Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning corruption, pollution, and privatization.

By now you've likely heard that Congress gave our Department of Defense $1 billion to make personal protective equipment (or PPE) to help battle COVID-19 -- and Defense instead spent most of it plugging perceived holes in its budget wholly unrelated to COVID-19. They've apparently spent (among other expenditures) $22 million on propellers from Rolls-Royce and over $13 million making drones, a press release trumpeting the saving of "14 jobs." That's almost a million dollars a job! Could it be that our Administration is trying to prove that government can't do anything right? I kid, of course -- they're absolutely trying to "prove" that, while simultaneously asserting that only this President can "fix" it! But corruption is still corruption, hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our Pentagon's use or misuse of these funds. And remember: every dollar misspent means fewer masks and gowns for hospital workers working directly with COVID-19 patients.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to roll back protections against toxic wastewater from coal plants, even though they pump out all kinds of toxins -- including mercury, lead, and arsenic, all linked to cancer, heart disease, diabetes and developmental problems in kids. Clean Air Act regulations restricted emissions from coal smokestacks, so coal corporations started putting the pollution into wastewater and dumped it into our rivers and streams! Then the Obama Administration issued regulations addressing coal wastewater, but now this Administration wants to roll them back. They're probably ready to tell us that this whole story just proves that ALL TEH REGULASHUNZ AREZ TEH USELESSEZ!!!!! -- that "corporations will just find another way to pollute," or something. But what kind of message does that send to our children? "Don't do the right thing, ever, because wrongdoers will find a way to confound you?" U.S. PIRG helps you tell our EPA to reject its own plan to roll back toxic wastewater emissions from coal plants.

Finally, corporations are trying to privatize Pennsylvania's public water systems, but HB 2746 and HB 2597 would require that any proposed sale of our public water to private corporations go before the voters first. And what would private corporations have to fear? If they really can run it better than our government, they shouldn't have any trouble proving it to the voters! Of course they can't, since we all know water privatization means higher prices, worse service, and lost jobs, and that's only in the short run -- in the long run, water privatization means that the people who drink the water lose all control over its maintenance. Our government, after all, is accountable to us, and that remains true even after they fail us; private corporations are only accountable to their shareholders, and executives try their damnedest to avoid even that responsibility. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your PA state legislators to ensure that we get to vote on whether we sell our water systems.

I'll be taking care of a health issue over the next few days, so posting may be light. Before that happens, I feel compelled to mention that I've received numerous action alerts exhorting us to prevent Republicans from voting on a new Supreme Court justice before Inauguration Day 2021, but I haven't passed any of them along, because I wanted the Senate to vote on Merrick Garland in 2016 and I am not a powermad hypocrite like Mitch McConnell. I know some folks will say I speak from a position of privilege, that I am not one of the folks who stand to lose the most from replacing the last Justice Ginsberg with a reactionary (i.e., folks of color and gay and transgender folks), and thus I have the "luxury" of following the rules. But I say that following the rules isn't actually a luxury even if so many Americans (most of them rich!) act like it is, and I also say that if we say one thing in 2016 because it suits us and then say the opposite in 2020 because it suits us then we become the folks we most hate. And I also say that putting a sympathetic Supreme Court Justice on the court is not the only way to fight for justice; yes, a 6-3 right-wing majority on the Court will suck, but we have dealt with worse as a nation and succeeded. In any case, if I find our President's eventual nominee wanting, I will advocate for our Senators to reject her, and if we do that, and we make our Senators afraid for their jobs, they will comply. It's the only thing that really works in such instances; everything else is a shortcut.

Around the table: in which we shake our damn heads at yet more Presidential drama.

Presidential votaries hinder early voting in Fairfax, VA. Whether or not plaintiffs will be able to hang these folks on Virginia state law (which prohibits political advocacy within 40 feet of a polling place), that doesn't change the fact that confident people don't have to chant and wave flags in front of a polling place. Also, these I'm-not-touching-you games don't do well at persuading others to vote for their candidate. And though we know relentless negative TV advertising depresses turnout, making someone throw up their hands and go home once they've already trekked out to the polling place may be another thing entirely.

Federal agents abduct two Native American protestors at a holy site in the path of our Administration's vanity border wall construction, and hold them without access to a lawyer for almost 24 hours; their detainment (at a private prison over two hours away) includes at least two strip-searches and being "chained at the feet and waists." You know, in case you thought this was only happening to police brutality protestors. Anyone else think the private prison's claim that they couldn't tell the two activists were women is utter horsedoodle -- or worse, was a show they put on for the Administration and/or its votaries?

Shane Burley at TruthOut finds catches T-shirts disappearing from retail site Teespring while far-right groups actually committing violence on the ground still selling their wares. Freedom: it's best when it's completely conditional! And Teespring spokeshacks flat-out lied about it, too, first alleging "copyright violations," then when confronted with evidence to the contrary, admitted it was all about the word "antifa." Using a corporate website to hawk your wares is always fraught with danger, particularly when the corporate types live in fear of offending right-wingers, but don't give a damn about those of us who are actually offended by the noise of Nazi wannabes. So go ahead and boycott their sorry asses. It's not like the internet is a tiny place.

Upon hearing that our President has led his votaries to believe he's actually received a Nobel Peace Prize when he's only been nominated, I feel compelled to note, again, that none of his votaries will verify his assertion; they'll just take it at face value because they want it to be true. And maybe if he gets re-elected, and doesn't actually win it (which sure seems likely!), his votaries will whine about how they "took" it from him! (Also, too, over 200 individuals and 100 groups were nominated this year, so I can't even say it's "an honor to be nominated," as they say about the Oscars.)

While it may not be precisely true that 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Amy Coney Barrett -- reportedly at or near the top of our President's short list to replace the late Justice Ginsberg on our Supreme Court -- belongs to an organization that inspired Margaret Atwood's famous novel The Handmaid's Tale (now a Hulu TV series starting Elizabeth Moss), one Facebook meme of Ms. Barrett in a handmaid's headdress might be weapons-grade PR against her. Our President loves to create drama, of course, so he might pick Ms. Barrett precisely because of the uproar it'd create, where a choice like 11th Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa would more likely fly under the radar.

Finally, speaking of drama, our Justice Department designates three U.S. cities -- New York, Seattle, and Portland (OR) -- as "anarchist jurisdictions," meaning our Administration could deprive them of federal funding. Or try to, anyway -- the only leg our President has to stand on here is a memo he wrote, which, last I looked, isn't law, no matter what he thinks. More likely he just likes using the word "anarchist" as often as he can, to make people think ZOMG TEH CITIEZ AREZ TEH LAWLESSEZ!!!!! Again, our President never talks about "law and order" as it would relate to polluters and banksters.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Social Security, surprise medical bills, and private prisons.

Congress is off the rest of the month, but we should still call them and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and reject the suite of Republican-proposed bills known as the HEALS Act. This remains very simple: the HEROES Act extends enhanced unemployment benefits, funds our Post Office, and funds states and localities -- while the HEALS Act gives corporations undeserved immunity from lawsuits filed by the people they hurt and business honchos get to deduct 100% of their meals instead of 50%. Republicans must be very confident they're going to win elections this year for them to go all-in on something as moronic as the HEALS Act. Of course, our "liberal" media is helping them out, by casting Congress's failure to pass another COVID-19 relief bill as either a bipartisan or a Democratic failure. Stone cold truth is that it's a Republican failure -- the Democrats, for once, passed the HEROES Act almost three months ago, and that bill would do what the people want it and need it to do, but Senate Republicans did nothing. And we don't just "get along" with people who do nothing.

And while you have your Congressfolk on the phone, tell them to fight to the death our President's recent Executive Order deferring payroll tax contributions until after the election, because those contributions fund Social Security. Our President has said, out loud, that he'd prefer to "terminate" these contributions and fund Social Security and Medicare from general budgeting, which of course will lead eventually to at least one body of Congress throwing up its hands and saying we just can't afford it anymore! But we should not tolerate the government of the greatest nation on Earth saying we can't "afford" a dignified retirement for all our citizens. No equivocation is possible here -- a large number of politicians and not just Republicans are thrilled that our President is willing to take the PR hit for achieving one of Our Glorious Elites' long-standing goals, the destruction of Social Security. They will not stand up for Social Security unless we stand up for Social Security -- and we must stand up in such numbers that our will cannot be mistaken.

Meanwhile, previous COVID-19 legislation ensured that COVID-19 tests would be free to anyone who needed one -- or so we thought! As we speak, good Americans still get slammed with surprise medical bills ranging from $150 on the low end to $3,000 on the high end. Turns out those bills didn't address the matter of health care facilities partnering with "out of network" facilities to get the tests done, but hey, last I looked, "free" meant "free," not "free unless your local ER is out-of-network," or "free unless this particular ER doctor is out-of-network even though all the others are in-network," or "free unless we're dumb enough to use an out-of-network lab," or "free unless we gouge you by using an out-of-network lab." What do I always say? Incompetence is malice! The stupid-or-evil debate doesn't matter if the end result is evil! Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to end surprise medical billing during this pandemic. Surprise medical bills always make the news, so you'd think ending them would be a bipartisan cause. Alas, only if we make it so.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell TD Bank to divest from notorious private prison corporation GEO Group. TD invested heavily in GEO during the pandemic's early days, and I wouldn't blame you for thinking that's a bit of a head-scratcher there. Did TD Bank think our President's anti-immigrant cruelty was the wave of the future and it was time to get on board? Did they think there was going to be a motherlode in imprisoning folks during a pandemic? Did they fantasize that private prisons would control the pandemic better than everyone else, instead of the obvious truth that they'd do worse than everyone else, since private prisons operate facilities where you can't even pee in private? We may never know! What we do know is that private prisons, despite their relative favor with this President, put immigrant detainees in concentration camps and even if they didn't, they'd still generally do a crap job of spending taxpayer money. What we also know is that the Big Stick of Bad PR works on big corporations. If we wield it, that is.

Action: concerning public schools, pandemic data, and COVID-19 vaccines.

