Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: down with Drama Kings!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning education, banksters, and pollution.

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

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

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

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

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

Penny rants for March 27, 2023.

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Corporate Capture Act, reject the REINS Act, and pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, and tell legislators in 20 states to ban child marriage once and for all. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Corporate Capture Act and reject the REINS Act. This is your basic Goofus and Gallant strip: the Stop Corporate Capture Act (a.k.a. Gallant) would require our government to disclose conflicts of interest inherent in rule-making comments, like when a corporation comments on a rule that would affect it, while the REINS Act (Goofus) would give our Congress endless attempts to nullify the regulations it has already authorized through legislation – which is just a way for right-wingers in Congress to destroy our clean air and clean water regulations. So our task is clear, and we should get to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: pushing back against bankster horror.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, repeal the Iraq AUMF, and pass the Justice for Black Farmers Act, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning education and voting rights.

Long story short: tell Florida to teach the AP African-American studies course, tell North Dakota to stop targeting gay and trans books in book bans, and tell Pennsylvania to reject proposed sore loser constitutional amendments. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your state legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Environmental Justice for All Act and the EQUAL Act, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Hide No Harm Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act and abolish the debt ceiling. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

Action: concering tax cuts for working families, maternal health care, and the *Hobby Lobby* ruling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit, pass the SHINE for Autumn Act, and investigate the alleged Alito leak over the Hobby Lobby ruling. 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 Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion from 2021, and make it permanent. That expansion delivered $250 and $300 checks per child into working families’ bank accounts every month during the latter half of 2021, but then 50 Republican Senators and Joe Manchin refused to extend the expansion, with Mr. Manchin notoriously alleging that people were using that money on drugs! Ah, no – they were using it to offset the high inflation Mr. Manchin used as his excuse to block almost everything else. And thanks for letting Republicans off the hook, Joe! I still prefer him to Kyrsten Sinema.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5487/S. 3972, the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (or SHINE) for Autumn Act, which would, as its title suggests, fund more research into stillbirths in the hope of preventing them. Over 60 babies come out stillborn every day, which means over 60 grieving families every day, and for what? The greatest nation on Earth should be able to prevent that, and not for nothing, but Black and Brown families experience the tragedy of stillbirths a lot more than the rest of us. Couldn’t be all of the polluting factories we tend to concentrate in Black and Brown neighborhoods, could it? We’ll never know, unless we spend the money to find out!

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate the alleged leak from Supreme Court Justice Alito about the notorious 2014 anti-birth control Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling to certain right-wing activists. Though this alleged leak might not be illegal, that’d likely only be because Supreme Court Justices don’t have to adhere to the same ethics laws as every other federal judge. And a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation would sure be a good way to get some momentum for a law that would protect us from the Supreme Court corruption we all know we’re experiencing right now.

Action: concerning corporate spying, media fees, and big corporate mergers.

Long story short: tell ShotSpotter to stop spying on good Americans, tell DirecTV to say no to higher Fox fees, and tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell ShotSpotter to stop spying on good Americans. ShotSpotter sells “gunshot recognition technology” that, surprise, works just as badly as facial recognition technology, since it can hardly tell the difference between a gunshot and a loud bang at a construction site. Despite that, cities use ShotSpotter to send police officers out to Black and Brown neighborhoods, which just increases the possibility of more needless deaths at the hands of cops. And ShotSpotter doesn’t just record gunshots (and “gunshots”) – it also records what people say and do nearby. Without a warrant! Hence we use the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Daily Kos helps you tell DirecTV not to cave in to Fox’s demands for massive carriage fee increases, which you know DirecTV will pass on to all of its customers, who may include you. I’m old enough to remember when Fox could dictate fees to the big telecom services for its “services,” and no, its regular TV offerings aren’t good enough to offset all the harm the notorious Fox News Channel has done and will continue to do. So now would be a good time for us to lend some steel to DirecTV’s spine and tell them to stand up to Fox’s demands for more money. Maybe they’ll have to drop Fox entirely! What a shame that would be.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, which will create yet another mega-corporation in a world that already has too many of them slashing jobs, raising prices, and imposing their will on good people. Oh, and paying their executives way, way too much money; we can’t forget that, since that’s the real reason corporations merge. Luckily, we have laws against this sort of thing, and though it may take a while to get judges who’ll remember we have laws against this sort of thing, we can have an FTC that remembers – if we keep reminding them.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, tribal lands, and marriage equality.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop handing out corporate welfare and pass the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act and the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act, and tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage 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 stop handing out corporate welfare to big corporate donors like they do every year. We just had a midterm election that was, ah, not as big a win for Republicans as they’d hoped; once they formally organize to lead our House again, they’ll propose all kinds of stupid corporate tax cuts for their big donors, so we need to communicate our will to our Congressfolk, again. Like I said, they do this every year, at the end, when we’re all preoccupied with the holidays, but there’s another reason to deny them this year: corporate profits are driving at least half of the worst-in-40-years inflation we’re suffering. Make sure to tell them that.

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8108/S. 4421, the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act, and H.R. 8109/S. 4423, the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act. The former bill would prohibit sale of any public land where a native American nation has treaty or other reserved rights, while the latter would establish a federal system protecting sites of cultural significance to native Americans. That all sounds pretty common-sensical to me; the only people who’d hate it are the big corporate executives who want to turn everything into a mine or a mall. And we’ve already taken enough away from native Americans.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which somehow still hasn’t passed our Senate, despite getting 47 Republican yea votes in our House back in July. And sadly the other side’s arguments against it are profoundly disappointing – they won’t say they just don’t want gay and interracial couples to marriage, so they can’t land a punch! One announced that “This Depraved Law Would Allow Pedophiles to Marry Children,” as if there's literally no such thing as consent, as if our laws don’t already prohibit adult-child marriages. So let’s not let bigots have all the say about everything.

Action: concerning data privacy, internet freedom, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our FTC to keep law enforcement’s grubby mitts off our private data, tell our Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner, and tell President Biden to remove Donald “Lee” Moak from our USPS Board of Governors. 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 our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop private data-collecting corporations from selling all your private info to law enforcement. If law enforcement wants that information, they should get a warrant from a judge; supporting “convenience” or “efficiency” here is nothing more and nothing less than supporting fascism. Seriously! If law enforcement can just buy your personal data, and look at it whenever they like, what’s to stop them from going on fishing expeditions once they decide you’re an enemy? Hey, were you at George Floyd rallies in 2020? Well, congratulations – now you’re an enemy. It’s way too easy for cops to do that, which is why we restrict their power.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner with a quickness. They’ve been dragging their feet about this nomination for two years, and as a result, our FCC can’t do the work Congress has given them to do – work that not only includes reinstating network neutrality as virtually everyone in America left right and center wants them to do, but also allocating a lot of infrastructure money, since Congress has passed a few of those bills over the last two years, too. Currently our FCC suffers from 2-2 votes caused by not having a fifth Commissioner, and if Gigi Sohn is extraordinarily well-qualified no matter what corporate lobbyists say. So let’s get on this.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to replace Donald “Lee” Moak on our USPS Board of Governors, preferably with a nominee who will replace the notorious Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Mr. Moak is one of Mr. DeJoy’s biggest supporters even as he freely admits – because such admissions apparently mean nothing anymore! – that he hardly understands his work on the Board. The only thing he seems to “understand” is that raising prices, slashing jobs, and cutting services in a nation where many Americans rely on our Postal Service for life-saving medicines is somehow a good plan! And that’s why he’s got to go.

Action: concerning data privacy, political prisoners, and forever chemicals.

Long story short: tell our FTC to protect our data from law enforcement, tell various world government to stop oppressing political opponents, and tell our EPA to protect us from “forever chemicals.” Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to bar law enforcement from buying private data sold by third-party data collecting corporations. Since Congress won’t move on the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would accomplish the same end, we must turn to our federal agencies, which also have the power, granted by law, to protect us from law enforcement fishing expeditions. I guess the cops will say how can we do our jobs, just like they do when we try to stop them from killing Black folks when they brandish a cellphone. But your rights and your freedoms matter more than law enforcement’s convenience.

Amnesty International helps you take action on 10 separate cases of world governments oppressing political opponents. Read about their stories (in the internet age, that never takes as long as it seems like it should) and you’ll notice disturbing patters: people protesting peacefully or expressing an opinion that’s different from that nation’s Glorious Elites, then that nation throwing them in jail on trumped-up charges and/or torturing them. It’s a tired, tired story common to snowflake governments, tired enough that you may get tired yourself – or, worse, that cynics may exploit your fatigue. Never let a cynic tell you what to do. Cynicism is evil, its proponents prisoners of evil.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect good Americans from PFAS chemicals. Which we call “forever chemicals” for a reason: they’re awfully durable, which must have seemed a positive back in the day, but we now know they’re so durable we can’t get them out of our air and our water – and our bodies. And scientists link PFAS chemicals to cancer, fetal development issues, and other health issues, with folks in Black and Brown communities more affected (since industrial plants more likely exist close to these communities). So we need to tell our EPA to take the most vigorous action possible under the law, not least because we can get them in court if they ignore us.

Finally, I’ve started making campaign donations again – apparently that $200 I gave to Doug Jones in 2020 was a gateway drug! – so in the interest of full disclosure I’ll list them here. Surprise: they’re all Democrats! Because the Republicans are the party of whining and drama and sedition and book banning and spreading COVID and banning birth control and cutting Social Security and Medicare and they ain’t worth my money! So: $100 each to Katie Porter, Matt Cartwright, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Gary Chambers, and Val Demings; $27 to Charles Booker, and $25 each to Tim Ryan, Cheri Beasley, Catherine Cortez Masto, Raphael Warnock (though I’m still deleting all his emails!), and John Fetterman. I'm sure I've missed many worthy candidates (though I urge you to pay more attention to Ms. Perez, in Washington's 3rd House district), and I want all these folks to win their races. But whether they will or not is up to us, and then after Election Day it’s up to us whether they do our will or not.

