a fair price to pay for a society with the best education system in the world and no real poverty." (And for those of you in a hurry, there's still "Six Words.")

Around the table: the endless folly of right-wingers.

Hillary Clinton releases plan to slow rising drug costs. Like her student loan debt plan, it's as unwieldy as Obamacare and, also like Obamacare, will probably do some good. Here's a campaign slogan: Jeb give you wankery, but Hillary gives you wonkery! But, ah, you know what else would stop runaway drug prices? Single-payer health care, that's what.

Ho hum, Marco Rubio thinks Pope Francis's "moral authority" only extends to things like abortion and "the importance of marriage" and certainly not economics. Mr. Rubio wants you to believe that more tax cuts for the rich alleviates poverty, but wanting you to believe that "morality" has only to do with the narrow buttons Republicans always push is even worse than that. At least he's having a public spat with Donald Trump, which lessens the possibility that Mr. Trump will pick him as his running mate, and having Marco Rubio as the VP nominee (I don't think he's quitting the Senate for any other reason!) is almost as bad as having Scott Walker as the VP nominee.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones evaluates Jeb Bush's claim that it's just too hard to start a business in America, and finds it wanting. Those of us who started a business in one day already find Mr. Bush's claim surprising, of course, but read the piece anyway, so you can be reminded that (for example) it's bad to generalize about an entire country by using data from two cities, and it's also bad to cite "authorities" if their science is bad.

Martin Shkreli is so hated in America that even Donald Trump piles on, calling Mr. Shkreli "spoiled," "smug," "disgusting," and a "disgrace," concluding, also, that "(h)e is zero. He is nothing." And that, folks, is why Donald Trump has led in polls for so long -- because he talks about Martin Shkreli the way a lot of folks would talk about him. I'm not terribly motivated to be polite about Martin Shkreli, either.

Finally, Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe got very, very upset when folks described a man he invited to testify at a committee hearing as a "white supremacist." Mr. Metcalfe insisted the man was actually a "white nationalist," and added that "(t)o say somebody is a nationalist and for the independence of their country and a patriot to (sic) defending their country, is a lot different from saying somebody is a racist," leaving us to wonder exactly which white nation Mr. Metcalfe's guest hails from. Or should I say heils from?

Around the table: renaming Mt. McKinley, tracking undocumented immigrants with FedEx, and other stories.

The Economic Policy Institute reports on "What Families Need to Get By," complete with a budget calculator that can tell you (if you live in one of 618 locations) how much money your family needs to make to meet an adequate standard of living in your zip code. You can enter up to two adults and up to four children to see how much you'd need. Key point: whatever the minimum figure is where you are, it's likely considerably higher than the federal poverty standard (let alone the minimum wage!). Also, child care costs exceed housing costs in over 80% of the locations studied.

President Obama announces that America's tallest mountain, Mt. McKinley, will be renamed Denali. Which is what most Alaskans (including the state's senior U.S. Senator) call it anyway, but cue the right-wing whinefest -- a whinefest defending William McKinley, a President who acted like corporations were the only Americans with a voice and who dragged us into war with Spain even after our diplomats had negotiated an agreement to avoid it. He not only makes George W. Bush look like a socialist; he makes George W. Bush look like a peacenik.

Chris Christie says we should get FedEx to track immigrants, since they do so well tracking boxes with barcodes that can't move on their own. He went on to say that it's just another example of how the private sector does everything better, but all I could think was he got that from Newt Gingrich's book Real Change! And it sounded utterly stupid then, too! When Chris Wallace has to remind you that "people aren't packages," it's bad. And, ah, it's not like FedEx delivers that many packages -- many, many packages fewer than the U.S. Postal Service, which has satisfied this customer rather more than FedEx has.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says we ought to consider building a wall on the Canadian border, too, because "some people" he's talked to in New Hampshire have "raised some very legitimate concerns," which he then went on to describe at length. I kid, of course -- he talks and you accept, just like the rest of them. But I wonder if Stephen Harper is still his BFF.

Finally, Steve Wasserman at The American Conservative bemoans the "phony populism" that "den(ies) Americans the joys of serious thought," and tells us that the internet age has, like the television age before it, made us less patient with serious criticism or, indeed, with anything we don't "get" right away. You can think of a hundred moronic internet comments as easily as I can, and I miss the days when Dick Cavett interviewed writers as much as anyone. But if Americans don't strive for "(t)he ideal of serious enjoyment of what isn’t instantly understood," one might also interpret that as an impatience with bullshit, and I sure hope Mr. Wasserman would count bullshit-detection among those critical thinking skills that "strengthen" the mind "as a workout tones the muscles."