Thieves in the Temple.

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 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 food safety and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make baby food manufacturers get the heavy metals out of their foods and allow our Postal Service to do more than just deliver packages. 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation requiring that baby food manufacturing corporations test all their products for heavy metals before they go on the market. The state of California has done just that, and California is a big enough economy – eighth largest in the world if it were its own country, last I heard – that baby food manufacturing corporations will wind up doing a lot more testing, but really, we shouldn’t punish babies in Wyoming and Nebraska just because their Congressfolk wouldn’t think to do this. Too much baby food has arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury in it these days, and it shouldn’t be a tough thing even for a drama-hound Republican to demand better.

Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the law that prevents our Postal Service from offering new services such as postal banking. The Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 allows our Postal Service to offer some licensing services, but our Postal Service could do so much better if we didn’t tie their hands – they could sell public transportation tickets, offer wi-fi in parking lots, host electric vehicle charging stations, and check on seniors, all in addition to the basic banking services that would sure help out those folks in rural and urban areas where banksters don’t even want to go. This vision is a much, much better vision than Postmaster DeJoy’s “vision” of fewer jobs, higher prices, and worse service. It’s the kind of crap vision only a worthless CEO could come up with, and we’re better than CEOs.

Action: concerning corruption, gerrymandering, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to call for Sen. Menendez’s resignation, tell the Wisconsin state legislature to abandon its election-nullification scheme in impeaching Justice Protasiewicz, and tell your Congressfolk to let our Postal Service offer more services. 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.

Peace Action helps you tell your Senators to demand the resignation of Sen. Bob Menendez already. Just like Brett Kavanaugh and so, so many others, Mr. Menendez pretends not to know the difference between the right to presumption of innocence and the “right” to a position of power; he also, not incidentally, pretends that the people of New Jersey are really, really rooting for him, when the only reason they even put him in office is that they can’t stand the idea of putting a Republican in our Senate. In other words, read the room, dude! Anyway, only two kinds of people keep half a million dollars in cash in their homes: old people who don’t trust banks, and corrupt people. I’m pretty sure I know which category I’d put Bob Menendez in.

Rise helps you tell the Wisconsin state legislature to abandon its efforts to impeach Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz before she’s even heard a case. Their BS reason for impeaching her? Oh, she criticized gerrymandering on the campaign trail, which they think “prejudices” her. But everyone except elected politicians who couldn't win without gerrymandering opposes gerrymandering! It’s not a tough thing to say, and doesn’t even predict how she’d rule on a particular gerrymandering case (see Kennedy, Anthony). So, you think they’ll listen to us? They won’t want to. But they also won’t want to be humiliated by public outcry against their obvious folly, and they’ll only feel that humiliation if we all speak out against them. And make no mistake: they’re trying to nullify the people’s will as expressed in an election, so they deserve all the humiliation we can give them.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve our Postal Service by allowing it to offer new services, like postal banking, selling public transportation tickets, and checking in on seniors. That’d be better than the coward’s way out of slashing jobs, raising prices, and cutting services, and maybe letting our Post Offices offer more services is a far better way to ensure we have a Postal Service in the future – a Postal Service that our Constitution has actually mandated into existence and requires that we maintain, I feel compelled to point out. The privatizers will tell you that a privatized Postal Service could fulfill that Constitutional mandate with enough oversight. If you believe that, I’ve got some extra scholarships to Trump University to sell you.

Action: concerning chemical safety, consumer protection, and fuel emissions.