Action: concerning racism, tax cuts for working families, and immigration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and codify DACA protections for “dreamers” into law. 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: as you may know, the GI Bill helped a lot of WWII soldiers buy houses they wouldn’t have been able to buy otherwise, but racist enforcement of the GI Bill left most Black soldiers behind. No, really – when you’re Black and you fill out your application five times and your government loses it five times, that’s racism. But H.R. 5905/S. 3210, the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, would help fix that, by making survivors and direct descendants of WWII Black soldiers eligible for the GI Bill benefits their forebears were denied, the benefits that lifted so many Americans into the middle class for the first time. So this bill merits a phone call to your Congressfolk.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion that helped so many good Americans weather the pandemic and inflation in 2021. The CTC expansion deposited $250 or $300 checks (per child!) every month in working families’ bank accounts in 2021, and why aren’t Democrats running ads saying we cut your taxes and Republicans fought us? Regardless of their negligence in this area (or because of it!), we should get in our Congressfolks’ grills and make our will known, that the CTC expansion kept millions of kids out of poverty and we should bring it back so they can get back out of poverty. Why does anyone deserve poverty, after all?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to permanently enshrine DACA protections for immigrant youth into law. I’m speaking, of course, of the children who came here long before they were capable of remembering their birth country – and thus had literally no say in coming here, of course – and who have maintained a residence here and contributed to American society. I have just given at least three reasons why deporting them would be unconscionably cruel. We’re either a great nation or we’re not, and if we’re unconscionably cruel, then guess what? We’re not. So let’s not let such cruelty be our legacy.

Action: concerning political prisoners, campaign finance disclosure, and chemical plant safety.

Long story short: tell Iran to release Vahid Afkari, tell President Biden to require campaign finance disclosure for federal contracting corporations, and tell our EPA to protect good Americans from chemical spills and explosions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first: Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to release political prisoner Vahid Afkari immediately, expunge his record, and drop any charges against him. Mr. Afkari's story has a lot of recognizable particulars: participated in peaceful protests against Iran’s repressive regime, got arrested on trumped-up charges, got sentenced to over 30 years in jail (plus 74 lashes), has spent the last two years in solitary, and now has health issues that I’m sure are completely unrelated to the injustices his government has inflicted upon him. But, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, only a snowflake government does this to their own people. And if we pressure them enough, they’ll fold, because that's what snowflakes do.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to force corporations that contract with our government to disclose their campaign spending. This should be a layup – most corporations do business with our government sooner or later, and they spend taxpayer money, which is to say our money, so we deserve to know which politicians they’re funding. Right-wingers will whine that this would have a “chilling effect” on “free speech,” but it won’t, because money is not speech. Corporate executives will still be able to say what they like; they’ll just be less able to bribe their way to getting what they like. And why should they have it so easy, when the rest of us must howl to be heard?

Finally, the National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous Risk Assessment Plan possible for American chemical plants. More than one out of every three Americans lives within three miles of a chemical facility, meaning more than one out of every three Americans faces a significant chance of exposure to toxic leaks, fumes, fires, and explosions. And not for nothing, but most of these Americans are Black, Brown, or poor; why, it's almost like that's the idea. But if we believe that everyone deserves a chance in America – and even right-wingers make a show of believing that – then we must protect everyone from the toxic waste that could sicken, injure, or kill them.

Around the table: starring bad people and William Shatner.

Sonali Kolhatkar writes that if Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (a.k.a. Lula) wins the Brazilian Presidency, “he must not only rebuild the social investments that Bolsonaro destroyed, but also restore trust in a nation damaged by fascism’s sophisticated propaganda machine.” Like fellow irredeemable asshole Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro has wreaked a lot of havoc on the good citizens of Brazil, and if paragraph 5 seems a little extreme to you, recall all the times American media celebrated the prospect of a Bolsonaro presidency because it’d be “good for business.” Also recall that the “orchestrated effort to attack democracy in Brazil” included the Car Wash “corruption” probe that toppled a liberal President and briefly put Lula in jail. And finally, recall that the main difference between a foreign dictator and an American corporate executive is that an executive has the luxury to act civilized.

“The CIA Thought Putin Would Quickly Conquer Ukraine,” writes James Risen and Ken Klippenstein at The Intercept. “Why Did They Get It So Wrong?” Long story short: “U.S. intelligence missed the impact of corrupt insider dealing and deceit among Putin loyalists in Moscow’s defense establishment, which has left the Russian army a brittle and hollow shell,” and they missed it because they relied more on high-tech surveillance observing things like troop movements than, you know, people on the ground who might have told them the Russian government is totally corrupt. Machines failing to do the work of people: where have we heard that story before?

You might not expect to hear from William Shatner that going up into space actually caused him “overwhelming sadness,” but while he’s not the only person who ever went up into space and experienced the void as, well, a void, we should remember that most the times we’ve “seen” space we’ve seen it in sci-fi films and TV shows, which their creators construct to excite and entice us. The first group of people who cross the void to another place will be profoundly lonely, and we won’t even know how they fared in our lifetimes. Read the whole thing, though – Mr. Shatner implores us to be aware “not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant” – the grandeur of being on Earth, that is.

I expect exactly zero right-wingers to care that J.D. Vance’s anti-opioid non-profit completely fizzled after five years, two op-eds, and two Twitterings – as we’ve just been reminded with Herschel Walker, right-wingers care about nothing except winning, and they tend to think showing up equals winning – but making a big show of caring about a problem and then doing nothing about it seems absolutely toxic to me! And if one guy's absence could really capsize the whole effort, as Mr. Vance claims, then it wasn’t much of an effort. I will say the ads Tim Ryan is running about this feel rather odd to me – regular folks don’t sound this scripted in real life; maybe Mr. Ryan’s not as good a candidate as I thought. But Mr. Vance is such an absurdly bad candidate that maybe he doesn’t have to be.

When I hear that Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI), the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name, actually suggested we ought to repeal the federal minimum wage, all I can say is: what will it take to send this man home for good? I actually take some comfort in his relatively good polls recently, not just because attacking Mandela Barnes in late September and early October ain’t as good as attacking him in late October and early November, but because maybe this time Wisconsin Democrats aren’t leaving Mr. Johnson for dead. Also, Russ Feingold, the man who couldn’t campaign without tying at least one hand behind his back in 2010 and did victory laps for months in 2016, isn’t running.

Finally, I don’t know if Sen. Tommy Tuberville (E-AL) thought he was killing two birds with one stone by saying that Democrats “want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that,”but I do know that calling Democrats “pro-crime” is quite desperate, particularly from a guy who has reportedly violated the STOCK Act at least 130 times since assuming office not even two years ago. Republicans really have nothing of consequence to offer anyone, do they? Just remember, folks: no matter how stupid Tommy Tuberville looks or sounds, he’s not stupid. He’s evil.

Action: concerning voting rights, discrimination, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell state Secretaries of State to make it easier for college students to vote, tell the Biden Administration to stop discrimination in health care, and tell our USPS to fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

RISE helps you tell state Secretaries of State to make it easier for college students to vote. You’ll hear right-wingers say college kids aren’t really invested in the area where they’re going to school, though, hey, nobody likes people who act like the Emotion Police! Right-wingers also love saying you should have to work harder, not easier, to vote, though if you have to “earn” rights, they're not really rights! Of course their real problem is that college kids don’t vote Republican very often, but if they don’t like how they vote, maybe they should try attracting their vote, instead of suppressing it. That's what a bootstrapper would do!

Moms Rising helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to enact the most vigorous rule possible prohibiting discrimination in health care. Moms Rising also helps you describe how you’ve faced discrimination in health care; chances are, if you’re Black or Brown or female or gay or transgender, you have, whether it’s a doctor dismissing symptoms because “Black women always exaggerate” (yes, some doctors say that!) or a doctor refusing to treat a trans patient because of his “religious” “conscience.” I’ve said it before, but if you won’t treat people because of your “religious” “beliefs,” you need to find another profession – maybe one that doesn’t involve service.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell President Biden to install two more members of our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors so the Board can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Who really, really deserves it – he’s cutting services, raising prices, and slashing jobs like this is some private corporation he can bleed for his own benefit or his shareholders’. But our Postal Service is a government agency that belongs to us, and thus should serve us, not some corporatist ideology. One of the main reasons they should serve us? They deliver a lot of our life-saving medicines through the mail. And if we want our Postal Service to do that right, we have to get rid of the bosses who’d do it wrong.

Action: concerning housing, privacy, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase affordable housing funding and pass the Protecting Data at the Border Act, and tell your Senators to pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase funding for affordable housing in America. Why? Because rents are skyrocketing, because a lot of good Americans face eviction, because too many rich folks block too many working families from buying a good home – and because we were a much, much stronger country when we took affordable housing seriously. Don’t brook any rubbish about how folks just need to bootstrap, because when rents shoot up higher than inflation, ain’t no bootstrapping happening. Don’t brook any dumb jokes about “the projects,” either. Racism looks intractable, but to just throw up your hands about it? That’d be un-American.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5524/S. 2957, the Protecting Data at the Border Act. Typically our government has to get a warrant to see your cellphone, but officials have been searching everyone’s cellphones at the border willy-nilly, our Constitution be damned. The Protecting Data at the Border Act would require our law enforcement to get warrants before searching cellphones at the border, and before you protest but they’re not citizens, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) consider how easily our government could abuse this loophole to harass American citizens at the border, if they, you know, happen to be the “wrong color.”

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Your right-wing Senators will likely lecture you about giving workers a “choice” to organize, but they ignore the bosses who don’t give them that choice! Bosses make workers’ lives miserable, demanding more for less pay, and then force workers to attend anti-union propaganda meetings and threaten those who organize by telling them they’ll fire them or outsource their job or close their plant. If all that’s OK with your Senator, he’s a monster. If it’s not OK with you, then you’re a decent person, and you ought to give your Senators what-for about it.

