Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning net neutrality, government shutdowns, and William Barr.

First things first. Three fake net neutrality bills just debuted in Congress, these being H.R. 1006, H.R. 1096, and H.R. 1101. Republicans have been pumping out "pro-net neutrality" bills for years, bills that pretend to protect your right to go where you want on the internet without worrying about being herded into junk news ghettoes by big corporations, but their bills are full of loopholes that would let those big corporations throttle traffic and block websites, and their bills also try to reclassify broadband so that our FCC can't ever regulate net neutrality again. So why these bills now? Could Republicans be a bit nervous that our FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal -- you remember, the one where the FCC came out and said it ignored most of the public comments it got -- is about to die in court? Whatever the reason, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject these fake net neutrality bills and fight only for the real thing.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to insure that federal contract employees, and not just employees who work directly for our government, also get back pay from our most recent government shutdown, then Moms Rising helps you do that. And if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government you don't want either another shutdown or a vanity border wall, then a group of good-government organizations still helps you do that. Our government has already provided for back pay to public employees, but contract employees don't work directly for our government; they work for private corporations that have contracted with our government, so even though taxpayers pay them, their bosses won't -- unless we make them. Of course, if we just stood up to our President every time he had a tantrum over his vanity border wall, we wouldn't have these shutdowns in the first place. See? Fixing one problem fixes the other!

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of William Barr as Attorney General, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. Mr. Barr's career has been one long lesson in believing folks when they tell you who they are -- he has been quite public with his animus toward Roe v. Wade, the Affordable Care Act, and the God-given rights of LGBTQ folks in America. And that's in addition to all the other reasons we should oppose him: he thinks the President should have more power than the Constitution grants, he thinks our government should let more contractors rip off the public, he's been far too cagy about whether he'll let the Special Counsel do his work, and he helped President George H.W. Bush pardon a crapload of folks who were neck-deep in Iran-Contra. If that doesn't sound like law-and-order to you, you need to tell your Senators with a quickness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning war-making, shutdown worker pay, and pollution.

The Democrats' number two man in the Senate, Richard Durbin of Illinois, has acted like a real number-two man in recent days by expressing support for our President's reported machinations in Venezuela, where he would apparently like to see a military coup. Rep. Gabbard (D-HI) got a zinger off in response -- "(w)e don't want other countries to choose our leaders, so we have to stop trying to choose theirs" -- but Mr. Durbin is part of party leadership, and you know how our politicians and our "liberal" media get when they can sniff out a war coming: they bend to the will of the President, no matter how hated he or she might be, instead of bending to the people's will, as is their job. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell Mr. Durbin to resist our President's apparent desire to go to war with Venezuela. It's a shame we have to remind Mr. Durbin of his Constitutional duty (i.e., that Congress declares war, not the President), but we do it because we love our country.

Meanwhile, the agreement to end for-now the partial government shutdown guarantees that federal workers will get back pay, but not federal contract workers, who ostensibly work for a private corporation even though taxpayers pay their salaries. And don't be the one who says "well, the law says what it says," not when H.R. 678/S. 162, the Fair Compensation for Low-Wage Contractor Employees Act, would change the law to ensure that we don't leave federal contract workers out in the cold. Federal contract workers are some of the lowest-paid workers in our government, and if we must outsource federal government functions to private contractors, we should at least avoid the appearance of using these workers' employment status to avoid paying them whenever our President decides to have a month-long tantrum over his vanity border wall. Hence UNITE HERE helps you tell your Congressfolk to support all federal workers by passing the Fair Compensation for Low-Wage Contractor Employees Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to a full-time gig as EPA Administrator, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Mr. Wheeler is supposed to be a saner, more competent, less greedy version of Scott Pruitt, but I don't want any version of Scott Pruitt to lead the EPA, especially when I look at Mr. Wheeler's record so far and see nothing but rolling back of regulations that protect our clean air and clean water. His clean air and clean water, too -- I mean, he doesn't live in a domed city with its own aquifer, much as I'm sure he'd like to. I must say it continually amazes me that today's "conservatives" can look at the Pruitt/Wheeler record at the EPA and see "conservatism." What, exactly, is today's EPA "conserving" besides the "right" of corporate executives to make even more unearned money? How is "increasing executive pay at any cost" a bedrock principle of civilization?

Around the table: starring our snowflake FCC and Mob Boss Mitch.

You can almost feel the disgust emanating from the U.S. District Judge who struck down Wisconsin's recently-passed restrictions on early voting, saying these restrictions were virtually identical to the ones he struck down in 2016. Although my heart swells to hear the Judge say "(t)his is not a close question," I wish it were more of a consolation that Wisconsin Republicans seem to be this lazy, since they seem to suffer very little for it.

FCC unsuccessfully asks D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to delay hearings on a lawsuit against the FCC net neutrality repeal, citing, of course, the ongoing government shutdown. Well, that's not a good sign! Did they really think having another few weeks to brainstorm would deliver the magic legal argument that will win the case for them?

Rachel M. Cohen at The Intercept finds Democratic politicians generally unwilling to address one of the striking L.A. schoolteachers' biggest gripes -- that private charter schools are siphoning off money that should be going to public schools. Of course, you already know why -- because Democratic politicians want that charter school donor money to keep coming! (I know someone out there is already saying that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's criticisms of charter schools "cost her nothing politically," as if it's her fault she was only a child when Democrats started selling out public schools to charter schools.)

I was just going to ignore the story of how Vice President Pence's wife went back to work for a school that explicitly tells you that you have to oppose homosexuality to work there, but then Mr. Pence had to open his fat yap and say that media criticism of "Christian education" is "deeply offensive to us." So many of our political class seem to equate "religion" with "hating gays," and our Vice President is one of the worst of these. Also, "religious education" did kinda used to mean "schools without black kids in them." Also, I'm sick of people saying NO YOUR TEH OFFENSIVEZ!!!!! like they're the cleverest people who ever lived.

Finally, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) says that H.R. 1 -- which rolls up the Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Fair Elections Act, and the DISCLOSE Act (among others!) into one bill -- is a "power grab." Yes, the people are trying to grab power back from the politicians. And he acts like this is a bad thing? Of course he does: he believes power isn't for us "little people." Still, I guess it is a good thing to make Mob Boss Mitch talk in public as much as possible, particularly in advance of his 2020 re-election campaign.

Penny rants for Sunday, December 23, 2018: concerning veterans' health care, right-wing drama, and "political correctness."

You remember when long wait times at the Veterans Administration were all over the news? And you remember how right-wingers said privatizing the VA would solve the problem? Well, surprise, surprise, a ProPublica/Politifact investigation finds the privatized part of the VA hemorrhaging money and subjecting our veterans to, guess what, longer wait times. Well, that's what happens when private health insurance corporations charge close to $300 for referrals! And dig one of the privatizers suggesting you calculate their overhead using "an average cost" rather than total costs! You know, like right-wingers tell you to calculate the benefits from their tax-cuts-for-the-rich based on an "average tax cut" that sure ain't making its way into your bank account. Maybe we should spend less on corporate welfare and more on soldiers' health care? Maybe we should stop making our soldiers fight stupid wars so they won't need so much health care in the first place? If you think these are big asks, well, that's not the attitude that abolished slavery.

You may have heard that our President has stopped following Ann Coulter on Twitter after she criticized him for (momentarily!) caving on his desired border wall funding, and you may have also heard that our President's beloved Fox and Friends hosts slammed him for announcing that our military will pull out of Syria, so before we go any further, let's all take a deep breath and remind ourselves that this is all drama, and bad drama at that. I mean, these aren't the kind of pissing matches that even make for good reality show drama, if such a thing can be said to exist. Right-wingers stage these "disagreements" to look "independent," so that when you accuse them of marching in jackboot lockstep agreement, as they do, they can point to that one time one of them yelled at another and hope you momentarily forget that one counterexample doesn't obliterate all trends. And, really, how "independent" can you be if you're coming at our President because he's not nativist enough, or not enough of a warmongerer?

"Liberal" media poll finds a majority of Americans oppose our nation becoming more "politically correct." So Americans oppose right-wingers constantly having swordfights over who's more conservative, or Nazi wannabes demanding "safe spaces" for their racism or demanding that everyone call them "white nationalists" instead of racists? Apparently not -- Americans believe that "there are too many things people can't say anymore," presumably about women and people of color, since the article insists that Democrats had better heed this poll. But folks losing their jobs over what they say at work is not exactly a new thing, since our First Amendment protects you from your government and not so much from your employer, and if folks really feel oppressed at the prospect of being shamed by their fellow-Americans, all I can say is waaaaaaaaaah. And I can't shake the feeling that if this poll had asked if Americans should be more sensitive to what other Americans go through just because they're women or people of color, it would have found a majority favored that, too.

Around the table: with more sad proof that bailouts and tax cuts don't create jobs.

It really is understatement to note that "GM Announcement Confirms Tax Cuts Don’t Prevent, May Encourage Layoffs." Not that this would surprise you if, for example, you didn't routinely give your children cookies before they did their homework. Seriously, how hard is this? Threaten to take away a corporation's profits through taxation, and they'll spend it on jobs and building stuff. (As an aside, I don't know that GM's problems come from their aversion to building SUVs, even though they're "wildly popular." When corporations decide to make mostly junk food, people learn to crave mostly junk food. And SUVs are the junk food of American cars.)

We are also reminded that GM has received "billions" in public subsidies over the years, and that didn't save those almost-15,000 jobs, either. That would include some $50 billion in American bailout money after the 2008 bankster Armageddon. Nice work if you can get it! Sadly, I expect most of our President's votaries will only remember the mean things he said to GM after the layoffs, and thus presume he actually did something about it. Hell, yelling about stuff is exactly the same as "doing something," right?

Michigan's still-reactionary state legislature might try to ram a bill through while they still have a Republican Governor that would allow corporations to create their own private police forces. No use dreaming libertarian dreams of ending the war on drugs and suchlike -- if you think police officers are bad now (and a few of them are), just wait until they don't have to account to their bosses, the taxpayers, at all! Seriously, when I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Though voters in Wisconsin turned Republican Scott Walker out of office in favor of Democrat Tony Evers, state Democrats fear that Republicans will try some lame-duck shenanigans that could cut the incoming Governor out of the redistricting process altogether. And Republicans are saying who, us? -- which should be of no comfort, since Republicans have spent the greater part of the decade springing their most nefarious works on the voters without warning. How much is enough for a party that got 46% of the votes for Assembly seats but still wound up with 63% of the seats? The answer is: nothing is ever enough for a desperate and intellectually bankrupt party.

Finally, apparently because he couldn't get away from CNN while traveling abroad, our President thinks we should create a "Worldwide Network" (caps in original) to counter the "unfair and false" coverage CNN is supposedly giving him. All together now: waaaaaaaah! I mean, if Barack Obama had mooted creating a giant propaganda network to promote his Administration, right-wingers would justifiably be giving him what-for, but our President's most devoted followers seem to live vicariously through our President's self-pity, while simultaneously imagining that only Those Other People do that. But whining is whining, no matter where it comes from. And our President is not America; we are.

Around the table: a potentially-major Presidential miscalculation, and other items.

House Democrats propose requiring a three-fifths majority to raise tax rates on the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers. Maybe this proposal makes raising taxes on higher incomes easier and maybe it doesn't, but anyway I'd prefer not to change House rules concerning majority votes for certain legislative aims, even if I agree with those aims (and I surely agree that working folks shouldn't pay more taxes). I'd prefer they reductions in middle-class tax rates with top tax-bracket income hikes, and then (since most Americans would support that program) just keep explaining past the haters and their lies.

Our Administration is mulling actually delivering an enemy of Turkish President Erdogan into his hands. Well, I guess we now know why Mr. Erdogan threw the Saudis under the bus over Mr. Khashoggi's murder. The good news? "Career officials" at three federal agencies were "furious" over the idea. The bad news? There are fewer "career officials" in our government than there used to be. And our President fist-bumped Mr. Erdogan not too long ago -- over his authoritarian tendencies, no less! I wonder how he'll feel about that if Mr. Erdogan persists in his requests.

ProPublica finds our Administration doing its damnedest to funnel Veterans Administration money toward private care for our veterans. Private health care is, of course, more expensive than single-payer health care (which our Veterans' Administration is), and the VA's well-covered problems in recent years started with Congressional sequestration dramas. This is how they win: they squeal TEH GUVMINT DOESN'T WORKZ!!!!! and then run our government badly to prove their point. I'm really surprised more members of our "liberal" media aren't on to this oh no wait I'm actually not surprised.

Speaking of our "liberal" media, FAIR catches them pretending they have no responsibility in reflexively trumpeting our President's squealing about caravans of foreigners coming to destroy us. Actually, their editorial pages exposed our President's racist game while it was going on, but their news pages covered it like it was real news! And then after the midterms, their editorial pages covered the caravan controversy like "everyone knew" it was BS! If I were more generous, perhaps I'd posit this schizophrenia as an improvement in media coverage -- over, you know, merely treating racism as something that "deserves a hearing." But I yearn for truth from our media, not coverage that's merely marginally better than awful.

I suppose it makes sense that our President would find Sean Hannity a suck-up who asks "dumb" questions, since the kind of loyalty he demands from everyone else seems to sicken him. You might even suppose (as the article's author does) that he keeps calling on CNN's Jim Acosta because he loves drama. But you might also suppose that reports of "discord" within our President's inner circle are also drama, and thus worth very little of our time. Still, I have to point this out occasionally, just as vaccines have to have a little bit of the disease they're fighting in them so they can teach your body what to fight.

Finally, Heather Digby Parton at Salon may have hit on something big here: that our President may be undercutting his obvious "Discredit Everybody Until Nobody Believes Anything Anymore" strategy by being completely untrustworthy himself. Indeed, this isn't a new strategy -- candidates always fill the air with BS so that more independent-minded voters throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. But given the highest midterm turnout in 52 years earlier this month, we also have evidence that his strategy is not working. So when's that terrorist attack coming?

Around the table: more lessons about the folly of "bipartisanship."

Our President declares that the California wildfires are the result of bad "forest management," but scientists inform him, gently and not, that he's dead wrong about that, too. "These aren't forests," says one, "(t)his is supposed to be the rainy season," says another, and our government's own National Climate Assessment warned, just last year, of "the increase in wildfire risk resulting from the combined effects of high precipitation variability (wet seasons followed by dry), elevated temperature, and low humidity." Of course, when our President mentioned "forest management," I'm sure he intended to suggest we should sell all of our public forests to big logging corporations. They'll take care of those pesky trees!

Joan Walsh writes that "Yes, There Was a Big Blue Wave Last Week," although I think she's a bit generous to suggest that the pund-idiots who got it wrong on Election Night "unwittingly" fueled our President's claims of "voter fraud." I think it was quite witting, actually! In any case, Democrats have picked up more than a few House seats since Wednesday morning, when I also looked over the results and wasn't particularly impressed, and I certainly should have remembered that it actually takes a long time to count a lot of votes, just like it did in 2016. Despite the apparent failure of high-profile candidates like Beto O'Rourke, Andrew Gillum, and Stacey Abrams, Democrats' popular vote margin also so far exceeds the Republicans' popular vote margins in their 1994 and 2010 wave elections.

