Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: the corruption, it burns!

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Social Security, refugees, banksters, and the minimum wage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act, reject the TABS Act, and raise the minimum wage. 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 Civic Shout and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act, which would ensure that income over $250,000 gets taxed into the system for the first time. Yes, currently Social Security doesn’t tax income over $160,200 annually, meaning that only working people pay into the system; the fat-cat class is exempt! I suppose right-wingers would argue that since they don’t need Social Security they shouldn’t have to pay into it, but that’s exactly the sort of everyone-for-themselves masturbation that’s gotten this country into the trouble it’s in. Rich folks need to pay more into Social Security, for the good of all Americans.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would help some 78,000 Afghan refugees living in America to get legal immigrant status. I can already hear the right-wingers saying when are we going to provide for our own people? As if a great nation has to choose! And, you know, as if giving legal status to a refugee really injures someone else. I didn’t ask for Tha Bush Mobb to invade Afghanistan, nor did I ask the Obama and Trump Administrations to stay there, so I also didn’t ask for tens of thousands of Afghan refugees. But I’m not an evil bastard, either, so I’ll still demand we take care of them, because that’s what great nations – and great civilizations – do.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (or TABS) Act, which would repeal our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB)’s independent funding mechanism, and instead subject it to the whim of Congressional funding. Other banking regulators have independent funding mechanisms, so why not our CFPB? Because banksters hate our CFPB, and Republicans live to suck up to their bankster overlords, that’s why. This may all be moot, since our Supreme Court obviously has the long knives out for our CFPB. But we should still tell our Reps how we really feel about their drama.

Finally, the Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour or more, since $15/hour has been a calling card for so long that inflation’s outrun it a bit. Don’t brook any right-wingers telling you good luck getting that through this Congress ha ha ha snort. Congress passed a minimum wage hike in 2007 why? Because they wanted to? Because Democrats had impregnable majorities in either House? No, because we demanded it. And don’t brook any where’s it going to stop? hysteria from right-wingers, either. That’s a loser’s argument. It’s going to stop when we get justice. Which is what they’re really afraid of.

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: concerning taxes, refugees, and insulin.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, and cap insulin prices for all Americans. 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 Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk “No Tax Breaks for Corporations Without Relief for Families.” You’ll specifically ask for the return of the expanded Child Tax Credit (or CTC) which put $250 and $300 checks every month in working families’ bank accounts through 2021; Congress wants to pass a bunch of corporate welfare tax breaks at the end of the year, just like they do every year in the hope that no one will notice, but certainly we should tell them not to do that if they won’t help working families at the same time. And, frankly, we ought to tell them to stop giving corporations handouts, too. The letter the FCNL helps you write will give you space to say that, if you like.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8685/S. 4787, the Afghan Adjustment Act. The Afghan Adjustment Act would let allow more good Afghan citizens escape the Taliban, as long as they meet certain requirements, like serving in our military or the former government’s military, and when right-wingers scream at you that THEZE PEEPULZ AREZ NOTZ TEH VETTEDZ!!!!, kindly repeat the bit about “certain requirements” at them. Right-wingers love pretending that nobody screens or vets a refugee in America, when actually that process can take years! So don’t put up with any BS about that, any more than you put up with BS about crime.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans. Republicans stand at the ready to campaign against lower drug prices! Do I have to admire their chutzpah at deciding to die on this completely unpopular hill? No, I do not, because if it works – or, at least, if it doesn’t look like it fails – then all future Republicans will feel even more emboldened to take unpopular positions that hurt good Americans. I don’t know how many more times Republicans have to tie the woman to the train tracks for Republican voters to get it, but we’d better plan on it being a few more times – and we'd better play offense.

Action: concerning Afghan refugees, credit reporting, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, reform our nation’s credit reporting system, and pass the Equality Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8685/S. 4787, the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would let more good Afghan citizens escape the Taliban, as long as they meet certain requirements, like serving in our military or the former government’s military. If anyone asks you why we care more for refugees than Americans, just ask: why does it have to be either-or? I mean, are we a great nation or not? A great nation is good to all people, and that includes those who a) have already met fairly stringent requirements to stay here and b) were displaced by our military adventures in the first place. When our leaders won’t be accountable, we have to make them be accountable.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to overhaul our credit reporting system in America. It’s bad enough this three-digit number aims to define us – particularly when it also stands in the way of us getting a good house or a good job – but in America credit scores don’t even define us particularly well! Credit reporting corporations often get those scores wrong – through incompetence or malice, does it really matter? – and about 20% of credit reports have mistakes. One of the things you’ll ask for is a public credit scoring agency; that’s a terrific idea, and I bet the Equifaxes of the world sling a lot of BS about it.

Finally, the Human Rights Campaign helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The bill passed 18 months ago, and just because we’re trying to get 10 Republicans to vote for the Respect for Marriage Act doesn’t mean we should hold their feet to the fire about this bill, too, because this bill would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)” would be one of the reasons bankers, landlords, and employers (among others) couldn’t discriminate against you. So if folks come at you with rubbish like TEH BOYZ WILLZ PLAYZ TEH GURLZ SPORTZ!!!!, remind them what the bill’s really about – preventing the powerful from hurting good Americans.

Around the table: everyone's a terrorist! And other absurdities.

A now-former VP at Kelloggs, referring to the 10-week strike this past fall, told a meeting of lawyers and union-busters last week that "the union leadership" at his corporation "were behaving more like terrorists than partners." I said they'd call us all "terrorist" one day and I was right, but I feel compelled to note that "terrorists" and "partners" is one hell of a dichotomy to present when discussing labor negotiations, and not just because the other, truer word for "partners" is subordinates. Labor negotiators should of course be civilized, but being "civilized" may not even require civility, depending on the situation. And what are the specific "terrorist" tactics of Kelloggs workers? You won't learn that from Mr. Hurley's audio remarks, but you'll hear a lot about Joe Biden making an "inappropriate" statement and certain social media outlets being too powerful for arguably the biggest name in breakfast cereal and, of course, George Soros, because apparently right-wingers can't perform a whining rant without bringing him up.

You've heard of folks going north of the border for affordable prescription drugs? Now meet the family that went south of the border, to Mexico, to avoid yet another several-thousand-dollar health care bill. The kicker, of course, is that the Fierro family of Arizona has health insurance! Which costs them $1,000 every month! So you can see the attraction of spending $5 to get a doctor to pop your son's dislocated shoulder back in place. Recall that almost half of Americans don't have the money saved to cover a several hundred-dollar expense, and none of them are saving their way to health care happiness by skipping coffee and avocados.

Now Texas Gov. Greg Abbott thinks he can "invoke war powers" by declaring the migration of refugee-seekers from other lands an "invasion," which supposedly would comply with Article I, Section 10 of our Constitution. But words mean things, and folks running from oppression to seek sanctuary don't constitute an "invasion" unless you can prove they're all fronting, which he can't. So this looks to me like just another Greg Abbott drama, one where he flexes his muscles and accomplishes nothing, like his mass inspection of trucks coming through the border that (per Texas's own Agriculture Commissioner!) caught exactly zero would-be immigrants and produced exactly zero drug seizures.

Laura Ingraham opposes student loan debt forgiveness by saying her mother worked as a waitress until she was 73 to pay off her kids' college bills so why can't yours? Other Twitter users dunked on her in ways you might easily expect ("You let your mom work until she was 73 to pay your debts?"), though not too many pointed out the most pertinent fact -- that college cost a lot less when Ms. Ingraham went to Dartmouth. Which gives the lie to "(l)oan forgiveness just another insult to those who play by the rules." Ah, folks who took out loans to go to college whose tuition went up 600% in 35 years also "played by the rules," and a lot of them took out loans that actually cost more to pay off after 10 years, even after you "play by the rules" by making all your payments on time. By charging this much for college, and charging this much for loans, we have profoundly betrayed all those who played by the rules. Loan forgiveness would right that wrong. And if we can't right wrongs, what's the point of America?

Hoo boy now Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) says it "may be true" that COVID vaccines cause AIDS. That should be weapons-grade PR against the Senator, no matter how many ads he runs in which he plays catch badly with his grandson, but that man has been spewing out filth for decades now, and Democrats keep underestimating him. Well, by "Democrats" I really mean Russ Feingold, and he's not running this time, thank God, so maybe now they have a shot, so to speak, at defeating him. (How do vaccines "induce AIDS," you ask? Google it and you'll find a line of "reasoning" that rivals QAnon for sheer stupidity, plus is full of big scare words. Naturally "America's Frontline Doctors" also figure in the drama.)

Finally, anyone else think the "leak" of a draft of a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade was an inside job? An "attack" by the "radical left" my ass -- any liberal in a position to leak the draft not only knows it would have intimidated exactly zero of the five (or six!) right-wing Justices prepared to endorse it, but also knows that even though more Americans support abortion rights than oppose them, the other side has more folks who'd run through a wall for their position. Right-wingers would totally leak the draft for three reasons: one, to keep the base ginned up; two, to give independents six months to forget all about it before Election Day, and three, and most importantly, to remind the base that they've actually done something for them. People like it when you do something for them; it's well past time for Democrats to commit to that lesson, rather than whine about how they "just can't get to yes" on things 80% of Americans want. (As an aside, Alexander Cockburn used to say that the day our Supreme Court actually overturns Roe v. Wade, Republicans will wander in the wilderness for decades. I sure hope he's right.)

Action: concerning immigration, junk fees, grizzly bears, antibiotic abuse, wage slavery, and the notorious OAN.

Long story short: tell President Biden to end the notorious Title 42 program, tell our CFPB to end bankster "junk fees," tell our Interior Department to protect grizzly bears, tell our FDA to root out antibiotic abuse from factory farms, tell Wendy's to do better by the farmworkers in its supply chain, and tell AT&T to sever all ties with the notorious OAN. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Moms Rising helps you tell President Biden to end the Title 42 program that Donald Trump put in place so he could turn more refugees away. I know they said their Title 42 program was a health care thing, designed to keep COVID out of the United States, but what a crock of shit that was! How much COVID came from Mexico, or Honduras, or anywhere else a "caravan" supposedly came from? Now how much COVID came from a quarter of Americans refusing to get vaccinated in an elephantine hissy fit over Their Guy losing the 2020 election? Yeah, sure was a good thing we kept Mexicans out for "health care" reasons. Title 42 only allows our government to send refugees back without even the hearings our laws guarantee them. As civilized people, we demand better from their leaders as well as ourselves. So let's get to the demanding.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to stop the "junk fees" bank love to impose on working families. You can name overdraft fees as a "junk fee" -- do you really put a bank out that much when you make a math error? -- but our CFPB also wants to hear from you about "fees for things people believed were covered by the baseline price of a product or service," "unexpected fees for a product or service," "fees that seemed too high for the purported service," and "fees where it was unclear why they were charged." Banksters do come up with creative ways to steal your money! And of course they do it the most to working families and seniors. Our CFPB will fight for us -- but only if we demand it.

Change.org helps you tell our Department of the Interior to reject any plans it might have to remove Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears. We've been working to help improve grizzly bear numbers for almost 50 years -- yes, good works do occasionally take a very long time. But grizzly bears still only number around 1,200 in the United States (a far cry from 200 years ago, when their numbers were more like 50,000, not that we'd be trying to get back there, necessarily), and when the Governors of Montana and Wyoming talk about revoking protections for grizzlies, they don't foreground "tyrannical federal mandates" or "protecting other animals" or "we got wells to dig!" -- they foreground trophy hunting. It's like they're trying to be soulless! And soulless people shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to eliminate antibiotic abuse on factory farms. We've been telling them for a long time, and it's not like they've done nothing, but the need remains. Two out of every three antibiotics in America go not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, partly to make them "meatier" and partly to help them better endure the squalid conditions at factory farms. And what does antibiotic overuse help create? Superbugs, which took over a million lives worldwide in 2019, which was less than 2% of the 58 million folks total who died that year, but we could see 10 million annually by 2050, per a U.K. government study from 2014. And if a superbug gets you, the number that'll really matter will be 100% of you.

Daily Kos helps you tell fast-food corporation Wendy's to join the Fair Food program, which roots out the wage slavery and unsafe work conditions on farms supplying food to fast-food corporations. Every other big fast-food corporation has joined the Fair Food program, so Wendy's needs to step up its game, lest farmworkers march on Wendy's board chair Nelson Peltz's huge Palm Beach, CA mansion in the next few weeks and brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR against him. Imagine him having a gathering there; and then imagine him and his fellow travelers all laughing at the "little people" who think they can make a difference against his awesome power. Then imagine us winning, because his power is less like a machine gun and more like an anvil around his ankle.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut off all ties with the notorious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN). DirecTV dropped OAN from its lineup staring next month, and AT&T owns most of DirecTV, but OAN wouldn't exist without AT&T money to begin with, so starving the OAN beast of a platform isn't quite enough if you're still feeding it. OAN has, of course, filed a hilarious lawsuit against AT&T just for doing what it did, even suggesting that if they don't get an audience fed hand-to-mouth they have no free speech, though dozens of 2000s bloggers got big audiences without big corporate sugar daddy money. To think OAN says that with a straight face and still calls itself "conservative." C'mon, OAN, bootstrap up! Prove you don't need the corporate welfare!

Around the table: of refugees, bioweapons, and "terrorists."

Everyone wants to help out Ukrainian refugees, but Julie Hollar at FAIR reminds us that "civilians in other conflicts" are "much less newsworthy" -- "particularly when they’re victims of the US." Hence Ukrainian civilians get on TV a lot, but Iraqi civilians didn't get much screen time back in the mid-2000s, nor did Serbian civilians a mere half-decade earlier, nor do Syrian civilians today; you just have to wonder if there's a connection, despite TV journalists intoning that "the pain of war is borderless." And when you read about how our "liberal" media tripped all over themselves back in the day avoiding saying that American forces were attacking Iraq, you'll be reminded of how they trip all over themselves today avoiding saying that American police officers shoot people.

When I hear that Russian biologists have informed us that Russian/QAnon claims that America is sponsoring bioweapons labs in Ukraine are utter bunkum, I'm reminded of when former U.N. inspector Scott Ritter said Iraq had no WMD in 2002, when he had at least three very good reasons to say the opposite. These Russian biologists are all very likely to find themselves dead or in jail soon, so let's not squander their good works by forgetting them, or by, say, giving more oxygen to the amateur epidemiologists who told us COVID wasn't real or masks choked you or vaccines killed 50,000 people.

Michigan's biggest energy providing corporation makes big bucks while shutting off electricity to many, many more homes than any other similar corporation in the state -- and also charges the highest prices in Michigan, and though it wouldn't be fair to say the state of Michigan rubber-stamps their rate hikes (generally, DTE gets about half of what it asks for!), I sure do wonder how the state allowed any energy-providing corporation to get so big, let alone fail to take into account whether good Michiganders can even afford these rate hikes. I mean, capping bills as a percentage of income will help, but how about some good old-fashioned trust-busting?

Senate Republicans apparently plan to attack President Biden's Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, for her work defending "terrorists" at Guantánamo Bay. Perhaps conscious that most Americans now think Guantánamo Bay was a total fraud, they're working on shortening their argument to "she kept defending terrorists," which should be enough for folks who already fight anything touched by Biden-nature. But as you're mindful of how many innocent people got sent to Guantánamo over the years, and how often our government held them for decades without even charging them, then really, Guantánamo was horseshit is the only response you need deliver.

When I hear that One America News Network has sued AT&T for breach of contract after AT&T simply didn't renew their contract, I'm tempted to yell frivolous lawsuit! from the mountaintops. OAN's argument has (at least!) four prongs, which is already a bad sign. First, it alleges a conspiracy between AT&T's (Black, Democratic) Board Chair and plaintiff-against-OAN Dominion Voting Systems, and good luck finding the smoking gun emails for that one! Second, it suggests that AT&T should have continued their relationship past 2022 because OAN had had an "exclusive advertising agreement" with AT&T through 2024; you've heard of the Commutative Property of Contracts, of course? Why, no, you haven't. Third, it alleges that AT&T didn't enforce a non-disparagement clause by preventing some of its other properties' celebrities from criticizing OAN; calling that a "reach" would insult actual reaches. Fourth, it alleges that AT&T is "imped(ing) the right of American television viewers to watch the news media channels and programs of their choice," a charge that should make every early-2000s blogger laugh hysterically. Gosh, these big corporations will say just anything to avoid the obvious truth: that good Americans succeeded in agitating for AT&T to dump OAN. Why would they want to occlude that truth, I wonder?