Action: concerning Social Security, the filibuster, and marriage equality.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, and tell your Senators to ditch the filibuster and pass the Respect for Marriage 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 pass H.R. 5723/S. 3071, the Social Security 2100 Act. Republicans sure are getting, ah, courageous about wanting to injure our Social Security benefits – Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI), running for re-election as we speak, thinks we should make Congress authorize it every year, never mind the promise we made to seniors a lifetime ago, and he also thinks we ought to invest it in index funds, never mind that the stock market goes up and down enough to make you puke. Better to tax the rich harder and invest that money in higher Social Security benefits, as the Social Security 2100 Act would do.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the damn filibuster already. Yes, that was Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) saying this: “Not only am I committed to the 60 vote threshold, I have an incredibly unpopular view, I actually think we should restore the 60-vote threshold for the areas in which it has been eliminated already.” Indeed, you have “an incredibly unpopular view”! You should be used to that! More to the point, of course, is that it’s an incredibly injurious view – only an aspiring Galaxy Brain would tell us we need even more gridlock, as if Republican filibuster abuse hasn’t been giving the middle finger to the popular will for close to two decades. So, yeah, we need to get in our Senators’ grills about that.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act. Our House passed it, it would protect gay and interracial marriage from our Supreme Court, and Justice Thomas has said out loud that our Court should use the Dobbs decision to go after gay marriage, so our Senators need to act, regardless of their “calculations” of Democrat caucus numbers after the midterms. Yeah, it looks good for Senate Democrats, but we’ve heard that before! And the time for justice is always right now, so let’s get in their grills about this, too.

Around the table: the delicate dance of fascism, and other horrors.

Hadas Thier at In These Times provides “A Left Answer to Inflation,” which contains at least two important reminders for Americans: one, that economists have attributed more than half of our current inflation to nothing more and nothing less than corporate greed, and two, that “price controls” may be a right-wing shock word, but they’ve done America a lot of good in the past, and today’s Americans won’t be as offended by the words “price controls” as professional right-wingers pretend to be. I rather think Americans would like price controls, in fact.

Here’s another important reminder: ”People of color are as interested in buying electric cars as white consumers – the biggest obstacle is access to charging.” And you just know the same crowd who chortled at the notion that “highways are racist” (which they are whenever we build them to divide or destroy Black and Brown neighborhoods) will joke that you can’t put electric charging stations in “bad neighborhoods” because “they’ll get destroyed.” That would, of course, be a pretty un-American way of looking at the matter, but that's never stopped self-styled "patriots" before.

When I hear that Republican campaign ad themes are more AMURIKA IZ TEH FALLINGZ APARTZ!!!! while Democratic campaign ads are more I-started-with-nothing-and-here’s-what-I-made-of-myself, I’m reminded that independent voters might respond well to the difference! I remember watching the Eagles-Giants game the Sunday before Election Day in 2016, and I found the sheer negativity of the political ads quite oppressive. Now, it's also possible that some independent voters will respond to Republican negativity as if it’s everyone’s negativity, but I wonder how many of those are even really "independent." And if they are, can you even reach them? They may just be so stupid or rage-addled that we must leave them to God.

Remember when I imagined Newt Gingrich responding to future criticism with his usual hifalutin BS? Apparently I gave him too much credit! When a reporter pressed him about the January 6 Committee, Mr. Gingrich responded “I think you have a learning disability.” Everyone thinks they’re a damn comedian, and so few of them make me laugh. Could be because I know plenty of people who overcame their learning disabilities – and all the abuse inflicted upon them by the Gingriches of the world – and contributed mightily to their communities. When Mr. Gingrich finally shuffles off his mortal coil, no one will remember any contributions he has made to America, because he hasn't made any. No, I don't think "spending your entire life demonstrating how not to be" is very much of a contribution.

When I hear that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton actually fled his own home to avoid being served with a subpoena, all I can say is waaaaaaaaaaah. Well, OK, since the issue behind the subpoena concerns abortion funds trying to avoid getting sued out of existence by anti-abortion vigilantes in Texas, I can say one other thing: our Supreme Court needs to strike down Texas’s anti-abortion law, since it gives people standing to sue someone even when that someone hasn’t injured them. Standing is a pretty basic legal principle – one our Court has spelled out pretty precisely in previous rulings – and I hope they're conservative enough to, you know, conserve it. I fear they won’t, because they’re fascists, not conservatives.

Finally, Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz says that when his Democratic opponent, John Fetterman, wears a hoodie as a “costume,” he’s actually “kicking authority in the balls.” Listen to the whole clip and you’ll realize he’s aiming for Pennsylvania’s fascist vote, appealing to their sense of “authority.” Of course fascists only value authority when they’re the authority, and the rest of the time they wear the costume of rebellion, so maybe Mr. Oz has pandered effectively to the fascist vote, and maybe he’s also helped Mr. Fetterman swing more of those folks to his side. Mr. Fetterman did put those comments up on social media almost as fast as Mr. Oz made them, after all.

Action: concerning voting rights, pregnant workers, and credit reporting.

Long story short: tell your state legislators to create ranked-choice voting in your state, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and reform our credit reporting system. 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.

Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to create a ranked choice voting system in your state. Maine and Alaska use it, so now third-party candidates no longer create openings for right-wing ogres (cough Paul LePage cough) to win elections. Right-wingers no doubt cite that as a reason not to use this system, and indeed, I haven’t heard a single coherent argument against it. Ranked-choice voting – in which you have to essentially seed candidates in order of preference – not only ensures that independent candidates can run and win, but also ensures that the two major parties can’t use independents to defeat the other guy. I think that’s something we can all get behind.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1085/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. We’ve gone over how the PWFA doesn’t “make it impossible for bosses to manage their workers,” but I have neglected to mention that the bill would protect all female workers who could get pregnant, by preventing bosses from making workers miserable if they get pregnant after being hired. A woman of child-bearing age could get pregnant at any time, but that doesn’t mean they suddenly lose all the skills and qualifications that got them hired in the first place! Sadly, too many bosses act like it does, because they’re not up to dealing with challenges. But they shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to overhaul our credit reporting system. Why? So that it doesn’t make so many mistakes, so credit agencies can’t let identity thieves steal your personal data, and so credit reporting doesn’t allow historical racism to keep crushing Black and Brown folks! Our private credit reporting corporations do all of that, and we just put up with it, thinking there’s no other way. Of course, there is another way: a public credit reporting agency, accountable to the American people, competing with the private ones! Now let’s watch the big credit reporting corporations soil their shorts.

Action: concerning marriage equality, health care, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, extend the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act, and stop USPS Postmaster DeJoy’s plan to cut jobs and close down post offices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Daily Kos and Moms Rising help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act. Democrats have decided to hold a vote on this bill after the midterms, perhaps figuring that the voters will give them a sort of mandate at the midterms, but they’ve been wrong about that before – not too long ago, in fact! – and anyway our job isn’t to align with Democratic Party aims but to press all of our elected representatives to do our will. And I think it’s pretty clear by now that very few people still have a sad over a gay couple getting married – and even fewer folks still get mad over interracial marriage. And the Respect for Marriage Act would protect both. So let’s not let a tiny, whiny minority have all the say about everything.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act, which provides compensation and health care to folks exposed to nuclear testing and uranium mining. These folks are disproportionately Native Americans, by the way, in case you thought environmental racism was a recent phenomenon. We stopped testing nuclear bombs in 1992, but that was only 30 years ago, so quite a few of the folks who got sick off that test (and others) are still with us and still need our support. Sadly we’re still mining for uranium, despite all the evidence telling us it pollutes our water and makes us sick, so we’ll need to keep this program around for longer yet. But we won’t, unless we get in our Congressfolks’ grills about it.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our Congressfolk to stop Postmaster DeJoy’s plan to close post offices and slash jobs. Our Post Office isn’t some corporation for banksters to drain; our Constitution actually mandates that our government run it, and run it well. Also, our Post Office is all some rural and urban folks got, and cutting jobs and services will make it harder for good Americans to get the life-saving medicines they need. Our USPS delivers a lot of that now, and who’ll do it if they don’t? Some private corporation that’ll charge you an arm and a leg? No thank you, I’ll take the Postal Service that belongs to us, not because we’re shareholders or customers, but because we’re Americans.

Action: concerning political prisoners, discrimination in health care, and climate change.

Long story short: tell the government of Egypt to release Alaa Abdel Fattah, tell our HHS Department to prevent discrimination in health care, and tell our DOT to properly measure the climate change emissions caused by our transportation system. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Egypt to release Alaa Abdel Fattah from prison. So let’s play “what are the charges?” In 2013 he got 15 years for, dig this, “organizing a political protest without a permit”; any government that’ll give you 15 years for that is a snowflake government which will resort to any tyranny to oppress its people. Eventually they shortened that sentence, but in 2021 gave him five years for “broadcasting false news,” another charge favored by snowflake governments. They even tried a “shooting at soldiers” charge in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, but couldn’t make it stick! They should let him out before they embarrass themselves further.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the most vigorous anti-discrimination-in-health-care rule possible. The Affordable Care Act authorizes our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to enact rules protecting good Americans from discrimination, and a lot of folks experience it, from the person who doesn’t speak English well getting post-surgery instructions only in English to the transgender person not getting care because their doctor doesn’t like them, or the Black woman getting her symptoms dismissed because their doctor doesn’t like them. All of that’s horrible, and nobody’s “religious” “beliefs” should allow them to inflict it on their patients.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our Department of Transportation to issue the most vigorous greenhouse gas emission tabulation rules possible. So we can better fight climate change! You can guess the Republican response to DOT’s proposed rule – that it would be a “burden” on corporations. They’re so law-and-order about detaining Black folks indefinitely, but not so much about corporations polluting your air and water. Funny how that works; you might almost think the amount of corporate money they get for their campaigns warps their thinking! And that’s why we have to get in their grills about it.

Around the table: drama, snowflakes, and evil, part 773.

The real story of Ron DeSantis’s shipping off of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard so that Teh Libruls can deal with Teh Immigrantz in their own backyard is how well the good folks of Martha’s Vineyard rose to the challenge. Your right-wing friends and neighbors will never admit such a thing, since they think of liberals – and therefore you, and you need to deal with that head-on! – as traitorous snowflakes. At least Gavin Newsom is willing to give Ron DeSantis what he deserves: “you have only one overriding need – attention,” he says, and we should all emulate his example. By “all” I mean you, too, Charlie Crist.

I’ll admit I was actually surprised to hear that Roll Call organized an event enabling a special interest group to give away free donuts to folks who probably didn’t know this group opposes antitrust legislation that would help rein in big tech corporations. I hadn’t thought a nominally objective “liberal” media outlet would do something that brazen. Yet, for all their brazenness, they sure do wilt when real journalists ask where they’re getting their funding. Remember the lesson of the Star Trek story “The Savage Curtain” (yeah, the one with Lincoln flying around in space, you gotta get past that): when good confronts evil, evil runs away. Because evil folks are the real snowflakes.