But of course Democrats did much better in Republican-inflected suburbs than in rural areas, and though winning in the suburbs seems like an easier task, Matthew Hildreth at the Daily Yonder reminds us that rural voters already support what Our Glorious Elites call "far-left" or "liberal" policy initiatives. This is true even though over two-thirds of rural voters call themselves "conservative" or "moderate." The problem, of course, is that most rural voters think Democrats don't fight for them. There's a solution in there, somewhere -- and when rural support for Medicare-for-All (a healthy 63%) actually lags behind rural support for treating-not-imprisoning drug addicts (77%) and taxpayer-funded community colleges and trade schools (66%), the solution is most emphatically not "acting more like a Republican." (Also, too, Republican policies help big ag corporations crush small farmers. Democrats could actually stand up for small farmers, maybe?)

Sadly, some folks still just don't get it, as a center-right Democrat and a far-right Republican collaborate on an op-ed extolling the need for "more bipartisanship." Guess who that leaves out? I mean, if, say, Barbara Lee and Richard Hanna had written such an op-ed back in 2016, every winged monkey in America would squeal BIAS!!!!! at once. OK, the House should implement the two reforms Messrs. Kilmer and Buck propose in paragraph seven, but their focus on every House Rep getting heard is secondary to our purpose of every American getting heard, and every time I read about the "importance" of "bipartisanship" I'm reminded not only that one party spends all its time stamping its feet and the other party spends all its time appeasing it, but that Americans don't care about "bipartisan" government as much as they care about good government. And that's as it should be.

Finally, even Sen. McConnell (E-KY) is getting on the let's-have-more-bipartisanship train. Given his leadership in totally nullifying the will of the voters for at least the last 12 years, it is hard to listen to anything he says about bipartisanship without either giggling or throwing a shoe at him, but it might actually be a good sign that he's the one mouthing these ridiculous pablums -- I mean, a real mob boss lets his underlings say the truly ridiculous shit so he can pretend to disown it. (Also, too, I wouldn't brag about getting more appropriations bills done before the start of the fiscal year if I were him. That's like schoolkids boasting that they go to school most of the time.)

Action: concerning war, media, and immigration.

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

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

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

Action: concerning worker rights, education, and Chaco Canyon.

A few years ago, our National Labor Relations Board made it easier for workers to hold parent corporations accountable for wrongdoing -- which meant, among other things, that fast-food corporations couldn't pretend their franchises were completely independent actors. Of course, the Presidency has changed parties since then, meaning that a whole new NLRB is in town, meaning they're trying to repeal the joint-employer standard as we speak, because RULEZ ARE TEH BADZ!!!!!! Repealing the joint employer standard wouldn't just hit fast-food employees, of course -- it'd also hit temp workers, since a lot of corporations love using temp workers instead of hiring full-time workers like their forbearers did. But our NLRB still by law must take public comments on its proposal, hence Jobs With Justice helps you tell our NLRB to reject its own proposal to repeal the joint-employer standard. Of course, I don't think a corporation should ever own another corporation, particularly for the purpose of evading its responsibilities under the law. But that's another fight, for another day.

Meanwhile, you know that our schools face funding crises -- largely because of our failure to tax rich people hard enough and our willingness to continue indulging the charter school scam, but I digress -- and this makes schools more vulnerable to corporate money. Case in point: McDonald's sponsors McTeacher's Nights, during which our teachers serve junk food to students. I bet it's rather popular with the kids, as they say, but our children don't need any help from our schools choosing to eat 1200-calorie meals that'll contribute to obesity and all the health care problems that go with it. But wait, there's more! Putting teachers behind the food counter also denies work and pay to McDonald's own workers (who make rather less than teachers), and, as it happens, the schools don't get a whole lot of money out of these events. Hence Corporate Accountability helps you tell McDonald's to stop with the exploitation of schools and teachers already and end their McTeacher's Nights. The Big Stick of Bad PR can find all bad actors eventually, if we will but wield it.

Finally, our Administration still has a jones for drilling for gas and oil in the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico, despite the damage oil and gas drilling does to our clean water, despite the thousand-year-old Anasazi ruins and roadways and rock engravings revered by Pueblo and Navajo -- that latter item suggesting, again, that for this Administration, your heritage only matters if you're white. Our government has, over the years, leased most of the public land outside Chaco Culture National Historical Park for gas and oil drilling, but not the land inside the park -- even our current Interior Secretary seems a little cowed by all the public pressure against drilling inside the park. And there's no reason not to keep up that pressure, particularly since our Interior Secretary is eyeing the midterms just like all the rest of us are. (Note: we'll continue fighting the way we fight regardless of the results.) So Food and Water Action helps you tell our Interior Department to reject gas and oil drilling leases in the Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning war-making and pollution.

Win Without War helps you tell our Congressfolk to end the war in Afghanistan now. I know, I know, it's only been 17 years! And tolerate no backtalk from your Congressfolk (and, remember, we heard this from both parties in 2007!) about how "ending the war" would put our troops in harm's way, as if there's just no way to get soldiers out of a war zone. Wow, that phrase "ending the war would put our troops in harm's way" really is a cluster bomb of stupid. Also tolerate no hifalutin rubbish about how privatizing the war --as Erik Prince would like to do, his corporation (The Artist Formerly Known as Blackwater) having done so much for the Iraq war effort! -- would sate the public's desire to get out of the Afghanistan War without, you know, actually ending the killing and destruction. Certainly don't tolerate anyone saying the private sector does everything better than the public sector, not when the malicious and the weak take turns controlling the public sector.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to scuttle its plan to weaken fuel efficiency standards, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. Again our Administration wants to get all law-and-order on black folks, but pretends that making cars pollute less and get better mileage is a hardship. They also act like cars costing less because they're less fuel efficient (you can click your heels together three times for that one if you like) is somehow better than gas costing less for the entire life of the car. And recall, also, that our Administration actually thinks that lower gas mileage will save lives because folks will drive less and thus die in fewer car crashes. I suppose not being able to breathe the air reduces the chance you'll die of cancer, too, but what sane person would say that with a straight face?

Action: three alerts concerning *real* national security.

Our Administration plans to admit only 30,000 refugees into America this year; recall that refugees are running from terror and are thus far less likely than everyone else to commit terror and you'll see their plan as the grandstanding cruelty it is -- unless, of course, you're a rage addict. But our ministry is not for rage addicts, but for those who may be thinking "we need to do something," when the whole point of living in this world is not to do "something" but to do the right thing. I will say we would find it a whole lot easier to do the right thing in re refugees if we a) stopped treating the world's citizens as impediments to resources we could take for ourselves and b) stopped letting corporations import workers willy-nilly so they can pay workers less and keep more money for themselves. In the meantime, we still have to do the right thing, hence Amnesty International helps us tell our Congressfolk to welcome more refugees to America.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6534, the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, would ensure, within six months of its passage, that employees of our government, and not private contractors, perform essential diplomatic and consular security functions in those areas of the world we're fighting. The bill would then give our President a little over a year to get rid of private contractors in other war-making functions. If you recall how Tha Bush Mobb tried to win the Iraq war with too few soldiers, and then recall how much they paid Blackwater private contractors to perform security functions in Iraq, then you no doubt see how fiscally responsible it would be to ensure we don't privatize so much of our war-making. And if we can't fight or win wars without privatizing some part of them, well, that may just be an indication we shouldn't be fighting the war at all. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop privatizing our wars by passing H.R. 6534.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 6840, the Hold the LYNE Act, and thus stop our Administration's efforts to build so-called "low-yield" nuclear weapons. ("LYNE" stands for "low-yield nuclear explosive." I know, you also thought of this, too.) Anyway, we're already capable of destroying the world hundreds of times over with the nuclear weapons we already have, so you have to wonder why we'd consider building more. I'm sure LYNE advocates try to tell us that we need to have nukes that can cause less damage and give us more military flexibility. But setting aside the notion that we'd ever want to make nuclear war easier to fight: while there's a difference between a handgun and a semi-automatic rifle, there's really not very much difference between a low-yield nuke and what we're used to -- they both kill, they both make survivors very sick, and they both make worlds uninhabitable. It's enough to make you think LYNEs exist merely to make defense contractors rich.

Around the table: our Administration writes another Democrat attack ad for them! And other tales.

Did you know that 49 states have the ability to bill prisoners for their stay when they get out? And 46 states can put you back in jail for failing to pay your five-digit "debt" to the state. I put "debt" in quotation marks for a reason: you pay your actual debt to society by serving your sentence. And if you get saddled with a $50,000 bill for the cost of incarcerating you, you'll almost certainly never make enough to pay it back (most criminals can't find work as banksters, after all). You can't work it off in prison, either, and certainly not at 50 cents an hour. But wait, there's more! The problem is even worse in states that have privatized their prisons. What a racket!

Ho hum, our President said that tax "reform" would bring $5 trillion back into America -- from corporations that stashed it overseas and pretended it was money made in foreign countries -- but a mere $147 billion has come back. Nobody could have predicted that, given the choice between paying a low percentage on their "foreign" profits and no percentage, corporations would choose the latter! Well, except anyone who thought about it. You like how our politicians act like there's just no way to make corporations pay the taxes they owe? Even though they routinely kill bills that would do that? (And, in a peripherally-related note, Administration economic advisor Larry Kudlow tells the Economic Club of New York that it'll be time to go after Medicare and Social Security after the midterms -- you know, since tax "reform" blew another hole in the budget, not that Mr. Kudlow will say that. His statement is, of course, a Democrat ad that writes itself, and thus a Democrat ad we're not terribly likely to see.)

Michigan's reactionary state legislature passes a paid sick leave law which also makes the minimum wage the same for tipped workers as for everyone else -- but labor activists aren't celebrating. Both of these initiatives were going to go before the voters in November, but now that the legislature has passed them, they're not -- and the legislature can now change the law with a simple majority, instead of the three-quarters supermajority they'd need to overturn laws passed via ballot initiatives. You know how politicians talk about "polishing this turd" when they support bills they know aren't perfect? Well, this is kinda the opposite of that. You might even call it "turding" a bill.

Lisa Song and Al Shaw at ProPublica inform us that Hurricane Florence is very likely to destroy homes that have already collected federally-funded flood insurance payments. And naturally climate change is going to make all that much, much worse. Remember that time John Stossel all but admitted he built a house on the beach so he could collect flood insurance payments? Good times! Seriously, you can't tell people where to live, but it seems to me you can tell developers where to build.

Verizon ends its membership in the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) because of its association with the notorious David Horowitz. You may well be asking, as I did, "Stand Your Ground didn't do it, Voter ID didn't do it, climate change denialism didn't do it, but David Horowitz did?" Mr. Horowitz has, after all, been a sort of ambulance chaser of right-wing causes for decades. But, yeah, he says profoundly ugly crap that's unworthy of a civilized people. And anyway I'll take a hit to ALEC's pocketbook however I can get it.

Finally, Fareed Zakaria takes to the Washington Post an alleged "Threat to Democracy -- From the Left." How has this threat manifested itself? Well, two colleges disinvited right-wing speakers three years apart, the New Yorker changed its mind about having Steve Bannon on a panel last month, Roy Innis never got to debate William Shockley about racism in 1974 though he really really wanted to, and John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes said things about freedom of speech. Really, that's the whole argument. Here's a better, shorter one: the First Amendment only protects you from your government; it does not guarantee a public audience for your views, nor does it guarantee a reputation as a public intellectual. Even if one of our papers of record routinely prints your ramblings.

Around the table: what we must do when the next financial crisis hits the fan, and other lessons.

Thomas Hanna at In These Times reminds us that the next time the banksters collapse the economy, we'll need to have a better response than "save the banks" -- like "require a public ownership stake, with full voting rights, in any financial institution that has to be bailed out due to its own fraudulent or speculative activities." I'd just say "nationalize the banks," and anyone who responds by calling that a BIG GUMMINT TAKEOVURZ!!!! ought to take a good look around and see what all that "freedom" for banksters has done for us. And public banks now make up about a fifth of the banks in Old Europe, while the Bank of North Dakota made sure that state didn't go in the tank after the oil and gas bubble burst there (oh, and North Dakota weathered the 2008 economic armageddon pretty well, too).

Chinese government bans one of its many non-state-sanctioned Protestant churches, for, you know, refusing to allow the government to install closed-circuit cameras within. The Zion church is one of China's many "black market" churches -- or, as we'd call them in America, churches. Memo to right-wingers still gnashing teeth over transgender folks in their bathrooms: this is what government oppression of religious freedom actually looks like. Then again, the lesson may be lost on them, since this tale also has actual Communists in it, rather than the "Communists" in America whose main crime is "not being a cruel and heartless Republican."

Surprise, surprise, North Korea still seems to be going to some trouble to conceal its nuclear weapons program. Also, North Korea doesn't appear to have gotten rid of any of its nukes, and appears to have made new ones. But what happened to we don't have to worry about it anymore? We must remember that all of our President's pronouncements have an expiration date, and that expiration date is generally "just after now."

Ho hum, Dept. of Treasury Inspector General finds that the outsourcing of IRS functions to private corporations is going very badly. Not just because they've only collected one percent of the money these deadbeats owe, but also because the IRS isn't holding these corporations accountable, and because private corporations are contacting taxpayers over the phone, just like pretty much every identity thief (and precisely unlike the IRS). This is the third time we've tried to privatize IRS debt collection; when will we learn? When we stop electing politicians whose one dream is to destroy everything about government that works, that's when.

Finally, Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis spoke to the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2017, which has, over the years, hosted a flotsam of racists and other unjustifiably aggrieved speakers. Naturally Mr. DeSantis calls the Freedom Center's apparent obsession with multiculturalism and diversity straight-shooting and truth-telling. But why would anyone expect any differently from a teabagger who has so obviously (and successfully) courted our President's support? And I wish I could say associating with this crowd would hurt him in Florida, as it would in, say, New Jersey.

Action: concerning public water, airline fees, and animal experimentation.