Finally, Ohio Republican Senatorial aspirants Mike Gibbons and Josh Mandel got into it in a debate hosted by FreedomWorks last Friday night, after Mr. Mandel accused Mr. Gibbons of outsourcing Ohio jobs at roughly the same time Mr. Mandel was fighting in Iraq. The timeline Mr. Mandel presents is more than a little tenuous, but Mr. Gibbons really stepped in it with his response -- think "I personally didn't buy the stock" will resonate with anyone? Will "I wish I'd made millions off of Chinese Petra"? And that was before the big confrontation, when Mr. Gibbons told Mr. Mandel he had no experience in the private sector and Mr. Mandel responded "I've done two tours in Iraq! Don't tell me I haven't worked!" Bad behavior in public is never good, but I think all this will help Mr. Mandel on primary day -- he orchestrated it all pretty well, though not perfectly (Mr. Gibbons didn't actually say Mr. Mandel has "never worked," but, as they say, if you're explaining, you're losing), and getting in other people's faces isn't exactly something that repels Trump votaries, is it? I guess we now know why Donald Trump is hedging his bets in this race. Josh Mandel's no great prize, of course -- he's already lost a Senate race, to Sherrod Brown in 2012 -- so all Tim Ryan or Morgan Harper has to do is, like Mr. Brown, offer Ohio voters something of value.

Action: concerning child slavery, social media, pollution, immigration, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell big chocolate corporations to stop using child slavery, tell state pensions to stop investing in Facebook, tell President Biden to reject an oil export facility in the Gulf of Mexico, tell 88 Energy not to drill in the Arctic, and tell President Biden to stop deporting immigrants under Title 42 authority and fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Care2 helps you tell big chocolate corporations Hershey's, Nestlé, and Mars to get child slavery out of their manufacturing processes. Just in time for Halloween, too! These three corporations tell us they've gotten the child slavery out of their products, but that's a lyin'-ass lie, as these corporations still get their products from West African cocoa farms that use child slaves. These children work from sunrise well into the evening, which doesn't exactly give them very much time for school or family, and it can't be a coincidence that big chocolate corporations make billions of dollars in profits. These corporations are all big enough that they could strong-arm cocoa farms into doing better -- but they won't, unless we embarrass them with the Big Stick of Bad PR. And given their record, we'll likely have to do it more than once.

Sum of Us helps you tell big state teacher pension funds to get their money out of Facebook. Yeah, it's a great investment -- until you remember that Facebook knew it was harming children and did nothing about it, and until you remember that Facebook cares about "engagement" and doesn't care whether that engagement does actual people actual harm. And by "actual harm," we don't just mean algorithms that magically connect Nazi wannabes, but the Myanmar military's slaughter of the Rohingya. Social media has fallen far -- time was you had your pick of networks to help you connect with people, but now we're all on Facebook, and only because it's a monopoly, with the other networks gone now, some of them (WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram) literally assimilated by Facebook. But, again, when we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR, we do a lot of good.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Maritime Administration to reject the proposed oil export facility off the coast of Texas in the Gulf of Mexico. Hasn't the Gulf suffered enough from oil spills? This particular facility aims to transport close to 750 million barrels of oil annually, which is more than all the offshore drilling in the Gulf produces -- and, as you remember from the 2010 Spillageddon, you don't have to spill all of that oil to befoul our water and kill local industries. And we saw the danger again earlier this month when another underwater pipeline leak belched out almost 600 gallons of oil off the coast of Southern California. Hate to sound like a broken record, but we'd do a whole lot better relying more on renewable energy -- after all, how many bird-killing sun spills have you experienced?

Penn Environment helps you tell Australian oil corporation 88 Energy to abandon plans to drill near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). I've said it before and I'll say it again: once you burn oil, it's gone, leaving behind only pollution and ill health in its wake, but wild areas live forever -- if we can keep them. And all the other standard objections -- that the inevitable oil spills are even harder to clean up in frigid areas than in temperate ones, that we know little enough about the Arctic that we're almost certainly underestimating the damage we'd do in drilling -- still apply. Plus you'd hate to kill the world-famous sockeye salmon industry in Alaska. Always they talk about "creating jobs," but never do they confront the jobs they'll destroy. And not for progress, either, but for greed.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden to abandon the Title 42 deportation policy, born of the mind of Stephen Miller, need I say more? I need say more: deporting immigrants solely because "there's a pandemic going on" isn't just stupid -- natural-born rage-heads are keeping this pandemic going on quite well enough by themselves, thank you very much! -- but it doesn't speak very well of our civilization, does it? Don't we bear any burden to do the right thing? The right thing to do here is to evaluate asylum claims on their merits, give everyone due process, and admit refugees running from countries that'll kill them if they return. The right thing to do is most certainly not pretend you're protecting Americans by throwing everyone out.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom, which will make firing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy a lot easier. Mr. Bloom has praised Mr. DeJoy's work in slowing down services and making us pay more for them -- I guess rich people see things a little differently than we do -- and I'm sure none of that has anything to do with Mr. DeJoy investing in a fund run by Mr. Bloom! And now we have further evidence of Mr. DeJoy's corruption, as he took his time recusing himself from making decisions about over a dozen corporations he had invested in and which had business before our Postal Service. But let's not wait until it's blindingly obvious to President Biden that Mr. DeJoy has become a liability; instead, let's pressure him now.

Action: concerning pollution, social media, campaign finance, immigration, and waste.

Long story short: tell the PA DEP to limit air pollution from trash incinerators, tell Facebook to ditch its drama-enabling algorithms, tell big corporations to stop funding January 6 coup enablers in Congress, tell the Biden Administration to drop the notorious Title 42 immigration policy, tell our Department of Homeland Security Secretary to stop deporting Haitians, and tell Amazon to stop throwing perfectly good products away. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to set more vigorous limits on air pollution. The news hook here is the Covanta trash incinerator in Chester, in Delaware County, which pollutes more than any other trash incinerator of its kind in America. And it takes in trash not just from Pennsylvania, but from New Jersey, Maryland, and New York. That means more mercury, nitrogen oxide, and sulfur dioxide than you should be breathing! Our DEP is looking into Covanta's permit as we speak, and with your help, could do the right thing here. Don't let the right-wingers tell you this is just Big Gummint Destroying Jobs! In America, we do the right thing and we create jobs; they're not mutually exclusive, no matter how much the big polluters want you to think they are.

Daily Kos helps you tell Facebook to ditch its algorithms. Because they cause palpable harm to our civilization, and Facebook knows it! We didn't even need Frances Haugen’s Senate testimony on Tuesday to know this; we need only to listen to Facebook's own words, from a 2018 internal report: "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness." That's why troll farms do so well on good Americans' news feeds, that's how white supremacist assholes find each other so easily on Facebook, and that's how anti-vaxxers get so much damn attention! Meanwhile, actual social justice sites (ahem!) can't get so much as a flare up on Facebook. It's not too far to say Facebook favors evil, and as civilized people, we have no obligation to merely put up with it. In fact, we have a duty to stop it. (Not for nothing, but getting rid of algorithms will force Facebook to create jobs for people who would moderate Facebooks' offerings.)

Common Cause helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the Republican House Reps who enabled the January 6 coup attempt. These big corporations said they were done funding the 147 House Reps who votes against certifying the 2020 election and thus gave aid and comfort to those who tried to overrun our Capitol on January 6 -- but obviously they were lying. No, I won't even give them "credit" for "speaking in the moment" and then "thinking better of it later" -- big corporations have a lot of people on staff who think about these things. Now these big corporations need to hear from us about their enabling of fascism in America, and we need to bring the Big Stick of Bad PR down upon them, lest they "think better" again and ignore us again. They'd probably prefer fascism to democracy, you know -- unless we make it impossible for them to act on that preference.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to end our government's notorious Title 42 deportation policy. Stephen Miller came up with the idea of deporting immigrants en masse because ZOMG THEYZ BRINGZ TEH COVIDZ!!!!!!, and I submit that's reason enough to stop the program. However, most of you will want more from an argument than that, so here it is: the Title 42 policy doesn't even protect us from further illness; after all, wouldn't cases have gone up dramatically this past spring if immigrants were really bringing COVID here? We're keeping this pandemic going all by ourselves, thank you very much! And, not for nothing, but you don't even see our Border Patrol whipping Haitian migrants around without Title 42 giving them license to do their worst. And why would we want to do our worst?

In a related note, Moms Rising helps you tell Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas to stop deporting Haitians. He, like President Biden, has condemned the sight of CBP agents treating Haitian migrants like dogs, but he, like President Biden, doesn't seem to understand that he can do something about that, hence the reminder we will give him at the above link. And, not for nothing, but we do have a process for folks who come here from other nations; maybe process is all "Deep State" to some people, but usually those folks have no clue what a Deep State actually is -- it's a real thing, not just something you blame when you don't get your way! -- and we give immigrants the best chance to come here not because we're weak, or because we're trying to "replace" white people, but because we are confident in our greatness. Maybe right-wingers just aren't as confident about our greatness as we are.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell Amazon to stop throwing out hundreds of thousands of perfectly good products. All those laptops have to go somewhere, after all -- like, in landfills, where they will stay for hundreds of years and leech pollution into our air, water, and soil. But I may be going too fast here; you may still be stuck on Amazon throws away laptops! And I wouldn't blame you. Gosh, Jeff Bezos is really the man who has everything! And "hundreds of thousands" is almost certainly a very low estimate -- one warehouse aims to throw away 130,000 items daily, and Amazon has over 180 warehouses. It hasn't occurred to them to donate all these items? I guess it wouldn't, if you already don't pay any taxes. But at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, tax breaks aren't the only reason in the world to do good works.

Action: concerning torture, immigration, Palestine, our Postal Service, and women's health.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to stop police torture of protestors at Line 3, tell the Biden Administration to stop deportation flights to Haiti, and tell Congress to pass the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, the Postal Service Reform Act, and the Women's Health Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Justice Department to stop police from torturing protestors at Line 3. Ever heard of "pain compliance"? Sounds a lot like "enhanced interrogation," doesn't it? "Pain compliance" describes the practice (not that you'd want to practice this) of inflicting searing pain on pressure points until the person you're inflicting the pain upon cries uncle. If Enbridge is resorting to torturing protestors, they must be having trouble getting everyone on board with their plan to transport tar sands oil over Midwestern water tables. And if Enbridge has to pay county cops to do it, well, maybe the Line 3 pipeline has become too toxic. So to speak.

Both Amnesty International and Moms Rising help you tell the Biden Administration to stop its deportations of Haitians. The recent news hook, of course, is the Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) officers nearly running down Haitian asylum-seekers on horseback, a sight President Biden condemned -- before resuming flights of said asylum-seekers back to Haiti. Hey, did something happen there a month ago? Oh, right, another earthquake. And has something been happening there for 200 years? Why, yes, Western nations including the United States have been treating Haiti like toilet paper, all for having the gall to win independence from France. All these nations were perfectly OK with forcing Haitians to actually pay reparations to former slave-owners. How's that sound, Larry Elder? How about we not be cruel bastards this one time? It'll make the next time easier.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2590, the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act. It doesn't make a clever acronym, but it would prevent American taxpayer dollars (i.e., your money) from going toward actions that violate international law, such as detaining and maltreating Palestinian children, seizing and destroying Palestinian property (including homes), and annexation of Palestinian territory generally. You really don't have to trace back who-did-what-first in this matter; you only need realize that Israel is a lot more powerful than Palestine, and even worse, acts like they're besieged and beleaguered, which guarantees they'll do a lot worse to Palestine in the future. And that's not something you want to pay for.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Can you believe there are folks who have "lost faith" in our Post Office? Such folks are largely unaware that the reason our Post Office has funding issues is that our laws mandate that it pre-fund retiree benefits 85 years in advance, a mandate our laws ask of literally no other federal agency, and certainly of no corporation. That means cut services and cut jobs, almost as if Congress planned it that way back in 2006. Lift the mandate and it'll be like lifting a 300-pound weight off the Post Office's chest. Our Postal Service workers will breathe easier, certainly. We can have more of them, too! And postal banking! But first, let's cut the cancer out.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. Republicans won't vote for it (apparently not even the pro-choice ones like Susan Collins, what a good little drone she is!), because it'll actually get rid of all the heartbeat bills and the forced ultrasound bills and the six-week abortion bans and the forced bad medical advice bills that states have passed in order to make it hard for women to get abortions when they need them. Yes, women do need them, if pregnancy puts their life or health in danger, or if their fetus has no organs. And women should get them when they want them, too, lest the state force women into the role of breeders-and-nothing-else again.

Action: concerning vaccines, refugees, pollution, "fraudits," and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to loosen trade restraints on vaccine production, admit more Afghan refugees, and deliver the most vigorous Clean Car standards possible; tell Pennsylvania state legislators to end their election "fraudit," and tell big corporations to stop donating to Republican insurrection-supporters. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Rethink Trade helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop dragging its feet on stimulating world-wide vaccine production. Despite our Administration's stated preference for a waiver on intellectual property demands that would stimulate vaccine production worldwide -- which would reduce the chance COVID would come back to bite us again and again and again -- we know from an internal WTO document that our Administration has, in fact, not been pressing in any meaningful way on this matter -- they voted against the South Africa/India proposal to suspend intellectual property rules vis a vis COVID vaccines, and they continue to lament "lost momentum" without actually providing any of that "lost momentum" in negotiations. In sum, their ass is showing, and the best way for them to cover it up is to do their jobs already.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to ensure all the Afghan refugees who helped out our 20-year war effort can get asylum in the United States. Compassion is one good reason to do this; we-broke-it-we-bought-it is another. But you know what's a bad reason to do this? The fact that we still have homeless veterans! Well-meaning people have brought this objection to me recently: we're going to take care of Afghan refugees, but not our homeless veterans? Thing is, we actually do have programs that help homeless veterans, and the fact that some of them aren't getting the help we need is actually not a good reason to deny help to everyone (or anyone!) else. I'd go so far as to say their position is illogical, in fact. So if your nephew brings it up, now you know what to say.

Consumer Reports helps you demand that our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) enact the most vigorous Clean Car standards possible, and ignore the self-interested arguments of big auto manufacturing corporations. I guarantee you our comments will vastly outnumber theirs anyway. But seriously, we have all the winning arguments -- if cars get more miles to the gallon, they'll pollute less, and we'll spend less money on gas for all the years we drive them. What does the other side say? That cars will cost less to buy, which means little if you can't breathe the air or pay more for gas. Yet the EPA's plan, as currently constructed, has more than a few loopholes designed to induce agreement from big automakers -- as if they don't always demand more! But we've got to speak up, not least so we can eventually win in court, as we did all through the Trump years.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state Senators to end their attempts to bring an Arizona-style "fraudit" to Pennsylvania. Arizona's "fraudit" of Maricopa County votes -- conducted by a firm with no experience in election audits but plenty of experience in saying STOP TEH STEAL!!!!! very loudly -- cost the taxpayer money, amplified absurd election fraud claims, damaged Maricopa County's voting machines to the point they need to be replaced (again at taxpayer cost), and (per at least one very rich Trumphole) will shortly report exactly zero "voter fraud" in Maricopa County's 2020 votes. So, yeah, let's bring all that drama to Pennsylvania! If I cared only about politics, I'd say bring on the fraudit and watch Pennsylvania's independent voters all vote Democrat in 2022. But since I care about civilization, and despise drama, I'm going to advocate for better behavior instead.

