Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning financial regulation, tax policy, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep our CFPB as independent as possible, reject any extension of the Trump tax “cuts,” and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining 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.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would subject our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to the annual appropriations progress. Congress has long found this method of funding perfectly acceptable for other agencies, so why not now, with our CFPB? Probably because our CFPB has done a lot of good work for us. You’d think that’d mean something to our House Reps, given that they’re supposed to represent us (that’s why we call them “representatives”), but apparently the whining of big donors means more, hence why right-wingers want to defund our CFPB, which is an awful lot like defunding the police, since our CFPB catches financial predators. I’d hate for America to be a land where all you have to do to get what you want is have a lot of money and whine a lot.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to extend the notorious Trump tax “cuts.” I put “cuts” in quotation marks because most Americans didn’t get nearly as much benefit from them as the rich and corporations did. I’d happily make tax cuts for lower brackets permanent, but I would never be a hostage to letting rich folks pay hundreds of thousands of dollars less every year and corporations paying millions of dollars less every year. One percentage point is a lot more money at higher incomes, after all. Politicians pretend not to get that, but we do.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Big corporation (foreign or not, I really don’t care) wants to mine for copper on Native American sacred land that also happens to be public land? Why, no, thank you. And I’m not particularly anti-copper – the health care industry found out during the pandemic that getting rid of all those copper tables years ago was a big mistake – but I am anti-pollution and pro-clean water and pro-clean air and pro-respecting actual religious freedoms. I guess, for some people, religious freedom only counts if you’re white – or if you’re Black or Brown but also a Republican. That’s not the America we want to pass on to our children and our children’s children.

Action: concerning voting rights and government shutdowns.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and stop all the government shutdown drama. 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.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would expand voting rights for all Americans, by restoring our government’s ability to stop vote suppression at the state or local level. Our Supreme Court ended that in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, by ruling that the Voting Rights Act (which gave our government the power to stop discriminatory voting rights laws) itself discriminated against Southern states – I know! – but the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would empower our government to stop vote suppression in any state or locality with a documented history of vote suppression. That sounds exactly the kind of thing Congress should be doing instead of indulging in shutdown drama.

Oh, yeah, speaking of that: both the National Women’s Law Center and the Coalition on Human Needs help you tell your Congressfolk to oppose brutal, hateful spending cuts and avert a government shutdown. I trust I don’t have to explain why, oh, but I will anyway: the folks who want to shut down government aren’t just evil, they’re also whiny diaper-loaded brats who act the way they do because they can’t win arguments on the merits. Government shutdowns mean no food inspections, no pollution inspections, no workplace safety inspections, and no soldiers’ pay. Anyone who wants any of that to happen just to prove a point about “spending” is an evil bastard whom we must oppose and defeat.

Penny rants for September 25, 2023.

Here’s some big, good news: our Commodity Futures Trading Commission (or CFTC) has banned corporations from using derivatives to essentially bet on Congressional elections. The CFTC argues that betting on elections is far beyond its purview, and the corporation trying to bet on elections refuted that argument point by point, right? Ha ha ha ha! “It’s a known fact that radical innovation often requires time to be understood and accepted,” its CEO said. As I’ve said before, facts don’t need to announce themselves as facts, let alone “known" facts, and a lot of “radical innovations” do, in fact, suck, like this one does. If you know a lot of folks who bet on sports – which is very easy now, thanks to our internet and smart phones – then you know that almost everyone who bets on sports thinks all the games are rigged now. Now imagine everyone citing organized betting to suggest that “elections are rigged,” and you will know that no corporation should create a betting hall for elections, ever. Hell, I'd go further: I think horserace polls should be illegal.

Donald Trump apparently thinks that his legal troubles make him a sort of honorary Black American – and his campaign thinks it can capitalize! “Paying hush money to a porn star, allegedly mishandling classified documents, and attempting to overturn a free and fair election” are all far worse offenses than “brandishing a cellphone,” “carrying a toy gun,” and “telling a police officer you’re carrying a gun for which you have a permit,” all of which have induced police to execute Black folks in America. But Mr. Trump's strategy is, sadly, not as stupid as it sounds, and not just because of the actual “weaponization of law enforcement” I've just described. Democrats sure don’t reciprocate the love when Blacks routinely give them 90% of their votes, and George W. Bush showed us in 2004 that every little bit helps. He got 11% of the Black vote that year, versus Donald Trump’s 8% in 2020, and though that wasn’t the only reason Mr. Bush won, it sure didn’t hurt.

Dig this: the University of Florida, now headed by former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, just handed a $4.7 million no-bid contract to McKinsey & Company to “help develop the university’s vision for the future.” It’s a “no-bid” contract not just because of crony corporatism but because everyone knows by now that it’s a stupid idea to contract with the notorious McKinsey about anything, let alone creating a “vision” for your university! And I bet you thought vision was a college President’s job. Of course, that’s what leadership is all about these days: forcing other people to do your work for you, and then saying it’s not your fault when they screw up, and if Mr. Sasse didn’t know that before he was in our Senate, I’m sure he learned it there. Yikes, they could have paid me a lot less to develop a vision for education. Here it is: teach people to detect bullshit well enough that folks would be ashamed to hand out $4.7 million to big corporations to diddle themselves.

Finally, sure it was funny to hear Sen. Collins (R-ME) say that with the disappearance of the Senate dress code she might decide to wear a bikini on the Senate floor, but far less funny is hearing her say “I think there is a certain dignity that we should be maintaining in the Senate, and to do away with the dress code, to me, debases the institution.” Ah, do they think there’s any dignity to serving in the U.S. Senate? Have they looked in the mirror? Ron Johnson debases the institution with his endless stream of noxious, nonsensical crap, but at least he always looks sharp doing it! Meanwhile, Bob Menendez just got indicted, again, and still says I’m not going anywhere like anyone should care. Is it any wonder folks would take the guy in a hoodie and shorts who actually helps people over the guy in a suit who ensures that job-killing corporations get tax breaks?

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 498.

Now that Mitt Romney’s retiring, we’re hearing from him – through a book written about him – that at least one “top” Republican Senator voted to acquit Donald Trump on January 6-related impeachment charges because he was afraid Trumpholes would come after his family. And I’ve heard this kind of thing before before! Still, in America, we expect better from our leaders than that. Cowing to imagined threats, even threats against your family, means you shouldn’t have any power in the first place.

In a related note, bomb threats “prompt” the city of Chicago to close all of its public libraries this past Thursday, but anyone can threaten to blow a place up! I just want to see one library respond to a bomb threat by saying no more and staying the hell open. I’m tired of the worst people getting all the say about everything, and I’m beyond tired of the politicians who defend them by saying they have legitimate grievances. No grievance excuses terrorism.

Maud Newton at Slate writes an extensive, personal essay about dealing with her mother’s extreme right-wing views – in the process describing a Christian nationalist TV network called the Victory Channel, run, of course, by a super-rich right-wing evangelist. So now you know where folks who say “I don’t get my news from Fox” get their news! I always suspected Fox News would be a gateway drug for far worse things – not to mention far more lucrative scams! – and sadly, I was right.

It's sad that I hardly blink at the news that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has apparently been having an affair with Corey Lewandowski for years despite being yet another anti-gay marriage, “family values” politician. Her votaries – and there’ll be more of them if Donald Trump makes her his running mate – not only don’t care about the hypocrisy, they like it when their people get away with being hypocrites; they think they're sticking it to us, but they're just sticking it to themselves. We’re going to come back to this point momentarily.

As promised: Vivek Ramaswamy says he’ll “gut” the H-1B visa program that he just so happened to use 29 times as he was making his fortune in the big pharma biz. One could make a point about how corporations use such programs to drive down wages for everyone, but of course he doesn’t make that point! And I’m sure his votaries would applaud him for using the system to get ahead and then pulling up the ladder before others could. (As an aside, his press hack’s analogy in paragraph 9 is ridiculous. No, it’s not like “using water and electricity” though water and electricity regulations are “broken,” because using water and electricity isn’t the same as trying to get rich. The stupid, it burns!)

Finally, I’m not surprised that all these indictments have only hardened Trump votaries’ support for their Personal Lord and Savior, and not just because I’ve watched it happen at my own job. But when they talk about “the system” being “rigged against him – and, by extension, them,” they are demonstrating their utter ignorance of not just recent American history, where Walking While Black still gets you the death penalty in too many areas, but of distant American history, during which police have spent far more time beating up strikers and protestors than arresting men of means. All of which reminds us, again, that we should only minister to those we can save, and leave the rest to God’s mercy.

Action: concerning voting rights, government funding, and whistleblower protections.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restore voting rights to ex-felons, pass a clean funding bill, and expand whistleblower protections for federal workers. 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.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Democracy Restoration Act, which would restore the right to vote in federal elections to released prisoners. Because they never should have lost their right to vote in the first place! Because continuing to punish someone for a crime for which they’ve already served their sentence is cruel! And, not incidentally, because folks who try to deny voting rights to ex-felons mean to deny rights to Black and Brown folks, not because “they commit all the crime,” but because our justice system tends to target them. So, like, enough already.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk you expect them to pass a clean government funding bill, with no poison pills and no manufactured hostage crises. And no means no! Just because politicians want to do something doesn’t mean anyone else wants to do it! Rep. Greene (E-GA) says she won’t vote for any spending bill if our House doesn’t vote on impeaching President Biden over a whole lot of nothing, and we have to stop coddling people who do that. No means no! And no whining means no whining!

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Expanding Whistleblower Protections for Contractors Act, which would, as its title suggests, strengthen protections for whistleblowers and expand those protections to include federal contractors as well as federal employees. Because contractors can dime out some serious corruption, too! And they don’t do it for the money, because no amount of money can make up for lost jobs, livelihoods, families, or friends, so don’t believe big corporate lobbyists who tell you they do.

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.

Around the table: the drama, it burns! Part 399.

Here’s some good news: a Leon County circuit judge has struck down Florida’s last gerrymander and told the state legislature it’ll have to do better. Right-wingers will appeal, but they’ll have to come up with something better than “Florida’s state Constitution violates our federal Constitution,” which argument sure doesn’t sound very states’ rights of them, does it?

Don’t get too excited that3M will pay $5.5 billion for selling defective earplugs to our soldiers, because that suit has 300,000 plaintiffs, working out to less than $18,500 each and that’s not counting the lawyers’ cut, and might we say hearing loss (not to mention betrayal!) is worth more than that? Anyway, file that under “Why We Shouldn’t Privatize Shit, Part 2399” and "The Private Sector is So Not Better Than the Public Sector, Part 3884."

It’s heartening to hear that most Americans – even most Republicans – support unions and strikes, but remember that those numbers will go down the minute corporate propagandists go on TV with their they get goodies you don’t get rubbish. The obvious answer to that is well, then organize for more goodies, and also punish bosses who refuse to negotiate.

When I hear that wannabe Nazis marched through a Florida park chanting “we are everywhere,” all I can say is no, you’re not. The article doesn’t note that there were no more than 50 marchers in that “terrifying” video. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to Nazis, of course, but how about we stop giving them the big dramas they want?

Be careful reading stories telling you that TEH EPA IZ REMOVINGZ PROTEKSHUNZ FORZ TEH WETLANDZ!!!!!, because our EPA is literally only complying with our Supreme Court’s will. That information should be in the headline, not just the lede. It’s not in the headline because our “liberal” media are lazy, stupid, or evil. But I repeat myself.

Finally, billionaires are having trouble building a “new green city” in Northern California because they’ve pissed off all the locals. This article is way, way too credulous, so I’ll say it: they want to build a “new green city”? That is to laugh! Billionaires just want to build a city that redlines Black and Brown out of it. They also want to be able to abuse the help with impunity.

Action: concerning government spying, animal abuse, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Cooper Davis Act and pass Canyon’s Law and the FATCAT 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 Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Cooper Davis Act, which would force internet service-providing corporations to report to our Attorney General regarding substance abuse violations. I got a better idea: how about our government get warrants for that information? And I got an even better idea: how about we stop putting drug users in jail and start getting them the help they need instead? Sure, we’d have to start seeing drug users as patients and not criminals, and ending the war on drugs also means less racism. But I’m all for enabling our personal growth as a nation – just not by giving law enforcement more weapons to bludgeon us with.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Canyon’s Law and outlaw the use of cyanide bombs to kill animals on our public lands. Because cyanide bombs are absolutely heinous! They result in a slow, painful, and torturous death for anyone nearby, and n.b. that pronoun – cyanide bombs don’t just kill animals that prey on livestock, they can also kill any animal who happens to be nearby, and they can also kill any human being who happens to be nearby. In fact, the bill’s authors have named their bill after an Idaho boy who almost died from cyanide bomb exposure. Could it be that just throwing hurt and pain around isn’t the only way to solve problems?

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fueling Alternative Transportation with a Carbon Aviation Tax (or FATCAT) Act. Again, the acronym isn’t as unwieldy as you might have expected! Believe it or not, folks with their own jets actually pay less in fuel taxes than folks who fly commercial flights (i.e., you and I), but the FATCAT Act would increase that tax eightfold (from 22 cents per gallon to $1.95 per gallon) and end exemptions for oil exploration and logging. Oil and logging CEOs hardly need the handout, after all! And given how oil tax breaks helps foster the right-wing movement that eventually destroyed the New Deal, perhaps we should be more careful about that.

Around the table: banksters, billionaires, and other people who ruin everything.

