Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning taxes, education, birth control, reforestation, privacy, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fund our IRS properly so it can catch more tax cheats; tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act, the EACH Woman Act, the REPLANT Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to better fund our Internal Revenue Service so it can catch rich tax cheats. Our IRS estimates that tax evaders cheat us out of $1 trillion every year, and that represents about a quarter of our entire federal budgets most years, so the law and order thing to do, the pro-law enforcement thing to do, would be to give our IRS the funding it needs to make tax cheaters pay up, so we can then properly fund roads, bridges, schools, firefighters, police, et al. And now you know why Republicans stamped their feet so much in the early 2010s about "political bias" at our IRS -- so they could curtail collections, starve our government of money, and make it run so badly that even fascist assholes routinely get elected to federal office now. And if Congress doesn't fund our IRS, just look out for the QAnon/Trumpholes that'll take over Congress in 2022.

Speaking of things better tax collection could pay for, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2730/S. 1288, the College for All Act, which (among numerous other reforms) would pay for tuition and fees for all students who come from families that make less than $125,000 annually. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the bill's main sponsor, says the money would come from the Tax on Wall Street Speculation Act, which would tax stock trades at half of one percent, bonds at one-tenth of one percent, and derivatives at one-two hundredth of one percent; this bill would raise around $240 billion annually, which, in the context of the $1.2 trillion in wealth billionaires have accumulated during this pandemic, sure ain't too damn much to ask.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2234/S. 1021, the EACH Woman Act. The EACH Woman Act would repeal the notorious Hyde Amendment that prevents federal funds from covering abortions, but abortion is a legal medical procedure, and thus federal funds should cover it. The Hyde Amendment has essentially kept the world the way it was before Roe v. Wade, when rich folks could get abortions and poor folks can't. Right-wingers are always complaining about "how many babies Those People are always having," but then cling to the Hyde Amendment like grim death. It really is like they'd just prefer a world where nobody ever solves any problems and rageheads get to pop off all the time. But we're Americans, and we deserve better than that. And if you're against abortion, don't get one.

And now for the rare Arbor Day-related action alert: Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the REPLANT Act. The REPLANT Act would help reverse deforestation in America by mandating the planting of over a billion trees over the next decade, and if you're thinking of indulging in some hippie-punching over this, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that trees help purify our air and thus help us stay healthier, 3) consider that trees also trap a lot of carbon dioxide and thus help mitigate the effects of climate change, and 4) a lot of animals use trees to find food and shelter their children. How much of any of that does your average office complex or gas drilling well do? Yeah, that's what I thought.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. The bill would close the legal loophole that allows big data mining corporations to sell your personal data to law enforcement, a sale which completely circumvents our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Big telecom corporations can't sell your personal data to law enforcement, because it's against the law; big data brokers should face the same prohibitions. And if that puts them out of business, well, why do we tolerate a business model that's essentially "make money violating other people's rights"? A sane, moral, and decent society asks these questions; this sick, immoral, and decadent society doesn't ask them anywhere near enough.

Finally, Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Expand Medicare to include everyone, pay for it by converting the money big corporations already pay for private insurance into an employer-side payroll tax, and voila! We've solved all health insurance problems without any workers -- or corporations! -- spending a penny more on health insurance, plus we stop leaving 30 million Americans out in the cold. Plus no more surprise bills, no more four-digit deductibles, and no more networks with shifting boundaries. People who want to keep their private insurance? Too bad! You'll just have to settle for much better insurance.

Around the table: vaccines are still good, and other reminders.

When I learn that our CDC has found that some 5,000 folks -- out of 66 million fully vaccinated Americans -- have contracted COVID anyway, I fear that a few more fools will throw up their hands and say I TOLDZ YOUZ TEH SOZ!!!!, when, actually, we all knew, or should have known, that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines didn't have a 100% success rate (though they appear to have a considerably higher success rate than we thought!), and we also know, I would hope, that the number of people who would have gotten COVID out of that 66 million would have been much higher without the vaccines.