When I hear that 45% of Pennsylvania voters absolutely will not vote for Doug Mastriano for Governor, but about 28% would never vote for Josh Shapiro and 21% would definitely vote for Mr. Mastriano, I believe we have yet more data suggesting that about 25% of the electorate is bat-shit insane. Another 15% would “probably” vote for Mr. Mastriano; what do you suppose is tamping their enthusiasm? His “no exceptions” anti-abortion stance? That he won’t STFU about the election his Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump lost? His promise to install a Secretary of State who’ll throw out any vote he doesn’t like? I don’t know how one could be undecided about these things. And 45% “hard no” ain’t 50%-plus-one “hard no.” Just ask Hillary Clinton how that can work out.

Ho hum, Georgia Republican Senatorial hopeful Herschel Walker uses incorrect crime figures to attack his opponent, Sen. Raphael Warnock. I say this not in the hope he’ll feel shame and stop saying crap like TEH CRIMEZ IZ UPZ 47% SINCEZ TEH WARNOCKZ!!!!, but in the hope that you will be more skeptical when you hear crime statistics, because generally, you’re better off erring on the side of they’re fucking lying. Also too, rape in Atlanta (to name just one of Mr. Walker’s cherry-picked concerns) actually went down from 2019-2021.

Jesus Mary and Joseph now Donald Trump says we’ll have “problems” “the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen” if our Justice Department indicts him. “I’m just saying,” or I’m just delivering a terroristic threat? I kid, of course – it’s the latter. And anyone who decides to shoot anyone over a Trump indictment deserves everlasting shame until they die and everlasting Hellfire afterward – yes, I’m willing to blaspheme to make that point! – and in between, they don’t get to say “Trump ordered me to do it,” because that’s what a snowflake would do.

Iranian “morality police” beat a woman to death for not complying closely enough with that state’s new hijab-wearing law, and let me just state for the record that tiny, tiny men did this, and they’ll answer to their god for it. What, you think Allah favors beating women to death over not wearing a hijab? Too many people imagine their god is as small-minded as they are. And yes, this kind of crap absolutely will happen in the United States unless we start shaming the people who would do it. Even in America, there must be a price for being an asshole.

Finally, let’s not do victory laps over Rep. Lauren Boebert (E-CO) saying “wonton attacks” in place of “wanton attacks,” because – as with the helpfully-referenced Marjorie Taylor Green “gaffe” about “gazpacho police” – I’d lay money that Ms. Boebert said “wonton” on purpose, partly to get attention, partly to get liberals to attack her for her “stupidity,” but mainly to tap into stupid right-wing hatred at the Chinese. Once she said “wonton,” she reminded the racists in her district that she’s one of them. How nice for them, that they can feel such kinship with each other, when all they deserve is loneliness.

Action: concerning marriage, pregnant workers, and baby food safety.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, and tell all your Congressfolk to pass the Baby Food Safety 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.

Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which would protect gay marriage and interracial marriage from future Supreme Court decisions declaring them unconstitutional. Recall that Justice Thomas has told the Supreme Court to do just this, using the logic, such as it is, of the Dobbs ruling. And still Republicans pretend the Respect for Marriage Act is a “stupid waste of time,” in Marco Rubio’s words. You know what’s a stupid waste of time? Marco Rubio. And if we all call our Senators and demand they pass the Respect for Marriage Act, we’ll have to waste much less time on him.

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1085/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would make it harder for bosses to fire or harass workers for the cardinal sin of getting pregnant. Specifically, the bill would force bosses to make “reasonable accommodations” for pregnant workers – including less strenuous assignments and more bathroom breaks – and would prevent bosses from refusing to hire someone instead of making those accommodations. Let me guess the Republican argument against it: lazy sluts trial lawyers nanny state right to work fuck your feelings. I don’t think a pregnant woman going to the can for the 12th time would find any of that persuasive.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2229/S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act, which would limit the amount of certain heavy metals (like mercury, lead, and inorganic arsenic) that could be present in baby food. Since they damage babies’ brains! I guess the Republican argument against this one might be a bit more cogent: more regulations means more baby food shortages and you remember baby food shortages? But n.b. I said “a bit” – a great nation can insure its baby food is safe and plentiful at the same time, and demanding that we sacrifice safety for plenty is the mark of someone who doesn’t believe America is a great nation anymore.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, self-managed abortion, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell President Biden to issue campaign disclosure rules for federal contracting corporations, tell state Attorneys General to protect self-managed abortion, and tell President Biden to appoint two new USPS Board of Governors members who’ll fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to issue an Executive Order forcing federal contracting corporations to disclose their political campaign spending. They are taking our money, after all, so we deserve to know how they’re spending it! You may recognize that since most corporations contract with our federal government for some reason or other, this Executive Order would, to some degree, get around our Congress’s refusal to pass the DISCLOSE Act. If folks don’t like that, they can try to take away our President’s authority to issue such an Order! Rather than whine about TEH AMURIKAN CAESARZ!!!!, I mean. Whining is so unseemly.

Daily Kos helps you tell your state Attorney General to protect the individual right to self-managed abortion. Thanks to technological advances, self-managed abortion (largely with mifepristone or miferpristol) is now generally safe up to the 12th week of pregnancy, and while states have largely left self-managed abortion alone even in their anti-abortion zeal, some prosecutors still go after self-managed abortions – particularly in poor/Black/Brown neighborhoods. But Attorneys General can (among other things) prioritize resources in different directions. And to stop America from turning women into mere breeders, they should.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to nominate two more qualified individuals to our USPS Board of Governors, so they can get rid of Postmaster General DeJoy. Why get rid of Mr. DeJoy? Roll call! He tried to interfere with the 2020 election! He had money in the corporation that provided free COVID tests this past winter! He’s raised prices, cut services, and slashed jobs! And all this drama means good Americans who rely on our Postal Service to get their life-saving medications suffer. And that’s a sin we should definitely punish Mr. DeJoy for committing.

Around the table: featuring *even more* right-wing hostage-taking!

Surprise, surprise, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s little voter “fraud” effort isn’t going so well, with all 18 of its first highly-touted arrests literally having received voter registration cards from their counties of residence. In other words, this is just like every other attempt to convict large numbers of Americans for “voter fraud,” where right-wingers yell ZOMG 1,000 CHARGEZ!!!! but never discuss convictions. And then the handful of voter fraud convictions you do hear about all seem to involve right-wing voters! I’d look forward to Charlie Crist ads about how Ron DeSantis just creates drama to obscure the fact that he can’t govern, but I don’t think he has it in him. I’d be happy to be wrong!

As the Justice Department’s classified-document investigation into Donald Trump develops, Joe Conason at The National Memo reminds us that Hillary Clinton took exactly zero classified documents among all those thousands of but-her-emails. That’s not just Mr. Conason talking – it’s also two Trump Administration Secretaries of State talking. Yet Trumpholes still yell “lock her up” at the big man’s rallies, and though it’s getting harder to explain away how Mr. Trump’s most devoted lieutenants failed to find enough evidence to do so, we’re pretty much at the point where their “explanations” are all shutup you traitorous libtard groomer.

Ho hum, Arizona Republican Senate candidate/man with a face even a mother could punch Blake Masters has hired two of those “electors” who tried to deliver Arizona’s electoral votes to Donald Trump in contravention of the people’s will there. I believe we call this sort of thing “wingnut welfare.” Nice, also, to have the reminder that Mr. Masters indulged in election denialism on his campaign website until scrubbing it a short time ago. But let us also be reminded that Mr. Masters would privatize Social Security, thus exposing your dignified retirement to the greed of banksters and the chaos of our stock market. Naturally the Masters campaign has responded to the Mirror by bringing up child molestation, because it’s not like they’re going to win actual arguments or anything.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (E-SC) threatens us with “riots in the street” if our Justice Department prosecutes Mr. Trump for taking classified documents to Mar-a-Lago. Nice democracy you got here, he’s saying, shame if something happened to it. In later days, of course, he said he was only describing what would happen, which still makes it both rhetorical hostage-taking and an attempt to influence an investigation which he should really be avoiding the appearance of doing, right, Atlanta grand jury? And when police kill yet another unarmed Black man, I doubt Mr. Graham will shrug at any rioting that might occur afterward. Anyway, note to fascists: only inflict violence upon me if you want me to fight you twice as hard afterward.

Finally, holy fucking shit Alaskans just elected Democrat and Native Alaskan Mary Peltola to finish out the late Rep. Don Young’s House term – and she beat former Gov. Sarah Palin by three points! Now Ms. Peltola might lose the November rematch; whatever impression Mrs. Palin tries to give, she’s far from stupid. But the real reason Mrs. Palin hates Alaska’s new ranked-choice voting system isn’t that it’s “weird” or complex, but that it doesn’t let Republicans hold voters hostage at will. Now we just need to keep reminding Democrats that they can’t hold us hostage either.

Action: concerning voting rights and marriage.

Long story short: tell legislators to stop taking the vote away from folks who’ve been convicted of felonies, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Respect for Marriage 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 state and federal legislators to stop depriving ex-felons of the right to vote. That was the new frontier in vote suppression in the ‘90s, and now it means one out of every 16 Black folks in America have lost their right to vote – in a nation that tries to put as many Black folks in prison as it can to begin with! Frankly, no one currently in prison should lose their right to vote, either, but most Americans already agree that once you’ve paid your debt to society you should be able to vote, and if most of us want something that harmless, we should get it. No, making it harder for Republican to win elections isn’t “harm.” They could try appealing to anyone’s better nature!

The Human Rights Campaign helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act. Justice Thomas came out and said our Supreme Court should use the Dobbs decision to roll back previous Court rulings protecting contraception, gay sex, and gay marriage, so we need to pass the Respect for Marriage Act to protect gay marriage (and interracial marriage!) from future Supreme Court judicial activism. Don’t listen to Republicans who say we don’t need a law like this. because Justice Thomas, again, came out and said it was open season on all of these things. And remember, kids: don’t like gay marriage? Then don’t gay marry! It’s that simple.