First things first. Asahi-Schweppes (you may know Schweppes' tonic water and bitter lemon sodas from your grandparents' liquor cabinet) is pumping a few hundred thousand liters of groundwater from the town of Stanley in Australia, and then selling it as, well, "better" than what comes out of your taps, I guess. Thing is, Stanley has nut and fruit orchards which provide the town's 370 residents with a livelihood, and those orchards need groundwater to keep going. (Oh, and people already pay taxes so they can drink clean water, too.) The good folks of Stanley seem to have exhausted all their legal options; now it's up to us to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against Asahi for picking on a town of not even 400 people thinking they won't be able to stand up for themselves. So Sum of Us helps you tell Asahi to stop taking Stanley's water from them. Over 95,000 good folks have signed this petition, at this writing; I bet those 370 Stanley residents don't feel so alone now.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the FAIR Fees amendment to the FAA reauthorization bill. You just love being hit with unexpected airline fees for changing flights or checking bags, right? Of course you don't; nobody does, but if the FAIR Fees amendment passes, our Department of Transportation (or DOT) would have the authority to tamp down high airline fees. I guess right-wingers will squeal BIG GUMMINT!!!! at the thought of our DOT actually making sure these fees have something to do with the "services" airlines supposedly provide in exchange, but I'd just respond you like big airlines better? The three biggest airlines collected over $16 billion in fees in 2016 alone -- and none of us are getting across the country in five hours by train or automobile, so what do we call that? A hostage situation, that's what. And whenever predatory corporations take us hostage, we have to get our government to stop them.

Finally, the White Coat Waste Project has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell our government to retire and release lab animals at the end of federally-funded animal experiments. You don't have to oppose animal experimentation to see that letting them go to good homes is a much, much better idea than simply killing them off, which is what otherwise happens to those animals at the end of experiments. If you fear that the animals would never adapt to a life outside of being imprisoned in a cage, then I would urge you to have a little more faith in a living thing's resilience. And if you'd rather just kill them off so we can spend less taxpayer money, then I would urge you to a) slap yourself and b) contemplate more fully the idea that civilization should take some effort on our part to maintain, and maybe it should even cost more money than barbarism. You may also want to contemplate the fact that rich folks sure could be paying more in taxes.

Around the table: starring 3D-printed guns and the FCC hack that wasn't.

Jon Stokes at the Los Angeles Times reveals "The Boring Truth About 3D-Printed Guns." If you know that 3D printing is mostly about making knick-knacks right now, you probably guessed at least one boring truth: that making a gun out of plastic is a recipe for making a gun that fires maybe once before melting. You may not have known that the ability to make guns out of parts is not a new thing, or (even!) that putting gun blueprint files on the internet is not a new thing. In re what to do, Mr. Stokes comes to more or less the same conclusion as Thom Hartmann did earlier this year -- "(s)omething like a federal license for simple possession of semiautomatic weapons."

Ho hum, a Washington Post report finds that rents are still going up for poor folks in America's most expensive cities but actually dropping for rich folks. Because rich folks are landlords' kind of folks -- and what are poor folks going to do, live in the street? How many times must I tell these pimps! This is not how a free market operates! Truly free markets don't give landlords the "freedom" to extract as much tribute from renters as possible -- truly free markets reduce payments that exceed required costs. The economists' word for "payments that exceed required costs," as you may know, is rent.

Have we reached the point where anti-Nazi protestors will now vastly outnumber pro-Nazi protestors, as happened this past Sunday at the "Unite the Right" rally? We can only hope! But we ought to remain vigilant anyway, lest, oh, I don't know, hypothetically speaking, some future Presidential candidate who panders to racists and says nasty crap about black and brown people all the time somehow gets elected. (At least we had the spectacle of the rally's organizer whining that "I have people attacking me left, right and center" at a rally called Unite the Right.)

FCC Inspector General does, in fact, report that the FCC lied to Congress about a hack attack that never took place. Remember that this "hack" just so happened to take place the same two days that a crapload of Americans -- having just watched John Oliver's latest righteous rant on HBO about the matter -- took to the FCC website to comment on their net neutrality repeal proposal. And you know, FCC Chair Ajit Pai can talk all he want about those other people who failed him, but that only makes him just another boss who only acts like the boss when things are going well. A real boss would take responsibility for failures on his watch, too. Then again, see his boss, our President.

I don't know what you've heard, but scientists have most certainly not figured out how to reverse aging -- they've managed to stop individual cells from aging in laboratory experiments. Specifically, they've delivered very small amounts of hydrogen sulfide (found in rotten eggs!) to some very old cells and made them start dividing again; cells tend to stop dividing when they get old, and then they accumulate in organs, and adversely affect the functioning level of other, younger cells. Next step, I imagine: trying to figure out how to deliver hydrogen sulfide a) only where it's needed and b) in amounts that aren't poisonous. That means don't go around huffing rotten eggs so you can stay young.

Finally, Negin Owliaei at the Our Future blog describes how the good citizens of Lancaster County, PA kept the notorious private prison corporation Geo Group from taking over the country's prison re-entry function. How did they win, when clearly the county government stood against them? They planned townhall meetings and packed county commissioner meetings, that's how, because if there's one thing politicians don't like, it's the people they're supposed to serve getting all up in their grills, like they're supposed to do. I wish the good folks of Lancaster County luck, since they kept Geo out, but they still have to convince the county that what they had (a group of non-profits helping prisoners readjust once they got out) wasn't broke and thus doesn't need fixing.

Around the table: from a potential war averted to the conspiracy theory you can't escape.

Alex Emmons at The Intercept informs us that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson may have been fired not for criticizing Russia, but for actively opposing Saudi Arabia's apparent lust for war with Qatar. Which recommends him, if true. I didn't even need Mr. Emmons to remind me that of course our President said last year that Qatar "has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level." But I'm not sure I'd lay even a scintilla of blame for this still-possible war on Saudi Arabia's "'cradle to grave' welfare system" which "relies on high oil prices," since surely other, far less palatable Saudi Arabian programs also rely on high oil prices.

From Victoria Law at Wired we learn about JPay, an email messaging corporation that seems to be gouging prisoners and their families. JPay charges 47-cent "stamps" for each e-message going in or out, and has a virtual monopoly on this "market"; sadly a lot of "free" marketeers think this is how it's supposed to work, "freedom" apparently including the "freedom" to rig the game to keep a competitor from reaping the reward of doing a better job, and I presume they also think tapping a literally captive market in this manner (which includes kickbacks to the prisons) is clever and not exploitative. Luckily the rest of us find the whole concept of paying to send an email offensive.

Ho hum, then-Senator-now-Attorney-General Jeff Sessions was in up to his neck with two men convicted in a bribery trial. All three men were trying to keep the EPA from making an Alabama coal corporation pay to clean up a (mostly black) area of North Birmingham, and though two of them are now in jail, the EPA still hasn't cleaned the area up, or made the coal corporation pay for the cleanup (and Mr. Sessions still hasn't said if he has recused himself from any potential Justice Department investigation of the matter). It's hard to reassure folks with higher levels of cancer and respiratory ailments, folks who've been told not to let their kids play outside, that at least two bad man went to jail for bribery.

When you read about the battle to fight water privatization in El Salvador, and you hear both political parties mouth platitudes about their opposition to privatization though it's the obvious goal of one if not both of them, I wouldn't blame you for thinking about how things are here in America, where both parties declare their devotion to getting citizens good health care when taking away citizens' good health care is the obvious goal of one if not both of them. The good news? Over 250 communities around the world are taking back their water -- and just in time, too, as climate change wreaks its havoc. Our Glorious Elites still want to privatize everything, of course, but folks are wiser to their schemes now.

Finally, in case you were wondering, here's what all that QAnon stuff is all about. Long story short: it's the kind of conspiracy theory gobbledygook (apparently our military appointed the Whiner-in-Chief President so he could destroy a massive, government-run child pederasty ring) that's detail-free enough to allow, shall we say, a lot of imagination -- enough that its votaries can confidently say every piece of contradictory evidence is actually supporting evidence in disguise. I suppose I'd be more inclined to believe that Our Glorious Elites foisted QAnon upon us just to cause more chaos, since chaos is the only thing Republicans can count on to win elections anymore.

Action: concerning fuel efficiency, private prisons, and detainment.

Our Administration has proposed freezing fuel efficiency standards after 2021, and they also want to stop letting California set stronger emission standards, because hippie-punching. But get a load of this pile of dung: they claim that if cars get more miles to the gallon, folks will drive more and therefore expose themselves to more danger. By that logic, we should never do anything that helps people live longer, because they'll just "put themselves at more risk" with all that extra life! (The Administration is also wrong that lighter cars necessarily lead to more deaths in crashes, but then they don't appreciate science, or subtlety.) Our laws require they still take public comments on their plan, and Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, and Penn Environment all help you do that. Seriously, paying more for gas and pumping more filth into our air: who looks at that and says, yeah, great program? Only our 46% President and his enablers.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big banks to divest from private prison corporations, then both Moms Rising and the Courage Campaign still helps you do that. You may want to remind big banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase that they're making money off putting kids in jail, since private prisons handle most of our government's immigrant detainment functions, and since our President's notorious "zero tolerance" policy has had the side effect (or, possibly, "side effect") of putting a lot of immigrant children in detention. You'll also be reminded, if you read that previous sentence carefully, that letting private corporations handle government functions is a terrible idea -- putting people in prison is our job as a democracy, after all, so our government should handle it on our behalf, not farm it out to some corporation that only cares about enrich its CEOs. So cutting off their money supply would be a good work.

Finally, S. 3225, the Stop Shackling and Detaining Pregnant Women Act, would prevent our government from detaining pregnant immigrant women except under narrow circumstances -- if "credible, reasonable grounds exist to believe that the person presents an immediate and serious threat of hurting herself or others," per Sec. 2(a)(2) -- and would also prevent our government from using restraints on such women, with similar exceptions. S. 3225 would also require detention centers to give pregnant women the health care they need, which right-wingers would like, right, since they're all about caring for babies and such? I mean, if we are the nation that sets an example for the world, then let's be the nation that says "we take care of pregnant immigrants while we're figuring out whether to let them in." Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote our better natures by passing the Stop Shackling and Detaining Pregnant Women Act.

Action: concerning drug pricing and private prisons.

H.R. 6505, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, would (as the title suggests) allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices for its Part D drug benefit program. You've no doubt heard of studies suggesting that letting Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices wouldn't actually bring drug prices down, but if that's true, how does the Veterans Administration pay 40% less for drugs than Medicare does? It boggles the mind that folks could argue that allowing the buyer of almost one-third of prescription drugs in America to negotiate drug prices "will have little effect on drug pricing." Maybe if the Medicare negotiators are complete incompetents! But we can replace them if they're incompetent, because they work for our government, and therefore for us, but all big pharma corporations will ever do is push everyone around and steal your money. Hence both Public Citizen and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to help lower drug prices by passing the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop using private prisons to detain immigrants, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Again, letting private prison corporations house immigrant detainees is a way of putting a wedge between the American people and the government that presumably works for us -- oh, sure, governments always promise to oversee private corporations that take on government functions, but how has that worked out for us? When private prisons put immigrant children in jail, sexually and physically abuse them, and force them to take psychotropics, what does our government do? They say how horrible all that is, and then they do nothing about it, since private prisons are, after all, doing necessary work. But if we make our government house immigrant detainees, then we can more easily shine a light on, and get rid of, serial abusers. And as a bonus, we'll have far less corruption -- and the corruption we do encounter we can more easily punish, since it's our government.

Around the table: starring a bunch of bad people, acting badly!

Ari Paul writes quite the elegy for the New York Daily News after its owner, a media corporation somehow named Tronc, fires half of its editorial workers. The Daily News has given tabloids a good name, by focusing on the local government issues the other New York papers are either too haughty (cough New York Times cough) or too crazy (cough New York Post cough) to cover. But killing off editors and expecting writers to do-that-job-too is a good way of crippling a paper's ability to cover local politics. And even a Times editorial board member says that now "(u)nscrupulous developers and corrupt politicians can breathe a sigh of relief." In a sane and moral society, such people would never have a moment's peace. And you know what that means.

Federal lawsuit digs up evidence of Michigan Republicans actively trying to give their party an advantage in redrawing House districts; one of them boasts of concentrating "Dem garbage" into a small number of districts. If you're the hopeful kind, as I generally advocate you should be, you might think that spelling out how you're trying to create a partisan advantage -- versus, you know, redrawing districts to better represent the people -- might raise a red flag even with someone like Chief Justice Roberts. But lately our Supreme Court has been far less interested in the actual animus of right-wingers than the "animus" supposedly generated by liberals.

What's left for charter school advocates now that their failure is plain? Well, according to Jeff Bryant at the OurFuture blog, all that's left is to "recast their failed agenda as a success." And, I guess, to claim they're "fact-based" and then not produce any facts -- or, at least, any facts that stand up to scrutiny -- and claim that you're the one who's "ideological." Nice work, if you can get it! When your Tea Party uncle tells you that charter schools "do better" than public schools, you can remind him that charter schools can take anyone they want and kick out anyone they want, and yet they still can't win a 500-yard dash with a 490-yard head start.

Beleaguered U.S. House Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) plans to run for Speaker of the House if Republicans still hold the House after the midterms. Because when no less than eight former Ohio State University wrestlers come forward and say you knew about the team doctor sexually abusing wrestlers 30 years ago while you were assistant wrestling coach and you did nothing about it, not only do you not resign, not only do you not "retire at the end of your term to spend more time with your family," you run for Speaker of the House! Moral values!

Finally, our distinguished gentleman of a President slams the FCC's sudden unwillingness to rubber-stamp the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, saying that it would deprive America of a "great and much needed Conservative voice for and of the People" (odd capitalization in original). I guess he means the merger would provide yet another "conservative" "voice," since we only have (aside from Sinclair as it's currently constituted) Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Newsmax, World Net Daily, Breitbart, and am I leaving any of them out? I wouldn't expect our President to grapple with Chairman Pai's stated objection to the merger, but the more pertinent question, of course, is whether one corporation should own so many media outlets -- a phenomenon which tends to annoy conservatives as well as liberals.

Around the table: with at least four lessons in how evil works.

Our Health and Human Services Department has been diverting funds earmarked for other purposes to pay to reunite the families it separated at the border. Among the programs affected are rural health programs, which reminds me that this whole imbroglio isn't a bug, it's a feature -- our HHS is literally taking money from rural Americans and giving it to immigrants so that rural Americans will conclude that ITZ TEH IMMIGRANTZ FAULTZ!!!!! Hey, you gotta keep the hate machine running somehow.

Administration "loyalists" are replacing long-time Veterans Administration employees at a rapid pace. And here, too: replacing good employees (including an "experienced scheduler," remember all those wait lists that were in the news in 2015?) with unqualified loyalists helps assure that the VA runs down, and when it does, our Administration will say THIS PROVEZ THAT TEH GUBMINT DOESN'T WORKZ!!!!! and privatize everything. When I say "incompetence is malice," this is kinda what I mean.

Former Sen. Joe Liebermann, himself a victim in a 2006 Democratic primary, rues the "outside the mainstream" politics of NY-14 Democratic House nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and urges NY-14 residents to vote for the man she vanquished in the primary instead. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez sure is making a lot of enemies among folks who are actually outside the mainstream -- if we measure the mainstream by what regular Americans think, rather than the fake "mainstream" of the Beltway chattering class. I didn't realize, though, that Mr. Crowley was on the Working Families Party line, which conjures up the prospect of a lot of right-learning Democrats voting the Working Families Party line. That could be trouble, but maybe some good can come of that, too -- like hard hats remembering that they actually have a lot of liberal opinions.