The New York Times has apparently killed a story about a bill that would restore the state's financial transaction tax, since the bill "had no chance to pass," a situation the Times could have helped by, you know, covering it! The state currently rebates financial transaction taxes back to investors; Rep. Phil Steck wanted to end those rebates, which makes sense -- I mean, you can't collect revenues if you're just giving them back! But when New York state can't fund police, firefighters, and libraries because they're not collecting enough in taxes, I bet the Times covers that -- and I bet they also say it "proves" that "government doesn't work."

To those who despair that our policing problems can ever be solved, note well that Fayetteville, NC has, for years, only pulled folks over for actual moving violations, rather than "busted tail-lights" and expired tags, and they're doing much better. And still some police officers would bristle under that regimen: how can I do my job? they'll say. You mean "how can you do your job when you have less actual work to do, and the work you do helps the community more"?

Another day, another reminder that there are no "moderates" in the Republican caucus. Read over the 10 names and you won't be inspired to think of John Sherman Cooper or Margaret Chase Smith, but worse than that, "moderate" Jerry Moran co-founded the Tea Party caucus in the Senate, "moderate" Thom Tillis shepherded the most reactionary legislative agenda in North Carolina history as speaker of that state's House from 2012-2014, "moderate" Mitt Romney is always there for you when it doesn't make a difference, and even Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have pretty much one achievement as "moderates," that being their refusal to go along with Obamacare repeal in 2017. Hell, Lindsey Graham was a hero once, too, but that doesn't mean we regard him as anything but a reactionary now.

In a peripherally-related note, "moderate" Sen. Shelly Moore Capito whines about how Joe Biden doesn't really negotiate with Republicans. She must have been asleep during that 12-year stretch where Mitch McConnell "negotiated" by simply saying no and blocking everything in sight. Later she admitted that her "sweet spot" figure of "$600-$800 million" for an infrastructure/jobs bill was pretty much made up on the spot. Could it be that Joe Biden won't negotiate with Republicans because he knows they're not serious? I would hope eight years of being Barack Obama's VP would have taught him that much.

Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price -- who famously instituted a $70,000 minimum wage at his collections corporation and cut his own salary to same, and then watched his revenues triple, his customer base double, and his employees almost double -- responds to Fox News morons who call him a "socialist." Spoiler alert: he's right, they're wrong. And we are reminded, once again, that they just call people "socialist" because they can't win arguments on the merits. Right-wingers really have so little to offer the world.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Costco drops My Pillow from its stores, so says My Pillow CEO/seditionist Mike Lindell. You likely helped bring this about, so treat yourself to a Boylan's Creamy Red Birch Beer, or whatever it is you like. And no, neither you nor Costco has violated his free speech rights -- no one has a First Amendment right to sell a pillow, after all. As a votary of the "free" market, Mr. Lindell should already be figuring out what to do next! Sadly, I suspect "what to do next" will be "make people feel sorry for me," which, also sadly, will likely make him more money than he deserves in this sick, immoral, and decadent society.

Action: concerning a financial transaction tax, unsafe baby sleepers, and campaign finance disclosure.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a financial transaction tax, also known as a Robin Hood tax or a Wall Street sales tax. We used to have a financial transaction tax in America, but that was 50 years ago; now banksters use the internet to trade like they're all on speed, but don't pay a tax per trade that might actually fund some good things for good Americans. H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, would impose at most a $5 tax on every $1,000 in trades, while H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, would tax $1 every $1,000 in trades; I'd go higher and do a full one percent tax, but at the lowest tax rate in the Wall Street Tax Act, we could raise over $70 billion annually. How do right-wingers respond? By taking your pension hostage, of course! As if your pension relies exclusively on the lightning-fast trades speculators conduct -- or as if a less-than-one-percent tax is somehow onerous! But most sane people support a financial transaction tax, and it's well past time most sane people got to make most of the decisions.