Long story short: tell our EPA to protect communities from chemical pollution, tell our FTC to protect consumers from unscrupulous car dealers, and tell our DOT to protect communities from fuel emissions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue the most vigorous chemical safety disclosure rules possible for industrial polluters. Which will fight them tooth-and-nail, as they did under the Trump Administration, because kill jobs cause inflation nanny state environmental extremists but the real problem, as usual, is that making big polluters pollute less affects executives’ ability to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, and nothing else. Besides, don’t the (mostly Black, Brown, and poor) communities deserve to know how their air and water gets polluted? It helps them fight for cleaner air and water, that’s for sure, and everyone deserves a fighting chance.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to issue the most vigorous rules possible protecting car buyers from shady practices. And “car buyers” will almost certainly include you sometime in the future! And you may face a car dealer who won’t tell you what’s really wrong with the car you buy or charge you more than the advertised price or even change the terms of your financing after you’ve driven off the lot, and you deserve better than all of that from car dealers. So let’s make sure our FTC hears that we want more disclosure, fewer lies, and stronger penalties for those who won’t do the right thing.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of Transportation (or DOT) to issue the most vigorous transportation emissions rules possible for our states. Which can then have the freedom to reduce emissions in a manner more consistent with their constituents’ will – such as more bike lanes, more public transit, more electric charging stations, and more walkable streets. And remember: the only people in America who want more pollution are the folks who don’t want to clean up the messes they’ve already made – or the messes they’re planning to make. And they shouldn’t get all the say about everything in America.

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 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).

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning cable fees, abortion, and public lands.

Tired of surprise cable TV fees that inflate your bill by over $35 a month? Well, H.R. 1220/S. 510, the TRUE Fees Act, would essentially outlaw those fees by forcing cable corporations to include all of them upfront in a base subscription price. The bill would also let you get out of your cable contract without penalty if your provider pushes some new fee on you. Big cable corporations of course oppose the TRUE Fees Act, and they might well be telling you that TEH BIG GUMMINT FORCEZ UZ TO IMPOSEZ TEH FEEZ!!!!!, but you should know that they've lied about that in court before, and you should also consider that such an objection really doesn't matter, since the TRUE Fees Act requires transparency. And if the big cable corporations call it a "rate-fixing" maneuver (which it's not!), they should be prepared for your reaction to be we can only hope! Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support cable customers by passing the TRUE Fees Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1692/S. 758, the EACH Woman Act, would repeal the Hyde Amendment that has (except in very limited circumstances) prevented our government from funding abortions over the last 40-plus years. The problem with the Hyde Amendment is that it essentially makes a matter of right (you have a right to have an abortion, after all, per our Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade) into a matter of means -- folks who have the right to have an abortion but can't afford abortions can't get them (if Medicare, Medicaid, or other government-subsidized health insurance won't help them). I guess for some folks that's a feature, not a bug, but a right is a right for everyone, not just for the people who can afford it, and none of us should use the powerless as a political pawn in order to gain a small advantage. Do I particularly want abortions to happen? Of course not! No one does! But a right is a right, regardless of what we "want," and we don't ask of rights that they never challenge us. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support abortion rights by passing the EACH Woman Act and thus repealing the Hyde Amendment.

Finally, H.R. 4273/S. 2467, the Transit to Trails Act, would fund more public transportation buildout to public parks, so that everyone can enjoy the public parks we all pay for with our taxes. After all, why should only people who can afford cars get to visit public parks? Why shouldn't everyone? Remember: anyone whose answer would include words like "riffraff" is an elitist, and elitism is un-American. At least, that's how I was brought up. And anyone would would answer with a statement like THEY GET TEH GOODIEZ WHY CAN'T I!!!! very likely isn't counting the goodies they already get with their tax dollars. Seriously, if you pay taxes, as prescribed by law, you should get to enjoy the things your taxes buy. And folks who ask WHEREZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!! should note the $10 million annual price tag, which ain't much in the context of an annual $4 trillion federal budget. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve our access to our public parks by passing the Transit to Trails Act.

Around the table: celebrating our third consecutive day with at least one item of good news!