MoveOn helps you tell Congress to prevent our Administration from withholding federal funding from schools that do not fully reopen this fall. You contemplate our President suggesting he might do exactly that last month, and you wonder why he's so anxious to get kids packed like sardines into buildings where they can't possibly socially-distance, and you might well conclude that he's trying to get all those pesky unionized public school teachers killed. I wouldn't put it past him! But if you think that's a bridge too far for him, consider that he might decide to give all that money unused on public schools to private schools, because it's an "emergency." This is why I say incompetence is malice -- people like our President, just like George W. Bush before him, go out of their way to screw up as much as they can so they can prove "government doesn't work," and then they funnel all our taxpayer money to their cronies. But this is America, and we don't have to put up with any of that.

Meanwhile, you may recall that our Administration, faced with rising COVID-19 infections, decided to order health care providers to send all COVID-19-related data to the Department of Health and Human Services rather than the Centers for Disease Control. Presumably our President has decided he can "trust" HHS more than CDC, since the CDC is, by all appearances, actually trying to help Americans during a pandemic, while our President is only trying to help himself get re-elected. Fittingly enough, the numbers we are getting (I use Worldometers to get the latest) are still pretty damning for our President, but you would not be alone in suspecting that HHS might be concealing some information that's even worse than what we're getting. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would make sure all COVID-19 data gets shared with the CDC as well as HHS. I guess if HHS wants to have a pissing match with CDC, I can't really stop them. But I would warn them that we good Americans don't have the same tolerance for drama that we used to. In fact, I would say most of us are profoundly tired of it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk that any COVID-19 vaccine must be available to everyone regardless of their "ability to pay," then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Rather than asking if individual Americans can "afford" the vaccine, we should ask if we, as a civilization, can afford to let hundreds of thousands of good Americans die merely because they're not banksters! I mean "afford" in the metaphorical sense, of course -- I know some cynic out there stands ready to retort that TEH DEADZ DON'TZ NEEDZ ANY MOREZ OF TEH HEALTHZ CAREZ HA HA HA HA SNORT!!!!!! But you measure the worth of a civilization by how it treats its most needy members -- a civilization that routinely says TO HELLZ WITHZ YOUZ HA HA HA FREE MARKETZ!!!!! may not deserve to endure. And there is also the practical matter of all these folks who would be unvaccinated-because-they're-poor, and thus would be able to keep the various COVID-19 strains going. For Americans of a certain stripe, of course, that's a feature, not a bug. But this is America, and they don't get all the say around here!

Action: concerning public water, paid family leave, and plastic pollution.

H.R. 2, the Invest in America Act, has its strengths, but it also has one glaring, intolerable weakness: it would make privatization of water systems a lot easier. Some folks no doubt believe that private corporations would do a better job than our government would, but the only thing private corporations do better is charge you more for your water. You may well respond well, the lead pollution in Flint's water supply was caused by a government, but a right-wing government caused that -- with an unelected "Emergency Manager," no less! -- and that right-wing government no doubt hoped that the good citizens of Flint (and elsewhere!) would simply throw up their hands and give over their water to private corporations. But the only solution to bad government is good government, not unaccountable and unelected private corporations who care only about their money. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to take our public water away from us and give it to corporate cronies.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislator to support HB 1739/SB 580, the Family Care Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Family Care Act would create a paid family/medical leave program in the Commonwealth, one that would pay less than the average wage in Pennsylvania in all cases (the formula in Sec. 305 [a] is a bit complex), but that's better than what we've got, and would allow good Pennsylvanians to take care of themselves or their loved ones and not get kicked out of their house or apartment or have their water or electricity shut off. Really, that's what "insurance" is all about, isn't it? The payroll tax the bill would levy is a little over one half of one percent (and is not "58 percent," "liberal" media! They make "mistakes" like that because they're malicious!), which, for someone making $50,000 annually, would amount to less than $25 monthly. And that's not a whole lot to ask to get all Pennsylvanians the paid family leave we deserve.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to put the brakes on plastic pollution by passing H.R. 5845/S. 3263, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. As Penn Environment's latest email missive puts it, "(n)othing we use for a few minutes should be allowed to pollute our oceans and rivers and threaten wildlife for centuries." And the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act would ban a lot of single-use plastics like polystyrene, and enact a moratorium on new plastic-manufacturing facilities. If the words "job-killing" come to mind when you hear these things, remember that we can create many different kinds of jobs in America, and we need not only create jobs in industries that dump the equivalent of a garbage truck full of trash into our oceans once per minute. At the risk of beating a dead horse, we could choose to create renewable energy jobs, jobs that would reduce trash and pollution, but we don't do that, because (as Ralph Nader used to say) nobody can own the sun. Maybe we could stop putting money at the center of every single thing we do?

Action: concerning unemployment, energy policy, public water, and factory farms.

One of the few good things to come out of the CARES Act was an expansion of unemployment benefits; now guess what our government wants to get rid of ASAP? The benefits expire at the end of July, but given the jones so many of our elected leaders have to "reopen" the economy, we could be back in the middle of an unflattened curve by then. And some of them say it's OK if some folks die if we "reopen" the economy faster! Apparently they do not know the definition of "mammon-worship" anymore. But over 30 million folks are out of work, the official U3 unemployment rate is over 14% (and the real U6 unemployment rate, which also counts the discouraged and underemployed, is almost 23%), and not that many Americans will be rushing into Best Buy even if they all open up tomorrow, so I think we should be prudent and prepare for the likelihood that workers will be unemployed past July. Also, too, when the answer to every question is GOVERNMENT SHOULDZ DO TEH NOTHINGZ!!!!, it's well past time to look at the man in the mirror. The Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the unemployment insurance boost past its original expiration date.

Meanwhile, too many politicians want future pandemic relief legislation to include corporate welfare handouts for big oil and gas corporations, and our Administration has rolled back oil and gas royalty rates on public lands even though that's our damn money! But along comes H.R. 6707/S. 3611, the Resources for Workforce Investments, Not Drilling (or ReWIND) Act, which would keep big fossil fuel corporations from taking funds meant for working families and small businesses, roll back our President's drilling royalty cuts, block new gas and oil leases, and stop banksters from taking over any oil or gas corporations in trouble. The bill would also prevent our Administration from overstocking oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, since seizing resources and directing them to where they're not needed seems to be a pattern with this President. And if right-wingers respond by whining about the bill's "Democrat priorities," they run the risk of suggesting that preventing corruption and mismanagement is only a "Democrat priority." So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner energy policy by passing the ReWIND Act.

In other news, Nestlé plans to siphon off yet another source of public water at pennies a gallon, in order to make absurdly more expensive and not significantly more convenient bottled water -- this time at Ginnie Springs in northwestern Florida, and this though Ginnie Springs is dangerously low, and largely from overpumping. As it happens, the Suwannee River Water Management District has already heeded the thousands of public comments it received on this matter, and has thus denied Nestlé any new permits -- but Nestlé, of course, is taking the matter to court, because, as we know, corporations never ever file frivolous lawsuits! Only injured people ever do that, with the help of mustache-twirling trial lawyers! That's what right-wingers say, anyway. But big corporations don't need to take public water in order to make bottled water; rather, our state, local, and federal governments need to manage water effectively on our behalf and with the tax dollars we pay them. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell Nestlé to abandon its plans to drain Ginnie Springs merely for mammon.

Finally, H.R. 6718/S. 3221, the Farm System Reform Act, would not only ban new factory farms and the expansion of current ones, but would phase out current factory farms over the next 20 years. Factory farms aren't a more efficient way of delivering meat to consumers than small family farms: they're just a more efficient way of clogging up public waters with animal manure, and a more efficient way of redistributing income upward to executives. And they're also a more efficient way of making antibiotics useless, since some seven out of every 10 antibiotics in America still go to nominally healthy feed animals, so they produce more meat and so they better endure the squalid conditions of their imprisonment. To those who would still cite "high food prices" as a reason not to end this sordid state of affairs, we need but ask: how did Americans ever get enough to eat before factory farms came along? We did it through saner farming policy, of course, and not "big ag corporations know best" policy. So Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support better agricultural policy by passing the Farm System Reform Act.

Action: concerning internet freedom, worker safety, and conservation in Pennsylvania.

Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate the net neutrality rules it repealed back in 2017. Why now? Because with more Americans working from home and more schoolkids taking classes at home, we are seeing, in real time, why we need our FCC to force internet service providers to treat all of its network traffic with equal importance. FCC Chair Ajit Pai says he's watching to make sure big telecom corporations don't just kick people off, but thanks to his own ideological predilections, he has absolutely no power to make big telecoms treat us all well! He can only beg! And begging big corporations to do the right thing sure is a great look for our government, which exists, after all, to serve us -- better to make big corporations do the right thing, and then punish them if they don't! Because if history has taught us anything, it's taught us that big corporations won't do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do -- but we get much better results if we make them do the right thing.

Meanwhile, you may not know that our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) uses private contractors to staff its call centers! And you may not know that one of them -- a corporation called Maximus, operating a CDC call center in Hattiesburg, MS -- trained 70 newly-hired employees without following physical distancing rules, and surprise, surprise! At least one got infected. And then Maximus didn't provide protecting equipment to its employees, or allow enough of them to work from home though "call center operator" seems like an obvious work-from-home job! I'd call all that irony, except for the nagging sense that irony should be subtler than that. Hence Good Jobs Nation helps you tell CDC Director Robert Redfield to ensure that all workers who answer calls for the CDC be able to keep themselves safe during this pandemic. Not for nothing, but Mr. Redfield could do that a whole lot more easily if our government didn't keep outsourcing vital services to private corporations. Our government's supposed to work for us, after all.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Commonwealth's reactionary state legislature continues taking a reaper's scythe to any government program that might actually benefit people, now with HB 1822,which aims to slash the Environmental Stewardship Fund, the Conservation District Fund, and the Keystone Recreation, Park, and Conservation Fund, and if that seems like "too many funds" to you, consider how much money our state gives away in corporate welfare to gas and coal, and consider how often legislators slash funding for good conservation programs over the years just so they can one day argue "hey, let's get rid of it, no one'll miss it." You'll miss the clean air, clean water, and parks to go hiking, fishing, and hunting in, I can guarantee you that! So let's not be like the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water who doesn't realize he's cooked until it's too late. HB 1822 has already passed the House but awaits a Senate vote, hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senator to protect conservation funding by rejecting HB 1822.

Action: concerning taking care of Americans during a pandemic.