Meanwhile, infant inclined sleepers have now killed 73 infants, but you can still buy them! That's right, no manufacture has recalled these sleepers, nor has our government forced them to do so even after our own Consumer Product Safety Commission declared them unsafe. This sorry state of affairs goes on even though every pediatrician worth the title will tell you babies should sleep on their backs on flat and firm surfaces, and even though infant deaths do tend to be all over the news for good reason. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell the nine corporations that manufacture infant inclined sleepers to recall them immediately. Our current Administration hates telling other bosses what to do, but if we want to remain a civilized society, we have to tell them what to do, and there's a good chance they'll do our will, if for no other reason than that they want the bad publicity to stop. Of course, anyone who builds a device that suffocates helpless infants deserves all that bad publicity. But if they do the right thing, they can make it stop.

Finally, H.R. 2592/S. 1356, the Honest Ads Act, would amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 -- our seminal campaign finance law -- so that it would be able to require disclosure for online political ads as well as TV, radio, and newspaper ads, and the bill would also extend that law's prohibition on foreign nationals buying campaign ads to internet ads. I remain one of those folks who think we wouldn't even be talking about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign if Democrats had nominated a better candidate, but it's fairly obvious that more and more Americans (ahem!) look to the internet for their news, and thus deserve the same protections from noxious campaign ads that other folks get. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand campaign finance disclosure to internet ads by passing the Honest Ads Act. I'm sure the right has its lies about preachers being silenced and politicians being able to silence opponents all lined up, but this bill is about disclosure; what do they have to be afraid of?

Action: concerning banksters, immigration, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would impose a small financial transaction tax on big Wall Street banksters, then Americans for Tax Fairness would still help you do that. The bills in question are H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, which would impose a 0.1% tax on financial transactions including stock and derivative trades, and H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which would impose a range of taxes (from 0.005% to 0.5%) on same; the highest tax imposed here would be $5 per $1,000 in trades. Folks on the right are calling this a "tax on my 401(k)," as if all financial speculation winds up in pension funds, and as if $5 per $1,000 is onerous -- and as if reducing the number of trades banksters make, which these bills would do, wouldn't actually stabilize markets. Most people understand all of this intuitively -- unless, of course, their salary depends on them not understanding it. But if we get it, we must act.

Meanwhile, I have two private prison-related action alerts for you: in one, Color of Change (among others) helps you tell your Congressfolk to close a loophole that allows private prison corporations to avoid taxes, and in the other, Moms Rising helps you tell two big banking corporations to pull their investments from private prison corporations. Both of these are also concentration camp-related, of course, since this Administration thinks detaining immigrants in inhumane conditions and funneling taxpayer money to corporate cronies is a two-fer. Even the Obama Administration had started getting private prisons out of the immigrant detainment business; the least we can do is hold the folks who work for us (i.e., our government) accountable to us. And certainly private prison corporations deserve no special treatment from our tax code; at least S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would stop private prison corporations from calling themselves "Real Estate Investment Trusts."

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell three big airline corporations (JetBlue, Delta, and American) to stop using facial scanning technology on their customers. Why? Well, we'll begin with the airlines' explanation: it makes things faster! After all, presenting your boarding pass or your passport (which biometric screening would replace) takes several seconds, and Delta claims that using biometric screening saves a whole nine minutes per flight. Would you want to take "I saved nine minutes per flight" to the Pearly Gates? I didn't think so -- it would display a distinct lack of imagination. The downside, meanwhile, is that we don't have a whole lot of law covering facial scanning, so who knows how long the airlines hold on to the information or which government agency they give it to without a warrant? Yeah, I know the airlines say they don't store the info, but you don't trust corporations more than you trust your government, do you? Of course you don't. So let's not trade liberty for convenience.