The Lever describes how private equity corporations are ruining health care. Long story short: banksters ruin everything. Long story somewhat longer: no, really, they’re a bunch of damn vampires, seeing every hospital, nursing home, and doctor’s office not as a thing that serves people but as a thing to bleed money from. Long story even longer: I really can’t say enough what evil bastards these folks are; I don’t even feel particularly blasphemous saying they’re going to burn in eternal hellfire. Let me know if I’m not making myself absolutely clear. I have been told I have a propensity to hold back.

Matthew Rosza at Salon reminds us that the heart problems caused by COVID way, way outnumber the heart problems vaccines cause. Remember when that latter item was all over the news a few years ago? Now it’s back, thanks to that fool Elon Musk, who heard about LeBron James’s son having a heart attack in practice and immediately said TEH COVIDZ!!!!! I’m old enough to remember when J.V. Cain dropped dead at an NFL practice due to a heart condition 30-odd years before COVID; in the meantime, COVID causes many more heart problems than vaccines do, and of course some folks exaggerate the problems caused by vaccines by confusing correlation and causation. So maybe some people need to either learn to STFU until they know what they’re talking about or stop running with salacious headlines.

I hate to say it, but I already know how our Supreme Court will rule on whether a disabled woman who has filed over 600 Americans With Disabilities Act lawsuits against various hotels actually has standing to sue -- they’ll rule she doesn’t, even though she’s, you know, disabled. Why? Because they didn’t let alone a First Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that she does have standing, because the hotel chain plaintiff whines incessantly about the “cottage industry” of “self-appointed testers” even though, in the words of her lawyer, “(n)obody complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act until they’re sued,” and because our Justice Department could just step in and enforce the law (although they generally don’t). I also know because they only care about preserving big corporate power – and sadly, that isn’t an exclusively right-wing disease in our federal courts.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (E-CA) now says our House might look into impeachment proceedings against President Biden. I’m not a hundred percent sure there’s nothing there – I do remember thinking Joe Biden’s brother Jim could be an anvil around his neck – but I am certain that all Republican attempts to demonstrate there’s something there have delivered way, way more drama than evidence, and most Americans hate drama, though perhaps not auite as much as I do. Anyway, Republicans always complained that impeaching Donald Trump would result in the opposition party just impeaching Presidents at will – and they were right! They were so right it's like they actually reached back into the past and impeached Bill Clinton!

Because we need the occasional reminder, Laura Clawson at Daily Kos delivers “A Partial List of Things People Screaming About Cancel Culture Want to Cancel.” Mostly it’s about the Barbie movie, which has (among other “sins”) a trans actress playing a doctor, though we could also the cancel-culture crowd wants to cancel the entirety of Black culture and history. I would say the hypocrisy is strong with right-wingers, but of course they don’t care about that, or about making rational arguments, even – slinging shit is their only aim. After all, they don’t have to clean it up – the rest of us do!

Finally, Sen. Tim Scott, running for the Republican nomination for President, confronts the slavery-with-benefits idea coming out of Florida thusly: “There’s no silver lining in slavery. Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives. It was devastating.” And I wish he’d stopped there! Sadly, he also said, of Mr. DeSantis, that “people have bad days,” even though it took more than a bad day day for the Florida State Board of Education to concoct these “standards,” and even though Gov. DeSantis’s “war on woke” has gone on for much, much longer than a bad day, and really, for most politicians a “bad day” is a day they yell at a reporter, not a day they insist we should teach “both sides” of slavery. If Tim Scott had gone all the way, and then ignored the inevitable right-wing whining about it, he’d be the front-runner for the nomination right now, but he didn’t, so he’s not.

Around the table: law and order is for *everyone*, not just us little people! And other truths.

Scientists have recorded water temperatures over 100 degrees off Florida at least twice in the last few days. I’ve been in 80-degree water and that was warm, but 100-degree water is like hot tub water; though silty water does tend to trap light and therefore heat, you would not be audacious to blame climate change for the severity of the problem. I’d tell the citizens of fascist Florida that I hope they’re happy with the razor-wielding clowns they’ve been voting for all these years, except that other creatures actually have to live in that water.

Israeli Knesset passes a judicial “reform” bill, one that will handcuff the nation’s judges from striking down evil laws, despite hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens taking to the streets (and a thousand military reservists boycotting military service). The law the Knesset passed is considerably narrower than the one the ruling far-right coalition wanted to pass in March; you would not be audacious to credit the protests for the coalition’s change of tactics. It’s a damn shame Israel doesn’t even have a second strong political party. But it’s a good thing they have so, so many upstanding citizens. They deserve to win

Bryce Covert at The Intercept details how “(i)n the five years since the start of the #MeToo movement, a quiet but effective legal backlash has swept over those who spoke out about sexual harassment and abuse. The accused have turned around and sued their accusers, effectively silencing them.” Plus, generally the accused have money and their accusers don’t. Right-wingers will claim this difficulty proves all lawsuits are bad, but they’re lying, and even if they weren’t, I wouldn’t want someone who throws up their hands at the slightest difficulty in my foxhole. Anti-SLAPP laws (SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” meaning, essentially, its whole purpose is to silence you) would help. Guess which political party generally stomps its feet and refuses to pass them, and guess which other party hasn't worked hard enough to pass them.

Surprise, surprise, a fellow about to become Ron DeSantis’s next deputy campaign manager also worked on that infamous anti-net neutrality campaign from 2017, the one that created millions of fake comments opposing net neutrality. Is there any evil into which Mr. DeSantis won’t dig his fat little fingers? Remember that Our Glorious Elites couldn’t repeal net neutrality – which virtually everyone who has ever thought about it and who also isn’t a cable corporation PR hack supports – without faking comments from dead people. So next time right-wingers argue that dead people delivered the 2020 election to Joe Biden, you can say thou doth protest too much.

Our Senate Judiciary Committee advances a Supreme Court ethics bill without any Republican votes because of course Republicans wouldn’t ever vote for that. Sen. Grassley (R-IA), who used to be pretty good at his job, said the bill was all “about harassing and intimidating the Supreme Court,” while Sen. Graham (R-SC), whose one act of heroism was almost 20 years ago and did no good almost like that was the whole idea, called it an “assault on the Court itself.” Jesus Mary and Joseph what ever happened to “if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime”? Or is that only for us little people?

Finally, Rudy Giuliani did not contest lawsuit claims from two Georgia poll workers that he smeared them after the 2020 election, but still argued that’s somehow not defamatory. Trigger warning: the whole story is fucking triggering. Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are still afraid to go out to the grocery store out of fear that diaper-loaded racists will kill them, but don’t expect repentance, let alone shame or self-reflection, from Rudy Giuliani – he’s just saying what he needs to say to get this case moving to the conclusion he somehow thinks he’s going to get! And that’s why our justice system needs to slap his sorry ass down.

Action: concerning education, airline regulation, and legacy admissions.

Long story short: tell Florida Republicans to get rid of stupid teachings about slavery, and tell your Congressfolk to regulate airlines again and end legacy college admissions. 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.

Care2 helps you tell Florida Republicans that Black slaves did not, in fact, “benefit” from slavery by learning “skills” they could use “later in life,” and to repeal educational standards forcing public school teachers to “instruct” their pupils as such. “Later in life,” Gov. DeSantis said! Of course slavery was always for life, and would still be so if we didn’t fight a damn war over it. Yes, we fought a war to end slavery! Don’t believe cynics and BS artists! Just as it’s good to celebrate what we did right, it’s evil to pretend what we did wrong wasn’t so bad, or was somehow “beneficial.” Folks with privilege can turn almost anything to their advantage. Did slaves have privilege? Of course not! And Florida needs to stop pretending otherwise.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that our government needs to start regulating airline corporations again. We haven’t regulated airlines for about 50 years, and among other things, that means you don’t get a complementary dinner on a two-hour flight anymore, but now on a much longer flight you have to pay through the nose to get a Panini sandwich that looks like it's been in a vending machine for months. Right-wingers will utter the word “regulation” with a sneer like anyone else feels that way about it anymore! More likely good Americans have become tired enough of cancelled flights and stranded families and lousy customer service that they would welcome a little government intervention.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fair College Admissions for Students Act, which would prevent colleges from giving preferential treatment to children of their donors and alumni. Our Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, but did nothing about all the failsons of rich donors that elite colleges admit all the time; indeed, those failsons include our last two Republican Presidents. I’m sure right-wingers will pretend to agree with us – but will argue that laws mandating fair treatment aren’t necessary! You’d be within your rights to ask: then what are laws for?

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: now with *even more* bile!

When I hear that some Republican House Reps claim to be preparing for a “World War III”-level fight against their own Speaker over spending cuts, I have a few reactions. First, none of these clowns would do anything but soil their pants in a real foxhole. Second, too many folks want to be war veterans without doing any of the hard work that comes with being war veterans. Third, when you’re throwing around words like “war” to describe negotiating with your own people, you’re showing your utter contempt for civilization. Not that item three is a surprise; these people hate civilization, because it repeatedly reminds them there are other people in the world who mean a damn.

Alabama state legislature redraws their Congressional maps, but doesn’t include a second majority-Black district “or something quite close to it” as our Supreme Court mandated. Well, that’ll teach people to count their chickens! Folks were salivating over getting another majority-Black district in Louisiana, too, but these states are just going to run out the clock on this matter, knowing our Supreme Court will allow them to use the maps they just made because “it’s too close to the election.” You think our Supreme Court knew that ahead of time? Of course they did!

Now the Florida State Board of Education has adopted “standards” which require public school teachers to tell students that slaves “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit,” and they deserve all the ridicule they’re going to get. There’s an upside to virtually anything, but generally the bigger the horror, the smaller the upside, and the mere existence of an upside doesn’t make just anything OK, and making slavery OK is of course what Florida fascists want. I eagerly await the first class clown to ask if surviving starvings and lashings from cruel masters was a “skill” that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”

People ask me what I think about Country Music Television (or CMT) yanking that Jason Aldean song about how us city folks shouldn’t try any of our putative shenanigans in a small town off the air. Long story short: my loathing for right-wing weaklings who act tough is bottomless, Republicans sure do have some cojones whining about “censorship” as they’re banning books about racism, and though I have only watched CMT for perhaps an hour out of my life, I’ve only heard terrific songs during that time – good, complex, hummable relationship songs – and I really doubt that’s just my dumb luck.

So Donald Trump is now obliquely threatening “to do things” to Special Prosecutor Jack Smith “that have never been done before” and also suggesting that since he has “a tremendously passionate group of voters” maybe it “would be very dangerous” to put him in prison. So Mr. Trump has become a surrealist, but instead of painting a pipe with the caption “this is not a pipe,” he’s issuing terroristic threats and saying “this is not a terroristic threat.” Anyway, his “tremendously passionate group of voters” are whiny diaper-loaded brats. A lot of them have guns, sure, but they’re about as ready overthrow a government as your average high school football team.

Finally, when I hear that former NBA superstar/current TNT analyst Charles Barkley has become a “role model” after all, I can’t help but think that whole thing’s quite overplayed. A handful of barfights got him negative press as a player, but everyone I know who’s met him say he’s kind, generous, and affable, suggesting, again, that maybe people treat you the way you treat them. The article doesn’t delineate his political transformation, either, from Friend of Rush Limbaugh to supporter-of-affirmative-action-but-also-for-poor-whites to “I was a Republican – until they lost their minds” (that was 2006!) to protector of diversity at Auburn and defender of gay and trans folk. I’m just grateful to know that someone, somewhere, didn’t let all that money make him an asshole.

Around the table: the Tulsa massacre *was* racist! And other truths.

When I hear that ”(t)he stock market is not loving Thursday’s job data,” I must ask if we need any more evidence that worshiping the stock market is evil. It’s all big corporations do now, and it hollows out our economy and ensures misery for most of us, so we need to fight it with every breath. (ADP’s job creation data, which reports that our economy gained almost 500,000 jobs in June, reported more than twice as much job growth than the Department of Labor, which reported a hair over 200,000 jobs. Either way, it’s not hard to tell right from wrong here, unless you worship mammon like our corporate CEOs do.)

Thinking maybe North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson was just calling for us to read the works of Hitler and Stalin and Mao more closely in his remarks before Moms for Liberty? Well, when you learn that Mr. Robinson has a history of saying racist and anti-Semitic crap on social media, you won’t think that anymore. Isn’t this about the point where Republicans decide they need to support someone who loves Nazis but isn’t so obvious about it? And who needs to read Mein Kampf just to be sure Hitler was an evil bastard?

When I heard that the New York Times clutched its pearls over Brazilian judges banning Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for the next eight years for the crime of election fraud, the very first thing I thought was: where were they when Brazilian judges were ginning up impeachment charges against one liberal President and throwing another liberal in jail so he couldn’t beat Mr. Bolsonaro in a Presidential race? The answer, of course: spewing forth over three dozen articles sympathizing with the Brazilian justice system. Read the whole thing, because the details are even worse than the summary.

Canadian judge counts a thumbs-up emoji as a contract agreement, meaning the emoji-ing farmer is out over $60,000, and while I might agree that an emoji could constitute a contract agreement in other circumstances, I could not count it as a contract agreement when the questioner merely asked if the emoji-er received the contract. Receiving a contract and approving it are two different things! Sounds like a judge is trying to force a point without adhering to the law or common sense; sound familiar, good Americans?

Donald Trump says he’ll do his next Muslim ban even bigly-er than his last one if he gets re-elected, though I’m not sure that declaration diddles the rage gland of even his most devoted followers; maybe anti-Muslim hate can be reactivated, but more likely they’ve moved on to new hatreds, like anti-racist teaching in schools. But don’t expect that declaration to attract moderates, either – he can talk all he wants about people “blowing up our shopping centers,” but I think everyone knows by now that the face of American terror is white and male, and its heart is right-wing and bigoted.