All the trillions of dollars Congress hands out and they still don't protect good Americans who, through no fault of their own but certainly through great fault of their President, don't have jobs and thus can't pay their utility bills. More than a few localities have imposed moratoria on evictions and water shut-offs, but this pandemic is everywhere, so why not protect everyone? And this isn't a matter of giving "handouts" to people who don't deserve it -- like I said, they didn't ask to get laid off! And Congress hasn't had any problem giving out massive handouts to big corporations (under the guise of "helping small businesses," no less!), so maybe it's time to start protecting people. Hence both the Sierra Club and Consumer Reports help you tell your Congressfolk to make sure good Americans don't get their utilities shut off during a pandemic. Consumer Reports makes another good point: as good Detroit residents still have trouble getting their water turned back on, big corporations like Pepsi and Coke were taking public water, selling it, running up far larger unpaid water bills, and getting precisely zero shutoff notices. It's a shame we have to remind the politicians that they work for us, but we'll keep reminding them.

Meanwhile, you know what else good Americans need now that they can't send their kids to school and they're either not working or working from home? Internet access, that's what. I guess right-wingers will say is this going to be yet another thing we just hand out for free? Of course, that formulation describes precisely none of the services our government delivers, since we pay for them, with our tax money. And even though our FCC disagrees, the best way to look at our internet is as a utility, not a content provider (like, say, Facebook), since it supplies the entire community with something it needs -- information. Kids have to go to school over the internet now, for example, and we already charge our various state, local, and federal governments with the task of educating our children, so how can we deny internet service to anyone during a pandemic? Particularly since the internet bill is yet another bill people can't pay when they don't have jobs? Of course, internet service providing corporations tend to be private, and they deserve some competition from state and local governments (i.e., community broadband) on that front, but in the meantime, Battle for the Net helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure all Americans have internet access.

Finally, big food processing corporations have suffered enough work stoppages due to the pandemic that a spokeshack for one of them, Tyson Foods, has come out and said, and I quote, "the food supply chain is breaking." And I know a lot of right-wingers would cite exactly that statement as proof that we just can't give workers paid sick leave right now, but, as usual, the opposite is true: if "the food supply chain is breaking," that's precisely the time to ensure that workers have paid sick leave, so they can take time off, get themselves better, and -- I keep saying this, and I hope people are finally getting it -- not make other people sick. I keep saying this, too: if you fire a worker for being sick, you then have to replace that worker, and you have to find someone willing and able to do the work, and you have to train them to do the work, and a lot of bosses have come around to the notion that it's better for business to just give your workers paid sick time instead of churning them over constantly. And while Tyson sounds the alarm over the food chain breaking, they're not taking care of their own very well, hence MoveOn helps you tell Tyson to give its workers paid sick leave.

Action: concerning physical distancing, our Post Office, and pollution.

It ain't just red state Governors who are reopening their states too early -- it's also Democratic Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, who's planning to loosen physical distancing standards (OK, you know them as "social distancing standards," but I'll keep trying) in the coming weeks, without securing the widespread testing and tracing we need to fully understand the threat we still face. I would hate to think all those stupid right-wing protestors had an outsized say in the conversation yet again! So let Keystone Progress help you push back against stupidity, by helping you tell your Pennsylvania state government to put people before profits and let the science dictate when we start relaxing physical distancing standards. One more thing: we've now had a million confirmed coronavirus cases in America, but we hardly test for it, so we don't know how many we've really had -- unless New York state's finding, that more than one out of every eight of its residents have COVID-19 antibodies, is instructive. I would hate to think we'd have another spike in cases because our leaders don't have the patience we elected them to have.

Meanwhile, a consortium of good government groups (including Progress America, Demand Progress, and Daily Kos) helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest an additional $25 billion in our U.S. Postal Service. I mean, we just pissed away $350 billion in a "small business relief fund" that mostly went to big corporations, and we're pissing away some $150 billion every year in lost revenues thanks to the 2017 tax "reform," so $25 billion ain't that much to ask to keep a good service going, one that helps all Americans. Right-wingers have wanted to privatize our Post Office since time immemorial, and to them every crisis is an opportunity to do evil, but we don't have to put up with that. Nor do we have to put up with our President calling our Post Office "a joke" because it doesn't charge us four times as much! Note well, however, that our President did say there are circumstances under which he'd authorize more funding -- absurd circumstances, to be sure, but I say he just showed us weakness, and it's well past time we attacked when right-wingers are weak.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to reverse its new, supposedly pandemic-related policy of not enforcing any damn clean air and clean water regulations. Like I said, cynical right-wingers imagine every crisis as an opportunity to do evil, and thus the ones who run our EPA think a pandemic that attacks good Americans' ability to breathe means nothing so much as a time to let big polluting corporations make our air harder to breathe. As a young man, and an aspiring cynic, I suppose I would have found this amusing, but having long rejected cynicism and, hell, having become a man and having put away childish things, I find it all quite disgusting. I wish I could be sure that the worshipers of mammon will find their hell -- or maybe I would simply prefer that they find their hell in this lifetime, so we can all see it, and so future generations can be taught how not to be. In the meantime, I suppose we'll all have to settle for merely doing our duty as best we can.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning voting-by-mail, our Post Office, tax cuts for the rich, and health care equipment.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, helpfully reminds us that voting-by-mail actually has a lot of problems, and that these problems mostly afflict (you guessed it!) poor folks and folks of color. In some states, you need to have a witness co-sign your ballot; in three states you have get a notary to sign it, which costs money, you know? In a lot of states, you also need to mail a copy of your ID with your vote, and we all know how state ID processes tend to deprive poor folks and folks of color of their right to vote. That's before we get to whether or not your ballot ever gets to you, since if you're poor, you tend to move around more, or what happens if you mark an "X" instead of filling in the box entirely and the machine can't read it! Mr. Palast makes a number of good suggestions -- barring witness signatures, barring signature challenges in the absence of a stolen ballot accusation, mailing every voter a ballot -- for a good voting-by-mail bill at the end of his post, so you can call your Reps and Senators and demand that of them.

Of course, we can't make voting-by-mail work for us if we don't have a U.S. Postal Service! Our USPS might run out of money by the end of September, a mere five weeks before Election Day, and it's almost like our President planned it that way! He didn't, of course -- he prefers to let his incompetence create crises that he then exploits for his own glorification, just like George W. Bush used to do, even if Mr. Bush was more civilized about all of that. But we have other reasons to want our Post Office to continue doing its job, mainly that it actually does a very good job despite all of the crippling blows Congress has dealt it over the years, and our Post Office delivers those medicines and medical supplies that must travel through the mail better than all the other options. What, you think UPS will drop your medicine at your door on the cheap? You think FedEx will charge 55 cents to mail your ballot? Privatization doesn't mean "better service," it means "you pay more money." So the Center for American Progress helps you tell our President to drop his opposition to fully-funding our Post Office.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard about how the pandemic "relief" bill gives more relief to some folks than it does to others, as in an average of $1.7 million of "relief" to folks who own "pass-through corporations," a corporate welfare handout so big that our Joint Committee on Taxation estimates it'll cost us $90 billion this year. And that would be enough to, just as a for-example, fund tuition-free college at state universities and community colleges for an entire year, let alone get us more ventilators, more masks, and more COVID-19 tests. Gosh, remember when Republicans excoriated Democrats for demanding that their "pet projects," like securing the vote during a pandemic, be included in the pandemic relief bill? We should have known, just from the fact of that complaint, that the finished bill would be larded down actual Republican pet projects benefiting their rich donors. Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal this nefarious tax break.

Finally, National Nurses United helps you tell our President to finally start using the authority granted to him by the Defense Production Act to force big corporations to start making the personal protective equipment our health care workers need to keep us well during this pandemic. You know his excuse for not doing it, right? That it would be TEH BIG GUMMINT OPPRESSINGZ TEH PEEPULZ!!!! Yeah, he really said that -- even used the phrase "black helicopters" in saying it. This, from the Administration that has demanded the power to indefinitely detain people while the pandemic keeps our courts from operating! Yeah, that's not Black Helicopter Land; only making corporations do what they should do in times of trouble is Black Helicopter Land. Ronald Reagan used to say that a government that can do anything for you can do anything to you, but the long game he began as President has now resulted in a government that can do anything to you but can't do anything for you! And we do pay taxes, so we deserve to get good services in return. This President pretends not to get that, but he ain't the damn boss of us.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Social Security, and public water.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. Bills that protect voting rights, health care, clean water, worker wages, and public lands (among other good things!) shouldn't have so much trouble passing in the Senate. And the more we demand they pass those bills, the more likely it'll be that they pass. Hey, it's not like Our Glorious Elites or their media enablers want them to pass! So it's up to us.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to cut Social Security disability insurance, and will take comments on their proposal until January 31, so both Social Security Works and Moms Rising help you tell our Administration to scuttle their proposal. President Reagan tried cutting SSDI benefits for hundreds of thousands of people in the '80s, and helped cause over 20,000 deaths; he ultimately reversed course after public pressure, but that sure didn't help those 20,000-plus dead folk, did it? Our current President no doubt will yell and scream about making sure the people who actually deserve it get what they need, but everyone thinks of "those people" as "undeserving," and when we do that we're generally unaware that other people look at us exactly the same way! And our President's votaries seem to have more serious trouble realizing that these Social Security disability cuts could very easily affect them. And, really, folks who try to convince me SSDI is rife with fraud and abuse love to cite individual stories, but, as Neal Gabler has said, three incidents of chicken pox don't constitute an epidemic.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Suwannee River Water Management District to keep notorious water-bottling corporation Nestlé from pumping out over a million gallons a day from the Ginnie Springs along the Santa Fe River, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. We could go on about the cypress trees and underwater caves and species of turtles at Ginnie Springs, but let's keep it simple: why are we letting private corporations take public water for pennies a gallon so they can sell it for dollars a pint? That's rock-stupid, and it's not the "genius" of the "free market," either, since it requires governmental capitulation in order to work. Clean water is one of the great achievements of the last 150 years, and it does not belong to some corporation like Nestlé; it is our achievement, as a civilization. And it is kind of amusing that the corporate drive to undermine this achievement needs public water to work. Ultimately, though, it also needs public acquiescence to work, and we don't have to give them that.

Action: concerning privatization, pollution, child care, and equal rights.