A ProPublica/WBEZ Chicago report describes how the meteoric rise of video gambling in Illinois has been little more than a "botched money grab," as underregulated gambling corporations make off with the money while leaving towns and counties even more destitute. Why, it's almost like that was the whole idea! The video gambling troubles began in 2009, at the height of the Great Recession, when "something had to be done" to raise money. And the gambling bill, with the Orwellian title of the Illinois Jobs Now! (exclamation point in original), was a truly modern bipartisan mess, created by Democrats too afraid to raise taxes on big donors and Republicans who had clearly abdicated conservatism (and who now say they should have studied the matter more, which is just dandy now that the barn door's open).

Well, how about that -- poll finds almost 60% of Americans support a 70% tax on income above $10 million. How "radical" can an idea be if a decisive majority of Americans support it? "Not radical at all" is the correct answer. Americans generally support higher taxes on the rich, but it's good to see such support when someone puts a number to it. Yet I do wonder if Rep. Ocasio-Cortez means to forestall a drive to set the top tax rate even higher -- say, at 91%, and on millionaire income -- which would, in turn, suggest that the Democratic establishment's hand-wringing over her is, that's right, drama. I'd be happy to be wrong about all of that.

You think the government shutdown's bad now? Well, three Bloomberg writers remind us that it could get a whole lot worse -- not just no food stamps and no housing assistance, but no court hearings, no flights, no buses. Why, even Wall Street might shut down! And then, if our President is really lucky, we'll have a terrorist attack to rally the country around him, I'm sure they've mooted this possibility at the White House -- I mean, they've lost all the arguments, so how can they hope to keep winning elections without sowing chaos? Remember: if terrorists attack, immediately blame our President for holding up government funding over his precious wall for however many months it's been by then.

Here's some more good news: federal District Court Judge halts our Administration's efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire, saying our Commerce Secretary broke "a veritable smorgasbord" of rules and laws in adding the question. Per the judge, he also "cherry-picked facts to support his views, ignored or twisted contrary evidence and hid deliberations from Census Bureau experts." All that sure doesn't bode well for the FCC's net neutrality repeal of 2017, particularly since the judge found that our Administration's census question did, in fact, violate the Administrative Procedures Act.

Finally, I don't go looking around for Iconic Photos of Our Age, but the sight of our President inviting the national college football champion Clemson Tigers to eat mountains of junk food is actually a pretty good one. Junk food is really the perfect metaphor for everything this Administration offers -- it might taste good in the moment, but it'll ultimately leave you fat and malnourished at the same time. And there ain't nothing else on the menu.

Action: concerning Puerto Rico, self-driving cars, and endangered species.

Given the fact that Puerto Rico -- which ought to be a state, so Americans are less likely to think it's full of brown-skinned foreigners -- is still suffering from the ravages of Hurricane Maria over a year later, Amnesty International helps you tell local and federal authorities to investigate our government's response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The immediate news hook: a CBS News report (based on photos taken by a Puerto Rico police officer) that millions of bottles of water sat on a runway in Puerto Rico for more than a year. I guess our Administration will blame REGULASHUNZ!!!!! for that, though is that sort of excuse really worthy of a can-do country? Also, both the Union of Concerned Scientists and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to enact some real relief for the good citizens of Puerto Rico. And if that means building out a renewable power grid and/or ending the forced austerity policies so beloved by the banksters who hold Puerto Rican debt, well, those are sacrifices we should be willing to make.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to oppose S. 1885, the AV START Act, which would let corporations put self-driving cars on the road without ensuring their safety, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You heard about the two people self-driving cars have killed this year, but you may not have heard that road tests commonly find self-driving cars absolutely flummoxed by a little snow or a solitary seagull. One corporation wants to put sensors under cars so they'll "see" the road better. I have a few better ideas: properly fund public transportation, mandate that corporations with known safety problems start disclosing them, and shame people who only buy cars because they're flashy. We'll start getting safer driving after that! Why do we assume machines will do things better than people when machines can't check out my groceries better than a 16-year-old? Because bosses don't want to have to pay workers, that's why. Let's not enable that behavior.