Finally, Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Schools suggests that we shouldn’t tell kids that the Tulsa massacre of 1921 was racist because “that is Critical Race Theory” and “kids should never be made to feel bad or told they are inferior based on the color of their skin.” He’s tried to backtrack, largely because good Oklahomans seem to protest his every appearance and good for them, but let me just say that when I learned about slavery as a child, I didn’t take it so damn personal because I knew that I didn’t enslave anyone. Sure, I came to understand privilege later, but right-wingers will never get there, because that’s wisdom, and wisdom is their Kryptonite.

Action: concerning voting rights, judicial ethics, and endless war.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, and to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF. 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Yes, it’s back, and Congress should keep bringing it back until it passes. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore our Justice Department’s ability to reject state voting law changes, and our Justice Department could do that in any state or locality that’s demonstrated a pattern of voting rights abuses. That would close the hole in the Voting Rights Act our Supreme Court blew open in their notorious Shelby County v. Holder ruling. And it would help us restore the voting rights a lot of states have spent the last several years gutting.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would force our Supreme Court Justices to follow the same ethics rules every other federal judge follows. Is there a news hook? You bet there is! Paul Singer apparently paid for Sam Alito to go on a very expensive fishing trip to Alaska in 2008 when Mr. Singer had business before our Supreme Court. Long, long experience has taught us that we should not trust our leaders so much as make them do right by us; hence we do not “trust” Sam Alito that they weren’t really pals or that his First Class plane seat was just sitting there unused, we make sure he never does such a thing again. Why should this be hard?

Finally, the Secure Families Initiative helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq. That resolution is almost old enough to get itself blind drunk at a bar without getting carded, and all it’s good for is encouraging Presidents to fling us off into more stupid wars, so getting it wiped from our laws shouldn’t be a big deal. And let me state, at least one more time, that our Constitution mandates that Congress declares wars and Presidents conduct wars. And it doesn’t say Congress declares “police actions” or “authorizes military force”; it says war. There are some old words we’ve got to get back to using, precisely because they’ll make us fly right again. “War” is one of them.

Readings for June 28, 2023.

Wendell Potter writes at The Lever about the direct relationship between runaway health insurance CEO pay and higher prices for regular folks. Remember when they tied CEO pay to “performance”? Sounded like a great idea, didn’t it? But in practice, it meant tying CEO pay to increasing stock values – not to developing better products or delivering better services – which means executives get rich by bleeding their companies dry and handing out money to shareholders. Now they get rich by (among other evils) jacking up out-of-pocket expenses so much that over 100 million Americans now have medical debt and you or someone you love will soon be “functionally uninsured.” Wendell Potter’s forgotten more than I’ll ever know about health insurance shenanigans, partly because he partook in them for so long; his work exposing private health insurance horrors over the last 15 years redeems him.

Akilah Wise at Capital B takes some pains to say that scientists don’t really know why some 80% of Black women suffer from uterine fibroids – or why they get them earlier, or why they’re more painful – but by the time you assess her argument, you’ll pretty much come away saying it’s the racism. At least, that’s what I did – you don’t even have to believe “weathering” (or “gradual whittling of Black people’s health due to the chronic stress of racial discrimination”) is a thing to trace human hormone disrupters, dietary and nutritional deficiencies, and higher stress pretty much to institutionalized racism. No, I’m not exaggerating! Do white folks more likely live near polluting power plants, or do Blacks? Do white folks have less access to money and privilege and therefore also better food, or do Blacks? Do white folks fear their next police contact will be their last one, or do Blacks? We could go on about this. Remember, though, that privilege isn’t so much about the help you got as the obstacles you didn’t have to face.

KNKX Public Radio offers a detailed look at “How liberal Seattle created a powerful conservative influencer: Christopher Rufo,” and it’s worth reading, but I quarrel with the notions that a) Seattle “created” him and b) Seattle is all that liberal. Mr. Rufo doesn’t differ dramatically from other right-wingers – he made his bones offering a “conservative” critique of Seattle’s homeless problem, but he did it the same way all right-wingers do everywhere, with “non-sequiturs, factual errors and ahistorical claims.” And we’ve got to get past the notion that cities are “liberal” merely because they're more tolerant; a real “liberal” city would also fund public services, which cities are too afraid to do in the post-Reagan era. Also too, “witnessing authoritarianism up close in China” doesn’t “turn people conservative,” because liberalism doesn’t equal authoritarianism except to those who don’t like liberalism. Seattle didn’t “create” Mr. Rufo – we did, by abandoning our duty to preserve and advance civilization.

Around the table: the corruption, it burns!

Ho hum, our “liberal” media cherry-picks data to “prove” that folks move right as they grow older, particularly the New York Times’s Nate Cohn, who concluded that based merely on 2012 and 2020 Presidential elections, never mind any election that happened inbetween. “To call it superficial is to be kind,” writes David W. Moore, in what must have been painful understatement. Anyway, people don’t get “conservative” as they get older, they get civilized – imagining all that drinking you did in your 20s as evidence you were “liberal” and all those stop signs you don’t roll through anymore as evidence you’ve become “conservative” would be absurdly simple-minded. Why, it’s almost as simple-minded as imagining that Joe Biden is the liberalest liberal ever merely because he happens to be President. Seriously, though, the whole article’s pretty good; you should read it.

If you want to read something truly depressing, read Phil Jones’s account of how big tech corporations use refugees all over the world as a kind of slave labor force to power their big machines. If, like me, you think great empires always rely on slave labor (and if, like me, you think that’s an abomination unto the Lord), you won’t be surprised or pleased to see big corporations using unemployed Palestinians and folks in Ugandan and Lebanese refugee camps to (among other things) teach algorithms how to recognize cats in photos – and paying them dung pellets for it, because who are they going to complain to? Don’t let your neighbors argue that at least they’re not the Uyghurs! Pointing out slave labor somewhere to excuse slave labor somewhere else is, what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, yeah: evil.

You may be pleased to hear that Kenya has reduced teen pregnancies by close to 40 percent over just the last four years, and you may also be pleased to learn that they’ve done that largely with more education for girls, though more punishment for rapists and molesters would also be nice. But why do I suspect American right-wingers won’t find this to be good news? Because the more teen pregnancy rates fall, the less they can complain about the immorality of (Black) folks? Because education, for them, is just an excuse to throw some white supremacist tantrum? Because they’re all about controlling other people? I kid, of course – all these reasons are true!

U.S. District Judge rules that West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice can’t simply avoid providing financial information in a lawsuit just because he’s running for Senate in 2024 and the information might be used against him. They all act like they want to be public servants, but then they act like they can’t take any punches whatsoever; no one has a “right” to avoid scrutiny, let alone criticism. And I can’t even say for sure he’d be a worse public servant than Joe Manchin, the man he’d likely run against once Mr. Manchin is done pretending he’s running for President because the moment demands him. I actually typed all that without convulsing in laughter.

Finally, I wish I were more surprised to hear that Moms for Liberty book-banning types often have deep ties to groups like the Proud Boys. That’s right, “Moms” wanting to ban books are using violent thugs who call themselves “Boys” as their brownshirts, because we are cursed to live in Interesting Times! I’m not upset that one source for this article came out after they all turned on her, because we don’t learn everything through thought experiment. Note well, though, that one Moms for Liberty member who got Gender Queer banned in Fascist Florida thanked her “friend Jacob Engels, who is part of the LGB community and also a reporter” for his help; she didn’t mention he was a Proud Boy. Every time they talk about some "friend," remember that every fascist is someone’s friend.

Action: concerning justice, pollution, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell our Department of Justice to investigate Mika Westwolf’s death, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to better protect good Pennsylvanians from fracking, and tell Delaware state legislators to let felons vote and not to let corporations vote. 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 legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate the suspicious death of Mika Westwolf, a 22-year-old Native American woman killed while walking along Montana’s Route 93 on March 31. That’s almost three months ago, good peoples, and with the Montana Highway Patrol refusing to release dash cam and body cam footage, and with no nearby businesses being contacted, apparently, for surveillance footage, it sure does seem like justice will come slowly, as it tends to do for Black and Brown folks in America. Oh, and the main suspect has Aryan Nations ties; you’d sure hate to think the police might want to sweep this under the rug for that reason. So let’s find that out.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Food and Water Watch helps you tell state House Environmental Resource and Energy Committee members to let HB 170 get a full vote by the state House. HB 170 would increase the amount of space between gas drilling sites and schools, hospitals, and water wells, and would also set much longer setback distances for hydrofracturing (or “fracking”) operations; the bill would further prescribe minimum distances between hospitals and other potentially hazardous sites. The only argument against HB 170 is that gas drilling executives don’t have enough money to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes yet, so we ought to pass it.

Finally, Delaware residents, take note: Common Cause helps you give felons the right to vote and reject a bill that would give corporations the right to vote. Nobody should have their right to vote taken away no matter what they’ve done, period, end of sentence. And a corporation is a thing, not a person, period, end of sentence. They’re actually selling giving corporations the right to vote – corporations headquartered in Delaware but with no other presence there, I feel compelled to add – as a way to boost turnout. I’m so old-fashioned I think serving your constituents is the best way to boost turnout. Maybe they should try that.

Action: concerning medical debt, price-gouging, and Senatorial whining.

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to fight medical debt and water corporation price-gouging, and tell your Senators to stop letting holds keep our government from doing their work. 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 78, the Medical Debt Relief Act would help good Pennsylvanians get out from under their medical debt, by establishing a Medical Debt Relief Program that would buy up and discharge said debt – which is what organizations like RIP Medical Debt – and, before you ask, would expressly prohibit the Pennsylvania state government from collecting on that debt in Sec. 3 (c) (3) (vi). Imagine that, government doing something that actually improves our lives! The Medical Debt Relief Act merits a phone call to your PA House Reps; the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you find your PA Rep, as does the OpenStates tool in the upper right-hand corner of this page.

Staying with Pennsylvania politics for a moment, Food and Water Watch helps you tell your state Senators to repeal Act 12, which enables a lot of predatory water and sewer pricing in the Commonwealth. It’s like I keep going out of my way to say “Commonwealth” for a reason – and it’s almost like that reason is that our water belongs to all of us, and we shouldn’t let private corporations gouge us merely because they provide a service. Ideally our government should provide that service – privatizing water and sewer services doesn’t mean better service, but it does mean regular folks pay more for them. So let’s make sure our state Senators understand all of that.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our Senators to ensure they evaluate and confirm Justice Department nominees. Sen. Vance (E-OH) has put a hold on all Justice Department nominees because waaaaaaah, I mean because of the “weaponization” of our Justice Department against Donald Trump, and I have to say he’s not being very conservative here – I mean, a conservative would say if you don’t want to be hounded by law enforcement, don’t do so many crimes! Or do they only say that to Black folks? Anyway, we might want to call our Senators and tell them to get rid of holds entirely. That Tommy Tuberville is also making a mess of things with Defense-related holds.

Action: concerning health care, education, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to keep no-cost preventive health care, tell Ohio state legislators to reject an anti-education bill, and tell your Congressfolk to stop with the cutting of food stamps already. 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you tell your PA state House Rep to pass the Health Insurance Preventive Coverage Act, which would ensure that good Pennsylvanians continue to get no-cost preventive health care. But doesn’t the Affordable Care Act already require that of everyone in America? Well, it did, but then that Texas judge, the one who’s had it in for Obamacare since forever, struck it down, in a ruling so terrible our Supreme Court should have an easy time gutting it, although you know how they are. All that's to say we must protect what we’ve won at the state level. And preventive health care helps everyone and saves money, so let’s get to it.

Ohio residents, take note: Civic Shout helps you tell your Ohio state legislators to reject the so-called Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act, which would prevent colleges from teaching anything that might give right-wingers a sad – like climate change, which the bill somehow declares a “controversial” subject. It’s “controversial” only because corporate executives want to keep polluting rather than embrace new technologies! Oh, and also because of the politicians who suck up to them. Frankly, I don’t find racism “controversial,” either – like climate change, it’s real, it’s happening, and it’s wrong, and folks who can’t handle these truths should move to a police state. In the meantime, let’s not let stupid people win.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut food stamps. But wait, you may well ask, didn’t the debt limit “deal” take care of that? We sure thought so, didn’t we? But Republicans upset about the “deal” continue to throw tantrums, such that the House couldn’t pass any legislation last week, and Congress also has to pass actual appropriations bills in a few months, so they’ve seized on “more food stamp cuts” as the way to, I don’t know, feel better about themselves? Someone who’d cut food stamps to feel better about themselves will have a tough meeting with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. We could help them avoid that fate by communicating our will that they not cut food stamps.

Readings for June 14, 2023.

From Nature magazine we learn about “The Illusion of Moral Decline.” You may be surprised to learn that I myself have subscribed to this illusion out of frustration and ignorance! Or not. Anyway, research from Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel T. Gilbert finds that “people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations.” So think of that every time you say you never did something kids do today that you most assuredly did, or every time you say you listened to real music when you were young when your parents and grandparents complained about it exactly the way you do now – or, ah, every time you begin a sentence about how politics used to be. There! Now no one can say I never admit I’m wrong.

