Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning domestic spending, polluter welfare, and Congressional stock trading.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject arbitrary spending caps on domestic spending, and pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and the ETHICS Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject arbitrary spending caps on domestic spending. Republicans made a deal with President Biden on domestic spending, but now they’re trying to go lower. They must think they’re Darth Vader! I am altering the deal; pray I do not alter it again. Republicans plan to cut Department of Transportation spending by 10% – just as Pete Buttigieg is starting to do his job! – and want to cut Labor, HHS, and Education by similar levels; these departments run programs that actually help good Americans, so let’s put a stop to these shenanigans.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would (as its title suggests!) repeal all sorts of tax breaks that big oil and gas corporations get. Those tax breaks might have made sense once, while these industries were getting started, but they don’t make any sense now that they’re well-established, and they make a lot less sense when you consider that they’ve not only turbocharged climate change but they’ve also lied about it – about both doing it and knowing they were doing it. Have I mentioned I love the use of the world “welfare” in this bill’s title? Turn their words against them, that’s what I say.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the ETHICS Act, which would ban Congressfolk from trading in stocks. Now, to far too many folks addled by four decades of right-wing rule, that will seem laugh-worthy – who’s gonna pass a bill preventing themselves from investing in stocks ha ha ha snort look at me I’m so smart! These folks, despite my ministry and that of others, still do not get that Congressfolk exist to serve the American people, not enrich themselves, and we can’t trust that Congressfolk who legislate about corporate conduct but have investments in corporations would ever put their self-interest aside. We may be optimists, but we’re not fools.

Action: concerning taxes and stock buybacks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, expand the IRS Direct File program, and pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, which would address several kinds of corporate tax dodging, like headquartering in the Cayman Islands and sucking up tax money while shipping jobs overseas. Remember when Barack Obama made ending tax breaks for outsourcing corporations one of the pillars of his job creation program, and every single Republican in the Senate voted against it? How did any of those dolts get re-elected? I kid, of course – they got re-elected because Democrats (including President Obama) didn’t fight that hard for it afterward. Let’s make sure they don’t make the same mistake again by communicating our will clearly and forcefully.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase IRS funding so they can expand the IRS Direct File program. Virtually every other nation on Earth lets its citizens file their taxes directly with their government for free, but not us! Apparently we’re not happy until some undeserving corporation is overcharging us to do the same thing! Now House Republicans have been throwing tantrums about IRS funding going up at all under President Biden (which hasn’t exactly worked out for them electorally, but I digress), so you know they won’t want to do this, either. But if we all speak out, they’ve got two choices: do our will, or ignore us. Know anyone who likes being ignored?

Finally, Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would quadruple the stock buyback tax in America. That tax needs quadrupling, now that Apple plans to spend $110 billion on stock buybacks that reduce shareholder power, increase executive power, and make products and processes and infrastructure worse. Robert Reich reminds me of one more problem with stock buybacks: big corporate executives never pay taxes on the stocks they buy, because they never cash them out! And less tax money means, as you know, less public investment in libraries, cops, bridges, and other services we all use. So we know what we have to do.

Action: concerning stock buybacks, corporate welfare, wind power, and tax cuts for the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, and the NOW Act, and tell your Congressfolk to let the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax “reform” expire. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would raise the 1% stock buyback tax (enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022) with a 4% tax, which would, I would think, be at least four times as effective in discouraging stock buybacks, which used to be illegal, because they concentrated shareholder power in fewer and fewer hands, but now are as big a blot on our economy as the hedge fund or the monthly stock report. You know it’s always the folks who already have too much money (i.e., executives) who buy back the most stock, but the Stock Buyback Accountability Act would help make shareholders relevant again.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, which would restore the 35% corporate tax rate, close loopholes that allow corporations to move money overseas and outsource our jobs, and end, once and for all, the practice of using a Cayman Islands P.O. Box as a “headquarters.” Every year, too many big corporations pay literally nothing in taxes – or, worse, suck tax money out of our very pockets. That’s money that could pay for cops, libraries, and bridges! But the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act would help us get that money for the public investment we deserve, so we should do it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Nonrestrictive Offshore Wind (or NOW) Act, which would repeal the law (passed, sadly, in the Inflation Reduction Act) mandating that wind power leases can only occur after our government has handed out an offshore oil drilling lease. Hey, it was what Joe Manchin would let happen in 2022! And I’m sure more than a few Americans are still so timid about these “new” renewable energy sources that they don’t mind their development being so closely tied to the further development of “established” energies. But renewables have been around for decades, and really, we don’t need training wheels to use them anymore.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to let the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax “reform” law expire. That would, sadly, not include the corporate tax rate cut from 35% to 21% (which is why we need the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act described above) but it would include the big tax cuts for the top income tax brackets and the pass-through deductions that somehow only benefit the already-too-rich. Don’t expect a second Trump term to do anything but give bosses more unearned goodies; best that we take action now, and at least reveal to our Congressfolk a will they will have to work to ignore.

Action: concerning corporate taxes and public media.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act and reject any attempts to defund public media. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, which would, among other things, restore the corporate tax rate to 35% and prevent corporations from indulging in a variety of shenanigans to move profits and debt overseas to avoid being taxed here. That includes using a foreign P.O. Box as their home address! A lot of folks will oppose this bill because they think they’ll face no consequences, but I rather think so-and-so voted in favor of corporate tax dodging so we’d have fewer libraries and cops and bridges is a losing argument.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject attempts to defund public media like NPR and PBS. Yes, Republicans are talking about that again, even though we measure public media funding in the hundreds of millions (not even the billions!) and it’s not very “fiscally-responsible” to cut that in the context of a $5 trillion budget. We should increase public media funding so that we can get all the private corporate funding out of it! And as even former Sen. Chambliss has pointed out, a lot of rural areas don’t have local media, and NPR and PBS is it. I don’t think leave rural voters out in the cold is a winning argument, either.

Action: concerning the “war on terror” and housing policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject attempts to expand the “war on terror” and invest more and better in housing policy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Senators to reject S. 4136, which would allow our Treasury Secretary to suspend the tax-exempt status of “terrorist-supporting” organizations. So, to review: our government calls organizations “terrorist” (or “terrorist-supporting”) without even defining these terms and aims to injure them without due process, all of which is a way of saying they can’t win arguments and they don’t respect law and order. S. 4136 supposedly aims to go after “terrorist-supporting” Palestinian organizations, but you can see them using it to come after you, right? Yes, you can. So it’s time to communicate our will to our Senators.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in housing policy for-real for-real. Before President Reagan’s massive housing cuts in the ‘80s, we didn’t have a homelessness problem in America; now, with landlords extorting renters and banksters sucking up as much of the available housing supply as they can, we’ve got a homelessness problem like we’ve never had before. The housing policy increases we demand are hardly bank-breaking – our government routinely wastes more money on the F-35 fighter plane – and these hand-up-not-hand-out public investments will save lives and help good Americans live better lives. So let’s do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning voting rights, public education, and our care economy.

Long story short: tell your legislators to protect voting rights, stop diverting public school money to private schools, and invest in our care economy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would subject any voting law change from a state or locality known for vote suppression to Justice Department approval. The Voting Rights Act used to do that – until our Supreme Court struck that part of the law down because it “singled out” Southern states and localities for extra scrutiny. You can imagine why, I trust! But since the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act says any state or locality, not just Southern ones, our Supreme Court will have to come up with some other reason to oppose it. Not that they should take that as a challenge!

Daily Kos also helps you tell your state and federal legislators to stop diverting public school funds to private schools. Want public schools to do better? Well, certainly don’t hamstring them further by using public school money on private schools that don’t necessarily do a better job! And don’t tolerate anyone saying “we have to do something,” because we don’t have to do something but we have to do the right thing, and the right thing to do is fund public schools well and teach kids all they’ll need to learn – like the kind of BS detection that would prevent our tax money from going to someone’s private school crony so our public schoolkids suffer even more.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest more in our care economy, particularly into making sure workers like home health aides and nursing home aides get paid well for the work they do! Our care economy will only get bigger, and we’re all going to need it one day, so we’d better get ahead of that before big corporations do, because they’d pay everyone in dung pellets if we let them. And that’ll be hard to fight – not impossible, but it’ll be so much better not to have to fight it, so we can better fight other evils.

Action: concerning endless war, health care, and public banking.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to do all they can to get a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war, and pass both the EpiPen Act and the Public Banking Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you demand an immediate cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war. Pleased to see someone else refer to it as exactly that, since that’s exactly what’s happening – even the Iraq War’s most fevered supporters never called it the “U.S./al-Qaeda war,” and not just because that would have been absurd. But with the International Court of Justice lately saying that some of Israel’s actions might qualify as genocide – and with that court continuing to consider South Africa’s genocide complaint – I would think we have some momentum here. But we’ll only turn that momentum into good works if we speak out now.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the EpiPen Act. You recall how Mylan jacked up the price of EpiPens 500 – to around $600! – between 2009 and 2016, and controlled 90% of the EpiPen market back then? Well, the EpiPen Act would cap the price of two EpiPen doses at $60, or one-tenth of the price that made Mylan so much money, like any corporation should profit like that off a drug that people with anaphylactic allergies will die if they don’t have. Right-wingers love squealing about “price controls,” but I think most Americans would look a lot more sanguinely on the concept now – particularly with regard to live-saving drugs.

Finally, Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Public Banking Act, which would more easily allow states and localities to open public banks like North Dakota’s, which has helped good North Dakotans weather recessions and depressions for over a hundred years. You may have noticed several members of the Squad – Reps. Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Omar – among the bill’s sponsors. Our “liberal” media concentrates far too much on their alleged anti-Semitism and not a whole lot on their actual populism; one has to wonder why that is. It’s because media outlets are objectively pro-bankster. That’s the reason. Also sexism.

Action: concerning taxes, public transportation, and asylum rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop cutting IRS funding, better fund public transportation, and establish asylum-seeking as a human right. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Patriotic Millionaires and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to stop with the cutting IRS funding drama. When you hear that every dollar our IRS invests in auditing taxpayers above the 90th percentile brings in twelve dollars of revenue, you understand that cutting IRS funding doesn’t actually save money, but costs money, and you also understand that efforts to defund our IRS (which we might also call defunding the police) are really efforts to give the rich more tax cuts. Shame these “fiscal hawks” Republicans pretend not to understand any of that. But then, we’re better than they are, and it’s well past time for that to actually mean something.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act, which would, as its title suggests, invest $80 billion into our public transportation systems over the next four years. That would be $80 billion out of a projected $20 trillion in total federal spending, so don’t let anyone get all where-you-gonna-find-the-money about this. Better bus and rail transportation not only means less pollution, fewer carbon emissions, and cleaner air and water, it also means fewer temporarily insane people driving cars on our roadways. Your children and your children’s children will thank you for both.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to affirm seeking asylum as a fundamental human right. It’s a shame we have to tell Congressfolk to exercise basic compassion and mercy! But we have far too many drama hounds running around acting like asylees are all drug-runners, terrorists, and job-takers, when asylees are actually running from terror in their home countries. You’d like a place to go if you had no place to go, wouldn’t you? And the thing about rights is they occasionally interfere with your desire to do whatever diddles your rage gland. But that’s what they’re supposed to do! They’re supposed to outlast the fevers of the day!

Action: concerning endless war, public banking, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end the Biden Administration’s bombing of Yemen, pass the Public Banking Act, and protect the Affordable Connectivity Program. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the Biden Administration’s bombing of Yemen. Not just because Congress did not issue a declaration of war against Yemen as our Constitution requires, but because, frankly, it’s not achieving its stated goal (to stop Houthis from attacking local ships). President Biden even said it’s not working! I can’t let it pass by that Houthis have historically fought well against al-Qaida, and yet we still support the UAE/Saudi war aiming to exterminate them. I don’t care if Iran supports them! Has nobody in power thought maybe the war-making itself is the problem causing all other problems?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Public Banking Act, which would, as its title suggests, help public banks flourish all over the land. Right-wingers will yell SOSHULIZM!!!!!, but seriously, who really wants to protect the big banksters who won’t lend in urban and rural areas? Only other banksters, that’s who, and they shouldn’t get all the say about everything. You may have noticed the Bank of North Dakota helped good North Dakotans get through the gas drilling bust of the last decade, and the Republicans who run North Dakota have done nothing to touch it. Why, it’s like they know it works! But we should all get to know that.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to save the Affordable Connectivity Program (or ACP), which allows over 20 million Americans to get internet access they otherwise couldn’t afford. Because cable prices are stupid high, amirite? But when I hear that Ted Cruz wants to kill this program because mean-girl, I must ask: isn’t Ted Cruz up for re-election this year? He must be feeling awfully good about his chances, to take such an objectively pro-inflation stand! But then I thought that after he abandoned good Texans for Cancun during that murderous 2021 winter storm. I sure would like to see good Texans remind him who’s boss this November.

Action: concerning monopolies, the Oakland A's, and social media.

Long story short: tell our FTC to stop proposed Exxon and Chevron mergers, tell major league baseball owners to reject Oakland’s proposed move to Las Vegas, and tell Meta to stop using algorithms to trap kids on Facebook. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Exxon/Pioneer and Chevron/Hess mergers. Because those mergers would give those big corporations even more power to hurt us! Don’t brook any stupidity about how some monopolies are “beneficial” because they deliver “efficiencies,” because the only “efficiency” they “deliver” is the more “efficient” upward redistribution of income from hard-working Americans to fat and lazy bosses. Certainly don’t brook any stupidity about how monopolies give us “lower prices”! We’ve just witnessed high inflation and record corporate profits happening at the same time! Monopoly corporations are obviously gouging us! And that’s why our government must use the power we give it on our behalf.

More Perfect Union helps you tell major league baseball owners to reject the Oakland franchise’s proposed move to Las Vegas. It’s the same story we’ve heard since a Texas Rangers owner named George W. Bush foisted it upon us all those decades ago: another billionaire owner (here John Fisher of the A’s) born on third base acting like he hit a triple, saying he “needs” a publicly-financed new stadium or the A's won’t be able to “survive” (wow, it’s like he forgot all about Billy Beane!). It’s never about a baseball team’s “survival” – it’s always about one rich person’s greed, whether it’s John Fisher or Jeffery Loria or Peter Angelos or George W. Bush. Only seven MLB owners would have to reject the proposal to stop the move – but most of them are rich idiots like Mr. Fisher. That’s why we must raise our voices.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell Meta (the parent corporation of Facebook, another arrangement that should not exist in a civilized society) to stop targeting children with algorithms that keep kids on the platform more than is healthy for them. And it’s not healthy for them – imagine the peer pressure you grew up with multiplied by 10 – and folks can’t just say “kids just need to be strong enough to stay off it” because children can’t make adult decisions. This is why we outlaw statutory rape and child porn! So go ahead and regard people who say “kids just need to be stronger” as useful idiots for corporate power, since their real argument is “never tell a corporation what to do, ever.” They likely know it, too. Evil people are never as stupid as they want you to think.

Action: vote!

If you have any problems voting today – said problems may include, but are not limited to, finding the polling place, voter intimidation, accessibility issues, voting machine problems, and provisional ballot issues – or if you witness anyone having these or any other problems, Election Protection has a toll-free line for you to call. It's 1.866.OUR.VOTE – or, if mnemonic devices such as "OUR VOTE" actually slow you down when you're trying to dial (as they do for me!), that's 1.866.687.8683. Don’t be skittish about making that call, because our enemies sure aren’t skittish about preventing you from voting.

Odd-numbered year elections don’t even get the respect that midterm elections do, but we will vote (or finish voting) in a lot of important elections today. Mississippi and Kentucky will elect Governors, while Pennsylvania will elect a new state Supreme Court judge and New Jersey and Virginia will elect entire legislatures; in both of these latter states, voters may tell us whether 15-week abortion bans are really more popular than six- or eight-week abortion bans. Voters in Ohio will vote on whether to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitution, and the fact that Donald Trump handily took Ohio twice seems unreflected in recent polling; Ohio voters will also vote on legalizing pot, same notation. And Maine will vote on whether to create a public power utility that can acquire private utility corporations, as well as seven other questions. And Republicans all over America will test their thesis that fearmongering about rising crime (remember, both violent and property crime are about half as bad as they were 30 years ago) will result in electoral gold, a thesis that did not exactly bear fruit for them in 2022 (especially in Pennsylvania!). So the fact that no Presidents or Congressfolk stand for election today doesn’t make this Election Day inconsequential.