You may have heard that the Internet Society (or ISOC) plans to sell the Public Interest Registry (or PIR) -- a database containing the names of all .org domains -- to Ethos Capital, a hedge fund management corporation. That should send off alarms, but the results could be even worse than a hedge fund deliberately mismanaging a database in order to extract its value, or even making prices for .org domains go up-up-up: as Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in this very useful primer, selling something of public utility to a private corporation raises a buttload of questions. For example, would authoritarian regimes (ahem!) pay off Ethos to help shut down pesky .orgs that detail those regimes' crimes? Would Ethos cut back on domain name management such that some .orgs that provide lifesaving services can't do it anymore? Luckily, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN) has to approve the sale, hence Save .ORG helps you tell ICANN to reject the proposed sale of .org names to a private corporation.

Meanwhile, our EPA wants to weaken rules that prevent power plants from polluting toxic filth into our clean water, because our Administration hates good regulations with a passion bordering on madness. If our EPA gets its way, we'll have more mercury, more lead, and more arsenic in our water, not to mention more dead animals and higher water bills for good Americans -- all so we can hand out more corporate welfare to the dying coal industry. Seriously, the coal industry is dying -- even Murray Energy declared bankruptcy filed for bankruptcy shortly before Halloween -- and it's dying partly because gas is considerably cheaper and partly because renewable energy is starting to achieve cost parity with coal. As Paul O'Neill might say, it's the genius of civilization. But all this Administration cares about is enriching the few remaining coal executives, and they're willing to be objectively pro-pollution in order to achieve this goal. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA to protect our clean water by scuttling its plans to weaken its own regulations.

In other news, it ain't just health care costs and college costs that have skyrocketed over the years -- it's child care costs, too, with a Freddie Mac study finding those costs going up almost 50% over the last quarter-century, and that means a lot in a world where single parents have to juggle working and parenting and two-parent households typically have two paychecks. You may even know someone who gives over their entire paycheck to child care! But H.R. 1364/S. 568, the Child Care for Working Families Act, would (among other good works!) mandate that child care could never cost more than 7% of a family's income, and would also ensure that poor working families can get good child care. Because they're people, too! And also because when we invest in child care, we invest in our future. That's as true when we invest in the poor, because (regardless of what many right-wingers still think) talent crosses lines of race and class. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to give working families the help they need by passing the Child Care for Working Families Act.

Finally, as you may have heard, the Virginia state legislature passed the Equal Rights Amendment, making it the 38th state to have done so. Of course, the original ERA had an expiration date that has long passed, but H.J.Res. 79 would eliminate that date, which means the Equal Rights Amendment could become the law of the land, as it has always deserved to be. Yes, I know, a few of those original 38 states repealed their passage of the ERA, but playing such games of take-backsies may not even pass Constitutional muster, so People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support equal rights in America by passing H.J.Res. 79. And yes, I can also imagine our Supreme Court (particularly now that it has two younger fresher right-wingers on it!) saying that passing H.J.Res. 79 with anything less than a two-thirds majority would trample on the will of the Congress that passed it, since some Congressfolk surely wouldn't have voted for the ERA without the expiration date. But one might reasonably wonder why we would be more anxious to scrutinize such matters when women's rights are at stake.

Action: concerning war on Iran, actually rehabilitating prisoners, and sane energy policy.

As you know, the House passed a War Powers resolution last week aimed at keeping our President from launching any more military attacks on Iran -- and now word on the street is that it has the votes to pass in the Senate as well. But don't get complacent! The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you call your Senators and tell them to restrain our President's war-happy ways. Yes, our President can veto this resolution, but let's make him do that! And let's not get caught up in exactly how many Republicans will vote the right way this time, not after Sen. Tillis (R-NC) made all that noise about voting for the resolution of disapproval aiming to overturn our President's "national emergency" declaration and then voted against it. Let's also not get caught up in which Republicans (cough Rand Paul cough!) will vote for this resolution precisely because our President will veto it. The whole point of America is not to sit around the TV and game out outcomes like this is Draft Kings or something -- the whole point of America is that citizens must act.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell American county sheriffs to stop eliminating in-person visits between prisoners and their families. Sheriffs like to tell you we don't have the staff (and here you thought privatization would have solved that!) and we're afraid they'll pass drugs to each other (actual translation: we'll find out how many of our staff are peddling drugs) and, perhaps most importantly, we've got this fancy new video service that lets prisoners essentially Face-Time their loved ones at exorbitant expense! When big telecom corporations offer monetary incentives to use their service, you're right to suspect all their excuses, and when you recall that real live contact from family helps prisoners stay out of jail once their sentence is over a lot more than "video conferencing" does, you'll suspect all their excuses even more. I must say when private prisons claim they just can't have real live family visits, they're not exactly conjuring up the Genius of the Free Market. Where's their can-do spirit?

Finally, you no doubt know by now that Australia is on freaking fire -- so much so that normally recalcitrant koala bears will come gulp down any bottled water you bring to them! -- and yet they're still trying to build coal mines there, most notably in central Queensland, where German chemical corporation Siemens plans to provide rail signaling equipment for the proposed Adani coal mine. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Siemens to end its involvement in the Adani coal project. Here you would add your voice to the voices of climate activists in Germany who've been striking every Friday for months; they've been wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR effectively enough that Siemens's CEO has sounded a bit rueful about his involvement in the Adani project -- but he could be jiving us, you know. And yet, if he really is counting on another coal project to get him his 19th vacation home, he should remember that cheap gas is killing coal, and the falling cost of renewables sure ain't helping, either. We can help him get with the times by telling him to abandon coal mining in a burning country.

Action: concerning Social Security, public housing, and our Post Office.

S. 2733, the so-called TRUST Act, would of course create a fast-track process to cut Social Security "behind closed doors," as Sen. Ernst might put it. Because how else can you cut Social Security? The politicians pretend Social Security is going to go belly-up any minute -- I'm old enough to remember when they said it would go belly-up in 2016! -- when actually it'll pay out full benefits until 2037 and we could put it on sounder footing (with expanded benefits!) if we merely taxed income above $132,000 into the system. But that's just impossible, says the "bipartisan" "consensus" among our elected officials, which has little to do with reality as ordinary Americans experience it, and sadly the TRUST Act has four co-sponsors among the Democratic caucus. They keep using that word "bipartisan", but I do not think it means what they think it means. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject secret Social Security cuts by rejecting the TRUST Act. (Those four Senators are Messrs. Manchin, Sinema, Angus King, and Doug Jones, if you're looking to do more.)

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the infamous Faircloth Amendment, which has stymied the building of public housing for the last two decades. The Faircloth Amendment represents yet another capitulation by nominal Democrat Bill Clinton to the far right; we said Republican moderates were useless the other day, but that's no less true of Democratic ones. And guess what's happened in the meantime? A major housing bubble burst, throwing millions of good Americans out of their homes, and several major American cities (and minor ones -- hello, Berkeley, California, where the $400,000 listings are all empty lots) have become too expensive for folks to live in. Oh, and America has 50 million more people now, and they can't live in tents. Republicans used to say that when the "free" market failed us, government had to step in; now they say "oh, the free market failed you? Well, tough toodles for yoodles!" But we don't need to take that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to reject any Postmaster General appointee who aims to privatize the service, then Progress America still helps you do that. Too many right-wingers say PRIVATIZE TEH POST OFFICEZ!!!! as if it will cure all of America's ails; these folks seem unaware (do I mean "unaware"? Perhaps I do!) that our Post Office has taken exactly zero dollars in taxpayer money for operating expenses since 1982 -- or that our Constitution literally mandates the creation and Congressional oversight of a national post office. But, if anything, we should bring our Post Office more under the American people's control. If we did that, we could more easily reinstitute the postal banking service that was a regular feature of our Post Offices until the late 1960s, and that would better serve urban and rural folks banksters don't bother to serve -- certainly it would serve them better than check-cashing joints! But if we privatize our Post Office, that won't ever happen -- and good Americans won't get the services they pay for and deserve.

Action: concerning transparency, privatization, and robocalls.

Our Treasury Department plans to change campaign finance rules so that big political organizations can keep their big-money donors secret! Specifically, Treasury wants to make such campaign finance disclosure mandatory only if the IRS is auditing that particular group. What one has to do with the other I'll never know -- the whole point of disclosure is to shine sunlight on who's trying to buy our democracy, and no it's not about privacy rights, because money isn't speech -- folks who exercise their free speech rights need protection from our government more than folks who exercise an imagined "right" to either bribe elected officials or ensure more bribable people get elected. (My app isn't flagging the word "bribable," and further investigation reveals that it is, in fact, a real word. The more you know!) Anyway, Public Citizen helps you tell our Treasury Department not to change the rules to protect the identity of big money campaign donors. They don't need our government's protection -- we need our government's protection, from them.

Meanwhile, are you using an .org domain for your website? You know, like virtually every good-government website helping you express your will to your Congressfolk? Well, the Internet Society (or ISOC) plans to sell the Public Interest Registry (or PIR) -- which contains the names of all .org domains -- to Ethos Capital, a damn venture capital firm. It's bad enough that they want to privatize the part of the internet where people get together to cooperate on positive change, but to sell it to a damn investment firm, which we have every right to expect will charge usurious rates for .org domains until they all go out of business? I said it a long time ago and it's still true: Our Glorious Elites know they're evil, and they know we know they're evil, so they're going to try to take everything from us, including, apparently, .org domains. After all, banksters won't manage them in our interest -- they'll manage it in theirs. This is why we don't privatize everything! So Save .ORG helps you tell ISOC to abandon its plans to sell off the .org domain name database to vulture capitalists.

Finally, S. 151, the TRACED Act, would enact strong protections against robocalls and call-spoofing; the bill passed the Senate in May, but an improved version passed the House last week, so now it goes back to the Senate for approval -- and since both versions of the bill passed their respective houses nearly unanimously, we might be optimistic about its final passage. Still, duty is duty and complacency is anathema, so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Senators to help protect good Americans from scam artists by passing the TRACED Act. If you're like most Americans, you've lately stopped answering calls from phone numbers you don't recognize because they might be trying to trick you into giving up your Social Security number or a big wad of cash (or both!). The TRACED Act would force big telecom corporations to authenticate phone calls and block scam phone calls, and would also prevent big telecoms from imposing additional fees on good Americans for providing such services. These would be good works, so we should encourage them -- and not just because Congress so rarely does good works.

Around the table: concerning our economy, our public lands and water, and several far more trifling matters.

