Thieves in the Temple.

The last post.

I’ve given this matter a lot of thought, and I’ve decided this blog won’t publish anymore. In time, I’ll take it down in its entirety; there’s no point in having it up when I won’t be updating it anymore.

I’ve still got the fight, but now, for the first time, I’m not sure America is worth the fight. In 2004 and 2010 and 2014 and 2016 I could still believe most Americans were good, and simply had their attentions divided and diverted by unscrupulous Republicans and weak Democrats. No more. Democrats pushed the best President of my lifetime out of the race, but they actually ran a good campaign where they confronted kitchen-table issues head-on and won every argument; Republicans ran a shitshow with a whiny, traitorous asshole as their standard-bearer, and America, apparently, preferred that to having a Black woman President. There’s no way to spin this. There’s no “but look at all the people who didn’t vote,” because those folks should have had the sense to vote against the whiny, traitorous asshole. And there’s no “he didn’t get a majority,” because the whiny, traitorous asshole shouldn’t have gotten any votes. No, America has a lot more bad people than I wanted to think, and frankly, a lot more racist people than I wanted to think; I know about racist cops and racist bosses and racist diamond-mine heir billionaires better than most people, but after over 77 million Americans pushed their Original Sin in my face on Election night I still felt like I had much to learn about racism. The good news is that Trumpholes have started to answer for their evil, to the friends and family members who have ostracized them since the election, and I sincerely hope their loneliness is instructive, and that if they ever have another chance to do right at the ballot box, they think of literally anyone other than themselves for a split second even. (I also hope they learn to call their Congressfolk and communicate their will to them, but ha ha ha yeah sure.)

And yet I also must admit that, even though I think this is a damn good blog and I know people in both blue and red states who have appreciated it, obviously it hasn’t affected my country as much as I wanted it to. A big part of that’s my fault — I’d rather be catheterized than promote myself. But it’s not all my fault: thanks to social media’s mania for “engagement,” it’s very hard to get noticed unless you’re willing to be a complete asshole, which, for better and for worse, I’m not willing to be. But even I will admit, after long enough, when something’s not working, and reader, this ain’t working. So I’ll pass along action alerts and relatively short philosophical statements at Bluesky (amento), Mastodon (amento8), MeWe (@alecmento), and Friendica (amento8). You won’t find me on Facebook any more than you’ll find any of my books at Amazon, but if you want what I’ve got to offer, you’ll find it at the above locations, albeit in smaller doses.

So, in closing: good luck to you, and may God bless you.

Action: concerning tax cuts for the rich and funding cuts to programs we all need.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject cuts to programs America needs just to fund yet more tax cuts for the rich, and tell your Congressfolk to specifically reject cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislation that cuts services good Americans need in order to pay for yet more tax cuts for the rich and for corporations. They want to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, veterans' health care, renewable energy infrastrucure, and many more things that benefit all Americans – all so the rich and corporations can have yet more unearned money. No one believes supply-side arguments anymore, so they'll either lecture us about "living within our means," or they’ll simply deny what they're doing. Neither one of those things justifies more stupid tax cuts for folks who don't need them and who hurt us every day of our lives.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to specifically reject any effort to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. They need to hear us generally about tax cuts for the rich, but they also need to hear us specifically about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Our President-elect said he'd never make such cuts, but you cannot believe a promise that man makes – why, he proposed Social Security and Medicare cuts in every budget he put out, and during the pandemic tried to stop collecting payroll taxes. Naturally our Vice President-elect and many Congressional Republicans have also said they'll try to cut these programs. So we need to get in their grills about all of that.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any cuts to food stamps. The food stamp program was a TFG whipping boy during his first Administration, and you can see why: too many Americans still think of food stamps as something Those Other People Get. But they're not! White folks comprise almost 63% of food stamp recipients, for example, and really, Americans need to grow up about this shit – any of us might fall on hard times, and thus need food stamps, at any time, so we should ensure we have a vigorous, well-funded food stamp program, not just for other folks, but for ourselves.

Action: concerning transgender soldiers, voting rights, and financial predators.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect gender-affirming care in appropriations bills, stop preventing prisoners and ex-prisoners from voting, and stop trying to destroy our CFPB. 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 National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect gender-affirming care for our soldiers and their families. Transgender people exist, everywhere! At least half of America just needs to fucking get over it! At least half of America also needs remedial education in How Not to Be Cruel, but I'll try to avoid piling on and instead just say, like Rep. Casar of Texas, that transgender soldiers didn't deny your health insurance claim – your health insurance corporation did, and they did it with the help of those same Republican politicians who throw tantrums about taxpayer money going to trans soldiers. I might also add that taxpayer money pays for everything our government does. I hope that clarifies things for the benighted! But I won’t hold my breath.

The Vera Institute of Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that folks in prison can vote. Tolerate no dick-thumping about how we always need to get tough on crime – rights are rights, and if everyone doesn't have them, then no one has them. Getting tough on crime doesn't mean taking voting rights away from criminals or making it harder for them to vote, either – getting tough on crime means making sure the real sociopaths can't hurt us anymore, which in practice means putting polluters and Medicare fraudsters and financial predators in jail. Besides which, if our government doesn't want us to vote, they'll just invent new crimes and put us all in jail! Hey, if I thought of it, you know theyhave. Especially TFG.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep their grubby mitts off our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB). Politicians have this hard-on for getting rid of a government agency that actually works on our behalf! How do I know they work on our behalf? Not just because they've returned billions of dollars to good Americans hurt by financial scams – but because Elon Musk says he wants to "delete" our CFPB (he's such a good little Cyberman!) because it's "duplicative." If it worked badly, he'd surely have said so! And not for nothing, but a Black President created this agency, and I'm pretty sure that's at the front of right-wingers' minds (including that of the apartheid diamond mine heir!) when they say they hate our CFPB.

Penny rants for Sunday, December 1, 2024: special “goodbye to all that” edition.

Folks, you all know TFG's not leaving office except in a box, right? Because the minute he leaves office, he's going to jail! So how would he stay in power? Berin Szóka at The Bulwark explains how. The 22nd Amendment is pretty plain on whether he can actually run for President again (i.e., he can't), but he might be able to run for Vice-President – whether as the "real" power behind the "President" or as the next "accidental" President, whatever keeps him out of prison – and although the 12th Amendment pretty clearly states that "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States," a far-right Supreme Court might rule that this eligibility question relates to earlier questions of eligibility and not the 22nd Amendment. Of course, TFG could also just purge our military of "disloyal" generals, run again, win, and have our military forcibly install him in defiance of our Constitution. So we have four more years to turn our backs on him – and on all his enablers.

Mike Lofgren, the ex-Republican who has published some withering Jeremiads against his former party, bids goodbye to America "for the last time" in this Salon piece. And I find Mr. Lofgren's disgust sympathetic. I always thought the people were better than the politicians, and I've known about America's dark side forever, but I didn't believe America had this many dangerously self-absorbed people who value nothing other than a) their own pocketbooks and b) nobody ever telling them they're wrong about anything ever. And the 2024 election reflects badly on the character of most Americans – whether they actually voted for TFG, refused to vote for the Black woman when they voted for the white guy in 2020, or just stayed home, all of those people watched a Grown Man Act Like That for ten years, and not only decided his tantrums were OK, but that they shouldn't stop him from being President. Nothing's irreversible, I suppose, but I doubt America will ever earn my love back.

Action: concerning the debt limit, non-profits, and federal judges.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise the debt limit without drama, tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, and tell Democratic Senators to confirm as many judicial nominees as possible. 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.

We hit the debt ceiling again on January 2, so today is a good day to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to lift the debt ceiling before then without any poison pill drama. Why? Because, as Dave Troy reported in the Washington Spectator back in July, the incoming Administration might allow a government default to happen, simply because it might financially benefit one of the Vice President-elect's pals, the notorious Peter Thiel. You'd hate to think the incoming Administration would simply ignore the calls of literally every corporate executive in America that a default would lead to depression, millions of lost jobs, and trillions of dollars of wealth disappearing. But you would also be a fool to count on the incoming Administration to be rational! Best to count on ourselves and our good works.

We thought the so-called Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act died an ignominious death last week, but now Republicans (and way too many Democrats!) want to bring it back — because what zombie don’t they want to bring back? Thus Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the "non-profit killer" bill. Our President-elect just spent an entire election cycle telling everyone that he would get revenge on anyone who had ever wronged him; why would we give him more power to do that, specifically by letting him revoke tax-free status from certain non-profits he would designate as "terrorist-supporting"? And anyway, what the hell is "terrorist-supporting"? What a mealy-mouthed term! And one we certainly shouldn't leave up to TFG to define.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell Senate Democrats to confirm as many judicial nominees as possible before TFG takes over. Because you don't want him filling judicial vacancies! And it's not like Senate Democrats have anything else to do, and I would want to distract them from all the navel-gazing they're doing about what went wrong with the election. Here's what went wrong: 77 million Americans voted for selfishness, venality, and drama because that's what gets them hard, and at least six million other Americans wouldn't vote for the Black woman because she's a Black woman. How do you make all that meaningless? Oh, I've only been telling everyone how to do that for almost 20 years now – you pass policies that actually help working families and that keep rich sociopaths from hurting them. Democrats won't be able to do any of that for at least two years, so they ought to give us some judges who will at least consider the inevitable lawsuits over the evil TFG is about to do.

Around the table: the continuing follies of our Big Baby President-elect.

Our big baby President-elect still plans to use our military against immigrants and protestors in contravention of our laws. Will our military refuse to obey illegal orders, as is their duty? Depends on whether or not our President-elect purges all the "disloyal" generals first, I suppose! See, all you suddenly tariff-skeptical voters? Actions have consequences, especially when they feel good.

Speaking of which, quite a few military observers absolutely hate our President-elect's pick for Secretary of Defense, noted misspelled white supremacist tattoo-wearer/germ skeptic Pete Hegseth. Recall that our President-elect also wants to get rid of "disloyal" generals and you might think nominating someone like Mr. Hegseth – a man who seems almost designed to provoke decent and competent people – was a mistake. But then a compliant "liberal" media could help him get away with it anyway, and given how they ran Joe Biden out of the race and "covered" that shitshow of a Republican campaign, they sure look awfully pliant.

Our President-elect can't stop whining and yelling as he says he'll seize the endowments of colleges "illegally" promoting DEI initiatives and give that money to "wronged" white people. You know DEI must be doing good, or else right-wingers wouldn't throw such tantrums about it! And would white people ever get reparations from Dear Leader? Of course not! That might make them happy, and the whole point is to keep them enraged!

Here's some good news, at least for the moment: our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) has ruled that bosses can't force employees to attend meetings about how bad unions supposedly are, since that's basically coercion. The bad news? The next President's NLRB could reverse the decision. The good news? That'll take a new case before our NLRB. The bad news? Big corporations no doubt already have a new case or 20 ready to file as we speak. BTW, no corporation has "First Amendment rights." Corporations are things, not people.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes says hell yes she's going ahead with her prosecution of the alleged fake electors scheme in that state in 2020. And since it's a state trial, Dear Leader can't legally stop it from happening, nor can he pardon any of the defendants if they're convicted – though, again, if Dear Leader manages to purge our military of "enem(ies) within," I suppose he could send troops down there to intimidate her.

Finally, It Begins: our President-elect "jokes" that he could serve a third term if our House decides "he’s so good we got to figure something else out." Not a joke, and not just because it's not funny. The 22nd Amendment to our Constitution is quite plain, and frankly Dear Leader's 75 million-plus supporters don't have the guts to force their will on the rest of us – but, again, if he reshapes our military in his image, he could serve additional terms until he's a brain in a jar. Remember, folks: once he's out of office, jail remains a very real possibility.

A few thoughts about the election.

First, we have some good news.

Missouri voters enacted Proposition A, which raises the state minimum wage to $15/hour and guarantees five to seven paid sick days annually from most private employers. Workers can get five days at employers with 15 or fewer employees; I'm pleased that Prop A didn't simply give big corporations the opportunity to pretend they're small businesses because they might have fewer than 15 employees at a particular location. Nebraska voters also voted to mandate private employers to provide paid sick leave; voters here mandated five days at employers with 20 employees or fewer and seven at larger employers. And while the tally isn't final yet, Alaska voters have apparently voted to mandate paid sick leave, raise the minimum wage to $15/hour by 2027 and a prohibit captive audience meetings at workplaces, so that your employer can't force you to sit through political or religious meetings if they don't actually relate to your job.