From the "How Reassuring Is This?" file: Janelle Shane tells us that "The AI Revolution Will Be Led By Toasters, Not Droids," since artificial intelligence works a lot better when it has a lot fewer tasks to handle. Which makes sense, though it also seems that the more single-task-centered AI bots aren't that good, either. The human mind, as I've said many times, is a wondrous and complex thing, and we barely know how it works, so we're probably not going to be creating C3POs anytime soon -- though a lot of banksters will make a lot of money off dumb investors before that's too obvious, and more than a few big corporations will fall because they move to AI far too quickly. (As an aside, that AI-generated "Spread Chicken Rice" recipe made me laugh out loud. Never, ever forget to seed your hearts before cooking!)

Finally, our Homeland (sic) Security (sic) Secretary says, in re the Nazi wannabes rioting in Charlottesville last year, that "it's not that one side is right, one side is wrong" and "(a)nybody that is advocating violence, we need to work to mitigate." What stunning wishy-washiness, and not just because our President's votaries squeal when liberals use words like "mitigate." Fact is, more people commit violence than advocate violence, and just about everyone who commits violence feels they had no choice! And, in this debate, one side is right and one side is wrong -- and these sides are, respectively, "everyone but white supremacists" and "white supremacists." Remember when I said we had to unlearn the post-modern notion that "there's no such thing as good and evil"? Yeah, this is why.

Around the table: the President of France is not a good President either! And other lessons.

Good news, everyone: prosecutors have dropped all remaining charges against the J20 protestors. As you know, prosecutors tried to ring up over 200 Inauguration Day protestors on felony rioting charges, but they failed abjectly to do so. Of course, their own lipstick-on-a-pig statement that "21 people have pled guilty to charges for their conduct that day" hides the fact that they brought so little evidence to trial that they would have had to count on guilty pleas to get any guilty verdicts. I wonder how they got those guilty pleas.

Our Army has started discharging immigrant soldiers who joined the Army so they could establish a firm path to citizenship. Our Army told a few of them they were "security risks" because they had relatives abroad (why, nobody could have predicted that immigrants would have relatives in other nations!) or because the DoD hadn't completed background checks, which are, of course, more extensive for immigrants. Is there any promise this Administration won't break just to diddle the rage glands of its votaries?

Shira Tarlo at Salon reminds us that Andrew Wheeler, the coal lobbyist replacing Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator, won't be any better than Mr. Pruitt. He may not have Mr. Pruitt's peculiar taste for low-level perks, but a former colleague assures us he "does things by the book," which may mean he'll move more slowly than Mr. Pruitt, which is good -- or it may mean he knows all the loopholes he can use to make our air and water dirtier again, which is bad. Apparently he doesn't really want the job, either, though he might be doing it for a while.

Surprise, surprise! Juliette Legendre at Inequality.org finds the Presidency of France's Emmanuel Macron to be "an old-fashioned, right-leaning neoliberal determined to overhaul France’s hard-won social model under the guise of modernism and emancipation." Cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations, gutting labor laws, partially privatizing the national rail system, and declaring his opponents to be "slackers," "cynics," and "do-nothings" -- how preferable, really, is all of that to the shitshow we're enduring here in America?

Police union President talks of "an influx of tremendous outrage" from the community over the inclusion of two books on an eight-book summer reading list for incoming students at a South Carolina high school. Dig how he calls two books "almost an indoctrination toward distrust of authority figures" -- gosh, I wonder how many of our Founders complained that our Constitution was "almost an indoctrination toward distrust of authority figures." My favorite part is when we learn that one of the books this fellow fears actually has a good police role model in it. All together now: waaaaaaaaah!

Finally, Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic says Democrats will have to choose in 2020 between mobilizing whiter, Republican-leaning voters disgusted with Trump or mobilizing younger, less white, more liberal voters. I can make that decision for them! Mobilize the voters who are sick of an economy that serves only the richest Americans, because disgust with that economy pretty much resonates across age and race groups. Hell, it might even remind some Republicans that they're really Democrats.

Around the table: meet the new boss, same as the old boss, part 785.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: ISIS fighters have moved back into Raqqa, Syria, not even a year after coalition forces allowed 250 of their fighters to leave Raqqa with their families and all the weapons they could fit into a three-mile long convoy. It sure is a good thing our new national security braintrust isn't overly preoccupied with truly ridiculous projects like regime change in Iran! Oops, sorry; I forgot which evil alternate universe I was in for a moment.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigns/is fired, citing "unrelenting attacks on me personally" because waaaaaaaaaah! And our President's votaries now see Mr. Pruitt as One of Them, because he gets attacked by Those Librul Elites just like they do! Never mind that they'd never tolerate a Cone of Silence from a Democrat. (Also, a former coal lobbyist now runs the EPA, on an "interim" basis that I expect to last at least until the end of 2020.)

In the face of yet more "liberal" media hand-wringing over Just What Those Red State Voters Are Really Like, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us that the glue that really binds them (and their messy lives) to our President (and his messy life which is now our messy life) is sexism. "The anti-abortion campaign is all about punishing women for sex, not men," right-wingers don't "put a 'higher value' on marriage" so much as they "stigmatize not being married," by which they mean women not being married -- all true, and as long as men are trying to get sex from women (and imagining themselves somehow disenfranchised if they don't), this'll all remain a problem.

Ho hum, privatizing IRS tax collection functions has caused our government to lose money, which Nobody Could Have Predicted! Worse, private tax collectors more typically go after low-income working families than big fish, which Nobody Could Have Predicted, Either! We talk about this kind of stuff all the time, but our elected representatives never seem to listen. That's why we need to keep talking about it. Can't some enterprising Democrat somewhere run campaign ads about this? Or would that be uncivil?

Max Boot becomes another major right-wing figure (a la George Will) to openly root for Democrats to win back the House and Senate this fall. Of course, Hillary Clinton was able to find plenty of Republicans willing to endorse her and even shoot ads for her; how did that work out? And how much pull do folks like Max Boot and George Will really have with regular Americans? Hell, how much pull do they have with other elite right-wingers, most of whom, I imagine, are saying we're getting rid of regulations and getting two Supreme Court Justices out of all of this as we speak?

Finally, leave it to Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall to point out that simultaneously telling Democrats "we have to fight or we can't win" and "if we do fight, it will backfire and we also can't win" is utterly absurd. He also approves of the "Abolish ICE" slogan because at least it's got "clarity and power," like, you know, all right-wing slogans do no matter how stupid they are, plus "(i)f your political language tip toes around what you think or shows you’re not quite sure what you think or shows that you know what you think but may not be willing to act on what you think, that has bad consequences. It signals weakness and irresolution. It shows you may not have the resoluteness to act." Which explains how Scott Walker/Sam Brownback/Paul LePage/Rick Snyder/Rick Scott somehow won all those elections -- they're wrong about everything, but they're resolutely wrong.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, private prisons, and media consolidation.

In the wake of the implosion of anti-gerrymandering bill SB 22 underneath the weight of over 600 amendments, Fair Districts PA helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to call a special session of the state legislature to pass redistricting reform. If he does so, we'll be able to introduce HB 722 and SB 22 again -- possibly in improved form! -- and we'll be able to punish our legislators for taking the people's will and pooping all over it (since legislators will regard not having the month of July off as a punishment). Mr. Wolf absolutely has the power to call a special legislative session, and the people's clear support for redistricting reform gives him the reason to do it -- but does he have the will? Surely he'll want to consider that calling unpopular legislators back for a special session to do the job the people have clearly commanded them to do would be a smart political move, not a "risky" one.

Meanwhile, Moms Rising helps you tell Wells Fargo to stop investing in the private prison corporations that are (among other evils!) helping our Administration forcibly separate parents and children at the border. The Obama Administration started to move away from using private prisons for immigrant detainment -- since, you know, our government really should perform its own duties, not farm them out to someone's crony -- but this Administration, flush with private prison campaign money, has moved back in the wrong direction. Still, private prisons would have a much tougher go of it if they didn't get money from big banks. And you know Wells Fargo could certainly use all the good PR it can get! Indeed, it's been all but begging for good PR, after being caught opening checking accounts for customers without asking them (among other sins). If pulling out of the private prison game happens to benefit them at the same time it benefits us, I won't complain.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, then Free Press still helps you do that. Sinclair Broadcasting already owns 193 "local" TV stations, which are enjoying a bit of a vogue as more people reject the obvious partisanship and hackdom of cable news channels, but Sinclair indulges in quite a bit of partisanship and hackdom itself -- forcing their "local" newsreaders to read a noxious script about "fake news" as if it's something those other people do, and forcing "terrorism news desk" items and must-run "opinions" from a former Administration spokeshack on their local stations. Buying up Tribune Media would enable Sinclair to force even more of this crap into even more households. What on Earth is wrong with local news stations having local ownership? And if you couldn't find a local owner, what on Earth would be wrong with worker-owned broadcasting stations?

Around the table: racism, authoritarianism, trade, housing, and our President's latest reason for deporting people.

Good news, everyone! "The Social Shaming of Racists is Working," says Laila Lalami at The Nation. That New York lawyer who got caught on video harassing and threatening non-English-speaking workers at a deli? That jerk who called the police on a black student for napping in their dorm's common room? The Starbucks manager who called the police on two black men for not ordering something? They have all suffered for their wrongdoings! And yet too many presumably intelligent folks are whining about these completely-deserved sufferings as an ominous sign of "conformity of thought," when, hey, if you threaten someone with deportation, or call the police on someone who's doing nothing wrong, you deserve to be shamed. Hey, it's what civilized people do.

My heart swelled when I saw this headline: "Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists." But David Adler's study says folks who identify themselves as centrists like civil rights less and strongmen more than folks who identify themselves as left or right. If you've ever listened to a centrist drone on and on about how bad both sides are, you won't be surprised to learn that they're the most likely to prefer strongmen -- and this is pretty good news for our President, and pretty bad news for folks who are counting on "reasonable" Americans to reject him and his policies. (Luckily, you and I don't "count on" other people to do the right thing; we do the right thing ourselves, and set a good example for others.)

If your right-wing uncle is telling you that our President's "deal" letting the Chinese corporation ZTE off the hook for its violation of sanctions against Iran and North Korea is evidence of a "master negotiator," then ask him why the President counts "forcing ZTE to buy American parts" as a "concession," when ZTE has long relied on buying American parts is ongoing, and keeping them from buying American parts is what hurt them the most. Also, too, law and order means nothing to our President when the lawbreaker is a big corporation.

Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut describes how "US Lets Public Housing Developments Crumble as a Prelude to Privatization." The headline pretty much says it all -- our government lets public housing get worse and worse, as an obvious prelude to getting corporate cronies (are you reading, Sean Hannity?) to tear them down, and build up new buildings to attract richer (and whiter!) customers. Still, read the whole thing, and recall that public housing was always segregated, and note that Europe (or, as Don Rumsfeld used to say, "Old Europe") does public housing a lot better -- and cheaper.

Finally, ain't nothing the NFL can do to its players that our President can't make worse, and so it goes with his suggestion that NFL players who won't stand for the anthem should maybe be deported. No, there's really no other way to read that! The NFL absolutely can issue this mandate to their players, not just because their contract allows it but because the First Amendment protects players from their government, not their employers. But only a sick, immoral, and decadent society whines this much about flags and anthems. And, sadly, this sickness, immorality, and decadence manifests itself perfectly in our President.

Around the table: with important reminders about "far-left" policies, privatizing prisons, and political bad actors.

And here's the best headline I read all week: "The Surprising Popularity of 'Far-Left' Policies." The only way it could have been better is if they'd put ironic quotation marks around "surprising," because only Our Glorious Elites and their "liberal" media enablers would consider "protecting more public lands," "limit(ing) corporate tax loopholes," and "raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy" to be "far-left" positions, when in fact these policy proposals generally get majority support (and therefore bipartisan support) from Americans! But, as I've been saying for a long time, they love calling popular, good proposals "extreme," when their own solutions to everything -- make war on other countries so you can swing your balls around, cut spending that actually helps people, cut benefits for programs you've paid into all your life! -- are actually quite extreme.

The city of Tucson, AZ adopts resolution banning the privatization of its prison system. The even better news? Tucson isn't even the first locality to outlaw private corporations running their detention centers and jails, and a lot of the other localities that have done so are, like Tucson, in very red areas of the country. Of course, if you thought about it for a minute, you'd see that private prisons have no "market" incentive to improve prisoners' lives, because the more miserable they are, the less they'll be able to make it on the outside, and thus the more likely they'll become "repeat customers."

"Nearly Half of You Reading This Have Bullshit Jobs," announces the headline of this Daily Beast interview with the author of (you guessed it) the book Bullshit Jobs. The term "bullshit jobs" describes jobs that are a) quite well-paid and b) quite useless, the kind of job that exists to make other people look good, or at least not incompetent. They can range from the receptionist who takes one phone call daily but has to exist to make the boss look important to the "people who provide unnecessary supervision" to corporate-lawyer "goons." And they don't exist in spite of our "free" market ideology, but because of it, and its mania for quantifying everything. (Read the whole article; it contains, among so many other things, the best argument for a universal basic income I've yet heard.)

California Republican U.S. House candidate actually films herself harassing a transgender woman trying to use the bathroom at a Denny's. I won't name name this U.S. House candidate, since we shouldn't give jerks too much sunlight. But I will highlight her stupid argument, that a transgender woman was "invading my privacy" (italics in original) merely by a) being born male and b) wanting to use the women's room. Setting aside that following someone into a bathroom and then harassing them is an actual invasion of privacy, I could more easily argue that this House candidate is invading my privacy merely by being such an asshole that I noticed it. The good news? She'll be lucky to lose by only 50 points in this district, and thus she's the proverbial walnut in the batter of eternity.

Finally, upon hearing the so-far-unsubstantiated rumor that the Administration might fire Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, my first thought was: who on Earth do they think they're going to find to do that job better than she does it? By "that job," of course, I don't mean "informing the American people about what the Administration's doing," but the job of putting entire cartons of lipstick on the pigs this Administration keeps trotting out. Seriously, even Tha Bush Mobb's notorious last Press Secretary, Dana Perino, couldn't match the sheer will-to-lie of Sarah Sanders. Then again, I'd hate to report, in a few months, that I'd spoken too soon.

Action: financial predation, compassionate release, and food safety.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has, apparently, not taken even one enforcement action against banks or debt collectors or credit card corporations over the last four months, and now it's soliciting public comments on a proposal to get rid of the "civil investigative demand" tool for its investigations, hoping that since you're not a lawyer, you won't say anything about it. But even if you're not a lawyer, you can look at the law describing the tool and see that its authors obviously built in safeguards to prevent governmental abuse. I must conclude, then, that the corporations who'll whine the most about this see any regulation of their activities as "abuse." Don't let the whiners win: Public Citizen helps you tell the CFPB to fulfill its legally-mandated duty to protect consumers from financial predators by preserving the civil investigative demand tool.