Your right-wing uncle telling you about wages going up under our President? Well, Dean Baker reminds us that state minimum wage hikes and our Federal Reserve's low interest rates are actually driving recent wage increases. You know that high minimum wages cause wage hikes at the low end, but you may not know that low interest rates have helped drive unemployment down -- and Mr. Baker says that "low rates of unemployment give workers the bargaining power necessary to secure real wage gains." Naturally our President says minimum wages should be lower, though, admittedly, he also thinks interest rates should be lower. But low interest rates have been Fed orthodoxy since 2008, so we can safety say he deserves very little (if any!) of the credit for what gains we're making in this economy.

If you've been following Nestlé's attempts to gobble up as much public water as it can and then sell it as bottled water at an absurdly high profit, you'll be interested to hear that the Michigan state court of appeals has ruled that Osceola Township can block Nestlé from expanding its bottled-water operation within town limits, because bottled water is most emphatically not an "essential public service" or a "public water supply." I was a little surprised that any legal eagles at Nestlé would make such ludicrous claims -- even as part of a see-what-sticks effort -- until I learned that a lower Michigan court had approved them, and I note that the court of appeals also said that a bottled water operation might be "essential" in a place with no water, which I'm pretty sure could be stretched by some judicial activist to mean any of the many areas of desert in America.

Big pharma executives tell OHSU researchers that prices for MS drugs go up so damn much go up purely for profit-making reasons. Also, you can only gouge patients in America, since (to quote one exec) "(i)n the rest of the world, prices decline with duration in the marketplace," and prices never go down because then people would think "we're less effective, (that) we think less of our product." You do hear the quiet part out loud more than you used to even 10 years ago, when it seemed (to me, at least!) we heard the quiet part out loud all the time. Maybe big pharma execs are tired of pretending they're anything but thieves, not that I expect their behavior to change.

From the "How Do They Always Find Someone Even Worse?" file: Interior Secretary David Bernhardt wants to reduce fees oil and gas drilling corporations pay to drill in shallow Gulf of Mexico waters. It's not just the stench of an Interior Secretary lowering fees on corporations for which he used to lobby, or the horror that we could have another Spillageddon in the Gulf like we had in 2010 -- it's the fact that these are our waters and we, the public, deserve to make more money if our government is going to be so foolish as to allow more drilling in the Gulf. It's like they have literally no idea that they're supposed to serve the American people.

U.S. House Rep. Steve Watkins (R-KS) apparently listed a UPS store as his official residence, which just so happens to have had the effect of allowing him to vote in a different Topeka City Council district than the one in which he otherwise would have voted. Has the Fox News Channel "accidentally" identified him as a Democrat yet? After all, ONLY TEH LIBRULZ COMMITZ TEH VOTER FRAUDZ!!!!!

Finally, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has suspended her campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, citing a lack of money to keep campaigning. I don't actually think it's correct to say that "she struggled to define a clear rationale for her candidacy" -- actually, I think she was completely successful in "defin(ing) a clear rationale for her candidacy," since that rationale was "I'm here to trick the liberals into thinking I'm going to run this country the way they'd want me to when I'm really going to run it however my big donors tell me to." If I'm right, then it's heartening that Democratic voters have rejected that rationale, at least as far it manifested in her -- and almost two months before the Iowa caucuses, no less!

UPDATE. An alert reader pointed out that I'd gotten our President's position on interest rate cuts entirely wrong; I've corrected the first paragraph above as a result.

Action: concerning voting rights, arbitration fairness, and our Post Office.

H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, may receive a vote in the House as early as today, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to call your House Reps and tell them to pass it. As you may recall, our Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated Sec. 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, saying that forcing Southern states to pre-clear changes in their voting laws with our federal government constituted an undue burden on those states given narrowly-perceived advancements in voting rights in the South. But the Voting Rights Advancement Act would institute a new pre-clearance formula into the Voting Rights Act that would subject any state or locality with a long record of voting rights violations to federal scrutiny. It would, essentially, revive the Voting Rights Act, so let's ensure our House Reps pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Meanwhile, Amtrak has recently inserted a forced arbitration agreement into its tickets, meaning that you wouldn't be able to take Amtrak to court if they crash your train, but you'd have to go before a private arbitrator, and you know how that tends to go. (Remember not to believe the right-wing BS about "average" awards from arbitration cases being higher than class action awards, because the average of all awards to people who lose in arbitration is zero.) Amtrak sure has some chutzpah pushing this on its riders, because its riders are also its owners -- our government still controls Amtrak, and gives Amtrak $2 billion in taxpayer money annually; given the public stake in Amtrak, I wonder if this clause could actually survive in court, particularly given that we can learn the results of a court case, but not a privately-arbitrated case. In the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell Amtrak to remove forced arbitration clauses from its customer agreements.

Finally, our U.S. Postmaster General will leave office next month, which means our President will get to appoint a new one, and he might decide to appoint someone who favors privatizing our Post Office -- but the USPS Board of Governors can reject such a nominee if they choose, so Progress America helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to reject any attempt to put a privatizer in charge of our Post Office. A lot of right-wingers have a jones for privatizing our Post Office, but we already know why that's a bad idea -- because any privatized Post Office won't operate for our benefit, but for the benefit of some Presidential crony or other. But our Post Office is supposed to serve us, and, not incidentally, our Constitution explicitly mandates that our government ensure mail delivery -- so let's help ensure a Post Office that belongs to us fulfills that mandate.

Action: concerning voting rights, public lands, and immigration.

Monday is list day! So call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Today we add H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, passed by our House last week, and I'm pleased to see that Moms Rising has provided a contact tool so you can tell Senate Majority Leader McConnell to hold votes on good House-passed bills. Moms Rising adds H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act (which will help out immigrants who moved here as children) and H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act (which would roll back Administration attempts to weaken protections for folks with pre-existing health conditions), and you can add these in your phone call, too. Plus you can add H.R. 1146, H.R. 1644, and H.R. 2513 in the comment section of Moms Rising's contact tool. Seriously, if we do this enough, we can get these bills passed, and we might even give our President pause before he vetoes them.

Meanwhile, our Administration still has this jones for logging and mining in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, so CREDO helps you leave a public comment with our U.S. Forest Service opposing the construction of more roads in the Forest that would allow more logging and mining there. The Tongass, as you probably know, has thousand-year-old trees in it; how many more times in our history will we be able to hold onto thousand-year-old trees, let alone learn the lessons they have to teach us? You may not find that argument persuasive if you think everything exists to be turned into money, as our President does, or if you think everything exists to be ruled over and used by humans, as our Vice-President does. If you're a civilized person, on the other hand, you might actually find it conservative to hold onto some thousand-year-old trees, not to mention the unique wildlife and indigenous humans that also live in the Tongass National Forest. Conservatism isn't all about making some crony money, after all. Or, at least, it shouldn't be.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2415/S. 1243, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. This bill wouldn't get rid of private prisons or punish corporations that import immigrants in order to drive worker wages down, but it would do a lot of positive, necessary, and reasonable things, like force our government to adopt good standards for detention, permit our government to break contracts with private prison corporations that repeatedly violate such standards, and mandate inspections of detainee facilities and investigations of detainee deaths in custody. Show me the person who would oppose such things and I'll show you a flabby thinker who shouldn't get all the say about anything in America. I mean, really, who else would support "no standards for housing detainees" or "holding to private prison contracts even when detainees die" or "sweeping egregious mistakes under the rug"? Because those are the alternatives. And they're not really alternatives -- at least, not to civilized people.

Action: concerning voting rights, law and order, immigration, and endangered species.

Happy Monday, good peoples! You can use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And today, we add the recent House-passed bill H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, which would shine some sunlight on the shell corporations used by banksters, drug kingpins, sex traffickers, tax-evaders, and big campaign donors. With one phone call, you can do something about that, and about voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections. Yes, America is a great country, precisely because of its promise of freedom and justice -- but we must fulfill that promise.

While you've got your phone out, the tools in the upper right corner of this page can also help you find your House Reps' phone numbers, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President. Why, as I write this, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) is running an ad on Facebook calling the House's impeachment inquiry a "kangaroo court." The House is following rules laid down by Republicans during their impeachment of Mr. Clinton 20 years ago, but attacking the "process" is all you got left when you can't win the argument on the merits. Of course, Mr. McConnell would be one of 100 judges of this impeachment, and it does seem corrupt to attack the "process" of an indictment you'll soon have to try, doesn't it? Let alone raise money for your own re-election over it? It's not quite as offensive as Roger Stone telling us that ZOMG IMPEACHMUNT WILL CAUSEZ TEH CIVIL WARZ!!!!!, but that's not the story you want to take to the Pearly Gates. The story you want to take to the Pearly Gates? How you fought this evil and corrupt President.

In other news, a few big banks still haven't committed to getting out of the whole private-prisons-separating-families business, so Moms Rising helps you tell Citizens Bank, Synovus Bank, First Tennessee Bank, Pinnacle Bank, and Regions, among others, to stop financing private prisons. A large number of well-known banks -- chief among them Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, SunTrust, and PNC -- have pledged to stop financing private prison corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic, which is a big deal, since these banks represent seven out of every eight dollars those two private prison corporations get, and if they can't get financing from big banks, then they'll be hard-pressed to continue operating. Don't be swayed by the right-wing hype that you'd be putting those families in jeopardy by starving the private prison beast of money, because you know what that is, right? A manufactured hostage situation, that's what -- and one our government could rectify simply by doing its own dirty work. And we could fight that more easily.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the PAW and FIN Act, then WildEarth Guardians still helps you do that. The PAW and FIN Act is a clumsy acronym, but don't hold that against it -- the bill would reverse the regulations issued by our Administration that put more endangered and threatened species at risk of annihilation, regulations that force our government to consider the "economic factors" of regulations, which means the money gas and oil drilling corporations would lose if they couldn't drill somewhere. How many times must I tell these pimps! We're not supposed to base all our decisions on whether or not someone loses money! Why, if we did that, we'd have ratified the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" so that foreign investors could overturn our laws whenever they lost money to some clean air or clean water law! And once they drill a species out of existence, it's gone forever -- just like the money they make doing it will, one day, be gone forever. None of this is conservative.