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Administration not to pursue a bunch of regulatory changes that would seriously injure our ability to protect endangered species. Get to stepping, though, because the deadline for your comments is Monday. What does our Administration plan to do? Among other things, they plan to allow agencies to tabulate "economic costs" when deciding how to protect endangered and threatened species and also to ignore scientific data before giving out oil and gas drilling leases. They'd further mandate that every single threatened species in America get its own rule, even though one rule currently covers all of them; is that what right-wingers mean when they say REGULASHUNZ IZ TEH BURDENZ!!!!!? Apparently the right finds cumbersome regulations just fine when it makes the real work of civilization much harder. They'll answer to God for their nefarious works -- but let's maybe help them walk a more rewarding path by speaking out now.

Action: concerning free speech, killer weed-killers, and corporate welfare.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Cambodia to release housing rights activist Tep Vanny from prison. Ms. Vanny is currently serving a 30-month sentence (of which she's already served two years) for "intentional violence with aggravating circumstances," which sounds better than what they ring activists up on in Saudi Arabia, I suppose, but that's nothing to brag about. The Cambodian government convicted her solely on written statements of purported witnesses, which, like, any government can do; you might more reasonably suspect that they're really convicting her of agitating against her government's ongoing evictions of over 20,000 good Cambodians from her community under its notorious Economic Land Concession scheme, which is, apparently, how the government gives land away to foreign corporations for "development." Untrammeled corporate power: it really is a menace everywhere on Earth. Luckily the world has folks like Ms. Vanny to fight it.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the news that a terminally-ill man who used Monsanto's signature weed-killer Roundup in his job as a school groundskeeper won a $289 million judgment against Monsanto after getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Penn PIRG helps you tell the EPA to ban Roundup. I'll bet the tort "reform" crowd is just aching to call this a frivolous lawsuit because of the massive award, but they'd have to explain how a 42-year-old man got terminal cancer after using Roundup at his job for just two years, and they'd also have to explain Monsanto knowing (per internal documents) that Roundup causes cancer for decades while insisting in public (and still insisting, no less!) that it doesn't. They'd be better off realizing that not putting more potentially carcinogenic chemicals in our food and water is actually a conservative impulse. You know, instead of insisting that whatever's good for big corporations is "conservative."

Finally, S. 1885, the AV START Act, would actually let corporations sell self-driving cars without ensuring they conform to federal safety standards, and worse, would pre-empt states from passing their own laws regarding self-driving cars. Conservatism! It's all about advancing solutions that make problems worse! It's also about keeping states from doing anything about driverless cars that run people over! Seriously, aside from the prospect of collecting corporate welfare, why is anyone excited about driverless cars? Are they really a better transportation option than buses or trains? Are we really going to have fewer accidents when we get rid of people? And how offensive is it that we have to fight like dogs to get public investment in actual revolutionary technologies like solar and wind, but self-driving cars somehow wind up on the fast track? Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumers by rejecting S. 1885.

Action: health care, Amtrak funding, and anti-pollution funding.

As you know, Senate Republicans have postponed voting on their even-worse-than-the-House-bill health care "reform" bill, and maybe it looks bad for a bill that typically gets around a 17% approval rating (higher than Congress's approvals generally, but rather lower than Obamacare's approvals at similar points in 2009 and 2010). Still, let's not get complacent; the Senate plans to be done with revisions on the bill today, which means it would go to the CBO next week and get a vote in mid-July, and these Republicans are evil. They don't care that you rely on the Obamacare Medicaid expansion right now or might one day, they don't care that the ban against pre-existing conditions protects you from getting screwed by your insurer, and they certainly don't care that you already see through their lies about "tax cuts for the middle class" (they're for the rich, just like always!) and "lower premiums" (your premiums might go up more slowly, but who cares if you're paying more out of pocket for lousier health care?). So call your Senators again, just to let them know we're watching them.