Action: concerning saving our Postal Service, fuel efficiency, and education.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight to keep U.S. Postal Service Jobs, tell our Department of Energy to force home-heating furnaces to be more efficient, and tell our Department of Education to fight for teaching against racism and sexism in classrooms. 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 roll back Postmaster General DeJoy’s plan to cut 50,000 U.S. Postal Service jobs. Raising prices, cutting services, and now putting postal workers out on the street – these “bold” ideas come straight from the CEO playbook. But America ain’t a corporation; it’s a democracy, so the American people should get more say in our Postal Service’s runnings than any one well-placed former CEO. And most Americans want our Postal Service to run well and do right; it’s why we were able to make the Postal Service Reform Act into law (with actual bipartisan support!) earlier this year. But evil doesn’t sleep, so we keep fighting even after we win.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of Energy to enact the most vigorous energy efficiency standards possible for home-heating furnaces. Last time our Department of Energy meaningfully addressed furnaces was over 30 years ago), so yeah, this is long overdue. We want furnaces to use less gas, and furnaces that use less gas already exist, so don’t believe the lies from the gas industry that better standards would “kill jobs” or whatnot, because a) big gas drilling corporations would replace all their workers with mounds of dung if they could and b) all the gas industry wants is for you to spend more money on gas. So they shouldn’t get all the say about everything, should they?

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our Department of Education to stand up to the right-wing drive to stamp out all discussion of racism and sexism in our classrooms. Localities generally run public school systems, so what can our Department of Education do about this? They can join lawsuits against states that pass such restrictive legislation (like Florida’s notorious Stop WOKE Act, to which a federal judge has lately taken an axe), or they can offer incentives to school districts that reject that legislation (per the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965). So let’s tell them to get to stepping.

Action: concerning stock buybacks, social media, and conservation.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to extend the airline industry’s stock buyback ban, tell Facebook to stop enabling hatemongers on its platform, and tell President Biden to enact the strongest old-growth tree conservation rules 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.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Congress to extend the airline industry’s stock buyback ban they enacted in 2020. Seems Congress was afraid that airline corporations would take corporate welfare and just give it to their executives to buy stock back with, instead of helping their workers keep their jobs; now, with airlines flush with cash again but inflicting delays on customers, they’re hoping to outlast the ban and start spending all their money on stock buybacks. Hence our call to keep that ban going. Don’t believe the hype that it’s “unfair” to airline corporations! Frankly, all corporations should have stock buyback bans.

Color of Change helps you tell Facebook to stop enabling hate on its platform. Among other very important things, you’ll ask for Facebook to end page “auto-generation” that automatically generates white supremacist “pages” that help white supremacists find each other. Free association is free association, but no law says big corporations should make it easier for racist pricks to find each other, and there’s no substitute for people when it comes to content moderation. Facebook uses algorithms for that not because they do it better than people, but because you have to pay people and give them off when they get sick or have problems, and Facebook doesn’t want to do that. So let’s stop enabling them.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell President Biden to protect old growth forests as vigorously as possible. When a tree is centuries old, as some of America’s trees are, it stores a lot of carbon emissions, so it seems to me you’d not only like to keep old trees around but help more trees get old! And once you cut a tree down, it doesn’t store carbon emissions anymore, nor does it help keep our air and water clean or preserve wildlife habitats. And as impermanent as is the desk they make from old-growth trees, the money an executive makes from cutting them down is even more impermanent. No one remembers folks who convert life into money.

Around the table: Rick Scott *is* Max Headroom! And other stories.

Sonali Kolhatkar explains how Alex Jones, in purporting to fight government, actually helped make our government significantly worse. And not by spewing bad ideas to enrage the inattentive, but by turning over his primed-to-believe-whatever audience to Donald Trump, who helped put our government even more in big corporations’ pockets while ranting about the “deep state” (which is a thing, as you know, but not necessarily the thing the Trump/Jones axis yells about). So, to sum: not only is Alex Jones a jerk, he’s a jerk who serves Our Glorious Elites while pretending to oppose them. St. Peter’s really going to dig that at the Pearly Gates.

Naomi Oreskes at Scientific American laments that today’s scientists too often peddle solutions that “depend() on technologies that do not yet exist.” It gets worse: depending on unproven (and likely unviable) technologies like carbon capture is just another way of avoiding scaling up the renewable technologies that do work. And we all know why that’s happening! (I was also displeased to learn that the “bipartisan” infrastructure bill passed last year allocated 20 times as much money to carbon capture as it did to renewables. Getting to yes!)

ProPublica tells us all about “A Uranium Ghost Town in the Making” in New Mexico. Since 1958, a uranium processing corporation has polluted air and water, and federal and state regulators didn’t tell good New Mexicans for over a decade; this all started during the nuclear arms race, so I guess sacrifices had to be made. The mill closed in 1990, but folks still suffer from ill effects, so the corporation’s bright idea now is to buy out all the local homeowners (as cheaply as possible, of course) and force them to absolve the corporation of any liability as a condition of sale! In what’s still a seller’s market, no less!

When I hear that Republican Senate Campaign Committee Chair Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) “br(oke) down like a glitching Furby” when an NBC reporter asked him about the Republicans running for Senate in 2022, I’m tempted to say, “well, in fairness, he is a robot,” but I’ve rarely seen someone have such trouble enunciating. How does one get so unnerved by the question so why do all your candidates suck? And saying the word “Biden” like it’s a cuss word ain’t gonna work no matter how low his approvals go. It doesn’t bode well for any of the Republicans running this year, not just Blake Masters, who really does have a face even a mother could punch.

Mere days after Democrats dared Republicans to remove a $35/month insulin cap from their massive reconciliation bill, both North Carolina Republican Senators face a “vehement backlash” from their own constituents for voting against both the cap and the bill. And that’s how it should be, even when both Senators think they’re immune from accountability – Sen. Burr is retiring, of course, and Sen. Tillis just got re-elected, even though the next time he gets even 49% in a Senate election will be the first. Democratic Senate nominee Cheri Beasley promptly jumped on them for it; maybe she can win her race, if the Democrat consultant class doesn’t make her forget what matters to voters.

Finally, our FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, ostensibly for classified documents wrongfully and/or illegally removed from the White House, but right-wingers still leap to his defense. Here’s the money quotation: “if law-enforcement officials want to murder an unarmed Black man in the street, brutalize protesters against police misconduct, or investigate a Democratic presidential candidate, conservatives will insist that such officers are infallible and that any criticism of their conduct is outrageous. But when the law is used to investigate or restrict the conduct of people deemed by conservatives to be above its prohibitions, that is axiomatically an abuse of power.” Rush Limbaugh being a conservative was harder than being a liberal, but not when being a conservative means you just make up the rules as they fit you. Holding values that don’t always tell you what you want to hear? Now that’s hard.

Action: concerning marriage, lead poisoning, and campaign spending.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, tell our Interior Department to keep lead out of bullets and tackle used to hunt and fish on public lands, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the DISCLOSE 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act. Our House passed it a few weeks ago, but our Senators won’t, unless we get in their grills about it. The Respect for Marriage Act would protect gay and interracial marriage protections from our Supreme Court’s recent thirst for overturning the precedents that protected them in the first place. No, really, Justice Thomas specifically called for our Court to use the Dobbs decision (which overturned Roe v. Wade) to overturn rulings protecting gay and interracial marriage! So when the mustache-twirling villains actually tell us what they’ll do, we have to stop them.

Mobilize 4 Change helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to ban lead from bullets and fishing tackle that Americans use on public lands. Really, is this so much to ask? Not a hunting ban, or a bullet ban, but a lead bullet ban. Any right-winger who complains about this is a whiner, simple and plain. I mean, I think they’re whiners anyway, but I bet everyone thinks the lead-bullets-or-bust crowd are a bunch of whiners. But when we hunt animals with lead bullets or go fishing with lead bait on public land, that lead gets into animals that don’t get hunted, like, apparently, half of all bald eagles. And that lead also gets into the water that we drink and that fish swim in. Seriously, this is a bank shot.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 443, the DISCLOSE Act, which would force large organizations to disclose their biggest donors, particularly when they run ads about judicial nominations. The bill would also expand prohibitions against foreign financing of campaigns to digital media, in case you were worried the Russians would spend heavily on Facebook ads favoring Republicans this year. I can’t say that’s a dumb worry! Anyway, huge majorities of Americans favor more campaign finance disclosure, so we should get more of what we want for all our trouble, maybe?

Around the table: evil works have a long half-life -- and so do good works.

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut informs us that “The Secret Service Text Cover-Up Keeps Getting Bigger and Bigger,” as the mass text-deletion scandal now encompasses our Department of Defense and our Department of Homeland Security as well as our Secret Service. One observer wonders if folks have a “moral right to presume the worst about Trump entities that deliberately destroyed federal evidence regarding January 6,” but “moral right” is a bad way of putting it – we as Americans have a duty to ensure the survival of our own civilization. “Trump entities” would enjoy the presumption of innocence if they stand trial in a court of law, but Americans need not give them that presumption either at the ballot box or the water cooler. Hey, that’s the marketplace of ideas.

Texas jury finds right-wing blowhard Alex Jones guilty of defamation over his repeated assertions that the Sandy Hook school mass murder was somehow not real, and orders him to pay nearly $50 million in damages. Stupid Texas law will limit that outlay, but it’s still a big deal anytime someone pays a price for their evil works. And if you’re thinking Alex Jones only paid that price because he’s a relatively small player in the system, so is almost everyone else who deserves his fate. Why keep Alex Jones or Steve Bannon around when a hundred other jerks can rise up to take their place? Hell, they only keep Donald Trump around because he won’t go away.

When I hear that New York state’s Health Commissioner says the single case of polio they’ve found so far could well mean hundreds of other folks might have it, all I can say is: heckuva job, Andrew Wakefield! Mr. Wakefield, you may recall, is the ex-scientist who manufactured “data” finding a “link” between the MMR vaccine and autism; anti-vaxxers ran amok with this “research” and convinced numerous Americans that all vaccines were dangerous. Fast forward to the summer of 2021, when numerous crybabies refused to take the COVID vaccine and thus helped keep us all in danger to this day, and we can see clearly the damage anti-vaxxers have done. What’s next, smallpox?