Massachusetts voters approved a law allowing "transportation network drivers" (i.e., Uber/Lyft drivers) the right to bargain collectively for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. And Nebraska voters weren't done, as they also repealed a state law using taxpayer money on private school scholarships by a 15-point margin. They weren't the only ones, either! Kentucky voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have permitted taxpayer money to flow to private schools. I am heartened that, even in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, good citizens like those in Nebraska and Kentucky agree with the common-sense notion that we ought to use public money on public schools (and certainly we should stop pretending that charter schools are somehow a way out of whatever problems we have in public schools, problems that do not result from CRT or whatever but from our refusal to fund them properly in the first place).

This year's pro-abortion initiatives met with some success, as voters in seven states expanded abortion rights at the ballot box, while voters in three others did not. The Missouri initiative, which guarantees a right to an abortion up until fetal viability in that state's constitution, will get most of the ink, largely because Missouri was the first state to ban abortion in the wake of the Dobbs ruling, but don't sleep on Montana voters, either – a 1999 state Supreme Court ruling locates the right to an abortion within the right to privacy, but precedents never change until they do, so enshrining abortion in the state constitution was a smart move on their part. I suspect initiatives like the ones that failed in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota might succeed in future years when some other Republican candidate is at the top of the ticket. (The one in Florida only failed because Florida required a 60% threshold for passage; clearly Florida politicians don't like it when good Floridians tell them what to do.)

Not every good ballot initiative succeeded, unfortunately, as Ohio voters rejected an amendment that would have created a bipartisan redistricting commission to start undoing decades of right-wing gerrymandering of that state's Congressional seats. Don't be too quick to blame Ohio voters for that – Secretary of State Frank LaRose wrote the amendment misleadingly in an obvious attempt to make it fail, and in any case Ohio Republicans have simply ignored previous directions from the electorate that would have compelled them to draw maps more fairly. What could they be afraid of? (Do go ahead and blame Ohio voters for replacing one of our Senate's finest human beings, Sherrod Brown, with Bernie Moreno, who clearly aims to threaten Tommy Tuberville for the title of "America's Stupidest Senator.")

I have little else to say about the national election. Somehow the whiny, traitorous asshole is back, so those Americans who want to threaten immigrants, beat up transgender folk, sling racial slurs, grab a woman's breasts in public, taunt Muslims on trains, and whine about all their clearly deserved rejections once again have a guardian angel who'll bless their every noxious urge. I pray that America survives another four years of this disgusting drama.

Action: concerning health care and right-wing drama.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Global HER Act and expel Rep. Higgins from our House. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (or Global HER) Act, which would kill the notorious Global Gag Rule dead forever. The Global Gag Rule – generally imposed by Republican Presidents and rescinded by Democratic ones on their first days in office – prevents taxpayer money from going to any foreign organization providing health care in a foreign land if they dare to mention "abortion" or provide abortion-related services; the Global HER Act would allow foreign organizations to receive such money if they abide by U.S. federal law and the laws of other host nations. The Global Gag Rule is just one of many right-wing dramas I want to end, and if we pass this bill, we can end it.

Speaking of right-wing dramas, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to expel Rep. Clay Higgins (E-LA) from our House of Representatives. Most people were disgusted by the Trump/Vance ticket's promotion of completely false and racist stories about Haitian immigrants eating other people's pets – but not Rep. Higgins! He doubled down on the drama, repeating the false stories and further saying they should "get their mind right and their ass (they only have one ass? No wonder they’re a menace!) out of our country." He's said stupid, hateful crap like this his whole life, even as a police officer, and it's about time he paid for it. No, our First Amendment doesn't guarantee you a House seat if you say stupid, hateful crap.

Action: concerning pollution and racism.

Long story short: tell our EPA to protect communities from the hazards of vinyl chloride, and tell a Texas county to stop reclassifying Native American history as "fiction." Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect communities from the evils of vinyl chloride. You remember vinyl chloride from its featured role in the East Palestine (OH) train disaster in early 2023? Well, our EPA has already designated vinyl chloride as a "high priority chemical," and scientists have told us vinyl chloride causes cancer. And the corporations manufacturing vinyl chloride tend to neglect communities they displace of build through, hence we demand that our government step in. You think corporations will do the right thing on their own? Ha ha ha corporations are like children without the charm.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell Montgomery County (TX) to stop reclassifying Native American history as fiction. Just when I think they can't sink any lower! Montgomery County told libraries to stick Colonization and the Wampanoag Story in the fiction section, though it is actual history written by an actual historian, after secretly creating a "Citizens Review Committee" and keeping actual librarians off said "committee." I guess the exercise was "say 'we never oppressed Native Americans' without actually saying it." But too many assholes already tell too many of us that our lived experience and heritage is fiction, so how about we prevent a local government from getting away with that particular evil?

Action: concerning voting rights, price-gouging, and worker safety.

Long story short: tell our government to investigate Ohio's recent voter purge, tell airline CEOs to stop using hurricanes as an excuse to price-gouge, and tell Tennessee to investigate hurricane-related worker deaths. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Civic Shout helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to investigate the Ohio state government for its recent voter registration purge. Brook no silliness about "a government's duty to purge voters who no longer live in Ohio," because purging voters from Black and Brown neighborhoods disproportionately (which several civil rights groups allege Ohio has done) is not part of that duty, and anyway no one should lose a right simply because they haven't exercised it in a while. "Oh, but they can just go re-register!" Ah, not if they don't know the state has de-registered them, and besides, making people jump through extra bureaucratic hoops just makes it harder for them to vote. Is that right?

More Perfect Union helps you tell airline CEOs to stop price-gouging for flights out of the way of incoming disasters like Hurricane Milton. It's a shame we even have to say such things out loud, but apparently United and American have done this exact thing, despite the fact that we now live in an age where virtually anyone with an internet connection can discover them doing this exact thing. If anyone tells you this is just how the "free" market "works," ask them how they'd feel if it were their own family members facing this kind of price-gouging. Some people love saying grandma needs to be "sacrificed" to make burdens lighter for the rest of us, but those folks don't mean their own grandma.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to, well, investigate Impact Plastics of Erwin, TN for telling their employees not to leave as Hurricane Milton was hammering them. At least three people died because their bosses told them the emergency just wasn't bad enough for them to evacuate, and then they were all trapped, and then when they tried to escape anyway they found themselves in the middle of a catastrophe. But good managers foresee catastrophes (like a hurricane whose approach has already been on the news for several days!) and plan for them. So we should keep demanding accountability for those who do not plan, and who kill their employees as a result.

Action: concerning voting rights and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and expand (not repeal!) Medicare drug price negotiation. 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 Power United helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The first bill would standardize early and mail-in voting, ban gerrymandering, and force disclosure of big campaign donations, while the latter would give our government the power to investigate and end racist voting practices more vigorously and allow our Justice Department's ability to pre-clear voting law changes in any state or locality that has established a record of vote suppression. Who's against these bills? Self-serving Republicans, and approximately no one else. Must they win again? If we speak out in numbers they can't deny, they'll lose, and we'll win. It's that simple.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate prices for more drugs not fewer. Because "fewer" is the Republicans' preferred position, apparently! Many Republicans are actually running on repealing Medicare's ability to negotiate prices for a few drugs beginning in 2026. Taking such a position, in public, used to end political careers, but not in this sick, immoral, and decadent world; how do we begin to bring a sane, moral, and decent world back? By demanding that Medicare should be able to negotiate the price of any drug, on behalf of both seniors and taxpayers, since that's our tax money they're spending. If we speak out enough, our Congressfolk will heed our will.

Action: concerning health care and nativism.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Health Over Wealth Act and expel Rep. Higgins from our House. 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 pass the Health Over Wealth Act, which would make it harder for bankster hedge fund managers to take over nursing homes and strip the money out of them. Seriously, they buy nursing homes, cut services and jobs, load them up with debt, and eventually redistribute all the wealth upward to themselves when they "have to close" a "badly-functioning" nursing home – leaving seniors out in the cold! The Health Over Wealth Act would outlaw such asset-stripping and require DHS approval of nursing home sales – among other reforms! It ain't everything we'd want, but it'd make things better for our seniors, a class of people that will, ideally, one day include all of us.

Civic Shout helps you tell your House Reps to expel Rep. Clay Higgins (E-LA) for his most recent comments about Haitian immigrants. Mr. Higgins obviously thinks it's OK to say just any old thing, no matter whom it hurts, as long as you get attention for it. And while I would say he has absolute First Amendment rights to post his vile rhetoric on his Facebook page to his private (not public!) groups of friends and followers, he does not have a First Amendment right to a House seat while doing that. In fact, I'd say we have a duty, as civilized people, to keep him out of our government while he's doing that – and brook no cynicism about how “all politicians are bad,” because cynicism invites and enables bad behavior.

Around the table: “truly the most oppressed minority."

David Corn reminds us that Donald Trump badly mishandled the COVID pandemic while he was President. Well, he also talks to memory experts to explain how Americans might actually have forgotten that (long story short: the pandemic sucked, why would you want to remember it?), but the better public service is reminding good Americans that a President less interested in creating drama at every turn and more interested in leading us through and out of the pandemic might have saved many more lives. And putting this guy in charge again would just mean more drama, more hysteria, and more assholes threatening to kill people who actually know how to do things, which is all pretty much the opposite of the future I signed up for.

Ho hum, right-wing "journalist" discovers that libel is actually a thing and not just a weapon to brandish at anyone you don't like. Specifically, a Scranton Times reporter reminded everyone that said "patriot reporter," who makes a living claiming that "certain high-ranking elected and public officials are satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles sexually abusing children and drinking their blood to ingest the life-extending chemical adrenochrome," has, in his own past, a Corruption of Minors conviction. The "patriot reporter"'s libel lawsuit, predictably, failed. Nice to know Scranton, PA still has a local daily, though will they still have one after a few more frivolous libel suits?

Portage County, OH Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski advises his Facebook followers that, if Kamala Harris wins the Presidency in November, they should "write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards! Sooo...when the Illegal human 'Locust' (which she supports!) Need places to live...We'll already have the addresses of the their New families...who supported their arrival!" (Odd capitalization and use of ellipses in the original.) When he feels like responding to press inquiries, he'll no doubt say that of course he didn't mean to intimidate anyone, but was just "trying to make a point," but I'm pretty sure most folks just read "write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards" and reacted accordingly, and that's almost certainly just as he intended. In case you were wondering, I think folks so obsessed with "illegal immigration" that they'd upend law and order are racists.

With the news that the Florida ACLU has sued a state health care agency for using taxpayer money to spread lies about the abortion-related ballot initiative up before Florida voters in November, we will gain some insight into what right-wingers plan to do if they lose this fall. They'll do what they did with their book banning and masking-related attacks in 2021 – attack where liberals are strong, and with clear majorities supporting the liberal position on abortion, they'll dig in with their "abortion always hurts women's health" rubbish and their LIBRULZ AREZ TEH REALZ FEARMONGERURZ!!!!! rubbish. In the meantime, someone should go to jail for misuse of taxpayer funds. And whoever ordered police to interrogate petition-signers at their homes maybe should go to Hell – in addition to jail or in place of it, whichever.

I'm old enough to remember when saying you "create stories," as Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance did on CNN when confronted with the fact that he repeated lies about Haitian immigrants eating cats, would finish your campaign, but in the Donald Trump era, you can get away with saying pretty much anything anymore – if you're a Republican, anyway. Those who would respond "well, fiction writers create stories to get you to pay attention to other people suffering" should note that Vice Presidential candidates are not fiction writers. We should expect political candidates to tell the truth; if we don't hold them to that, we're not "superior" because we're more cynical, we're just not doing our job as citizens. (At the risk of piling on, Mr. Vance sure is one to claim that "the left needs to tone down the rhetoric," since his running mate is the one who says 99% of all the obnoxious shit we hear.)

New Hampshire Libertarian Party opines on X/Twitter that anyone who would "murder()" Kamala Harris would be "an American hero" – and then deletes the tweet, saying they only did so because the tweet violated X/Twitter's terms of service, laments that "(i)t's a shame that even on a 'free speech' website that libertarians cannot speak freely," and further adds – and you may want to sit down for this – that "Libertarians are truly the most oppressed minority." Yeah, I remember when our government enslaved Libertarians and marched them off to detention centers and gas chambers and threw them out of helicopters! I kid, of course. I fucking hate whiners.