Common Cause helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the 147 Congressional Republicans who gave aid and comfort to the January 6 coup. They would be the ones who voted not to certify the 2020 election, even though the "allegations" of "fraud" were utter bullshit, and a lot of corporations talked a good game about not giving them money anymore, but they've quietly gone back on their word. We're talking General Motors, American Airlines, UPS, and Tyson -- all household names, giving their blessing (and their cash) to politicians who acted like diaper-loaded brats earlier this year, and enabled the attempted coup at our Capitol on January 6. They deserve all the bad publicity we can give them, and we're good enough at using the Big Stick of Bad PR that we can make their donations toxic. So let's do that.

Action: concerning privacy, monopolies, student loan debt, Arctic drilling, refugees, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Apple to withdraw its plan to scan every piece of data on folks' iPhones, and tell the Biden Administration to suspend big pharma monopolies, cancel student loan debt, scuttle the ConocoPhillips Willow project, reverse its Title 42 refugee ban, and fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both No Spy Phone and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you tell Apple to scuttle its plan to scan every piece of data on our phones. Which makes a mockery of their oft-stated commitment to user privacy! They say it's to protect kids from sex traffickers, but does scanning every piece of data on every iPhone really do that? Apple's plan would compare photos of children to a national database of "child abuse images," but this is a species of facial recognition software, which we already know isn't very good at its stated purpose. And Apple's plan would also use, you guessed it, an algorithm to inspect kids' phones for sexually explicit messages, but this'll more likely put more gay kids at the mercy of abusive parents, since algorithms tend to regard any gay content as "sexually explicit." So, in sum: you don't want to give up privacy for security, but you certainly don't want to give it up for bad security.

Rethink Trade helps you tell President Biden to suspend big pharma monopolies so that everyone across the planet can get the vaccines. So we can end the pandemic! It sickens me that our leaders place "corporate intellectual property" above ending the pandemic; as long as we try to "do both," COVID will keep getting more opportunities to mutate and kill people. President Biden did say he favored a temporary WTO waiver on intellectual property matters, but saying you support something and actually doing something are two entirely different things, and the 150,000-plus cases we're getting every day now tell us it's well past time to do something.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to cancel federally-held student loan debt. This should be a conservative initiative! Our government would get less revenue, and the money would go back to good Americans so they can decide what to do with it -- yikes, it sounds like a tax cut! Of course, today's "conservatives" don't traffic in ideas; they traffic in rage, hence all that whispering in your ear about how you didn't get to have your student loan debt cancelled, so why should they? As too often happens with "conservatives" today, that kind of argument is utterly childish -- not letting someone else get a benefit merely because you didn't get it? What are we, 12? We have a heritage and traditions to uphold, and that demands maturity.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell President Biden to "walk away" from the proposed ConocoPhillips Willow oil drilling project in Alaska's western Arctic area. Arctic drilling has numerous intractable problems -- chiefly, the near-impossibility of remediating oil spills and our lack of knowledge about the ecosystems we'd disrupt -- but last week an Alaska District Court judge revoked the permit ConocoPhillips got from the Trump Administration, on the grounds that the Trump Administration (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) didn't adhere to federal law in analyzing the environmental impact of the Willow project. Seems like a good opportunity for the Biden Administration to simply wash its hands of the whole thing! And you can help them reach that decision.

NETWORK helps you tell President Biden to reverse his decision extending the notorious Title 42 ban on refugees, a ban based on the tenuous proposition that refugees might make the COVID pandemic worse. Governors DeSantis, Abbott, and Noem are already doing a bang-up job of that, amirite? The Trump Administration's decision to impose a Title 42 ban came from none other than advisor/man with a face even a mother could punch Stephen Miller, and loathe as I am to use ad hominem arguments, that fact alone should indicate that this Title 42 ban ain't about health care but about racism -- and about using any conceivable tool in the toolbox to slow emigration to the United States. You know what would slow emigration to the United States? If we stopped using the world as our litter box, that's what! So let's demand that our leaders do the right thing, in the right way.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy already. Not just for trying to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump, not just for raising prices and cutting services which is such a bold way of fixing problems, but for our USPS giving contracts to his old employer and for him investing in a fund run by one of our USPS Governors, Ron Bloom -- who not long ago said he thought Mr. DeJoy was doing a great job! If I pulled all this crap at any of my jobs, I'd be out on my ass. But in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, having money means never having to say you're sorry, or being held accountable for your actions. Let's work to change that, shall we?

Action: concerning jobs, war, refugees, voting rights, police violence, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to pass the reconciliation budget blueprint, tell your Congressfolk to repeal the "war on terror"-era AUMFs, tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap on Afghan refugees, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, eliminate qualified immunity for police officers, and pass the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: call your House Reps and tell them to vote in favor of the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint the Senate passed a few weeks ago, the budget blueprint that will enable all sorts of good things to happen in America -- higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, a stronger care-based economy, and paid family/medical leave for all workers, just to name a few. A few "moderate" Democrats are trying to take the bill hostage, but theirs is the calculus of cowardice -- the result of their actions, which may also be the aim of their actions, will be to scuttle both the reconciliation bill and the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" at whose altar they kneel. If they do that, they will lose not only their own seats, but the House and Senate -- and this time, they'll lose them to Republicans who openly identify as fascists. So brook no silliness from your House Reps about "the difficulty of raising taxes in an election." You know what's harder than raising taxes in an election? Winning elections in a fascist state when you're not a fascist.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs) that started the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and thus end our "forever war." Some people, and by some people I mainly mean people on the right side of the political spectrum, just aren't happy unless we're at war. Put six beers in them and they'll say war is the way to remake the world! Helluva job they did in Afghanistan, if so. War isn't the way to "remake the world," it's the way to redistribute income from taxpayers into defense contracting CEOs' pockets. You may note that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) has sponsored these AUMF repeals, as she has done in the past, and you may remember that Rep. Lee was literally the only "nay" vote against the Afghanistan AUMF. If I were her, I'd wear an "I WAS RIGHT" baseball cap from now until the day they put me in the ground. But first, let's have her being right about that count for something.

In a related note, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to raise the refugee cap for Afghans fleeing from the Taliban, so that more of the 300,000-plus Afghans who helped our military during the war effort can get out. You've already heard famous right-wing blowhards warn us about the coming "invasion" of Afghans, but this should be pretty simple to figure out from a moral perspective -- we did this to them, by invading their country, toppling their government, and promising them we would make their lives better. Now the government we toppled is back in power like the last 20 years didn't happen, and right-wingers expect we'll put racism above letting the Taliban murder the folks who helped us? So much for being the "guardians of morality." Let's not let them make all the damn decisions around here.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Remember when our Supreme Court knocked the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder? H.R. 4 would put those teeth back. In the aforementioned Shelby County v. Holder, our Court held that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states by forcing them to pre-clear their voting law changes with our Justice Department -- but our Court also held that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass Constitutional muster. God only knows if that's true anymore, what with Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the Court now, but H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of voting rights violations to Justice Department pre-clearance. And with so many states trying to suppress the vote as we speak, we need H.R. 4. So brook no silliness about "how the South has changed," because this is about America.

Black Lives Matter helps you tell your Congressfolk and the Biden Administration to prioritize ending "qualified immunity" for police officers when they execute Black folks without even charging them with a crime. I put that last phrase in there because it gives some people pause -- folks will "support the police" without thinking very hard about what it means, but they generally will not support "killing people without charge." A few will, believe it or not, but then every generation has had to deal with crazy people. Without getting too inside-baseball (I've done that in other posts about this matter!), "qualified immunity" restricts your ability to sue a police officer for a wrongful death, and restricts that ability way, way beyond the bounds of common sense -- to the point where parents of teenage kids shot by police can't get the justice they deserve. So let's get our government to do the right thing here.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. Postmaster General DeJoy's response to USPS funding shortfalls? Raise prices and lower services. The Postal Service Reform Act's response? Stop forcing our USPS to pre-fund retiree benefits for employees who ain't even born, get postal retirees into Medicare, and allow our USPS to offer additional services like postal banking -- though the bill doesn't specify postal banking, so you may want to say that you want that in the bill when you talk to (or write) your Congressperson. Virtually all of our USPS's problems can be traced to the pre-funding of retiree benefits, and in my experience, our Post Office continues to deliver exemplary service even with all the crap they have to put up with, and services that work you want to keep working. So let's keep our Postal Service, and let's help it thrive.

Around the table: featuring the usual assortment of whiners and sore losers.

Richard Wolff at Counterpunch says "The Neoliberal Drive to Privatize Everything is Running Out of Gas," but what if Republicans are just waiting until they regain the keys to Congress, be that this election or next? Not that we should ever allow them behind the wheel again, but I always fear that Americans have short memories, even when one party tries to nullify the people's will in an election, and I hate to beat a dead horse, but if Democrats actually accomplish something worth accomplishing with the power they have, they can head off Republicans getting control again, at least in the short term. And yet, as Mr. Wolff says, Mr. Biden ain't taking advantage of this situation the way he could, even if he seems to be doing more with the opportunity than Mr. Obama did. There's a solution in there, somewhere.

Jesus Mary and Joseph another sore loser cries "fraud" after losing an election, this time in Peru. And where a coup attempt failed in this country because a) our institutions have somehow survived 40 years of right-wing assaults and b) the coup ringleaders were awful leaders, I don't see Peru doing as well, not just because it's a closer race than Biden-Trump was, but also because right-wing racism is even more out in the open than it is here. (By the way, the leftist candidate who won enjoys the support of the rural poor. See, Democrats? That could be you, too.)

Ada Rajkovic at FAIR notices something missing from TV coverage of border issues: the words and stories of actual refugees! You'd think their voices would count for something, after all! And even when they do talk to a refugee, it seems like it's only for a few seconds. Maybe they don't know any refugees! I mean, it is possible, since media personalities tend only to talk to powerful people and each other these days. (And remember: when they call it a "crisis," they lie. And when they call it an "invasion," they insult the memory of everyone who ever had to endure an actual invasion. Words do mean things, after all.)

Sen. Sanders (I-VT) makes a list of things he won't support in an infrastructure bill, like gas taxes and electric vehicle fees. I wouldn't support any of these things, either, but this will be an interesting test -- does the right think it can make the nation's most popular Senator into an "enemy of bipartisanship"? If they think that, they have their work cut out for them -- after all, Bernie Sanders is the fellow who got applause for supporting Medicare-for-All at a Fox News town hall. (Seriously, though, electric vehicle fees? It's like Republicans just hate any kind of progress.)

Finally, when I hear that anti-vaxxers kept out of a Foo Fighters concert say their plight is like "segregation,"all I can say is waaaaaaaah. What was segregation like again? Being forced to walk and talk and eat and drink and live and work and play and get jobs and health care separately from your fellow human beings because of something you couldn't control, i.e., the color of your skin; you have considerably more control over whether you get a COVID vaccine. Segregation also involved getting the crap kicked out of you by police on a fairly routine basis. I keep having to explain this to people, and I think they're not listening because they know I'm right but don't have the guts to admit it.

Around the table: Republicans spread rubbish about the infrastructure bill, and other total non-surprises.

FactCheck reminds us that Republicans are fairly consistently "underestimating" how much of President Biden's American Jobs Plan actually consists of what we'd reasonably call infrastructure spending. Long story short: it's not "6 percent" like they're all repeating like a bunch of robots, but by Sen. Thune's own limited standards it's more like 17%. And everything FactCheck names sounds like infrastructure to me, so really it's more like 65%. I include the $400 billion for long-term care for the aging, for example, since investing in facilities that take care of us when we're older does sound rather like building things our civilization can use.

When I hear that our "liberal" media still calls a thing "divisive" if people like it but Our Glorious Elites don't, I'm reminded that our "liberal" media called "opposing the Iraq war" an "extreme" position even after polls informed us that 60% of Americans held that position, and that the sainted President Obama called those who criticized his 2010 capitulation to Republicans on tax-cuts-for-the-rich "sanctimonious" and "purist," even though well over half of Americans, even then, wanted the rich to pay more in taxes. So this is an old trick, but one that's working less and less, I think. And let's say this one more time: "Every single Democratic incumbent in a swing district who endorsed Medicare for All won reelection in 2020. The same cannot be said for those that did not endorse it."

We mentioned last week that colleges have used the pandemic as (another) excuse to cut their departments, but I'm pleased to note that unions at CUNY and Rutgers have been pushing back, albeit when those universities actually tried to violate contractually-promised pay increases. But that's why we have unions, and it's why we should have more of them. It's also why right-wingers constantly go on about "union dues," when you'll generally make a lot more money in salary at a union shop than you'll pay in dues. I mean, what else they got? "Unions hold back progress" sure ain't working for them, being, as it is, demonstrably wrong.

After a lot of pushback from liberals, President Biden decided to lift the Trump Administration's draconian cap on refugee admissions after all. I guess our "liberal" media will talk about how he "caved" to the left, as if doing the people's will is itself "capitulation" (no, I don't think "the people's will" was ever "try to keep out all refugees"). But perhaps Mr. Biden realized -- unlike President Obama, notoriously known as the "Deporter-in-Chief" during his tenure -- that acting like a right-winger on immigration matters will garner you the appreciation of exactly zero right-wingers.

In a related note, certain right-wing Republicans planned to start an "America First Caucus," devoted, apparently to maintaining "a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions" oh the hell with it waaaaaaaaah. You can always tell when someone's blind to their own privilege: they think the fact that they don't get all the say about everything means they get no say about anything. Naturally one of the ringleaders now denies the whole thing, and just as naturally blames the media for reporting on the matter accurately.

Finally, the interwebs are agog with a clip in which Pat Robertson opposes police shooting Black folks to death without even charging them with a crime. He says a lot of the right things, but he keeps cutting himself off, too; possibly he's trying to avoid saying something he thinks will alienate his audience, and possibly he's angry police shooters put him in this uncomfortable position where he has to say he's "pro-police" while also saying you'd better be able to tell the difference between a gun and a taser. I do feel like I have been describing how to split that knot -- it starts with "stop making our police the Swiss Army knives of our civilization."

Action: concerning COVID relief and concentration camps.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a "robust" COVID-19 relief bill. You may want to edit their email, given that our more cowardly Congressfolk are whining about the deficit, which they never do when contemplating corporate welfare handouts, but always do when contemplating serving actual bosses, the American people. But hey, we're all about solutions, too. So you can go ahead and tell them that you want $2,000 checks every month until the pandemic's been over for three months, plus enhanced unemployment benefits, plus a $15/hour minimum wage -- and that you would help pay for it by repealing the CARES Act's massive hedge fund tax cut, plus a 55% tax on corporate profits and capital gains over $1 million and a 91% tax on income over $1 million. They say liberals never ask how we're going to pay for things, so go ahead and prove them wrong.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden's been very, very busy issuing Executive Orders just to undo the damage of all of Donald Trump's Executive Orders -- but he has thus far failed to get rid of the Trumpian concentration camps full of asylum-seekers and other immigrant families. You may well find yourself hesitating at the thought, not because you want people in concentration camps, but because it takes time to fix things right. But even if we set aside our conviction that justice must be done now, I think such concerns would be misplaced -- these concentration camps are dirty and overcrowded, and that's before we get to the fact that we're still in the middle of a pandemic that shows no signs of abating; you might well conclude, then, that releasing the folks in ICE camps isn't just the right thing to do, but the pragmatic thing to do. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to release families from ICE concentration camps immediately.

Action: concerning pollution, immigration, and bankster misbehavior.