And once again, remember that voting is a citizen's absolute minimum duty in America. This is our government, no matter how little it resembles a good government, and our duty as citizens is to make it a good government, first on Election Day, and then on every day thereafter. Still, our work on every day thereafter will be a lot harder if we don’t turn all the bad politicians out of office we can. And there are only bad reasons for not voting. Negative campaigning is an especially bad one – folks do realize politicians run negative campaigns in order to alienate voters and make them stay home, right? If you stay home, you can't vote against the bad people who want you to stay home! And cynicism about the state of the nation is not only a bad reason to stay home, it's a bad reason to do anything. Yes, things get discouraging. But I pray that we always have the strength to refuse to drink from the cup of cynicism.

Penny rants for October 27, 2023.

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

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

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

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

Readings for September 25, 2023.

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

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

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

Allegedly trenchant analysis for September 5, 2023: Vivek Ramaswamy as Republican front-runner.

It’s now a few weeks after the first Republican debate, and I’m still sure the smart play for Republicans is to get behind Vivek Ramaswamy as their nominee and put someone on the ticket with him who might actually be able to run a country. Doesn’t matter that he’s non-white – evangelicals didn’t turn up their nose at Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, the number of liberals caught off-guard by conservative Black and Brown folks is very small now, and right-wingers may not love Black and Brown folks in the abstract or the tangible but they’ll defend their Black and Brown fellow-travelers to the death. Doesn’t matter that he sounds batshit, either. That fool Ron DeSantis actually thinks all his precious oppo research will make a difference? Was he paying attention in 2016? What does matter, though, is that Mr. Ramaswamy helps Republicans get the Trumphole vote without actually having to have Trump on the ticket. How stupid do Republican politicians sound trying to defend Donald Trump these days? Very, very stupid, that’s how. Now imagine a world in which they don’t even have to talk about Donald Trump anymore, let alone defend him, but can run someone who’s pushes all the same emotional buttons without having any of the Trump baggage. Then imagine those Republican politicians reassuring nose-holders that since someone like Tim Scott is on the ticket, things will actually get done. That sure is a better idea than letting Donald Trump run again (and again!), and it’s also a better idea than getting behind the trans-hating, race-baiting, book-banning, COVID-enabling Ron DeSantis.

That doesn’t mean Mr. Ramaswamy will beat Joe Biden. Joe Biden’s done a good job. Doesn’t matter that Mr. Biden’s approvals are low now, or even next year, because I suspect our economy will keep on chooglin’ into Election Day 2024. And it also doesn’t mean Mr. Ramaswamy will have the same coattails Donald Trump obviously had on Election Day 2020, when Republicans picked up 15 House seats and damn near held our Senate. But Republicans need to face facts: they are the party of masturbatory rage now, and nothing else. They can still win elections wherever they can gerrymander districts or suppress voting rights, but that’s a tough thing to do across an entire nation, and the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections – the exception being George W. Bush in 2004, who would never have been able to win re-election in the first place but for the Electoral College. So the best strategy for Republicans, going forward, is to nominate freak candidates for President. It’s not a good strategy. But it is their best one.

At the risk of opening up a hole in space-time, I will devote a small amount of space to understanding the Trumphole a little better. Like Amanda Marcotte, I am enormously tempted to say that Trump supporters are “deplorable bitter clingers” and nothing else, but I really think it’s more than that: just like murderers think of themselves law-and-order adherents facing extenuating and unprecedented circumstances, Trumpholes throw tantrums they feel perfectly justified in throwing – and yet would happily use the word “tantrum” on anyone else on the other side who ever got emotional. A lot of Trumpholes have been provoked, I suppose, but not by liberals, or immigrants, or transgender folks, or public school teachers, or whomever the Enemy of the Week is. Big corporations provoke them, and the politicians who suck up to big corporations – which has, as you know, been a bipartisan attitude for some time – also provoke them.

Many Trumpholes will agree with that analysis; some will even volunteer it – and then support candidates who have enabled their provokers, because Critical Race Theory Cancel Culture Bud Light Trans People Try That in a Small Town. Even this ain’t entirely stupid – everyone knows Democrats have been chasing big campaign donation money as much as Republicans, and Democrats have long pushed so-smart-they’re-stupid solutions to our problems (we’re going to teach construction workers to write code! No, I am never letting that go!) for decades. But Democrats have also come around a bit lately – Joe Biden is the most anti-monopoly President we’ve had since FDR, and it’s not exactly business-as-usual to see large-scale public investment (mainly through the Inflation Reduction Act, but also through the American Rescue Plan Act) that actually moves us forward as a civilization. That dilemma will impale Mr. Ramaswamy; he’s not stupid enough to oppose public investment or support monopolies, but saying “I’ll just do all of that better” won’t win hearts and minds, either. And yet he represents a better bet than hoping the Big Man himself survives all his interlocking indictments with all their interlocking co-defendants. In or out of jail, Mr. Trump could still get the nomination and win, though likely not if the economy’s still humming along. But if you’re a Republican politico, you’d rather not keep drawing to an inside straight.

Action: concerning voting rights, tax collection, and public media.

Long story short: tell California to let prisoners vote when they get out of prison, and tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to defund our IRS or our public media. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Progress America helps you tell California state legislators to pass Assembly Constitutional Amendment 4, so that good Californians can vote on whether to restore voting rights to prisoners once they’ve completed their sentence. No one should ever lose their right to vote, but restoring prisoners’ voting rights once they’ve paid their debt to society would be a good start. And yes denying voting rights to felons after they get out is absolutely racist! Black folks make up one-eighth of the population but comprise almost one-third of folks in prison; why, I’d rather have polluters and financial predators comprise almost one-third of folks in prison! In the meantime, let’s be a lot less cruel.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your House Reps to reject any effort to repeal the IRS funding passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. Between this and their grandstanding about the FBI, Republicans are so hot to get rid of law enforcement funding these days! You might even call them the “defunding the police” party! But the added IRS funding has already started to catch some big-time tax cheats, and I know Republicans target our IRS because “no one likes paying taxes,” but people also don’t like schools and libraries closing or bottoming out over potholes or getting put on hold on 911, so maybe we should encourage Republicans to put their big-boy pants on.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to repeal or reduce public media funding. It seems like Republicans always threaten to cut public media funding and they never do, but that’s only because we speak out, so we need to keep speaking out. And, as with our Postmaster General’s zeal for getting rid of post offices in areas where no private mail-delivery corporation wants to go, a lot of public media work in areas where big private media corporations either don’t operate or put out a lot of cookie-cutter media “product” that doesn’t do a damn thing for the good Americans who live there. Sure I wish public media were less pro-establishment, but the folks who have nothing else likely don’t care.

Around the table: featuring one-third good news! (Unless IRL's shutting down counts; then it's half.)

When I hear that ”Close to 100,000 Voter Registrations Were Challenged in Georgia – Almost All by Just Six Right-Wing Activists,” I am reminded that citizens participating more in democracy is generally a good thing – but citizens trampling on the rights of other citizens just so their preferred candidates can win is a bad thing. If you’ve struggled with homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, or cancer – or were doing traveling work – you’d be pretty annoyed at some right-winger making you jump through extra hoops just to vote. And if you’ve got time to challenge tens of thousands of voter registrations at once, why aren’t you, I don’t know, feeding the poor?

Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect describes “Biden’s Unheralded War on Poverty,” one in which a few indices of economic inequality have actually reversed themselves by 25 percent. I think the pandemic made a lot of workers think a lot harder about their jobs, but I also agree that spending nearly $2 billion on an actual stimulus bill did a lot of good in just two years, and we’ll find out shortly what the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act were able to accomplish. And remember: when right-wingers complain that “no one wants to work,” they really mean no one wants to work for dung pellets.

The Progress Action Fund runs one of the greatest political ads ever made, in which a man and a woman about to get it on in their bedroom has their condom stolen by a Republican Congressperson who won’t leave. My description surely doesn’t do it justice, so go see the ad, and then wonder, as I often do, why Democrats don’t run ads like this all the time. OK, I know why they don’t run ads like that – because they still listen to the center-right consultants who tell them that “independent voters are turned off by incivility.” You know what really turns off independent voters? Democrat weakness.

Uh oh: event organizing software corporation IRL shuts down after an internal investigation finds that 19 out of every 20 of its users are fake – in that they’re either “automated or from bots.” Of course IRL raised $200 million and valued itself at almost $1.2 billion, lately laying about a quarter of its workforce a mere year after tripling its size, all of which means a big chunk of our financial sector are either unbelievably stupid or simply don’t care about doing the hard work of maintaining a civilization. Considering how much money banksters have thrown around over a company that’s not terribly innovative, I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

Florida veterans allege that the state’s recently-revived state guard is becoming a “personal militia” for Gov. Ron DeSantis. Why does an “emergency-focused, civilian defense force” need to be barked at by R. Lee Ermey wannabes? One of the veterans making the allegations thinks thinks Mr. DeSantis doesn’t know what’s going on or would disapprove of what’s going on, both of which I find highly improbable. Again, even though only a quarter of the electorate is bat-guano insane, that’s not the same all over America; I suspect fascism is what a majority of Floridians want. I hope the rest of them get organized.

Finally, speaking of fascist Florida, a Congressional hopeful tells an adoring crowd that what we really need to do in America is “extinguish the left.” I’ve been saying for a long time that right-wingers want to exterminate us, and now even they’re saying it out loud. This Anthony Sabatini fellow – with his stupid COVID “jokes” and his masturbating over a new civil war – is running in Florida’s deep red 11th district; current Rep. Daniel Webster has gone out of his way to court Donald Trump’s support, and while I would enjoy seeing Mr. Webster finish last in his own primary despite/because of his ass-kissing, that’d likely mean we’ll be getting more and more Sabatini drama over the next few years, and that isn’t a good trade.

Action: concerning taxes, energy efficiency, and voting.

Long story short: tell our IRS to make tax filing a lot easier, tell the Biden Administration to strengthen federal building codes, and tell state legislators to abandon any proposed internet-voting scheme. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Internal Revenue Service to offer free direct tax-filing software, no matter how much the big tax prep corporations whine about it. Most of us don’t have complex investments designed to evade legal scrutiny, so we ought to be able to just file our tax returns with our government and be done with it. And these corporations have been getting caught red-handed trying to divert people from free filing options even as they claim to promote free filing options, so Jesus Mary and Joseph why should they get all the say about everything? And we’re about the only rich country that makes people jump through these hoops about taxes, so let’s maybe be “number one” only at good stuff.

The Sierra Club helps you tell the Biden Administration to update energy efficiency standards for all federally-financed buildings. Even a conservative would agree that if we’re paying for it, we get to set standards, but today’s right-wingers would reflexively call any energy efficiency standards evil. But what’s wrong with living or working somewhere that doesn’t bleed heat, or gets electricity from the sun? What’s wrong with keeping pollutants out of federal buildings? Maybe all that doesn’t make some executive rich, but we’ve spent the last half-century letting these executives dictate to us how we live our lives, and that is not freedom. I mean, yeah, it’s freedom for them, but not for the rest of us. And that is why we fight.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell state legislators to abandon any thought of forcing internet-based voting on their constituents. Because it’s easier to steal an election conducted over computers than it is to steal an election with a paper trail, that’s why! Gosh, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea. Don’t get tempted to think that we’re the greatest nation on Earth so we should be able to do elections over the internet. A better thing to think is that we’re the greatest nation on Earth so we should be able to conduct free and fair elections! Which easily-hackable internet elections won’t be, no matter how many rich people get in the grills of state legislators. So we’ve got to get in their grills first.

Action: concerning taxes, stock buybacks, and sacred lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax the rich and corporations harder and pass the Reward Work Act and the Ruby Mountains Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

You’ve heard about the debt limit deal President Biden and Speaker McCarthy negotiated, but Demand Progress still helps you tell your Congressfolk to get rid of the private jet tax deduction from the 2017 Trump tax “reform,” while Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. As they consider this deal, we need to remind them of what their real priority should be: making sure folks with enough money to ruin the world pay their fair share of taxes so we can all have health care and roads and bridges and cops. If nothing else, they’ll more likely remember next time – and if they don’t, we’ll remind them again.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act, which would ban stock buybacks and let workers elect a third of all corporate boards. If you’re not seeing right away how that would “reward work,” recall that quite a few corporations (Bed, Bath and Beyond most recently) have gone belly-up after using their profits to buy back stock rather than, you know, pay workers, develop new products, or improve their operations. Stock buybacks, in short, don’t “reward work,” they reward wealth. And getting more workers on corporate boards will also help keep executives from doing only what’s best for them – which will also reward work. So let’s get this done.

Finally, the Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ruby Mountains Protection Act, which would permanently protect the Ruby Mountains of Nevada – a sacred land to certain Shoshone nations – from oil and gas drilling. The energy you extract from the ground will get used up eventually, and the money big corporate executives make from oil and gas drilling will get used up eventually, but sacred lands are forever, if you can keep them. And the Shoshone have already prevented our government from drilling for oil and gas in the Ruby Mountains in 2019, so we know this can be done; our Congressfolk just have to have the will to do it. And they won’t, unless we express our will in numbers they can’t deny.

Readings for March 22, 2023.

Sonali Kohatkar at Pressenza describes “Why Student Debt Cancellation is Reasonable, Not Radical.” Right-wingers love to use small business owners as a human shield, even though their own economic policies have driven most of them out of business (and, ah, small business owners have student loan debt, too!), but “student debtors are in trouble precisely because they didn’t get the same government benefits compared to their predecessors.” Remember when California’s state schools were tuition-free? That was true until 1967, when Gov. Reagan made Californians start paying – because, in the words of his advisors, an educated working class is a dangerous thing – and today’s students pay more than twice what students in the mid-’70s paid. Folks who think of this issue only in terms of Starbucks baristas majoring in gender studies won’t be convinced, but then nothing will ever convince them of anything, so how about we stop letting them set the terms of debate in America?

If you know someone who still thinks abortion should be illegalinallcasesnoexceptions, you may want to refer them to the story of Mayron Michelle Hollis’s ectopic pregnancy in Tennessee, a state with one of the “toughest” anti-abortion laws in America now that Sam Alito has worked his grotesque will. The story is harrowing from start to finish – and it’s still not over – and don’t brook anyone saying well she shouldn’t have gotten addicted to drugs ha ha ha snort high five where they ought to be saying “there but for the grace of God go I.” You probably won’t be surprised to learn that most of the legislators who voted for Tennessee’s abortion ban didn’t read it or understand it, but don’t feel sorry for them because they'll all face primary challenges from their right if they do their jobs. One of these Republicans should try fighting extremism, maybe? Anyway, I actually think the abortion issue is pretty simple to decide: if you’re against it, don’t get one, and don’t force everyone to be just like you.

Trinity Tran at TruthOut instructs us that “The SVB and Signature Bank Crashes Show Why We Need Public Banking.” The argument resembles conservative and moderate arguments in favor of Medicare-for-All: the private sector has screwed up so badly that our government couldn’t possibly do worse! And with our government swooping in to save every last dollar of the Silicon Valley Bank failure – even beyond the $250,000 FDIC threshold, do those rich clowns deserve that? – why not just cut out the middleman? And certainly we shouldn’t be giving welfare handouts to rich investors while decrying the “moral hazard” of, say, mortgage cramdown for families who only have one home. I’m starting to think I should just slap folks who use the phrase “moral hazard.” What, they're going to prove they’re substantial thinkers? Substantial thinkers don’t even have to theorize about public banking when they can just point to the Bank of North Dakota.

Around the table: the best people running as Republicans! And other follies.