Finally, an internal Department of Homeland Security report reveals that under former President Trump, DHS tried its damnedest to link Portland, OR protestors to an "imaginary terrorist plot." Just as anyone who had even one working brain cell could have predicted when Tha Bush Mobb created the Department of Homeland Security after 9.11! The good news? Some DHS rank-and-file pushed back, because no one could prove the antifa "terrorist organization" even existed. But don't worry, folks! If we put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office this November, he'll make damn sure this time that nobody who ever stood between him and his evil fantasies will ever work for our government again! I wish I were kidding, but Project 2025 has essentially said the same thing.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, voting rights, and bankster bonuses.

Long story short: tell our government to stop arming Israel, tell our DOJ to investigate Texas's Attorney General for vote suppression, and tell our Federal Reserve to stop banksters from giving themselves big bonuses for their risky behavior. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our government to stop arming Israel's attempt to blow Palestinians out of existence. Yes, the terrorist attack of October 7 was evil, but so is the Israeli response, and because Israel is much more powerful than Palestine, the response will do more harm, almost as if Hamas intended that all along. And of course Benjamin Netanyahu has no intention of destroying Hamas – he needs an enemy so he can con good Israelis into clinging to him! Cut off his weapons and this house of cards will collapse.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to investigate Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for attempting to harass and intimidate voters. Which is against the law! Lately Mr. Paxton has threatened to sue Harris County and Bexar County over their plans to make sure eligible but unregistered voters get registration forms. Sounds like a frivolous lawsuit? It gets better – both counties have large Latin-American populations! No use arguing "prosecutorial discretion" when that "discretion" always seems aimed at non-whites.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell Fed Chair Jerome Powell to finalize rules prohibiting bankster CEOs from getting big bonuses for taking absurd risks with their customers' money. I'd say "finally finalize" if it didn't sound corny, but fact is the Dodd-Frank law authorized this rule almost 15 years ago, so our government's got to get to it! Otherwise we could have another bankster Armageddon like we had in 2008, and there might really be torches and pitchforks this time.

Action: concerning rich tax evasion, corrupt judges, and vote suppression.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the OLIGARCH Act and the High Court Gift Ban Act and reject the SAVE 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.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the OLIGARCH Act, which would create a four-bracket wealth tax (the brackets would be 2%, 4%, 6%, and 8%) on homes with at least 1,000 times the median wealth in America. So brook no silliness about how this would be a "100% tax" (like Donald Trump said in 2020), because the four brackets are right there, and none of them would even come close to breaking a billionaire. Why, Elon Musk could still spend $45 million a month trying to elect Donald Trump President! That's a hell of a lot of money to piss away, by the way. If I had $45,000< I could do a hell of a lot more good than he's doing with all his money!

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the High Court Gift Ban Act, which would ban gifts over $50 to our Supreme Court Justices (and limit aggregate gifts to $100 annually). After all the luxury vacations our Justices have gotten from billionaires over the years (which we've only learned about lately!), you'd think they'd know better than to say how dare you say we can't be impartial! You may remember that all it took to get Bank of Amerikkka clerks to foreclose on more homes were $25 cash gifts and Bed, Bath, and Beyond gift cards. So we've got to put some guardrails on our Supreme Court Justices.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject the so-called SAVE Act, which purports to be a bill protecting us from the scourge of undocumented immigrants voting – for the record, that's been illegal since anyone can remember, and no one can even prove it's happening – but would also turbocharge right-wing efforts to throw people off the voting rolls for the heinous crime of being Black or Brown (and therefore, in their minds, a Democrat voter). Look, if Republicans want people to vote for them, then maybe they should offer something other than hysteria and drama. It ain't that damn deep.

Action: concerning government spying, judicial corruption, and vote suppression.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to support Sections 1201 and 1202 of the Intelligence Authorization Act, impeach Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Alito, and pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to support Sections 1201 and 1202 of the Intelligence Authorization Act, because these sections will protect good Americans from the worst effects of government spying. These "worst effects" include, no lie, our government actually forcing Americans to spy on each other. Yes, you read that right – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (or FISA) now basically allows our government to expand the definition of "electronic communication service providers" to individual Americans, meaning they could one day serve wiretap orders to you and I. Turning Americans into “service providers” in order to spy on each other is evil, and we should fight that to the death. Its death, that is.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Congressfolk to impeach Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Alito over their fairly obvious and well-reported conflicts of interest. 20 years of luxury vacations for free for Justice Thomas, a luxury trip with Paul Singer for Justice Alito before Mr. Singer had no less than ten cases before our Court – Jesus Mary and Joseph Abe Fortas had to resign his Court seat over a $20,000 gift from a bankster under investigation for insider trading in 1969; of course $20,000 is a little over $180,000 in 2024 dollars, but I think that notation doesn’t smash a precedent, but sets one. If you're not convinced, remember that these clowns took away the right to an abortion and made Donald Trump a King.

Finally, the Workers Circle helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Our Supreme Court struck down our Justice Department's ability to pre-clear voting law changes from Southern states; they said it unlawfully discriminated against the South – don't linger too long on that, it'll just anger up the blood! – but they also said a law that didn't discriminate against the South would pass muster. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would let our Justice Department pre-clear voting law changes from any state or locality, Southern or not, that has historically suppressed the vote. So maybe we ought to put that to the test!

Around the table: fight the real enemy, part 922.

After hearing about right-wingers blaming liberals for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump even though the shooter was a registered Republican, I can only say, well, how typical. Having been unimpressed with crying about Sarah Palin’s “role” in the Gabrielle Giffords shooting back in 2011, why would I be impressed with efforts to link Joe Biden to the Trump shooting? (Both used crosshair imagery in various campaign efforts.) And yet Republicans, despite positioning themselves as “the party of personal responsibility,” can’t seem to blame anyone who fires a gun at another human being for, you know, firing a gun at another human being. I’d call it irony, but irony should be more pleasurable than that.

Appalachian expat Neema Avashia reminds us that new Trump running mate/Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance is an “opportunist” who “only represents himself.” She also reminds us that there aren’t many non-white folks in Mr. Vance’s Appalachia although Ms. Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants, “(a)nd in his campaign rhetoric, we only exist as the root of Appalachia’s problems; never as one of its sources of strength.” Let me say, also, that we should be wary of being too impressed with Mr. Vance’s populist bona fides – yes, he makes sympathetic noises about monopolies, but plenty of people make sympathetic noises and then do nothing, and anyway sympathetic noises are no reason to vote for a fascist, particularly when our current President has actually done something about monopolies.

You heard about the Microsoft software crash that threw airports into chaos this past week? Well, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but Microsoft pushed back against an FTC investigation of “the risks of a handful of cloud services companies controlling the world’s technological infrastructure” because of course they did. Brook no what-do-you-expect-a-corporation-to-do cynicism, because we should expect a corporation to do right by its customers. Of course FTC Chair Lina Khan is right that “a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto-dealers” and that monopolies create “fragile systems,” and of course anyone with a functioning brain would come to the same conclusion, but cue another six months of headlines from the Wall Street Journal about how wrong she is about everything.

Tennessee state legislature, never content with all the harm they’ve done to good Tennesseans, extends a law letting police officers fly drones over private property without getting a warrant first. The law’s defenders actually compare it to airplanes flying over your property! Because police routinely use planes flying 30,000 feet above your property to spy on you! And of course the law’s defenders also offer a) anecdotal evidence and b) anecdotal evidence that would fall outside warrant requirements anyway, meaning no one actually requires cops to get a warrant before saving someone in a cornfield from their own attempted suicide. Even this U.S. Supreme Court, the one that immunizes Presidential “official acts,” wouldn’t smile on any of these arguments.

From In These Times we learn about “green” biomass corporations turning trees into wood pellets. It’s not even better than coal, since burning wood pellets actually creates more carbon than burning coal does, and biomass definitions of “waste wood” are much more, shall we say, liberal than common sense would dictate, so this is exactly the kind of thing that makes right-wingers go HAHAHAHA YOURZ RENEWABULZ AREZ TEH DURTEEZ!!!!!, so maybe we ought to do better. Sometimes you wonder if some executives don’t want to do better – yes, I mean that they may literally be doing it wrong just to enrage folks they find sympathetic, or useful. Hey, if I thought of it, I’m sure they have.

Finally, in a development that will surely enrage those who complain about the “weaponization of the Justice Department” ha ha I kid of course, a jury finds Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) guilty of bribery charges. Good riddance to him, but I can’t help but wonder if he could appeal to our Supreme Court and say he should be immunized for his “official acts.” Again, I kid – they’d respond that their doctrine only applies to Donald Trump ahem Presidents because only Donald Trump ahem Presidents need to be “vigorous” and “energetic.”

Action: concerning corruption, education, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight corruption, fund education, and keep pollution off our public lands. 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 youtell your Congressfolk to restore the anti-corruption protections our Supreme Court just struck down in Snyder v. United States. Our Court said, in Public Citizen’s words, that “federal law does not prohibit paying state and local officials for favors if the money isn’t promised in advance.” You remember former Rep. Vance McAllister (R-LA) telling us that other Congressfolk told him that if he voted a certain way on legislation, a group would give him money? So that’s why our Supreme Court is wrong this time! The fact that no formal offer gets made is irrelevant if you know what’s coming after you perform a favor! Hence we must fix a Supreme Court mess, again.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject education funding cuts. Some of our Congressfolk sure have crap-ass priorities – more spending on weapons that don’t work, less investing in our children – but if they want a fight over this, we’ll give ‘em one, and we’ll win it. Because the only reason they’ve got to cut education funding, itself an unpopular idea, is the racism of the book-banning crowd, also an unpopular idea. Republicans only won the 2021 gubernatorial election in Virginia because a) Terry McAuliffe is a horrible candidate and b) the “star” of that ad about books in school was a professional book-banner pretending to be a random “concerned mom.”

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would, as its title suggests, reverse a transfer of public (and, to the Apache, sacred) land to a big mining corporation and permanently protect that land from future development. So we have two reasons to act: one, we shouldn’t allow polluters to despoil our public lands, since they serve as a sort of repository for clean air and clean water, and two, the Apache find the land sacred and religious freedom still matters in America. At least, if it’s about people actually practicing their religion, and not forcing everyone else to practice their religion. The latter ain’t happening here, no matter what Rio Tinto says.

Action: concerning law and order, voting rights, and financial predators.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to put limits on Presidential immunity, protect voting rights, and reject pro-financial predator legislation. 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.

Left Click helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation limiting Presidential immunity for crimes a President might commit while in office. Seriously, it boggles the mind that we revolted against a King who abused his power and hurt us, but now we have to immunize a President from facing any legal accountability for his actions when he hurts us while in office, so Congress has to act, lest our federal judges decide that a President who literally shoots someone dead on Fifth Avenue can’t be prosecuted for it because it’s an “official act.” And make no mistake: right-wing judges will not call any of Joe Biden’s “official acts” official. So we’ve got to step up.

The Workers Circle helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Our Supreme Court, as you know, struck down our government’s ability to scrutinize voting law changes in Southern states, on the pretext that such an ability “discriminated” against Southern states – don’t chew on that too long; it’ll just anger up the blood! – but the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would correct that mistake, in more or less the manner our Supreme Court prescribed, by subjecting any state or locality, Southern or not, to similar scrutiny if they’ve demonstrated a pattern of vote suppression. So don’t listen to the haters; just do good works.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislation that would repeal the Biden Administration’s newly-enacted “fiduciary responsibility” rule. I’m not sure what else I can say about this! The Biden rule forces financial planners – including those in charge of your pensions – to put your financial security ahead of their own. And that’s because they too often put their own financial needs ahead of yours! But Republicans want to pass a resolution nullifying that rule, meaning those Republicans are objectively pro-financial predation, since we enable financial predators every time we go easy on them. How about we not go easy on evil, then?

Action: concerning junk fees, marijuana convictions, and big pharma greed.