You've no doubt heard that our Administration has rolled back the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard, which had already done a good deal to reduce pollution from coal corporations. And not because our President "cares" about coal miners! How many times must I tell these pimps! Coal miners breathe air, after all, so dirtying their air a little more doesn't help them -- though it does help their bosses gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, and for our President, that is what "saving coal" is all about! It's always about other bosses with this guy! And not for nothing, but polluting the air more is approximately the last thing you should do during a pandemic that literally chokes people to death. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to stop rolling back pollution protections during a pandemic, or, indeed, during any other time. If coal corporations want to survive, why don't they embrace renewable energy? They'll whine about how "tough" that is, but these are our "best" and "brightest" entrepreneurs, after all, so maybe they ought to live up to their own PR.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell our President to give asylum-seekers a fairer process. There is, after all, a world-wide pandemic going on, even if there are fewer wars going on as a result, and folks do deserve our mercy. Don't brook any silliness from right-wingers about how WE HAVEZ TO TAKEZ CAREZ OF OUR OWNZ!!!!! No one has actually said otherwise! Though plenty of right-wingers actually do espouse not taking care of our own, and too many of them also indulge in rage-fantasies that every single refugee, merely by being in America, takes food out of an American child's mouth. That being said, yes, if we stopped importing foreign workers to do the jobs that we (wrongly) imagine Americans won't do, we would better be able to practice the mercy of a great nation by helping more refugees from war-torn or plague-torn lands. Strangely, that's not how we do it in America, because it doesn't enable some CEO somewhere to gild the plumbing on his 19th vacation home. I sure do hope some Americans remain who regard civilized behavior as more worthy of preservation than a millionaire's unearned income.

Finally, our Treasury Department says it'll allow banks to seize your stimulus check in order to cover fees or debts. This comes, of course, from the Treasury Department headed up by the Foreclosure King, Steve Mnuchin, who once foreclosed on a grandmother who was 27 cents in arrears on her mortgage, and who recently claimed that you should be able to make your stimulus check last 10 weeks! Maybe that was true the last time he ever had to count the cost of anything -- or maybe he's just a bad human being who doesn't care about anything he says or does. But the whole point of a stimulus is to get money in people's hands so they'll spend it and keep the economy going, but if banks are just going to take it from you -- to pay off debts they've likely tolerated for a long time! -- then it's not very much of a stimulus, is it? Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk and your Treasury Department to stop letting banks take people's stimulus checks. I don't necessarily expect our politicians to listen -- but I do expect them to suffer embarrassment in the eyes of the American people if they fail to act.

Action: concerning Medicare-for-All health insurance, voting by mail, and other excellent ideas.

At the risk of being accused of "using the pandemic as an opportunity to pass my wish list" -- an accusation I usually hear from people actually using the pandemic as an opportunity to pass their wish list! -- I think you should call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act. We all can see that the "free market" didn't make enough masks and didn't make enough ventilators -- and we all can see that the "free market" would never have made enough masks and ventilators to withstand a pandemic because there's no money in saving people from the coronavirus; the people who die, after all, are no longer a "burden on the system." That's not me talking; that's every health care CEO after his sixth beer talking. I would also tell your Congressfolk that Sen. Warren's plan to fund Medicare-for-All -- she would convert what corporations are already paying private insurers into a kind of fee that would fund Medicare-for-All -- is the best one. You know, for when they ask HOW WILLZ TEH LIBRULZ PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!!!

I'm going to put a lot of repeat action alerts at the end today, because this is going to be a busy week, but I want to highlight this one, in which Daily Kos helps you tell your state governments to allow voting-by-mail for the 2020 election. We've told Congress to do it, but getting Congress to do something good for their-bosses-the-people is like pulling teeth, so now we tell state governments to do it -- and they might be more responsive, even in red states, being as they're more likely to run into their constituents than federal-level politicians are. I say "even in red states" because Republicans are saying the same damn thing -- our President suggested to Fox and Friends last week that if too many Americans vote, Republicans won't win any elections, and the Georgia House Speaker echoed those "concerns" shortly afterward. You know what I say to that? It's bootstrap time! If you're afraid no one will vote for you, stop your whining and try persuading them!

Meanwhile, Avaaz helps you call for a global ceasefire as the pandemic rages. I know some idiot will say, again, "you're just using the pandemic to pass your own pet initiatives," but I would a) challenge them to produce the last time I called for a global ceasefire (spoiler alert: never) and b) I would remind them that wars just make pandemics worse -- wars create more destruction and more refugees, and wars take health care workers away from fighting the pandemic, either by killing them or putting them on the front lines where they're just fixing up troops well enough so they can go be cannon fodder again. And, seriously, can we name a war that's worth fighting right now? That war on Yemen, for example, might make Saudi Arabia's government feel safer, but really it does nothing but put good Yemenis on the brink of famine and kill the Houthis who are some of the best fighters of al-Qaeda on Earth. The Syrian civil war has been going on for almost a decade now, and to what end? Too often it seems like everyone's moved on from war except the politicians, so we should bring them to heel.

Finally, as I've said, I've got a lot of action alerts for this week (and it's only Monday!), so I'm going to summarize the ones I've talked about before. The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to contain coronavirus in our nation's concentration camps, since, you know, immigrants and refugees are people, too, even if our President says they're not. Also, the Union for Concerned Scientists helps you tell our President to start using the Defense Production Act to manufacture masks and ventilators already; he still hasn't done it, because GUMMINT BAD!!!!, but such ideology really should wither before the spectre of death. And Penn PIRG helps you tell your state Attorney General to investigate Amazon for price-gouging of medical supplies; they've said they're cracking down on it, but you know they also benefit financially from it, so you'd like to see some action. Last but not least, People for the American Way helps you tell our SEC to investigate any Senator who may have benefited financially from selling their own stock in advance of the pandemic. These ain't big asks, frankly -- and we'll keep asking until they do our will.

Action: concerning xenophobia, pollution, and high drug prices.

The third anniversary of our President's notorious Muslim Ban passed this week, and our President -- never one to admit that he's ever done anything wrong! -- has said he'll expand the ban, so this is as good a time as any to let the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your House Reps to pass two bills that would restrain our President's xenophobia with regard to immigrants and refugees. The bills in question are H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, and H.R. 2146/S. 1088, the GRACE Act; the former bill would roll back the Muslim ban and make it harder to enact future religion-based bans, while the latter would increase the minimum number of refugees we can admit every year. I would caution against pointing to the lack of 9.11-style attacks since our President enacted his Muslim ban, since we had many, many years without such an attack while having much, much less restrictive immigration policies. I would also remind you that our President's election saw a spike in hate crimes against Jews and Muslims and that we do still seem to suffer an awful lot of mass shootings. I mean, white people also commit terrorism.

Meanwhile, it ain't just the Great Barrier Reef that's under siege from pollution -- America's only living coral barrier reef, the Florida Reef, also struggles with pollution despite its continuing designation as a marine sanctuary. And now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA) is mulling whether to offer new protections for the Florida Reef, so Environmental Action helps you tell our NOAA to implement the strongest protections possible for the Florida Reef. The threats to the Reef have, after all, changed over the years -- the Reef didn't face rising sea levels, farm runoff, and plastic pollution 40 years ago the way it does now -- and thus our regulations need to meet those changes. Interesting that our NOAA is actually considering strengthening environmental protections, considering that this Administration has consistently demonstrated a hatred of such protections. Probably our President wants something to argue about with TEH LIBRULZ!!!! whenever we complain about his record, and probably he wants to win Florida again. But I would take these risks to save the Florida Reef.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell the Connecticut state legislature to cap the cost of insulin copayments. Why Connecticut? Presumably because the petition's author lives there, but also because several states have already moved to cap the cost of insulin, and though our House of Representatives has moved to do the same at the federal level, our Senate will do its damnedest to do nothing about it, this even though one out of every four diabetics wind up rationing their insulin due to its exorbitant cost, and a diabetic who rations their insulin is likely to wind up dead. I'd prefer to contextualize the rising cost of insulin a bit differently, though -- the cost went up 100% (that is, it doubled) between 2012 and 2016, and what was inflation, generally, during that time? 4.5%. And how much did health care costs go up generally during that time? 15%. 100%, you'll notice, is considerably larger than both of these numbers, and no producer of insulin has ever justified such a cost hike. So gosh, maybe governments can hold those costs down without ludicrous insinuations of "socialism"?

Action: concerning abortion rights, the war on Yemen, and Presidential corruption.

First things first. Hot on the heels of a "heartbeat" bill designed to test whether our Supreme Court will continue to uphold Roe v. Wade, Ohio state legislators have introduced HB 413, which would force doctors to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy inside a woman's uterus or face "abortion murder" charges, even though scientists tell us that such reimplantation is medically impossible. I guess they'll call that an "unintended consequence" of the bill, but the hell it is -- today's "conservatives" care nothing about good policy, and they certainly don't care about reducing abortions; they only care about swordfighting over who's more "conservative." You can reach House Speaker Larry Householder (R-72) at 614.466.2500, and Senate Majority Leader Larry Obhof (R-22) at 614.466.7505, and Gov. Mike DeWine (R) at 614.644.4375, so you can tell them you want Ohio to stop playing politics with women's lives and reject HB 413.

Meanwhile, our government continues to enable the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, a continuing humanitarian disaster, and our government also talks of revoking Temporary Protected Status (or TPS) for every refugee it can, hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that Yemeni refugees can still get TPS status in America. I mean, if we're going to help create the conditions from which refugees try to flee, it would be hypocritical for us to shut our doors to those same refugees, would it not? And don't let anyone try to tell you that giving TPS to Yemeni refugees would "cause terrorism," not just because refugees flee terror, but because Jesus Mary and Joseph the war on Yemen causes more terrorism! Yes, by targeting the Houthi rebels in Yemen, we are helping decimate the ranks of some of the best al-Qaeda fighters on Earth. So no one gets to play the "terror" card when discussing TPS status for Yemeni refugees -- at least, not if they don't want to be the stupidest people on Earth.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to investigate the flow of our taxpayer money into our President's pockets, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. And if your Tea Party uncle tells you that all politicians do it, ask him: does that make it right? Seriously, this is the question we must always ask! Every day we must battle the cynicism of which far too many Americans are proud! And it is most pointedly not beside the point that a President (even one who got only 46% of the popular vote!) might use the power of his office to fill his coffers with taxpayer money. I'm old enough to remember when politicians avoided even strictly-speaking-legal diversions of taxpayer money into their properties, so worried were they about the appearance of corruption. And that's an America we ought to bring back, regardless of whether or not it hurts the feelings of our President's most devoted supporters.

Action: concerning social media, school lunch shaming, and Bahamian refugees.

In the wake of reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hobnobbing with notorious right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro -- ostensibly in order to understand why right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's "bias" against them! -- Free Press helps you tell Mr. Zuckerberg to adopt vigorous rules defending its users from abusive hate speech. So far Mr. Zuckerberg has hidden behind the First Amendment in his effort to avoid adopting such standards, but the First Amendment doesn't protect us from Facebook; it protects us from our government, and Facebook, as a publishing platform, has no obligation to publish every single noxious utterance of every single asshole in order to adhere to a notion of "free speech" -- or, at the very least, no obligation to make these utterances public. And if he wants to know why right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's bias, he doesn't have to ask Ben Shapiro -- he can ask me. Right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's bias because whining is all you can do when you can't win arguments on the merits. You're welcome.

Meanwhile, you've heard horror stories of schools sending collection notices to families who can't afford school lunches, or putting wristbands on their children so everyone can identify them by their debt? Sounds like something you'd have seen in Nazi Germany, right? Well, H.R. 3366/S. 1907, the No Shame at School Act, would put a stop to school lunch shaming, would prevent school districts from handing over parents' private info to debt collectors, and would streamline the certification process for school kids so that simple misspellings (for example) won't lead to school lunch debt. You'd think civilized people would know better than to make a kid's life miserable just because his parents don't make a whole lot of money -- so I guess that means the people who would do such things aren't particularly civilized. Civilization isn't just something we have to maintain, after all; it's also something we have to earn. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop school lunch shaming by passing the No Shame at School Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to allow Hurricane Dorian refugees save haven in America, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Hurricane Dorian slammed into the Bahamas last month, leaving over 70,000 good Bahamians without homes, but our President, of course, cited the possibility of allowing "some very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very very bad drug dealers" into the country, as if America has never had a vetting process for refugees, ever. Gosh, nobody ever said you have to be stupid every single time you show mercy; why do you suppose some people would like to link the two in your mind? And why do you suppose our President would want you to think we have always just let people into America willy-nilly? It couldn't be because fear is the only weapon he has left, could it? It's not like he can point to a whole lot of good works as President (or as a human being, really) and persuade people to support him that way. But we're better than him, so let's do better than him.

Action: concerning our Estate Tax, patent trolls, and compassion for hurricane victims.

S. 309, the For the 99.8% Act, would hike our Estate Tax on larger-income estates, i.e., those over $750,000, and create more progressive brackets for Estate Taxes, such that folks who leave billion-dollar estates would pay 77 percent on that part of the estate over a billion dollars, and estates over $10 million dollars would get taxed overall at rates much closer to 50% than they are now. (The high end of the Estate Tax rate is currently 40 percent.) Right-wingers have been having all the say about this matter for a long time now, what with their calling it the "death tax" even though (as the bill's title suggests!) much fewer than 1% of Americans will ever have to pay it! And if we don't tax large estates, then we won't be able to restrain the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to make Estate Taxes fairer and more vigorous by passing the For the 99.8 Percent Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3666/S. 2082, the so-called STRONGER Patents Act, would let patent trolls have their way in America by gutting the inter partes review process, which allows folks to challenge the validity of patents. And a lot of patents, quite frankly, need to be challenged, or else the Patent Office wouldn't have thrown out over 1,500 patents over the last seven years (more than one every other day!) via the IPR process. Patent trolls go around patenting every widely-used thing they can, like crowdfunding and messaging and picture menus, so they can sue craploads of people and win craploads of money, and of course Congress wants to make patents "stronger" so they can withstand scrutiny, rather than making them better so that real innovators can benefit from their work. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect real innovation in America by rejecting the STRONGER Patents Act.

Finally, Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas hard, depriving tens of thousands of good Bahamians of access to food, water, and shelter, but our President, peach of a man that he is, doesn't want to allow any victims of the hurricane to seek refuge in America, because some of them are bad people, or something. He really wants you to think this country has just never had a system to vet people who want to come here! Of course the Temporary Protected Status (or TPS) system has long existed to help out folks who flee their country because of natural disasters, hence H.R. 4272, the TPS for Victims of Hurricane Dorian Act, would allow Bahamians to live and work here for the next 18 months. 18 months! Some folks enjoy TPS status for decades, so bad off are their home countries. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to show some compassion by passing the TPS for Victims of Hurricane Dorian Act.

Around the table: starring Saint Reagan, the racist! And Rand Paul, the bastard!

Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that "Ronald Reagan's Racism" -- as recently exposed on previously-unscrutinized Nixon tapes -- "Should Come as No Surprise." Nor, I might add, should his cleverness about hiding his racism come as a surprise -- as Mr. Goldwater explained his opposition to the Civil Rights Act by saying "(y)ou can't pass a law that will make me like you or you like me," Mr. Reagan framed his opposition to a successful open housing referendum by saying "I have never believed that majority rule has the right to impose on an individual as to what he does with his property," all of which, of course, distracted us from these initiatives' true aim: to prevent people from taking away the rights of other people on the basis of skin color. It almost makes our current President's artless brutality refreshing. I said "almost."

The incomparable Dean Baker asks a question I haven't heard anyone else ask yet: "Why is Facebook, the World's Largest Publisher, Immune to Publishing Laws?" Long story short: people post a lot of false (and damaging in the legal sense) stuff on Facebook, but if our laws treated Facebook as a publisher, which it is, then Facebook would have to a) remove the false/damaging stuff and b) post prominent corrections so that everyone who saw the false/damaging stuff would see the correction. You know, like every other publisher has to do. That might sound like a lot of work, and might actually require Facebook to hire more workers and pay them well, but I've always believed that work builds character, and that adherence to the values of our civilization is the best job-creator.

Ho hum, more than half of our President's trade-aid-to-farmers went to only one-tenth of the farmers in the program. And our USDA claims that this is how the program is supposed to work! No, really, they said, and I quote, "the more acres they farm and bushels per acre they produce, the more assistance they receive." I guess they no longer believe that economies of scale "reduce costs." (As an aside, I'd be wary of suggesting that this is uniquely "a time when the number of mid-sized family farms is declining," because that's been happening for decades, and it's because our government no longer cares about consolidation or monopolies.)