Meanwhile, S. 2471, the Granting Release And Compassion Effectively Act (or GRACE Act), would, as its title suggests, make it easier for criminals who are terminally ill to get a compassionate early release -- largely by requiring prisons to do better in notifying terminally prisoners of their options, and allowing prison staff and a prisoner's family members to help filing release requests -- and also make it easier for families to visit their terminally ill relatives while they're still in prison. We should interpret none of this as "being weak on law and order," since our civilization does (and should) value the quality of mercy. And the GRACE Act doesn't even ask all that much of us! I mean, Hollywood dark comedies aside, we don't presume that folks who can barely stand up for any length of time will go out and rob banks, do we? Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support merciful treatment of terminally ill prisoners by passing the GRACE Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our USDA to abandon its efforts to let pork processing corporations control far more of the pork inspection process, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Our USDA has already tried this with chicken earlier this year, but our activism against their attempts caused them to fail; perhaps they're figuring that fewer people eat pork than chicken and thus won't care as much. But folks do eat bacon, sausage, pulled pork, scrapple, and the like, so I suspect our USDA will find that it's calculated incorrectly. Speeding up processing lines and letting pork processing corporations do their own inspections won't just result in bad meat and sicker people -- in a nation where every incident of food poisoning in America seems to find its way to the news, I feel compelled to state again -- but it'll also result in more workplace injuries and more miserable workers. All that so pork processing executives can make more money! Does that sound like America to you?

Action: media monopolies, corruption, and food inspection.

So that video showing Sinclair "local" news anchors all saying the same damn thing: is that not the best argument ever against monopolized media? And is it also not the best argument ever against letting Sinclair buy Tribune Media so it can have even more TV stations spouting the same thing? Hence Free Press helps you tell the FCC to reject the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger. The FCC, under Ajit Pai, doesn't care what you think -- well, not unless you present "new facts into the record" or "serious legal arguments," and if it contradicts their freedom-only-for-corporations philosophy, then not then, either, really. Still, duty is duty, and if we want actual local TV news stations to cover actual local TV news, then we have to fight for it, as we have to fight for anything worth having. Even if we must have right-wing windbags on the local news, they should be local right-wing windbags.

Meanwhile, the EPA Inspector General has been investigating Administrator Scott Pruitt's various spending habits, and Climate Hawks Vote helps you tell the IG's Office to expand its investigations into Mr. Pruitt's possible corruption. It sure doesn't look good for Mr. Pruitt once you add up his $40,000-plus "cone of silence" phonebooth, his rock star-style security entourage, his flying First Class on the taxpayer dime because one coach passenger cussed at him, and his $50-a-night-only-the-nights-you-stay condo he rented from an energy lobbyist's wife. But of course our President reportedly has Mr. Pruitt's back, and I doubt that'll change, since gutting regulations that actually help Americans is the one ideological cause to which our President will always remain a slave. So, as always, we must make the change.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the USDA to abandon plans to privatize and speed up hog slaughter inspections, then the National Employment Law Project still helps you do that. It seems like every time someone gets food poisoning it makes the news, so why would our government want to embrace policies that will inevitably result in more food poisoning? Pretty much for the reason I described in the previous paragraph: the current Administration believes that all regulations that actually help people must be destroyed, because regulations that help people invariably prevent corporate executives from gilding the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, and when faced with the choice between the right not to be made sick by your food and the "right" to even more unearned money, our Administration will always choose the latter. Unless we get in their grills, that is.

Action: vote suppression, fair sentencing, and the war on Yemen.

The notorious "Interstate Crosscheck" program supposedly aims to catch voter fraud by tabulating people with similar names registered in multiple states, but -- as America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, has documented at length -- "Interstate Crosscheck" actually foments vote suppression by allowing states to simply deregister voters who have similar names to folks in other states, and a great many of these folks just so happen to be black or Hispanic. "Interstate Crosscheck" flags voters without checking middle names or Social Security numbers, and if you're sitting there thinking that just means that these folks registered with different middle names, I would remind you of the phrase innocent until proven guilty, which is a bedrock principle of our judicial system, after all. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your state to stop or decline participation in "Interstate Crosscheck."

Meanwhile, did you know that in Pennsylvania you can get your drivers' license suspended for six months (or longer) after doing time on a drug-related offense, even if that offense had nothing to do with driving your car unsafely? An important part of law and order is ensuring sentences fit crimes; another important part of law and order is ensuring that convicted criminals can rehabilitate themselves, but it's awfully hard to get a job, get an apartment, see your family, or participate in your community without a car, especially in places with very little public transportation. If that sounds like "setting folks up to fail and go back to jail," well, that just so happens to be the very market model of the private prison corporation. But HB 163 would repeal the law mandating license suspensions for drug-related convictions, so the ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to support rehabilitation of prisoners by supporting HB 163.

Finally, S.J.Res. 54, the bill that would end American participation in Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen, is a good bill, but the similarly-numbered S.J.Res. 55 would let our government keep helping Saudi Arabia in its war against Yemen as long as our Secretary of State (whomever that is!) certifies that Saudi Arabia is making a "good faith effort" at diplomacy and helping to alleviate the near-famine and near-plague conditions in Yemen that have resulted from the war. In other words, it lets Senators look like they're doing something about the war without actually doing something about it! Don't brook any silliness about how this fake resolution gives the President more "flexibility," because Presidents don't need "flexibility" -- they just need good Americans to tell them what to do. Hence Just Foreign Policy and Change.org help you tell your Senator to reject S.J.Res. 55 and actually do something about starving Yemeni citizens.

Around the table: a noted centrist suggests that Democrat centrists stop meddling in Congressional primaries, and other tales.

Elizabeth Hinton thinks we should "Turn Prisons Into Colleges." If we could keep prisoners away from the for-profit sector, though, that'd be nice. I suppose the ragehead crowd will squeal PRIZUNZ ARE FOR TEH PUNISHMENTZ!!!!, though actually prisons are for rehabilitation. But those who only care about punishment and retribution can take heart that a lot of prisoners would find studying to be an absolute chore, at least at first. What rageheads will say when more of those prisoners become functioning members of society again? Oh, who am I kidding -- they'll point to the ones who don't and declare the whole thing a failure. And their heroes will say PRIVATEZ PRIZONZ ARE TEH ANSWURZ!!!!!

Our Department of Defense tells Congress it can't tell them not to refuel Saudi planes that go on to drop bombs on Yemen, which suggest a certain ignorance, on Defense's part, on how the Constitution is actually supposed to work. They're not even trying to argue that the 2001 AUMF, which needs to be repealed yesterday if not sooner, gives them all the authority they need! Instead, they're trying to say helping Saudi Arabia bomb Yemen doesn't "constitute 'hostilities'." Anyone want to ask any Yemenis about that?

Ho hum, the Obama Administration started a commission that finally got some health care help for Cold War-era nuclear workers exposed to toxins, but the current Administration has let that commission's expired seats (i.e., all of them) go unfilled. Because GUBMINT BAD REGULASHUNZ BAD ADMINISTRATIVEZ STATEZ BAD!!!! I predict that once someone explains to President Manchild that a lot of these workers probably voted for him, he promptly takes to Twitter to slam Democrats for holding up his nominees, even though they literally can't now.

Well, this is a watershed moment: brilliant but occasionally infuriating centrist Matthew Yglesias not only says the DCCC should stop trying to pick nominees for voters, but that the Democrats' whole elect-someone-who-can-win theory has "very little evidence" to back it. Which we've known for a while -- long before 2016, even! -- but again, nice to have some science behind it, and nice to hear it from an unlikely source, too. Studies do not, in fact, show that candidates who "moderate" their positions do better, and where have Democrats been cleaning up in special elections so far this cycle? In red areas where they did better before 2016, and notin places like Georgia's 6th district, where Barack Obama got shelled but where Hillary Clinton barely lost.

Finally, the Administration has told Idaho it can't break the Affordable Care Act as nakedly as it had planned to do, by selling health insurance plans that don't comply with Affordable Care Act requirements in re pre-existing conditions, for example. Still, we shouldn't congratulate the Executive branch for doing its job, nor should we ignore all the wink-winks in Ms. Verma's letter to Idaho Gov. Otter, which could just as easily have read "we told you how to break Obamacare, but NOOOOO! You had to do it your way!" And, ah, what "freedoms" is Gov. Otter talking about Obamacare destroying? The "freedom" to buy crappy health insurance that won't be there for you when you need it?

Around the table: describing at least three should-be career-ending utterances!

You may think the "liberal" media generally does a better job In These Interesting Times, but Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us that the "liberal" media still falls all over itself trying to tell you that runaway CEO pay isn't really a big problem. Amidst the pile of hair-splitting and cherry-picked data you'll find one truly astounding nugget: the New York Times analyst who says Rep. Kennedy's statement that the best-paid CEOs make 300 times what average workers make is "true, but misleading." That really ranks down there with "alternative facts."

Hey, how's that tax cut working out for you? Here's how it's working for Kimberly-Clark workers: around 12% of them are going to be losing their jobs. And the corporation's own CFO says they're going to use those tax cuts "for capital investments and to allocate capital to shareholders," apparently unaware of how that sounds to people who work for a living. Oh, and they're also going to shut down 10 manufacturing plants, which fact will no doubt not make Mr. Trump's next State of the Union address.

Neuroscience News asks whether we'd better consider our social media interactions not as an anti-social addiction, but a hyper-social one. And given that our natural need for food can easily turn into an addiction to junk food, we ought to set boundaries on our social media use. That all sounds pretty sane to me -- why think there's something really wrong with you if you spend too much time on your phone, when a fairly simple solution would be to check your phone only at certain times?

Ho hum, Puerto Rico's Governor announces plans to use charter schools and vouchers in response to Hurricane Maria's destruction of the island's schools. Why is disaster always an opportunity for bad right-wing ideas to flourish? I guess I should look forward to the day when much better ideas will get slammed as similarly "opportunistic," as opposed to simply being ignored. (As an aside, I did not know that former Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans." Really, that should have been a career-ending utterance.)

Finally, Dave Zirin at The Nation explains "Why So Many Philadelphia Eagles Are Rejecting This White House." As if you needed another reason to love our new Super Bowl champions! The anti-racist activism of Malcolm Jenkins and Chris Long you probably knew about, but wideout/pass interference penalty-drawing machine Torrey Smith explains it best: "If I told you that I was invited to a party by an individual I believe is sexist or has no respect for women or I told you that this individual has said offensive things towards many minority groups...this individual also called my peers and my friends SOBs, you would understand why I wouldn’t want to go to that party. Why is it any different when the person has title of President of the United States?" This isn't a country founded on the idea that we should treat the President with kid gloves, after all.

Action: "free" trade, and infrastructure.

NAFTA negotiators are meeting in Montreal as we speak, and since our President has already faltered before the challenge of demanding an end to the hated "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanism in NAFTA, and our Commerce Secretary thinks the hated TPP would be a wonderful guide to renegotiating NAFTA, it's up to us to act. So Public Citizen helps you demand that any future NAFTA deal put people before corporations. Corporations have the decided advantage, of course, since they're able to take a peek at NAFTA negotiations and we're not, even though we're, you know, the owners of government. And "free" trade deals have not only subjugated workers to corporations, they've overthrown American law -- recall that the World Trade Organization recently struck down a law mandating country-of-origin labeling for chickens as a violation of two of the more obscure "free" trade deals! And a more corporate NAFTA would do more of that. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Axios published a leaked outline of President Trump's infrastructure plan, and it's as awful as we've feared. The plan, you recall, would use some $140 billion in corporate welfare handouts to lure $1 trillion in private investment, but already you see the problem: private investors won't invest in a project unless it makes money, which makes it more likely they'll skimp on vital services to the people who need them just so they can make more money. And where's the money coming from? From oil and gas drilling in public parks, naturally. Of course we'd be better off simply reversing the recently-passed corporate tax cut, which offers a boon to corporations much larger than the infrastructure plan's $140 billion price tag, every year. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell our President to abandon his privatization-centered infrastructure program. He won't care, but duty is duty.

Around the table: conservatism's ongoing decay, and other sad developments.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy provides us with yet more helpful data demonstrating that outsourcing the IRS's debt collection function is a terrible idea. The IRS spends about $3 on private debt collectors for every $1 they bring in, which won't surprise you if you have, well, virtually any life experience at all. Strange that today's "conservatives" push for privatization, then do nothing when the private corporations deliver bad results. Aren't conservatives all about making government more efficient and saving the taxpayer money? Or is that just what they told us?

Gov. Walker's little corporate welfare deal with Foxconn will now cost Wisconsin taxpayers $4.5 billion, instead of the $3 billion he previously said it would cost. I wouldn't put it past Mr. Walker, who's as politically astute as he is evil, to try to get some insulation from the backlash by letting President Trump announce the Foxconn deal last year, but this imbroglio remains a major opportunity for Democrats to finally find bipartisan hatred of corporate welfare sexy enough to run ads about. Of course, these are Democrats we're talking about.

Not quite two weeks after passing the massive tax "reform" bill, House Speaker Paul Ryan gets $500,000 in campaign contributions from Charles Koch (of Koch brothers infamy) and his wife. I won't say you could prove a quid pro quo in a court of law, but I'd be a schmuck to say the two events are completely unrelated. I've become convinced that the future of campaign finance is the small contribution, and that big campaign contributions like this will become massive PR headaches for donors. But I wouldn't mind the future being now, of course.

Ho hum, West Virginia's plan to drug test welfare applicants has caught exactly four people in its web over the first three months. One shouldn't compare number of welfare applicants who fail drug tests to the number of folks who use drugs in the population as a whole, but to the number of folks who fail drug tests in the population as a whole. But proponents of this sort of thing have failed to make the case that welfare drug testing is fiscally responsible, which is, again, the sort of thing we thought conservatives cared about. Of course, I'd also argue that punishing addicts is far less fiscally responsible than treating them.

Finally, former Maryland Lieutenant Governor/RNC Chair Michael Steele says the Republicans are entirely to blame for the current government shutdown. I never enjoyed watching Mr. Steele, an obvious moderate, run as far right as he could to appease the rest of the party -- you remember him popularizing the phrase "drill, baby, drill" at the 2008 Republican convention? And you remember his apology for his very mild criticisms of Rush Limbaugh the next year? -- but if he's really as fed up as he sounds these days, he might do some good for this great nation after all.

Around the table: the Democrats' peculiar position on government spying, and other follies.

Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept reminds us that "The Same Democrats Who Denounce Donald Trump as a Lawless, Treasonous Authoritarian Just Voted to Give Him Vast Warrantless Spying Powers." And since a significant number of Republican House Reps actually opposes warrantless government spying, Democrats could have unified and killed the bill. But they didn't. Remember that the next time someone tells you that electing more Democrats is the only way to get things done.