If you find yourself occasionally flummoxed by the boostrapping of Tim Scott (let alone Thomas Sowell!), then Dustin J. Seibert at Huffington Post provides the corrective. Mostly it’s about how right-wingers oversimplify the world – “(t)hat no one is dragging Black folks by their noosed necks behind moving cars in the open anymore doesn’t suggest it’s completely nonexistent in all its forms,” and “there’s a wide chasm between rejecting victimhood and suggesting that racism died with Jim Crow,” though right-wingers often say exactly these things. My heart fell out at the fourth-to-last paragraph: “Racism is not our utter inability to accomplish the goals of our white counterparts. It’s our need to work a bit harder to do so. To be more agreeable and palatable. To go the extra mile to prove that we belong in spaces in which we’re not traditionally expected…spaces in which we literally weren’t allowed at a time when our parents walked the Earth.”

We’ve gone over this before, but it never hurts to go over it again: Jessica McDonald at FactCheck describes what the VAERS (or Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) database “can and can’t do,” and “how anti-vaccination groups habitually misuse its data.” You may recall Tucker Carlson doing exactly that with the VAERS database as he was trying to convince folks the COVID vaccines were the most dangerousest things ever. I wonder how many Tucker Carlson votaries died as a result! I wonder how many of them tried to spit their COVID on ER nurses out of rage! Anyway, anyone can submit a report to VAERS, our CDC and FDA can’t review all of them, and any species of BS can sit on a database unmolested for years. VAERS has helped do a lot of good work over the years, but bad people can ruin anything. That’s why our work, the work of civilized people, is never done until we pass from this world.

Around the table: Republicans will eat themselves! And other truths.

Some rare good news from our Supreme Court, as they have thrown out Alabama’s 2020 redrawing of Congressional districts on the grounds that it unlawfully concentrated Black voting power into one district. Blacks comprise more than a quarter of Alabama residents, so they can easily have two districts to represent them. I keep hearing that the ruling will have ripple effects in other Southern states, but that would require our Supreme Court (or one of the lower federal courts) to specifically rule against their district maps; the idea that these states will preemptively give up power strikes me as more than a little optimistic. No one gives up power easily, particularly those who never deserved it in the first place.

George Chidi at The Intercept wonders why, if “no one believes in” the Cop City training facility in Atlanta, then “why did Atlanta’s city council fund it?” One reason is that virtually no one thinks current police training facilities are anywhere near adequate, but another reason is that the mostly-Democratic city council is afraid of being painted as “soft on crime” – and/or thinks they won’t suffer too much electorally from building it, which may not be true, given how close the 2020 Presidential/Senate and 2022 Senate races were. I will say that the activist who said to a City Council member “I will fucking find your ass” belongs in jail. Hey, if the pricks who say “I know where you live” to school board members belong in jail, so do those I might find more sympathetic. Threats are threats, no matter who issues them.

Ho hum, right-wingers take to our airwaves to tell us that all that carcinogenic wildfire smoke that was all over the Eastern seaboard last week was perfectly safe for us to breathe! Just like the air in India and China, one Koch-funded hack said; even the least informed among us know the air is not, in fact, safe to breathe in India and China. “(W)ildfire smoke” is “natural,” they say, but particulates cause breathing problems whether they come from “nature” or burning coal or driving cars. We all know it’s climate change causing more wildfires, too. Now would be a good time to remind everyone that highly-paid fossil fuel industry hacks wouldn’t exist if we still had a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income.

In the wake of Target’s cowardice in the face of a few drama kings, Sonali Kohatkar reminds us that “corporations are not allies” to the queer community. Seems to me knocking down a pride display at a store is a reason to call the cops, not capitulate, and it also seems to me that when someone accuses you of putting trans-friendly bathing suits in the kids’ section when you haven’t done any such thing, you shame them for their stupidity/evil, but then I’m not a very flexible person. Also too, “(c)orporate support of causes is simply public relations. It is a sign that the culture is shifting thanks to the hard work of those impacted. It does not mean the business actually cares. Target’s recent capitulation to right-wing bigots proves this point.”

Florida Republicans, trapped between a rock and a hard place of their own making, start telling migrants that Gov. DeSantis’s new anti-immigration law “has no teeth” and is only “designed to scare you.” So that’s what you have to do when you’ve stepped in it that badly! One is of course tempted to laugh at Republicans attempting to justify having voted for the worst bill they could possibly find. And of course this law bites pretty hard for something with “no teeth” – ask anyone working in Florida’s farming industry if they’ll go to a hospital now that they’re going to get asked their immigration status. Oh, well – wherever Democrats are weak, fascism flourishes. It’s that simple.

Finally, North Carolina Republicans formally censure their senior U.S. Senator, Thom Tillis, for not being adequately conservative I guess, and all I can say is how soon they all forget! Thom Tillis was the North Carolina House Speaker who helped shepherd the most reactionary agenda in history from 2012-2014, and though North Carolina’s legislature has done far worse since then, these fools should be grateful for all he’s done for them. So North Carolina Republicans can primary him out in 2026 in favor of a “true conservative,” and then primary that fool out in 2032 in favor of a “true conservative,” and on and on and on until they start electing actual rabid raccoons to office. If any courageous Democrats ever emerge in North Carolina, of course, they’ll stop the cycle cold dead.

Action: concerning conservation, social media, and pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to protect old-growth forests, tell YouTube to stop putting up 2020 election denialist claims, and tell our EPA to regulate truck emissions as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to protect old-growth forests from logging corporations as vigorously as possible. Once again, while it’s good our government would actually propose to protect old-growth forests – all the Trump Administration ever cared about was making money for bosses, you recall – our Forest Service would still allow far too much logging of these forests to take place. Thousand year-old trees trap carbon emissions like nobody’s business and help keep our air and water clean; in that context, cutting them down so you can make money you’re just going to spend anyway doesn’t seem very far-sighted. But that only means the most far-sighted among us must make ourselves heard.

Both Care2 and Common Cause help you tell YouTube to stop letting users post false claims about the 2020 election. Which Joe Biden won, which was not “stolen” from Donald Trump, which was not plagued by “voter fraud” – you get the picture. YouTube stopped posting such videos for a while, but lately they’ve reversed course; they must think we’re not looking anymore, or that 2020 election deniers have anything to offer YouTube users except masturbatory rage. But Fox News just had to fork over $787.5 million because they amplified this crap in their coverage; we can help YouTube avoid such a fate by reminding them that our First Amendment doesn’t permit or obligate them to publish just any old lie.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect us from truck pollution as vigorously as possible. This may be The Future, but we still ship most of our goods on our roads, and tailpipe pollution causes a lot of health problems (not to mention climate change!), so we ought to make that process as painless as possible. And not for nothing, but the ill health effects of tailpipe pollution do hit Black and Brown communities harder, no matter how many right-wingers say so the roads are racist ha ha snort? We built a disproportionate number of those roads through Black and Brown neighborhoods, so again, we should make that fact as painless as possible.

Penny rants for June 5, 2023.

First they said “greedflation” – the notion that corporations were raising prices because they could – was a “fringe” theory “nobody” believed, then they said that yes actually greedflation was really happening, and now they’re saying greedflation is actually a good thing. Why? Because it’s “keeping us out of recession,” but that’s a rhetorical hostage crisis if ever I saw one: you better let corporations charge whatever they want, or the economy gets it! And if you see through that line of dung too quickly, they’ll tell you that wage growth is the real cause of inflation, though we’ve lately seen inflation go down much faster than wage growth. Also, “(s)trong consumer spending — the very factor that, by the Journal’s own admission, is preventing an economic downturn — has been possible partially due to strong wage growth.” Also, charging people more money because you can is immoral. Let me know if you think I’ve forgotten anything. I really want these zombie lies to die already, and I’ll keep the headshots coming until they do.

In case you were wondering why right-wingers were mad at Chick-Fil-A, which should be their very favorite corporation, apparently it has to do with Chick-Fil-A having an “executive position overseeing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the company” – one not filled by a white person, no less – plus Chick-Fil-A CEO Dan Cathy once shined a Black man’s shoes as a way of dealing with racial tensions in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. And just like that, decades of Chick-Fil-A hating gays go out the window! I swear, people don’t appreciate a damn thing these days. Naturally some of the right-wing blowhards urging their brethren to cancel Chick-Fil-A have also gone on the record as opposing cancel culture. Of course, the less obnoxious you are, the less you have to worry about “cancel culture.” (I would also say the shoe-shining bit is in fact a weak response to a big problem, but I’m pretty sure right-wingers just saw TEH BLACKZ!!!!! and went nuts. Hey, some people give me no choice but to think little of them.)

Around the table: finally they admit greedflation is real! And other miracles.

Apparently the “fringe theory” of “greedflation” is finally “get(ting) its due,” now that even the Wall Street Journal thinks greedflation is real. Of course, nobody who’s been saying it for two years (whose number even includes several members of our “liberal” media) is “fringe” to anyone but a corporatist paid to ignore what’s right in front of their face. I only wonder whether Lael Brainard was being too circumspect in describing a “price-price spiral,” “where companies mark up prices far higher than the increases in their input costs,” because “greedflation” is a much easier way of saying that.

Judges have been slow to accept that they should enforce antitrust law, but Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge Leo Sorokin not only struck down the American/JetBlue “Alliance,” but excoriated the paid hacks who testified on the “Alliance”’s behalf. If, like me, you think even psychology is a more rigorous science than economics, you’ll find Judge Sorokin’s notes fairly affirming. You may also, like me, find the “economic consulting” gigs Mr. Stoller describes to be a kind of welfare-for-the-rich, a far more pernicious kind of welfare than food stamps could ever be. By the way, bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income would fix it. Imagine a world where it simply didn’t pay to lie about how money works!

Rick Scott thinks he’s so, so funny for saying Florida is “openly hostile” to socialists, though it’s no laughing matter that the actual travel advisories from the NAACP and the Human Rights Campaign that he mocked describe a burgeoning fascist state where you might actually die for being Black or gay, respectively. Also too, imagine being a guy who went to college on the G.I. bill. Now imagine being a guy who ran a hospital that defrauded Medicare and Medicaid so badly they had to pay a $1.7 billion fine. And now imagine being a guy who talks shit about "socialism" all the time. Actually, you don't have to imagine any of that: Rick Scott is all three of those guys! (And anyway, anyone who’s ever driven a car or used a library or called a cop is a socialist.)

I’m a bit perplexed at a Georgia Republican district chair seems to feel personally assaulted by all the globes everywhere that “brainwash” people into thinking the world isn’t flat, not just because people have known the world is round since long before Columbus, but also because globes are actually a lot less common now that we can get planetary images in so many other ways. Globes taught me everything about geography when I was a kid, but getting one in my 40s turned out to be a chore! Oh well, I guess some people never stop whining, and Georgia may finally be becoming a place where a woman like Kandiss Taylor can only get to 49% in a statewide election.

Good news, everyone: Texas Republicans failed to ram through their bill mandating that all state public schools commit the sin of idolatry by posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom. If you were among those who spoke out about this matter, congratulate yourself! Note well, however, that this is only one victory; the forces of religious folly have won plenty of times in Texas in recent years. Also note well that the ACLU’s statement about parental rights is not inconsistent with anything they’ve ever said about teaching Black or gay history in schools: the key phrase in “(p)arents should be able to decide what religious materials their child should learn” is religious materials.

Finally, Rep. Lauren Boebert (E-CO) apparently stonewalled cops after her son called 911 to allege abuse by his father/her soon-to-be-ex-husband, but I don’t celebrate this news at all. I might question the timing of its release (she just announced that she’s filed for divorce, while her son called 911 in December), and I do celebrate some of her other reversals, but I do not celebrate her acting like or being someone who felt she had to keep the family together by herself. And I also don’t blame her for trapping herself in a bad marriage! She married when she was 20, and I was pretty dumb at that age myself.

Around the table: of Nazi wannabes, scaredy-cat Presidential candidates, and Democrat weakness.

So Rep. Paul Gosar’s (E-AZ) 19-year-old digital director is a superfan of Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes. This article helpfully leads off with eight paragraphs describing Mr. Fuentes responding to a rift (i.e., drama) within his ranks by demanding that his followers “pledge your allegiance to me forever.” Jesus Mary and Joseph anyone who makes you take an oath of loyalty to them should be shunned and shamed until they’re completely alone in the world. Being completely alone in the world is a horrible thing, so I don’t say that lightly. But hey, what you deserve is what you deserve. And Nazi wannabes deserve loneliness.

U Cal-Berkeley researchers find that, contrary to what right-wing economists constantly tell us, that counties that have hiked their minimum wage over the last few years have seen more job growth, not less. They also found that mid-wage workers did not see lower wages as a result of minimum wage hikes, though right-wing economists have warned about that, too. But the research finds this wage and job growth happens more readily in areas with fewer employers, another condition we shouldn’t let exist (and exists mainly because we let corporations get so big). Still, this is another lesson to ignore the Henny Penny tales of right-wingers.

Dig Nikki Haley’s utter inability to decide what she thinks about E. Jean Carroll’s defamation/sexual assault judgment against Donald Trump! “I have always said that anyone that feels like they have been sexually assaulted in any way should come forward and have their voice heard. I also think that anyone that’s been accused should be able to defend themselves. I was not on the jury. I am not the judge. I think that both of them had their voices heard. There has been a verdict and there has been an appeal.” And they say Hillary Clinton never says what she means! Seriously, you don’t need to be judge or jury to know Donald Trump is a predator, and if you’re that afraid of his votaries, don’t run for President.