Ho hum, George Santos actually thinks he’s going to run for a second term and thinks they-got-me-like-Jesus is the argument that’ll earn him victory, but what George Santos doesn’t get is that, no matter how much you act like him, acting like Donald Trump works only for Donald Trump. Ain’t nobody running through a wall for George Santos just because he’s dramatic like Donald Trump. On the other hand, given his fundraising activities, he clearly gets at least one thing exactly as well as Donald Trump: that grift is the only thing that really matters.

Also ho hum, Rep. Andy Ogles (E-TN), last seen arrogantly ignoring federal disclosure laws, has also said an awful lot of different things in his various résumés, such as how he’s an “economist” when he appears to have received no extensive training in the subject. But in the post-January 6 era, people like George Santos and Andy Ogles are the only folks left Republicans can run! No “sane” “moderates” are coming to the rescue! (Also, I wouldn’t tout my “expertise” in a damn thing based on a connection with Arthur Laffer. That man is the OG of BS.)

At least one California startup is recycling used batteries from electric cars for solar power storage, which will certainly help keep them out of landfills for at least a few more years. And this is exactly the kind of entrepreneurship that results from Big Gubmint stewardship! If states weren’t investing in renewable power grids, this market might not exist, and we’d be putting more toxic crap into our planet. I know more than a few right-wingers will howl HAHAHAHA TEH ELEKTRIX AREN’TZ SO RENEWABLEZ ARE THEYZ!!!!!!, but surely we know better than to let the perfect murder the good.

Heather Digby Parton at Salon reminds us that Donald Trump has been ramping up the “ghastly homicidal rhetoric” about crime lately – why, he’s even talking of bringing back the guillotine and televising executions! – but ball-swinging about crime sure didn’t work for Republicans in 2022, or else they’d have a comfortable margin in our House and any margin in our Senate, plus they’d have done a lot better in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Of course, if the economy’s in the toilet by mid-2024 – and Our Glorious Elites, furious at our President’s ramped-up efforts at trust-busting, will do their damnedest to bring that about! – I guess anything could work, not that we’d ever really know.

From The Intercept we learn that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (N-AZ) started a consulting firm with a fellow Democratic state Rep who later became a payday loan industry lobbyist. Why, it’s almost like she’s twirling a mustache – or brandishing a Fuck Off ring! Everyone involved wants us to believe the firm has never done anything in 15-plus years, but it sure seems like there’s no unpopular bankster Kyrsten Sinema won’t kowtow to. I wonder if her veterans advisory board told her that payday lenders trap our veterans in a cycle of debt. And I wonder if she then told them to stay in their lane.

Finally, let’s have a little more good news today! A group of formerly-incarcerated folks have convinced the city of Atlanta to recognize them as a protected class, which could shield them from the kind of discrimination that former prisoners face every damn day when they get out of prison. I’m sure some “well-meaning” right-winger stands ready to say that our Constitution doesn’t allow just anyone to be protected from discrimination, but fact is Our Glorious Elites come up with new ways to discriminate all the time, and if our Constitution can’t prevent bad people from discriminating against good Americans, then what’s it for?

Action: concerning price-gouging, D.C. statehood, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell our government to stop COVID vaccine price-gouging, and tell our Congressfolk to enact legislation making Washington, D.C. a state and repealing the notorious Hyde Amendment. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to stop big pharma’s attempts to price-gouge us on COVID-19 vaccines. I almost typed “their” vaccines in that sentence, but that would have been a mistake, since they developed those vaccines with massive infusions of taxpayer money, i.e., our money. And that alone should give our HHS Department the authority to stop price-gouging on our behalf! Republicans will say they don’t have that right, but we all know by now that Republicans only hate the parts of Big Gubmint that actually help good Americans. So ignore them.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation granting statehood to Washington, D.C. Currently they don’t have it, even though they have more citizens than Vermont or Wyoming, and not having statehood causes problems – like when right-wing crybabies want to overthrow our government and D.C. has to wait for Virginia to call out their National Guard to help beat that attempted coup back. It causes other problems, like when right-wing politicians at the federal level make decisions for D.C. they shouldn’t be able to make. Don’t brook any whining about D.C. statehood meaning “two more Democratic Senators”! If Republicans want Senators that bad, they can win arguments.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (or EACH) Act, which would repeal the Hyde Amendment (that prevents federal funding of abortion in public health insurance programs like Medicaid) and keep our government from interfering with private health insurance corporations that cover the cost of abortions. With 58% of Americans approving of Medicaid covering abortions and disapproving of the Hyde Amendment, our Congressfolk should understand that they need to adhere to the will of the people here, as elsewhere. It is their damn job, after all.

Action: concerning inflation, pollution, corruption, law and order, and immigration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending Corporate Greed Act, the Green New Deal for Public Schools Act, the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, and the People's Response Act, and tell your Congressfolk to end the Title 42 program. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7443/S. 3933, the Ending Corporate Greed Act, which would tax excess corporate profits at 95%. Want to do something about inflation, Democrats? This is it! Let Republicans explain how no corporate profit can really be "excess"! Let Republicans pretend record-high corporate profits have nothing to do with high prices! Most Americans are smarter than that -- yeah, supply chain issues have also contributed to inflation, but mainly it's corporate greed. Of course, this'll only work if Democrats bang that saucepan. And they'll only bang that saucepan if we bang that saucepan first, as loud as we can.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4442, the Green New Deal for Public Schools Act. The original Green New Deal was always a simple "sense of Congress" resolution, but this bill would actually remake our public schools into energy-saving, climate-helping, job-creating buildings, and it would, according to scientists, accomplish the equivalent of taking 17 million jobs off the road. Republicans will whine about the price tag -- $140 billion annually for the next decade. Can you think of anything Republicans have done lately that cost that much or more and did no good? Oh, right, the 2017 tax "reform." So drink a big glass of STFU, Republicans.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6678/S. 3631, the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, which would pretty much do what it says it'll do -- prevent members of Congress and their spouses from owning any stocks, bonds, derivatives, and the like. Because owning them clouds your judgment when you have to make decisions about them! Which is obvious to anyone who thinks about it! The list of exceptions in Sec. 2(c) -- T-bills, public pension funds, other investments that don't present a conflict of interest -- could be pared down a bit; a lot of public pension funds are in the death-grip of hedge funds these days. But this still represents progress.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act, which would fund alternative public safety responses -- alternative to policing, that is. Some folks would call that "defunding the police," but I suspect they're the same people who call everything "socialism" and "Communism"; this bill wouldn't "defund the police," but would fund approaches like mental health workers and youth programs that would work better than throwing everyone in jail all the time. It'd take a lot of pressure off our police, too; I say that if you want to "support the police," you stop asking them to do every conceivable thing like our brains are that flexible.

Finally, the Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the xenophobic Title 42 program. A lot of Congressfolk -- including, even, some Democrats I actually like! -- are acting like the end of Title 42 would be the end of the world, but that's rubbish. Title 42 expels would-be immigrants without their lawfully-mandated legal hearings for "health reasons," but has it kept COVID numbers down in the U.S.? Obviously not! Right-wingers who refused to mask and refused to get vaccines powered the COVID pandemic quite well enough on their own, thank you very much! So this is no time for any politician to strut like a peacock about being "tough" on immigration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning health care, indigenous folk, good Afghans, facial recognition, and factory fur farms.

Long story short: tell Germany to support the pandemic waiver at the WTO, tell Tanzania to stop evicting indigenous folk from their ancestral lands, tell our government to release Afghani citizens' funds, tell our local governments to stop using ODIN facial recognition tech, and tell the European Union to ban fur farms. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell Germany's government to stop blocking the COVID vaccine patent waiver at the World Trade Organization (or WTO). Yeah, Germany's in on that, too, putting corporate intellectual property rights above the health of the world's people. Two and-another-things about that: one, we should be calling it, at the very least, intellectual property shared by corporations and our government, since taxpayer money and research made those vaccines, and two, by "the world's people" I mean all the world's people, not just the folks too poor to pay for COVID vaccines, because if they get it, then everyone's going to get COVID again, and maybe not as friendly a variant thereof as we've seen so far. Also, if we get Germany to back down, it'll make the Biden Administration's obstruction harder to justify.

Avaaz helps you tell Tanzania's government to stop evicting Maasai indigenous folk from their ancestral lands in the nation's northern area. It ain't just indigenous folk in the Amazon or Ecuador fighting this battle; indigenous folk are defending their land from big corporations all over the world, and it just might be that they know what's best for the land they live on. Too conservative? Not one "conservative" bloviating in public today would put indigenous people above money, even though all money goes the way of all flesh, while civilizations based on lasting values can endure forever. The Maasai may not be battling drilling and mining corporations, but they are battling a tourism/trophy hunting corporation from Saudi Arabia, so yeah, I think they know what's best for the land they've lived on for centuries.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to disperse good Afghan citizens' funds. Because the money belongs to them! And we should pressure the Taliban in ways that don't require starving Afghan people! You may well be asking yourself, self, what if the Taliban gets hold of this money before it can get to its rightful owners in Afghanistan? But I doubt they'll do that -- a government can only create so much chaos before it backfires on them, and when a mere 2% of Afghan children have enough food to eat, I think we can all see the Taliban is well past that point. Which means, again, the compassionate thing to do is also the practical thing to do. Funny how often that happens -- but not so funny how our politicians never seem to see it.

The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell your local governments to stop using ODIN facial recognition technology to spot and harass homeless folk. One more time: facial recognition technology sucks! And using it to arrest homeless folk also sucks! You know what wouldn't suck? Putting homeless folks up in tiny houses, which would cost less than picking them up and putting them in shelters or hospitals or jails. If folks saw how tiny these tiny houses would be, they wouldn't feel jealous of someone else getting "something for nothing," either. You know what else wouldn't suck? Well-funded public housing and rent control laws. When we stopped spending money on public housing in the 1980s, the homeless population exploded, and I think there's more than mere correlation there.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell the European Union to ban fur farms. Now I have nothing against folks making fur coats for themselves, just like I have nothing against folks raising chicken for themselves, but the fur farms that Italy has recently banned feature squalid conditions that you probably won't find completely unfamiliar, like almost impossibly small and almost impossibly dirty cages. That's right: fur farming is very much like factory farming of chickens and pigs in the United States! We might do better calling them factory fur farms, in fact! As I said, you want to make a coat out of animal skins, you go right ahead. But factory fur farms don't care about anything but efficiency -- or, more precisely, efficiently making their executives money -- and that goes hand-in-hand with soul-destroying cruelty.

Action: concerning corruption, taxes, health care, racism, pollution, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban themselves from stock trading, stop letting rich families evade Estate and gift taxes, lower drug prescription prices, end qualified immunity for police officers, fight plastic pollution, and save our Postal Service. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to, well, ban themselves from trading or owning individual stocks. They'll act all offended about that -- how dare you tell me I can't separate the stocks I own from the decisions I make concerning the businesses in which I own stock! Yeah, they really say stuff like that. Well, guess what? It's our job, as citizens, not to trust our Reps and Senators to do the right thing; it's our job to make them do the right thing. Owning stock in a corporation over which you may have to perform oversight duties is an invitation to corruption. And sooner or later, the 13-dimensional chess they all play in their heads will demand they accept such invitations. Unless we stop them, of course.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop America's richest families from dodging Estate and gift taxes. Which they may do over a period of decades, even centuries! All the while they get their Congressdolts to write laws which help them evade taxes, and thus deprive the rest of us of "nice things" like paid family leave, an expanded Child Tax Credit, bridges that don't collapse, and water pipes that don't poison us. Fewer of our Congressfolk want to repeal our Estate Tax than they did two decades ago, but too many still want to cut it, to "save family farms" even though no family farms have ever gone under because of our Estate Tax. So they ain't changed enough, and they won't, unless we make them.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices. We pay many times more money for prescription drugs than any other similarly-wealthy country on Earth, to the point where good Americans have to ration their insulin (and thus risk death!) just so they can make ends meet, and the only reason for any of that is big pharma greed! How much is enough for these people? And how much is enough for tools like Kyrsten Sinema, Kathleen Rice, Scott Peters, and Bob Menendez? At least eight out of every 10 Americans want Medicare to be able to negotiate its own drug prices, but the aforementioned four said no, and because Democratic margins are narrow, we can't have what we need to survive and thrive in America. So we keep telling them, until they fear being left behind, because that's all that'll get folks like that to do the right thing.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers. "Qualified immunity" is the doctrine our Supreme Court developed in the late 1960s, which basically shields civil servants from lawsuits for their wrongdoing. I guess the notion was that our government did it, not them, but every government has a few bad apples, and anyway we have tools to punish governments, like, you know, turning them out of office. But what of those individual civil servants who do the inexcusable? Like murder Black folks for the heinous crime of brandishing a cellphone? If you respond to stories like that by saying I SUPPORTZ OUR POLICEZ!!!! like a damn robot, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) consider whether you might be a slave to authority. Being a slave to authority is not a good look for a can-do American.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2238/S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. This bill would phase out a lot of single-use plastics, since they all just wind up in landfills and in our air and water anyway (remember that part), plus the bill would also force plastic manufacturing corporations to clean up the mess they've helped make, by collecting and recycling plastic products. Now, about "remembering that part": this ain't just about keeping plastic out of our landfills, or about keeping it out of our oceans where it's strangling all the life. It's also about keeping it out of our bodies, since scientists tell us we now ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic every week. Where it only does us harm! So let's fix that.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Our House passed this bill by a wide, actually-bipartisan margin last week; now it's our Senate's term, and this is not only a good bill, it's a good bill that'll actually do a lot of good, by removing the onerous mandate Congress placed on our Postal Service (to prepay decades of retiree benefits in advance, a mandate required of no other public or private entity) back in 2006. It's possible that Republican Senators, who never pass up an opportunity to do evil, will try to attach numerous poison pill amendments to a bill the American people want and should pass. Go ahead and tell them they'd better not do that, because Jesus Mary and Joseph we're not hostages, we're free people.

Around the table: exploding lies about inflation, law and order, and COVID.

Matt Stoller says about 60% of the inflation hike comes from rising corporate profits. How does he know? Long story short: inflation is five percentage points higher than it was in 2019, and the sharp spike in corporate profits probably accounts for three of those five percentage points -- and n.b. we have investment managers on the record saying that they want to find corporations with "pricing power," a power you don't have unless you also have monopoly power. Thus inflation isn't just a thing that happens, but a thing people with unearned power make happen. You'll also understand "why economists tend to dislike rules against profiteering" -- because "(p)rice gouging, they believe, transmits important information." Well, as long as we have "important information," it must be OK that people get hurt! (And seriously, why do we listen to Larry Summers? Like the proverbial fool who thinks everything's a nail because all he's got is a hammer, Mr. Summers's one solution to every problem is STOP ALLZ TEH GUBMINT SPENDINGZ!!!!)

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson says his administration will prosecute anyone who might have helped the St. Louis Post-Dispatch expose a massive security issue in a state website. Well, waaaaaaaaaah -- I mean, if you don't want to be embarrassed, don't earn embarrassment, and blowing the whistle on a state security issue ain't the same as "attempt(ing) to steal personal information and harm Missourians." Hate to beat a dead horse, but this is what happens when Democrats don't run economic populist candidates -- know-nothing, do-nothing right-wingers like Mike Parson coast to re-election.

Robyn Pennachia at Wonkette describes the mercurial rise of an anti-abortion Missouri state legislator who, our "liberal" media tell us, listens to Lizzo and Beyoncé and watches The West Wing, and I must admit that I, too, have long found it tiresome that our "liberal" media outlets go mining for the "unexpected" personal traits of right-wingers. It has the effect of "normalizing extreme viewpoints," as Ms. Pennachia says, and I wouldn't expect any right-winger to be impressed that "Okie from Muskogee" and "The Fighting Side of Me" are two of my favorite Merle Haggard songs (though neither one is "Branded Man" or "Uncle Lem."