Meanwhile, among the multitudinous other nefarious things the Trump "hard power" budget would do is zero out funding for Amtrak long-distance service for passengers. Historically, Presidential budgets that have tried to cut Amtrak funding have met with fairly steadfast resistance even from Republican Senators -- remember Mr. Specter's blithe dismissal of a Bush Mobb budget cut proposal in 2005? -- but these are, as they say, interesting times. And ending federal funding for Amtrak's long-distance train rides would essentially destroy long-distance train travel in America, denying that service to nearly half of all Americans, particularly those in areas that don't have much in the way or airports or interstate highways. The truly stunning thing, of course, is that Mr. Trump's budget actually comes out and says it'd be better for Congress to concentrate on improving Amtrak's "corridor" services, meaning, essentially, densely-populated areas. And they say Democrats hate flyover country! MoveOn helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to end funding for Amtrak's long-distance passenger service.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: your state legislators are all hot to cut funding even further for the state Department of Environmental Protection, as well as the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Why? Because these things don't make money for some politician's crony -- they only protect our clean air and clean water and public lands. But cutting funding for these two departments has real-world consequences, ranging from the closure of beaches and trails to the backlog of clean water complaints the DEP can't address because it doesn't have the staff. I shouldn't even say "staff" -- I should say jobs. Maybe then the legislature will fund the DEP and the DCNR -- because they create jobs for people who actually do the hard work of (for example) inspecting mines and monitoring fracking waste. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to protect the commonwealth by properly funding the Departments of Environmental Protection and Conservation and Natural Resources.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: the defense community vs. methane emissions, and other tales.

Democrats declare they won't work with President Trump on tax reform until he releases his own tax returns, presumably so we can see how his tax reform plans would benefit him. But we already know how his tax "reform" plans would benefit him (i.e., bigly), and we really shouldn't make everything about Mr. Trump, since he feeds on drama like a dung beetle feeds on dung. Instead, Democrats should be advancing ideas that would actually reform our tax code, like bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and closing corporate tax loopholes, but of course they won't do that, because they fear losing their big corporate donors, when they should fear losing American voters.

Have you been wondering why the Senate hasn't yet acted on the House's "resolution of disapproval" aiming to overturn the Bureau of Land Management's rules limiting methane emissions on our public lands? Well, apparently a significant slice of the defense community, including thousands of veterans and four Generals, support the methane emissions rule, arguing that (among other things!) venting methane as wastefully as we do hurts our efforts to produce our own energy, and thus also our efforts to stay out of wars over energy. Could we run ads saying those who want to get rid of the methane emissions rule are objectively anti-security? Hey, they'd just be getting some of their own.

Adrianne Jeffries at The Outline reminds us that stories about people who walk 12 miles to work every day are not "heartwarming" -- that they're "really indictments of a country that has the world’s largest economy but can’t promise a living wage," or at least not enough of a living wage to buy a car. Also, too, why can't we have nice things like public transportation, particularly in rural areas? Because we won't tax the rich hard enough to get them, that's why.

Alana Semuels at The Atlantic describes how four years of complete Republican rule have allowed coal ash pollution to hurt residential clean water in North Carolina. It's a big story, and note well that in Amy Brown -- the Belmont, NC resident and former Republican who now lines her walls with bottled water for cooking, drinking, and tooth-brushing and who agitates against coal ash pollution -- North Carolina has summoned a thundercloud, for hell hath no fury like a Republican utterly abandoned by her party.

Finally, Trump Administration spokeshack Sean Spicer suggests that public disclosure about such issues as Mr. Trump's tax returns and the identity of White House visitors is (as the Times puts it) "unnecessary, intrusive, or even harmful." People who talk about the importance of "privacy" not as it relates to your internet information but as it relates to "the President's ability to get the best advice" don't seem to understand that they work for America, and they also don't understand that Americans give the President all the advice he needs. It's a shame Mr. Spicer's position isn't an elected one, or we could pelt him with "public disclosure is harmful" ads until he has to get a real job.

Around the table: the Big Pharma vs. Trump phony war, and other tales.