West Virginia man gets a little over three years in jail for sending threatening emails to Dr. Anthony Fauci and ex-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins while they were both federal officials. Let the record show that this man was no expert dancer on the free-speech-or-terroristic-threat high wire. And while it’s great that we got justice here, how about we go after everyone who threatened a schoolteacher or school board official over masks or vaccines or “critical race theory”? Because good teachers won’t come back until we prove we’ve got their back.

Ho hum, FactCheck.org finds too many folks using misrepresented vaccine safety data in order to claim that the COVID vaccines have “serious side effects” they don’t actually have – but this time the database is German, not American. And naturally Tucker Carlson, who jumped all over misrepresented data coming from our VAERS database last year, jumped all over this one, too, proving that those who would exploit the rage-added never rest, nor do they feel shame when we expose their lies. It’s enough to make you think that Jon Stewart’s method – good old-fashioned ridicule! – is the better way.

Finally, in an act of political aikido I can’t believe came from Democrats, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the Inflation Reduction Act couldn’t contain a $35/ month insulin price cap for non-Medicare patients and still comply with the Byrd Rule concerning budget reconciliation – but Democrats left the cap in the bill anyway, daring Republicans to force them to take it out, and Republicans dutifully took the bait. 60 votes would have overcome the point-of-order raised by Sen. Graham (E-SC), but only seven Republicans voted with Democrats to overcome it – meaning that headlines like “Republicans strip insulin price cap from bill” are now completely valid both in newspapers and campaign ads! Of the seven Republicans who voted to keep the insulin cap, only two – John Kennedy of Louisiana and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – are up for re-election in 2022, so you have to wonder what goes through the minds of people like Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley, and Rand Paul, each of whom have formidable Democratic challengers this year. (The insulin price cap is particularly in Kentucky Democrat Charles Booker’s wheelhouse, for reasons you might easily imagine.)

Around the table: the most pro-corporate Supreme Court ever! And other total non-surprises.

I’m sure you already knew that the John Roberts-led Supreme Court is easily the most pro-corporate Supreme Court in recent memory, but it’s still good to have some data behind it, even if we’d also like to know how the Roberts Court compares on this matter to, say, the Courts led by Salmon Chase or Morrison Waite. How incoming Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson writes on corporate issues will help tell us whether President Biden actually wants to change our politics so that ordinary Americans count again, or whether he just wants to look like he's doing that.

I wouldn’t blame you for being skeptical that “the teacher shortage in America has hit crisis levels,” because our “liberal” media cry “crisis” at a lot of things (cough crime cough) that aren’t actual crises, and the fourth paragraph of this article admits it can’t teacher levels well, at least not beyond data and anecdotes from (by my count) nine “state and district-level reports.” To the degree that it’s happening, though, I point the finger at right-wingers yelling and screaming at (and threatening!) teachers over wearing masks and getting vaccines and teaching about racism. Yes, the pandemic was rough on teachers, but I’d lay money that all the right-wing whining afterward tipped more teachers over the edge.

Not long before Kyrsten Sinema finally signed off on the Inflation Reduction Act after forcing through at least one significant change-for-the-worse, someone in the “liberal” media actually wondered why Democrats “left (her) out” of negotiations on the bill. Gosh, I don’t know – maybe because they hate her even more than they hate Joe Manchin? Joe Manchin is garden-variety corrupt, after all, but Kyrsten Sinema thinks she’s so much smarter than us, and the next person I meet who actually likes people who think they're so much smarter than everyone else will be the first. And anyway, “mavericks” don’t go to bat for banksters, not when even Donald Trump says nasty things about them.

Surprise, surprise, study links “Earning Persistently Low Wages” “With Faster Memory Decline In Old Age,” which results include dementia. I’ve long said that people aren’t “bad at math” or “bad at budgeting” so much as they don’t make enough money to make a budget work, and I’ve also suspected that failure at that task alone (never mind the consequences of that failure, like foreclosure and eviction and getting your water and your heat and your electric turned off) makes you less sharp as the years go by. I’ve even suspected that not having savings to fall back on (as low-wage earners rarely have) also makes you less sharp. Now we have data that supports these notions.

The money shot from this article about how John Fetterman’s parents supported him and his family well into his 40s shows pretend-Pennsylvanian Mehmet Oz calling Mr. Fetterman a “pretend populist,” but I don't care that Mr. Fetterman grew up in a (his word!) “cushy” suburb or needed a substantial cash infusion from his parents as late as 2015. No child picks where they’re born or where they grow up, and if you're lucky enough to have privilege, your life's work is leveraging that privilege for all the folks who don’t have it, so in that light, giving up an insurance underwriting career to mentor young orphans and high-school dropouts seems heroic. And how did Mr. Oz leverage his privilege at pandemic's outset? By telling Sean Hannity that some kids would have to die to keep the economy going. Gallant, meet Goofus.

Now Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI), the man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name, wants Congress to have to renew Social Security and Medicare every single year. As a way of “controlling government spending,” something the Ron Johnsons of the world never do when it comes to all the welfare handouts they give to corporations. But Americans like their Social Security and Medicare, and the only way this ends well for Mr. Johnson is if Mandela Barnes – the presumptive Democratic nominee now that his top three Democratic opponents have bowed out – simply doesn’t mention it in campaign ads. Sadly, this is not difficult to imagine. Too many Democrats preoccupy themselves with being “different” and “special” and "thinking outside the box" when what they really need to do is go for the throat.

Finally, let us take a moment to celebrate good Kansans turning back an anti-abortion constitutional amendment by an impressive 59-41 margin. The people of Kansas accomplished this despite a) voting on the matter during a primary election which always has lower turnout, b) a poorly-worded-probably-on-purpose ballot question, and c) a mysterious effort to mislead pro-choice voters into pulling the wrong lever that’s almost certainly going to send someone to jail. The news wasn’t all good from primary Tuesday, though: Lucas Kunce, as impressive a candidate as Democrats have ever lucked into in Missouri, lost his bid for the Senate nomination to (sigh) the beer heiress who goes-along-gets-along with Republicans like that has ever energized turnout. Even that cloud’s got a silver lining, though: Mr. Kunce’s strong showing (he lost 43-38; a lot of folks ran) puts him in a good position for a 2024 Senate race against Josh “Running Man” Hawley.

Around the table: well, at least we knew Bill Russell.

NBA legend/civil rights warrior Bill Russell died on Sunday at the age of 88, but he leaves behind a life of good works. Mr. Russell helped the Celtics win eight straight NBA titles – it would have been 11, but for that one year Wilt Chamberlain’s 76ers went wild – and he did this at a time when Jim Crow still throttled Black folks in half of the cities in which he played, and his own city treated him like dirt, his money and fame apparently not good enough to get him into more exclusive communities, nor enough to keep feces-smearing assholes from trashing his house. So what does one do about all of this? Do what Bill Russell did – organize against evil, and excel at what God put you here to do. We can all do better, thanks to his example, and that’s all you can ask of anyone.

Ho hum, our “liberal” media seem to be against Chile’s draft constitution, though they can’t seem to decide whether that’s because it’s “undemocratic” or too democratic. They call it “woke,” a word that only right-wingers ever seem to use these days, or a “left-wing wish list,” and boy do Our Glorious Elites brutalize our language! Who thinks “wish list” are bad words, until some Thought Leader tells them to? My personal favorite moment, though, is when the right-wing hack says the proposed constitution “could destroy Chile’s economy, democracy and integrity as a nation.” I love how these clowns put “economy” before “democracy” and think no one can tell they’re sociopaths.

I’m sure the right-wing media had a field day with an unnamed Friend of Biden comparing this Administration’s first two years to Ronald Reagan’s first two years, and it’s true that the American Rescue Plan Act isn’t as consequential as the Kemp-Roth tax cut, nor has Mr. Biden had a defining moment comparable to Mr. Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers. But I’d also say it’s no worse than 50-50 that the Biden Administration might actually turn America around – thanks to Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter, and Rohit Chopra, mergers are going down, and I think our Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes will ultimately break the banksters’ hold on our economy, because why buy up real estate (or bitcoin!) just to show assets for cheap loans if you can’t get cheap loans anymore? Hell, why financialize the economy if you can't get cheap loans? To put it more poignantly: I wasn’t as optimistic about America in August of 2010, and I was more innocent then.

Jesus Mary and Joseph why on Earth does anyone care if Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) “was caught completely off guard” by the announcement of the Inflation Reduction Act? We’re not supposed to care about politicians’ feelings! They’re supposed to do their job, which is to listen to their constituents and do their constituents’ will. On that latter part, I understand that Sen. Sinema’s office has hemorrhaged staffers over the last two years, at least in part because they tire of taking angry calls from good Arizonans wondering why she’s not voting the right way. I’m not sure how many more ways can I say I hate drama.

Finally, I was going to say you can judge this article by its headline – "Democrats Are Dangerously Close To Changing Laws So Our President Is Elected By Popular Vote" – except that it’s actually much worse. Why? Not because the author assumes that anything the Founders wanted should stay; not, even, because he cries about tyranny like Donald Trump’s only obstacle to tyranny was his own bad character, but because he assumes that the Presidential election is the only election that matters and the “interests of the minority would naturally be set aside” if the popular vote won a Presidential election, as if there is literally no other way a “minority” could win legislative battles. We can set aside all the legislative battles rich minorities have been winning the last couple of decades, and just mention that Wyoming, for example, has two percent of all U.S. Senators despite having less than two one-thousandths of one percent of America’s population. You may be able to see why I have little patience with right-wingers whining about unheard “minorities.”

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 539.

Our Justice Department sues to prevent Meta’s acquisition of a virtual reality app corporation, thus saying not-so-fast to Meta’s mad dash to create the “metaverse” which is totally not Decentraland or Sandbox or Second Life. Naturally Meta’s entire retort to the suit is regulation chills innovation, an offensively absurd argument which persuades very few Americans. Of course, they don’t throw it out there to persuade so much as to give people pause. Don’t pause, good peoples. The famous cliché instructs us that necessity, not “freedom from regulation,” is the mother of invention.

Hoo boy Donald Trump sure has big cojones throwing around phrases like “law and order” like he personally isn’t the most lawless individual most people know, but I’ll grant that calling for the death penalty for drug dealers is probably fairly popular, and it would absolutely be the wedge he uses to do all his other unpopular fascist crap, like sending the National Guard into cities and parking police cars on every corner and “removing” prosecutors who don’t do exactly what he wants. Seriously, cop cars on every block? It’s like they never want a teenager to vote Republican again!