Remember back when President Trump "saved" all those jobs at the Carrier plant in Indiana by giving Carrier a boatload of corporate welfare tax breaks? Well, a lot of Carrier workers are getting laid off now, and have had it up to here with Mr. Trump's "promises.". The deal was never that good in the first place -- over 500 Indianapolis workers got laid off, and Carrier completely closed its Huntington plant and moved the jobs to Mexico -- but that didn't stop a lot of obnoxious right-wingers from whining that TEH LIBRULZ HATES TEH JOBZ!!!! Are any of them sorry about that now? I kid, of course -- being a Trumphole means never being sorry, or accountable.

Ho hum, the Republican mania for cutting the IRS's budget will lead to an IRS workforce that won't be able to implement the Republican tax "reform" with any skill or efficiency. Why, it's almost like that's the whole idea! Congress has slashed the IRS's employee training funding by almost 75% over the last eight years, which I'll admit is likely the envy of the corporate world vis a vis training workers, which they regard as yet another drag on profits. I wish I could say corporations that refuse to train their workers will fail -- I mean, they should, but Our Glorious Elites always seem to fail upward in this sick, immoral, and decadent society.

Julia Kassem at TruthOut finds corruption and mismanagement of public water in the Middle East to be even more damaging than in other parts of the world, leading, of course, to privatization of those resources, and thus also to more corruption and more lousy service. You see this everywhere: governments promising to "make sure" private corporations handle the public's resources properly, then being missing-in-action when those private corporations foul up. Again, it's almost like that's the whole idea.

Finally, some bad news: the number of folks without health insurance in America went up by over 3 million people in Mr. Trump's first year in office. I'm sure Mr. Trump will blame all of that on the Democrats, but nobody put a gun to his head and cut off subsidies, nobody put a gun to his head and reduce the exchange sign-up period to 45 days, and certainly nobody put a gun to his head and told him to repeal the individual mandate. I guess it's Democrats' fault because they wouldn't "work with him," by which he means capitulate to him. See? He is a real Republican!

Around the table: tales of privatization and corporate welfare, plus slim rays of hope in Appalachia.

Zachery Tracer at Bloomberg explains how Mr. Trump's ending of Obamacare subsidies will actually cost our government more money. Since other health insurance subsidies essentially limit how much folks who use the exchange pay out-of-pocket, our government will wind up paying even more of the cost of the now-higher premiums. Of course, since so many Trump votaries won't actually feel it in their pocketbook, they'll decide it either didn't happen or doesn't matter. I'd call all that clever of Mr. Trump, if I didn't insist that cleverness also work toward some greater good, rather than some selfish evil.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry wants to guarantee profits for coal and nuclear power plants in deregulated energy markets, as long as those plants keep 90 days' worth of fuel on site. Free markets! Seriously, this is a very edifying read -- among other things, it reminds us that cost-benefit analyses usually wind up ignoring most of the real costs, particularly the health care costs -- but it should be quite irritating navigating the excuses the right will offer in defense, from TEH OBAMAZ MADE TEH WARZ ON TEH COALZ!!! to PROTECTINGZ TEH PROFITZ PROTECTZ TEH WORKURZ!!!!! to TEH SUN SETZ TEH WIND DIEZ!!! to WHY DO YOU HATEZ TEH AMURKIAZ!!!!

The subheader on this William D. Hartung piece at The American Conservative reads thusly: "Your tax dollars support troops of defense contractor CEOs." Turns out about half of defense spending "goes directly to private corporations and much of it is then wasted on useless overhead, fat executive salaries, and startling (yet commonplace) cost overruns on weapons systems and other military hardware that, in the end, won’t even perform as promised." And of course the Pentagon doesn't hold them accountable, not when they can't even tell you how many private contractors they've hired. This sure looks like yet another argument against privatization.

In a related note, you no doubt heard that Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to remake Puerto Rico's entire utility grid into a renewable one, and though your heart may have soared in appreciation, Kate Aronoff at In These Times reminds us that it would likely come with a price -- the privatization of Puerto Rico's power grid. All the standard objections apply: the good citizens of Puerto Rico would have no control over what a private corporation does to them, and such private corporations will do what's good for shareholders before they'll ever do what's good for citizens. And even if you're fairly sanguine about Tesla, remember that Tesla could sell whatever it would own in Puerto Rico at any time -- and to multiple corporations, which would multiply potential problems.

And speaking of Puerto Rico's many other problems, the House has unveiled a Puerto Rico relief plan that contains $16 billion of debt relief -- but for the underfinanced National Flood Insurance Program, not the island. But wait, there's more! The bill would give Puerto Rico, which has already faced a financial crisis due to bankster manipulation and governmental corruption, $5 billion in loans. I bet the House calls giving them grants a "moral hazard;" clearly the real moral hazard of using a crisis to put people deeper in debt is invisible to them.

Finally, Catherine V. Moore at Yes! magazine discusses the various ways local Appalachians have taken to reviving areas where coal corporations use to conduct mountaintop removal mining. Note well that though invasive plant species have proven difficult to remove, and the cost of restoring the soil is steep (putting one foot of topsoil over formerly-mined land costs about $2,400 an acre), Appalachia area is actually fairly temperate, and could certainly support agriculture again. Not to mention a renewable power grid, but that may be a job for the next President.

Penny Rants for Sunday, October 15, 2017: why video conferencing doesn't work for prisoners, and other horrible truths.

It begins: President Trump ends subsidy payments to insurers that offer health insurance plans in the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Though the end result of Mr. Trump's action will be higher insurance premiums for poorer working families -- indeed, higher premiums have already been the result of the mere uncertainty over whether the Trump Administration would continue the subsidies -- I doubt any lawsuit against it will succeed, which testifies mainly to how badly the Affordable Care Act was written. Congress might be amenable to funding the subsidies, but at what cost? At the cost of further raiding Medicare and Medicaid? At the cost of destroying the pre-existing conditions ban, which nobody except health insurance corporations hates? And you know how I hate to pile on, but a single-payer health insurance system would help us avoid these problems -- particularly the appearance of "bailing out insurers," which, really, is a PR bank shot for Mr. Trump.

The Straight Dope explains to us why "video conferencing" between prisoners and their families is a poor substitute for in-person jail visits between prisoners and their families. Surprise, surprise, video phone calls don't help prisoners stay out of jail once they get out as well as, you know, family actually being there for them, plus the service is crappy and expensive, and some jails stop offering in-person visits the minute they get video conferencing, often at the request of the corporation providing the "service"). This state of affairs does not exactly conjure up "the genius of the free market" -- surely video conferencing, if it were so great, could beat in-person visits on the merits. The punchline: Ajit Pai's FCC has lately stopped efforts to cap prices for this service, because you could stuff a burner phone into a dead cat and throw it over a prison wall! (How I wish I were making that up).

Here's a hopeful note: not long after whining that its hands were so tied it just had to offer Equifax a service contract Equifax didn't even win on the merits, the IRS has suspended said contract with Equifax, at least temporarily. Maybe the IRS hopes we'll all forget about it in a few days, particularly since our drama-addicted President will provide us with many distractions in the meantime, but the fact that the IRS backed down so quickly from their main argument (apparently that whenever a corporation sues them they have to do that corporation's will, how full of American can-do is that?) suggests that such arguments may be as transparent to good Americans as they should be. Consider, however, why on Earth the IRS would be outsourcing customer account verification to a private corporation. You'd think if the IRS did it itself, it'd cost the taxpayer less, regardless of the mountains of BS various PR hacks have fed us regarding the absurd notion that "private corporations do everything better."

Finally, because you deserve some edifying reading, Maria Konnikova at The New Yorker discusses "How Norms Change," particularly vis a vis our racist adolescent President. I've long hoped to report in a few years that Donald Trump single-handedly obliterated the bully pulpit, but whether we like it or not, Donald Trump is an "authority figure," and "authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think" -- the Supreme Court's 2015 legalization of gay marriage may not actually have changed very many opinions, for example, but it suggested to folks that other folks' opinions were changing, and so it goes with the President who has everyone thinking there are more racists then we thought, even though he only got 46% of the popular vote. So what do we do about a President who (for example) makes anti-Semitism appear more legitimate? Other authority figures must speak out -- ideally close-at-hand authority figures, like your professor or your pastor. I like to say we're all moral leaders in America, and that means we're all authority figures as well, so go forth and do good works.

Seven Things to Avoid Doing Now that Donald Trump is President.

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: With Congress coming back tomorrow, I thought I'd repost the early January epic "Seven Things Not to Do When Donald Trump Takes Office" -- slightly rewritten and retitled, of course, to reflect the passage of time since the New Year, and also to conform with my video, "Seven Things to Avoid Doing Now that Donald Trump is President." I thought it'd be a good way to assess how we're doing, and to remind us of our real relationship to our Congressfolk (i.e., that we're the boss of them, not the other way around). So take a few minutes to re-read it -- and have a happy Labor Day holiday, because you know what? You earned it.)

A great many of us fear the next four or eight years of a Donald Trump Presidency, and for good reason. But this moment in our history also offers a unique clarity: no longer can we fantasize about Democrats protecting us from the worst that Republicans do, not merely because, well, they've never been very good at that, but also because they can't now. Only we can protect ourselves from the worst they'll do, and the sooner we understand that, and practice that, and live that, the better. Hence I offer seven things we should avoid doing when Mr. Trump ascends to the Presidency.

1) Do not bother with media horserace coverage. The media treat everything like it's a big sporting event, and they treat you like a spectator. They routinely choose sensationalism over substance, and they're a big reason we're stuck with Donald Trump as our President right now. If they obsess about something (like, say, Russian hacking), you can pretty much assume it's not worth your time -- or that they want to distract you from something more important (like, say, vote suppression). And when they report on fissures within the Republican party, you should assume any such "fissures," or reports about them, are feints, designed to lull you into a false sense of security so that you don't do your duty to your country by communicating your will to your representatives. Certainly do not bother with media speculation on how much of the coming horror is Mr. Trump's fault and how much is Mr. Pence's, or that of Republicans, or Democrats. If we're all hurting, it doesn't matter -- it only matters what we do about it.

2) Do not accept the narrow choices Our Glorious Elites offer in policy debates. Whenever they talk about government deficits, the only choice they offer is spending cuts; about Social Security, benefit cuts; and about Medicare, privatization. But we know better: we can (for example) cut deficits by closing corporate tax loopholes and bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income. And we can improve Social Security by lifting the cap on payroll taxes so income over $117,000 can be taxed into the system. And we can improve Medicare by letting it negotiate its own drug prices and by hiring more investigators to stamp out fraud. There are always good alternatives to the moronic ideas Our Glorious Elites peddle -- after all, isn't America the can-do country that always finds a way?

3) Do not support Democrats. Not just because they're weak, and not just because their weakness has enabled the coming horror, but because it's not your job, as a citizen, to "support" a politician -- it's the politician's job to support you. They're supposed to do our will regardless of what party they belong to, regardless of what ideology they profess to hold, so don't concentrate on getting more of them into office who might listen to us: just call them and email them and demonstrate in front of their offices and ask them pointed questions at public events until they have no choice but to listen to us. Now, Democrats will ask you to soft-pedal your demands -- they'll say your demands don't help them hold the center, or something. Ignore them when they do. Seven short years ago, they held the Presidency, a 70-seat majority in the House, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and still they lectured us about "the art of the possible," rather than widening the palette of the possible, as Republicans always do, regardless of their numbers in Congress. Remember: your will is your will, your duty to communicate it to your representatives is inviolate, and any Democrat who insinuates otherwise deserves defeat.

4) Do not "give Donald Trump a chance." Of course we all want him to do well, despite the multitudinous indications that he won't, but "giving him a chance" is, again, beside the point of our democracy -- our job is to express our will, and his job is to execute that will. And there is no "waiting and seeing" in the country we love; there is only doing, and people who tell you to "give him a chance" (or "accept the results," or "get over it") really have a different aim in mind: they want you to be silent, because they're afraid if you're not silent, you'll make good things happen in America. And when good things happen in America, Our Glorious Elites don't get richer. And anyway, Donald Trump is going to be a pretty terrible President. You wouldn't look at a mound of dung in the middle of the sidewalk and "give it a chance" to magically transform itself into meatloaf, would you?

5) When terrorists inflict a 9.11-sized (or larger!) attack upon us -- and we just know they will, though we don't know where or when -- do not "pull for Trump" the way we all pulled for Mr. Bush after 9.11. In fact, your solemn and immediate duty as an American citizen is to criticize Mr. Trump for failing to keep us safe. And when I say "immediate" I mean "the minute of." He deserves no less, having already strutted around like he knows everything (more than "the generals," even!) while ignoring most of his early intelligence briefings. All this, after 54% of the electorate voted for someone else for President! If his cock-swinging arrogance means anything, it means he gets no grading on a curve when it comes to protecting our country. And don't flinch when Our Glorious Elites then say "how dare you attack the President at a time like this!" Criticizing the President, at any time, is one of your inviolable rights as an American, so do not be silent when Our Glorious Elites bid us be silent -- be ten times as loud. For America is greater than any one President, and criticizing a President does not injure our country. And anyone who thinks it does is a weakling. Make sure you tell everybody that, and make sure you use the word "weakling." Our Glorious Elites love calling us weaklings, so they deserve some of their own.

6) Do not take slurs on your character lying down. When people say "you hate America" or "you're a traitor" or "you're with the terrorists" or "you want Donald Trump to fail," do not be courteous in response -- be fierce, and don't be afraid to shame people who attack you like that. Too many liberals think shaming is something only conservatives do, but it's not -- it's something civilized people do, to anyone who injures their community. And certainly don't worry whether you're "too angry" or not, because such slurs against your character deserve nothing but anger -- and besides, your enemies will say you're "too angry" even when your voice is perfectly even and low. But when they attack you, remember this: Our Glorious Elites are morally and intellectually bankrupt. Their program of austerity-for-the-people-but-gluttony-for-themselves has led to disaster all over the world, so they can't win arguments on the merits -- all they can do is lie about our patriotism, our strength, our intelligence, our commitment, and our character. Don't be afraid to give them hell when they do. Because hell is what they deserve.

7) Do not allow Our Glorious Elites to sow doubt inside you. You are right, and they are wrong. It's that simple! If you want our government to provide the good services we've paid for with our taxes and then leave us alone, you are right, and the people who want to cut your services and funnel your hard-earned taxpayer money to their cronies and spy on your every move are wrong. And if you have learned (either from emotionally manipulative people or from post-modern literary theorists) that there really is no such thing as good and evil, unlearn it now. Our Glorious Elites are evil, and they know we know that, so they're going to try to take everything from us -- our right to dissent, our right to privacy, our right to clean air and clean water, our right to an economy that works for all of us, our right to protection from financial predators, our right to not have the crap kicked out of us by police, and our right to a safe and secure old age. Taking away these things is evil, and the people who would take them away are evil. So the time for navel-gazing is past. The time for civilized action is now.