Jim Naureckas reminds us that President Trump didn't "revoke" transgendered student protections because, actually, he can't do that. Prior court decisions have made clear that Title IX protections extend to transgendered students; all Mr. Trump did was rescind the Obama Administration's guidance on certain issues surrounding those protections, many of which, I feel compelled to note, public schools all over the country will keep anyway, because why should Trump be the Boss of Us? We're the Boss of Us.

ProPublica and Consumer Reports tells us how big pharma is getting leading academic voices to publicly support their thousand-dollar-a-day drug prices. You'll hear the familiar rhetorical hostage crises, i.e., we have to charge a lot for these drugs in order to ensure future innovation, though Big Pharma sure does spend a lot of money on advertising, lobbying, and executive salaries, all while sucking at the Big Gummint teat. But why does the article think Big Pharma will be "fighting" Mr. Trump? They've already beaten him -- he now says Medicare, though forbidden by law to negotiate better drug prices, is the "real" price-fixer.

The Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt to the EPA Administrator post before we could see all those emails he wrote to fossil fuel corporations while serving, such as he was, as Oklahoma's Attorney General, but Mike Ludwig at TruthOut tells you what they're all about. Long story short: it's not pretty -- for people who bleed money, fossil fuel executives sure do whine constantly about having to follow clean air and clean water regulations. And I'm tired of the you-either-work-with-us-or-you-work-against-us dichotomy the fossil fuel industry peddles -- as if they have no obligation whatsoever to work with us, the owners of government.

18 state Attorneys General write to Education Secretary DeVos, asking her not to ease up on for-profit colleges that bilk students out of money and lie about their chances at getting jobs after graduating. I'm tempted to say good luck with that!. But duty is duty, particularly when folks like Rep. Foxx (R-VA) say we've got to ease up on those fly-by-night schools that used to be the laughingstock of the country, schools that the Obama Administration cracked down upon only after Republicans retook the Senate.

Aarian Marshall at WIRED says the Trump Administration's delay of a Caltrain grant (so Caltrain can move from diesel to electric power) presages an all-out Trump Administration attack on public transportation. Well, why wouldn't he? We're not necessarily prepared for it, and Mr. Trump knows that, and plenty of right-wingers think public transportation is TEH COMMUNISTZ!!!! and EVERYONEZ IN AMURIKAZ SHOULDZ DRIVEZ TEH CARZ!!!!!

Finally, we learn that Democrats in difficult races may face primaries from their left, if certain grassroots groups have their way. National Democrats, of course, have no standing to take Democrat voters hostage to the notion that you have to stick with the people who can win, because we all saw how that worked out in 2016. I sure hope these grassroots groups don't go the way of their Tea Party counterparts, most of which dissolved in puddles of corruption. But worse things could happen -- like the inevitable 20-point losses Sens. Donnelly, Heidtkamp, Manchin, McCaskill, and Tester will suffer in 2018 if they're not primaried out.

Around the table: Virginia's DMV turns the state into a debtors' prison, and other stories.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept reminds us that we shouldn't let the terrorist attack in Nice prompt us to "Give ISIS What It's Asking For," i.e., a world divided against itself. You know, kinda like we gave Osama bin Laden what he was asking for after 9.11 -- not just withdrawing American troops from Saudi Arabia (his only actual demand, if I remember correctly), but all the injuries we did to ourselves afterward, like the PATRIOT Act and the Department of Homeland Security and the Iraq war. If your impulse, upon reading the first sentence above, was to respond well, naturally a guy named Hussain would say that, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) stop reading this blog. (You would also have the option of repeating step 1 as often as necessary before proceeding to step 2.).