Now an Oklahoma legislator, with obviously no intimate knowledge of Texas's notorious anti-abortion law, not only wants to give parents the "right" to demand that school libraries remove a book, but give them the "right" to "earn" a $10,000 bounty for every day the school doesn't comply. None of these efforts should survive even cursory legal scrutiny -- seriously, have none of them have ever heard of standing to sue? -- but perhaps a few authors will get a boost in their book sales if they get banned in Oklahoma. Why, authors could even try to get their Oklahoma buddies to demand that a book gets banned and then split the bounty! These right-wingers never think anything through.

J. Alexander Navarro at The Conversation reminds us that when folks got tired of wearing masks and social distancing in the 1918 flu pandemic, they paid and paid and paid. Today's lazy, entitled right-wingers won't listen to that, so maybe they'll listen to this: people don't actually want to fuck you as much as you think, so maybe you're not losing out all that much if you cover up that mug of yours.

Finally, Matt Novak at Gizmodo runs down "Fox News' Worst Lies About Covid-19 From 2021." I was actually disappointed to hear that Fox had peddled the BIG GUMMINTZ LYINGZ ABOUTZ TEH DEATHZ!!!! lie (which lie depends on a misunderstanding about the difference between reported deaths and confirmed deaths, not to mention the difference between correlation and causation), because when a relative parroted it to me for the first time I thought maybe it came from some YouTube "celebrity," not plain old rubbish-peddling Fox News. This is why we demand that our cable corporations stop carrying Fox News.

Action: concerning our "liberal" media, forced arbitration, women's health, protecting our democracy, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell CNN to ask tougher questions of U.S. Senators, tell your Congressfolk to pass the FAIR Act, and tell your Senators to pass the Women's Health Protection Act and the Protecting Our Democracy Act and to confirm Gigi Sohn as an FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

FAIR helps you tell CNN to ask tougher questions of U.S. Senators during live interviews. The occasion for this action alert is a softball interview CNN did with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ), in which CNN threw a bunch of granny balls at her, and didn't ask her about how her campaign donations might influence her actions or how she could possibly say she's serving Arizona when the good citizens of Arizona seem to disagree with everything she's doing. Big media poobahs like saying you can't ask tough questions of powerful people because then they won't come on your show anymore. I can think of a few words for that, like coddling and enabling. The powerful get too much of that in America. We have to remind our "liberal" media outlets that all that coddling and enabling is what makes good Americans hate them.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (or FAIR) Act, which would, as its title suggests, prohibit corporations from forcing you to resolve "employment, consumer, antitrust, or civil rights disputes" via an arbitration process that generally favors them, not you, and certainly not justice. (Forced arbitration clauses also generally prevent class-action suits; the bill prohibits them from doing that, too.) Do you like getting a Christmas gift that doesn't work right, only to find the corporation that made it or sold it to you won't let you go to court to redress this incident, as is your right? Then you will want your Congressfolk to make this bill into law. (Don't buy reports of four-digit "average arbitration awards," for when you lose, your "average" will be zero!)

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755, the Women's Health Protection Act. Our Supreme Court has allowed clinics to sue over Texas's notorious SB 8, but has inexplicably left the law in place while those suits work their way through the courts; only the Women's Health Protection Act will protect a woman's right to control her own damn body, and it would do a good job protecting it, both from state-level bans and from state-level obstacles (like forced ultrasound laws, laws allowing anti-abortion clinics to give false advice, and laws requiring more from abortion clinics than they require from any other health care facility). Don't believe the hype that Susan Collins wants to help codify Roe v. Wade into law, because she's already said this bill goes too far; the best way to change her mind is to flood her phonelines.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. This bill would stop future Presidents from profiting from their office, abusing their pardon power, declaring "national emergencies" whenever their ego gets bruised, and fire Inspectors General whenever they feel like, to name just four injuries Donald Trump did to this country while President. And don't brook any nonsense about how you're "rehashing the past" if you support this bill, because under that "logic," one could reject pretty much any attempt to make anything better in America! Indeed, it's almost like that's the idea! Besides which, he's running in 2024 -- he hasn't made it official, but c'mon -- which means his evil deeds are not the exclusive property of "the past."

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to be our fifth FCC Commissioner. Our Senate confirmed Jessica Rosenworcel as FCC Chair earlier this month; now they just need to confirm Ms. Sohn, and we can finally realize our dream of getting net neutrality back. That is, of course, exactly why Senators Tillis (R-NC) and Sullivan (R-AK) put a hold on her nomination earlier this month! But literally the only people who don't support net neutrality in America are a) corporate lobbyists and b) the politicians who enable them -- everyone else, conservative to liberal, supports an internet where big corporations don't get to dictate to you where you can go. It ain't just net neutrality at stake, either -- it's also all that infrastructure bill broadband investment our FCC has to manage. So let's get to it.

Action: concerning, at least one more time, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Senators to get the lead out of our drinking water, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, invest in the care economy, enact paid family/medical leave, let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and expand Medicare. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Senators to ensure that the Build Back Better Act protects our clean water by funding lead pipe removal. As you know, the infrastructure bill President Biden signed begins the work of getting the lead out of our water pipes, but will by no means finish that work, which is why the Build Back Better Act needs to finish that work. I'm reminded, in the wake of Donald Trump whining that Republicans shouldn't have passed that infrastructure bill, that Mr. Trump's own infrastructure plan was to use $150 billion in tax cuts to "attract" $1 trillion in investment -- in exactly the kinds of "infrastructure" that makes money for some boss-man but doesn't actually help anyone. Getting the lead out of our drinking water helps everyone, so let's finish the job on that.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. Here I'm reminded that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) made loud noises about the cost of the bill when she originally spoke about it, but drew all her red lines around the parts that would have paid for the bill, like raising tax rates on the wealthy and on corporations! Doing that kind of bait-and-switch does open you up to the charge of being a liar, and in a sane, moral, and decent society, she would be so ashamed of what she's done that she wouldn't run for re-election. Why do I get the sense she's even more immune to shame than many of her colleagues? Anyway, that's why we keep doing what we do.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to ensure that the Build Back Better Act funds the "care economy," i.e., things like child care and home care. Cutting child care costs in half would be, as a famous philosopher once said, a big fucking deal, and I guess it's gratifying that Senators Manchin and Sinema haven't spoken out about any desire they might have to kill it, but I sure hope I haven't summoned a demon by saying that. And again: child care subsidies aren't "communism." Ask anyone who says so what they would do about child care corporations jacking up the cost of child care simply because they can -- that is, because almost all two-parent families have two working parents. Just remember: if they respond by saying "that's a discussion we should have," they're signaling that it's a discussion they're never going to have.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Senators to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Sen. Manchin is the 50th Democratic Senator who opposes this one; he says he'd like to pass something more "bipartisan," and more specifically something that relies more on payroll taxes, but he doesn't really think Mitch McConnell will allow that to happen, does he? And frankly our House's four-week paid family/medical leave plan is better, since it doesn't rely on regressive payroll taxes for funding. (Not incidentally, it also doesn't violate President Biden's requirement that the bill raise zero taxes on folks making less than $400,000 annually.) Now, previous paid family/medical leave bills did rely on payroll taxes, and they weren't onerous, but why do the worse thing if you can do the better thing?

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, Penn PIRG, and More Perfect Union all help you demand that your Senators put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. This was the other pay-for Kyrsten Sinema drew a red line against: the notion that Medicare could actually save the taxpayer money by negotiating for lower drug prices for American seniors. Seems the only folks who favor higher drug prices for seniors are the big pharma execs and the politicians who take their money. And when big pharma CEOs say that Medicare drug price negotiation will "cripple innovation," just remember that innovation only comes from necessity, not from comfort. Also remember that folks who have all the money don't "innovate" anything except how to get more money.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Joe Manchin doesn't like this, either, and to justify his opposition he mouthed a bunch of word salad about making sure Medicare is solvent first. Maybe he was just trying to avoid saying that he's been collecting a lot of money lately from big Republican donors with whom he previously had no connection. I should say that he and Sen. Sinema have been doing that, of course, and folks who shrug and say money talks really need to ask themselves: should politicians only listen to big donors? Politicians have to listen to their real bosses, their constituents, and most good Americans would have their Senators vote differently on a lot of these matters.

Action: concerning Medicare, Guantánamo Bay, vaccines, Arctic drilling, public water, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, close Guantánamo Bay, prevent big pharma monopolies from stopping worldwide vaccine production, ban Arctic drilling, and stop private corporations from taking water from our public lands, and tell corporations to stop bankrolling the campaigns of Texas state legislators. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Word on the street is that the House Energy and Commerce Committee, currently marking up the Build Back Better Act, actually doesn't have the votes to pass Medicare drug pricing reform. Virtually everyone thinks Medicare should be able to negotiate drug prices -- everyone, that is, except big pharma corporations, who appear to be getting all the say about everything, yet again. This is why independents vote Republican in the midterms -- because Democrats are too scared to offend their big donors and do big things. And in 2022, it'll be worse, because most of the Republicans running will be out-and-out fascists. The three members of the Committee most opposed to Medicare drug pricing reform are Rep. Schrader (D?-OR), Rep. Rice (D?-NY) and Rep. Peters (D?-CA). If you're a constituent of any of these three, please call them and tell them to do the right thing, not least because the alternative is fascists taking Congress. Call them even if you're not a constituent, though. It's that important. And big pharma ain't anyone's "constituent," so any Rep who treats them like one has pretty much forfeited the right to nitpick about whether any of their callers are constituents.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center already. He promised he would, so he ought to keep that promise! As you know, Saturday marked the 20-year anniversary of 9.11, which means almost 20 years of pretending the "terrorists" we've held in Guantánamo Bay without charge and without trial were "too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release," in the Obama Administration's immortal words. It was all a lie, and we have done our civilization incalculable damage since 9.11 -- and if right-wing crybabies get their way, as they far too often do, we'll continue to suffer the fruits of that damage for years to come. That makes it all the more urgent that we close this self-inflicted wound on our national honor.

Rethink Trade helps you tell the Biden Administration to use every tool at their disposal to ensure vaccines can be produced and administered worldwide. Because the alternative is COVID-19 mutating and coming back to bite us in the ass again and again -- recall that scientists first spotted the Delta variant, currently slicing its way through red states, in India. At the point of life-or-death, things like "big pharma's intellectual property rights" don't matter a whole lot -- or, at least, they shouldn't. And "every tool at their disposal" means pushing for an intellectual property waiver from the WTO, of course, but it also means using already-existing legal authority to force big pharma corporations to produce vaccines worldwide. Taxpayer money invested in them, after all -- taxpayers like you and I paid for the Moderna vaccine in its entirety, in fact -- so we get a say in how they're used.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell our government to stop drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). Opening up ANWR to oil drilling was a key "achievement" of the Trump Administration, but we all know why we would put "achievement" in quotation marks there -- scientists have long told us we're not getting very much oil out of ANWR, and we know that drilling in the Arctic Ocean presents unique problems, like the near-impossibility of cleaning up the inevitable oil spills in near-freezing water. But you know, the will of the Gwich'in Native Americans who live there, and the Porcupine caribou they depend upon, aren't chopped liver, either. Often, the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do -- but too often, the politicians ignore both in favor of whatever pleases some crony or other. You can fight that by leaving a public comment opposing Arctic drilling.

Environmental Action helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to deny any permit applications to corporations attempting to draw water from our San Bernardino National Forest in California. BlueTriton, formerly Nestlé Waters North America, drew some 58 million gallons of water from Strawberry Creek in the aforementioned San Bernardino National Forest just last year, but at least California wasn't in a state of drought or anything. Oh, wait, they were! And the drought is even worse this year! This, as farmers struggle to water their crops, to the point where they actually use fracking wastewater on them. Hmm, fracking wastewater on crops, private water siphoning -- could it be that preventing the latter could make the former unnecessary? Why, yes, it could -- but only if we speak out in numbers they can't ignore.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop bankrolling the campaigns of Texas's most extreme right-wing legislators. These would be the legislators who passed both SB 1, Texas's notorious anti-voting law, and SB 8, Texas's notorious abortion ban, and if corporations want to do something more than issue PR releases sympathetic to the plight of women, they can, you know, stop bankrolling the campaigns of these politicians. Of course, they may not want to do more than issue sympathetic PR releases, which is why we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR. (As an aside, don't be too impressed that Salesforce has vowed to relocate any Texas employee who wants to leave because of SB 8. If you're an employee who requests that, your boss has just learned a lot about you, and you're much better off keeping yourself to yourself as much as possible at your job.)

UPDATE. And on cue: Rep. Kathleen Rice (D?-NY) says she cannot support Medicare drug price negotiation because it is "not fiscally responsible." Wondering how saving the taxpayers $84 billion every year is "not fiscally responsible"? Yes, I bet you are, as is any sentient life form on Earth. Her D.C. office number is 202.225.5516. She deserves to lose her re-election bid, and the way Republicans are going, she'll lose it to Zombie Adolf Hitler.

Action: concerning infrastructure, fracking, police, privacy, endangered species, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our FCC to better protect communication infrastructure, tell the DRBC to ban fracking-related activities from the Delaware River Basin, tell President Biden to demilitarize our police, tell our FTC to punish T-Mobile for its latest data breach, tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to do better at saving red wolves, and tell AT&T to stop funding anti-abortion politicians in Texas. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to better protect our communications infrastructure from the effects of climate change. And if that means issuing new regulations that make corporations build better infrastructure, too bad! Where private corporations refuse to do their job, government must step in, and by the looks of New Orleans's power outage, the private corporations that "manage" New Orleans's electricity ain't doing their job: aside from the loss of phone services (many of which are cable-provided now!), 911 calls didn't get answered for over 12 hours after the storm hit, and since AT&T manages that service in New Orleans, you can hang that on AT&T. But you'd rather be able to hang it on your government, since you can better fight them if they screw up. AT&T executives can wipe their asses with hundred-dollar bills, so they're immune to accountability.

Food and Water Action helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) that it should allow no activities related to fracking near the Delaware River. Fracking you can understand, since it would put dangerous chemicals in a river serving citizens of five American states, and indeed the DRBC did ban fracking in the Delaware River watershed last year. But the DRBC might consider letting gas drilling corporations siphon off Delaware River water to use in fracking elsewhere! That's our drinking water, dammit! The DRBC might also decide to let these corporations store or dispose of fracking waste in the Basin, and, again, that's our drinking water, dammit! Calling that a compromise would be like if King Solomon actually split the baby in half, so let's not let that happen.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden to demilitarize our police. Police don't need tanks and grenade launchers to arrest folks and serve warrants -- they "need" them to put down the good Americans who protest police brutality! I mean, if you want to go by how these military weapons actually get used. President Biden pledged to end the 1033 program that lets local police departments buy surplus weapons from our military -- but then, says word on the street, police unions got in his grill about it and made him back down. That means we have to get in his grill and make him keep his promise to us! Folks who whine that vaccine mandates are "Nazism" really ought to take another look at police officers who walk the streets armed like soldiers.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to punish T-Mobile for its latest data breach, which has potentially exposed the birthdate, driver's license number, and Social Security number of 50 million good Americans to identity thieves. Why, you can rig up a fake identity on one or two of those items, let alone three! And this is the fifth big data breach at T-Mobile in just three years, so we can look forward to another round of apologies and we'll-do-betters from T-Mobile executives -- who will then do nothing, because, as I put it earlier, they can wipe their asses with hundred-dollar bills. But, again, where big corporations won't do their job, our government has to step in and do it, hence we call upon our FTC to hold T-Mobile accountable. Our FTC has good people in charge of it now, but we still must communicate our will.

The Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to do better at saving red wolves, one of the most endangered species on Earth, given that there are only nine of them at present, where there were 130 as recently as 15 years ago. Our laws mandate that our Fish & Wildlife Service look for a place for them to live in peace (where they won't get hunted or hunt other species into endangerment), but word on the street is that they've let themselves be hamstrung by a single well-connected property developer into abandoning their lawful duty. Federal judges have twice told our Fish & Wildlife Service to do its job, and yet they act like our laws mandate that single property developers get a veto over the law whenever they like. That's not very law and order of them, so we should stop it.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell AT&T to speak out against the Texas abortion ban and stop funding anti-abortion politicians there. They'll probably stop at doing the first, which is why we're telling them to do both -- PR releases aren't worthless in and of themselves, but they are worthless without action, and they're certainly worthless if AT&T keeps funding the campaigns of the same politicians who enacted the nefarious abortion ban! AT&T will probably retort that they fund those politicians for "economic" reasons, or even that they won't have enough "access" if they don't fund these clowns. But would that be the can-do attitude of the free market? Because it sounds more like "we've got the power and we're not going to use it." But the Big Stick of Bad PR beats any carefully-worded corporate PR release. And we're not afraid to use that.

Around the table: from corporate electric utilities to Democrat weakness.

Thomas M. Hanna at In These Times argues that New Orleans's loss of electricity after Hurricane Ida proves "We Need Public Control of Our Energy Systems." You know, if that Enron BS in California in 2002, or Texas's utter failure to keep the lights on in a snowstorm in 2021, didn't already prove that! Recall that Greg Palast recently characterized what happened in New Orleans last week as something that wouldn't happen in Bangladesh during a monsoon. Mr. Hanna lists yet more of Entergy's sins in New Orleans, and also informs us that Sacramento's publicly-owned electric utility has functioned well through wildfires and worse. (You may remember that Nebraska is the only state in America which uses entirely publicly-owned electric utilities.)

An AP/Univision/Center for Public Integrity story finds that our USPS managers have been stealing wages from mail carriers for years. You may get that Louis DeJoy stink off this story, but this has been going on at least since at least 2005; managers got "disciplined" with things like more training, which, like, how much "training" do you need not to change your workers' time cards? Just so happens 2006 was the year our government mandated that our Postal Service pre-pay retiree benefits 80-odd years in advance, which has pushed our Postal Service almost $200 billion in debt even as it's cut over 140,000 jobs over the last 13 years; gosh, could all of that have something to do with the wage theft they tolerate? Remember: when something goes wrong, look to the bosses first.

Federal judge grants immunity from further prosecution to the Sackler family -- until recently the owners of Purdue Pharma, now widely-hated as the corporation that got everyone hooked on OxyContin -- as part of a bankruptcy settlement. Naturally the Sacklers admit no wrongdoing -- because settlements can't even get that done anymore! -- and though they'll lose Purdue and $4.3 billion as part of the settlement, they'll still get to hold on to over $5 billion and they'll still be one of America's wealthiest families. Law and order! At least our Justice Department plans to seek a stay on the judge's ruling; how vigorously they'll seek it I can't say, but I'm old enough to remember when a Democratic Administration wouldn't even do that, because looking forward economic crisis free markets.

I'm not a fan of headlines like "John Roberts Has Lost Control of the Supreme Court," because why do we assume this? Why do we assume that he's actually been trying to "control" the Court? Why don't we imagine that the chaos we saw over their non-grant of the ACLU's emergency petition to stop the Texas abortion law from going into effect -- a ruling that doesn't even rate as a conservative argument! -- is the desired end result? Yeah, I know he excoriated the ruling in his own opinion, but that could just be part of the drama: he gets to act all principled about precedent, while he also knows our Court has enough far right-wingers now that it doesn't matter.

Finally, Paul Waldman, in writing that "The Harsh Truth of This Moment" is that "Republicans Understand Power" and "Democrats Do Not," has just about summed up the last 40 years of American politics. It's enough to make you think that even when the Democrats passed a COVID relief bill that was actually as good as the HEROES Act of 2020, they were just playing us -- they have no intention of doing anything else that could actually make America a more perfect union, and that bodes ill for the budget reconciliation bill they have to pass this month. I think the American people have something to say about that -- but we have to actually say it.

Action: concerning the Amazon indigenous, taxes, jobs spending, privatization, chemical safety, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell Brazil's government to protect the rights of indigenous folks from corporate land-rapers, tell your Congressfolk to fund our IRS, fund home and community care, reject the privatization of public assets, and protect us from PFAS chemicals, and tell your Senators to pass the Equality Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: Sum of Us helps you tell Brazil's Congress to reject a bill that would allow the Brazilian government to force indigenous peoples from their lands in the Amazon rain forest so that big corporations can develop it. It's not just that the Amazon rain forest is the greatest carbon capture machine the world has ever seen, it's that people live there, and people are more important than profits, more important than development, and more important than some politician's "legacy." Besides, the indigenous people of the Amazon have been a thorn in Jair Bolsonaro's side since day one of his ignominous reign, and any enemy of Jair Bolsonaro is a friend of mine. And yours.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our IRS so it can catch more tax cheats. People who avoid their taxes cheat all of us, after all -- they cheat all of us out of roads, bridges, schools, police officers, firefighters, and libraries. Naturally Republicans have balked at more funding for the IRS as a way of helping to pay for the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" they're continuing to hash out, plus the ProPublica reporting about rich folks' tax evasion has made Republicans more defensive of rich folks than of the rest of us, whom they have cheated. I guess they're objectively pro-crime, then! Why do Democrats not paint them this way every day? Because it would be "uncivil"?

The National Domestic Workers Alliance helps you tell Democratic Senate Majority Leader Schumer to ensure the $400 billion proposal for care infrastructure makes it into the big reconciliation bill Democrats are planning later on this year. Presumably Democrats will pass that without Republican help, so all we need to do now is ensure that Democrats don't eject it from the bill because, oh, gosh, I don't know? Because they like shooting themselves in the foot? Because "bipartisanship"? Because debt and spending and I'M SCARRRREEEEDDDDD!!!!!! OK, maybe I'm being a bit harsh, this time -- our government has never invested this much in home and community care before, prospect of creating a million jobs or not. But if you want to make progress, you have to take big steps. Bigger than Democrats are accustomed to taking, to be sure, but we need to be the spine in their back. At least then they'll have a spine.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk not to let the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" privatize public assets in order to pay for other public assets. President Biden wanted to fund it with higher corporate taxes, but Republicans, being the party of "fiscal responsibility," prefer smoke and mirrors, like "user fees" and selling off some bridges and roads and suchlike in order to pay for others. But we need only look to Chicago's privatized parking meters and Bayonne's privatized water system to see what that bodes for America -- higher prices and worse service. You know, like they're trying to do with our Postal Service. Who voted for that? I don't think even Trump voters voted for that.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3990/S. 2047, the No PFAS in Cosmetics Act. PFAS chemicals, as you may know, are the "forever chemicals" you find in carpeting, cookware, food packaging -- and, eventually, in our drinking water and our bodies, where it might well help give you and/or your loved ones cancer, a weakened immune system, or a learning disability. You also find it in cosmetics, and though you may not wear makeup, someone else does, and they wash it off their face at night, and then guess where it goes? Into your drinking water, and into your body. (Consumer Reports also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, which would do more about PFAS chemicals generally; the former bill has a better chance of passing, but there's no reason you can't say you support both.)

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The other side has their people calling their Senators going WAAAAAAAAAAH WHATZ ABOUTZ MY RELIGUZ BELIEFZ!!!!!! and WAAAAAAAAAAAH TEH BOYZ WILLZ BEATZ TEH GURLZ ATZ TEH FIELD HOCKEYZ!!!!!!, so we need to be on the horn with our Senators talking about stopping banks and bosses and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folks, which is what the Equality Act is actually about. Republican Senators, in particular, pretend the hysterical opinions count more than yours. But we civilized people must make our will unmistakable.

Action: concerning monopolies, "fraudits," private militaries, paid family/medical leave, expanding Medicare, and expanding broadband.

Long story short: tell President Biden to enact vigorous anti-monopoly regulations, tell PA state legislators to reject another election "fraudit," and tell your Congressfolk to outlaw government use of private militaries, enact paid family/medical leave, expand Medicare coverage, and build out broadband. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

President Biden, as you may know, issued an Executive Order late last week requiring Executive branch agencies to fight corporate monopolies a lot harder than our government has done for the last 40 years, but, as you know, the devil is always in the details, so Public Citizen helps you tell Biden Administration agencies to enact the most vigorous anti-monopoly regulations possible. Good anti-monopoly regulations wouldn't just mean cheaper hearing aids, though that's no small thing; it could also mean an end to early termination fees that keep you from choosing a different internet provider, an end to cellphone corporations "locking out" independent computer repair stores, and an end to "non-compete agreements" that keep workers in one place forever -- not to mention an end to big pharma price-gouging and big telecom mergers. We should fight for these things, and we should remember that the big corporations and the corrupt politicians who fight against them are evil.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators you don't want them to conduct a "fraudit" of the 2020 election like Arizona's doing. Like Arizona, Pennsylvania has already conducted multiple audits of the 2020 election's accuracy, so let's oppose any one Senator's efforts to waste taxpayer money just to do a "fraudit" that might tell sore losers what they want to hear. And don't believe the argument that "people have questions about this election," because they don't. What some people have are the same lies Donald Trump has been feeding them for over eight months, which other Republicans have repeated and amplified. And I'm tired of right-wing rage making all the decisions around here.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban any state or federal government use of private military. The news hook, of course, is South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who really must be completely unworried about re-election, using a Tennessee gazillionaire donation to fund a state National Guard adventure at our Southern border over 1300 miles away. Needless to say, this is a bad idea, regardless of how you might feel about immigration -- an army answerable only to a gazillionaire, rather than the American people who pay the taxes to fund said army? I wish I could say it was unprecedented; the use of mercenaries is as old as the hills, and you likely remember how many Blackwater mercenaries, who were paid much better than our soldiers, operated in Iraq. So this is a cancer we need to cut out.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to put paid leave in the American Jobs Plan. Yeah, I know what President Biden and 20 Senators negotiated, but they're supposed to negotiate with us, not each other. And things like paid family/medical leave, investing in child care programs, and making the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent are actually pretty popular -- a lot more popular than Republicans saying no to everything or insisting on investing in "real" infrastructure or thinking we're going to pay for it with more smoke and mirrors. Seriously, nobody would run through a wall for any of that, which is why Republicans constantly try to enrage and distract people with whining about transgender folks and critical race theory. If we make our voices heard above the din, then the din will lose. It's that simple.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare in the American Jobs Plan. Again: who cares what the politicians want? Lowering the Medicare age to 60 would be a good first step in lowering that age to zero, as we must eventually do, and expanding Medicare to include vision/dental/hearing is also the right thing to do. And you know expanding Medicare coverage also creates jobs. After all, who's going to be providing all that extra care? Robots? At the risk of piling on, the poverty rate of seniors before Medicare was a lot higher than it is now; what a shame that too many seniors continue to vote for the right-wing politicians who would take all of that away from them.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act in the American Jobs Plan. You recall how much time you had to spend on the internet just to do work this past year? And how much time your kids had to spend on the internet just to go to school this past year? And do you find, every time you get your cable bill, that you're paying more and more for less and less? That's why we need the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act -- it would not only help build out the high-speed broadband we all need more and more, it would help small communities create their own broadband systems that would compete with the big telecoms who constantly overcharge you and give you lousy service. Ask the good folks of Chattanooga, TN how much better off they are with that city's municipal broadband network, and you'd be even more eager to imagine a world without Verizon and Comcast dictating terms to you.

Action: concerning taxes, child care, drug approvals, renewable energy, Exxon lobbyists, and racist podcasts.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and invest in child care, tell our FDA to rescind its approval of a controversial Alzheimer's drug, write a letter-to-the-editor supporting renewable energy investment, tell your Congressfolk to shun Exxon lobbyists, and tell Google to get rid of racist podcasts. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact at least $4 trillion over the next decade in tax hikes on the rich. Republicans keep pretending that the point of all these the-rich-don't-pay-taxes stories is TEH IRS IZ TEH EVILZ!!!!, rather than, you know, the rich don't pay enough in taxes. And then they throw up their hands and say "nothing can be done!" when you press them on Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk paying zero dollars for entire calendar years and 55 big corporations paying nothing in 2020. You know what, though? Something can be done -- you can change the law, and then you can enforce the law. What else do we ask of our government, after all?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in child care. Republicans say that's not "real infrastructure," but what builds a civilization, other than people? They brag about how much more money households have made since Reagan without mentioning that households were one-income households before Reagan and generally two-income households thereafter, and in two-income households, who's doing the child care? Grandma can't do everything, after all, and deserves a break, quite frankly! Investing $700 billion over the next decade in affordable child care every American can get without paying an arm and a leg is investing in the infrastructure of our civilization, no matter how pedantic Republicans want to be about it. And investing in child care also means investing in jobs, done by people. So let's do it.

Public Citizen still helps you tell our FDA to revoke its suspicious approval of the putative Alzheimer's drug, aducanumab. Our FDA has narrowed its recommendations for prescribing aducanumab, after a long and sustained public outcry (of which you may have been a part!) over all the suspicious activity surrounding aducanumab's approval, but that ain't good enough: the drug caused 40% -- 40%! -- of test subjects to get brain bleeding and swelling, and our FDA's own independent advisors urged them not to approve it. Plus, it'll cost over $50,000 annually per patient, which will surely test Medicare's ability to provide other drugs to seniors, since it may not be able to afford them. So, yeah, let's stop this.

Environment America helps you write a letter to the editor of your local paper supporting more investment in renewable energy. I surely don't need to say why by now! But, OK: renewable energy uses the sunlight that's already falling and the wind that's already blowing, pollutes less, and contributes less to climate change, plus it encourages more self-reliance, rather than reliance on electric utilities. That's right, more self-reliance! This is why you occasionally see Tea Party groups jump on the renewable energy bandwagon -- and it's why right-wing opposition to renewable energy so frequently devolves into absurdity. Having your own power source, one that helps conserve the planet -- you see what I did there, I trust.

In a peripherally-related note, 350.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to pledge never to meet with Exxon lobbyists again. You'll know the news hook, of course: Exxon lobbyists got caught on tape bragging about how they've stymied efforts to include climate change-related initiatives in the American Jobs Plan. Yikes, who the hell brags about that? You brag about your kid hitting three home runs in a baseball game, not about slowing down progress so you can make more money. Of course, journalists in 2015 found that Exxon had spent close to 40 years knowing climate change was coming and lying about it so they wouldn't have to change. That's another hell of a thing to take to the Pearly Gates. And that's why our Congressfolk should shun them.

Finally, ParentsTogetherAction helps you tell Google Podcasts to get rid of all the Nazi wannabes, conspiracy theorists, and other nutjobs. Kids listen to this stuff, after all! You have a responsibility not to let your podcasts tell kids to kill the Jews! And the specious "free speech" argument should be losing by now. Do Nazi wannabes have a right to free speech? Of course they do! But they do not have a "right" to have their speech broadcast. In a sane, moral, and decent society, Nazi wannabes would have to fight like dogs to get heard; in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, which cares only about drama, they don't. Let's make Google help us work for the former and against the latter.

Action: concerning voting rights, the filibuster, communications policy, and chemical plant safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and get rid of the filibuster, tell President Biden to nominate a fifth FCC Commissioner already, and tell our EPA to enact vigorous chemical plant safety regulations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Plus Daily Kos helps you sign up to call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator, the notorious Joe Manchin, to vote for the For the People Act. Nearly four out of five West Virginians support the For the People Act, so we really ought to help them communicate their will to the man who should be doing their will, rather than sacrificing their will to the Golden Idol of Bipartisanship. Particularly "bipartisanship" with a party that only wants to obstruct the people's will, but which tried to overturn the 2020 election results! Why do we keep having to say this? Why do politicians keep "working with" people who do not work? (I know the answers, of course, but that doesn't make it any less absurd.)

Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill does one thing the For the People Act does not do: it restores our government's ability to reject voting rights changes at the state level by rewriting the Voting Rights Act's pre-clearance formula so that any state or locality with a record of vote suppression (not just certain Southern ones, per the Voting Rights Act) must submit its voting law changes for federal Justice Department pre-clearance. I would have put that with the For the People Act and thus made it even harder for its opponents to lie about it -- really, from Joe Manchin to Lindsey Graham, they're doing a bad job of it! -- but while they're two bills, we should tell our Congressfolk to support both.