Most of us have now twice experienced eight-year Democrat Administrations that consistently failed us. A far-right Republican Administration, one that ran roughshod over our rights and listened only to its super-rich cronies, followed the first one, and by all indications, a worse far-right Republican Administration will follow the second. That could mean 32 years of America vacillating between weak Democrats and malicious Republicans, and we have got to break that wheel. But we're not going to break that wheel by helping out the damn Democrats. We will only break that wheel by saying no to Our Glorious Elites' attempts to make us spectators in our own democracy, in our own country, and by speaking out so powerfully that politicians from both parties will have no choice but to follow us. So when your friends and relatives and neighbors ask you "what do you think will happen under Donald Trump?" you should give one answer and one answer only: whatever we make happen. Because that is the stone-cold truth. Either we, the American people, stop Our Glorious Elites from destroying the country we love -- or no one does.

Action: three alerts about clean air and clean water.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Pennsylvania House Rep to reject HB 542, which has mutated from a bill about internet sales into a bill that would gut clean air and clean water protections in the Commonwealth, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. HB 542 would start privatizing the entire gas and oil permitting process -- in spite of the fact that you generally don't want unaccountable private corporations regulating matters pertaining to clean air and clean water -- and would also let the state legislature veto clean air and clean water regulations issued by the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP), for those times when the legislature can't get its act together enough to simply pass laws dirtying our air and water, I guess. Don't legislators work for people? And don't people breathe air and use water? And aren't people the real job creators anyway? Without us, no one could sell a damn thing. Not even fuel!

Meanwhile, the EPA, which has shown a stunning reluctance to do any work on the American people's behalf since President Trump took over and put pro-pollution politician Scott Pruitt in charge, skirted yet another responsibility to government's owners last month, by failing to respond to the state of Maryland's petition that the EPA require upwind power plants to actually run the already-installed pollution-controlling equipment during the summer season. Why summer? Because summer is premium smog season, that's why -- heat and sunlight are like steroids to all the pollutants power plants put in the air, which means more asthma and more heart disease for us poor schmucks who don't run fossil fuel-fired power plants. (Well, fossil fuel CEOs also breathe air, as far as I know, but they sure act like they don't.) Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to do its job and make power plants use their pollution-control equipment when people need it the most.

Finally, the Trump Administration still plans to roll back automobile fuel efficiency standards, because what is more popular than making people pay more for gas? That is, after all, the most obvious result of freezing fuel efficiency standards between 2021 and 2025 (instead of raising them every year, as our government is currently mandated to do). Of course, the worse result -- more pollution in our air -- may not be as obvious to us as the hit to our pocketbooks, but it's just as real. Why would the Trump Administration do such a thing? Besides, you know, we won fuck Obama? Because the Trump Administration believes big auto executives and big fossil fuel executives have more rights than the rest of us. But if you could "earn" more rights because you make more money, then they're not really rights, are they? The Sierra Club helps you tell the Trump Administration to keep fuel efficiency standards right were they are, so good Americans can breathe easier and save more at the pump.

Action: health care, pollution, and food labeling.

You've likely heard by now that a group of "centrist" Congressfolk have come up with ideas for health care reforms to write into a bill. Headline: their ideas are mostly bad. Of course I'd like Congress to continue funding Affordable Care Act subsidies, but not at the price of applying the employer mandate only to corporations with 500 or more employees, versus corporations with 50 or more employees. The right constantly tries to see exactly how big they can make a corporation and still call it a "small business," but does 499 employees sound like a Mom and Pop store to you? They also want to get rid of the medical device tax and want to mess around with the pre-existing conditions ban, in the name of "innovation." You can't call a pile of dung meatloaf and then congratulate yourself for "innovating" on the definition of meatloaf. And why should I care that these ideas have ever received "bipartisan support"? I don't care about "bipartisan" ideas; I only care about good ideas, and these ain't those. Tools are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to help you call your Reps and Senators.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania state Senators have used a bill originally dealing with internet sales, HB 542, as a vehicle to gut clean air and clean water regulation in the Commonwealth! HB 542, in its relatively uncontroversial form, passed the House with a staggering majority back in May, but the Senate amended it thereafter to include a slew of pro-pollution amendments and then passed it by a far, far narrower margin. Hence the bill going back to the House now opens the door to privatizing the whole permitting process for gas and oil drilling, while also creating a legislature-appointed board that can veto clean air and clean water regulations and automatically approve drilling permits after 45 days. The bill also creates a fracking tax like the one the majority of Pennsylvanians have wanted for years, but again, why should we accept a slew of bad initiatives just to get one good one? That, folks, is called hostage-taking, and we Americans don't do hostage situations. Of course, having been so radically altered, HB 542 has to go back to the state House for approval, so both Penn Environment and Food and Water Watch help you tell your Pennsylvania House Reps to reject HB 542 when it comes back around.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FDA to finalize its food labeling rules, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The FDA finalized food labeling rules for menus from restaurants, supermarkets, convenience stores, and movie theatres, and the rules require menus to give information about calories, sugar, fat, and salt. But delay, delay, delay is the Trump Administration way, so the FDA has mooted delaying the rules until 2018, presumably so it can collect more comments from corporate types about how oppressive it is for them to tell people how fatty their burgers are or how sugary their soft drinks are. I'm a compulsive food label reader myself, and I've seen the positive changes in my life once I decided that maybe a proper serving of pasta was better than just eating with my eyes. But I'm not the only one -- a lot of folks make better dietary choices, even when eating out, once they're supplied with good information. Of course, a venal fool like President Trump -- for whom sensation is everything and thinking about the future is for "losers" -- probably doesn't understand that very well, and reflexively anti-government Republicans will do little but enable him. But we don't have to enable him.

Action: Social Security, and corporate transparency.

Social Security Works helps you tell Congress to protect and expand Social Security, not cut and privatize it. Since everyone who tries to destroy Social Security says they're trying to save it, you have to be specific: if someone's out to cut Social Security benefits, or give it up to the vagaries of the stock market so banksters can collect unearned commissions, then they're not trying to save Social Security. Even if they say so! Good intentions don't go a long way with me ordinarily, but lying about one's good intentions goes nowhere with me at all. You know what else goes nowhere with me? Scare stories about TEH SOSHUL SECURITIEZ IZ RUNNINGZ OUTZ OFZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!!! I'm old enough to remember when very serious projections from very serious people said the trust fund would run out by last year. And even if it were in trouble, very simple solutions present themselves -- chief among them, lifting the payroll tax so that income above $121,000 gets taxed into the system -- if our politicians had but the will to, you know, do the people's will.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3089, the Corporate Transparency Act, would force folks who start corporations to disclose that corporation's "beneficial owners," i.e., anyone who has (or shares) voting power or investment power in a corporation. Disclosing such information would essentially end the practice of forming a "shell corporation," which generally exists to launder money, and no, right-wingers, the Corporate Transparency Act would not infringe someone's "freedom of speech"! Money is not speech, and using corporations to conceal one's Medicare fraud or tax evasion or drug trafficking or terrorism certainly doesn't qualify as "speech," either. You may be pleased to learn that, in this drama-soaked, hyper-partisan time, three of H.R. 3089's seven House sponsors are Republicans -- two from New York and one from California, and you might describe any of them as moderates in the right light. You might even describe one of the Democratic sponsors as a moderate in the right light! So Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight corruption by supporting the Corporate Transparency Act.

Around the table: in which Republicans blink, for now.

Senate puts off health care "reform" bill vote until after the July 4 holiday. But don't get complacent: keep calling your Senators and communicating your will. And what's with President Trump's spokeshack saying that Mr. Trump hopes "Republicans would live up to their promise" of passing an Obamacare repeal? Like Mr. Trump never made that promise himself? Way to throw your party under the bus, Dear Leader!

So how was Mitch McConnell putting lipstick on that pig of a bill until yesterday? Why, by completely ignoring that part of the CBO report that says 22 million good Americans will lose their health insurance under the Senate bill, of course! He also pretended tax cuts going mainly to the rich were "middle-class" tax cuts, and he also "confused" rising premium prices and the rising growth rate of premium prices, so he could "accidentally" say the bill will do something about the former when it actually does something about the latter. Punchline? Obamacare has already reduced the growth rate in premiums -- and that's nothing to write home about.

Just to remind you that states aren't the only organs keeping massive amounts of data on good citizens, Cora Currier at The Intercept describes World-Check, a database owned by Thomson Reuters and used by world banks, which lists some two million folks whose alleged ties to crime or terrorism may be quite exaggerated. You might be able to get World-Check to change its data on you, eventually -- if you even know you're on it. And of course Thomson Reuters says it's a "risk assessment" tool, which is just doublespeak for blacklist.

Jeff Bryant at the OurFuture blog explains why "Charter Schools Do Bad Stuff." Long story short: "Because They Can." Long story somewhat longer: private agencies, not public ones, generally "monitor" charter school activities and "hold them accountable." It's bad enough we throw away the taxpayer money on private schools that we should be spending on public schools, but then our local governments don't even hold them accountable, instead outsourcing the job to a private entity. But really, what do charter schools have to fear from the people?

Finally, in a heroic effort, Tasneem Nashrulla at Buzzfeed tabulates recent softball questions Fox News has asked President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Ivanka Trump in the last 24 days. The list is either disheartening or hilarious depending on your level of spiritual advancement, but I'm only going to highlight one example: one talking head asks Mr. Trump if "Republican Senators are doing enough to have your back" on the health care bill, rather than the more pertinent question of whether they, or their President, have got the people's back. You see, for Fox News and for Donald Trump, democracy ain't about you, it's about them. May God have mercy on their immortal souls.

Around the table: the Donald Trump chicken-egg question, resolved! And other lessons.

The incomparable Naomi Klein reminds us that Donald Trump "is not the crisis," but "the symptom of the crisis." Much happened before his election, after all -- we abandoned our commitment to helping each other and began worshiping the undeserving rich long ago, after all, and Mr. Trump is merely a culmination (not necessarily the culmination) of this decadent age. Among the many necessary reminders: Our Glorious Elites routinely associated the anti-"free" trade movement with terrorism after 9.11.

The incomparable David Dayen reminds us that Mr. "Trump Assigned Himself an Awful Lot of Homework That Isn't Getting Done." Most of Mr. Trump's very dramatic Executive Orders direct federal agencies to accomplish something; so far, his Orders have set 27 deadlines that have already passed, and his Administration's met less than half of them. These include a deadline for a progress report on vetting violent extremists worldwide. So add that to your list of reasons Donald Trump will have failed America when we have another 9.11-sized attack. (Oh, and if you're inclined to complain that all these missed deadlines are just bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, you have to explain why the President is even setting them in the first place.)

Dean Baker at TruthOut tells us why the Trump infrastructure plan is a "scam." I've been using the word "boutique" to describe his infrastructure plan (because it'll more likely spur development of "boutique" projects in wealthy areas of the country that don't need all that help), but "scam" is as good a word for it. One could imagine a hundred campaign ads painting Mr. Trump as the kind of scam artist you used to see all the time on late-night infomercials. Then one would remember that weakling Democrats would have to run them, and like the steam from your coffee cup, one's reverie would dissipate.

Adam Rogers at Wired explains why "If You Care About Cities, Apple's New Campus Sucks." Long story short: Apple "produced a building roughly the shape of a navel, and then gazed into it," a building that takes up 175 acres but looks inward rather than outward, failing to connect in any meaningful way to the community in which it sits, particularly in areas like housing and public transportation. Read the whole thing, though, because it's a hell of a deconstruction.

Finally, Montana U.S. House Rep. Greg Gianforte pleads guilty to assaulting a reporter, gets 40 hours community service. I should've known the moment he pled out that he wasn't going to jail, being a big politician with lots of money, but what can I say? I remain a creature of hope, and there is hope, I suppose, in the fact that he pled out so quickly. So if Mr. Gianforte challenges Jon Tester for Montana's Senate seat next year, will we get to anoint Jon Tester the Luckiest Man in American Politics?

Around the table: campaign finance reform threatened by Democrats, and other sad tales.

From Richard Eskow at the OurFuture blog we get perhaps the best one-paragraph explanation of why you shouldn't support President Trump's boutique infrastructure plan: "If you needed a new stove or refrigerator, you wouldn’t give the keys to your kitchen to Olive Garden, then pay them to let you eat. You’d be opening your wallet for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of logic Donald Trump and his party are using to give away our shared wealth." The rest of the article's great, too, describing how private corporations would own our roads, our bridges, and our water systems, and charge us obscenely to use them. But please, right-wingers, complain about how TEH LIBRULZ HATEZ TEH JOBZ!!!! as if there are literally no other alternatives to whatever Mr. Trump wants to do. (Like, you know, paying for infrastructure by taxing the rich a lot harder.)

Sen. Risch (R-IA) relies on a very literal interpretation of what Mr. Trump said to Mr. Comey to justify his belief that Mr. Trump did not obstruct justice. I'm far from unsympathetic to the notion that our justice system should err on the side of not putting people in jail, but the law instructs us that one might obstruct justice merely by trying to corruptly influence an investigation, rather than issue "orders." Of course, like many Republicans, Mr. Risch seems more interested in saying "nothing to see here" and moving on to gutting Obamacare and our tax code.

Former Bernie Sanders advisor says we ought to connect with voters more traditionally, i.e., by actually going door-to-door and talking to them. Ms. Bond says, quite rightly, that Democrats seemed to think voters were very happy with the Obama era, when in fact they weren't, and if they'd actually talked to as many voters as possible -- their obsession with "big data," she says, leads them to ask "what is the smallest number of people you can talk to and win?" -- they might have seen that. Of course, then they might have had to do something about it, which might have offended their big donors. And that's why we trust people, not politicians.

Ho hum, Connecticut Democratic politicians are trying to destroy their state's Clean Elections Program, which keeps big money out of campaigns. They'll tell you it's because of budget shortfalls, but Connecticut's budget shortfalls are way bigger than the CEP's entire budget, so you know that's a lie (plus, as one observer points out, public campaign financing saves the public money, in corporate welfare tax breaks that don't get passed). More likely they're trying to kill it because incumbents want to stay incumbent, even when many of them got to be incumbents because of the level playing field the CEP instituted. It's hard out there for a pimp.

Finally, President Trump has apparently told the British government that he won't be visiting there until he can be sure his visit won't be met by protests. All together now: waaaaaaah!

Action: corporate welfare, clean water, and freedom of speech.