Long story short: tell our CFPB to end junk fees in the mortgage industry, tell your Governor to pardon all marijuana convictions, and tell big pharma corporations to stop suing Medicare over drug price negotiation. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Matt Stoller writes about the “credit bureau cartel” – we had 2000 credit bureaus in America as late as 1970, but now we have three, and they hamstring a lot of business in America, though not as much, even, as FICO scores do, since FICO has a monopoly over credit scoring so it jacks up mortgage-related fees at will. That’s why their profits are soaring while interest rates are still so high that fewer people want to buy houses! Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed capping junk fees relating to the mortgage industry, and you can leave a comment with them here.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Governor to pardon all marijuana convictions. A lot of right-wing Governors will resist, of course, but not all of them, since they can put their finger to the wind as well as anyone else and find that folks just aren’t as tight-ass about pot as they used to be. And marijuana is legal in enough places now that it seems cruel to keep such folks in jail, plus a pot conviction can doom you to a lifetime of rejection from employers and lenders and renters. Also too, we know that the right concocted the “War on Drugs” to better oppress Black people. Don’t take my word for it: take John Ehrlichman’s!

Finally, Health Care Voices helps you tell big pharma corporations to stop trying to sue Medicare to stop Medicare drug-price negotiation. Yes, big pharma corporations are still suing Medicare so they can force good Americans to pay usurious prices for medications forever, though, seriously, imagine taking that to the Pearly Gates! Yes, St. Peter, I did all I could to make sure people paid more for their life-saving medications, and I bankrupted a lot of people doing that! Always remember when professional haters claim you’re “just jealous” of rich folks that you actually have a lot to be angry about!

Around the table: this week with maybe half good news? Or more?

I don’t know what fresh hell our Supreme Court plans to unleash upon us next week, but on Friday they ruled 8-1 that our government can keep domestic abusers from owning guns. I’ve never liked using law-breaking as a pretext to take rights away, but then I’m no longer sure having a gun should be a right per se, and when right-wingers throw a tantrum over our Court saying “the Second Amendment is not absolute” (that’s Justice Barrett, from her concurrent opinion), they’ll show us their ass yet again, and I guess that’s useful. Of course Justice Thomas dissented, saying that since governments have barely ever prosecuted domestic violence victims then of course there’s no “historical precedent” to follow! I bet he likes bitcoin, too.

Our Supreme Court, in Moore v. United States, also rejected (at least in this case’s context!) right-wing arguments that our government can only tax “realized” income. Had our Court sanctified that pile of dung, our government would never be able to tax the kind of wealth rich people accumulate these days – capital gains, accumulated interest, stock options, and the like. Rich folks pay themselves like this so they can avoid taxes! Let’s see you and I try that! And now for the bad news: four out of nine Justices on our Supreme Court explicitly blessed the “realized income” argument; two of these merely differed on whether these particular plaintiffs had a case regarding their income.

Clearview AI – a player in the facial recognition software game, a game that should shame for all eternity anyone who plays it – is now so broke after all the lawsuits against it that it’s actually offering promises of future earnings in its settlement. Like they’re ever going to make money again! I mean, they’re not a name your grandmother knows, like Home Depot or Microsoft or DuPont. Well, at least a lot of idiots lost a lot of money boosting an absurd corporation (Clearview) as well as an absurd notion (that facial recognition software doesn’t completely suck). And, you know, it scraped all those photos off the internet without the consent of the photographed; turns out you don’t surrender all your rights just because the cynical say so.

The Tampa Bay Times profiles Rich Logis, who used to be a Trumphole but now runs a group aiming to help other ex-Trumpholes escape. I don’t believe anyone as emotionally-invested in Republican electoral fortunes as Mr. Logis was in 2015 could be an “independent” – no, not even if they voted for Ralph Nader four times! – and I never said losing friends and communities was easy, either, but the work of being yourself is the most important work you can do, and I’m pleased he’s now doing it, even if he never wants to tax the rich like I do. I’m also pleased January 6 and Gov. DeSantis’s mishandling of the COVID Delta wave pushed him away, because these should have pushed away every reasonable person. And while I’ve long said the work of redeeming Trumpholes is God’s work, not ours, maybe Rich Logis is doing God’s work.

When I hear that our government has designated a Swedish neo-Nazi group as terrorists, I’m more than a bit conflicted: I’ve never been thrilled that our government designates anyone a terrorist, and this is also a pretty obscure, faraway group; why, it’s almost as if they don’t have the guts to designate some American hate group a “terrorist” organization! Or, our government thinks Americans will more readily accept a “terrorist” designation of a domestic American hate group one day if they get one of an obscure foreign one first, but that’s also quite the double-edged sword. Still and all, fuck neo-Nazis with a broomstick sideways.

When I hear that Democratic strategists have expressed alarm over Joe Biden’s re-election strategy, I’m very, very tempted to say: these are same people who consistently snatch defeat from the jaws of victory! Your strategy can get no better endorsement! Now I could criticize Mr. Biden’s strategy – he’s not telling us that America is fighting monopolies again, for example – but of course none of these strategists seem to have that complaint. Actually, it’s hard to tabulate the complaints they do have, what with all the behind-the-scenes who’s-in-who’s-out drama the article describes. Why, it’s almost like the whole article was a bait-and-switch!

Finally, a megachurch pastor’s “confession” of a “moral failure” involving an underage girl – a failure that, of course, went on for many years – is an amazing document mainly for the utter lack of confessing that goes on in it! “Young lady”? Uh, ladies aren’t 12! “It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong”? Try it was wrong – nobody likes confessions that tabulate the sins one could have committed but didn’t. But best of all? “In March of 1987, this situation was brought to light, and it was confessed and repented of.” Not “I confessed” and “I repented”? Why, that sounds like someone who’s done neither! Remember: the passive voice hides evil.

Action: concerning facial recognition, sexual deepfakes, and IRS Direct File.

Long story short: tell state and local governments to ban facial recognition software in schools, tell Google to stop enabling sexual deepfakes, and tell your state Governor to opt in to our IRS’s Direct File program. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Ban Facial Recognition helps you, guess what, tell state and federal governments to ban facial recognition software in schools. Because it sucks! Because one wrong accusation can ruin a kid’s life anymore! Because it can’t tell Black people apart any better than your MAGA hat-wearing uncle can! Because it’s yet another way private corporations collect data on good Americans and sell it to those who shouldn’t have it! Because any trove of data might as well wear a HACK ME sign on it, and that kind of hackery ruins lives! Anyway, let me know if I’m not making myself clear. Many have told me I hold back on my emotions far too much.

Ultraviolet helps you tell Google to stop enabling the spread of sexual deepfakes on the internet. Actual porn stars get exploited enough; now comes the advent of artifically-created sexual images – often of famous people, but it could be you, too, if someone’s mad at you! – made without consent. Gosh, it’s like the future sucks! You thought it’d be all transmats and jetpacks, but it turns out it’s all fake sexual images and AI telling you to jump off a bridge if you’re depressed and banksters repossessing prostethic limbs after slamming patients with surprise medical bills. Anyway, Google’s full of billionaires, so they have the power to stop this crap from happening.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your state governor to opt in to our IRS’s Direct File program. The Direct File program – which lets good Americans file their taxes for free with our IRS, rather than have some middle-man skim a few hundred bucks to do the same – did so well in a dozen states that good Americans in all 50 states can take part next year, if their governor opts in to the program. A lot of right-wing governors will say no, and a lot of right-wing blowhards will pretend this is all TEH BIG BRUTHURZ!!!!! Well, that’s why we communicate our will to our elected leaders – to cut through the drama and hysteria.

Around the table: today with 43% good-news-I-guess.

Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) has proposed eliminating medical debt from consideration in our credit reports – which makes a lot of sense, since surprise medical bills can slam anyone at any time regardless of “how well people take care of themselves” – but of course the debt collecting industry is whining about it! Seriously, their “government picking winners and losers” argument is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard a lot of stupid in my time. Just remember: whenever someone whines about “government picking winners and losers,” they really mean they’re enraged that they don’t get to pick the winners and losers.

Our Supreme Court unanimously strikes down lower court decision banning mifepristone and misopropol (the drugs used in home abortions), saying the plaintiffs – who could not prove they had ever been made to prescribe these drugs against their will – lacked standing to bring the suit. That’s good news, and I guess it’s also good news that “standing” still means something to our Court, because I’ve had my doubts about that. But our Court – perhaps more mindful of how little regard good Americans have for them anymore – may simply be waiting for the “right” lawsuit that lets them snuff out mifepristone and misopropol for good.

Matt Stoller notes recent coverage of the numerous sexual improprieties allegedly committed by former FTC Commissioner/George Mason University professor Josh Wright, perhaps America’s leading intellectual pro-monopolist and also “the Harvey Weinstein of antitrust.” Mr. Wright stands accused of “advanc(ing) the careers of students at law firms and in government...based on whether they were sleeping with him”; he’s lost his job at George Mason as a result, which right-wingers will no doubt blame on the “woke mob.” Why does it matter? Because “(i)t takes a village to abuse power the way that he did,” and “he was allowed to act with impunity for almost twenty years. He was benefitting monopolists, so he could do whatever he wanted.” It sure does seem like using women for sex and believing yourself too powerful to be put in jail come from the same impulse.

You already know AI search answers might tell you to eat a rock or jump off a bridge, but Scientific American reminds us that AI searches also waste a lot of energy – it uses 30 times more energy to “generate” an answer than a regular search uses to simply find one. You’ll remember that “manufacturing” bitcoin also eats up a lot of energy, and you’ll also remember that bitcoin is also a stupid scam, and you may begin to see a pattern. What’s wrong with paying people to do a job again? Oh, right, the CEO can’t redistribute as much income upward to himself if he has to pay people to do a job.

Minnesota Republican Senate candidate Royce White – who used to be a hell of a basketball player, until his fear of flying did him in as a pro – submits for your approval a map purporting to show rising crime in Minneapolis when it actually shows the location of drinking fountains in Minneapolis. This should be the kind of mistake that ends a campaign, but my guess is he knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew he’d get caught, too – first, he stokes a feeling of deprivation about crime, and then another one about how all the liberals got him like Jesus. But like George Santos, he may soon learn that only Donald Trump gets away with being Donald Trump. To the degree he will from now on, anyway!

When I hear that an Arizona man planned to mass-murder Black folks at an Atlanta rap concert in order to spark a race war, all I can say is: what a fucking clown! Mass murders happen so often anymore that it’s virtually impossible to create one that’ll start anything larger! Why, mass murders don’t even prompt politicians to pass common-sense gun control legislation! And this is why I say our “liberal” media can’t give so much oxygen to the “motivations” of mass murderers. I mean, these “motivations” run from being mad at absolutely deserved rejections to thinking the world is “bigger than everyone else knows” but in a really stupid way.

Finally, Donald Trump demands that Joe Biden remove an ad citing the numerous documented instances of Mr. Trump cutting down our soldiers as “losers” and the like. He says he never did any of that, and although you and I weren’t there, fairly mainstream news outlets have reported them, and everyone just saw him get 34 felony convictions over trying to cover up something he said he never did, so I could understand if you didn’t believe these denials. Anyway, this is the age where you just don’t take ads down. He understands that better than anyone; he must be whining because it’ll incite that familiar ragey feeling in his votaries. They need a steady diet of manufactured outrage, of course, lest they get bored and turn to something like gardening.

Action: concerning asylum-seekers, clean air, and marijuana legalization.

Long story short: tell our government to stop using aslyum-seekers as a whipping boy, protect air quality as vigorously as possible, and legalize marijuana (rather than just move it from Schedule I to Schedule III). Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

HIAS helps you tell President Biden to abandon his draconian plan to curtail asylum-seeking in America. Exactly zero right-wingers have said way to go, Joe! since he announced his intentions, but what’s even more insane than constantly courting right-wing voters who will always spit in your face? Using asylum-seekers as your whipping boy, that’s what. Folks seeking asylum in the United States aren’t looking for a free ride so much as they’re looking for a life where their own government doesn’t kill them. And anyone who whines about “terrorists” or criminals in the context of asylum-seekers knows neither facts nor common sense. We do still value these things when we make policy decisions, right?

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect air quality as vigorously as possible. Right-wingers act like big corporations will do the right thing if we just leave them alone, but the only reason we have clean air and clean water is that we make big corporations pollute less by enacting laws and regulations. In other words, they use our success to justify not doing what makes us successful! Also too, do right-wingers tend to think people will do the right thing if left alone? Hell no! Otherwise you’d have less of them trying to regulate women’s health care and who can get married and what books you can read.