Ho hum, House Oversight Committee releases 65-page report purporting to describe vast corruption in the Biden family but describing exactly zero criminal acts. Remember when last Wednesday was going to be “Judgment Day” for the Biden family? Good times! This should be yet another lesson about the right’s propensity to brutalize good Americans with lengthy, empty arguments – indeed, I feel like I’ve offered dozens of these lessons – but I have a feeling our “liberal” media will never learn it. Partly that’s because it requires reading, and not getting clicks or juicing up your stock price.

When I hear that “centrist” Democrats have privately assured Speaker McCarthy that they’ll vote for him for Speaker if far-right Republicans try to depose him, I must wonder: do these clowns understand how things work? Is there a hostage crisis they won’t help create by offering themselves up as hostages? Let far-right fools depose Mr. McCarthy and force Republicans to have a new Speaker every three months. Default doesn’t have to happen first; these “moderate” Republicans everyone talks about could step up and help prevent a default. But give in now and Republicans will hold the country hostage again and again and again. They deserve oblivion, but so do their enablers.

Finally, when I hear that Joe Manchin is still flirting with that independent Presidential run he’ll never actually embark upon, I’m pretty sure he thinks this particular drama (like his I’ll-scuttle-my-own-climate-change-law BS) will get him the right kind of attention in his inevitable West Virginia Senate re-election campaign. He might even be right about that! Of course, the easier path for him would have been to do things for his constituents and then explain to them why he did them. Given that West Virginians actually liked most of those parts of Joe Biden’s agenda that Mr. Manchin single-handedly scuttled (i.e., paid family/medical leave), this wouldn’t have been as hard as he might think.

Action: concerning algorithms, bad media, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell big corporations to stop using algorithms to discriminate against people, tell big cable corporations to deplatform Fox News, and tell our USPS Board of Governors not to slash letter carrier jobs and pay. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell big corporations to stop using algorithms to commit acts of racial bias. You have likely already realized that they only use algorithms so they won’t have to pay workers, but you may not have fully realized that when biased folks write algorithms, they produce biased algorithms, which help corporations discriminate against women and Black and Brown folks. But this actually represents an opportunity to get corporations to look at their own algorithms and fix them so that they don’t, for example, deny Black folks loans when they try to move to the suburbs. And if right-wingers call that “woke,” just ignore them, because they’re wrong.

Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to deplatform the Fox News Channel. Because it has done uncountable harm to our country for over two decades, trapping millions of otherwise good and decent Americans in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage, and though we can’t reason with those folks anymore, we can at least cut their drug off at the source. And even if you’re not watching Fox, you’re still paying for it – more for it than every other “free” cable channel except for ESPN, in fact. And for the hundredth time: our First Amendment does not guarantee you a platform for your speech, only that our government won’t put you in jail for it. Our pressure’s worked before, so let's make it work again.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors not to slash letter carrier jobs and pay. They’ve raised prices, cut services, and slashed jobs, and now they want to cut jobs and pay of postal carriers – particularly rural ones – and why? Because an algorithm told them to! Think maybe they only write algorithms that tell them what they want to hear anyway? We don’t need fancy software to tell us that rural communities need our Postal Service perhaps even more than urban ones – not just for life-saving medicines, of course, but also for voting by mail, since a lot of rural communities don’t even have polling places. So it’s time to give our USPS Board of Governors hell, again.

Action: concerning "free" trade, climate change, and chemical safety.

Long story short: tell IPEF negotiators to put people and planet before products in any trade deal they craft, and tell our EPA to fund more climate change projects in low-income communities and crack down on PFAS chemicals as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Trade Justice helps you tell Indo-Pacific Economic Framework negotiators to put people and planet over profits. And if they can’t, they should just scrap the whole thing! It’s not like good Americans are chomping at the bit to get another “free” trade deal done, after all – in fact, it’s rather the opposite, as good Americans kept on their Congressfolk in 2016 over the Trans-Pacific “Partnership,” and then elected Donald Trump President in large part because he was the first Presidential nominee in recent history to oppose “free” trade deals. So let’s not let these negotiators think they can just ignore us and do whatever they like. You know, like Larry Summers would.

Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to put more Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund projects in low-income communities. Low-income communities have borne the brunt of big polluting projects – so much so it was once a joke on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 – so they should get some more love when our government funds climate change-fighting projects. Of course, the low-income communities that have suffered more also need it more, so it’s not just altruism that guides us here. Why, it’s like altruism and pragmatism work hand-in-hand more than Our Glorious Elites want you to think!

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our EPA to crack down on PFAS chemicals as vigorously as possible. They don’t call them “forever chemicals” for nothing! (They call them that because they stay in your body a long, long time.) Wondering why our government has dragged its feet on this matter? I mean, the Trump EPA dragged its feet on everything it could for four years, but I’m sure that’s not the whole reason. PFAS chemicals are so ubiquitous – they’re in everything from food wrappers to firefighting foam to nonstick saucepans – that our EPA may have gotten cold feet before causing upheaval. But hey, this is America, the can-do country; surely big PFAS-producing corporations can figure this out.

Around the table: the drama, it burns! Part 397.

From the “Our ‘Liberal’ Media Still Sucks!” file: “liberal” media outlets help right-wingers blow up Bud Light’s brief association with a transgender Instagram influencer into a “controversy.” Some folks will complain that FAIR mainly “picks on” articles in the business press, but the notion that business articles must be worse than regular news stories didn’t exactly get handed down on stone tablets from Mt. Sinai. And seriously, this is all a “warning” to big corporations that right-wingers will throw the biggest tantrums over the littlest things? I’ve got a better lesson: nobody should capitulate to tantrums from anyone, ever. Bud Light will learn that when their sales go back up.

When I hear that anti-racist teaching is actually picking up in blue states just as it’s dying out in states like Florida, all I can say is: well, that was always the risk of creating drama! If you go around attacking people all the time, as right-wingers love to do, nobody should be surprised when people strike back. And if you can’t handle the bad things about our nation’s past, like the Chinese Exclusion Act, how do you expect to handle the bad things about your own? How do you expect to grow and build character? Learning about racism, and accepting my role in both problem and solution, has sure built up my character!

Stephen Miller’s so-called America First Legal group has filed an EEOC complaint against Mars. Inc., claiming that its “efforts to increase diversity and representation of minorities within its workforce constitutes discrimination and a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.” This lawsuit looks like drama (after all, Mars makes the green M&Ms that aren’t sexy anymore!), but chances are better than even that they’ll find a right-wing judge, somewhere, with some lawsuit if not this one, who thinks efforts to address discrimination are themselves discrimination, and one sore on the body politic can too easily fester into a disease. If Stephen Miller ever read “Deutsches Requiem,” he clearly decided it wasn’t a cautionary tale so much as an instruction manual.

No need to think too deeply about Joe Manchin’s vow that he’ll help repeal his own bill if President Biden continues to use it to boost renewable energy production. His argument is a cluster bomb of stupid – he negotiated the damn bill; did he simply forget that boosting clean energy production was one of its main purposes? – but it’s also the kind of desperate posturing politicians do when they’re about to lose re-election by 20 points. When he leaves office, nobody will remember anything about Joe Manchin except the damage he did, and that’s a hell of a thing to take to the Pearly Gates.

From the “Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama!” file: certain “friends” are supposedly encouraging former U.S. House Rep./lewd photo-taker Anthony Weiner to run for office again – to “take (the city) back from AOC,” according to his right-wing radio co-host, Curtis Sliwa. Trigger warning: by the end of the story, some Democratic pol will talk about “the crime wave we have” like that’s a real thing that’s happening. So let’s see, any regular Americans urging Mr. Weiner to run for office? No – only his celebrity “friends.” Still, it can’t hurt to remind everyone that if you’re the Medicare-for-All Guy, you can’t also be the Sending Dick Pics to Women Who Aren't Your Wife Guy.

Finally, from Rick Wilson we receive a dire warning that Tucker Carlson might actually be the individual best able to take on Donald Trump in the Republican Presidential primary. Why, it could even wind up as a Trump/Carlson ticket, which would make Mr. Trump a more formidable candidate, though Mr. Carlson could also win the nomination and Mr. Trump could then run as an “independent” because grift, and that might be enough to deliver even Texas to Joe Biden in 2024. In the meantime, I keep thinking we’re at the point where Fox will start replacing their on-air “talent” with actual rabid raccoons – and then I keep learning exactly how many hungry right-wing drama hounds there still are.

Action: concerning wildlife conservation, environmental racism, and corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act and the Environmental Justice for All Act, and tell your Senators to investigate alleged corruption on the part of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 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 Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would give our government more funding to enforce the Endangered Species Act. The bill would allot about $1 billion more annually to wildlife conservation; that’s $1 billion out of at least $5 trillion in expenditures, so don’t let right-wingers act like that’s some unconscionable amount of money. Don’t let them tell you wildlife conservation and protecting endangered species are some kind of luxury, either, because they’re not – not to a great civilization, anyway, and a civilization that pretends the “free” market must do everything most certainly is not great.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Environmental Justice for All Act, which would, at long last, attack the system that allows big corporations to situate their most noxious power plants in majority-Black or majority-Brown neighborhoods. The bill would (among other things) let good Americans sue for discrimination over the pollution and bad health they’ve suffered and would take past environmental racism into future permitting decisions. We also need to enforce the Fair Housing Act in a way that honors Dr. King and all those who fought for it, but in the meantime we need to pass this bill to help stop environmental racism.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for his acceptance of expensive gifts. Republicans will act like such an investigation is a partisan issue – I’m sure they’ll say “witch hunt,” too, which insults everyone who ever died in an actual witch hunt – but when they do, all you have to say is: if you’re a judge, is it OK to get large gifts from people who might have a case before you one day, let alone fail to follow the few disclosure laws we do have? Some folks will say “yes,” and you can dismiss them, shun them, and shame them. But the rest should have something to think about.

Action: concerning profiling, energy efficiency, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell our government to cut it out with the “terrorist” profiling of good Americans, tell our Department of Energy to enact the most vigorous washing machine energy standards possible, and tell Google to stop enabling law enforcement to punish folks who get abortions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell our government to stop funding programs that profile good Americans for their alleged “terrorist” activity. Spying on good Americans’ normal activities for “terrorist” “tendencies” hasn’t prevented any terrorism or they'd brag about it, but it has enabled a lot of law enforcement fishing expeditions, a lot of which they undertake to justify the program in the first place! Why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea. And no, using those programs to “go after white supremacists this time” isn’t a good reason to give our government any more broad spying powers. As we should all know extremely well by now, those powers can be turned on anyone, anytime.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Department of Energy to strengthen energy efficiency standards for washing machines. Or, as a right-wing drama hound might put it, THEYZ AREZ TEH COMINGZ FORZ TEH WASHING MUSHINEZ!!!!!!! In actually, they are not coming for your washing machine, but ensuring that future washing machines use less water and electricity. I don’t imagine that right-wingers are coming up with these arguments on their own; I rather suspect that big corporations are feeding them these arguments so they can spread them around on social media. But they’re absurdly stupid, and we don’t have to let them win the day.

UltraViolet helps you tell Google to stop collecting location and search data from good Americans just trying to navigate this post-Roe v. Wade abortion rights hellscape. I bet some right-wingers call that an anti-law and order stance, but it’s not – police officers enjoy no Constitutional right to easy investigations, nor does any Constitutional right compel big corporations to collect and such data so they can turn it over, at least not without a warrant. But if states really want to prevent abortions, they have plenty of other ways to try and do that; a lot of them involve more access to birth control, so they likely won’t try them, but that doesn’t mean we’ve got to get all Big Brother on each other.

Action: concerning facial recognition, the care economy, and renewable energy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban facial recognition software at performance venues, invest more in our care economy, and ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefit renewable energy exclusively. 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 Congress to prohibit performance venues from using facial recognition software on event-goers. You don’t even have to know that facial recognition can’t tell Black people apart any better than your January 6-addled uncle can to tell Congress to ban its use; you only need know that facial recognition enables law enforcement fishing expeditions, and opposing those, I would think, would be something conservatives could get behind as well as liberals. If your right-wing neighbor retorts BUTZ I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!, just remind him that could be him getting profiled and wrongly-arrested the next time Bruce Springsteen rolls into town.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell Congressfolk to invest in our care economy. Sound like a tall order for a Republican House that cares only about drama? Doesn’t matter! Right is right, and duty is duty, and Congress has a duty to help us make our lives better, not stand by while nursing home corporations and child care corporations continue to gouge good Americans who can’t do without them. They say inflation is bad, but inflation has, for a very long time, been really bad in areas of our economy that folks can’t simply refuse to participate in – if you have kids or elderly parents, they need care. So our Congressfolk have got to help, not hurt.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefits renewable energy producers exclusively. Because there’s enough filth in our air and water already, and when politicians talk about the shift to clean energy “killing jobs,” they’re full of soup. Solar and wind and geothermal all create jobs; what they don’t do as well as coal and oil and gas corporations is redistribute more of your wealth upward to executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) are trying to take us toward more pollution and unearned income for bosses, so we’ve got to step up.

Around the table: evil people run from good people.

Supreme Court pauses lower court ruling on abortion drugs until appeals can work their way through the courts, meaning mifepristone will still be as widely-available as our FDA has mandated. Naturally Justice Alito writes a dissent casting doubt on our government’s willingness to enforce the law, which sure seems to me like a doubt Justices could deploy when it suits them. Also, folks yammering on about the Comstock Act might want to look at the Second Circuit’s United States v. One Package ruling from 1936.