Did you know this was "infrastructure week," according to President Trump? Sure, other things crowded it out of the news, but Mr. Trump did propose privatizing our nation's air traffic control apparatus -- by letting a "non-profit" run it, though non-profits can pay their executives outrageous salaries and then jack up prices and fees to balance the books as easily as any for-profit. The rest of his infrastructure program is pretty much what you already expected -- some $200 billion in corporate welfare handouts that will purportedly attract $800 billion in investment, so private corporations can own our roads, our bridges, our schools, and our water systems, putting their profits above our services -- not by streamlining operations in order to deliver better service at the same price, but by simply dictating prices and services to good Americans held hostage by private ownership. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Mr. Trump's boutique infrastructure plan.

Meanwhile, the authors of H.R. 953/S. 340 have called the bill the Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act and the Sensible Environmental Protection Act, respectively, and you know what that means: that "regulatory burdens" mean only those "suffered" by big campaign donors, and "sensible" means "whatever pleases big polluters." Read the bills at congress.gov and you may not be that appalled by them, as they would allow a corporation to discharge "a pesticide authorized for sale, distribution, or use under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act" into our public waters without getting a permit. But you might also see problems with that: saying something is safe to kill bugs is not precisely the same as saying it's safe to discharge in large quantities into our rivers, lakes, and streams, and getting rid of permitting requirements for polluters would reduce our ability to know what pollutants are in the water we drink, clean with, and bathe with. Is filthy water a good price to pay for a little less bureaucracy? H.R. 953 has already passed the House, hence CREDO helps you tell your Senators to protect our clean water by opposing H.R. 953/S. 340.

Finally, President Trump still has a jones to dismantle the Johnson Amendment, that slice of our tax code that prevents all 501(c)(3) non-profits, including churches, from endorsing (or opposing) candidates for office. Mr. Trump and his kind say that the Johnson Amendment violates a church's First Amendment rights, but it doesn't -- it merely strips politicking preachers of their non-profit status, which is hardly the same as being put in jail for your speech. And since churches don't have the same reporting requirements as other non-profits, you would not have difficulty imagining big campaign donors using churches as massive money-laundering operations allowing them to evade campaign finance disclosure laws. And frankly, churches need as much protection from the Johnson Amendment as we do! The church-state wall works both ways -- it keeps the church from imposing its will on good Americans, but it also protects churches from corruption by politicians, and thus keeps them free to serve communities. People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to repeal the Johnson Amendment.

Around the table: when a pro-hearing aid bill becomes an anti-gun bill, and other absurdities.

Surprise, surprise, President Trump's boutique infrastructure plan would include tolls on existing interstate highway lanes and privatizing rest stops on those highways. One more time: the private sector doesn't do things better; it just redistributes income from workers to executives "better." And I bet Congress and the President aren't really "headed for a fight" about this matter -- one Republican Rep says "I don't like paying for a road twice," which, like, hallelujah, but then adds "(e)verything's on the table." Profile in courage!

Dean Baker calls a financial transaction tax (a.k.a. the "Robin Hood tax" or the "Wall Street sales tax") "The Best Solution to Income Inequality." Why? Because the cost will borne entirely by Wall Street, rather than Main Street. Mr. Baker also reminds us that a) folks don't care about the number of trades they make so much as the amount of money they make, and b) banksters can't argue that "more trades makes the market more efficient," as "(s)omeone would be hard pressed to argue that capital was better allocated in the housing bubble years than fifteen or twenty years earlier when volume might have been less than half of its current level."

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted" file: Oklahoma's state budgeting problems are so awful now that a lot of kids are only going to school four days a week. The good news? Not every kid in Oklahoma likes it -- some of them, for example, don't like all the rushing around you do when you try to cram five days of work into four. Still, I worry that too many of them will remember this as some kind of Golden Age, even after they're grownups and the ill effects of their education take their toll -- how many of them will say "a four-day school week never hurt me" as they suffer through their umpteenth consecutive year without work?

Hoo boy: former Fox News punditoid recalls how that network (among other things!) made the news "like pro wrestling" and "performance art," and how they "fixed" panel debates so that right-wingers always won. Fox News punditoids getting their scripted "last word" 24 hours beforehand, a Fox News "star" telling his guests what to say -- these are, of course, the hallmarks of folks who can't win arguments on the merits. And remember, kids: if we could buy cable channels a la carte, we wouldn't have to put up with this garbage.

Finally, from the "When Do They Feel Shame?" file, gun rights groups contort bill allowing over-the-counter hearing aids into an anti-gun bill, quite likely because Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is one of its sponsors. Go ahead and try to follow their reasoning, if you dare. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is also one of its sponsors, and has rebutted these groups' talking points, but apparently to no avail. What a shame that some gun rights groups make all gun rights supporters look bad.

Around the table: meet the Senate health care "reform" effort, same as the House health care "reform effort."

If this Bloomberg report on Senate Republicans health care "reform" efforts is true, then we're in for a world of hurt. Sen. Portman (R-OH) has expressed skepticism about a Medicaid rollback -- his state, unlike other Republican-run states, has accepted the Obamacare Medicaid expansion with vigor -- but now he's proposing a longer phase-out, which is still a phase-out. Also, their "reinsurance" idea is nothing but corporate welfare -- corporate welfare they "hope" will keep premiums down, wink-wink. And not that I really care, but how is "auto-enrollment" significantly different from the Obamacare mandate?

Greg Gianforte wins Montana U.S. House special election -- even after allegedly bodyslamming a Guardian reporter who asked him about the House's health care bill. I had high hopes for Rob Quist, and maybe I still should -- where Mr. Trump won by 20 points and Mr. Zinke won the House race by 16, Mr. Gianforte only won by 7, and if Mr. Gianforte winds up in jail soon (he may have money, but that's all he's got), I presume they'll have to do this again. The road back to relevance is going to be harder for Democrats in solidly Trumpian areas, even when Berniecrats run. Still, no way another "problem-solving" "bipartisan" milquetoast comes within 7 points of Mr. Gianforte.

Another day, another reminder that the ZOMG TEH ROBOTZ ARE TAKINGZ OURZ JOBZ!!!!! argument is pure hysteria. Folks who fall prey to hostage crises ("don't raise the minimum wage or the robots will take all the jobs!") would do well to remind themselves that though robots do replace people in particular circumstances, "particular circumstances" still doesn't equal "always." You might be able to talk me into replacing CEOs with robots, though. I mean, they'd be no less inhuman than the ones we've got!

Despite Mr. Trump's incessant posturing about guns, his Justice Department is fighting claims by former nonviolent offenders to have their gun rights restored. Wondering whether fidelity to 2nd Amendment rights would win out over Mr. Trump's bottomless hatred/exploitation of petty criminals? Well, wonder no more. And no use arguing they're just continuing the "tradition to defend federal laws in court" -- how many voting rights violation cases has Mr. Trump's Justice Department dropped like a rock?

Jeremy Mohler and Donald Cohen at The American Prospect put the central problem of privatization quite well: "(f)or decades, the corporate world has increasingly become the exemplar of good governance, and the market has come to stand for economic efficiency," but "(d)espite claims of greater efficiency, the reality is usually higher fees and costs, reduced services, lower wages, and loss of public control." And big money for corporate executives -- which is why our 46% President is America's biggest cheerleader for privatization.

Finally, Neal Gabler at Moyers and Company calls Roger Ailes "The Man Who Destroyed Objectivity." Others may argue that Jacques Derrida deserves that title, but Mr. Derrida didn't create a cancer on society like the Fox News Channel. Critical point: Mr. Ailes, who "got his start in entertainment," "turned television news into tabloid news," so that we now have a world that not only enables right-wingers to spew obnoxious filth without suffering the consequences, but we also have a world where telling the truth isn't sexy anymore because it doesn't look like TMZ.

Around the table: health care, cybersecurity, cable news, celebrity candidates, and the absence of protestors.

Former health insurance corporation official says insurers have been defrauding Medicare Advantage program for years. Our taxes fund Medicare Advantage, as you may know, but private health insurance corporations deliver the service; nobody could have predicted that privatization of a part of Medicare could possibly lead to the same kind of overcharging you routinely see with Medicare! The only thing a private corporation does "better" than our government? Redistribute income from regular folks to executives.

President Trump finally delivers on a promise to revamp our cybersecurity efforts -- and his Executive Order doing so basically repeats President Obama's efforts. But they're different, you see, because now Mr. Trump can put his name on them, and thus make them YUGE and BYOOTIFUL! You'll be so cybersecure, you'll get tired of it! You'll beg President Trump for another ransomware attack, you'll be so bored with all the security! The new order is apparently better than the order his Administration tried to write in February, but let's not grade Mr. Trump on a curve.

The Fox News (sic) Channel is apparently starting to slip in the cable news ratings, thanks in part to its pronounced apathy toward all the latest Trump scandals. But I'm not sure this would be so if a certain 8 pm ratings giant were still at Fox, and I'm not going to celebrate just because other bad cable news networks are starting to win by following the sensationalism (even if it just so happens to be running in the other direction for once). And Fox has largely replaced its Trump non-coverage with even worse junk news. So, yeah, this is still fecal all the way down.

Ryan Teague Beckwith at Time tells us how "The Rock's Presidential 'Campaign' Shows We've Learned Nothing." Mr. Beckwith is of course concerned that the "liberal" media keeps giving celebrities soft coverage that tells us nothing about what they'd be like in an actual leadership role, but I read Mr. Johnson's comments (particularly about "disagreement") and I see another way for Our Glorious Elites to foist a corporate center-right Democrat upon us. Yes, the Rock is better-spoken and more sympathetic than Mr. Trump, but let's not let that be the only bar he ever has to clear.

Finally, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross praises the utter lack of protests greeting Mr. Trump in Saudi Arabia, a country that arrests, beats, and kills protestors. I was tempted to slam him for his utter cluelessness about Saudi Arabia's bad habits, too, or about the fact that his Administration demands protest every second of every hour of every day, but the worst thing about his remarks is that he seems to think the absence of people with "a bad placard" in the street is a good thing, an opinion I'm sure he held, and voiced, during all those Tea Party protests in 2009. If he likes police states so much, maybe he should stay in Saudi Arabia.

Action: anti-gay bills, media consolidation, and private prisons.

Jesus Mary and Joseph when will this madness stop? Now Texas's state legislature is contemplating a slew of anti-gay bills, including one that would curb gays' right to adopt children, another taking aim at their right to get married, plus, of course, another "bathroom bill." And along with these bills (and many others, for as one activist ruefully notes, "Texas just does it bigger") comes the litany of excuses: we're protecting people's right to exercise their religious beliefs boo-hoo, we're trying to make bathrooms safe oh come on. No one has a right to use their "sincere religious beliefs" to abridge the rights of others, and if you're familiar with actual statistics on child molestation, you know that you'd be better off banning heterosexual male adults from public bathrooms than transgendered folks. Of course, we wouldn't do that, either, but hey, just saying. You may want to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom, if you're on a smartphone) to find and call Texas legislators and give them the spanking they deserve over this matter.

Meanwhile, we were just talking last week about the Sinclair Broadcast Group digging their tentacles even deeper into America's local TV stations, and now Free Press helps you tell the FCC to stop the proposed Sinclair-Tribune merger. The FCC, under its intrepid new chair, Ajit Pai, has lately loosened rules governing how many UHF TV stations a single corporation can own -- perhaps thinking that nobody watches UHF anymore, so who cares? -- except that, well, people do watch UHF TV stations, particularly good folks underserved by cable corporations, and if this deal goes through, Sinclair will be able to reach seven out of every 10 Americans. The problem isn't so much that Sinclair is an unregenerate right-wing network, or even that they might have colluded with the Trump campaign to get quid pro quo goodies later -- the problem is that they push cookie-cutter news content on local TV stations, thus enabling those stations to do less of the local news and analysis that is their very reason for existence. And, really, a monopoly is a monopoly, regardless of what "the rules allow." I mean, we're not blind here in America.

Finally, just as President Obama was beginning (and I do mean beginning!) to get our federal government out of the corporate-welfare-for-private-prisons business, along comes new President Trump to pull us right back in. And, you know, if you remember Mr. Trump saying, at the very first Republican debate, that he just puts out the money and the politicians do whatever he wants, you have every right to suspect that somebody, somewhere, paid for this obviously-foolish policy move, and maybe even broke the law doing so. Hence Rootstrikers helps you tell the Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to investigate possibly illegal contributions coming from the GEO Group. The GEO Group just got a $100 million-plus contract to operate a Texas detention center for immigrants, and just so happens to have pumped six figures into a Trump-aligned SuperPAC and six figures into the Trump inaugural ceremony beforehand. And GEO, like other private prison corporations, generally takes public money to run prisons badly. You have to wonder why we, as taxpayers, would put up with that.

Action: school vouchers nay, cheaper medicines yea, and birth control coverage yea.

H.R. 610 has been under consideration by the House Education and Workforce Committee since late January, and I hope it stays there indefinitely, since it's a truly vile piece of dung that would institute a national voucher program in public schools, condition receipt of federal money upon institution of these programs, and (because hey, we've still got some teeth left!) repeals USDA nutrition standards for public schoolkids. Naturally, President Trump and his Barely Education Secretary, Ms. DeVos, are also voucher proponents. But vouchers don't work -- they don't guarantee admission to private schools, they don't guarantee students can even afford private schools, and oversight of these private schools is typically so lax you might think school vouchers is literally a racket, an impression reinforced when you remember that the far right largely manufactured the whole "public schools are failing" narrative to begin with. I think it's perfectly OK to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject any attempt to funnel even more taxpayer money toward private schools.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1245/S. 469, the Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Importation Act, would, as the title suggests, allow Americans to get cheaper prescription drugs from abroad, first from Canada, and then from other nations if they meet certain standards. You get basically the same drugs in Canada you get here, but they're cheaper up there, because Canada negotiates drug prices on behalf of its citizens, unlike Medicare, which our law forbids from doing so; recall that Brian Schweitzer damn near pulled off an upset in the 2000 Montana Senate race by busing seniors north of the border to get medicine. You may notice that Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) has gotten on board with this bill, after infamously shooting down the last attempt at importing prescription drugs from Canada by claiming that they don't meet American drug safety standards (though, as I said, they're basically the same damn drugs!). And in case you were wondering, the bill would also impose stiff penalties for those who'd use online pharmacies to cheat consumers. So when you call your Reps and Senators to urge them to oppose school vouchers (see above paragraph), urge them to support the Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Act, too.

Finally, new HHS Secretary Tom Price is (among so many other things!) vehemently opposed to the no-cost birth control coverage mandated by the Affordable Care Act, so the National Women's Law Center helps you tell Secretary Price to preserve the birth control coverage mandate so it can benefit women of all economic means. That birth control has become such a political football is one of the more disgusting developments of the last five years, and I blame all of it on right-wing swordfighting, where one right-winger "I oppose abortion" and another right-winger tries to one-up him by saying "Yeah, well, suck on this -- I oppose birth control!" Why should such hysterics should get all the say about everything? Of course, hysterics often try to sound rational -- Mr. Price, for example, claims that birth control is already affordable for everyone, which is only true in the sense that most bills are affordable when you take them one by one, but not when you take them in toto, which is, after all, how people actually budget.