Rand Paul offers to pay Ilhan Omar's way back to Somalia so she can "appreciate America more." Yeah, let's send people running from people trying to kill them back to the people who were trying to kill them, hardy har har. One more time: trying to improve America does not make you "ungrateful," nor does it mean you "don't love America enough." It's like these people think "a more perfect union" is some kind of magic spell, and not a phrase that actually means something.

Finally, let's address the ubiquitous center-right talking point that you shouldn't support an actual liberal for the Democratic Presidential nomination because Democrats wouldn't have the numbers in Congress to pass the legislation they propose. I was about to say this is something only cowards say -- don't support someone you believe in, it'll all end in tears! -- but it's actually worse than that: the No-We-Can't Caucus aren't cowards themselves, but folks who want you to be cowards. And why? Because they fear what we can do and will do when we stop obsessing about them! Our job as citizens, after all is to communicate our will to our representatives in such frequency and in such numbers that they do our will; our job is not to figure out which nominee is the most likely winner so we can be winners too, because that's playing their game. And history is, as usual, also instructive: the day before Election Day 1980, Democrats held 58 seats in the Senate, and you know what happened after that -- an "unelectable" extremist changed everything about politics for the next several decades.

Action: concerning government spying, discrimination, and immigration.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) to stop spying on journalists, activists, and legal advocates. Did DHS get warrants to spy on these individuals? Ha, ha, that is to laugh -- if they'd tried to get warrants, a judge would likely have laughed them out of court, because then DHS would have tried to tie all these good folks to specific acts of violence at the border, and then, perhaps, try to convince a judge that trying to help folks navigate the asylum process and reporting on same is somehow "violent." Also, too, spying on individuals isn't part of DHS's mandate, even if it's handing the data over to ICE and Border Patrol; how utterly surprising that the Administration that struts around about how "law and order" it is constantly flouts the rule of law when good Americans use their Constitutional rights in opposition to this Administration's will. But we have to fight them here, or we're going to be fighting them everywhere.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5/S. 788, the Equality Act, would amend existing civil rights laws (including the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act) so that gay and transgender folks can enjoy protections from discrimination under the law. The fight for LGBTQ civil rights has won many victories over the years, but it has not yet won many basic protections under the law, for you can still be fired just for being gay, denied housing just for being gay, or rejected from school just for being gay, and let's not even get started about how tough it is for transgender folks to take a piss in a public restroom. Which reminds me: the Equality Act will not abridge "religious freedom." You will still be able to worship whichever God you feel compelled to worship. You just won't be able to impose your beliefs on other people, or use the "religious conscience" excuse to discriminate against people you don't like. Freedom for All Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to support freedom and equality for all Americans by passing the Equality Act.

Finally, H.R. 6, the Dream and Promise Act, would accomplish most of the goals the DREAM and American Promise Acts would have achieved if they'd been enacted -- it would help more immigrants brought here as children stay in the country they love (and likely the only country they've ever known), and it would also help more immigrants keep their Temporary Protected Status if they countries from which they've come still aren't safe enough for them to return. What a shame we would call this bill "progress," since what it mainly does is fix what our President broke, but, sadly, that's where we are. I suppose Republicans and their "liberal" media enablers will whine that the bill isn't "bipartisan" enough, even though most of us are old enough to remember when Republicans supported its aims. Of course, good Americans don't care about "bipartisan" government; they only care about good government. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support common-sense immigration policy by passing the Dream and Promise Act -- and without right-wing poison pills.

Action: concerning H.R. 1, discrimination, war-making, and "national emergencies."

As you know, the House passed H.R. 1, the For the People Act, late last week; H.R. 1 would enact broad and far-reaching reforms in voting rights, gerrymandering, ethics, and campaign finance -- or it would, if Senate Majority Leader McConnell would hold a vote on it. But he won't, because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on." He's wrong as usual -- if we get in his grill enough, and we get in his fellow Senators' grills enough, they'll hold a vote on it whether they like it or not. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to vote on and pass the For the People Act. Our Glorious Elites don't seem to understand that most Americans don't consider (for example) automatic voter registration "radical," or campaign finance disclosure "socialist," but folks like Mitch McConnell really believe that the richest people in America are the best people in America and should thus have all the say about everything. I guess it's just our terrific luck that we get a seminar every single day from our President about how little wealth has to do with character or talent.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee state legislature will take up HB 836 -- the so-called Child-Placing Agency Religious Freedom Bill, and with a title that clunky, you know it can't be good -- as early as tomorrow. HB 836 would let private adoption agencies refuse to place children with gay couples if it violates their "religious" "conscience" -- well, actually, the bill words it "written religious or moral convictions or policies," but that might be even worse! You can easily imagine adoption agencies refusing to place children with Unitarians, Jews, Catholics, agnostics, or atheists, when they should just concentrate on finding good parents. I guess the bill's supporters will argue that forcing agencies to put their bigotry in writing is some sort of major advance for civilization, but I'm such a churl I prefer that civilization advance by refusing to let some folks use their bigotry to deny other people their rights. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to protect the rights of all their constituents by rejecting HB 836.

In other news, H.R. 1274 would repeal the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that each of the last three Presidents have abused in launching military campaigns without getting the necessary declaration of war that our Constitution mandates. You may recall that last year Congress tried to repeal the 2001 AUMF but replace it with a far worse AUMF that would have let a President start military operations without getting Congress's permission at all, unless Congress acted to end those military operations within 30 days of their start. But H.R. 1274, which is a very, very short read at Congress.gov, simply repeals the 2001 AUMF. Far too many politicians will protest that repealing the AUMF "puts our troops in harm's way," but that's a most disgusting form of rhetorical hostage-taking, and anyway I'll tell you what puts our troops in harm's way: sending them off to fight wars without doing the due diligence our Founders commanded and our Constitution requires. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help restore law and order by repealing the 2001 AUMF.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass the "resolution of disapproval" that would reverse our President's "emergency declaration" which enables him to fund his vanity border wall, then Moms Rising, Public Citizen, and People for the American Way all still help you do that. Our President's vanity border wall is surely a totem of stupidity and hatred, but you don't need to feel some kind of way about immigration or refugees to oppose his "national emergency" declaration -- all you need to know is that our President said, out loud, in the presence of reporters, not even one calendar day after issuing his declaration, that "I didn't need to do this" but "I would rather do it much faster." Few, if any, words in the English language carry the connotation of "need" that "emergency" does, but I guess our President is bold enough to ignore the common meaning of common words. But we sure don't have to take his guff, and we also don't need to take the guff of Senators too cowardly to oppose a man who's so wrong so much of the time.

Around the table: another net neutrality death, another Republican pretending to be human, and other sideshows.

You probably didn't hear about this, but the FCC just reclassified text messaging as a Title I "information service" versus a Title II "communications service," meaning that big telephone corporations will now be able to censor, block, or throttle your text messages if they like. Naturally the FCC claims it's all about preventing "spam," but that's utter BS, because what are they doing about the actual problem of spam phone calls? And don't think this won't happen to you, because corporations have been blocking text messages from political activist groups while screaming "controversy" for years now.

Color me unimpressed that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) now makes the same complaints about the 2017 tax "reform" that the rest of us do -- particularly that it enables stock buybacks over worker raises. He voted for the damn thing, after all, and all he did at the time was turn the bill's 15-percentage-point corporate tax rate cut into a 14-point cut. And his proposed solutions (taxing stock buybacks at the dividend tax rate! Instead of, heaven forfend, outlawing stock buybacks like we did until 1982!) sound positively Clintonian in their capacity to a) lull voters to sleep and b) utterly fail to solve the problem. Marco Rubio: he gives empty suits a bad name.

So what's the worst thing about outgoing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signing legislation to curb the power of the incoming Democrat Governor and Attorney General? That state Republicans will get even more power to nullify clean air and clean water regulations? That early voting will get curtailed again even though courts have struck similar efforts down before? That Mr. Walker resorted to a Venn diagram to "prove" the bill doesn't hurt the incoming Governor all that much? That it lets state Republican legislators waste taxpayer money on private lawyers when they get sued? Or that Gov. Walker made sure he gave $28 million more in corporate welfare to Kimberly-Clark (which has, as you know, already laid off about one out of every eight of its workers in February, and after getting all that corporate welfare from the federal tax "reform" bill, no less) the day before signing a bill that would have prevented him from doing that? It's hard to know where to start. Indeed, it's almost like that's the idea.

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut surveys some of the recent damage this Administration has done to veterans and refugees and concludes that it all "serves only as yet another bowlful of blood spooned to Trump’s execrable base." But, sadly, this base has been around for decades -- you remember all those "war on terror" voters and Tea Partiers and "Regulation Nation" teeth-gnashers and "All Lives Matter" squealers? Well, these are all the same people. And what really made them? A government of malicious Republicans and weak Democrats that funnels taxpayer money to its cronies and does little other than give us the back of its hand. Really, given how terrible our government has been over the last 40-odd years, we should take credit as Americans for not having more crazy people.

I have to dig into my "Stuff I Should Never Bother With" file to note that when right-wingers are passing around memes on social media attributing a quotation to Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that she did not say because that quotation's been around since before she was born, they're admitting that they can't beat you any other way than by just lying about you. The good news? Right-wingers have apparently decided they can't beat Ms. Ocasio-Cortez any other way than to lie about her before she has even served one minute in Congress.

Finally, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke will, per one of our President's ubiquitous tweets, be leaving his post at the end of the year. Naturally he says he just can't "justify spending thousands of dollars defending myself and my family against false allegations," which I presume include the half-dozen open investigations of his work and conduct, including one referred to our Justice Department. Well, he rode into Interior on a horse, and it looks like he's going out a horse's ass. (And seriously, does our President really not understand that bad actions attract bad press?)

Around the table: how to convert conservatives into liberals, maybe! And other tales.

From the "I'm Not Sure I Should Share This" file: a Yale study suggests we can more easily convert conservatives into liberals merely by first making conservatives feel safe. But the Yale study appears to have converted conservatives into social liberals, which seems to be an easier lift than turning them into economic ones. And even though I've long believed that most folks' emotional attachment to racism and nativism is actually pretty soft, we also have to remember that their newfound sense of safety (and thus their newfound attachment to openness) can be pretty soft, too, if they and their communities don't tend to it properly.

This really should be said a lot more often: "Bake Sales Can’t Fix This: Corporate Tax Cuts Leave Public Schools Desperate." No, really: I've had people tell me the answer to public school funding problems is to get a corporation to donate sports uniforms. And too many of the folks who'd say that would read the tales of corporate donations and online funding platforms and foundational grants and say see? The free market provides! Except that, well, it doesn't, as anyone with more than a glancing relationship with arithmetic would tell you.

"The Science is Clear," declares Elizabeth Shogren and Susie Neilson at Wired, "Dirty Farm Water is Making Us Sick." You know, given how unpopular food poisoning is -- I mean, even our "liberal" media covers it pretty intensely! -- you'd think it'd be easier for enterprising Democrats to draw a direct line from the FDA's delay in implementing new irrigation water-testing rules to our present inability to get Romaine lettuce that doesn't make us violently ill. But Democrats are too afraid of big ag corporations to do that, even though there's a Mack truck-sized opening for the "reasonable," "moderate," "fiscally-sound" Democrat to point out that the FDA rule delay (by the FDA's own analysis!) will cost consumers nine times more money in health care costs than big ag corporations will save in rule-compliance costs. And though I expect the FDA's delay will get struck down in court one day, you won't get much comfort from that if you've died of kidney failure in the meantime.

Uh oh: a Sierra Club FOIA request turns up emails showing former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt actually getting interview questions in advance from Fox and Friends -- and, in at least one instance, he approved a part of the program's script. What will Fox News votaries say about this pattern of obvious collaboration between media and governmental officials, the kind of collaboration warned about in dystopian novels and anti-Communist screeds? They'll say oh, news programs ask pre-interview questions all the time, though they do that with folks hawking their new books, not public servants. I guess the more cynical among them will say you just know MSNBC did that with Obama, though a) "you just know" does not actually describe evidence of a thing and b) if that were true, would that make it right?

Finally, a Fox News personality exclaims on Twitter that seeing our military use tear gas on migrants attempting to cross the border was the "HIGHLIGHT" (caps in original) of her Thanksgiving weekend. I guess some people feel closest to the spirit of the holidays when they watch other people suffer. And did she call it a "HIGHLIGHT" on any of those days the Border Patrol used tear gas on migrants during the Obama Administration? Somehow, I doubt it -- you know liberals never get any love from right-wingers when they act like right-wingers. Anyway, you've heard of this Tomi Lahren, I trust? She's pretty notorious. I don't think we've covered her flatugasms before in this space. But I'm certain we won't be covering them again -- she is, like so many inexplicably well-paid monsters before her, dead to this blog.

Action: concerning refugees and the war on Yemen.

In the middle of that fecal storm of bratty behavior he served up last week -- seriously, he should be ashamed of himself! -- our President authorized our troops stationed at the southwest border to use lethal force against anyone who comes over. But just as a man who has to tell you how tough he is all the time is actually weak, and just as a man who has to tell you what a great job he's doing all the time is doing a bad job, a nation that has to shoot refugees without telling which of them have legitimate claims for refugee status and which don't is, frankly, not a great nation. But then our President doesn't care about America actually being a great nation -- he only cares about diddling the rage glands of his most devoted followers, a strategy which has now cost his party the House and (by my count) at least two Senate seats. So Win Without War helps you tell Defense Secretary Mattis to bring our troops home from the border.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that our Senate could vote as early as tomorrow on S.J.Res. 54, which would end American support for the Saudi/UAE war in Yemen. Our President has said he'll end plane refueling support for this war effort -- which has, as you know, left millions of good Yemeni on the brink of famine -- but he has pointedly not said he'll end other American logistical support for the war effort, and he has more pointedly said that we should just live with our alliance with Saudi Arabia because "(t)he world is a dangerous place!" (exclamation point in original because of course it is) and because Iran is worse, neither of which you would recognize as convincing explanations unless you were a professional cynic. Which you're not, if you read this blog. Anyway, Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to support S.J.Res. 54 and end our involvement in the war on Yemen. Mr. Khasshogi's murder may have moved the needle a bit, but that's all the more reason we must move it more.

Around the table: how Tammy Baldwin won re-election, and other lessons.

David Rosen at TruthOut reminds us that "Regulations Protect Us All." He not only lists the various crises brought about or helped along by lax regulatory oversight (the bankster meltdown of 2008, the Spillageddon in the Gulf of 2010, the Flint lead poisoning crisis of 2014) but he reminds us that our "liberal" media too often buy what anti-regulatory groups are selling without being too critical of it. Regulations actually save money, after all -- they just don't deposit that money directly into CEO bank accounts, as anti-regulatory efforts tend to do. Also, too, "(i)t’s pretty rich for corporations to demand longer, more nuanced, more detailed rules full of loopholes and exceptions to boost their bottom lines, and then turn around and whine about how complicated the rules are."

Mary Bottari at the Center for Media and Democracy describes how Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin fought off $14 million in outside spending attacking her and defeated her far-right opponent by 11 points. How did she do it? She punched back hard against an early attack ad, she defined her opponent as a corporate shill, defended popular causes like fair trade and expanding access to health care, and made those causes personal for her (she lost her mother at an early age to opioid addiction and got seriously ill as a child) and for Wisconsin voters (explaining how "free" trade hurts Wisconsin's massive paper industry). It didn't hurt that her opponent ran truly awful attack ads unbecoming a civilized person, let alone a nurse, or a candidate for U.S. Senate.

Investment bank study finds that building a new utility-scale wind or solar farm costs about as much as running an existing coal power plant. And, you know, eventually we'll run out of coal, but the sun rises every day and the wind always returns (and, ah, there is such a thing as battery storage for relatively lean times). But please, right-wingers, let's hear more bogus stories about "wind turbine syndrome" and "piles of dead birds," and let's pretend that coal miners couldn't possibly adapt to a more renewable future.