From Emily Drabinski at TruthOut we learn about one way we can block right-wing book banning efforts: strong public library boards. They vary in strength – the ones in Florida generally operate in advisory capacities only, meaning they can’t do very much about Ron DeSantis – but others are stronger, and we can always make the weak ones stronger. Going back to childhood I’d always presumed I could handle everything I read, and I suppose maybe after all these years there still might be something out there I can’t handle, but I sure can handle a lot more than these right-wing book banners can – or more likely, want you to think people can, or kids can.

A Republican Muncie, IN county council member suddenly starts identifying as a “woman of color.” No, not for real – I mean, he did say it out loud, but I didn’t need the emoji-wink to tell he was doing some hardcore trolling; probably he imagines himself a satirist of Pythonian power. (Now would be a good time to mention that one of my favorite-ever filmmakers, Terry Gilliam, should really stop feeding into such nonsense.) Sadly, his trollery isn’t a teachable moment on transgender issues, but a teachable moment on, you know, not being a complete asshole in public, so better to point out his folly once and then let him sink into the oblivion he deserves.

Matt Stoller discusses how AI impacts anti-monopoly actions against Google. Hilarious to read that Google says it’s not a monopoly anymore because AI search engines exist; one almost suspects they sat on their own AI technology for years just so they could one day make this excuse. But any monopoly is an unqualified evil. No, there aren’t “good” monopolies, as our recent supply chain issues have (hopefully!) reminded us. A big problem is folks can’t imagine what an anti-monopoly world can do because they live in a monopoly world. You know what an anti-monopoly world did once? Oh, only defeat the Nazis.

Finally, the grandson of the man who shot Ralph Yarl for the heinous crime of accidentally going to the wrong house to pick up his siblings said his pappy imbibed a lot of right-wing media. And THAT! Is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! Moreover, the fact that he wouldn’t STFU about Stand Your Ground laws makes it less likely he’ll be able to deploy that argument in court! Seriously, though, it might also be time for a mass movement to get cop shows off the air. When you watch someone kill the bad guy a million times, you invariably start thinking about killing all the bad guys in your life, though your life is a thousand times more complex than a TV drama.

Around the table: today with *almost half* good news!

America’s Last Journalist, Greg Palast, in discussing the Dominion/Fox suit, reveals the “unspoken but horribly disturbing split growing between some White and Black activists.” Long story short: White activists talk about mostly about voting machine hacking, which could happen but almost certainly hasn’t happened, while Black activists talk about vote suppression, which most certainly does happen – and which we White folks don’t fear because we don’t typically get forced to fill out provisional ballots or get purged by Interstate Crosscheck or get “Souls to the Polls” early voting banned. Everywhere you go, the problem isn’t “changing” votes but simply not counting them.

Here’s a major downside to the Dominion/Fox news settlement: Fox may be able to write over a quarter of that settlement off on their taxes. Even though Fox noted, in its carefully-worded statement, that it did broadcast lies, our IRS has ruled in the past that settlements are just the “ordinary and necessary” cost of doing business, which tells us what a sick, immoral, and decadent civilization we are, to let big corporations do wrong and then get a tax break for it. Anyway, if our IRS changes their minds, they at least have the funding to go after Fox, which is presumably why Congressional Republicans have been so hot to repeal that funding increase.

The three major credit reporting corporations have decided to remove medical debt under $500 from credit reports, under pressure from our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB), and though they should also omit larger amounts of medical debt, since accumulating medical debt has virtually nothing to do with a person’s ability to be responsible, I feel compelled to point out that Donald Trump’s CFPB didn’t lift a finger to help anyone with their medical debt. The Trump CFPB wanted to be a “partner” to financial predators! Partnering with the American people clearly never crossed their minds.

By a large and actually bipartisan margin, Colorado’s government has passed the nation’s first state-level “right to repair” law for farmers. Naturally a John Deere spokeshack says that though of course John Deere supports the right to repair, this law will have (wait for it!) “unintended consequences.” Another manufacture specifically mentions “overriding emissions controls,” as if the first thing a farmer will do with his thresher is make sure it pollutes more, and anyway the law prevents farmers from doing that. Once again, everyone’s on the right side of history but the corporations.

Finally, when you hear that Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) actually criticized President Biden for not meeting with House Speaker McCarthy over the debt limit, you must remember a few things: 1) Joe Manchin thinks Bipartisan Happy Fun Time Land is a real place, and 2) in America, we prefer our leaders decisive, and refusing to pander to Republican hostage-taking over the debt is decisive. Seriously, “we are long past time for our elected leaders to sit down and discuss how to solve this impending debt ceiling crisis”? There’s one way to end this “crisis,” and that’s for President Biden to stand his ground – the same ground where we’re standing, not incidentally – and for Speaker McCarthy and his band of drama hounds to capitulate.

Around the table: right-wingers eat each other, and other horrible truths.

Uh oh: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been accepting very expensive vacations almost annually from a single Republican donor, without disclosing a one, meaning he’s apparently broken the law and, not incidentally, failed to adhere to considerably looser ethics standards than other federal judges. Right-wingers will say “there’s no quid pro quo,” but a) that seems unlikely, given how people with money are so interconnected with each other, and b) in a civilized society we also avoid the appearance of corruption, particularly if we’re leaders, as Supreme Court Justices surely are.

I’d love to celebrate the discovery that injecting a heart failure patient’s own stem cells back into their heart reduces their risk of stroke and heart attack by almost 60%, but I’m also reminded that right-wing hysteria held stem cell research back all through Tha Bush Mobb years, has held us all back generally going back many centuries, and continues to hold us back to this very day. It’d be nice if our “liberal” media would stop covering right-wing hysterics like they’re jes’ folks; right-wing hysterics should have to fight for coverage, like they did in the old days. At least it’d build character.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reminds us that while our FDA did us a solid by making the overdose-reversal drug Naloxone an over-the-counter drug, the drug is still fairly expensive, which will limit the number of good Americans who can get it. You’re looking at between $42 and $100 per dose without insurance – health insurance corporations should really cover it, since dead people can’t buy any more health care – and a lot of folks (what right-wingers call “those people”) don’t have that amount of cash lying around after paying bills and buying food and raising kids. No use retorting well, don’t do drugs, then, since that’s not how addiction works. (Assuming Naloxone will “encourage” drug use is also not how addiction works.)

See if you can follow this Moebius strip of a story: three-fifths of a very, very right-wing school board resign after the other two-fifths won’t STFU about critical race theory and “grooming” – this, after said very, very right-wing school board had long eradicated any trace of anti-racist or pro-gay teaching in their classrooms. On second thought, this isn’t that hard to understand: right-wingers constantly cannibalize their kind, because what else can they do? Right-wing ideology still dominates American discourse, and still limits the options our political leaders will consider, so right-wingers must find ever-more fantastic enemies, lest the rageheads snap out of their wage. They sure got lucky back in the day when they hunted a President who was an actual serial adulterer.

Finally, a pair of researchers explain AI’s critical shortfall: because “it takes a body” to understand the world. We don’t analyze trillions of words to figure out how to smooth out wrinkles in a shirt or keep a fire going; we do it through seeing and manipulating objects with our hands. This maps on to what I’ve been saying: that AI is, at present, little more than a good bullshit artist. The problem, of course, will be when humans won’t see that because they can make good money not seeing it. I’m pretty sure that’s the dystopian future toward which we’re headed at present, not the one where “there’s so much AI no one can tell what’s real anymore.”

Around the table: featuring foolish right-wingers and wise citizens.

Did a Florida school board really remove a movie about the first six-year-old girl to integrate into a previously all-white school because of one complaint from one parent who has admitted that she hasn’t seen the whole film? Yes, they did. Right-wingers have spent the last couple of decades claiming that liberals are weak, but only right-wingers are so frail they can’t bear to hear that racism exists. Get these people out of your life while you still can. If they can’t handle the most obvious truths about our nation’s history, why would they be there for you when you need them?

From the “Good News About Abortion From Red States” file: a Teton County, Wyoming judge has blocked that state’s abortion ban, ruling that a state constitutional amendment cooked up by right-wingers in 2012 to harness hysteria over the Affordable Care Act actually prevents the state from banning abortion. That amendment declares that Wyoming citizens have “the right to make their own health care decisions,” and though Wyoming legislators claim that abortion isn’t health care, you can guess how persuasive that is. You think right-wingers will start putting the brakes on their drama now that it’s bit them in the ass? I kid, of course – they have nothing to offer the electorate except drama.

When I hear that Republicans ought to get behind Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin because he’d be “a non-hostile alternative to Trump and a compelling centrist challenge to Biden,” I leap to say he’s not a centrist! Do centrists ban books, try to ban abortions, kill mask mandates, repeal protections for transgender kids, or put Andrew Wheeler in charge of regulating air and water? No, they do not. But this article is somehow even worse than its tagline – it acts like Mr. Youngkin should be proud of his ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth, rather than ashamed of it. And this is why people hate our "liberal" media – all they care about is the horserace.

In the wake of yet another school shooting, this one in Nashville, Tennessee, Rep. Tim Burchett (E-TN) says Congress is “not going to fix” the problem and adds that “I don’t see any real role that we could do other than mess things up.” Also, “as a Christian,” he thinks America needs a religious “revival,” one that electing ever more “religious” people to Congress somehow hasn’t achieved! If you took this flatugasm as an honestly-offered assessment, which I wouldn’t advise, you would still have to ask why anyone would want to be part of a body of legislators they profess to hate so much.

Finally, because the news can’t all be bad: Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has announced he’ll “pause” on his plan to kneecap Israel’s judiciary. The Netanyahu plan would reduce judicial review of the nation’s laws and give Parliament added power to overturn Supreme Court decisions, while also giving Mr. Netanyahu final say over judicial appointments, which I’m sure has absolutely nothing to do with his own pending corruption trial. This pause happened only after tens of thousands of good Israelis took to the streets in protest, the nation’s main union called a general strike, and soldiers threatened to avoid reporting for duty. They’ll all still need to work to make that pause permanent, but never let anyone tell you that speaking out doesn’t work.

Around the table: down with Drama Kings!

Good news on abortion rights from another red state, as the Oklahoma Supreme Court rules that the state constitution guarantees a right to an abortion “at any point in the pregnancy” when a doctor finds “with a reasonable degree of certainty” that denying the abortion would “endanger the woman’s life.” It’s a narrow right, to be sure, but it expands the only right offered by state law, which only allows abortion when a woman is in “actual and present danger” of dying. Personal to those who think the doctor’s determination is a loophole women will drive a Mack truck through: ain’t you the folks who say government should never get between doctor and patient? Or did you just mean you, and not “those people”?

University of British Columbia researchers find a way to get rid of the notorious PFAS “forever chemicals” from our water. The UBC process not only promises to get rid of 99% of all PFAS chemicals but obliterate them as well, via “special electrochemical and photochemical techniques”; destroying the chemicals would rid us of the problem of “more highly toxic solid waste that will be another major environmental challenge.” So maybe the big corporations will cajole our EPA into loosening standards well before the technology becomes widely-available? Hey, if I thought of it, I’m sure they did. In the meantime, I wish the UBC researchers the best of luck in solving an extraordinarily difficult problem.

From the “It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Guy!” file: big advertisers still haven’t returned to Twitter, almost six months after Elon Musk took over, at least in part because they have little confidence Mr. Musk can’t/won’t keep Twitter from becoming, to borrow Mr. Musk’s own phrase, a “free-for-all hellscape” where racists and other bigots run rampant. I think Twitter’s reputation as a not-free-for-all hellscape before Mr. Musk bought it is rather overstated, but let’s not set the bar too low here. And I’m not of the mind that we should just let big corporations eat each other – the law may not recognize Twitter (and other social media sites) as publishers per se, but that’s what they are, and that would make content moderation literally job one at Twitter, regardless of Mr. Musk’s distaste for that task.

Ho hum, now Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) wants to expand Florida’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” law to all the higher grades as well as the lower ones. Remember when your right-wing friends said “it’s not for all kids, it’s just for the really young ones who hardly understand sexuality anyway”? Now we know that they were either stupid or lying, neither of which is a good look, and anyway we ought to just go with “lying,” since the facts don’t justify giving right-wingers the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, Governor, come get your poll tax, if you have the guts.

Speaking of the Drama Kings, both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have now said that Mr. DeSantis would not be Mr. Trump’s running mate if Mr. Trump secures the Republican Presidential nomination in 2024, which should surprise no one, since both men are residents of Florida and Article II, Section 1 of our Constitution prohibits the President and Vice President from living in the same state. (The 12th Amendment, which largely rewrites the relevant part of Section 1, maintains this prohibition.) So, how about we never speak of this possibility again? No, not even to goad right-wingers into dreaming of the impossible; they do that enough anyway.

Finally, from the “Dystopia is Here Now!” file: clothing corporation Levi Strauss & Co. will use artificial intelligence-generated avatars in order to “increase diversity” among its models! And here you thought diversity was about helping real people get more opportunities to succeed in life, but not to the corporations that would never pay any worker any money if they could get away with it! I have to infer all of that, because Levis says it can’t fulfill its diversity obligations using just real people without explaining why. I mean, it's not like corporations can't find Black actors or models, as you know if you watch almost any TV.

Action: concerning education, banksters, and pollution.

Long story short: tell the Ohio legislature and a Florida texbook corporation to reject anti-education initiatives, tell the Biden Administration to keep the Silicon Valley Bank’s affordable housing promises, and tell our EPA to enact a more vigorous soot standard. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

You may have read my post from earlier today about Ohio’s “controversial beliefs” bill, which would be SB 83, the so-called Higher Education Enhancement Act; I said the details were even worse than the news hook (that the bill would ban the teaching of “controversial beliefs” in state-funded colleges), so here they are: it would ban mandatory diversity training, it would force professors to post all their syllabi online, and would ban any teaching that might cause “psychological distress.” You can reach the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jerry Cirino, at (614) 644-7718, and you can reach Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman at (614) 466-7584 and Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens at (614) 466-1366. You can tell them all you’re sick of the “hurt feelings” of bigots meaning more to them than the facts of history.