Finally, VERA helps you tell the Biden Administration to fully-decriminalize marijuana, not merely move it from Schedule I to Schedule III. I won’t lie, moving it from Schedule I (where it most certainly does not belong) to Schedule III will do a lot of good, but I think we know enough by now – and that’s pretty impressive, since Schedule I seriously hamstrings marijuana research – to say pot should be as legal as alcohol. One of the reasons we know enough by now, of course, is we know the cotton lobby wanted pot on Schedule I so no one would ever try to grow or use hemp, ever. We also have John Ehrlichman on record saying the “war on drugs” was really a war on “the anti-war left and Black people.”

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to Vote Act, which would establish a right to vote in law and thus make it harder for states to pass laws suppressing voting rights. Do you get tired of right-wing smartypantses saying TEH CONSTITUSHUNZ HAZ NO RIGHTZ TO VOTEZ HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!? I know I do! And of course they’re wrong – the 15th Amendment says “(t)he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” which, ha ha, means there’s a right to vote. But let’s at least make right-wingers come up with some new line of BS. They’ll just get dumber and dumber.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would plug the hole in the Voting Rights Act our Supreme Court blew open in their notorious Shelby County v. Holder ruling. They said, essentially, that since more Blacks vote in the South now, the Voting Rights Act now unfairly discriminated against Southern states by singling them out for having their voting rights laws pre-cleared by our Justice Department. This bill would fix that error, such as it is, by subjecting any state or locality, from any region, with a history of vote suppression to submit to Justice Department scrutiny. So we ought to do that.

Around the table: now with approximately 29% good news!

Connecticut State Superior Court judge upholds Public Utilities Regulatory Authority’s order reducing Aquarion water bills by 11% – Aquarion wanted a 9% rate hike – and boy does he sound pissed: between “(i)t bears repeating that PURA possesses broad regulatory authority and equally broad discretion in setting rates” and “PURA is permitted to make its own factual determinations and is not required to accept evidence presented by Aquarion,” it sounds like he had to stop himself from writing how dare you waste my valuable time over and over again for 100 pages. Naturally Aquarion responds that keeping it from raising prices now means will only force it to raise prices in the future. Those who create rhetorical hostage situations deserve their own circle of Hell.

New York state settles with two Republican operatives for $1.25 million over their robocall campaign to keep Black voters from voting by mail. The playbook – telling Black voters that voting-by-mail means getting “tracked” for credit card debt and outstanding warrants – won’t surprise you, and though our FCC also fined them over $5 million, I really wish the state hadn’t settled on this; I really want folks like Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl to get jail time. And were they to emerge with a newfound zeal for getting better treatment and rehabilitation for prisoners, all the better!

When I hear that agents and brokers are switching good Americans out of their Affordable Care Act plans and into new ones without their consent, all I can say is: nice work if you can get it! Seriously, our civilization lets too many people who don’t do a damn bit of work just hurt good Americans over and over again. Getting defrauded in this manner means, among other things, not being able to see your doctors because now because they’re in a different network. Would it be piling on to to mention that if we expanded Medicare to include everyone, we wouldn’t need so many middlemen? No, it would not.

You may be familiar with most of the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) “playbook” on fighting and busting unions – “right-to-work,” prohibiting dues deductions from paychecks, like that. But you may not know about a new ALEC model bill called the “Uniform Worker Classification Act,” which, according to them, “ensures that the 80% of workers who prefer their independent contractor status are able to keep it, rather than being forced into traditional employment models.” You know, because California makes corporations to classify gig workers as “employees” (who get benefits) and not “independent contractors” (who don’t). I bet that 80% figure (if it’s not, you know, made-up) is about as useful as the 75%-prefer-their-private-health-insurance canard – people usually “prefer” the status quo until hard times find them and they learn how the status quo actually hurts them.

Mississippi state legislators can’t seem to pass a bill that would bring back ballot questions, even in the weak form (requiring supermajorities to pass, leaving abortion and the state constitution untouched) they obviously prefer. The 2021 state Supreme Court ruling – which held that ballot questions are unconstitutional, since the state constitution requires them to get signatures in five Congressional districts and Mississippi now only has four – may be the worst court ruling I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty in my lifetime. In the meantime, the legislature seems to telling the good people of Mississippi to go fuck themselves. I wish I could count on them paying for that with their jobs.

Jesus Mary and Joseph now Disney asserts it has a First Amendment right to fire Gina Carano for her social media posts. No, a corporation doesn’t have a First Amendment right to do a God damn thing, because a corporation is not a person, period, end of, full stop. And in the absence of a collective bargaining agreement that protects employees from being fired for their speech, Disney would already have the right to fire her for her speech. We’ve never had First Amendment rights at our jobs – though, as I’ve just suggested, we could organize and get them, or at least get some protection for our political speech, however noxious it might be. As long as we still have the right to organize! Louisiana Republicans are about to take that away from public sector workers as we speak.

Finally, the Oklahoma state House has overwhelmingly passed a bill criminalizing the “intentional or reckless” spread of sexually-transmitted diseases – which could make literally everyone in Oklahoma a felon! I’d think “intentional” would be hard to prove – though admittedly so many folks treat emails and texts like they’re not written records these days! – but “reckless” might be too much in the eye of the prosecutor, especially given that the bill doesn’t define “reckless.” Think any good Oklahomans will get tested for syphilis or chlamydia or the like if this bill passes? No, you do not. The state Senate hasn’t passed the bill yet; maybe they’ll at least pretend to be shamed by the media coverage. Seriously, though, Republicans can’t offer solutions unless they punish good people who don’t deserve it.

Action: concerning racism and pollution.

Long story short: tell big corporations to stop funding racists, and tell our Department of Transportation to reduce pipeline leaks. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Color of Change helps you tell big corporations to stop funding infamous racists like Christopher Rufo, Kris Kobach, and Stephen Miller. How do such emotionally-stunted men wind up getting so much attention – so much, in fact, that we can’t simply shame them into silence? We can put some of the blame on credulous “liberal” media coverage, but these dolts’ fake crusades to kill anti-discrimination laws and pro-civil rights laws would be nowhere without big corporate money. The good news? Big corporations hate the Big Stick of Bad PR. So it’s time for us to swing it!

Earth Justice helps you tell our Department of Transportation to finalize the most vigorous anti-pipeline leak rule possible. Even in this sick, immoral, and decadent time big pipeline leaks always make the news, but gas pipelines also leak almost three million tons of methane annually just sitting there, and that isn’t just a whole lot of climate change leaking out, but also a lot of usable energy leaking out. You can burn methane as fuel, after all! It’s OK to be against pollution and against wasting energy! The latter argument’s the only one that’ll sway some folks anyway.

Around the table: behold, the *anti-sex party*!

Good news, everyone: the Biden Administration adds back most of the teeth to the Endangered Species Act that the Trump Administration knocked out, by extending the same protections endangered species get to “threatened” species, and by ignoring the “economic impacts” of endangered species protections, “economic impacts” really only meaning “whether some rich CEO gets even richer” to Donald Trump and his kind. The Biden Administration did not reverse a Trump-era rule allowing agencies to essentially disregard any predicted impact that wasn’t “reasonably certain,” but get the right people in agencies – i.e., not industry people – and you can mitigate that error, as well. Joe Biden hit the big targets, and good for him – and good for you if you left one of the 450,000 public comments telling President Biden to roll those Trump-era rules back.

Oregon government ends its experiment with drug decriminalization, by making possession of hard drugs in small amounts illegal again, though they also increase funding for drug treatment programs. I’ve always been wary of legalizing, for example, heroin and fentanyl, but Oregon used the legislative process to overturn the will of the people as expressed in a ballot question, and that’s more than a bit unnerving. South Dakota did it much worse by overturning a campaign finance ban mere months after good South Dakotans approved it, whereas Oregon waited three years, but I’m sure they could have better respected the people’s wishes. Yes, I know, the people elect representatives – but the people speak more clearly and directly through ballot questions.

Ho hum, Elon Musk passes around yet more “extremely concerning” information about voter “fraud” that doesn’t actually qualify as “information,” let alone “extremely concerning,” because it’s utter bunkum. No, anyone getting a Social Security number is not automatically an “illegal” registering to vote illegally, and a state could submit information about a citizen to a voting database more than once; Jesus Mary and Joseph what is wrong with just shutting the fuck up until you know what you’re talking about? Or is that something only “little people” like us, and not the richest man on Earth, have to worry about? Undocumented immigrant voting in elections is extremely rare, and that finding meshes well with actual common sense – folks here without papers tend not to give out very much personal information about themselves for reasons you can easily imagine. Apparently that finding does not mesh as well with some folks’ desire to be constantly enraged about anything and everything – or with certain rich individuals’ strange desire to show off for such people.

Just Security reminds us that most of the D.C.-held January 6-related inmates Donald Trump wants to release assaulted a police officer. (No, really – 10 of the 29 have been convicted of it, while another 10 have already pleaded guilty to it, which makes 20 of 29.) Well, so much for I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!! And so much for law and order, too. Of course, nobody thinks of themselves as law-breakers, and most folks who break the law tell themselves (and us) that their circumstances were “unique” and they had “no choice.” That is all, of course, very convenient reasoning. Please allow me to keep believing that I’m doing some good by pointing this out.

Newsweek asks if DEI – a term describing efforts to increase diversity, equality, and inclusion in corporations and academia – has become a “racial slur,” now that right-wingers blame literally every bad thing that happens on it, but remember that some people are so evil they’ll turn everything into a bad word. Remember when Barack Obama said he wanted his Supreme Court nominee to possess “empathy”? Oh, how the right-wing media pissed and moaned about that! And if they’d kept it up for longer than a day, they might have succeeded into making “empathy” into a cuss word, too. I wish I'd had as much success trying to turn “bold” into a cuss word during the George W. Bush era.

Donald Trump won’t tell Hugh Hewitt – about as sympathetic a media audience as he could hope to get – that he’s “100% with Israel” even after being asked twice, and while I know a lot of people in America are saying Israel might be wrong to themselves for the very first time (and Donald Trump knows that just as well as I do), just imagine what our “liberal” media would say if a Democrat refused to say directly he was “100% with Israel.” They’d call them weak, or a flip-flopper, or whatever – all things they refuse to say about Mr. Trump, because then they’d have to explain why he’s not actually a “strong leader” like all the polls they conduct say he is.

Finally, the incomparable Rebecca Solnit argues that Republicans – with their opposition to abortion and birth control and their embrace of fascism – have become an “anti-sex movement.” They’re saying it out loud! The Heritage Foundation wants to “restor(e) sex to its true purpose,” i.e., procreation, which means they want women to be breeders and nothing more (plus they want women to have no say over their breeding). Has the sexual revolution has been an unqualified good? No. But it doesn’t have to be for us to protect what women have won over the last half-century-plus, and calling Republicans the anti-sex party would be weapons-grade PR – most people still like sex, after all. I’ll whisper it into as many ears as I can.

Around the table: from TikTok bans to bloodbaths.

Matt Stoller describes why “The TikTok Problem Is Not What You Think.” The article has a lot of great info (particularly on the Biden-led sea change in data privacy protection), but long story short: foreign corporations shouldn’t have so much personal data on American citizens, particularly when those corporations align so closely with obviously authoritarian governments, and TikTok abuses its users just as badly as Facebook does. Also, note well that China happily keeps American internet platforms out of their country and tries to control what foreigners say about China – just say something about Tianenmen Square in a TikTok video if you don’t believe me! No, I don’t want Steve Mnuchin owning TikTok either, but even that’s better than China controlling it.

Do people really not get that the Florida teenagers who used AI to create deepfake nudes of their classmates committed child abuse and child porn? People also really don’t get that the perps are too young to go to jail, but certainly they’re not too young to be shamed, and if they never get into their first-choice colleges as a result of their actions, I won’t shed a tear. In any case, might this be more proof that AI development is moving too fast with too little governmental oversight? Why, yes, I think it might! Don’t brook any nonsense like government doesn’t know enough about AI to oversee it, because that’d be like arguing that only banksters know enough to regulate banks.