Pema Levy at Mother Jones runs down all the state laws that essentially enable every citizen to be a “snitch” for money, like the odious Texas anti-abortion law. People like thinking of themselves as vigilantes, but that doesn’t mean they like other people to be vigilantes, particularly when they gum up their lives! Our Supreme Court should throw out all these laws, given that they’ve previously ruled that you must be able to prove harm was done to you to have standing to sue about anything. Think this Court will respect that precedent? I’d sooner lay money that the Detroit Lions will win Super Bowl LVII.

Thinking Republican Doug Mastriano has a real uphill battle to win the Pennsylvania Governor’s race? Think again: corporations still love plowing money into the Republican Governors Association, and the RGA’s working hard to elect Mr. Mastriano, even as they’re pretending they’re not. Hilariously, the corporations that have given to the RGA either don’t respond to questions or respond with stupidity. “We give to both sides” is a stupid thing to say when one side literally imitates Nazis in saying a “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” runs the world.

What does it mean that figures such as Christie Todd Whitman and Andrew Wang have come together to form a third party optimistically called the Forward Party? It means someone’s created yet another gravity well to suck in money from the rich and/or inattentive, that’s what! A plurality of Americans call themselves independent, but BFD – I’m an independent, too, and I won’t vote for Republicans even under threat of catheterization with barbed wire. People don’t hate parties so much as they hate politicians who constantly give them the backs of their hands.

Finally, let the record show that Republicans reacted to the possibility that Democrats might actually pass an even more slimmed-down Build Back Better bill by killing popular veterans’ health care legislation, and threatening to derail legislation protecting gay marriage as well. When I say the only way to talk to a Republican is to tell him to stop whining, this is why, because all of this is literal immaturity on Republicans’ part. If Democrats want to win the midterms – and we have ample reason to believe that they don’t! – they should run ads depicting their Republican opponents as tantrum-throwing babies from now through November.

Around the table: when robots talk, and other horrors.

While even “liberal” media outlets like CNN and the New York Times apparently don’t want to shill for Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro – despite all the “good” he’s done American corporations with his “reforms” – Fox News has proven it’s up to the task. Hilariously they’re using booga-booga about China as a reason to support Mr. Bolsonaro, when Brazil spend four times as much on Chinese goods as Americans do – and that number’s actually gone way, way up since Mr. Bolsonaro took office. Sadly, Glenn Greenwald has slipped further down the rabbit hole at almost as rapid a pace. I know, the guy who literally broke the Sergio Moro corruption story! But obsession with censorship über alles has ruined many a good thinker.

A University of Chicago Institute of Politics Poll informs us that one out of every four Americans feels so “alienated” from our government they think it “may soon be necessary to take up arms against it,” but let me be the one to tell you that this information is not that startling if you’ve long thought, as I have, that about 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane in the first place. It’s just that back in the day they wanted to put Iraq war opponents in jail for treason, and today they think they need to take up arms against their government. It’s not even much of a devolution, frankly, and if you’d asked folks this question in, say, 2004, I think the only reason that number would have been lower was because you had a Republican government then. Strange, isn't it, how liberals talk about changing government while right-wingers talk about burning it all down?

It’s easy to dunk on Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) for voting against protecting gay marriage at around the same time he was toasting his own son at his son’s gay wedding. And Mr. Thompson seems like a good guy – his resume includes decades spent as a physical therapist, a firefighter, and an EMT – so we’re better off saying that he’s the sort of Republican who should be forcing his party to do better. But I don’t have the power, I guess he’d say, and setting aside the fact that he’s in line to be Agricultural Committee Chair if Republicans take the House, the first power you have, as a civilized person, is the power of shame. It’s a great power, if we would but use it.

What do you call it when a long-time advisor to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán breaks with him over his latest speech decrying all the European “people of mixed race”? Same thing you call it whenever right-wingers fight: drama! I mean, I really do like to think the best of people, but right-wingers have spent decades making positive noises about courage without delivering any actual courage, and the evidence does pile high after a while. (Don't object with "but Liz Cheney," for reasons including, but not limited to, the fact that for every Liz Cheney there are a hundred Jeff Flakes who talk a good game but do nothing.) In any case, I’d lay money that Zsuzsa Hegedüs will soon go back to work for the Master Race in some other capacity.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of overtly anti-democratic BS that has crept into mainstream political discussion lately, let me sum up “mysterious” and “complex” concepts like “neoreaction” in three words: you don’t count. Seriously, if you’ve grown up your whole life believing that anyone can make it in America (or that anyone should be able to make it in America), you shouldn’t take up with statements like “all organizations – irrespective of size – are best managed by a single executive” even after Joe Manchin scuttles the 135th attempt at Build Back Better. Here’s another five words about wishing for strongmen: boys do that, not men.

Finally, Ohio Senate candidate/pretend redneck J.D. Vance has caught a lot of well-deserved flak for saying that folks shouldn’t leave violent marriages for the sake of the children will no one think of the children! And I guess some folks easily fooled by robot talk will find his “defense” of marriage convincing. But Mr. Vance presents a false dichotomy: he posits only two possible worlds, one in which you “stay with your abusive spouse no matter what,” and the other in which “people change spouses like they change underwear,” and a great nation needs not submit to these false choices. Besides which, neither choice describe America as it actually is – the divorce rate, for example, is considerably lower now than it has been in decades, maybe because real Americans navigate all these issues better than Mr. Vance wants you to think.

Action: concerning internet privacy and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, tell our FDA to finally outlaw menthol cigarettes, and tell your Congressfolk to extend health insurance subsidies past the end of the year. 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 H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would prevent private data collection corporations from selling your personal data to law enforcement without a warrant. I know, getting a warrant, following the Fourth Amendment, how quaint! But there’s a reason we make law enforcement follow laws about investigating individuals – “individuals” includes you and I! – and that reason is you don’t want police officers to have too much power. And no use saying just don’t use the apps that sell your data, because all apps do that, so it’s a lot like saying just don’t breathe in the polluted air if you’re so mad about pollution.

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to prohibit menthol cigarettes once and for all. You’ve heard people say pot is a gateway drug? It’s not, but menthol cigarettes are a gateway for kids to a life-long bad habit that’ll likely wind up killing them before their time. Menthol cigarettes taste a lot better than the other kind, I’m told, but if they wind up killing you, BFD! Also too, the big tobacco corporations have spent a lot of money trying to addict Black folks to menthol cigarettes, and sadly, it’s worked. Just don’t smoke then, say the right-wingers who do nothing about their rage addiction. When corporations won’t do the right thing, our government has to step in and make them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies so that good Americans don’t get slammed with massive premium hikes at the end of the year. Joe Manchin says he thinks maybe he can support this, but more likely he’s just playing Lucy with the football to our Charlie Brown again, and anyway how many ways can I say this? Joe Manchin does not fucking matter! He is a pine nut in the batter of eternity! Only the American people matter, and if we rise up and speak with one voice to all of our Reps and Senators about this matter, we will deliver Joe Manchin to the oblivion he so richly deserves, 50th vote in the Senate or not.

Around the table: how to deal with horror, part 332.

Now this is how you do it: Oakland, CA parents occupy Parker Elementary School after the district announces its closure for next year. They’ve stayed there 50 days, even opening a “Parker community school” offering free summer programs to kids and adults. The district wanted to close, shrink, or merge 11 schools, mostly serving Black and Brown kids almost like that was the whole idea, but folks ain’t putting up with it, with occupations and hunger strikes and legal complaints. The right-wing parents get all the ink these days, but you’ll more likely remember these parents, even if they don’t win every battle this time around.

But alas, right-wing “education” organizations like Moms for Liberty don’t just get all the ink – they get all the corporate money, too, so says at least one observer who says the organization has grown “at a pace that only a corporation's monetary resources could manage.” These are some bat-guano insane folks at Moms for Liberty, and I don’t say that because they gave Ron DeSantis a wooden sword at their convention – I count two instances of defamation and one instance of a terrorist threat just in paragraph 7, and I think the victim of all three needs to file charges post-haste. Having feelings about stuff doesn’t make threats and defamation legal, let alone OK. Why do I feel like the conservative in every conversation about right-wing behavior?

In a peripherally-related note, Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old Ohio girl a month back, is planning to sue Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, in part for suggesting she failed to report the abortion to state authorities when, ah, she did. I hope this ends Mr. Rokita’s career, since he seems like the kind of guy who’ll say anything to induce rage in the easily-enraged – many of whom have dutifully followed up with terroristic threats against Dr. Bernard. I’d like all of them in jail, too, partly because I believe in law and order, and partly because, again, assholes need to start paying a price for their behavior in America.

Nicole Martins and Erica Scharrer at The Conversation discuss how to help young kids cope with violence on news programs. They give lots of good advice – chiefly, to limit their exposure to it! – but I have to say I was struck to read that “(v)ery young children will not understand that what they see are replays of the same event and not another tragedy happening again,” because I suspect that adults aren’t much better at this – adults will better understand that they’re seeing the same footage again, sure, but they’ll also readily turn three video clips into a crime wave. I still think we’re all much better off reading the news than watching it.

Finally, Laura Bassett at Jezebel instructs us that ”Just Three Weeks Post-Roe, the Stories Emerging Are Worse Than Anyone Imagined” – in the sense that stories didn’t “trickle out over the next six months to maybe a year” but instead “sprayed out like a firehose.” I guess I worry that folks will tune out the sheer volume of the horror, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell these stories, since that could be anyone’s wife, mother, or daughter who has to travel hundreds of miles to another state to deal with an ectopic pregnancy because their home state Republicans say no exceptions ever.

Action: concerning corruption, police brutality, and abortion.

Long story short: tell our Department of Justice to prosecute the Trump campaign for wire fraud, demand justice for Jayland Walker, and tell President Biden to open abortion clinics on federal land. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell our Justice Department to prosecute the Trump campaign for wire fraud. So how do they merit this particular charge? They told supporters they were raising money for an “Official Election Defense Fund,” ostensibly to fund all the frivolous lawsuits they filed over Mr. Trump’s seven-million-vote defeat in 2020, and then spent around 95% of the $250 million they raised on wholly unrelated matters, like raising more money and funding more rallies. The man gives off the stench of corruption with every breath he takes, so our laws have to land a punch somewhere. But only if our DOJ swings!