Pursuant to these goals, both Public Citizen and NETWORK help you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I've been telling people for 12 years or so that we need to make the filibuster a talking filibuster, so that you at least have to earn your obstruction -- like Strom Thurmond did, not even drinking water for 72 hours so he could filibuster civil rights legislation -- but these Senators don't seem to understand what earning is like, so we have to treat them like the three-year-olds they seem to be too much of the time, and take away the toy they're using to lay waste to the country we love. Seriously, I've tried to be nurturing, but I don't have infinite patience, either.

Demand Progress helps you tell President Biden to nominate a fifth FCC Commissioner. I know he's had a lot to do, but it's been almost six months, and we need a fifth FCC Commissioner to get anything done. Currently our FCC has a 2-2 split between Democrat and Republican appointees; Joe Biden won the Presidency, so he gets to appoint the fifth. And yet he hasn't done it. We don't just need our FCC to reinstate net neutrality; chances are Congress will also approve a massive broadband buildout, and our FCC will need to oversee that -- and you can just imagine the two Republican Commissioners just saying no to everything, in the style of their Personal Lord and Savior, Mitch McConnell? Yes, you can. Get on President Biden's case and we can avert this catastrophe, too.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous chemical plant safety regulations possible. America suffers an accident at a chemical plant more than once every four days, and these accidents can not only kill and injure good Americans, but poison the air and water where good Americans live. And not for nothing, but chemical plants seem to cluster in poor and Black areas of the country and I wonder why? Because folks with means can get all NIMBY and get results, perhaps? Frankly, it's cruel to do that to poor and Black folks. We're all Americans, after all. You wouldn't want a poor Black kid to get asthma he never would have gotten if he'd lived in your neighborhood.

Around the table: do not give corporations taxpayer money as an "incentive," and other lessons that bear repeating.

Headline of the year so far from Vox: "Robots Were Supposed to Take Our Jobs. Instead, They're Making Them Worse." After you read about all the Amazon warehouse workers getting fired for not moving fast enough and the gig workers who get offered $2 delivery jobs, you may come away thinking, as I did, that the "drive for efficiency" at work too often turns into a need for controlling workers and redistributing their hard-earned income upward. Plus delivery drivers no longer get incentives, like more pay, to work harder -- now they get disciplined if they don't work harder. The future, ladies and gentlemen! (As an aside, I am of course quite glad to read that someone else hates automated supermarket checkouts as much as I do.)

The Associated Press assures us, in an excellent report, that Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin's "private equity résumé draws scrutiny in Virginia," as it should -- putting seniors out on the street after your bankster firm buys their mobile home park is an ad that should write itself, and the Carlyle Group's rather intimate involvement in the Iraq war should finish Mr. Youngkin with independents. But, alas, Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe also invested in the Carlyle Group! Literally, that is! To the tune of at least $690,000! Again, this is why Democrats lose -- you catch their fingers in the same cookie jar and people just throw up their hands. Not to say Mr. McAuliffe will lose, but I'd lay money the 2021 election will be as close as the 2013 election, when he barely beat Ken Cuccinelli, arguably the furthest-right individual holding statewide office at the time.

When I heard about the seven House Democrats in Trump-won districts "balking" at the upcoming reconciliation bill, I said to myself, so this is how it begins! But then I read Axios's actual report about the matter, and I think they're dramatically overstating the case. Your first clue is Rep. Cindy Axne (D-IA) saying that broadband and child care actually are infrastructure, and by the end, you may conclude, as I did, that five of these seven House Democrats will vote for the reconciliation bill, whether they can make it more to their liking or not. You may or may not conclude, as I have, that the other two (who didn't say) are probably toast in 2022 anyway.

Ho hum, ProPublica finds that too many corporations took Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) money in 2020 but still laid off workers. Also, our government opened too many loopholes allowing big corporations and foreign corporations to pretend they were small businesses and get PPP money, and our government made it too easy to get the loans "forgiven," meaning they all essentially became corporate welfare. The lesson, once again: you don't give a corporation taxpayer money as an "incentive" not to fire people, you make them not fire people. The corollary lesson: never let Republicans manage a crisis, because they only take care of bosses.

Ho hum, Paul LePage will run for Governor again in Maine in 2022, despite having actually carried out his threat to move to Florida after Democrats recaptured the Governor's mansion in 2018. Were you just thinking "gosh, I've really missed all his whining about instant runoff voting"? Then you're in luck! Though he's not exactly in luck, not now -- 37% and 48% (his share of the vote in 2010 and 2014, you'd think these facts would have induced more humility) ain't gonna win it now. And hey, speaking of Florida, he's still a registered voter there, which means he'd be exactly the sort of fellow right-wingers whine about when they whine about voter fraud, except, of course, that he's one of them. Plus he may also have broken Florida law by failing to deregister himself when he moved back to Maine. Law and order!

Finally, Texas's Lieutenant Governor orders the cancellation of an event in an Austin history museum where the authors of Forget the Alamo -- a book critically reviewing the facts and myths of Texas's founding -- planned to give a talk. Once again, right-wingers indulge in literal "cancel culture" while decrying it! I don't mean to assert that the Bullock Texas State History Museum had a legal obligation to host the talk, but I do mean to assert that the people who cancelled it are cowards and hypocrites, and that our First Amendment doesn't protect them from me saying so.

Around the table: enough of the damn drama, part 988.

Our Supreme Court just loves to save the best for last: they strike down California's big donor disclosure law, claiming that it exposes said big donors to harassment and intimidation, and they uphold a pair of Arizona voter restrictions, claiming that they don't oppress minority voters the way plaintiffs (and the Ninth Circuit) said they do. Remember when our Court said campaign finance disclosure ought to compensate for the problem of letting people donate whatever they like? That might have been BS, just like it was when Mitch McConnell said it over 20 years ago. And they're apparently prepared to wait until legislators are stupid enough to write down WE HATEZ TEH BLACKZ!!!!! directly into their laws before acting on vote suppression. Or maybe not even then! I guess those unorthodox 6-3 decisions were just to put us off our guard.

Jennifer Rubin, one of the Washington Post's many never-Trumpers, suggests that Republicans want the infrastructure fight to be "all about process" because the actual infrastructure projects are popular with Republican rank-and-file voters. But of course, this could all be drama: Republicans pitch a fit over the "bad faith" of Democrats, and then Joe Biden, to "reassure" them, gives up the reconciliation bill Democrats will pass afterward. Or maybe Kyrsten Sinema steps up to say she just can't in good conscience support whatever reconciliation bill Democrats come up with. No one snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like the Democrats, and there are still a million ways to lose this thing -- unless, of course, we make that impossible for them.

In a related note, Republicans are now fixating on the IRS funding provision as a reason to oppose the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal." After all, no one cares when Republicans go back on their word, but the mere appearance of going back on your word is of course fatal to Democrats! Hilariously, Sen. Graham wonders aloud how much good $40 billion more would do, when the first sentence of the article reminds us that everyone involved in the "deal" (including Sen. Graham) agreed that $40 billion would harvest about $100 billion in otherwise-undetected tax evasion. That's not the kind of stupidity that can stand very much sunlight. Right?

But if you're looking for a sign that Democrats actually do know how to do politics, the House plans to vote on removing Confederate statues from our nation's Capitol early next week. Republicans could be impaled on the horns of a trilemma here: if you want to be the objectively pro-Confederate statue Congressperson, you go right ahead, and if you want to alienate Trumphole voters by voting to remove them, you go right ahead, and if you don't want to take a stand either way but just want to complain about Democrats playing politics, you go right ahead. I'll admit that Kevin McCarthy's response -- "all the statues were Democrats" -- made me laugh.

You may have heard that a certain former President's corporation now faces charges of fraud (and its CFO faces charges of grand larceny) in New York state, and Donald Trump responds in, apparently, the only way he can, by saying that the charges are part of a "political Witch Hunt by the Radical Left Democrats" that is "dividing our Country like never before!" "Never before"? It's like we never fought a Civil War! Could this incessant whining be the reason 54% of the electorate in 2016 and 53% in 2020 voted for someone, anyone, other than him? (Ransom note-style caps, by the way, come from the original text, as always.)

Finally, Bush the Lesser Defense Secretary/Iraq war hawk Donald Rumsfeld has died at the age of 88. You know, I used to be sad when my enemies died -- sad when Ronald Reagan died, sad when William F. Buckley, Jr., died, sad when Antonin Scalia died, even -- but not now. Could it be that my enemies used to be formidable but have gotten so, so much more stupid and venal over the years? Could it be that I became a man and put away childish things like "respecting your enemy"? I suppose it could be both, but I'm pretty sure it's at least the former.

Action: concerning jobs, education, discrimination, corporate spying, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal," and pass the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act, the Equality Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Today's another good day to tell your Congressfolk you oppose the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" struck between Joe Biden and a cadre of 20 Senators from both parties; Food and Water Action helps you do that because the "deal" would privatize a lot of public infrastructure, although, frankly, there's a lot of good reasons to oppose it. And don't brook any whining about "bipartisanship" from your friends and neighbors: it's far less important that "the two parties work together" than that our government govern well, and if that means the Party of Sedition can't get its way, well, maybe they could try going down the no-sedition path next election! If you're feeling especially ornery, ask your "bipartisan" friends and neighbors how Republicans have improved Joe Biden's American Jobs Plan. Because it sure seems to me the Republican plan is to build a lot less of what we need, privatize things we need to keep public, and pay for it with smoke and mirrors. Really, it's not "just another opinion" if that opinion happens to suck.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4011/S. 2125, the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act. Putting cops in schools hasn't made kids safer -- it certainly hasn't made them safer from cops! -- and this bill would redirect federal funding away from putting cops in schools and toward putting nurses, counselors, and other health professionals in schools so kids can get the help they need, rather than the back of some police officer's hand. Spare the rod, spoil the child, they say, but that doesn't mean only use the rod, either. I sure hope the folks who call this "defunding the police" don't take credit for it we actually make schools get safer because we're actually helping kids do better.

The Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Let's review: the Equality Act would prevent landlords, banks, and employers from discriminating against gay and transgender folk merely on the basis of being gay or transgender. It would do so by adding gay and transgender folks to the list of protected classes in the Civil Rights Act. Note well, whenever someone calls the Equality Act "an assault on religious freedom," that the Civil Rights Act already has a broad exemption for religious organizations, which the Equality Act does not amend. I would hate to think that right-wingers just see religion as mainly a matter of hating gays, transgender folks, and women. If so, they're really missing out.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Your internet service providing corporation can't sell your private data to law enforcement, but it can sell it to a third-party data-hoovering corporation, which can then sell it to law enforcement. Nice work if you can get it! The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would close that loophole, and Congress may be anxious to listen to us on this matter, since no one in America is :"objectively pro-handing over your private data to law enforcement without a warrant." No one except the folks who make money from it, that is. But this is America! They don't get all the say about everything!

Finally, Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Even good liberals frequently tell me that paying for all that health insurance is going to be very hard. After all, the Mercatus Center says Medicare for All would cost $32 trillion over the next decade! That's a lot of money! What they don't tell you, of course, is that our Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has predicted that America will spend $49 trillion on health insurance over the same time period -- which means you just have to capture the money that's going to gild the plumbing on some health care CEO's 19th vacation home and redirect it toward Medicare. We can do that with an employer-side payroll tax, in the amount corporations already pay private health insurers, that wouldn't cost workers a penny more. So what are we waiting for again?

Around the table: congratulations, you're a socialist! Part 383.

Sonali Kohatkar assures us that "Socialism Has a PR Problem, and It Can Be Solved." She doesn't really say how, though, except to remind Americans that right-wing authoritarian regimes are more prevalent in Latin America than socialist ones, and also to remind us (as India Walton does) that right-wingers are fine with "socialism for the rich." From my perspective, all Americans are socialists already -- unless, you know, they don't pay taxes and don't drive roads and don't call cops and I could go on -- and socialist policy prescriptions (hello, Medicare for All!) are actually quite popular. The PR, I guess, is you tell people that, and you don't back down -- in fact, the more fierce you are, the better. Definitely don't sound like an egghead.

Here's an interesting poll result in Arizona: not only do more Arizonans disapprove of the Cyber Ninjas' "fraudit" than approve, but the "strongly disapprove" numbers are rather higher than the "strongly approves," and independent voters disapprove by an 18-point margin. I used to say you can't win elections just by pointing out how big an ogre your opponent is, but maybe I was wrong -- maybe it just took time for most other liberals to get as angry about right-wing shenanigans as I've been for close to 20 years now. Or maybe it took the biggest ogre of them all.

In a related note, more partisan media outlets are seeing their online traffic numbers circle the toilet now that Donald Trump's out of office. "Left-leaning" outlets are actually suffering a bit less than "mainstream" outlets, and "right-leaning" and "far-right" outlets are tanking harder than "left-leaning" and "far-left" outlets. I'd quarrel with the placement of Fox News as "right-leaning" (they're "far-right," duh) just as I wouldn't call Mother Jones "far left" (have they never heard of Counterpunch or Jacobin?), but basically this is good news to everyone who hates our media's addiction to sensationalism and drama. Or it could be: right-wing podcasts are, unfortunately, picking up steam.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) eviscerates Sen. Sinema's case for keeping the filibuster, calling it "essentially an argument of saying, 'Well, why do anything at all, in case something in the future may change it?'" Specifically addressing Ms. Sinema's putative fear of "radical policy shifts" every time one party or the other retakes the majority, she adds, "(w)ouldn't it be better to get people health care and voting rights for three years instead of zero years?" As usual, she said it better than I did, which is, I imagine, why she's in Congress.

Justice Thomas criticizes federal marijuana policy, calling it a "piecemeal approach" and a "half-in, half-out regime that simultaneously tolerates and forbids local use of marijuana," and frankly he's got a point. Granted, I think I know which way he'd go -- two decades ago, he managed to mess up an opinion on behalf of a unanimous court in re federal marijuana law by opining that pot had no medicinal value, a statement irrelevant to the facts of the case (which hinged entirely a matter where federal law superseded local law) and one certainly unsupported by the research of the time, since that research would have been largely illegal.

Finally, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us not to underestimate Donald Trump, as coverage of his recent Ohio rally has tended to do. Key finding: "Trump is popular mainly because his followers believe that, due to his shamelessness and unending aggression, he's their best vehicle for establishing the authoritarian rule that is their only real hope of retaining control over a changing nation," and though "(m)ost of them may not show up at rallies to listen to Trump complain about nonsense for an hour and a half," "they definitely vote." I once said, about Jeb Bush, that you should "never count a bastard out"; maybe "never count an asshole out" should be Donald Trump's 2024 campaign slogan.

Action: concerning jobs, drug prices, endless war, broadband access, payday loans, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Biden/Republican infrastructure "deal," tell our President to put the brakes on a rule preventing our government from forcibly lowering drug prices, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, expand broadband, clamp down on payday lenders, and end the filibuster. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs; for the Biden-related alert, see the second paragraph below.

First things first: tell your Congressfolk to reject the "bipartisan" "infrastructure"/"jobs" "deal" negotiated between 20 Senators and President Biden last week -- either call them or let Food and Water Watch help you email them. No one in America should care if this is something our President wants, or moderates want, or Republicans want; all we should care about is if it's what we want, and I would assert that it's not. And that's not just because Republicans are pretending that the separate reconciliation bill even Joe Manchin wants to do is some kind of "betrayal." It's also because the "deal" would privatize public assets to build other public assets -- that's called "asset recycling," which is just a 10-dollar way of saying "privatization." And if Democrats agree not to do a separate reconciliation bill in order to "keep their word" or appease Republicans, then they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. Of course, we don't deserve the fascist storm that'll follow, so let's try to head all that off by communicating our will to our Congressfolk in an unmistakable manner.