From Johanna Richlin at The Conversation we learn that vaccine-skeptical mothers learned to be that way at least in part from all their bad experiences in the health care system. I’m reminded that 17th century poet John Dryden frequently aimed his ire at doctors, and of course we should empathize with women describing a health care system that injures them – you’ve heard that doctors will more likely tell women (especially Black and Brown women) that they’re just bellyaching? And yes, the mammon-worship endemic to our health care industry hurts us all. But what of the evil actors (i.e., Tucker Carlson, Andrew Wakefield, all the YouTube “influencers” who’ve hurt a lot of people but whom history will never remember) who have exploited this landscape?

Ho hum, ”liberal” media journalists actually read Robert Hur’s interview with President Biden over classified documents and suddenly discover that their initial reports on the investigation might have been a little overheated. We have all learned by now, I would hope, that reading is a good way to understand writing, but even after all these years of Donald Trump inflicting chaos and abuse upon good Americans, too many “liberal” media journalists still either cut corners or prefer sensationalism. Happily for Joe Biden, he delivered a State of the Union address earlier this month in which he did not appear to be the addled granddad our “liberal” media would seem to prefer.

Hard to believe, Harry, Special Counsel Jack Smith apparently put a Stephen Miller amicus brief about the Trump classified documents indictment through the woodchipper last week. In Mr. Smith’s telling, Mr. Miller apparently believes that “if a person illegally carries a firearm into a NARA facility or forcibly threatens a NARA employee,” then “NARA (would be) powerless to report that criminal conduct to the FBI,” and would have to “engage in notice-and-comment rule making to promulgate a regulation authorizing it to make such a referral.” But of course Mr. Miller doesn’t even intend to create a legal “precedent”, but merely to (in Steve Bannon’s immortal phrase) “flood the zone with shit” so the wheels of justice can slow down and maybe Donald Trump can win re-election before getting convicted of a crime.

Finally, I can’t wait to hear how right-wingers try to justify Donald Trump saying at an Ohio rally that there’ll be a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t get elected in 2024. Oh, he’s only joking (then explain how bloodbaths are funny!) and oh he’s only describing what will happen if he loses (it’s a good thing no one in human history has ever tried to influence history by pretending to predict it!). Seriously, though, if Trumpholes think Saturdays at the shooting range have prepared them for Civil War, they’re going to be very disappointed. The only people in America actually prepared to wage civil war are our soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of them just want the damn headaches to stop.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, let states create their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems, and reject any Social Security/Medicare benefit-cutting 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would give our Justice Department the authority to pre-clear voting rights law changes from any state or locality with a demonstrated history of vote suppression. That would replace the section of the Voting Rights Act our Supreme Court struck down because it supposedly discriminated against Southern states (which then instituted a slew of voting restrictions the next day, which nobody could have predicted!). With this bill, we could act against any state or locality, anywhere in our country, that discriminates for real against certain voters. And that’s a good work worth doing, so we should tell our Congressfolk to do it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act. Since our federal government won’t pass Medicare-for-All legislation, perhaps we can get a state to do it; indeed, Canada’s Medicare-for-All-style system started in Saskatchewan. Vermont passed such a system last decade, but then-Democratic Gov. Shumlin abandoned it, citing the “cost.” I’ve gone over how easily we could pay for it many times, but Mr. Shumlin was really just trying to support Hillary Clinton at Bernie Sanders’s expense. This story has a happy ending! Hillary Clinton lost, and Vermonters have sent a Republican to the Governor’s office four times since then! Maybe serving the people is the way to keep power?

Finally, the Alliance for Retired Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose any fiscal commission legislation concerning Social Security and/or Medicare. Because it’s just their way of trying to cut your earned Social Security and/or Medicare benefits without subjecting themselves to very much public scrutiny! Think of that the next time some knuckle-dragger on TV says we have to have the “courage” to cut these benefits, because hiding behind a commission that fast-tracks legislation without proper debate is the very definition of cowardice. If they were so “courageous,” they’d do it through the legislative process we’ve been using for centuries! I’d never want someone like that in my foxhole, and I hope you wouldn't, either.

Action: concerning monopolies, music, and data privacy.

Long story short: tell our government to block the proposed Capitol One/Discover merger, tell country music stations to play Beyoncé’s obviously-country songs, and tell our government to investigate online retailers’ privacy violations. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Reserve to block the proposed Capitol One/Discover merger. If we let Capitol One buy Discover, that’ll be one less credit card out there, and we need more credit card providers, not fewer! That’s so good credit card corporations can stay good – after all, if you can just buy another corporation, why would you make your corporation deliver good service? That’s before we get to all the good Americans who’ll lose their jobs if we let these two corporations merge. No, there’ll be no “increased market efficiency” coming from this merger – unless we count the “efficiency” of redistributing more income upward to undeserving executives.

MoveOn helps you tell country music stations to start playing Beyoncé’s country songs. I’m old enough to remember Hot Chocolate and the Specials, but since the early ‘80s big radio corporations have resegregated music, until now an estimable artist like Mickey Guyton has become Country’s One Black Friend. But let’s not just pick on country – even Eric Clapton says he’d be nowhere without Robert Johnson, but let’s see a classic rock station (whose One Black Friend is Jimi Hendrix) program that reality. If we can get Beyoncé’s country songs on country stations, we can start bringing these walls down again.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our government to investigate online retailers’ violations of our data privacy. Wonder how an upstart corporation like Temu can offer relatively expensive items for a buck? Certainly they’re trying to predatory-price their way to the top, just like Amazon did – but Temu can also collect data on its customers and sell it for buku-bucks, even more so than Amazon could at its inception. And some good Americans have found their personal financial info out there after giving it to Temu. So, once again, we need our government to step in and protect us from financial predators.

Action: concerning antitrust funding, paid family/medical leave, and book banning.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase antitrust funding, pass real paid family/medical leave, and pass the Books Save Lives 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.

First things first: Matt Stoller reports that Congress plans to reduce funding for our Justice Department’s Antitrust Division – and also plans to prevent Antitrust from collecting any fees from corporate mergers. I can’t blame Jim Jordan for this, because Democratic Sen. Shaheen wrote the legislation; yes, she’d fund Antitrust a lot more than Jim Jordan would, but we need to call our Reps and Senators and tell them to increase Antitrust funding, and not to destroy the merger fee funding mechanism. Fighting monopolies is Joe Biden’s greatest contribution to the world; corporations know it, and so do their lackeys in Congress, which is why they’re trying to destroy it. They can’t win.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real paid family and medical leave. Congressdolts know paid family and medical leave is popular, but they don’t really want to do it, so they’ve been dressing up crap policies as good policies, and we shouldn’t let them do that. The paid family/medical plan advanced by Sen. Gillibrand in recent years, which would fund 13 weeks of paid family/medical leave for all full-time workers with a tiny payroll tax, is the minimum we should accept, and though her proposed payroll tax would cost a mere $8 a month for a worker making $50,000 annually, I’d prefer to fund it by (surprise, surprise) taxing the rich like we used to. It’s OK to say so.

Finally, Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Books Save Lives Act, which would counter book-banning hysteria with federal force. When busybodies in your neighborhood raise their hackles about Black, Brown, gay, and trans books, the Books Save Lives Act would fight back by mandating that public school libraries carry books about/by “underrepresented communities” – and would make book-banning efforts into discrimination cases as well. Because that’s what they are! How many Moms for Liberty-types have been going after white male books? Tess of the d’Urbervilles was controversial, after all – and all the whining about it basically drove Thomas Hardy out of the novel-writing business, which was a profound loss to humanity.

Action: concerning voting rights, stock buybacks, and SSI asset limits.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act, the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, and the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act, which would end felony disenfranchisement across America. You know who wants to keep folks with felony convictions from voting? Folks who know our justice system is biased against Black and Brown folks and want to keep them from voting, folks who know that if everyone could vote they’d never win elections, and folks who want to look “tough on crime.” Now those are usually all the same folks! But a right only works if a) everyone has it and b) we enforce it. And a civilization only works if folks have rights.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would increase the tax on stock buybacks – passed in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 – from 1% to 4%. The 1% tax hasn’t discouraged rich executives from using corporate profits to concentrate nominally public stock in fewer hands, which is why it needs to go up. I really don’t want taxes to be onerous on anyone! I just know they have to be, on some people, or they’ll create a dystopian hellscape where they live in gated communities while we slave away just to pay our bills.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, which would raise SSI recipients’ asset limits have so they can have real breathing room. Currently SSI recipients can’t have more than $2,000 in total assets, but you know how many emergencies can steal two grand from you just like that, and that limit hasn’t gone up in over 30 years though inflation has gone up nearly 150% over that time. And if we’d indexed the limits to inflation in the ‘60s, the limits would be even higher than the bill would make them! So we know what we need to do.

Action: concerning government spying, voting rights, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act and the Youth Voting Rights Act, and also tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits. 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 pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would prevent law enforcement from buying our data from third-party data brokers and would make law enforcement get a warrant whenever they want to search data they’ve already collected from us. Because anything else would be a fishing expedition, conducted to harass and oppress good Americans, and would contravene both the spirit and the letter of our Constitution. Many right-wingers today don’t seem to understand that law enforcement can be used against Americans. But our Founders did, and they were right.

RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Youth Voting Rights Act, which would (among other reforms) require voting booths at colleges and universities and end the sort of residency requirement governments only pass to suppress votes. You hear from right-wingers all the time about how young people don’t know enough about anything to vote, but they always said that about Black folks, too; they were wrong then, and they’re wrong now, not just on the morals but also on the facts. I make fun of young people sometimes, but they do see things we olds don’t anymore, and that’s a good thing.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. But wait, right-wingers say: Social Security is becoming insolvent! You can’t expand it ha ha ha stupid liberal! If I had a dollar for all the times over the years they said Social Security was becoming insolvent, I could retire right now! It’s 2024, checks are still going out, and frankly we could make Social Security better if we start taxing income above $168,600 into the system and start calculating costs more realistically. It’s not actually hard to do these things – unless your salary depends on your stupidity.

Around the table: evil shows its ugly gnarled face, part 748.

First, some good news: our Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division has successfully stopped the proposed JetBlue/Spirit merger in court, thus guaranteeing that Spirit will still be able to offer lower prices to airline passengers. Because you know JetBlue was going to end that! And you know that because Spirit executives said so! The Antitrust Division literally hadn’t stopped an airline merger in over 40 years, so this is, as our President might say, a BFD. Personal to the corporate executives and the business press who can’t stop whining about this stuff: c’mon, fellas! Bootstrap yourselves! Oh, and Joe Biden: how about running for re-election on good works like this one?

And now some bad news: the Bernie Sanders resolution that would have required our State Department to report on Israeli human rights violations in Gaza failed by a 72-11 margin, and though some observers say “hey, it got 11 more votes than it probably would’ve gotten last year,” it still only got 11 “yea” votes out of 100. (If you really want to bright-side this vote, you may note that 17 Senators missed the vote entirely. How did they really feel about it? Surely they would have shown up to protect Israel, right?) The only Republican who backed the resolution was Rand Paul of Kentucky; I’m tempted to say he knows how to count as well as anyone else, but not without mentioning that he almost single-handedly made the USA PATRIOT Act significantly less repulsive in 2016.

“With Donald Trump's Iowa landslide,” writes Amanda Marcotte at Salon, “evangelicals reveal who they really are.” Yes, evangelicals really are fascists who see this patently un-Godly man as their best hope for gaining absolute power over the rest of us! Of course, right-wing evangelicals have revealed who they really are many, many times over the years – as Ms. Marcotte patiently and meticulously recounts! – but maybe we need all the reminders we can get. I will say that I don’t think regular Americans are falling all over themselves trying to reintegrate these evangelicals into the human community; I think only our “liberal” media tries to do that.

At the risk of diddling right-wing rage glands, ProPublica presents evidence that a solar energy project in Washington state isn’t respecting local indigenous cultural sites enough. Of course, the point of this article, I would think, is not never do renewable energy ever ha ha ha you stupid liberals, but rather do renewable energy right, and you shouldn’t have to run roughshod over folks’ rights in order to do the right thing. And generally, treaties with Native American nations already protect the right to continue ancient cultural practices, which makes this, guess what, a law and order issue as well.

Ho hum, Tucker Carlson’s still out there hawking viciously stupid crap about COVID vaccines, to the point that over one-third of Americans actually think the COVID vaccine has killed thousands of good Americans; now, most of those folks are actually insane, I’ll grant, but I’m bummed that lies about COVID vaccines have some appeal to the merely cynical among us. Hate to sound like a broken record, but Democrats can counter all of this insanity by providing good services to Americans without letting rich people whining about it. Joe Biden’s been the best at that in my lifetime, but that hasn’t exactly been a high bar to clear.