Action: concerning immigration, mandatory minimums, and fossil fuels.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Defense's Inspector General to investigate the militarization of our Southern border. When you hear that our Administration has deployed armed soldiers at our Southern border, you might reasonably ask: are we at war with someone? Our President would no doubt answer "yes," being a member of Our Glorious Elites, and therefore someone who uses the word "war" to mean all kinds of things it does not mean. But we are not at war with Mexico, and U.S. law actually forbids our government from using soldiers to enforce domestic laws. We don't use soldiers to enforce domestic laws because we don't want to become a tinpot dictatorship where people are afraid to be free. I suspect our DoD IG (Inspectors General still display a large amount of independence) will come to the same conclusion we have. But only if we speak out. After all, saying nothing and hoping for the best doesn't work.

Meanwhile, even though our Pennsylvania state Supreme Court overturned mandatory minimums many years ago, word on the street is that our state legislature wants to bring them back, in a four-pack of bills, HB 726, HB 1850, HB 1851, and HB 1852, that would target offenses committed with firearms. I understand that people want to "do something" about guns these days, but this is doing the wrong thing -- we should let judges do their job and decide case-by-case whether possession of a firearm really merits a longer sentence. I've been saying for a while now that we should make it just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons, and I'd rather support that solution than another set of mandatory minimums that wind up slamming folks of color harder and costing the taxpayer more money -- and feeding into the prison-privatization machine, too. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject more mandatory minimum sentences.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell big media corporations to stop taking advertisements from fossil fuel corporations and their flunkies. Sound harsh? Consider the simple fact that you already know whatever you need to know about fossil fuels -- you know what fuel your car needs and whether your house takes oil heat or gas heat and whether your stove takes electric or gas, for example -- and fossil fuel advertisements typically therefore extol the virtues of particular fossil fuel corporations; is it really too much to ask that ads give us information we can actually use? It's not particularly of issue that such ads tend to lie about fossil fuel corporations' commitment to renewable energy and about the real effects of pollution and climate change, but ads disguised as "news stories" or "opinion pieces"? They're a big deal, and any media outlet worth its salt would reject them out of hand. They don't do it now because they're corrupt, but that's why we're here: to show them a way out of corruption.

Action: concerning detainment, banksters, and wildlife.

Our Administration loves looking "tough" on immigrants, but H.R. 2415/S. 1243, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, would force our government to adopt actual standards for detention that are as good or better than American Bar Association's proposed standards from 2014. The bill would also allow our government to break contracts with private prison corporations that repeatedly violate these standards; I'd prefer never to use private corporations for detainment, but this bill would still improve matters. And the bill would mandate inspections of detainee facilities and investigations of detainee deaths in custody. These are reasonable, even mild, changes -- we should still work to prevent corporations (and "businessmen" like our President cough cough) from importing immigrants solely to drive wages down, and if we should do that, we'll better be able to show mercy to those running from real harm, but this bill will improve lives. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to advance the cause of civilization by passing the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo must have thought they'd done enough PR work to make everyone forget that they opened accounts for customers without their permission, because now they're apparently "forgetting" to close accounts their customers have asked them to close for a few months, which results in negative accounts and significant fees. Nice work if you can get it! Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to investigate Wells Fargo for its alleged wrongdoing. You might be wary of doing so, knowing how thoroughly our current Administration has gutted the CFPB, with the explicit purpose of making it "friendlier" to banksters. Why, that's like a cop saying he wants to be "friendlier" to burglars! And this, from the "law and order" Presidency! But I digress, and anyway, if this wrongdoing is as easy to diagnose as it sounds, our CFPB might want an easy victory to "prove" it's still working on our behalf. That would be cynical of them, but the result would be the same if they weren't so cynical -- money saved for customers, and justice done.

Finally, you know that we designate certain areas of the country as wilderness areas so that we can protect wildlife -- but what about the wildlife that has to migrate in order to survive, but finds highways and buildings in their way? H.R. 2795/S. 1499, the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act, would provide for endangered and threatened species by protecting new and existing wildlife corridors, a matter that'll become far more important for those species as climate change drives them to move to new habitats. And in the wake of the U.N. report saying that a million plant and animal species are in danger of extinction right now, well, that matter's actually pretty important. Folks who worry that WE'LL NEVER BUILDZ ANYZ OFZ TEH THINGZ EVAHZ AGAINZ!!!!! would do well to ask whether what they really want is never to be bothered by anything other than self-interest. Really, man-in-the-mirror moments such as these can be very instructive. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect threatened species by passing the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act.

Action: concerning banksters, whistleblowers, and abortion.

Another year, another attempt to "reform" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by privatizing them, which would effectively end their efforts to help low-income working families own homes. This idea didn't originate with our President, but he's sure glommed onto it, as he seems to glom on to all bad ideas eventually. Of course, privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would not "modernize" them, unless you have a very low opinion of modernity indeed, and it certainly wouldn't "stop another financial meltdown," because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't cause that meltdown to begin with. Bankster greed and hifalutin financial instruments caused the meltdown, and it'll cause another one -- particularly since hedge fund managers (whom our President supposedly hates, but you don't believe that, because it is to laugh) have grabbed themselves a big chunk of both corporations, and are now hoping to fully add them to their casino economy. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Meanwhile, with whistleblowers all in the news these days, S. 2529, the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act, would (as its title suggests) better protect those whistleblowers who expose corruption in the financial services sector of our economy. The bill would clarify that the protections of our laws extend to whistleblowers in commodities and securities (our Supreme Court apparently being unclear about that), would speed up the processing of whistleblower claims, and would beef up funding to the CFTC Consumer Protection Fund. If we'd had stronger whistleblower protections in 2008, the banksters might not have come so close to completely destroying our economy as they did. It's not beating a dead horse to keep reminding you of the 2008 bankster meltdown, since Congress too often seems to forget it happened. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good American citizens who expose fraud and corruption by passing the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act.

Finally, with an overturning (or, at least, a crippling) of Roe v. Wade within our Supreme Court's grasp, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act. States have been putting up hurdles to women getting abortions since the Republican wave of 2010, but this bill would prevent states from putting up these hurdles, which include forced ultrasounds, unnecessary tests, medically-inaccurate information, third-trimester abortion bans, forcing women to explain why they want the abortion and denying them if the state doesn't find their explanation "good enough," and absurd physical plant requirements for hospitals (this final item coming up before our Supreme Court shortly, in June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee). Like I said yesterday, rights are rights regardless of how legislatures "feel" about them, and no one makes a man write an essay on why he wants a vasectomy before letting him have one, do they?

Action: concerning debt collectors, food safety, and prison privatization.

Because our Administration only works for bosses and not for people, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is as we speak planning to allow debt collectors to harass and abuse customers even more than they do, in part by allowing debt collectors to send an unlimited number of texts and emails without customer consent. If you're sitting back thinking well then they shouldn't have run up the debt in the first place!, please do two things: a) slap yourself, b) contemplate that not getting deathly ill or having massive student debt may be a matter of luck rather than superior intellect, and c) consider that debt collectors often have bad information and thus call people who do not actually owe them any money! Now imagine debt collectors calling every damn day to demand payment on an unowed debt. Empathy: it's not actually that hard! Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your CFPB to scrap its plans to let debt collectors harass and abuse good Ameicans even more than they do now.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to implement a new rule limiting the amount of pathogens like E.coli in the water they spray on our food. Sounds fairly commonsensical, doesn't it? Not to this Administration, where they seem to think that delay, delay, delay is the American way. And they're slow-walking these food safety rules a little over a year after an E.coli breakout among Romaine lettuce killed five folks and sickened another 210 across 36 American states. If "five deaths" doesn't sound that impressive to you, please do four things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider whether anyone should die from a damn salad, 3) imagine it happening to someone you love, and 4) slap yourself again, because even contemplating 2) and 3) isn't enough to expiate your sin. And if you're tempted to think the FDA's delay saves corporations money and regulatory headaches, think about how rising health care costs might mean more than that. And maybe slap yourself again.

Finally, we've managed to get six big banking corporations to stop giving new loans to private prison corporations, and the commitments from JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust Bank, BNP Paribas, and Fifth Third Bancorp represent almost three-quarters of the money private banks currently get -- but that still leaves over a quarter of the money! Hence Moms Rising helps you tell PNC, Barclays, and other banking corporations to stop profiting from our Administration's cruelty. And I don't think I have to tell you stories of kids being torn from their parents and sleeping on concrete floors in detention centers in order to persuade you to join this call. All I need to tell you is that imprisoning folks for whatever reason is something we should be doing, as a civilization and as owners of our government. We should not leave it up to some private corporation that cares first and foremost about their bottom line. And once we fully grasp that our own taxpayer money funds cruelty, we'll be better positioned to stop it, as is our right and our duty.

Action: concerning data security, Arctic drilling, gun research, and cryptocurrency.

Lately our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has fined Equifax $650-$700 million for failing to secure the private data of almost 150 million Americans, but that's not as big as it sounds -- if you don't believe me, divide the fine by the number of people it hurt! -- and good Americans need more protection than that. Hence H.R. 2545/S. 1336, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would establish an Office of Cybersecurity within our FTC which would regulate data security at credit reporting corporations, would set strict notification requirements for data breaches, and would make penalties for losing consumer personal data a lot steeper. If you're one of those who reflexively respond oh great another bureaucracy, I would remind you that "just letting the corporations who know their stuff do it" clearly ain't working, and that's the world we're already in. Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumer data by passing the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the CEOs of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips to back out of their apparent plans to drill in the Arctic. Drilling in the Arctic has been a fever dream of big oil since time immemorial, but we all know the reasons we shouldn't drill there -- for one, it's much harder to clean up an oil spill which will happen in the Arctic than it is even in the temperate Gulf of Mexico (and you recall how well BP cleaned up that spill, which is to say "not particularly well"). Here are some more reasons: it'll threaten the famous Alaskan sockeye salmon industry, wreck the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, endanger the Native populations of the region, and it won't even give us very much oil. If I, an hourly-paid schmuck, can recite these reasons off the top of my head, then I bet a lot of other people can, too -- and surely these not-very-popular big oil CEOs are acutely aware that There Is-So Such a Thing as Bad PR. If we need to remind them of that with (wait for it!) the Big Stick of Bad PR, hey, we're here to help.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Senate to fund gun violence research by our Centers for Disease Control and our National Institute of Health, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Congress last year passed a spending bill that explicitly authorized gun violence research by these agencies, but naturally they didn't actually give them a dime to do that research; what are they afraid of? I'm no great fan of keeping people from having handguns and rifles -- though I think it should be just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as automatic weapons -- but there's no harm in researching gun violence scientifically, and our CDC and NIH have sterling reputations, though I imagine our President's trying to change that as we speak. Even the author of the Dickey Amendment that restricted gun violence research in the first place said before he died that he regretted his amendment's effects. I wish that remorse was more contagious in Congress these days, but hey, that's why we're here.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to block Facebook's efforts to create its own damn currency. Yeah, you read that right, and I'm sure Libra will be even more annoying than bitcoin has been over the years. They're selling cryptocurrency as, get this, a way of reaching the "unbanked" citizens of the world. Setting aside that we should never privatize currency, and setting aside, also, that Libra won't help the "unbanked" if they're also "uncomputered," there's a better way to help the "unbanked": stop treating the world as your personal fuckjar. Seriously, when we keep the world's biggest actors from exploiting good folks from other lands, those good folks will have more power to do the things they want to do with their lives, and they won't need Libra or whatever to do it. And an important step toward restraining the world's biggest actors would be to stop "freeing" obnoxious tech CEOs from "burdensome" regulations because they're such great "innovators." Mostly what they innovate is new ways to separate you from your money.