MoveOn helps you tell the city of Akron, OH and our Department of Justice to get justice for Jayland Walker, a Black man shot 90 times by police officers over a, get this, “traffic and equipment violation,” which sure sounds like a made-up category. “They won’t be convinced by ‘traffic,’ so let’s add ‘equipment.’ More words is better!” When I hear that police shot a man once, I get suspicious; what am I supposed to think when they shoot a man 90 times? The petition makes a lot of other demands of Akron, like an end to police violence against protestors and “investment in real, community-led public safety solutions.” The city should give in to all of them, because it's the right thing to do.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to open abortion clinics on federal land. If “abortion clinics on federal land” sounds a little absurd to you, put it next to our Supreme Court outlawed abortion because it’s not a “deeply-rooted” right even though it’s been legal everywhere for nearly half a century and was also legal for over half a century at our country’s founding and even Ben Franklin had an abortion cocktail! Not so absurd now, is it? And ain’t nothing states can do about what happens on federal land, try though they might. President Biden doesn’t seem like the kind of fellow who’d do this. But that’s why we stay on him.

Action: concerning taxes, climate change, endless war, and Medicare premiums.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich for-real for-real, pass real climate change legislation, repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization, and reduce absurdly high Medicare premiums. 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.

Word on the street is Senate Democrats are straining to water down tax hikes on the rich in the House-passed Build Back Better Act, so call your Senators and tell them to stop that shit. I mean, we all pay our damn taxes; when will the folks who make millions of dollars an hour start paying their share? And yes, by every conceivable measure, their fair share is a lot larger than ours! That’s how it’s supposed to be! That’s how we built the greatest middle class in history! And that’s not “punishing success” – rich CEOs succeed only on the backs of millions of good Americans who work for them! Seriously, if Elon Musk had to grow his own food, he’d be knocking on every door in your neighborhood with his hands out.

With our Supreme Court dealing yet another body blow to our government’s ability to keep big corporations from hurting good Americans in West Virginia v. EPA, the Climate Reality Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to act on climate change – as in, explicitly give our EPA the authority to curtail it. You may have thought our EPA already had that authority – even the late Justice Scalia said so! – but our literal-when-we-want-to Supreme Court disagrees, and they’re out to destroy everything we’ve fought for, until our government is powerless to do anything but spy on us. Yes, that’s the endgame! And we Americans have shed too much blood and spent too much treasure to let that happen. Our Congressfolk need to know that.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 AUMF that authorized war with Iraq, but which other Presidents have used to authorize all sorts of unconstitutional warmaking thereafter, including but not limited to former President Trump’s assassination of General Soleimani in 2019. Call the 2002 AUMF yet another humiliation visited upon good Americans in the wake of the “war on terror,” a “war” which may one day prove to be even more injurious to our great nation than the “war on drugs” has been. Yes, even though the “war on drugs” now exists almost entirely to put Black and Brown folks in prison! The 2002 AUMF is old enough to vote for stupid people now, so it’s well past time to send it to a much-deserved oblivion.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell the Biden Administration to lower outrageously-high Medicare premiums, preferably by rebating the overcharges to seniors before the midterms. Yeah, there’s some political calculation in there – yes, I said “some” because it’s also the right thing to do – but you know the other side only calculates; it’s why they’re irredeemably decadent and morally bankrupt. And Medicare really screwed up by deciding to cover the expensive-and-not-terribly-effective Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm – and then did the right thing by only covering it for seniors in clinical trials. But Medicare still needs to do another right thing by reversing the premium hikes that covering Aduhelm caused in the first place.

Around the table: tabulating even more drama from right and center-right!

National Republicans appear to be putting one of Steve Bannon's plans into action, by training an "army" of poll workers and linking them up with local Republican D.A.s. In the short term, I expect this plan could work pretty well in places like Michigan -- though it'd work better if their gubernatorial candidates could get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, amirite? -- but it won't work as well in places like Hawaii. I'm pretty sure 2022, which Republicans figure will go their way wherever they like though voters could prove them wrong, is just a dry run for a much bigger operation in 2024, when the party's biggest dick runs for President again.

Political Wire's Taegan Goddard, writing about why he has a membership model for his website, describes pretty well why the advertising model doesn't really work for our internet anymore. If you still think the world is all publications going out and getting advertisers so they don't have to charge customers, note well that the internet advertising model involves very little active involvement from publishers; too many middlemen control the process, hence you're bound to see an ad you can't stand. Like so much of modern life -- Amazon, social media, Bluetooth-enabled appliances, pharmacy benefit managers -- internet advertising cartels may make things easier, but they don't make them better. And they don't even make things easier for you, unless you're a CEO who hates doing real work.

Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Charles Booker runs a campaign ad with a noose around his neck. I wish it were 42 seconds shorter, of course, and at first I thought attacking Rand Paul for holding up anti-lynching legislation might be a mistake, since Mr. Paul eventually co-sponsored a similar anti-lynching bill that became law and will be more than happy to tell us that repeatedly. But what if that issue's a feint? After all, Mr. Paul will still happily tell you that Medicare-for-All is slavery, and his problems with the Civil Rights Act were the first thing anyone learned about him! And those charges will stick while he thinks he's brushing the other one aside. At least, I hope it works that way. And folks won't just remember the noose around Mr. Booker's neck; they'll remember him removing it at ad's end. All in all, pretty good, but, at the risk of sounding like Gordon Lish, make it 30 seconds -- or 15.

I'm pleased to see that professional athletes (and their bosses) have doubled down on their support for gun control legislation even though (because?) professional whiners like Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) didn't like it. (Want me to evaluate Mr. Rubio's complaints about China's treatment of Uyghurs and the NBA's complicity therein? Nah, screw that -- every time Marco Rubio seems sympathetic or smart, it's a feint, meaning to draw you into some offensive drama you'd otherwise never let yourself get bogged down in.) Watch out for Philadelphia Union soccer player Alejandro Bedoya, who says "(i)t ain’t freedom that we have to now look over our backs all the time." I'd like him to become a political consultant at career's end; America suffers too much from all the numbnuts who do that now.

When I hear, for the 443rd time, that Joe Manchin really, really wants to do something about prescription drug prices by the end of the year, I am compelled to note that it's a bit rich to hear the guy most responsible for Democrats Not Doing Enough suggesting that Democrats didn't do enough. Also, he better not forget to check with America's Other One True Great and Awesome Real American President, Kyrsten Sinema, who vetoed Medicare drug price negotiation and higher tax brackets on the rich and on corporations in 2021. My advice to Democrats, not that they'd ever take it, would be to cut through the Manchinema drama, produce a bill that addresses all their "concerns," and make everyone vote on it immediately. And if certain people vote it down because "it would strangle innovation" or "it's not bipartisan enough" or "it didn't go through the committee process," then let their words hang them. We don't need more Democrats as much as we need better Democrats.

Finally, buried in this horserace account entitled "Biden battles CEOs in inflation blame game" -- everything's a "game" when losing causes someone else to suffer, right, Politico? -- we get this shameful whinefest from an unnamed "CEO of one of the country's largest banks": "They said everything was going to be different under Biden and they would be more engaged with us, and they weren’t." And all I can say is: having all the power ain't enough? We shouldn't ask banksters for advice about anything, since they've amply demonstrated over the years that they don't care about anyone but themselves; really, we should be breaking their sorry asses up into much smaller and less harmful banks, which work I hope our FTC will begin soon.

Action: concerning banksters, law and order, pollution, immigration, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell our FDIC to stop predatory lenders, tell President Biden to do more for police reform, tell our EPA to curb cross-state pollution, tell our government to protect DACA recipients, and tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our FDIC to stop predatory lenders from laundering their three-digit interest loans through banks our FDIC supervises. These banksters also work through furniture stores, pet stores, car mechanics, and the like, offering loans for love seats and pets and car repairs and the like that don't charge interest if they're paid off in 90 days -- but charge up to 225% interest if they're not, which they generally won't be, since folks don't have much in savings anymore, and just try to turn such a loan down when they've got your car in the shop! Scheming sure is easier than working, but there's no reason we should allow this kind of scheming, particularly through federally-insured banks.

Roots Action helps you tell President Biden to go much further than his police reform Executive order does. The order bans military vehicles for police departments -- unless those departments say they'll use them only for disasters and the like. A police department that says they need a tank for disasters won't use it on protestors? Yeah sure. We're hearing these days that police "need" even more military equipment so they can deal with school shooters, but I think their inaction during the Uvalde mass murder has pretty much exposed that argument's bald spot for everyone to see. Those cops didn't act like your TV heroes, after all, and more weapons ain't gonna change that.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our EPA to finalize the most vigorous cross-state pollution rule possible. Cross-state pollution (particularly with nitrous oxide) is a real thing; air pollution doesn't just say whoa hold up when it gets to a state line, after all, nor can downwind states simply build barriers to keep upwind states' pollution out. You can already hear right-wingers whine how are those poor, poor power plants supposed to control what crosses state lines? Here's a response: same way you control your urge to say racist crap: just don't do it. Far too often I sound like the real conservative when I talk to right-wingers. Why, it's like they're not really conservative at all!

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to permanently protect recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program. The DACA program helps immigrants who arrive here as minors stay here, as long as they meet fairly strict standards (military service, college attendance, no felonies). After all, forcing them to go back to nations that don't know them, to make them pay for decisions they had nothing to do with, is cruel. And though our Supreme Court protected DACA recipients last time they ruled on the matter, don't think they'll do it again. They've been killing precedents like kitchen ants lately.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Our Senate has finally -- finally! -- confirmed the last two Biden nominees to the USPS Board of Governors, so they ain't got no excuse now: Louis DeJoy has got to go. He tried to sabotage voting-by-mail, he had investments with a (now-former) USPS Board member, he had his hands in the corporation that just so happened to make COVID tests for our USPS, and he's implemented a higher-cost, worse-service plan that no executive in his right mind would have implemented anywhere 50 years ago. And note well that "worse service" could well mean "you don't get your life-saving meds when you need them."