President Biden plans to move forward with a rule that would prevent our government, for the first time in over 40 years, from seizing drug patents when big pharma corporations charge usurious prices. If you remember Mylan charging hundreds of dollars for EpiPens and numerous corporations charging so much for insulin that diabetics now risk death in rationing the drug, you will scratch your head at the idea that our government should not step in and stop that shit cold, but, sadly, when Joe Biden was a Senator, he worked very, very hard to keep our government from "interfering" in absurdly-high drug prices. Maybe he needs a phone call about this matter! 1.202.456.1111 is the number, and here's the White House contact page. (If I get a separate action alert about this matter -- which seems likely, now! -- I'll share it.)

Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 256, which would repeal the nefarious authorization to use military force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Our House passed this bill, and not only that, 49 Republicans voted in its favor! Maybe I shouldn't make too much of that -- a lot of our Best and Brightest didn't do the right thing in 2002 when it really, really mattered, and a lot of the folks who just voted yea on H.R. 256 (Boebert, Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar, Greene, Issa, Jordan, McClintock, Schweikert) are still clowns, but at least now people like Mob Boss Mitch will have much less room to say well, this isn't bipartisan enough for me to permit to get to a vote. Oh, and if you're upset because "they're doing this to a Democratic President," please step away from this blog, because it ain't for you. And your values ain't shit if they don't inconvenience you once in a while.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. And don't brook any nonsense from your Congressfolk about it, either! Broadband internet is an essential service, or does Congress forget how many votes it took or hearings it held over the internet this past year? Certainly you don't forget how much work you did, or how much school your kids did, over the internet this past year! Note well, also, that H.R. 1783/S. 745 would prevent states from pre-empting localities within states from offering their own public broadband! After all, preventing localities from such matters of self-determination has always seemed not particularly conservative to me.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called "Fake Lender" rule promulgated by the Trump Administration. The Senate has already passed a resolution repealing the rule; now the House must follow suit. So what does the "Fake Lender" rule do? It lets payday lenders avoid state caps on interest by letting them essentially launder their loans through out-of-state banks! Woe unto the young buck who came up with that idea! That dude will find himself (do I need to gender-equivocate here? I suspect not!) at the Pearly Gates describing how he helped payday lenders trap even more good Americans in 300% revolving debt, and I think St. Peter's going to give him quite the side-eye. You know what you can take to the Pearly Gates? That you told your Congressfolk to stamp out this idea like the cockroach it is!

Finally, NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby and boy how I have missed saying that! helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster into the trash heap of history already. Yes, I supported keeping the filibuster around and making Senators talk through it all the way to the beginning of this year, but I'm done -- our Senators will never do the necessary work of a civilized society until we make them. And they just filibustered the beginning of debate on the For the People Act last week! The beginning of debate! No, I don't want to hear about lessening procedural "choke points" as a "compromise," because the Senate will not do it. If I may borrow a metaphor from Better Call Saul: if a chimp has a machine gun, you don't just hope he'll learn how to use it -- you take it from him.

Around the table: our leaders are irredeemably evil, part 737.

Here's something else you may not have known about the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" President Biden reached with Republicans late last week: it could reduce unemployment benefits in the name of "fighting fraud." I mean, God forbid we pay for an infrastructure bill by taxing some of the unearned hundreds of billions the richest Americans have squeezed out of us during this pandemic. Frankly I don't know how a state can fine people who have merely been accused, not convicted of unemployment fraud, but the ramblings of Sen. Shaheen (D-NH) on the matter don't exactly inspire confidence.

Josmar Trujillo at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media love creating fear about crime by hyping individual horrible stories and arguing about shadows. Crime is down since the 1970s, bail hasn't been reformed very much, and police haven't been defunded, but our "liberal" media don't care about the facts -- what are facts, after all, in the face of fear? Just remember: if someone says anything like "crime wave" in a totally unironic way, they're full of soup. (As an aside, I wouldn't use a phrase like "the corrupt poisonous fruits of BLM’s work," as Laura Ingraham does; the plural of "fruit," in this context, is "fruit, but worse, "fruit" really only requires one modifier -- "poisonous" would be the better one, I guess, but using two modifiers there just makes you dramatic.)

ProPublica keeps bringing it with their recent report that billionaire Peter Thiel has somehow stashed some $5 billion in his Roth IRA. Though Roth IRAs have historically limited the income of their holders as well as the contributions they could make, at least a dozen gazillionaires hold at least $20 million each in their Roths, mainly by taking advantage of tricks working families have no access to, like buying startup stock for pennies on the dollar and watching the value of that stock shoot up inside the Roth. Nice work if you can get it! You'll be pleased to know that Bush the Lesser made all of this worse during his second term in office.

Big telecoms have two more days to implement phone number-verification technology that aims to vastly reduce the number of scam calls you get on your phone. But many big telecoms have already implemented the STIR/SHAKEN caller ID technology, so if you haven't seen relief already, you might not. Plus, our FCC gave smaller telecoms (those with under 100,000 subscribers) an additional two years to implement the STIR/SHAKEN technology, and even if our FCC moves that deadline to next year, guess where scammers will be concentrating more of their efforts. You know what might make all this meaningless eventually? All the folks of my generation and younger who now won't answer the phone every time it rings because we're tired of all the scam calls!

Ho hum, Tucker Carlson wants you to think the January 6 coup attempt was an FBI-led "false flag" operation, and he's not only confused federal agents with "unindicted co-conspirators" in right-wing reporting (if you're a federal agent running a sting, you're by definition not conspiring, obviously!) but also cited, as evidence, the FBI stings that entrapped plenty of Muslims during the "war on terror" era. We all worry about law enforcement "creating" terrorists, but I suspect Mr. Carlson's concern about that subject is a relatively recent phenomenon, and though I generally don't blame people for coming to the truth only when it affects them personally, I do blame them for coming to the truth merely to broadcast another self-serving untruth.

Finally, Florida Gov. DeSantis signs a bill that would actually require the state to survey college students and faculty on their political beliefs. I firmly expect this law will die a horrible, humiliating death in court one day, though we may see a lot of fine educational talent abandon the state of Florida over the next few years in the meantime. But I myself have considered possibly going back to college in Florida just so I can be documented saying that Ron DeSantis is an irredeemable asshole.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, paid leave, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep privatization out of the American Jobs Plan, pass a Wealth Tax, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, enact paid family/medical leave, and make Washington, D.C. our 51st state. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

On the occasion of David Dayen at The American Prospect informing us that a central feature of the "bipartisan" infrastructure bill is the selling off of public services to private corporations in order to build new public services, this would be a good time to call your Congressfolk and tell them no privatization in the American Jobs Plan. When you sell off public works, you get money one time; when you hold on to public works, you get money, in the form of taxes, for as long as you can shepherd them properly. And nobody's still clinging to the notion that the private sector can do public works better, right? I mean, the opposite happens, like, all the time (as Mr. Dayen documents in his article). And once something's private, the people don't own it anymore.

In a related note, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Wealth Tax. We all just witnessed the ProPublica report detailing how little the very richest Americans pay in taxes -- and the Republican response was to say whoever leaked that information to reporters ought to go to jail! That sure is burying the lede! Most of us work a job and get a paycheck, but the very richest individuals don't have to work very hard -- they just let the money they already have do the "work"! But if they have absurd amounts of money, they can buy laws and politicians at will -- and they have! This is why we need to enact a Wealth Tax, and the Wealth Taxes proposed so far raise a lot of money without destroying any estates. Hard to believe, Harry, that anyone would seriously propose selling off public assets to fund new public assets instead of taxing the rich.

In yet another related note, both Americans for Tax Fairness and the Coalition on Human Needs help you tell your Congressfolk to make that Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. Lots of good American working families will be getting the first of their monthly $250 or $300 checks on July 15, and they're going to like it, even if Republicans don't. Even if Congress (foolishly!) let those expanded checks be annual after that, as they're supposed to be in 2022, good Americans with children will continue to reap the benefits of having more breathing space -- when you can meet the bills, you can be better parents. And, you know, it's hard to believe, Harry, that anyone would seriously consider ending these expanded benefits instead of taxing the rich.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family/medical leave for all Americans. We're about the only civilized nation that doesn't have it as a matter of course, and a mere 21% of American workers get paid family/medical leave via their employers, so we've got to fix that. Just so happens that President Biden's American Families Plan would include paid/family medical leave, but we'd do well for ourselves to tell Congress we want paid family/medical leave in advance. You hear how many Republicans talk about how their constituents are talking to them about the 2020 election? Wouldn't it be nice if they'd talk about how their constituents are talking to them about paid family/medical leave? Yes, it would. And we should help them do that.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which would make Washington, D.C. our 51st state. Because they deserve it! They have more residents than either Vermont or Wyoming and almost as many residents as Alaska and North Dakota, but nobody claims that those four states shouldn't be states. But at present, D.C. has one non-voting member of the U.S. House, and must submit to rule by our federal government -- and can I say that didn't help them very much on January 6? If D.C. had their own National Guard, for example, they could have responded to that uprising a lot more quickly than Donald Trump did. I mean, we do still value self-reliance and self-determination, right? Or do we only do that with areas that aren't majority-Black? I mean, I'd rather think better of my opponents, but they make it so hard.

Action: concerning the American Jobs Plan and how to pay for it.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk, once again, to listen to us as they consider jobs legislation, and fund it with higher taxes on the wealthy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

You've heard that a group of 10 Senators (only five of whom are Republicans, when you'd need 10 to overcome a filibuster) have come to an "agreement" about a $1.2 trillion (really only $569 billion in new spending) infrastructure bill? One that doesn't raise taxes on corporations or the wealthy, doesn't promise to fund renewable energy infrastructure, and doesn't fund the care economy we're all going to be a part of as we get older? Well, we've got action alerts for you today, then! Daily Kos still helps you demand a "big, bold, and green" jobs plan. Hey, why should we care what 10 Senators agreed to? None of them seem to think it's all that important to agree with us. Which is why we keep telling them, as often as we need to.

Both the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Moms Rising help you demand that your Congressfolk help build a care economy infrastructure. Think about it: child care costs an arm and a leg, elder care costs an arm and a leg, and workers in these fields get paid in dung pellets; keep leaving it up to the "free" market and we'll have a nation of debt slaves with a few CEOs at the top who gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Spend our taxpayer money insuring that care workers get good pay for good work and we'll start to build something we can be proud of. And it'd be nice if Republicans would stop pretending that it's not "infrastructure" if you can't drive on it. A civilization needs an infrastructure of hard-working, dedicated citizens more than it needs roads.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3805/S. 2028 and thus enact a "millionaire's surtax." I think millionaire income should be taxed at 91% just like the good old days and the bill's "millionaire's surtax" would raise the 37% rate on millionaire income only to 47%, but I try not to let the perfect murder the good, and we should take every opportunity we can to send our Congressfolk the message that the rich don't pay enough in taxes, a matter about which we got a painful reminder this week from ProPublica. Afraid it's not "biparatisan" enough? Over half of Republicans support it, per a Hart Research poll, so enough of that.

Inequality.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1979/S. 794, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act. This bill would actually raise corporate taxes if a corporation's highest-paid employee makes more than 50 times as much as its median-salaried employee; that tax rate would go up a half-percentage point in that case, and the rate would scale upward, such that a corporation with a 500-to-1 pay ratio would wind up paying five percentage points more. Again, I'd raise it all the way up to 55% for corporate profits over $1 million (and I would expect to lower the ratio that way, too), but let's communicate to our Congressfolk the fact that we think some people make too much money while the rest of us are scraping along, and that they should do something about it.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1459/S. 510, the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. This bill would enact a "wealth tax" that would finally start to get at the trillions of dollars the ultra-rich sit on -- you know, that money right-wingers always say will "trickle down" to the rest of us? Well, it doesn't, but the wealth tax would impose an annual tax of 2% of assets between $50 million and $1 billion and 3% on assets above $1 billion. It'd raise a lot of money, and the super-rich would still be super-rich -- sure sounds pretty harmless, doesn't it? Then all the whining right-wingers will do about might leave you scratching your head.

Action: concerning endless war, public trans, government spying, corruption, voting rights, and polluter welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Iraq war AUMF, create zero-emission public trans, release COINTELPRO files to the public, and pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act, the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that "authorized" war with Iraq and which all subsequent Presidents have used to fight unconstitutional wars all over the world. I put "authorized" in quotation marks because only Congress can authorize war, and they have to go through the trouble to declare war, not "give the President power to fight wherever he pleases." This is one of the reasons we broke off from England, folks! And Presidents have been abusing the AUMF for over 18 years now. Which means this mistake's old enough to vote, and it's damn near old enough to drink! So let's kill it already.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you demand that Congress pass legislation creating a zero-emission public transportation system. Yeah, we keep telling our Congressfolk what we want from this jobs bill, but they keep ignoring us -- so perhaps we should change tactics and demonstrate that the people want public transportation that doesn't choke the world with pollution. It's not so much to ask, right? Right-wingers act like people who like electric buses are weak. Of course, they then go around whining endlessly about how everyone thinks they're racist, but that's beside the point. The point is, having a livable planet in 30 years isn't "weak." Even if a few oil and gas executives don't get to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Which is what right-wingers really favor, whether they'll admit it or not.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2998, which would release all of our FBI's COINTELPRO files to the general public. I guess this bill's opponents will argue "bygones!" and "look forward" and "saying any part of our past wasn't absolutely perfect is treason!" But COINTELPRO went after protestors and activists ranging from anti-war and civil rights organizers to the Ku Klux Klan. Hey, maybe that's how you get right-wingers to support H.R. 2998! I kid, of course -- today's racists know well enough to disavow any love for the Klan. And yet our most recent departed President's campaign slogan was a Klan slogan from the '70s! So, again, learn about the past, and we can make a more perfect union in the future.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2662, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. "IG" stands for "Inspector General," and you may recall, particularly during 2020, how much maneuvering that irredeemably corrupt President did just to avoid the scrutiny of Inspectors General, who spend all their time investigating waste and fraud and abuse of power. You may even remember that Mr. Trump had to be talked out of firing all of them at the beginning of his term! Well, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act would place more limits on a President's ability to fire IGs and allow IGs to subpoena folks who've left our government if they can shed light on wrongdoing. It's bad if all that stands between us and oblivion is an Inspector General. But, ah, it's a lot worse if they're not there, or if they're a Presidential lackey.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Public Citizen helps you tell them to do both. I know, I know, One True Real and Great American President Joe Manchin has expressed a preference, but he ain't the boss of us. And, toward that end, Daily Kos helps you sign up and call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator to vote for the For the People Act. 79% of them support the For the People Act, after all! And if he's going to write 299 stupid paragraphs about why he won't, at least we can get his constituents to embarrass him.

Finally, both the Sierra Club and Food and Water Action help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. Our government shovels $15 billion annually toward oil and gas drilling corporations that don't need it; how would you feel about that if it were your money? Oh, right: it is your money. The bill would also prohibit federal funding (which is, again, your money) toward fossil fuel R&D and/or international fossil fuel projects. Solar and wind power aren't pie-in-the-sky technologies anymore -- walk around your neighborhood and count the roofs with solar panels if you're unconvinced. Also attend the ridiculous stories you hear about wind turbines; if wind really didn't work, wouldn't they just tell you that?