Action: concerning copyright trolls and corporate tax loopholes.

H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act, should set off your alarm bells first with the tortured acronym of its title and then with the word "alternative," because guess what "alternative" they're talking about? That's right, an "alternative" to settling small copyright-related claims in a court of law! Why our courts and our laws never seem to be good enough for our politicians I'll never know, but the CASE Act would let "claims officers" in our Copyright Office to hear copyright complaints and assess fines -- which would essentially enable copyright trolls to stamp copyrights on everything that ain't nailed down and then get an expedited hearing about the matter which will almost certainly go in their favor. There's a reason they might not try that in an actual court of law, you know. Thus the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect law and order by rejecting the CASE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to close corporate tax loopholes that benefit for-profit private prison corporations, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would prevent corporations that operate prisons from being able to call themselves a real estate investment trust (or REIT) subsidiary, which sure sounds like a loophole even if you've never heard of a REIT before. A REIT is, per section 856 of our Internal Revenue Code, "any corporation, trust or association that acts as an investment agent specializing in real estate and real estate mortgages"; mainly that means office complexes, shopping centers, and apartment buildings, but private prison corporations? That sure does seem to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the law, and we could put "following the spirit of the law" another way: doing the right thing.

Action: concerning banksters, immigration, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would impose a small financial transaction tax on big Wall Street banksters, then Americans for Tax Fairness would still help you do that. The bills in question are H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, which would impose a 0.1% tax on financial transactions including stock and derivative trades, and H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which would impose a range of taxes (from 0.005% to 0.5%) on same; the highest tax imposed here would be $5 per $1,000 in trades. Folks on the right are calling this a "tax on my 401(k)," as if all financial speculation winds up in pension funds, and as if $5 per $1,000 is onerous -- and as if reducing the number of trades banksters make, which these bills would do, wouldn't actually stabilize markets. Most people understand all of this intuitively -- unless, of course, their salary depends on them not understanding it. But if we get it, we must act.

Meanwhile, I have two private prison-related action alerts for you: in one, Color of Change (among others) helps you tell your Congressfolk to close a loophole that allows private prison corporations to avoid taxes, and in the other, Moms Rising helps you tell two big banking corporations to pull their investments from private prison corporations. Both of these are also concentration camp-related, of course, since this Administration thinks detaining immigrants in inhumane conditions and funneling taxpayer money to corporate cronies is a two-fer. Even the Obama Administration had started getting private prisons out of the immigrant detainment business; the least we can do is hold the folks who work for us (i.e., our government) accountable to us. And certainly private prison corporations deserve no special treatment from our tax code; at least S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would stop private prison corporations from calling themselves "Real Estate Investment Trusts."

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell three big airline corporations (JetBlue, Delta, and American) to stop using facial scanning technology on their customers. Why? Well, we'll begin with the airlines' explanation: it makes things faster! After all, presenting your boarding pass or your passport (which biometric screening would replace) takes several seconds, and Delta claims that using biometric screening saves a whole nine minutes per flight. Would you want to take "I saved nine minutes per flight" to the Pearly Gates? I didn't think so -- it would display a distinct lack of imagination. The downside, meanwhile, is that we don't have a whole lot of law covering facial scanning, so who knows how long the airlines hold on to the information or which government agency they give it to without a warrant? Yeah, I know the airlines say they don't store the info, but you don't trust corporations more than you trust your government, do you? Of course you don't. So let's not trade liberty for convenience.

Action: concerning trademarks, national forests, and bad leadership.

Big construction equipment corporation Caterpillar has actually asked the U.S. Trademark Office to remove trademark registrations that have the word "cat" in them, particularly that of Cat and Cloud Coffee of Santa Cruz, CA! Where do we begin with this? With the implication that anyone would ever confuse the maker of asphalt pavers and backhoe loaders with a freaking coffeeshop? With the notion that any apparel sold by a coffee shop could possibly be confused with any apparel sold by Caterpillar? Folks, this is what happens when we, as a civilization, decide that corporations should police themselves because they know their businesses best -- instead of innovating new products and processes, as a heavily-regulated civilization would force them to do, they just look for ever-more convoluted ways to make money without working, like frivolous patent requests. Hence Change.org helps you tell Caterpillar to stop bullying small businesses and stop acting like the world's biggest trademark troll.

Meanwhile, our Administration is totally hot to open up Alaska's Tongass National Forest to logging corporations -- thousand year-old ecosystems apparently being a profound insult to our Administration's ongoing program of inculcating short-term thinking into every governmental decision process -- but H.R. 2491, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, would revoke the U.S. Department of Agriculture's power to grant exemptions to the famous "Roadless Rule," which, as you may know, keeps roads and the associated development out of national forests. Of course big corporations would like to have roads in national forests, because that would make it a lot easier to extract the natural resources from national forests -- and, ah, to ruin national forests with their pollution, though big corporations will never admit they've ruined a forest even after they cut the last tree down. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect national forests and (as Penn Environment says) "keep wild areas wild" by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our Administration's nomination of Barry Myers to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA), then a consortium of good government groups (including CREDO and People for the American Way) still helps you do that. Mr. Myers used to own AccuWeather (more on that in a minute!), and as its owner constantly banged his saucepan to privatize our National Weather Service, and now our President wants to put him in charge of the National Weather Service? Also, when Mr. Myers divested from AccuWeather, he sold his ownership stock at cut-rate prices to family members; does that seem on the up-and-up to you? And the numerous sexual harassment claims filed by AccuWeather employees during Mr. Myers's tenure there -- claims that resulted in a six-figure fine assessed by our government -- also call Mr. Myers's leadership abilities into question generally. NOAA administrator is a leadership position, after all.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning discrimination, aircraft safety, and internet freedom.

Last week the House passed H.R. 5, the Equality Act -- with eight Republican votes! Eight! It's a firestorm of moderation! I kid, of course -- I'm old enough to remember when the Republican Moderate Caucus in the Senate had two dozen members; now it doesn't even meet for lunch! Still, that might bode well for passage of the Equality Act in the Senate, since all 47 Democrats will vote for it and a handful of Republicans still style themselves as moderates. Perhaps a handful more will style themselves as independents who worry about more important things than continuing to discriminate against gays and transgender folk -- but only if we get in their grills! Hence you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers so you can call them and tell them to pass the Equality Act. Maybe our President will veto it (at Vice President Pence's urging, no doubt!), but let's at least make him do it.

In the wake of numerous news reports about safety failings of the Boeing 737 Max plane, which caused two of them to crash in six months, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) to mandate the "optional" safety features that could have prevented those crashes, and Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase FAA funding and take decision-making power about safety standards away from airplane manufacturing corporations. When folks started telling us that "the private sector does everything better," and started privatizing government functions, they assured us that government would still hold corporations accountable when they failed -- and then they started privatizing the accountability itself! It's like telling burglars to decide the length of their own jail sentences because, hey, they know best! Truth be known, airline deregulation has been a problem as long as I've been alive; maybe now's the time to stop all that?

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to vote for H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. Americans across the ideological spectrum -- yes, actual conservatives and actual liberals -- support the Save Internet Act, because it would restore net neutrality, the principle that big telecom corporations should treat all network traffic the same, and thus you, and not some corporation, should get to decide where you want to go on the internet. But politicians don't support it, because politicians care more about big telecom money than about people. Harsh? Nah, just truth. How do we know? They can't concoct a good argument against net neutrality -- take their complaining that internet regulation needs a "light touch," when net neutrality is obviously "light touch"! When an internet regulation doesn't mandate content or price, that's light touch.

Action: concerning clean air, the Muslim ban, net neutrality, and prison privatization.

CREDO helps you tell our EPA to scuttle its own efforts to let corporations pump more soot into our air. When right-wingers tell you how our President has "freed" this economy by "unshackling" corporations from "burdensome" regulations, this is what they mean, whether they like it or not: dirtier air for all of us to breathe, and thus more sick and dead people. And at the risk of beating a dead horse: money goes away, but clean air can sustain a civilization forever. Right-wingers will probably pretend to agree with that statement, and them move on to asserting that "the science doesn't really conclude that breathing in soot is bad for people." No, really; they'll put it like that, because that's what they do: sow doubt about things we all actually agree about. That's what they have to do when they can't win the arguments on the merits.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, would rescind our President's Muslim travel ban and prevent future Presidents from enacting similar travel bans that obviously target folks based on their religious beliefs. Actually, I should say their parent nation's religious beliefs, since you can't identify an individual's religious beliefs merely by identifying their home country. Our Supreme Court gave the Muslim ban its blessing, and I'll always be sore about their willingness to use a proctoscope to divine lawmakers' "animus" against religious bigots in their gay-marriage cake-baking ruling but their absolute disinterest in our President's obvious, stated animus against Muslims -- which, again, doesn't bode well for Chief Justice Roberts's efforts to convince everyone the Court isn't "political." Anyway, Demand Progress (among other good government groups) helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight bigotry by passing the NO BAN Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. The Save the Internet Act would reinstate the net neutrality regulations the FCC enacted in 2015, before the 2017 FCC repealed them. Most folks would tell you they haven't really noticed a difference before and after net neutrality repeal, but big telecom corporations wouldn't block and censor and slow down websites right away, because freedoms best disappear a little at a time. You also have to consider that net neutrality repeal has a good chance of dying in court; big corporations won't want to do so much blocking, censoring, and throttling if the courts say they can't tomorrow. Indeed, that's why they largely obeyed net neutrality principles before the FCC codified them! But the courts could actually sanctify the FCC's repeal, so let's get our Congressfolk to pass the Save the Internet Act.