And now we’re on to Florida, again! The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell textbook publishing corporation Studies Weekly to stop erasing racism from its history texts. Apparently they’ve removed all references to race from its Rosa Parks lesson! That’d be like removing all references to Bernie Parent from a history of the Flyers’ mid-’70s Stanley Cup runs! Except not as evil, of course, for in Florida they act like they’ll hurt young white kids’ feelings by teaching them that Rosa Parks fought institutional racism, by white people, against Black people. Of course, kids ain’t really that fragile; grown-ups are. And fragile grown-ups shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Daily Kos helps you tell our government to keep the affordable housing-related promises the now-defunct Silicon Valley Bank made – specifically, by making honoring those commitments a condition of any SVB-related sale. One does get tired of always hearing that investors need to be “made whole” – and the Fed sure has bent over backwards to ensure that those investors were made whole! Nobody ever says the workers need to be made whole, and banks shouldn’t get off the hook for the promises they’ve made to communities, either. If the Biden Administration wants to prove that government works for Americans, keeping SVB’s promise to invest in communities would be a good start.

Finally, the Climate Reality Project helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to improve its soot pollution standard. The science tells us that the 8 microgram-per-cubic-meter standard would be much better than our EPA’s proposed 10 micrograms standard – it would more than double the reduction in health care costs over the next decade, because fewer folks will get sick, soot pollution helping to cause, as it does, a lot of health issues like heart disease, diabetes, and asthma. The costs to industry represent around two percent of that number, and though big corporations will complain that they have to pay it, this is America, where everyone makes sacrifices for the common good. Right?

Penny rants for March 27, 2023.

An Ohio bill would ban teaching of “controversial beliefs” at state universities. It’d also ban faculty strikes, and the details of the “controversial beliefs” ban are considerably worse than my summary in the first sentence might indicate, but my how I never tire of the “fuck your feelings” crowd using the alleged “feelings” of young people to justify never teaching about racism or sexism again. Yes, there was a point in my own life when I decided I’d heard too much about these things – youth is wasted on the young, just like they say – but you know what happened? I got over it, because anti-racists and anti-sexists were right, and getting over it, and accepting my part in both problem and solution, made me a stronger and more mature person. I guess actual growth experiences are too much to ask of right-wing snowflakes. Remember all this the next time one of them goes on about how “political correctness” (or whatever scare word they’re using now) is “worse” than actual racism and sexism. You don’t want any of these people in your foxhole.

You know why I don’t actually believe that a TikTok ban would “lose” President Biden “every voter under 35, forever”? Not just because Mr. Biden hasn’t actually called for one, and not just because said ban is mostly a right-wing dream, and not just because the Republican alternative to Mr. Biden would be a raging dumpster fire of a human being – I also note that the article quotes exactly five young voters, all from Arizona, and four of them don’t think a TikTok ban would affect either their vote or that of their peers. The fifth – whose testimony you get first, of course, and many paragraphs before the others’ – has this to say: “(President Biden is) maybe capable of doing a good job, but he’s not capable of gathering the troops, rallying the people. Especially the Democratic voter base. I don’t think he’s a strong candidate.” So given the opportunity to describe something Mr. Biden has done or hasn’t done that’s turned him off, this student opts for mere horserace anaylsis. We get too much of that from our “liberal” media, so it’d be nice if more of the children-who-are-our-future would abstain from it.

Action: concerning regulations, facial recognition, and child marriage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Corporate Capture Act, reject the REINS Act, and pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, and tell legislators in 20 states to ban child marriage once and for all. 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 Stop Corporate Capture Act and reject the REINS Act. This is your basic Goofus and Gallant strip: the Stop Corporate Capture Act (a.k.a. Gallant) would require our government to disclose conflicts of interest inherent in rule-making comments, like when a corporation comments on a rule that would affect it, while the REINS Act (Goofus) would give our Congress endless attempts to nullify the regulations it has already authorized through legislation – which is just a way for right-wingers in Congress to destroy our clean air and clean water regulations. So our task is clear, and we should get to it.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, which would, as its title suggests, prevent our government from using this awful technology that can’t tell Black people apart better than your right-wing uncle can, but which law enforcement uses to put the wrong people in jail and harass protestors. They’ll say imposing a moratorium will prevent us from doing the research we need to get it right, but they’ve had plenty of opportunity to get it right, and they’ve screwed it up. So we need to stop them from hurting us any further. I can’t put it plainer than that.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell state legislators in 20 states to outlaw child marriage. You mean that’s still a thing? Yes, that’s still a thing, at least in 20 states, even though children cannot by definition consent to a sexual relationship, and I’ll tell you a secret: it ain’t we libertine liberals who tolerate child marriage and child molestation and grooming, it’s right-wingers. When Roy Moore went on his infamous quest to find a just-barely-teen girl to groom into a wife, he was hardly the only one! A litany of evangelicals and other right-wingers do that, too! Remember: whenever right-wingers call us a particular kind of evil, they are that evil. If you haven’t been looking at the world that way, start now. Everything will make a lot more sense.

Around the table: the time to call George W. Bush a liar was *always* now.

Michigan looks ready to repeal its notorious “right-to-work” law, a.k.a. the “right to work for less” law, because apparently there are no Kyrsten Sinemas in Michigan’s slim Democratic majorities. Right-to-work laws, as you know, starve unions of funding by enabling union workers to get services without paying dues, and Sonali Kohatkar has a good way of thinking about that: “(i)magine calling AAA and demanding its roadside benefits without paying the auto club’s modest yearly fee.” That’s perfect, right down to the word “modest” – my dues cost me around 35 cents an hour.

Fox News producer sues her employer for coercing her to “take the fall” when testifying in the Dominion defamation suit. She’s also suing over sexist and anti-Semitic commentary at the workplace, which, gosh, that is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! You suppose Maria Bartiromo, as notorious a right-wing shill as has worked in the “liberal” media these last few decades, will change her ways now that she’s discovered her employer thought she was utterly disposable? I kid, of course – I mean, she’s no Gretchen Carlson.

I’ll admit I was not hopeful about this Los Angeles Times opinion piece on “how to stop the polarization” in American politics, but the advice dispensed therein isn’t bad – helping right-wingers “communicate ‘what (they) are observing, feeling, and needing” sounds like a full-time job, but I agree that name-calling famous people is a hell of a lot better than name-calling your friends and neighbors, and I think it gives them the space to change their minds. I even think they appreciate being given that space, even if they don’t articulate it that way. I guess I’m still an optimist, then.

Some, ah, distinguished individual called in a bomb threat to a Tuesday hearing on New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million lawsuit against Donald Trump for allegedly inflating real estate asset values. Because take-your-country-back rallies take more work, apparently! This kind of soft terrorism actually makes me think more kindly of hard terrorism – folks who make death threats and bomb threats without intending to back up their words actually rank below mass shooters in my book, meaning they’re pretty much at the bottom of that book.

Jesus Mary and Joseph did Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) actually say he’s different from Donald Trump because his style of leadership includes “no daily drama”? Yes, he really did, and that’s hilarious, because he’s all about the drama! If calling everything you don’t like “woke” and banning books like it’s the 1930s and going after anti-racist education like it’s the 1830s and demanding menstrual records of teenage girls (and this is a not-at-all comprehensive list!) ain’t drama, then what is? Oh, almost forgot: come get your poll tax from me, Governor, if you can.

Finally, two former CIA agents with four decades’ combined experience in intelligence describe at some length how Tha Bush Mobb lied about their findings so they could sell the invasion of Iraq. I feel terrible for these two good Americans, who detail the many, many honest assessments our CIA gave to Tha Bush Mobb only to have them lie about it because they were going into Iraq and damn everyone else. But the Insider is wrong to say that now it’s “time to call George W. Bush a liar,” because that time was the fall of 2002. If you were paying attention and thinking for yourself then, you were calling him a liar.

Action: concerning "forever chemicals," soot pollution, prisoner price-gouging, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous rules against PFAS and soot pollution possible, tell our Justice Department to abandon rules allowing prisons to garnish even more money from prisoners and their families, and tell President Biden to get a good public servant on our FCC as its fifth Commissioner. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous PFAS regulation possible. Our EPA is setting limits on PFAS plastics, a.k.a. “forever chemicals,” in our drinking water for the very first time, and that’s a good thing, since PFAS chemicals are (as evidenced by their nickname) virtually everywhere, from non-stick saucepans to fast food wrappers to plastic water bottles. Also, they don’t break down once they’re in your system, and scientists have linked them to cancer, heart, and immune system issues. So let’s lend our EPA the steel they’re going to need in their spine to withstand all the corporate hackery they’re going to hear.

Evergreen Action helps you tell our EPA to strengthen its proposed soot standards. Currently they’re planning to limit soot particulates – which scientists have linked to asthma, diabetes, heart disease, and cognitive breakdowns – to 10 micrograms per cubic meter, rather than eight, and eight is a lot better. Yeah, I know, two micrograms doesn’t sound like a lot, but you'll also inhabit way more than one cubic meter in a day, and a lot of the biggest killers in America are also the smallest. And not for nothing, but you find a lot more soot in poor, Black, and Brown communities, because big polluting corporations tend to build their power plants near them. Why, it’s almost like they know.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice to abandon new Federal Bureau of Prison rules that allow prisons to garnish even more money from prisoners and their families. I could argue basic human decency and compassion, and I could argue that sentences should be about loss of freedom and not price-gouging, but note well that these changes will interfere with our ability to rehabilitate prisoners, all so some corporate executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. Is that why we build and maintain civilizations? No, it is not. And no use arguing but jails need money if you’re not going to tax the rich a lot harder.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell President Biden to nominate a good public servant to be the fifth Commissioner on our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC). I’m sad it won’t be net neutrality architect Gigi Sohn – who may have decided that even more abusive questioning from Senators wasn’t worth the trouble and can we really blame her? – but America is a big place, so she can’t be the only person qualified for the job. And the person Mr. Biden nominates had better champion internet freedom – for people, not corporations – and that person should also champion bridging the racial divide and the rural divide with regard to internet access. So let’s get on that.

Around the table: pushing back against bankster horror.

Biden Administration announces that the Deposit Insurance Fund, and not taxpayers, will make depositors whole after the Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed; DIF funds come from fees assessed to banks, not taxes per se. I did not know the DIF currently had $100 billion in it! So feel free to push back against know-nothing right-wingers who declare it “just another bailout,” and also feel free to ask if any of them did a damn thing in 2008. I mean, many right-wingers did, but many also did not!

Ho hum, Silicon Valley Bank employed two former aides to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to lobby our government for weakened banking regulations, such as the kind that permitted Silicon Valley Bank to fail last week. Yes, the 2018 legislation weakening Dodd-Frank reforms (which were themselves not so vigorous to begin with) was a bipartisan mess, but few lobbied for it harder than Rep. McCarthy did. Presumably he will feel the appropriate amount of shame and make amends for his mistakes. I kid, of course.

Norfolk Southern sure is having a bad winter, as another train derailed in Alabama as its CEO testified before a group of angry Senators, the second such derailment since the East Palestine derailment, though neither of those, thankfully, carried toxic and/or carcinogenic chemicals. But heartened as I am to see Sen. Vance (R-OH) actually argue for something that might make a difference, I sure hope this event doesn’t become another in a long list of times our Senators grilled a CEO hard before letting him do whatever he wanted.

Pew Research Center poll finds that a staggering 83% of Black folks think our economic system either “needs major changes” or “needs to be completely rebuilt,” and I’m sure right-wingers will use this data to assert that “Black folks can’t govern themselves.” But given most Americans’ experience with capitalism, particularly lately, that argument won’t convince anyone outside the Batshit Insane Quarter (hereafter referred to as the BIQ) of the electorate, and likely not all of them, either.

Jason W. Osborne at The Conversation notes that the seemingly-exponential growth of legalized gambling “may pose a threat to college athletes,” and if you’ve ever heard (name of sport) is rigged! in your work locker room, you already know there’ll be more and more threats against athletes perceived to have cost gamblers money. And it’ll get worse, as gambling replaces work as the main money-maker in our economy for too many Americans – not that I could blame them much, since we’ve all watched financial predation replace work as the main money-maker in our economy over the last few decades.

Finally, I guess I feel a little sorry for Tennessee’s Lieutenant Governor after he got caught slapping heart-emojis on photos of a particular half-naked gay man on social media, though I must also note that his “evolving” views on LGBTQ+ issues have done nothing about the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Tennessee. But his spokeshack’s suggestion that he was just connecting with a constituent demands mockery! We shouldn’t have to send butt-grams to get our elected officials’ attention, after all.

Action: concerning abortion, education, internet freedom, and school meals.