And on cue: our "liberal" media stops covering the caravan coming up from Honduras, and now our President is pulling troops from our southwest border. Remember how much ebola was in the news before the 2014 elections and then wasn't in the news at all after that? Good times! But seriously, you can't pull out before an "invasion," can you? Our brave and bold President can. And of course his votaries will tell the story that their Personal Lord and Savior put troops on the border and scared the caravan away. I can't even dismiss the possibility that they'll say he did it with dust from his magic horn.

Finally, it's bad when my veteran co-workers are bringing up our President's statement that the retired Navy Admiral who got Mr. bin Laden -- and who's been very critical of our President lately -- maybe should have gotten to Mr. bin Laden sooner. I have three things to say about that. One, if you can't ever concede even a relatively unimportant point in an argument, you're not being tough so much as you're being weak. Two, a big reason we "didn't get bin Laden sooner" was that George W. Bush didn't "lose a lot of sleep" over it -- or, you know, preferred him alive so he could be a villain in future election campaigns. And three, our President isn't popular with our military so much as he's popular with folks who need everyone to watch them worship our military, and you remember what Jesus said about people who pray in public.

Around the table: concerning the, ah, *strained relationship* between wealth and work, and wealth and law and order.

Brett Stephens at Wired describes the threat coming from the "digital ID." A unified digital ID has benefits (for identifying refugees and for delivery of services for which taxpayers pay) but also has easily-imaginable drawbacks (oppression by governments, hackers, and Black Mirror-style "social credit systems"). Just so happens that some of the things that would protect us from these drawbacks -- i.e., the Fourth Amendment protections of the probable cause warrant -- have been under attack for decades now as part of the "war on terror." Why, it was almost like that was the whole idea.

U.S. District Court judge blocks our Administration's attempts to deport Temporary Protected Status (or TPS) immigrants from four nations -- and cites our President's own statements as evidence that he tried to end TPS status out of racism. I can't say I'm hopeful for this case going to our Supreme Court -- though I also can't say I'm any less hopeful now that the quite-overrated Anthony Kennedy has been replaced with Anthony Kennedy the Thirty Years Younger. They totally ignored his racist statements when evaluating the Muslim travel ban, even as they dug deep to prove an "animus against religion" during Masterpiece Cakeshop.

Our Supreme Court mulls whether trucking corporations can call truckers "independent contractors" and not regular employees so they can push them into arbitration more easily, and for once at least two right-wing Justices seem skeptical that "independent contractors" aren't employees. Shame on CNBC, though, for letting one source go on for several paragraphs about how supporting these truckers would result in higher prices for the consumer, because that is what, class? A rhetorical hostage situation, that's what -- don't do right by these truckers, or the low prices get it! (Also, too, when a guy says prices could go up "10, 15, 20 percent," he sounds like he's making it up, and that's not a good look.)

Briahna Gray at The Intercept reminds us that we tend to demand a "presumption of innocence" for "privileged men" like Brett Kavanaugh, but we don't demand that presumption for others who deserve it -- like Laquan McDonald, shot to death by Chicago police before being charged with a crime, and the Central Park Five, ultimately found innocent of a 1989 rape and murder despite our President's best efforts. I guess if I were more (or less?) spiritually-advanced, I'd find it amusing that right-wingers have gotten all "presumption of innocence" about Mr. Kavanaugh, when he's not even on trial! And if you "just know" Mr. McDonald or the Central Park Five or (fill in dead black person's name) "did something to deserve it," then you're not doing this law-and-order thing right.

Paul Krugman reminds us that the New York Times report on our President's apparent lifelong tax avoidance may do America a great service: it may explode the myth folks earn their "great wealth" "more or less honestly." I've been saying the relationship between work and wealth has been rather strained for a while, but the relationship between law-and-order and wealth also appears to be strained, if we attend our President's example -- or the example described by the Panama Papers, which showed that "(t)he truly wealthy end up paying a much lower effective tax rate than the merely rich, not because of loopholes in tax law, but because they break the law." I guess we now understand fully why our President admires Mr. Putin so much.

Finally, I'll leave it to someone else to expose all the cherry-picking Sen. Collins did in her speech supporting now-Justice Kavanaugh, but FactCheck points out that her statement that D.C. Court of Appeals Chief Judge Merrick Garland voted the same way as Judge Kavanaugh 93 percent of the time is rather misleading. Appellate courts have much, much less power to refuse to hear an appeal, and they're more tightly bound by Supreme Court precedent and circuit court precedent, which means, in one observer's words, "a lot of cases are just slam dunks" and the "vast majority" of appellate court opinions are unanimous. More telling, we learn, is that Justice Kavanaugh not only wrote the most dissents while on the D.C. Court, but also wrote the most separate opinions, which, as we know, can express subtle disagreements with rulings even when they're not actually dissents.

Action: three alerts concerning *real* national security.

Our Administration plans to admit only 30,000 refugees into America this year; recall that refugees are running from terror and are thus far less likely than everyone else to commit terror and you'll see their plan as the grandstanding cruelty it is -- unless, of course, you're a rage addict. But our ministry is not for rage addicts, but for those who may be thinking "we need to do something," when the whole point of living in this world is not to do "something" but to do the right thing. I will say we would find it a whole lot easier to do the right thing in re refugees if we a) stopped treating the world's citizens as impediments to resources we could take for ourselves and b) stopped letting corporations import workers willy-nilly so they can pay workers less and keep more money for themselves. In the meantime, we still have to do the right thing, hence Amnesty International helps us tell our Congressfolk to welcome more refugees to America.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6534, the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, would ensure, within six months of its passage, that employees of our government, and not private contractors, perform essential diplomatic and consular security functions in those areas of the world we're fighting. The bill would then give our President a little over a year to get rid of private contractors in other war-making functions. If you recall how Tha Bush Mobb tried to win the Iraq war with too few soldiers, and then recall how much they paid Blackwater private contractors to perform security functions in Iraq, then you no doubt see how fiscally responsible it would be to ensure we don't privatize so much of our war-making. And if we can't fight or win wars without privatizing some part of them, well, that may just be an indication we shouldn't be fighting the war at all. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop privatizing our wars by passing H.R. 6534.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 6840, the Hold the LYNE Act, and thus stop our Administration's efforts to build so-called "low-yield" nuclear weapons. ("LYNE" stands for "low-yield nuclear explosive." I know, you also thought of this, too.) Anyway, we're already capable of destroying the world hundreds of times over with the nuclear weapons we already have, so you have to wonder why we'd consider building more. I'm sure LYNE advocates try to tell us that we need to have nukes that can cause less damage and give us more military flexibility. But setting aside the notion that we'd ever want to make nuclear war easier to fight: while there's a difference between a handgun and a semi-automatic rifle, there's really not very much difference between a low-yield nuke and what we're used to -- they both kill, they both make survivors very sick, and they both make worlds uninhabitable. It's enough to make you think LYNEs exist merely to make defense contractors rich.

Action: federal budgeting, and Syrian refugees.

Once they return from their recess that I wish they'd stay on forever, Congress will have a mere five days to put together a budget -- or, more likely, a continuing resolution -- that will fund the government and raise the debt ceiling, and given that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the Presidency, I have no doubt they'll use the occasion to hold our government hostage to all sorts of right-wing budget priorities, including Mr. Trump's priority to cut $8 billion from the National Institutes of Health to build his precious border wall. And you cannot discount the possibility that Republicans will use the threat of a government shutdown and a default on our national debt to set other things aflame -- to slash Medicaid, to privatize Medicare and Social Security, to ram their health care "reform" bill down our throats, to defund FCC efforts to enforce net neutrality regulations, to slash EPA funding for clean air and clean water regulations, and any dozens of others you can name. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to fund our priorities, rather than use another manufactured hostage crisis to ram through theirs.

Meanwhile, as noted by more alert observers than I, it's a bit rich, so to speak, for President Trump to claim that he fired nearly five dozen missiles at a Syrian airbase because he wanted to save the lives of good Syrians, when he's so far issued two executive orders (both on hold, thanks to our court system) designed to prevent good Syrian refugees from coming to America! He'll say he needs to keep Syrian refugees out in order to keep terrorists out, but that's not how it works -- refugees, being people who, as the term implies, seek refuge from tyranny, are about the least likely people to try to foment terrorism on some other shore. The folks who commit terrorism are generally the reasonably well-off folks who watch other people get hurt, and who sympathize with them; really, every refugee we help is a blow not just against tyranny, but also against terrorism. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trumpian anti-refugee agenda. Because I won't let America become a nation of assholes just because our President is one.

Penny Rants for Sunday, April 2, 2017: false flags, "free" trade, and internet privacy.

Emphatic non-truther Paul Street says "the time has never been riper for a false flag terror attack." Approvals in the 30s not even three months in, his first attempt at repealing Obamacare falling flat on its face, his first two anti-Muslim executive orders dying in court, his utter inability to put the Russian hacking story to rest -- yeah, the new President has sure made an entrance, and don't forget that 54% of the electorate voted for someone else. And don't forget, also, that George W. Bush didn't win the popular vote either, and sure looked headed for a one-term Presidency before 9.11 became his "opportunity" (Condi Rice's word, not mine). At least Mr. Bush actually put together a government; Mr. Trump hasn't even done that much, meaning there'll be fewer people in the conspiracy if there is one (and of course the bigger the supposed conspiracy, the more likely it doesn't exist). Remember that, incidentally, when the attack comes -- along with his refusal to attend intelligence briefings, his purge of the State Department, his golfing weekends in Florida, and his general strutting around like he's got the biggest cock in the universe. But, really, Mr. Trump may not need a conspiracy -- as one of my co-workers says, Mr. Trump's election is ISIS's endgame.

Mr. Trump says he won't scrap NAFTA, formerly "the worst trade deal," but will keep many planks in place when he goes to renegotiate it. And I bet you just can't guess one of them. That's right, the investor-state tribunal -- which the Times doesn't even mention until paragraph 20, though I'd say the mere existence of such tribunals, which threaten to destroy law and order in America and any other country in which they exist, was the main reason folks across the political spectrum hated the Trans-Pacific "Partnership." Were you wondering how Trump was going to fail us on "free" trade? This sure looks like how. But Paul Ryan's smoke-blowing aside, Mr. Trump hasn't exactly convinced everyone he's a "closer," and it looks like our neighbor to the north -- you remember that Canada was also a party to SHAFTYA, right? -- might have more urgent concerns about Mr. Trump's aims than Mexico does. Let's not allow the existence of Mexico's national sales tax lure us into accepting Mr. Trump's proposed American national sales tax "border tax," either. I'd be happy to accept our withdrawal from NAFTA. I'd even be happy to give Mr. Trump credit for it, as I do for our withdrawal from the TPP. (Not too much credit, though. We really deserve most of that.)

Wondering how to navigate the post-internet privacy world, as delivered by Congress this past week? Quincy Larson at Quartz advises us to set up a Virtual Private Network (or VPN) and certainly to enable HTTPS on our browsers, while Emily Dreyfuss at WIRED advises us to check out the Internet Noise website, which opens five tabs on your browser to websites chosen at random, and then visits five more websites every 10 seconds until you tell it to stop. I will admit to being quite attracted to the latter item -- as we learned in the Star Trek episode "Charlie X," one good way to deal with someone who's got too much power is to give them too much to handle -- but I also imagine that the better ISPs (and the better data-buyers) will ultimately figure out which traffic is trash. You should also worry (especially since Internet Noise's creator hasn't even evaluated all the search terms he uses) that an unscrupulous actor will concoct a terrorist plot from these searches -- Cardinal Richelieu once said "give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him." There's more than one way to give evil too much to handle, though -- one of my random searches led me here, and that sure brought back some happy memories.

Around the table: Donald Trump wants you to spend more on gas, and other truths.

Buried in this account of President Trump's intention to roll back fuel-efficiency standards is, of course, a scare number advanced by the auto industry: ZOMG TEH BETTUR CARZ WILLZ COSTZ TEH $200 BILLYUNZ!!!! But of course you have to divide that $200 billion over the eight years automakers have to reach the standards, and you also have to divide that by the 17 automakers that made the claim, and now you're down to a little less than $1.5 billion annually, per automaker. Toyota alone made over $19 billion in net income during the fiscal year ending in 2016.

Federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii block Mr. Trump's Muslim Ban 2.0 a day before it was to take effect. It's not like you have to dig real hard to find the religious animus when Mr. Trump exposes that animus all the time and when his supporters go on TV and say Mr. Trump asked them to help him create a Muslim ban "legally." Mr. Trump responded to the news by saying, "(t)his ruling makes us look weak, which by the way we no longer are," which should remind you that anyone who has to say he's not weak is weak.

OMB head Mick Mulvaney defends the Trump Cruelty Budget by saying he can't ask "a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit" to keep funding public TV with their taxes. We can set aside, for a moment, that one of the features of living in a civilization is that your taxes occasionally go to things that don't appear to have immediate value to you. But dig how he insults these hypothetical Trump supporters! Does he think coal miners didn't grow up watching Sesame Street?

Yes it's damn annoying that the "liberal" media seems to care only about right-wing objections to the Obamacare repeal bill, though substantially more than half of Americans in poll after poll support Medicare-for-All, single-payer insurance, the most liberal plan out there -- but it ain't just corporate bias at work here, but an addiction to irony, and you know that I, too, used to comb through the ranks of the right to find folks who hated Tha Bush Mobb. Irony's like a hammer, though -- quite useful, but not the right tool for every task.

Matthew Yglesias at Vox notes that the recent CBO report also says that Obamacare is not, in fact, "imploding" as Messrs. Trump and Ryan love to say it is. And lo and behold, the reason Obamacare isn't likely to implode is that it ties its subsidies to income level, which makes it very likely that the working poor will stay in the system. But, ah, "(t)he merits of paying for a tax cut for millionaires by cutting millions of poor families off from Medicaid coverage" is not "something reasonable people can disagree about."

Finally, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously dismisses a challenge to that state's popularly-enacted minimum wage hike. The challengers, including the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, have now had so little success fighting these things tooth-and-nail that they're going to go after the law that allows good Arizonans to vote on matters concerning them in the first place, which puts their utter intellectual bankruptcy on full display. Keep worshiping mammon, gentlemen, and you'll find your reward in hell.

Around the table: tales of media revisionism, dying industrial towns, health care lies, and pension victories.

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut is righteously appalled at the recent George W. Bush media tour. Ever the cunning "political animal," Mr. Bush waited until a man far less able to disguise his asshole-nature occupied the Oval Office, because, gosh, anyone looks good next to him. But Mr. Bush still peddles an art book of disfigured soldiers and the "liberal" media doesn't mention that he put them there. Also, they ignore his role in creating all those refugees Mr. Trump doesn't want to let in now.

In case you were wondering, Factcheck.org finds the CBO's predictions of the Affordable Care Act's effects have actually been pretty accurate. The myth that they're "wildly off" is largely the result of right-wing cherry-picking -- they love saying the CBO got the number of people insured through the exchanges wrong, as if the exchanges are the only possible way to get health insurance (i.e., as if the Medicaid expansions don't exist, and as if the individual and employer mandates aren't driving up insurance participation).

Brian Alexander at The Atlantic visits the decaying glass-manufacturing town of Lancaster, Ohio. But Lancaster hasn't gone south because its jobs have gone overseas (though that could be coming!), but because its main employer, the nationally-famous Anchor Hocking, has endured at least half a dozen ownership changes at the hands of private-sector "financial engineers." And its workforce has declined by about 80%, which is usually what happens when banksters play their shell games.

Hot on the heels of a bad CBO report, Mr. Trump's spokeshack, Sean Spicer, says that "insurance for everybody" was never the President's promise, but a "goal." Next week he'll be telling us it was more of a "wish"! Seriously, nothing about the phrases "insurance for everybody" or "everybody's got to be covered" is ambiguous, and the more excuses Mr. Trump makes when he doesn't deliver, the fewer fans he'll have. That is still how it works, right? Or is the persistence of rage all his votaries care about?