Finally, Nikki Haley actually says “we’ve never been a racist country” in an interview, and while her longer answer is actually considerably better – get-less-racist-every-day isn’t just pablum, and only a cynic or a liar would claim that the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act simply don’t represent progress – it’s still well worth it to note that “we’ve never been a racist country” is utter horseshit one could refute with a cursory investigation of American history. And the people who call everything racism are still more my people than the folks who want to scrub racism from history because it hurts their feelings. “We’ve never been a racist country” obviously aims at the latter, but of course their hearts are spoken for.

Around the table: corporate sickness, immorality, and decadence, part 492.

Wondering how a Boeing plane’s window could blow out in mid-air seven minutes into a flight? The Lever tells us how. Long story short: Boeing gave so much money to Congress that Congressfolk let them do whatever they wanted. Better they spent that money building a plane with windows that didn’t fly off in mid-air! Long story somewhat longer comes via Matt Stoller, who reminds us of many important details, not least of which is that Boeing is already essentially a government-backed corporation, meaning that folks who’d cry SOSHULIZM!!!! if we nationalized Boeing and then broke it up (as Mr. Stoller recommends) are hypocrites, not that they really care about anything but brandishing scare words so we do the bidding of their corporate paymasters.

Sara Van Horn at In These Times writes about an “Emerging Green Technology” in New York state that “Could Decarbonize Buildings and Provide Good Union Jobs.” Basically it’s a “networked” geothermal system, which allows one to dig one hundred-foot hole to serve several buildings, and it relies on a steady source of ground heat. But of course you know what right-wingers will say: socialism ethanol dead batteries wind turbine syndrome electric car graveyards you can’t use solar in wintertime stupid.

Speaking of electric cars, I bet right-wingers are dancing a jig over Hertz’s decision to dump 20,000 electric cars from its fleet, but as usual they need to take their chill pills. In a few years we’ll have more charging stations all across America, and the parts for these cars won’t be as hard to come by and thus the repair costs will come down. Anyway, I think Hertz is right to dump Tesla cars, since as we’ve lately learned, Tesla, like George W. Bush, doesn’t know what it’s doing and is arrogant about it.

Ho hum, right-wing state legislator from Michigan announces that “(h)onestly, I work for God and not for man. And so at the end of the day, I answer to one person, and that’s Jesus Christ.” Hey, Mr. Schriver: you work for your constituents. And he should count yourself lucky that he represents a gerrymandered district where the Republican typically gets about two-thirds of the votes, but then again he’d probably call himself blessed instead. In which case I’d say I’m glad someone’s blessed by his service!

What’s the funniest thing about Chris Rufo, the “architect” of right-wing drama over critical race theory, misrepresenting his “degree from Harvard” at the same time he was nitpicking Claudia Gay’s research? That Harvard apparently created the Harvard Extension School (from which he received a Master’s degree, and even I know people who have the real thing!) to give more people access to Harvard – meaning that Mr. Rufo has benefited from affirmative action at least as much as anyone he criticizes. Remember: good people have a sense of shame, but evil people don’t.

Finally, here’s some good news: our FDA has approved a Florida program aiming to important cheaper Canadian drugs for certain Floridians with certain medical conditions. It’s a good start, and if it lets Ron DeSantis whine about how slow the wheels of our FDA turn – or oppose a Big Pharma PR machine no one likes – well, I guess I’ll put up with it. Of course, if he did the latter with any consistency, he wouldn’t be wondering what to do about his disastrous showing in yesterday’s Iowa caucus.

Action: concerning health care, drama, and housing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to lower health care costs, stop their big-drama impeachments, and stop cutting funding for affordable housing. 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.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass legislation lowering health care costs and making them more transparent. Specifically, you’ll ask them to make hospitals disclose costs in dollars and cents – yeah, we have to actually tell them to do that – and mandate “site-neutral payments,” where a service costs the same whether it happened in a hospital or doctor’s office. How would folks argue against that? By saying the “free” market knows best and we must bend the knee to it? The “free” market sure doesn’t seem very free for good Americans, does it? One might even call it costly.

Daily Kos helps you tell House Republicans to stop their big-drama impeachments, while Civic Shout helps you tell House Republicans specifically to stop impeaching our DHS Secretary. Why are they impeaching Joe Biden? For drama, of course! And some of them have the gall to say they have to impeach him in order to find out why they’re impeaching him, which sure sounds like a fishing expedition, and don’t they have a government to fund past this month? They want to impeach Secretary Mayorkas over the border. I guess they find Brown folks really threatening!

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase, not cut, investment in housing assistance. These guys, I tell you – they don’t want any immigrants to come in unless their presence cuts wages for everyone, and they don’t want to help anyone stay out of the damn cold; it’s all pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps with them, as if landlords aren’t raising rents absurdly high because they can, as if homelessness ain’t up 12% over the last year, as if redlining still doesn’t keep Black and Brown folks from living where they want. But if we don’t speak out, the cruel and heartless will win. And the cruel and the heartless should never win.

Around the table: our sick, immoral, and decadent culture, part 876.

Back in late December Reuters published an excellent investigation of all the problems Tesla cars have been having – which the corporation has known about, and has been blaming on drivers. Ha ha ha it’s your fault your front right suspension has completely collapsed while you were driving! But we make the best cars! And come on, give us some room to grow, we haven’t been around for 400 years like Ford! This could only happen in an America where shareholder wealth is more important than customers’ lives.

French researchers find that hydroxychloroquine may have killed almost 17,000 folks, in six countries (Italy, Belgium, France, Turkey, Spain, and the United States) over a period of four months (March to July 2020) at pandemic’s beginning. One is tempted to say that must be a very small percentage of folks who died from COVID (the U.S. reached 2,000 deaths almost every day in April of 2020, for example), but you won’t find that reassuring if it happened to someone you love. What a hoot it was to have our President tell people to take it, saying “what do you have to lose?”

Americans for Tax Fairness study finds that Americans worth $100 million and up are holding an astounding $8.5 trillion in untaxed wealth. How is this possible? Because most ultra-rich wealth isn’t exactly liquid – it consists of unsold (or “unrealized”) real estate and hifalutin investments, which rich folks then use as collateral to take out low-interest loans to subsidize their lives (apparently adding five points to the prime interest rate didn’t stamp out these low-interest loans as I’d hoped). Thrilling that efforts to tap into this untaxed wealth “have virtually no support among Republicans.” Remember that if Donald Trump tries to run to Joe Biden’s left, because he’s shameless enough to do that.

When I hear that ISIS has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack on an Iranian ceremony (commemorating the Revolutionary Guard commander assassinated by President Trump in 2019), I am reminded that every fundamentalist thinks his fundamentalist forebears are sellouts. Remember when young right-wingers took shots at William F. Buckley, Jr., after he came out against the Iraq War? Like any of those little snot-noses would have been anything without him! Anyway, think the Tha Bush Mobb gamed out a member of the “Axis of Evil” finding itself in the crosshairs of a terrorist threat midwifed by the Iraq war? Of course they did! The “war on terror” is just the gift that keeps on giving! And it’s well past time we broke this wheel.

With the completely shocking news that FAA officials have ordered the grounding of over 170 Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliners after a window blew out on one of its planes while it was in the air, let’s take the wayback machine to 2019, when two Boeing 737 Max planed crashed in five months. You may not be surprised by the story’s critical elements: shareholder wealth being more important than customers’ lives, banksters running out engineers and making absurd demands of them because love of money. Yes, engineers should run more of America than they do. Certainly banksters shouldn’t! Banksters ruin everything!

You already know that Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley has lately omitted slavery while listing Civil War causes – but you may not know that she managed to deploy the phrase “I had Black friends growing up” in explaining that omission. Her larger point, apparently, was that slavery was so obvious it didn’t need to be mentioned. Of course describing slavery in the passive voice, i.e., “(i)t is a very talked about thing,” reveals that Nikki Haley fears offending assholes. Never fear offending assholes! Assholes live to be offended, and if you don’t offend them, they’ll just pretend you did!

Finally, Donald Trump actually claims that we could have “negotiated” the Civil War rather than fight it. Of course we should not “negotiate” enslaving Black men, women, and children – and that was why we fought the Civil War; just read President Lincoln’s private letters, in which he won’t STFU about how much he hates slavery and how happy he’ll be when it’s gone – but we should also remember that The Dealmaker only makes deals that benefit him, and he’d prefer making deals that benefit only him. Sadly, he’ll probably have the sense to skip over the next rhetorical step – World War II is something that could have been negotiated! You’d never have heard of Franklin Delano Roosevelt! – and just blame Teh Libruls for the Holocaust.

Penny rants for November 29, 2023.

Where does one begin with the observation that a lot of Republican state governments are trying to remove local Democratic officials and curtail governing power of Democratic localities? Really, one could say so many things! Like: so much for letting the voters pick their representatives! Or: so much for letting the smallest government make the most decisions about its constituents’ welfare! Or: so much for making sober decisions based on the data! I say that last thing because “runaway crime” is the reason right-wing governors remove liberal prosecutors and district attorneys from office, but both violent crime and property crime are half what they were 30 years ago, even if right-wing whining about it often seems like it’s double what it was back then. The good news? Many more people are willing to call out these things as “not conservative” now. I’m old enough to remember feeling like it was just me.

Amanda Marcotte criticizes the Washington Post for saying liberals won’t date right-wingers anymore like that’s a bad thing. If there’s one thing our “liberal” media still does that I can’t stand, it’s whine about how liberals refuse to engage with right-wing assholes – I mean, buying right-wing coffee or right-wing underwear is one thing, but who in their right mind would demand a woman lash herself to a Trumphole for life in holy matrimony because America needs her to? We liberals have suffered a lifetime of being told we’re worthless and weak and traitorous for our beliefs, and no, us calling right-wingers callous assholes simply doesn’t compare as an injury. And not for nothing, but I don’t hear our “liberal” media outlets demanding that white folks date Black and Brown folks or foreigners so that they, too, can appreciate “alternative perspectives”; only Trumpholes get this kind of affirmative action from our “liberal” media. Jesus Mary and Joseph haven’t we pandered to them enough?

You probably already know that sports writers will happily tell us that the Carolina Panthers’ bankster owner is much more of a problem than newly-fired head coach Frank Reich, and while we’d all have fun recounting the tale of how the owner spent a mint landing a talented-but-small quarterback and then surrounded him with bad blockers and receivers, we should also question the notion that hedge fund magnate David Tepper “made billions of dollars hiring smart business people to do smart business things.” Hopefully we all know by now that making a billion dollars requires reputation and connection more than “smarts,” and a brief perusal of Mr. Tepper’s PR describes a man who made a living buying big corporate stock when it's low and selling it when it goes up again, which anyone can do, if they have enough cash to start with. So, yeah, big shock that he’s running the Panthers into the ground.

Finally, when I hear that “Americans Are Angry About Immigration,” which is what a Gallup poll supposedly shows, I am reminded of two things: a) bad politicians whine about immigration just like they whine about crime when they realize they have literally nothing else to offer the electorate, and b) it helps to actually look at the data. The author infers "anger" from the fact that 40% of Americans say we’re letting in too many immigrants, but that number was still higher throughout most of the 2000s, and the only years it fell below the current level was when we had a nativist asshole as President; do we really want to go back to that just so four out of 10 Americans will feel better? Also, nearly as many Americans (37%) don’t seem to feel one way or the other about it; maybe getting those people mad at hysterical nativists would be a better strategy – politically as well as morally! – than constantly pandering to people who'll just find something else to be enraged about.