Long story short: tell Walgreens to dispense abortion medication to all Americans, tell Florida legislators to reject efforts to ban anti-racist education from college classes, tell President Biden to fill the last FCC seat with a good public servant, and tell our USDA to enact the most vigorous school meal nutrition standards possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both UltraViolet and More Perfect Union help you tell Walgreens to stop refusing to dispense abortion medication even in states where it’s still legal. As you know, Walgreens said last week it wouldn’t dispense mifepristone in 20 states, which happened to be the 20 states whose Attorneys General sent a letter to Walgreens threatening to sue them over same. Of course, abortion is still legal in some of those states, and our FDA gave its blessing to nationwide distribution of mifepristone last year. Well, I know something even better than 20 state Attorneys General applying pressure: the American people applying pressure. So let’s get to that.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell Florida lawmakers to reject any legislation that would abolish Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (or DEI) programs at universities. Florida colleges have begun to dismantle their DEI programs on their own, and fascists love it when people are fascist to themselves before the brownshirts come to beat them up. And that’s why we have to step up here, too. There are more important things than the drama of right-wing “hurt feelings," and one of them, as I know from lived experience, is the knowledge and wisdom that these programs contain.

Free Press helps you tell President Biden to fill the fifth seat on our Federal Communications Commission post-haste with a public interest-minded nominee. Sadly, that nominee won’t be Gigi Sohn, who withdrew from consideration after a brutal two-year-plus attack from big telecom corporations and their nefarious allies, but while I presume Ms. Sohn was the best person for the job – never mind what Kyrsten Sinema thinks! – I don’t presume she’s the only person for the job. And our FCC needs all five Commissioners, not just to bring back network neutrality, but also to spend recently-authorized infrastructure money fairly. So let’s remind our President of his job here.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Agriculture to enact the strongest school meal nutrition standards possible. Better school meal standards was virtually Tom Vilsack’s only accomplishment as Mr. Obama’s USDA Secretary, but I’m happy to report that since Mr. Vilsack has been fully on board with President Biden’s anti-monopoly program, which means he can actually triple his good works in just a few short years, by improving those school nutrition standards even more. Republicans will hate it, but then they’re objectively pro-childhood obesity and pro-childhood diabetes anyway, so why listen to them? Seriously, they really do suck.

UPDATE. I totally forgot to write that individual introductory paragraph today, and I apologize for that. I've corrected that mistake now.

Action: concerning voting rights, endless war, racism, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, repeal the Iraq AUMF, and pass the Justice for Black Farmers Act, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already. 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 the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Do you remember how our Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act unfairly targeted Southern states for additional federal scrutiny – but also said Congress could fix the bill by ensuring that any state or municipality could face that same scrutiny? This bill does that! And right-wingers will whine that “it’s not needed” (which, like, duh) or “the South has changed” (also duh, in addition to being literally irrelevant to the bill). But they’re walnuts in the batter of eternity. We, on the other hand, are eternity, as long as we do good works.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to finally and for once and for all repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that authorized our adventure in Iraq. Come March 20, that mistake will be 20 years old, and at least three U.S. Presidents have used the Iraq AUMF to justify other stupid military adventures. Plus, you know Our Glorious Elites would love to party like it’s 1980 and wage war on Iran – Barack Obama actually solved this problem, but then Donald Trump pissed all over it, and now Joe Biden can’t (or won’t) fix it. That just makes it that much more urgent that we get this war-making tool out of the hands of this President and all future Presidents.

The Union for Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Justice for Black Farmers Act. Anyone who whines that we gotta do even more for Blacks? clearly doesn’t understand just how deeply we’ve injured Black Americans at virtually every opportunity, and so it goes with Black farmers trying to get land. If you know anything about redlining, if you know anything about how our government systematically shut Black folks out of every program meant to help good Americans, you won’t be surprised to find that Black farmers also face a long history of discrimination. And you won’t hesitate to help them, either. Unless you’re a troll, I guess.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) already. President Biden has now nominated Ms. Sohn three times to help do the very important job of keeping big telecom corporations from telling you where you can go and what you can do on the internet; he’s been admirably steadfast about this matter, and his steadfastness should find its reward here, not merely because doing the right thing should always find its reward, but also because the utter nonentities who oppose her are walnuts in the batter of eternity who shouldn’t get all the say about a damn thing in America.

Action: concerning education and voting rights.

Long story short: tell Florida to teach the AP African-American studies course, tell North Dakota to stop targeting gay and trans books in book bans, and tell Pennsylvania to reject proposed sore loser constitutional amendments. 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 state legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Organize For helps you tell the Florida state Board of Education to let high schools there teach African-American studies. The AP African-American Studies program may be new, but that doesn’t mean it “significantly lacks educational value,” as Gov. DeSantis says. And don’t take it for granted that Florida already teaches the Black experience, not just because Florida Republicans have created a lot of education drama lately, but because a lot of Floridian crybabies pretend to be “offended” when someone points out the South embraced slavery and Jim Crow with both arms. But facts are facts, and Americans face them.

North Dakota residents, take note: state legislators want to throw librarians in jail if they don’t remove “sexually-explicit” books from public school libraries. And “sexually-explicit” includes any book about gay or trans issues, though those books aren’t “sexually explicit” just because of their subject matter. Another way of putting it: sexuality isn’t “explicit,” let alone “obscene,” merely because it’s different from yours, and certainly not if you’re not actually watching it. So Openstates.org helps North Dakota residents find their state legislators. And remember we have a word for book banning efforts that target folks oppressed due to race or sexuality, and that word is fascist.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause still helps you tell your state house Reps to reject the Republican suite of sore loser constitutional amendments that would enshrine Voter ID in our state constitution – remember when Tom Corbett’s government couldn’t make Voter ID work, even before our state Supreme Court struck it down? – and put the state’s (Republican) Auditor General in charge of elections. That latter item, especially, isn’t just sore loser thinking but short-term thinking – what if a Democrat wins the Auditor General race in 2024? Then Republicans will amend our state constitution again, I guess. You’ve heard that power without wisdom is evil? Republicans prove it every day.

Around the table: evil people do evil crap, part 992.

U.N. report says the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is healing slowly and will likely close completely in 43 years. And if this comes to pass, and I expect it will, right-wingers will immediately demand that we start making chlorofluorocarbons again because “the Earth heals itself,” though the ozone layer would have “healed itself” in large part because we stopped making the chemicals that made holes in it! And think tanks will commission studies with titles like Was Hairspray Really So Bad?

Over 7,000 New York nurses go on strike for better working conditions. I don’t know if they’re saying so, but they’re also probably mad that their bosses make millions of dollars while they handle 20 E.R. patients at once. Remember: every time health care workers have ever organized or struck, plenty of right-wingers said these workers are too important to let organize or strike. The obvious retort: if a worker’s that important, we’d better treat them right! Right-wingers think being just one of 20 E.R. patients per nurse will never happen to them, but it will, when their heroes come for their money, as evil people always do.

Rep. Scott Perry (E-PA) says he won’t recuse himself from any House probes of various January 6 investigations, even though he himself is the subject of several of them. Dig his rhetorical bait-and-switch – pressed about the fact that he’s literally the subject of some investigations, he responds “should everybody in Congress that disagrees with somebody be barred from doing the oversight and investigative powers that Congress has?” "Investigation" and "disagreement" aren't synonyms, Roget. I’m old enough to remember when politicians tried to avoid even the appearance of corruption. Scott Perry won with only 54% of the vote in his district in 2022, so perhaps he shouldn't act so untouchable.

Today, in “Short Story Ideas That Would Have Earned Me a Rap on the Knuckles From My Creating Writing Teacher”: Florida school board bans production of a play about a hundred-year old play in Yiddish that was itself banned from production because it dealt with homosexuality. The Florida government pretends to care about “exposing children to indecency,” but we know what this is about: small people with small minds and small hearts who can’t have all the say about everything anymore and want to inflict endless pain on the rest of us because of it.

Health care experts warn that the recent Ohio outbreak of measles – declared “eliminated” in America as of the year 2000 – won’t be the last. The roots of the Ohio outbreak appears to pre-date COVID anti-vaxxers, however, at least in the Midwest, where anti-vaxxers a) believe lies about the “effects” of the measles vaccine, b) think measles isn't all that bad, which, like, no, and c) still haven’t shaken the disgusting lie that “vaccines cause autism” even though the man who started that lie has been exposed many times over as a fraud. When so many Americans pride themselves on attending the University of Google, we all suffer.

Finally, at least one legal expert thinks Fulton County (GA) District Attorney Fani Willis is “gearing up to indict” Donald Trump after wrapping up the probe into that phone call he made to Georgia’s Secretary of State where he asked why he couldn’t just find him 11,780 more votes. Maybe she is and maybe she’s not, but recall the two giant hurdles to convicting Mr. Trump of anything: one, he’ll never take a plea deal, and two, chances are good that at least one Trumphole will con his way onto the jury. Not that these probabilities should ever deter us from fighting evil.

Around the table: now *everyone* wants to be an insurrectionist!

I don’t necessarily think that the January 6, 2021 attempted coup in America inspired Bolsonaro supporters’ attempted coup in Brazil this past Sunday – most of the world has seen more coups than we have! – but I do think that when crybabies attempt a coup in the United States, then other crybabies across the planet become more emboldened. Also, while President Biden’s condemnation of the Brazil attack is far from worthless, I really needed to see more from him when Myanmar’s crybaby military staged a successful coup because they didn’t like the results of the 2020 election there.

I’m pleased that a British corporation has developed a tractor that runs on the methane found in cow dung, but I’d still like to know more about how well it works and how pricey it’ll be – I mean, if small farmers can’t buy it, then what’s the point? And that’s exactly what’ll happen if someone like Elon Musk gets his hands on it! The Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil, and I hate to see that proven so often.

Surprise, surprise, a Florida teacher trying to ban every book in sight gets described as racist and homophobic by her own students. One of this teacher’s crusades has a book about Wilma Randolph in its sights, because she thinks it’ll make white kids ashamed; now I wasn’t that spiritually-advanced as a youth, but I never made the world that much about me back then. Strange that grown-ups do – especially the ones in charge of educating kids.

When I hear that the government of Iran hanged two anti-hijab protestors – supposedly for murdering an Iranian cop, though both protestors said before their deaths that the government tortured them into confessing to that crime – I can only say this is a day ending in “y” in a fascist regime, and that when American fascists dream of the America they want, this is what they see. I do wonder if American fascists will they call their brethren in nations like Iran their “mud brothers,” as they called the 9.11 hijackers back in the day.

Finally, the South Carolina Supreme Court has struck down that state’s six-week abortion ban, saying, essentially, that the six-week ban doesn’t give women enough time to even find out she’s pregnant, let alone “take reasonable steps” to end her pregnancy. But the ruling puts a 22-week ban back in place; that ban only has exceptions for the life of the mother and the non-viability of the fetus. Why, it’s like we didn’t just spend an entire summer learning about all the reasons a woman might need an abortion.

Action: concerning environmental racism, sentencing racism, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Environmental Justice for All Act and the EQUAL Act, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission. 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 Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2021/S. 872, the Environmental Justice for All Act, which would enable Black and Brown communities harmed by corporate pollution to sue polluting corporations in court (if those corporations received federal funding to do their harm), and would also strengthen the National Environmental Policy Act (or NEPA) so that it takes this kind of historic racism into account. The racism of building factories almost exclusively next to Black and Brown neighborhoods is so obvious it was a joke on Mystery Science Theater 3000 some 20 years ago, so justice is long overdue.

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1693/S. 79, the EQUAL Act, which would (among other things) eliminate the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentencing. These days, folks convicted of crack-related crimes get nearly 18 times the jail time folks convicted of powder cocaine-related crimes get, and why? No good reason, that’s why – our culture (wrongly) assumes that crack is much more addictive than powder, and our culture (also wrongly) associates crack with Blacks and powder with whites. The bill would also reduce sentences for some folks serving time now, so let’s fight this form of racism as hard as we fight all the others.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as the fifth Commissioner of our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC). Our FCC needs a fifth Commissioner to break all the 2-2 ties on FCC votes, and, to be frank, to break those votes the way of the people’s will. The American people have communicated their will favoring net neutrality at least a half-dozen times over the last decade – and justifiably so, since net neutrality gives you the freedom to visit the websites you like without being hamstrung by some corporation’s will. But we need a freedom-friendly third vote on our FCC if we want to get it back, and our Senate has dragged its feet too long.

Action: concerning product safety, Afghan refugees, and the debt ceiling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Hide No Harm Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act and abolish the debt ceiling. 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 H.R. 9361/S. 5139, the Hide No Harm Act, which would hold corporate executives accountable for knowingly hiding their products’ dangers from good Americans. Some “law and order” types would call it “nanny state” legislation, but folks who’d injure or kill people to make money need a nanny! Others might throw up their hands at the prospect of ever getting a CEO to go to jail, and while I understand their pain, we should pass laws like this – even if they don’t put every law-breaker in prison, a lot of executives will think twice before knowingly putting out unsafe products, if only because fighting criminal charges is expensive.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4787/S. 8685, the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would help the thousands of Afghan refugees achieve permanent status a lot more quickly. There’s a lot of we-broke-it-we-bought-it here – we helped break Afghanistan, which sent a lot of refugees here, so we ought to take care of them. Folks who profess to be “worried” about having “potential terrorists” in America ought to consider that refugees run from oppression, and they should also consider that most terrorists in America are natural-born white supremacist killers. Maybe it diddles one’s rage gland to worry about foreigners rather than the real threat.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to just abolish the damn debt ceiling already. Because it never reduced public spending the way its adherents claimed, and because now Republicans just use it to manufacture a hostage drama. It doesn’t matter that Joe Biden and Senate Democrats will stand in the way of their using it to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, because I’m still scared of what Republicans might get with their little hostage drama – like defunding the police at our FTC, SEC, CFPB, and DOJ Antitrust Division, so their corporate cronies can merge into evil monopolies at will. Get rid of the debt ceiling, and we’ll never have to know.