James Russell at Labor Notes describes how Connecticut state workers switched from a 401(k) to a "real retirement plan," i.e., a defined-benefit plan. A defined contribution plan, as you may know, only assures what you pay in; a defined benefit plan assure what you get out, and defined contribution plans like the 401(k) suffer at the hands of bubble markets and overcharging pension managers. We must remind each other that the best attribute of a pension plan is that it be there, not that it gets the blessing of Wall Street.

Around the table: Presidential tantrums and small business truths.

Ho hum, Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post finds over a dozen claims made by President Trump at his recent Florida rally to be utter crap. Mr. Trump takes credit for jobs corporations were already bringing back, he pretends refugees come here "unvetted" when their vetting actually takes years, he pretends statistical outliers in Arizona and Chicago are trends -- if Mr. Obama had done these things, the flaming-dog-poop crowd would be howling. (And note well that he misses an opportunity to praise his Vice President for an actual decline in Obamacare premiums in Indiana, where Mr. Pence was until lately Governor. Think that's an accident?)

Dean Baker at TruthOut views a Congressional plan to deny states the right to allow private-sector workers to join public pension funds as "More Republican Handouts to the Rich." Mr. Baker has had pretty incredible message discipline recently, and he's right that most Republican policy initiatives seek only to redistribute income upward to their rich cronies. Sadly, the Obama Administration Labor Department's ERISA ruling enables Republicans to look like they're protecting worker retirement security, which makes you question Democrat motives, if not Democrat common sense.

Two Huffington Post writers make a point after my own heart: that while the President "distracts the public with his angry tweets," Congressional Republicans are rolling back federal regulations with the Congressional Review Act. Funny how that works, eh? It has long seemed to me that the CRA might actually be unconstitutional -- agencies have to write regulations to fit specific legislative aims, after all, and what if Congress strikes a rule that actually does that? In the meantime, we should again question Democrat smarts/motives if they finalize so many regulations within the 60-day window within which Congress can pass a CRA resolution.

Upwards of three Seattle-area restaurants institute a "minimum wage surcharge," apparently a reaction to Seattle's new $15/hour minimum wage. Because, as we know, these are the only three restaurants in the entire area! Plus, if they're not collecting sales taxes on their little surcharges, they're also breaking state law. It's enough to make you think that accepting the people's will, which clearly supports a decent minimum wage, is much better than throwing a tantrum about it.

Finally, we learn that a veterinarian co-op can help small business vets overcome a great many obstacles. Larger, corporate veterinary chains can pay less for supplies and machinery in bulk, but co-ops can give independent vets a lot of that bargaining power, too. Co-ops can also provide educational opportunities and a sense of community (that last item helped along by social networking, which, again, suggests that social media have gotten a bad rap in the "fake news" era). I wish them the best of luck.

Action: email privacy, Muslim bans, and methane emissions.

The U.S. House of Representatives has again passed H.R. 387, the Email Privacy Act -- and has, again, passed the bill unanimously. H.R. 387 would, as you no doubt recall, require our government to get a warrant before searching any emails you've left on your email provider's server. Current communication law -- and "current," in this case, means "30 years old" -- regards emails left on your server as "abandoned," and thus doesn't require our government to get a warrant before Hoovering them up, but this is the cloud computing era, where documents you clearly use all the time get left on servers. Last time the Email Privacy Act sailed through the House, a few Senators tried to attach poison pills to it (like the amendment offered by Jeff Sessions that would have allowed our government to shout emergency! as a way around getting a warrant, a power that could never, ever be abused!). So you may want to call your Senators about passing the Email Privacy Act as is, without poison pills. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, both CREDO and Amnesty International help you tell your Congressfolk to support legislation that would end President Trump's Muslim ban. A federal judge (not a "so-called" federal judge, Mr. Trump) issued a stay against the Trump order last week, but this may wind up at the U.S. Supreme Court, and you never know which hat John Roberts will have on (either the "obsessive literalist" hat or the "right-wing judicial activist" hat; the first is, obviously, more palatable) when the Court hears a case. So Congress can, in the meantime, act against a stupid and racist ban that clearly targets immigrants of a certain religion (hey, Rudy Giuliani said so! In public!) and clearly targets refugees, i.e., the class of people least likely to inflict terrorism on others precisely because they've had terrorism inflicted upon them. (No, terrorists more frequently come from classes of people who don't suffer from terrorism, but who witness others folks' suffering.) Congress may well be afraid of Trumpeteers throwing bricks through their windows if they oppose him, but no one said the work of civilization was easy.

Finally, Congress has lately moved to block the Obama Administration's methane emissions standards -- because what's more freedom-loving than natural gas corporations wasting methane gas into the atmosphere, so that it can not only make climate change worse, but be completely unavailable to consumers as an energy source? -- and thus some in Pennsylvania's state legislature have introduced SB 175, which would prevent the state Department of Environmental Protection from enacting any methane emissions standards that are stronger than the federal one! Which, as we've just described, is about to become nonexistent! What clever folks these Pennsylvania state legislators are! And again, it's not just the pollution that bothers me about this, it's the waste -- Pennsylvania gas drillers waste enough methane to heat over 100,000 homes for an entire year. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your state legislators to reject SB 175, and take matters like clean air and climate change a bit more seriously than they take their big donors' pocketbooks.

Around the table: from Trump Administration psyops to House Reps bailing on townhalls.

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone reminds us that Donald Trump wants "extreme vetting" for immigrants and refugees but not for banksters. Mr. Trump's economic advisors "represent a rogues gallery of the creeps most responsible for the 2008 crash," and that Mr. Trump "talks a big game when slamming the door on penniless refugees, but curls up like a beach weakling around guys who have more money than he does." That includes the people who caused the 2008 crash, now "back in charge of non-policing themselves."

The New York Times suggests Scott Pruitt will destroy the EPA "with a scalpel, not a cleaver." They're right to note that it would be difficult to get rid of the EPA, since the EPA enforces actual laws, and the process for reversing their regulations itself requires lengthy study and public comment periods -- but maybe Donald Trump eats some hot peppers and then just abolishes the EPA through Executive Order, daring the courts to step in. And then Mr. Pruitt actually looks like a good guy, almost like that was the whole idea.

Linda Pentz Gunter at TruthOut reminds us that the renewable energy sector provides a much, much fastest rate of job growth in America than fossil fuel corporations. Of course, it's a growing sector, which means more buildout, which means more jobs, but that's the whole point -- a smart government identifies sectors that are already growing and gives them the help they need to employ even more Americans. And do you think run-down coal towns would be picky about the precise kind of energy grid we could build in them?

MIT blackjack pro explains how the Falcons lost the Super Bowl by "ignoring the odds." Their utter failure to run the ball in the second half (why, even Andy Reid runs the ball when he's up three touchdowns!) was the story in my locker room at work yesterday morning, but the Falcons' failure to run down the clock on individual snaps may have been even more crucial -- and again, anyone who watched Tom Coughlin's Giants beat the Patriots in two Super Bowls knows the best way to beat them is to keep the ball from them.

Finally, House Reps are starting to avoid holding townhall meetings, due to the pushback they've been getting from their constituents. Our Reps are such weaklings! We're not even three weeks into the Trump Presidency! They have no sense complaining their opponents are "anarchists" (your neighbor with three kids is an "anarchist"?), but they have no right complaining about "coordination," as if Americans have no right to talk to each other or something. But it doesn't matter -- they'll have to go out in public sooner or later.

Penny Rants for Sunday, February 5, 2017: the further adventures of Our Man-Child President (and the real majority that opposes him).

Democrats boycott committee meetings so Trump Cabinet nominees can't get votes -- and then Republicans change the quorum rule (whereby the minority party must have at least two Senators in attendance for a committee vote to proceed) to ram nominees through committees anyway. I'm not ready to call this "unfair" -- Republicans have the majority, so they have wide latitude to change Senate rules. But I'm also not ready to call it a defeat. In changing the rules, Republicans also suffer the shame of having had to change the rules in order to get some really terrible people in office. And, you know, Democrats could have avoided all of this and taken the Senate back, merely by listening to the American people, and before the Trump ascension made doing so easier for them. And I think everyone knows by now that the only reason the Democrats have had any spine at all through this whole process is that we've given it to them. When these awful Trump nominees start destroying our government, we'll be waiting with our voices, and our will.

Laleh Khalili at TruthOut theorizes that the Trump Administration planned for "chaos" with its Muslim ban, but not "resistance." Of course, one of the reasons we reacted so quickly was because we've already lived through a President who wanted all-chaos-all-the-time, though he got off to a slower start (and that's probably how he lasted so damn long!). Do you remember when Steve Bannon said, "(w)e're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." No, of course you don't -- because that was Karl Rove, in 2004. (Personal to the folks still telling me to "let Trump do his job": his job is to execute our will, and I see no evidence that our will is to ban refugees -- the ones least likely to terrorize others precisely because they've been beaten down by terror themselves -- from nations that haven't even been sending us very many terrorists. That is pretty much exactly the opposite of how you'd handle thorny immigration issues.)

Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times describes "How Social Networks Empowered Mass Protests Against Trump." Today's "Resistance" uses Facebook and Instagram and the like not just to get in touch with each other, but to post photos of their works at rallies and protests, so when Mr. Trump says he has "the popular will," or that the Muslim ban is going swimmingly, photos of Women's March and airport protests refute him fairly decisively, and when he claims that "professional anarchists" do all the protesting, you can check your Facebook news feed and find it's actually people you know doing the protesting. One thing, though: I wouldn't call the anti-Trump resistance an "alt-majority," not just because the "alt-right" label (you know, the label that means "racist prick") has tarnished the "alt-" label forever, but because Mr. Trump's imaginary majority is the real alt-majority. No, I'd rather just call us the "the majority," since that's what we are, and calling yourself what you are is almost an act of courage in These Interesting Times.

Action: bad Trump nominees, bad Muslim bans, and bad attempts to kill good privacy and equal pay initiatives.

Senate Democrats have taken to skipping Committee meetings in an effort to stall President Trump's Cabinet nominees, which has led to some truly hysterical hand-wringing from the right -- Sen. Toomey (R-PA) called it "an unprecedented level of obstruction," which is to laugh! Surely you recall Senate Republicans refusing to confirm several of President Obama's nominees in 2013, which (unfortunately) led Democrats to get rid of the filibuster for Presidential nominees; Republicans seem anxious to point out that they didn't put up much of a fight on Mr. Obama's 2009 nominees, but his 2009 nominees were largely center-right nominees of whom even Pat Robertson seemed to approve, whereas Donald Trump's 2017 nominees are far right-wing extremists who do not speak for anyone but their biggest campaign donors. I was planning to urge you to use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Senators and tell them to oppose the nominations of Tom Price to Secretary of Health and Human Services and Mick Mulvaney to the Office of Budget Management -- Mr. Price for his obvious hostility to Medicare and Mr. Mulvaney for his stated desire to slash Social Security -- but hell, any of them is fair game right now.

Meanwhile, as you might expect, I've got action alerts concerning Mr. Trump's nefarious Executive Order which shut down refugee admissions for at least the next four months and banned legal immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations (though not the ones he's got business interests in or the ones who actually sent terrorists to kill us, amirite?). Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to denounce the Trump ban from the Senate floor, while the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Demand Progress, and MoveOn help you direct your will at all of Congress, and Sum of Us helps you contact Mr. Trump's CEO buddies, who (unlike some CEOs) have held their tongue about the Order. People who cheer on Mr. Trump's un-American ban should look into their own past and see if they were very well-received when they got here. Chances are they weren't! But did it kill this country to let such folks in? Of course it didn't. But the blind fear some folks have toward anyone who isn't like themselves is sure going to kill this country if we let it. And Donald Trump won't care, as long as he's making money. Let's try to make him irrelevant, as he most definitely deserves.

In other news, the FCC lately mandated that your internet service provider get your permission (which you can withhold!) before selling your data to third-parties -- and, of course, now that Mr. Trump is in office, his nominee for FCC Chair really, really wants to get rid of that mandate, because it's a good thing that helps people, rather than a bad thing that helps corporate CEOs make even more unearned money. Let me know if I'm not making my feeling absolutely clear, OK? Consumers Union helps you tell the FCC not to reverse the FCC's new privacy protections. Folks who would give you guff about this need to answer why on Earth we should expect privacy for our offline private information but not our online private information. The ease with which corporations can find and collect information is no excuse -- as your mama taught you, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. You wish our current ball-swinging man-child President's mama had learned this.

Finally, because like Ferdinand Foch I fight everywhere, Congress is mulling a backdoor attack on equal pay by rolling back pay reporting requirements that could reveal pay discrimination based on gender or ethnicity. What do our best and brightest corporate leaders have to hide? Some Congressfolk (no doubt egged on by these "best and brightest") act like any reporting requirement is onerous, like we're asking them to lift 16-ton weights with their pinkies or something. We only managed to get these reporting requirements last year, which means Congress might deep-six them before anyone has actually had to report any information! And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions (or EEOC) and the Labor Department (in theory, amirite?) need this information in order to investigate bad actors and enforce the many laws that would prevent corporations from discriminating against their employees. Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to gut equal pay reporting rules.

Around the table: what "extreme vetting" is actually like, and other tales.

Oops: Steve Mnuchin tells Sen. Casey (D-PA) that OneWest didn't indulge in the notorious and illegal "robo-signing" practice while he was there, and guess what? Of course it did. And then he had the cojones to complain that "filling out these government forms is quite complicated"! Nothing's that complicated if you're not evil, Mr. Mnuchin.

President Trump signs another Executive Order requiring agencies to slash two regulations every time they introduce a new one. OMB leeway to waive the requirement or not, I'm pretty sure he can't really do this, either, since the Executive's authority to regulate comes from Congress, and Congress orders the Executive branch to issue regulations to meet specific legislative aims. But if his Executive agencies obey him, which they will, it's still going to be a mess.

Remember that "mass resignation" at the State Department last week? Turns out it was less a "mass resignation" and more a purge. Add this to the list of accusations you can hurl (skips intelligence briefings, purges ambassadors, signed Executive Orders that attacked refugees and immigrants who don't terrorize Americans, struts around like he's got church bells for balls) against Donald Trump when he lets terrorists attack us.

Mostafa Housson writes about the "extreme vetting" he went through when he came to America as a Syrian refugee earlier this decade. He writes 25 paragraphs describing multiple interviews over 15 months, plus "enhanced" DHS review of Syrian refugees and an eight-hour physical. But please, right-wingers, tell us what we could be doing differently. Oh, wait -- you don't care about doing things differently; you only care about doing nothing at all. Civilization is so hard, after all.

Trump spokeshack Sean Spicer says Mr. Trump's Executive Orders will prevent terror attacks like the San Bernardino shooting, but the San Bernardino shooters were not from any of the countries listed in Mr. Trump's orders. I could also point out that it won't prevent domestic terrorists like the Planned Parenthood bomber, but would that be piling on? (The answer to that question, by the way, is always no.)

California state Senator calls upon the White House to release Melania Trump's immigration papers. I mention this only to point out the precise thing we, as good Americans resisting evil, should be spending precisely zero time wringing our hands about. They're already throwing so much crap at us that we can't grab at every perceived hypocrisy and wrestle it to the ground, so let's all stay focused.

Around the table: Trump follies and Aetna lies.

President Trump prepares Executive Order that would drastically restrict refugee admissions and deny visas to folks coming from "high-risk" countries" -- again, with no AMURIKAN CAESAR pushback from the right-wingers who whined repeatedly about Mr. Obama's executive orders. The Trump Administration is mulling seven different countries for their "high-risk" lists, and they just so happen to be Muslim-majority countries; perhaps Mr. Pence will remind Mr. Trump that Mr. Bush didn't go that far in his attempt to curb Muslim immigration, and then maybe they'll throw in a country Mr. Trump doesn't like. Sweden, perhaps?

Trump Administration will also require political appointees to review all EPA data and studies before the public can see them. It should be like a reflex, by now, to retort what does the Trump Administration have to hide? But I expect a lawsuit over this, since the EPA already has a Scientific Integrity Policy (still on the EPA's website at this writing, how did Steve Bannon miss that?), and it's also entirely possible Mr. Trump backs down before then (saying that he only intended that policy to be in effect until the transition was complete, or some such rubbish).