Charlottesville (VA) Legal Aid Justice Center files class-action lawsuit against the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, alleging that its system of automatically suspending drivers' licenses for unpaid minor infractions not only violates "the Constitution’s “fundamental principles of due process and equal protection," but has turned the state into a sort of debtors' prison. Before you laugh, consider not only that the fines are automatic (aren't judges supposed to set sentences in America?), but also that about one out of every six Virginia residents currently have suspended licenses -- meaning, if you live in Virginia, this could be you if you work a minimum-wage job and get caught with a busted tail-light in a state with inadequate public transportation, and you may be out of a job soon, and thus unable to pay your ever-increasing debt, et cetera. Wow, it's like the state is a payday lender or something.

As Donald Trump accepts the Republican Party's Presidential nomination this week, Justin Talbot Zorn at the Huffington Post wonders why Mr. Trump, supposedly so anti-"free" trade, chose a "free trade cheerleader" as his running mate. But I think he gives Mr. Trump too much credit for actually meaning what he says this one time, for his stance on trade, too, "has been subject to negotiation and revision" -- Mr. Trump said not long ago that he supports "free" trade, as long as it's a good trade deal, when we can all cite numerous reasons why the last dozen or so "free" trade deals are fundamentally evil. I bet President Trump's first yuge and byootiful trade deal will look just about exactly like the TPP he now professes to hate -- and I also bet he lies about it.

It gets worse, of course: Mr. Trump actually excused new running mate Mike Pence for his pro-Iraq war vote, while explicitly saying Hillary Clinton shouldn't be excused for hers. So now Mr. Trump has openly embraced hypocrisy as a way of making hard decisions, but then so have many of his votaries, who must do ever-more complicated intellectual gymnastics in order to keep the faith. Am I the only one who notices, by the way, that saying Mike Pence was "misled" about Iraq doesn't exactly endorse Mr. Pence's leadership ability? Does no one remember the time George Romney once had to quit the Presidential race in embarrassment after saying he felt like the military had "brainwashed" him regarding the Vietnam war?

Finally, some good news: the National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) rules that temporary workers may bargain collectively along with permanent workers regardless of the wishes of either the temp workers' employer or the permanent workers' employer. And if your Tea Party uncle cries TEH OBAMA AND HIS BUREAUCRATZ IZ TEH AMURIKAN CAESARZ!!!!!!, you can go ahead and remind him that this decision actually restores the status quo as it existed before the NLRB under an actual aspiring Caesar, George W. Bush, reversed it. Dig, also, the corporate lobbies weighing in that this NLRB ruling would "sow uncertainty and conflict." Want some cheese with that whine, American Staffing Association? Or will you cry into hundred-dollar bills?

Around the table: we're up to our eyeballs in dirt.

"Race to Build California Bullet Train Shows Value of U.S. Market," says Bloomberg Business -- mainly because it's attracting some attention from foreign corporations. Shame it's come to that, but blame Republicans in Congress and in states, who not only refused federal stimulus money to build high-speed rail in America, but mocked it like doing so made them the funniest people in the world. The only way this economy gets moving again is if we envision and build the future the way we want it -- as we last did with the internet boom of the late 1990s -- and if a few of Our Glorious Elites have to make several billion fewer dollars, that's too bad.

Lydia DePillis at Wonkblog argues that our nation's ports are beset by far worse problems than their "labor problem." The ILWU has worked Western ports without a contract since July, but other problems doing more to affect port function include an increase in tonnage through ports and increased size of ships, which not only require more support from the ports (like deeper dredging) but which also result in increased confusion, since many different shippers might use the same ships and the sorting of what goes where becomes increasingly difficult. Boy it sure is a good thing we have "free" markets to figure all this out.

ProPublica takes us "Inside the Wild World of Charter Regulation," and it's even worse than it sounds: much of the time, states and municipalities don't even do the regulating, delegating the task to private entities who could well have conflicts of interest. If you're starting to think we wouldn't have any charter schools if our state and local governments just did the oversight they're supposed to be doing -- since charter schools do, you know, take public money -- you're not alone. If you think they're not doing the oversight because their cronies run the schools, well, you're not alone there, either.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof announces that he was "wrong" about the deleterious effects of labor unions, and says they've been a positive force in building the middle class. I hate to pile on a guy who actually says "I was wrong," since so many people wrong about so much more never say it, but this is clearly a bigger deal to him than it is to me, since his negative impression of unions seems to have been built on the kind of evidence (look, three examples! It's an unstoppable trend! Plus unsubstantiated generalizations that could just as easily be made about employers!) that more critical thinkers can see through.