Finally, hot on the heels of announcements from Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase that they'll start to divest from private prison corporations, CREDO helps you tell Bank of America and SunTrust to divest from private prison corporations also. Getting two big banks to divest from corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic is a big deal, but why stop there? All the big banks should know the Big Stick of Bad PR if they continue to invest in the private prison corporations now best-known for helping our Administration separate families at the border. Of course, I think the evil of private prison corporations goes deeper: they take taxpayer money to do our government's job (of incarcerating those citizens who've broken our laws), and they generally cost more than public prisons and do a worse job of treating prisoners humanely. That's what you get when you bring public functions to the altar of mammon -- more waste, less accountability, and more evil.

Action: concerning health care, voting rights, and worker pay.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You may have read Paul Krugman's recent New York Times column stating (among other things!) that although it "(c)ould" be true that Medicare-for-All will result in better health care, and that we'd pay less in taxes to support it than we're currently paying in premiums, these would be hard to sell to the American people. And indeed, when folks confront the loss of their private insurance and how we're going to pay for that, support does fall off. But Medicare-for-All wouldn't poll well in the first place if folks were that emotionally-invested in their private health insurance; their support wavers not because they really think their insurer's doing a great job, but out of fear of the unknown. And we don't let that keep us from doing the right thing, do we?

Meanwhile, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow folks serving time in prison to be able to vote. No, letting prisoners vote won't turn prison into a "country club" (seriously, people say that to you whenever you argue that a civilization should treat prisoners better!), but it will prevent some fairly serious problems. One, our government won't be able to put people in jail just to prevent them from voting! I wouldn't argue they're doing that now -- I presume that putting folks in jail, particularly black and brown folks, is an end in itself, and our government looks at their inability to vote as icing on the cake -- but if I thought of it, you know they have. Two, denying prisoners the vote lets governments pack Congressional districts with large numbers of people who can't get proper representation! Sadly, state governments are already doing that. So let's put a stop to it.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell our government to give back pay to federal contractors during the government shutdown over our President's vanity border wall earlier this year. Federal employees got back pay, of course, but our government contracts a lot of work out to private corporations, and those workers didn't get back pay, though it wasn't their fault, or their employers' fault, that they didn't work. And a lot of these workers work low-paid jobs as cafeteria workers, security guards, and janitors. Which doesn't make their work any less important! And they have bills to pay just like the rest of us! Of course, our government shouldn't be contracting this work out to private corporations, and not just because these little government shutdowns leave them out in the cold. But we ought to do right by them while they're working for us, although our President is the kind of person who high-fives himself for sticking it to people who work for him.

Action: concerning taxes, Yemen, and pollution.

You may have heard that the Taxpayer First Act (which passed the House and now awaits consideration in the Senate) would forever prevent our IRS from offering good Americans free tax filing online, like many other nations do; the IRS could do that now but doesn't, in apparent deference to private tax prep corporations like H&R Block and Intuit. But there's really no good reason to prevent the IRS from providing this service to good Americans; if you're waiting to scream SOSHULIZM!!!!! at the idea, well, that ship kinda sailed the day you decided not to be a tax evader. To be sure, the Taxpayer First Act has some pretty good things about it, too -- it would shield low-income working families from private collection actions, for example -- but there's no reason we must swallow poison pills in order to get nice things in America, so Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to ensure that our IRS can offer free tax filing services to all Americans.

Meanwhile, both our House and our Senate have passed S.J.Res. 7, the resolution mandating that our government end unconstitutional participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen -- and word on the street is that our President might actually sign it. It's of no consequence that he might have said he'd "look at" the resolution just so one of his votaries can yell HE ENDEDZ TEH WARZ!!!!! at us a year or so from now, because our duty remains the same: to communicate our will to our President. Hence Just Foreign Policy has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell our President to sign S.J.Res. 7 and get us out of the moral quagmire that is the war on Yemen. We may want to remind him (since his advisors probably won't!) that helping make war on the Houthis in Yemen also just so happens to injure our fight against al-Qaeda, since the Houthis are some of al-Qaeda's bitterest and most effective enemies.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its plan to undermine the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that -- but be quick about it, because the EPA's comment period ends on Wednesday. If our EPA rolls back these protections, we'll have more pollution in our air, which means we'll also have more asthma, more heart attacks, and more premature deaths. Of course, if mammon is all that matters to them, we could also point out that with all these extra asthma attacks, hearts attacks, and premature deaths we'll have more hospital and ER visits and more missed days of work and school -- and all of that costs money. Of course, it doesn't cost some coal CEO money, so maybe our EPA doesn't care. But duty is duty, and if we talk to our government about the monetary costs of pollution, we can at least corner them.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Senators to extend the electric vehicle tax credit, so that good Americans can continue to get a deduction of up to $7,500 for every electric car they buy. I wouldn't blame you for worrying that this might be corporate welfare, but here's why it isn't: one, electric cars aren't the predominant form of automobile in America; two, electric cars are better for our air and water than cars running on oil; and three, it's perfectly alright for our government to spur production of technologies if they work better than what we've got. I'd take far less seriously the NO MOREZ WELFAREZ FOR TEH TESLAZ!!!!! objection, because any big automobile corporation, not just Tesla, can make an electric car, and thus also benefit from the increased sales that a tax credit would spur. And anyway, what about the actual corporate welfare fossil fuel corporations still get after all these years?

Around the table: concerning government spying, taxes, private prisons, "right to work," and "socialism."

Apparently now our government is tracking journalists and refugee advocates with a secret database run by the Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic), which of course doesn't have the legal authority to do such things. A Customs and Border Protection spokeshack says they're targeting these folks because of alleged violence at the border in November, and how do you know that's bullshit? Because that wasn't what they told NBC7 a mere five days earlier. Tha Bush Mobb would have given us the bullshit explanation right away, which is yet another reason they're worse than this clown car of an Administration.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy offers "Fairness Matters," a chart book showing who pays state and local taxes these days. Long story short: lower-income working families pay a bigger share of their income in state and local taxes than the rich do, and states that call themselves "low-tax" because they don't have an income tax tend to fill revenue shortfalls with the kind of regressive taxes and fees that hit working families a lot harder. Some rich folks think that's the way it should be, because they think they're better than you. But they don't get all the say in America.

Here's some good news: big banking corporation JP Morgan Chase has announced it will no longer underwrite bonds and loans for private prison corporations. If you have agitated for this very thing, go reward yourself a Buffalo chicken cheese steak, or what you will. (Also, too, you think this might have had something to do with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's call for oversight hearings on the relationship between banksters and private prison corporations? Of course it did, and there's another lesson in the importance of pushing to get people in office who'll do good, rather than merely settle for people who won't literally burn down your house.)

Kenawha County (WV) judge rules that West Virginia's "right to work" law actually violates workers' First Amendment rights to free association. It's similar to the Dane County (WI) judge's decision against Wisconsin's "right to work" law in 2016, which the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court reversed because of course they did -- and, lo and behold, the Republican-dominated West Virginia state legislature is at this moment trying to impeach every member of the Democratic-leaning state Supreme Court. It's like they can't win unless they set everything on fire. Why do we, as civilized people, tolerate such insanity?

Finally, when you hear Sen. McConnell (E-KY) suggest that the now-passed-in-the-House For the People Act is a "radical" and "socialist" bill, you are reminded that all they can do now is call what they don't like "radical" and "socialist." And when Mob Boss Mitch has to call it that -- rather than farm out the remarks to some hungry youngster like, say, Tom Cotton -- that means the forces of evil are even more desperate. I'd call that good news, except that we all know what desperate people are like -- they're the kind of people who throw nukes at Venezuela and Iran to keep power.

Action: concerning the war on Yemen, toxic pesticides, and family separation.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war/humanitarian crisis in Yemen, then Amnesty International still helps you do that. Close to 11 million good Yemenis stand on the verge of famine, and plenty of other countries have cut off their arms sales to Saudi Arabia because of that, but our President yells that "(t)he world is a dangerous place!" (exclamation point in original) and thus justifies any and all evils in which we might be complicit. I'm sure I'll hear from a few cynics that other countries don't have the "responsibilities" we have, and can thus more easily do the right thing with regard to Yemen. To that I could only say how often such cynics seem to regard the most powerful country on Earth as completely powerless. If we can't use our power to demand more civliized behavior from our allies, then why have power at all? Really, power without good works is useless.

Meanwhile, the EPA recommended a ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos back in 2015, but then a certain very damaged individual unexpectedly ascended to the Presidency, and he decided that all regulations that protect our health are evil because they prevent some CEO, somewhere, from gilding the plumbing in his 19th vacation home. Hence H.R. 230, the Ban Toxic Pesticides Act, would force the EPA to ban the sale and use of chlorpyrifos, including chlorpyrifos residue on food. Scientists have linked chlorpyrifos with brain damage in children and various autoimmune disorders, among other ills; indeed, the EPA banned chlorpyrifos for home use back in 2001, and that was Tha Bush Mobb's EPA, for frack's sake. Why not for agricultural use, then? I'm sure they'd say "less exposure per capita," but that's unconvincing if "less exposure" still makes us sick. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ban Toxic Pesticides Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase to "break up" with private prison corporations, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Investing in prison privatization is bad enough -- I'm old enough to remember when governments actually took care of government functions! -- but investing in prison privatization that aids in our Administration's efforts to separate immigrant parents and children is far worse, and you would think that big banksters like Wells Fargo and Chase would want to avoid all the bad PR that comes from investing in that. And we should absolutely "break up" with banksters that invest in evil crap, and encourage others to do the same -- at least until our Supreme Court finally rules that telling others to abandon big corporations isn't free speech but "terrorism" of big corporations. Don't laugh -- if I thought of it, you know they have.

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.