Uh oh: senior Trump Administration officials were using a private email server at the RNC until Wednesday -- and it was the same RNC server that somehow "lost" 22 million emails. These officials apparently stopped using that server after Newsweek originally published this story, but they still have to copy any emails they used at RNC addresses to the White House's email system, or they'll have committed a crime. Who wants to take a guess at how much the President who's still using an unsecured Android cell phone will enforce the law here?

Speaking of something-they-do-that-we'd-never-do-except-we-do, a Florida newspaper discovers that Trump senior advisor/racist Steve Bannon is registered to vote in both New York and Florida. This, after the President suggested that "those registered to vote in two states" deprived him of that 20 bajillion vote popular vote victory (or, indeed, any popular vote victory) he's sure he deserves! What Mr. Trump pretends not to understand, of course, is that most folks who move from one state to another stay on two voter rolls until they don't vote in a few elections in a row. And if not for the "Interstate Crosscheck" database (which, as you know, lists voters with similar names across states and is a tool for unscrupulous state government officials to throw people off the rolls on "suspicion" of fraud), we'd probably all be complaining about Hillary Clinton's Presidency right now.

Finally, because there's just no good news today, a federal judge has determined (from Aetna's own paperwork, despite their best efforts!) that Aetna didn't pull out of the Obamacare exchanges because it was "losing money" but because it wanted to retaliate against our government for not giving it the go-ahead to buy Humana. Paul Ryan has been saying for a while now that Aetna's "losses" proved that Obamacare wasn't working; will he now be swift enough to suggest that Aetna's attempted hostage-taking also proves that Obamacare wasn't working? I kid, of course -- the "liberal" media let him get away with any ridiculous uttering, out of a strange conviction that he's "smart" or "wonky," so he won't even have to try that hard.

Action: saving Medicare, and fighting "Muslim registries."

The Alliance for Retired Americans is sponsoring a national Medicare call-in day today, wherein you may call your Reps and Senators and demand that they reject any effort by their cohorts to privatize or voucherize or otherwise ruin Medicare, and you can certainly use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page and call your Reps and Senators and do that. But why not, as the People's Email Network reminds us, play offense? Why not tell your Reps and Senators to expand Medicare so that it includes all Americans? After all, who's in the Medicare pool now? People who need and use health care the most -- seniors, some disabled younger folks, and folks on dialysis. And Medicare actually runs pretty well, much better than the politicians who want to destroy it would have you believe; how much better would it run if it had hundreds of millions of relatively healthy folks sharing the burden? Pretty damn well, I would think. Don't believe the hype that we would "have to raise taxes" to do that, because a lot of people who say that are really trying to protect their preferred slab of corruption from scrutiny, be it bloated defense spending or unearned corporate welfare. They want us to play defense, to beg them to not do things, so let's tell them what to do instead as well. (If you just want the email action tool which helps you demand a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health care system, the People's Email Network provides that.)

Meanwhile, our President-elect has made a lot of noise about creating a "Muslim registry," so our government can go on harassing Muslims without being able to prove they did anything wrong -- or, indeed, without actually stopping anyone from doing anything wrong. Thus Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators and Governors to oppose any attempts by our federal government to create "Muslim registries." Folks who support Mr. Trump's horrible idea actually justify it by citing the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II; how long will it be before they use slavery as a justification for future anti-crime measures, I wonder? Of course, Tha Bush Mobb already tried a "Muslim registry" of foreign men from certain countries, and it didn't stop a damn thing. And one thing I've learned is that while repressive measures tend not to create terrorists from among the oppressed populations (which is another reason the fear-mongering about refugees is such horseshit), these repressive measures tend to create terrorists among better-off populations sympathetic to the oppressed. Why, it's almost like that's the whole idea. And with all the cock-swinging Mr. Trump does, we're very likely going to have another really big terrorist attack in America, one his Administration will use to clamp down on all dissent in ways Tha Bush Mobb didn't even dream of. So let's at least help him make one fewer mistake.

Action: concerning refugees, police brutality, and antibiotic abuse.

You've heard that stupid Skittles rant lately emanating from Donald Trump, Jr.? About how you wouldn't eat from a bowl of Skittles if you knew three of them were poisonous, and how that's supposedly just like the choice we face when admitting refugees, ha ha ha? Setting aside the utter stupidity of the metaphor (if a single Skittle could kill a human being, what might it do to the other Skittles in the bowl? And how is a single terrorist attack a poison that destroys an entire country?), the metaphor isn't even apt: refugees have perpetrated precisely zero terrorist attacks in American history (perhaps because they themselves are running from terror in their own countries), meaning that particular bowl contains precisely zero poisonous Skittles. Hence the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase our support for refugees when they come to America. And let's only use the word "poison" as a metaphor for things that actually hurt our beloved country -- you know, like Donald Trump's ongoing quest to legitimize racists.

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of at least two more senseless killings of black men by police, the ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5221, the Preventing Tragedies Between Police and Communities Act, which would mandate state and local police departments receiving certain federal funding to train their officers in de-escalation, and would also mandate that states and localities require their officers to use de-escalation techniques before they use violence. Though certain individuals would like you to think that police always do the right thing and don't need to be told what to do by Big Gummint, de-escalation training is, frankly, not a big ask -- we already ask soldiers in war zones to perform half a dozen tasks before shooting to kill, and no matter what Donald Trump tells you, inner cities are not war zones, so why do we tolerate the notion that police officers have "no alternative" but to shoot to kill where black men are concerned? The America I love is not the country where we throw up our hands and decide we have no choice but to kill black men. Not on my watch, anyway.

Finally, The Consumerist told us not long ago that most big restaurant chains still rely too much on antibiotic-raised meat, Consumers Union helps you tell those big restaurant chains -- including Burger King, Applebee's, Starbucks, and Olive Garden -- to do better at keeping antibiotic abuse out of their meat supply chains. As you know, four out of every five antibiotics in America get used not on sick people or animals but on nominally healthy farm animals, partly so they'll produce more meat and partly so they'll endure miserable factory farm conditions better. But you may well be asking: OK, but why the big restaurant chains? Why not just avoid eating at them? For one thing, you're perfectly free to use more than one tool to complete a task, particularly when the Big Stick of Bad PR works pretty well in this area. For another thing, a lot of people eat at these restaurants, and you won't be able to convince them not to just by telling them that eating too much antibiotic-raised meat could bring about a world of superbugs that medicines can't cure anymore.

Action: refugees, voter registration, and methane pollution.

Just when you thought the refugee-bashing had stopped, along comes South Carolina bill S. 997, which passed the state Senate a few weeks back and now awaits action by the state House. S. 997 would create that dreaded "refugee registry" contemplated by Donald Trump not long ago, and would mandate state law enforcement officials to "confirm" that refugees placed in South Carolina "do not pose a public safety risk" and then report back to the state legislature about that matter. As if vetting by the FBI, DHS, and the State Department weren't enough! I doubt S. 997 proves South Carolina legislators really care about preventing risks to safety and security -- refugees already get upwards of 18 months of vetting by our federal government, and they have perpetrated exactly zero terrorist attacks in American history. The fact that refugees are generally running from terrorism in their home country might have something to do with that. The ACLU helps you tell South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to veto S. 997, and thus prevent the state from persecuting refugees.

Meanwhile, three states now automatically register people to vote at the moment they get drivers' licenses. Now you may well ask: didn't the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 require voter registration at the same time you got a driver's license? Actually, no -- that law required states to allow you to opt in to voter registration at the DMV, whereas the laws lately passed in Oregon, California, and West Virginia require you to opt out if you don't want to register to vote while you're at the DMV. Voter registration was, once upon a time, a way to get more people to vote (and, not insignificantly, a way to avoid rioting when voters got turned away on Election Day), but now it's become more of a hindrance to voting than a help. And no it doesn't "cause voter fraud," particularly when you actually need more paperwork to get a driver's license. (The three aforementioned state laws keep traditional voter registration available.) Hence Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to support automatic voter registration.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to leave a public comment on the Bureau of Land Management's proposed rules limiting methane emissions from gas drilling projects on public lands, then the Environmental Defense Fund still helps you do that. This is your last chance to comment on this matter, though, because the deadline for comments is tomorrow. The BLM rules address venting, flaring, and leaks, and really, who would justify deliberately allowing methane gas into the air, or burning off gas to put more toxins into the air, or, you know, having leaky equipment? No reasonable person would, that's who. Of course, the unreasonable go to some lengths to appear reasonable, by complaining about Big Gummint interference (as if your government doesn't belong to you!) and hurting small businesses (which would suffer more from pollution than from increased utility bills) and suchlike. But if we don't have clean water to drink or clean air to breathe, we'll be in no position to celebrate the pristine purity of anyone's ideology.

Action: retirement advisors, refugee families, and antibiotic abuse.

You recall how late last week, the Department of Labor ruled that investment advisors handling retirement accounts and pensions must adhere to a "fiduciary standard," meaning they must put their clients' best interests before their own? You'd think that's pretty common-sensical, right? Yet some Congressfolk are talking about passing legislation preventing the Department of Labor's rules from taking effect. If Democrats weren't such weaklings, this is an argument they'd relish having -- I'd be running statements like do you seriously oppose making retirement advisors work for their clients rather than themselves? in ads all over TV and the internet, but Democrats would probably call that "uncivil." But again: it doesn't matter what greedy Republicans and spineless Democrats want; it matters what we want. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to stand up for retirees and future retirees by rejecting legislation that would weaken the fiduciary standard for retirement advisors.

Meanwhile, Mohammad Yousaf Yahyapur worked as a translator and administrative liaison for American journalists in Afghanistan during the war, and so naturally he faced death threats and sought refuge here in the U.S. He's been a refugee since 2013 (would Donald Trump call him "one of the good ones"?), but the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (or USCIS) hasn't acted on his request to bring his wife and three kids over for permanent residency status. Hence Megan Phan, of Syracuse, NY -- whose own grandfather did similar work in Vietnam during the war, and suffered similar hardships until he was able to emigrate with his family to America -- has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Senators Schumer and Gillibrand of New York to push the USCIS to grant permanent residency to Mohammad's family. If Mr. Yahyapur faced death threats for his work in Afghanistan, what do you think his family faces now? Are we in the business of stifling our generosity to those who risk their lives to help our war efforts? Not in my America, we're not.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell five major fast-food corporations to stop serving meat from animals shot through with antibiotics. With nearly four out of every five antibiotics in America used not on sick people or animals but on healthy animals just to make them produce a little more meat and endure their squalid living conditions a little better, two million Americans get hit by superbugs every year, and 20,000 of them die, and that's too high a price to pay for richer big ag CEOs. You may well be saying to yourself, self, why go after fast-food corporations for this? It's not like they're in the business of making healthy food anyway! But fast-food corporations are very sensitive to bad PR -- they get a lot of it already for, you know, serving unhealthy food and contributing to childhood obesity and paying their workers in dung pellets -- and they have lately proven somewhat nimble in adjusting their practices. And a lot of people eat fast food, so antibiotic abuse puts a lot of people in danger. So let's help each other out.

Action: corporate disclosure, fair treatment of farm workers, and fair legal access for refugee children.

As the Panama Papers promise more revelations Our Glorious Elites would prefer remain in the dark, here comes H.R. 4450/S. 2489, the Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which would force corporations to disclose the names of all their beneficial owners (that is, the owners who actually make money when a corporation makes money). Why do that? Partly because it would help law enforcement find terrorists and stop money laundering, partly because it would shine a light on the massive campaign donations that distort our democracy, but also because folks use anonymous "shell corporations" to hide their profits so our government can't tax them, and when they do that, it means less money for roads, for schools, for police, and for firefighters -- and more taxes that must be collected from working families and small businesses, who are already paying their fair share. So CREDO helps you tell Congress to support the Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act, and thus support law and order in America.

Meanwhile, blueberry season is upon us soon, but blueberry season in America really only runs from June through August, so you're getting your blueberries from nations like Chile and Peru if you eat them during the winter. And if you suspect blueberry workers in those countries may not be the best-treated, well, the big ag corporation that produces nearly half the blueberries Americans buy from Peru has lately fired and pressed charges against nine of its workers -- who, perhaps not coincidentally, comprise all nine officers from their union's executive committee. As it happens, one of our "free" trade agreements is with Peru, and demands better worker treatment from Peruvian corporations, but action on that front could take time, if it ever comes -- and these workers need their jobs back now. Hence the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell Tal S.A. to hire these workers back, stop harassing them, and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with them in good faith. And remember: you eat the blueberries, so you have the leverage.

Finally, H.R. 4646/S. 2540, the Fair Day in Court for Kids Act, would require our government to provide counsel for foreign children and "vulnerable" individuals (such as disabled folks or torture victims), so they can at least have representation in court while they try to stay in America. Denying them good representation isn't a way to "streamline" the process or "save money, after all; it's just a way to be cruel while pretending not to be cruel. The bill would also prevent our government from deporting them until after providing them with all documents (excepting privileged or national security-related documents) relating to their time here, and it would (via pilot programs) increase case management services to certain aliens, including enrollment of children in school and health care. Yes, a sane and healthy civilization can provide such services, even if doing so doesn't inflame the rage glands of right-wingers very well. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Fair Day in Court for Kids Act.

Around the table: starring stupidity, greed, and cruelty.

State Senators in New York and North Carolina -- whom we shall not name, lest they think they, and not their stupid ideas, are getting attention -- think that all refugees ought to register with our government. One more time: precisely zero refugees have ever perpetrated terrorist attacks, possibly because all refugees already go through a very thorough vetting process before they get here. Also, the North Carolina moron, suggesting donating to relief organizations as an alternative, says "Why should we bring one refugee here when we could spend the same money and help 10 in their part of the world?" Oh, gosh, I don't know -- maybe because they're being hunted to death in "their part of the world"?

The incomparable Mike Whitney, writing at Counterpunch, describes another Bubble Waiting to Explode, the subprime auto loan bubble. Long story short: just like unscrupulous devils handed out home mortgages to folks who couldn't possibly pay them, now they're handing out car loans to folks who can't possibly pay them. Mr. Whitney takes admirable pains to say the borrowers aren't the problem -- if a lender told you your low income and less-than-perfect credit was no obstacle to buying the car or home of your dreams, wouldn't you be inclined to believe him? As usual, the folks who know they're doing evil are the problem. I'm going to keep saying this until I don't have to anymore.

Maya Schenwar at TruthOut interviews the editors of an anthology of essays by folks who have actually survived solitary confinement. We learn that "(t)here was an exploding prison population" beginning in the 1980s, "and solitary was perceived as a tool to control it by heaping punishment upon punishment," to the point where prisons now throw folks into the SHU just to get them to inform on other prisoners. But we also learn that folks in solitary still try to connect with other prisoners in fairly ingenious ways -- and that sometimes all you need is a "shred of human community" to save yourself from insanity.

Ho hum, minimum-wage hating Carl's Jr./Hardees CEO goes to an automated eatery and talks positively about a restaurant without all those pesky employees. Dig how this clown says "you never see a person" like "seeing a person" is a bad thing! And his ideal machines are "always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case." He lost me at "always upsell" -- I've cut off fast-food joints for years at a time for upselling. Seriously, though, he's ignorant enough that I almost wish he'd spend a week in solitary, so he could see this whole no-social-interaction thing a bit differently.

Finally, Steve Wasserman, writing at The American Conservative, laments the disappearance of serious cultural criticism in America. He instructs us that "(t)he ideal of serious enjoyment of what isn’t instantly understood is rare in American life," and that we too often suspect that great-but-difficult art is "elitist" and "phony," until we have fewer kids reading Shakespeare and more college kids taking classes in comic books. Of course, as Mr. Wasserman implies, it doesn't have to be this way, any more than practicing "cultural and intellectual discrimination," and practicing it well, requires us to indulge the lies of the bankster class.