Action: concerning government spying, Medicare for All, and financial predators.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act, expand Medicare to include all Americans, and stop trying to injure our CFPB’s ability to protect us from financial predators. 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 pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act. This bill would do three fairly significant things: it would prevent our FBI from getting your data without a warrant, it would close the loophole law enforcement uses to get your data from private data collecting corporations without a warrant, and it would let more good Americans sue our government for the harm illegal surveillance causes. These would all be unqualified good works for the American people, so our Congressfolk should do them, without pretending crime is always going up. Seriously, if you can’t get a warrant to continue your investigation, then you should really reconsider whether law enforcement is for you. Unless, of course, you want to go live in a fascist country, then Godspeed.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a Medicare-for-All health insurance system. It’s an easy sell! The Koch Brothers said Medicare for All would cost $32 trillion over 10 years, but our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the system we’ve got now will cost $49 trillion over the same period! You can do the math – expanding Medicare to include every American would save $17 trillion over 10 years! I’d say that three times in a 30-second ad. I might also say you’d fund it with a small employer-side payroll tax (“employer-side” meaning, of course, that employees don’t pay it) capturing the money big corporations currently spend on private health insurance. All that’s left are the really desperate arguments.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislative riders that would harm our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB)’s ability to protect good Americans from financial predators. The “CFPB Restructuring Rider” would take CFPB authority from its director and hand it over to a five-person commission, and two of the commissioners “must have private sector experience in the provision of consumer financial products and services” – after all, it’s not like those folks would have self-interest or anything! – while the so-called “Small Business Lending Rider” would prevent our CFPB from collecting data on lending to Black-, Brown-, or woman-owned businesses, which just sounds cruel to me. Anyway, these are clearly fall-back positions, so let’s put them on their back permanently.

Thieves in the Temple will take the next week off, so I wish all of you a happy and safe holiday, and we'll be back November 27 or thereabouts.

Around the table: why we shouldn't sleep on a second Trump term as a "lame duck" term, and other lessons.

Thom Hartmann describes, in considerable detail, Republicans’ rightward march to fascism over the last 40-plus years, and I can only add two things: one, that Democrats could very easily link Mr. Trump calling our soldiers “losers” and “suckers” with Tommy Tuberville’s 80 million military holds in campaign ads, and two, it’s not enough to say Donald Trump will be a lame duck if he wins in 2024 (which will be how many Republican voters rationalize voting for him again), because if he can get his votaries to shoot enough people, he’ll be much closer to an America where folks like him can do what they like and no one else can. Which is, of course, the essence of the fascist impulse.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett has, on at least three occasions, sold millions of dollars in stock shares in which his corporation was trading, which would not only strike virtually anyone as a conflict of interest, but which Mr. Buffett has said out loud would be a conflict of interest. OK, I guess he’ll say that he said he shouldn’t be buying stocks Berkshire buys and he merely sold stocks Berkshire bought, but once you confront that time he boosted Wells Fargo stock on TV right after selling millions of dollars of Wells Fargo stock (or the fact that he’s called for higher income taxes on the rich but not higher investment taxes), that’d seem like hair-splitting. Anyway, so much for “the one billionaire we like”!

The good folks of the Pennridge School District in Bucks County, PA, managed to boot all five Moms for Liberty members from their school board on Election Day, and when I read that “Moms for Liberty, in the end, was a very expensive trap that the Republicans built for themselves,” I can’t help but respond that this trap is merely emblematic of the much larger trap Republicans have built for themselves – all they can do now is create hysterical dramas to win elections in the short term (which doesn’t always work; see “crime, hysteria about”), because once they have power, they either use it to directly hurt people (as the Moms for Liberty-dominated school board did) or create even more hysterical dramas. People hate book banning, after all, and people only “hate” Black/Brown/gay/trans folks because right-wingers want to distract them from the fact that their economic policies have taken their livelihoods and happiness away.

When I hear that “You Have a Right to Know Why a Health Insurer Denied Your Claim,” but “Some Insurers Still Won’t Tell You,” I’m reminded that a big reason we don’t let corporations get so big in the first place is so they can’t break the law with impunity like this. I mean, if the law tells a corporation to stop hurting people, and that corporation simply refuses to stop hurting people, that corporation is injuring our civilization, and deserves to die for it. (I mean, a corporation is a thing, not a person, so calling for its death isn’t “uncivil.” And don’t listen to folks who cry out “if you kill a corporation you’ll kill all the jobs!” Why, corporations spend virtually all their time killing jobs already! Think how many small businesses can start in their absence, doing work that actually helps people, and employing people they can’t regard as mere marks on a ledger the way corporations do.)

You know how Rep. James Comer (E-KY) has been banging his saucepan about a $200,000 loan Jim Biden paid to Joe Biden in between Joe Biden’s terms in the Executive branch? Well, guess what Mr. Comer has in his own past! “According to Kentucky property records, Comer and his own brother have engaged in land swaps related to their family farming business. In one deal — also involving $200,000, as well as a shell company — the more powerful and influential Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing. Other recent land swaps were quickly followed with new applications for special tax breaks, state records show. All of this, perplexingly, related to the dealings of a family company that appears to have never existed on paper.” Republicans have represented Kentucky’s 1st district since the 1994 wave, but the district actually has more registered Democrats; I presume a lot of these Democrats have been voting Republican for decades without bothering to change their affiliation, but I still see an opportunity for Democrats here. If he were to lose his 2024 re-election bid, Mr. Comer would no doubt whine about “the weaponization of the vote.”

Finally, West Virginia Democratic (?) Senator Joe Manchin won’t run for re-election in 2024, and rather than recount his various follies, let’s just say don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya. And no, I don’t care about the excuse that Mr. Manchin “represented a red state,” because Byron Dorgan represented a red state for 18 years, and he kept winning because he fought “free” trade, corporate crime, and bad media policy; everyone, liberal or conservative, approved of him for these good works. Yeah, I first said that over a dozen years ago, and I guess I’ll just have to keep saying it until our leaders finally learn.

Action: concerning internet freedom and ALEC.

Long story short: tell our FCC to bring back net neutrality, and tell big corporations to stop funding ALEC. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to bring back net neutrality, the principle that forces big telecom corporations to deliver all data with the same priority, and prevents those corporations from herding you into junk news ghettos or delivering corporate “partner” content before the content you want. This is why folks all across the political spectrum support net neutrality! Our government didn’t make net neutrality the law of the land until 2015, but corporations hesitated to violate its principles before then, and have only violated its principles since the Trump FCC’s 2017 repeal in ways that seem to benefit consumers – by packaging Netflix or Disney + for free with new accounts, for example. That might seem like a good thing, until you decide you don’t like Netflix anymore and have to pay extra for something like Hulu. So let’s make big telecom corporations do right by all of us again.

Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Voter ID laws, Stand Your Ground laws that never seem to protect Black folks the way they protect white folks, criminalizing protest – these are just some of the evil works of ALEC over the last decade-plus, but ALEC would starve to death without corporate funding, and our efforts over the years have already induced over 100 big corporations to drop ALEC, but there are lots of other big corporations in America still funding ALEC, not least among them Pfizer, Chevron, Blue Cross, Eli Lilly, Anheuser-Busch, UPS, FedEx, and, of course, the Koch Brothers. And don’t buy the BS line that these corporations only ally with ALEC for “economic reasons.” If anything, that’s even worse!

Action: concerning medical debt, junk fees, and facial recognition.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to make it easier to escape medical debt, tell our government to break up the Ticketmaster monopoly and end the abusive practice of assessing “junk fees,” and tell states to ban facial recognition software from our schools. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you tell your state Senator to pass legislation helping good Pennsylvanians escape medical debt more easily. Don’t fall for any ball-swinging about how if you didn’t want the crushing debt, you should’ve done things differently, because thanks to banksters and big health insurance corporations anyone can take on medical debt at any time, no matter how many miles they run or how much fiber they eat, and it’s not like you ever have the “option” to just get sicker because you never know which medical practitioner is suddenly not in your network anymore. Our PA House already passed this legislation; now our Senate must act.

MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break up the Ticketmaster monopoly and end their notorious practice of assessing “junk fees.” You know what a junk fee is just by looking at the last ticket you bought and see all the “convenience fees” and “ticket fees” and “delivery fees” and “order fees” and “fuck you we do what we want fees” (did I make that last one up? It sure doesn’t seem like it) that balloon the price of your ticket far beyond what they said it’d cost. And Ticketmaster can get away with that because they basically control the entire ticket market these days. Monopolies only benefit already overpaid corpulent executives; regular folks like us deserve better.

Fight for the Future helps you tell states to ban facial recognition software in our schools. Where does one start with this absurdly shitty idea? With the software’s apparent inability to tell Black folks apart any better than your right-wing uncle does? With all the data this software collects about students that can be monetized and used against them? With the corporate welfare inherent in handing out taxpayer money to private corporations to create bad software? With administrators abandoning any pretense that they’ll simply walk around the school and find out where folks are and what they’re doing? I really don’t know where to start with this one. I know where to end, though: by telling states to kill it dead.

Action: concerning violence against protestors, medical debt, and ALEC.

Long story short: tell Iran to free Toomah Salehi, tell our CFPB to force big credit-reporting corporations to exclude medical debt from credit reports, and tell big corporations to stop funding ALEC. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to release hip hop artist and activist Toomaj Salehi immediately. (Mr. Salehi protested Iran’s hijab law after “morality police” killed Mahsa Amini over it last year.) Iran’s habit of arresting and torturing protestors does not exactly win hearts and minds among the world’s peoples, and convicting Mr. Salehi of an obviously made-up crime like “corruption on Earth” only reveals their utter insecurity, like the proverbial naked emperor who, upon finding everyone laughing at him, retaliates with mass shootings. And while, as Americans, we need to remember our own complicity in this horror – our government helped topple a democratically-elected leader, then installed a Shah so foolish and venal he gave Muslim fundamentalism its opening – we also need to fight fascism wherever we see it, and whatever the flavor, it’s operating in Iran today.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to force big credit-reporting corporations to exclude medical debt from our credit ratings. Currently the Equifax/TransUnion/Experian axis won’t do that, because including medical debt on credit ratings makes it harder for good Americans to get good credit, and that tends to benefit the worst actors among our bankster class. But our CFPB argues that medical debt has nothing to do with someone’s credit-worthiness, and they’re absolutely right – if you get sick, and your employer gives you crappy health insurance, what are you supposed to do, stay sick or die? Our CFPB looks ready to do our will here, but they still need to hear from us.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Think of any BS laws we’ve had to fight over the last couple of decades – “voter ID” laws, the “Stand Your Ground” laws racist states don’t even consistently enforce, laws criminalizing protest against corporate power – and you’ll likely see the gray, gnarled hand of ALEC behind it. At least 100 big corporations (including Coca-Cola, Walmart, Verizon, and Amazon) have dumped ALEC over the years thanks to our agitation, but that still leaves such big corporations as Pfizer, Chevron, UPS, FedEx, Eli Lilly, Anheuser-Busch, and (surprise, surprise!) Koch Industries. So we’ve got some work to do.

Action: concerning bankster pay, big ag, and food safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the RECOUP Act, reject the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act, and pass the Expanded Food Safety Investigation 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.

Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Recovering Executive Compensation Obtained from Unaccountable Practices (or RECOUP) Act. Remember how the Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and Signature Bank (the last one had Barney Frank as a director, ha ha) all collapsed a little over six months ago? And did you know that Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO sold over $3 million in stock right before its collapse and a few First Republic executives sold about $12 million in stock in the months before its collapse? The RECOUP Act would, as its acronym implies, allow our government to recoup such executive compensation a full two years before a bank collapse. Maybe that’ll teach executives that they’re supposed to look out for their customers before they look out for themselves! OK, perhaps not. But if we don’t come out in force for this bill, it’ll be much harder to provide such teachable moments to executives in the future.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act. The bill sure sounds like it has a good name, but it’s an Orwellian title like so many others: it would nullify any state and local laws governing animal cruelty and food safety, which I have to say is real fucking “small government” of them! Right-wingers insist that the smallest communities know best how to govern themselves – until those communities stand up to right-wingers’ big ag paymasters and won’t allow them to put animals in cages in which they can barely stand or pollute their rivers with hog poop. I think the smallest community should get to set stricter standards without worrying about how billionaire corporations will cope – and if they want to set looser standards, we have to make damn sure they don't hurt anyone else. But you don’t get to have “states’ rights” just to oppress Black and Brown folks but not for anything else. End of.

Finally, in a related note, the Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Expanded Food Safety Investigation Act, which would allow Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) and Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) workers to go into factory farms and sample the kinds of diseases animals have that people could get. No use squealing BUTZ TEH ADMINISTRATIVZ STATEZ!!!!! about this, since a disease doesn’t respect state or local boundary lines any more than processed food does. How are we going to stop pandemics if we don’t deploy people to where they might be able to stop them? And why must corporate profits always be more important than our health, or our civilization? Folks who’d want to “debate” these matters should have no say about a damn thing in America.

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.