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, unemployment, our Post Office, immigration, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to divert the Child Tax Credit expansion to fund the American Jobs Plan and to prevent state Governors from prematurely ending extended unemployment benefits, tell our Post Office to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's plan to cut services and raise prices, tell President Biden to end yet another racist Trump-era immigration practice, and tell Senate Democrats, again, to end the filibuster. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

You know the latest Republican "counter-proposal" on the American Jobs Plan aims to repurpose unspent American Rescue Plan money -- but what you may not have realized is that "including unspent funds from the American Rescue Plan in the American Jobs Plan would repeal the Child Tax Credit Expansion that delivers $250 or $300 checks to working families every month for the next year. The fact they even proposed that shows how tone-deaf they are -- and how much confidence they have that it'll ultimately mean nothing in 2022. They might be right about 2022; these are Democrats we're talking about, after all, the same ones who are strangely not bringing up Republican involvement in January 6 every single day. So, yeah, repealing the CTC expansion should be an easy campaign ad for Democrats -- just show one hand passing a $250 check to another hand twelve times, and then show a Republican politician intercepting them all -- but, again, these are Democrats we're talking about. Which is why we need to get on the phone with our Reps and Senators and tell them no to repealing the CTC expansion. If Democrats allow that to happen, they deserve to lose their majorities in 2022. And the American democratic experiment will likely be dead at that point.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop Governors in nearly half of American states from ending expanded unemployment benefits prematurely. Those expanded benefits expire at the end of September anyway; what's the hurry? Especially considering we still have over 6% official unemployment (the more telling U6 figure, which counts folks who've given up looking for work and folks who want to work more hours, stands at 9.9%)? The "hurry" is that Republican politicians want to look like they're "doing something," and as we should know from decades of watching this happen, politicians who look like they're "doing something," even something abominable, always have the political advantage. This is why we constantly tell Democrats to actually do something. Will they listen? If enough of us speak out, they'll have to.

Progress America helps you tell our Postal Regulatory Commission to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's proposal to raise prices and cut services. I keep putting it like that because it should be obvious what a bad idea that is. Do you remember being dissatisfied with our Post Office's performance before the pandemic? I don't, and I used it all the time! They did extremely well considering all the pressure our government puts on them -- taxes haven't funded our Post Office since the early '80s, and our laws mandate that our Post Office prefund its employee benefit plans over 80 years in advance, which no other entity has to do. But, sure, let's believe the Trumphole who came in and said he had to "get tough." "We have to raise prices and cut services"? How un-American is that?

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to end the Trump-era policy that used COVID as a pretext to expel asylum seekers without due process. "Always the wrong solution for the wrong reason" should have been Donald Trump's campaign slogan. Why is it wrong to kick asylum seekers out because they might have COVID? Because you can treat COVID, that's why! At least, you can if you have the slightest amount of competence; of course, when Mike "Let's Start an HIV Mini-epidemic in Rural Indiana Counties" Pence as your COVID policy leader, you don't have competence. It's also wrong because if someone really has COVID, you're sending them back to a country that probably can't treat COVID as well as we can, where they'll infect a lot more of their fellow citizens -- which also makes it more likely COVID will survive and mutate into versions that'll infect us again. Of course, for Stephen Miller, all that was probably a feature, not a bug. But if racism and bad leadership makes all your policy for you, then you're doing policy wrong.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Democratic Senators, once again, to end the Senate filibuster. Because they say it actually impedes bipartisanship, and they're right! Back when the Senate filibuster wasn't so easily invoked -- Senators used to have to talk for 48 or 72 hours to stop a bill, but now Senators just say they're not going to end debate, and then they go off to dinner or the theater or wherever, which actually ends debate! -- Senators would more likely support bills, knowing that'd give them a chance to shape it more like they wanted it. Now Senators filibuster bills that require campaign finance disclosure and prevent big corporations from taking tax breaks after they outsource jobs. You'd think, given how popular both those things are, Senators would risk losing elections doing that. But they don't, because the filibuster is too painless and too easy to use, so much so that Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) won't consider ending it even though his friends on the other side of the aisle just humiliated him by filibustering the January 6 commission bill. But that's why we remind them of our will.

Around the table: private corporations hunting citizens, and other horrors.

Tens of thousands of good Brazilians take to the streets to protest President Bolsonaro's continuing inability/unwillingness to handle the COVID pandemic and to demand his removal from office. I sure wish we'd done that in America -- and given that protesting in America can get you ridiculed but protesting in Brazil can get you shot, I applaud the courage of good Brazilians, and wish them the best in getting that irredeemable asshole out of office. (People say I'm not kind to call him that. Believe me, I am kind to call him that.)

From the "Dystopia Is Here" file: Joseph Cox and Jason Roebler at Vice describe how the creator of an app called Citizen -- which purports to alert its users to crimes in progress, thus "enabling" them to stop them -- stalked an innocent man all night, purportedly for arson, even putting a five-digit bounty on him. Citizen sounds like Nextdoor on meth -- one former employee calls it an "anxiety sweatshop" -- and hopefully you can see how Citizen employees working undercover in major cities can turn into a corporation's private dictatorship. Which, I maintain, would be even worse than a government dictatorship, particularly since it would have the volunteer "assistance" of large numbers of folks who think every suspect is a perp and every perp must be Black.

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo tells the story of a man detained at a private prison, in solitary confinement, for almost a year, without having his day in court, until the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals finally set him free. He must have been some kind of super-villain, right? You already know the answer to that, I trust: police originally arrested him on "marijuana-related charges." And we all know that in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, the real super-villains always get off scot-free. Sometimes they even get elected President.

Not too many years ago, my great-uncle asked why colleges charged so much; I responded, "because they can." But Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns, and Money gives us a much more exhaustive explanation. Preceded, of course, with a refutation of all the wrong reasons: that public investment in colleges has gone down (it hasn't), that faculty salaries have gone up dramatically (that is to laugh), that the monetary "value" of a college degree has gone up dramatically (that is also to laugh). Which mainly leaves, you guessed it, administrative expenses, which not only include more (and more highly-paid) administrators, but an administrator "class" that moves around from college to college and mainly concerns itself with, you guessed it, making more money. I'm old enough to remember when an education had intrinsic value.

Right-wing garbage merchants claim that Moderna's COVID vaccine has a "secret ingredient," and then try to "prove" their assertion with a safety data sheet that describes the ill effects of chloroform, not the "secret ingredient" in question. It's a little like trying to prove eating beef is dangerous by describing all the ill effects of eating cow dung. And if you decided that this wasn't a mistake but malicious evil -- that there is no way someone promotes this garbage by accident -- well, how could I blame you?

Tierney Sneed at Talking Points Memo catalogues, at great expense to her well-being I would think, the right-wing's mania for election "audits" they all think will return Donald Trump to office. What part of "accept the results" and "get over it" did they not hear? And note well that when even the most sympathetic auditors don't deliver the results right-wingers want, right-wingers just turn on them. Remember when Rush Limbaugh used to say liberalism was easy? He was wrong about that, too: being a right-winger is easy, because you never need to accept something you don't want to.

Action: concerning drug prices, voting rights, public investment, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to let election officials count early-arriving votes before Election Day, and tell your Congressfolk to fund overdue public transportation repairs and pass the MEAL Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your PA state legislators' and Congressfolk's phone numbers (where applicable), or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices. Which virtually everyone supports! Except big pharma CEOs, of course, and we shouldn't let them have all the say about everything. The news hook, here, of course, is Rep. Porter (D-CA) embarrassing yet another CEO who deserved it, in unleashing her whiteboard to show how AbbVie has jacked up the price of Humira (the world's best-selling drug presently, treating arthritis and psoriasis, among other illnesses) 144% over the last nine years. You'd think high demand would result in lower prices! But you'd be wrong; if you really, really need a medicine, you're less likely to haggle over the price. Which is why we should let Medicare use the power of a 60-million-plus pool to bring drug prices down for everyone.

Common Cause helps you tell Pennsylvania's state legislature to let vote-counters actually count the votes they receive early before Election Day, instead of forcing them to wait until Election Day proper. Why did they do that? So they could make it seem like Donald Trump won the morning after the election, of course, and thus plant the seed of all his WAAAAAAH THEYZ STOLEZ TEH ELEKSHUNZ!!!! lies thereafter! No, I'm pretty sure that's the reason. It's not like we're asking election officials to put themselves out; ensuring a correct vote count is their job, after all. And we make that job harder by creating the illusion that the votes cast on Election Day somehow count more than the votes cast beforehand. (No, I'll not brook any hard-guys-vote-in-person silliness. Aren't we all too old to be swinging our penises around?)

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund long-overdue repairs to public transit. How long overdue? The NCTJ estimates that dedicating $20 billion annually for the next 12 years would eliminate the backlog. And that's not something we need to do instead of the American Jobs Plan, either, $240 billion over a dozen years not being a very large slice of the federal spending pie. No, I think calling attention to the public trans repair backlog -- and to the many, many jobs attacking that backlog would create! -- only brings more positive attention to the American Jobs Plan. Maybe the backlog will get incorporated into it! And billionaires made over a trillion bucks since the pandemic's start, so it's not like we just can't find the money.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2387, the Making Essentials Affordable and Lawful (or MEAL) Act. The MEAL Act would end the nefarious practice of keeping felony drug convicts from getting food stamps and other federal assistance, a practice which, if you think about it, defies all logic and common sense. Do convicts not need food if they can't get a job (which, thanks to the notorious "box" on most job applications, they often can't)? And how does denying them the federal assistance they need help them reintegrate into society? Again, too many politicians (including, sadly, our current President!) have made too much of a name for themselves calling cruelty and stupidity "tough love." This country is still young, but it shouldn't be that immature.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Because it'll fight gerrymandering, absurdly expensive campaigns, and all kinds of (frequently racist) vote suppression, of course! Also, if you've got a few hours, Daily Kos and Common Cause have teamed up to help you call West Virginia residents and ask them to call their state's senior U.S. Senator, Joe Manchin, and tell him to change his mind about supporting the For the People Act. The For the People Act enjoys supermajority support in polls there, just like everywhere else, and we at least need to deny him the excuse that his own constituents didn't call him. (He'll likely ignore us if we call from out of state -- a truism I've long heard but admittedly found hard to accept.)

Common Cause, People for the American Way, the Daily Kos Liberation League, and the League of Conservation Voters all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore that part of the Voting Rights Act that our Supreme Court killed in Shelby County v. Holder -- the part that allows our government to pre-approve voting rights changes in states and localities that have historically suppressed the vote. After this year, that's going to be a lot of states and localities! So we'd better get that done, and done quickly -- with or without the Republicans' blessing (though Lisa Murkowski has signaled her support for the bill; now we only need nine more to avoid a filibuster! Or, you know, fewer, if we just get rid of the filibuster).

Around the table: Republicans gonna Republican, part 845.

From ProPublica we learn that some $7 million in Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) loans went, via online lending corporation Kabbage, to obviously absurdly-named fake farms like the one in Minnesota that supposedly grew oranges or the cattle ranch put in the name of the Mayor of Long Beach Township, NJ. Clearly there was a lot of identity theft here, and just as clearly there was not a whole lot of oversight, either from Kabbage or from our government. If you're tempted to say $7 million out of some $350 billion ain't a big deal, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider how much good $7 million in loans might do for people who need it, and 3) remind yourself that corruption anywhere hurts our civilization everywhere. Also, consider all the steps Kabbage clearly took (like partnering with that bank in Utah to avoid interest rate caps!) to avoid scrutiny in the most general sense. Then, maybe, slap yourself again.

Sonali Kohatkar describes "Why Big Pharma's Arguments Against Patent Waivers," like the one we're trying to get so that poorer nations can have COVID vaccines too, "Don't Add Up." "It'll stifle innovation" you probably already saw through, since they trot that out when they oppose every good thing our government tries to do, but you might not have remembered that world taxpayers funded the COVID vaccines to the tune of billions of dollars, and big pharma corporations prefer to spend their largesse on marketing and overpaying their executives. But you may not have understood that calling generic vaccines from another country "fake" is sort of like saying we're the only civilized nation on the planet, which sure isn't the case -- every nation has a process for approving drugs. Some countries even have a better one!

Ho hum, we learn, once again, that there's no "exodus" from blue states to red states over TEH TAXEZ!!!!!, because too many people wind up paying higher taxes where they wind up -- like, say, in Texas, where taxes are actually a tick higher than they are in California. You'll remember studies demonstrating that high marginal tax rates in New Jersey explained very little about why people (ahem!) moved to other states. Which means I think the article does give too much credence to taxes as a reason rich folks move -- when your choice in life is either to be rich or to be rich, I don't think numbers that seem big to middle-class folks make a whole lot of difference.

Jessica Corbett at Common Dreams reminds us that although Amazon has extended its moratorium on law enforcement's use of its facial recognition technology, really, the credit belongs to activists (including you!) for wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. We are also reminded that Amazon still hasn't ended its Ring-police partnerships, that our government still hasn't acted to ban facial recognition technology, and that "Rekognition" is a hopelessly pretentious name for a piece of software.

Jesus Mary and Joseph where does one begin with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) blaming House Speaker Pelosi for causing the failure of the January 6 commission by "not consult(ing) in advance" with House Minority Leader McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader McConnell? With her almost mansplaining-level condescension, which we might almost call woman-on-woman crime? With the absurdity of demanding she "consult" with the party that egged on January 6 and is now gaslighting about January 6 about an investigation into January 6? With the sneaking suspicion that, just like with all Republicans, "consultation" really means capitulation? I know where we end: with the hope that that investigation into Sen. Collins's campaign finances has legs.

Finally, Alex Samuels at FiveThirtyEight describes "How The Republican Party Could Splinter (Or Stay The Same) After Liz Cheney’s Ousting." My money's on "stay the same." The Texas 6th House special showed us the ceiling of "Republican voters who absolutely won't vote for Trump or one of his Trumpholes," and that number is about 3 percent of the electorate. The remaining Republicans are a) Trumpholes, b) people who've been Republican all their lives and can't imagine being anything else, or c) people who will talk themselves back into the fold with fever dreams of SOSHULIZM!!!!! or -- far worse -- with "disgust" over "the people who hate Donald Trump" "going too far." That last item, seriously, is the soul of desperation.

Action: concerning the Child Tax Credit, paid family and medical leave, internet freedom, public transportation, and corporate welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass paid family and medical leave, and pass the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, the Freedom to Move Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools on the bottom of this page.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent. This summer, that expansion will deliver an extra $300 monthly to folks with children under 6, and an extra $250 to folks with children between 6 and 17. I've given this matter a lot of thought lately, and it sure seems to me that an extra $250 or so monthly will give parents a lot of breathing room, which will help them be the best parents they can be. Already our everything-for-the-rich-and-screw-everyone-else economy makes it hard for them to be their best; the CTC expansion is a rare government policy that actually does that. So we really ought to keep it around.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family and medical leave plan. Paid family and medical leave will be a focus of President Biden's American Families Plan, but it might be better in the short run to tell them we support paid family and medical leave in the abstract, and then hold them accountable for the details later; at that point, they won't be able to say their constituents didn't talk about paid family and medical leave. We're the only big nation on Earth that doesn't have it, and no it wouldn't be particularly onerous to fund. You've heard that America's billionaires have made over $1 trillion more since the pandemic's beginning, right? Well, that'd be a good place to start.

Both Consumer Reports and the ACLU help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. Again, though President Biden's American Jobs Plan would nominally include more broadband, our Congressfolk still need to hear from us about it, not least because too many of them (cough Republicans cough) have been banging their saucepans telling everyone that broadband isn't "really infrastructure." All you need to do to prove them wrong is go through a pandemic! Now kids go to school over the internet, adults go to work over the internet, folks see a doctor and buy groceries over the internet -- yeah, it's obviously infrastructure. Why do we listen to Republicans again?

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2287/S. 1172, the Freedom to Move Act. Since at least the beginning of the Reagan years, we've been caught up in the idea that we should each have our own cars and rely less on trains and buses to get us around. But I think we're seeing the folly of that idea -- not just that it's selfish, but that it'll also help destroy our planet a lot faster. And you know, not everyone can have a car -- some people just don't make enough money, and they need public transportation as a result. Hence the Freedom to Move Act would issue grants to help make fare-free public trans a reality; after all, why shouldn't we spend our money on things we might all use? (And, not for nothing, but yeah, this bill or something like it could also get folded into the American Jobs Plan, so best to let our Congressfolk know we want better public transportation.)

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would end some $15 billion of corporate welfare for big fossil fuel drillers. I have to say I find far too many fiscal hawks will go after social spending with almost absurd ease, but will never say anything about corporate welfare -- which is far larger, and which represents a far greater immorality -- unless you provoke them, and why should I have to provoke people to do the right thing? Can't people do the right thing on their own? Can't they follow their own philosophy consistently and fight all big government handouts? If they can't, you have to wonder who might be lining their pocketbooks.