WalMart has announced it will increase its base wages to $10/hour gradually over the next 12 months. I'm not going to quibble too much that they could do more, or that state minimum wage hikes have forced WalMart's hand, because progress is progress. I will mention, however, that when CEOs decide to hike wages due to popular pressure, they can always change their minds, which is why we need to keep the pressure up.

Finally, let me say that Scott Walker's refusal to condemn Rudy Giuliani's statement that "I do not believe that the President loves America" was actually fairly clever politically. "I'm in New York; I'm used to people saying things that are aggressive out there" reminds everyone he's a heartland boy, and though for a moment I hoped having to throw red meat to the far right in public would give Mr. Walker too much agita, I remembered that in 2000 George W. Bush had the sense to throw all his red meat in private. And imagining noted purveyor of political nonspeak Hillary Clinton castigating Mr. Walker for "talking like a politician" is almost enough to make me hope Jim Webb or Brian Schweitzer is the nominee. (In other news, if Mr. Giuliani needs that much reassurance that someone loves something, I bet a lot of women are glad they're not in a relationship with him.)

Around the table: the struggle to detect signs of intelligent life in corporations and government.

Ho hum, Citizens for Tax Justice finds that the latest Ryan Budget gives millionaires an average tax cut of over $200,000. Which they'll then turn around and use to create jobs, right? Sure -- just like they do whenever they get a massive tax cut. Which means "never," since the rich are very much like you and me in that they hoard a windfall when they get it.

Richard Kirsch describes some of the challenges unions face in organizing retail and fast-food workers today. Key finding: large corporations are extremely powerful, even "more powerful than governments," but they distribute their workers over hundreds of sites and unions can really only organize one at a time, giving said unions very little power to change what a corporation does. That's if it succeeds, of course -- workers in retail and fast food turn over a lot, which makes getting half the workers to sign cards that much harder.

Tennessee pols see the gnarled, ringed hands of the Koch brothers behind a bill restricting municipalities from creating mass transit programs using dedicated lanes -- you know, like the one Nashville just so happens to be trying to build right now to shorten commuting times. The good news? Sunshine on this bill might kill it, as it killed Tea Party efforts to kill solar power efforts in Georgia (though at least one other Tea Party group fought on the side of the angels during that battle).

Speaking of the Koch brothers, their front group Americans for Prosperity is dropping over a half-mil on an ad nominally aimed at incumbent Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor (D), featuring a speaker who seems to have no idea if he has health insurance or not. See, what you do here is you all get together and laugh at this clown, who seems to think his ignorance is someone else's fault, and whose wife, perhaps not coincidentally, narrated another AFP anti-Affordable Care Act spot broadcast in Arkansas that reporters found to be, well, not necessarily in line with the facts.

Hobby Lobby -- the corporation trying to assert before the Supreme Court that it has the "religious freedom" to deny its workers contraception coverage -- has pumped over $70 million of its employee retirement plan into mutual funds investing in corporations making abortion drugs and contraception pills and devices. Hobby Lobby's Glorious Leaders no doubt stand ready to tell us that they have no control over what the mutual fund does with its money, which I knew was bunkum even before I heard of the Ave Maria Fund. I guess actual people have an easier time living their values than fictional ones.

Finally, scientists have found an ocean under the icy surface of one of Saturn's moons, making that moon a candidate to support life. That life may not be very lively, since Enceladus is, like many of Saturn's moons, quite small and quite cold, and the ocean underneath its icy surface is about the size of Lake Superior. Still, it's a start.