Action: concerning voting rights, pollution, and taxes.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4/S. 561, the Voting Rights Advancement Act. I know, the For the People Act passed the House, but Mob Boss Mitch won't let the Senate vote on it, so it's time for Plan B, which is "squeeze the politicians on the specifics." The Voting Rights Advancement Act would plug the holes our Supreme Court blew out of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder -- and would do so in a way that doesn't "single out" Southern states (our Court's main problem with the Voting Rights Act) but would "single out" any state or locality with an established, demonstrable record of voting rights violations. Republicans have been opposing voting rights reforms for-freaking-ever; why, it's almost like they're afraid people won't vote them into office unless they have a few dozen ways to suppress the vote! And of course vote suppression makes it more difficult to punish politicians who suppress the vote -- but this is a democracy, and we can still speak out in force, so we can still make it right.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would keep ubiquitous PFAS chemicals out of our food and water. PFAS chemicals appear in just about everything, from firefighting foam to food wrappers; the Sierra Club calls them "forever chemicals," because they're just about indestructible. If you're thinking maybe you like "indestructible," recall that indestructible chemicals don't break down into more harmless chemicals, and that PFAS chemicals increase your risk of kidney damage, thyroid problems, and cancer. Also, the FDA's found them in foods ranging from sweet potato to chocolate cake, and over 100 cities have found them in their water supply. So, yeah, it's well past time we did something about all of that. Various Congressfolk have introduced over 20 bills that would address the problem, and now we've got to get Congress to move them, so they can become law and protect us from serious health care problems.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to impose a financial transaction tax on Wall Street banksters. A few bills in Congress would do that: H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, would impose a 0.1% tax (that's one-tenth of one percent, not "one percent" or "10 percent," "liberal" media!) on financial transactions including stock and derivative trades, and H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, would impose a range of taxes, from 0.005% to 0.5% -- none of which are "five percent" or "50 percent," though, again, our "liberal" media will report it as such by "mistake." Seriously, a financial transaction tax (which supporters often call a "Robin Hood Tax") is fairly popular across the board -- with everyone, it seems, except politicians. And politicians have betrayed us in the past -- remember when candidate Obama supported it, only to be "talked out of it" by Larry Summers once he became President? We can prevent that from happening again only by communicating our will to our Congressfolk until they do our will.

Action: concerning taxes, immigration, and discrimination.

H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, would (as its title suggests) levy an extraordinarily small tax (0.1% -- that's one tenth of one percent, not "10 percent," "liberal" media!) on all securities trading in America. I'd prefer a one percent tax myself, so that our "liberal" media can't lie about it as easily. Yes, it sticks in my craw that they routinely make these little math "mistakes" and don't get fired! If I ever got in a serious accident, I wouldn't want to find any of these clowns in charge of my morphine drip. "60 milligrams a day or 600, what's the difference?" Anyway, I digress: so, so much trading goes on in America -- too much, in my opinion, which is another reason I'd want the tax to be larger -- that even a 0.1% tax on trading would likely raise more than $75 billion annually, and that ain't small potatoes. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing Wall Street trades again. (Oh, and by the way, in case your Republican uncle is unusually attentive -- hey, it happens! -- Sec. 2 would exempt initial public offerings of stock from the tax.)

Meanwhile, you know our President has declared a "national emergency" to build his vanity border wall, and unless both the House and Senate override his veto of their resolution of disapproval nullifying this "national emergency" declaration, we have to presume he's actually going to get it built -- I mean, he might scheme to fail to build it and then blame everyone else, but that's not the way to bet. And if he's going to get it built, he's going to get private corporations to build it, since that's how our government does it these days, and one of those corporations is Caddell Construction. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Caddell Construction to withdraw its bid to build our President's vanity border wall. If we can't shame our Congressfolk into doing the right thing -- and many of them are quite emotionally-crippled in their utter lack of capacity to feel shame -- then we have to turn the laser beam of shame elsewhere, and maybe Caddell doesn't want to be forever linked in the American psyche with family separation, Presidential vanity, and the like. We won't know unless we try, though.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5/S. 788, the Equality Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. CREDO also reminds us that our current Administration is one that has proven unusually hostile to civil rights for gay and transgender folks, but the Equality Act -- by amending the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) so that LGBTQ folks can also enjoy their protections -- would pretty much put a stop to that. Our current Administration is hostile to gay and transgender folks, of course, because that's about the only way to keep the far right pounding the saucepan for you, never mind that we all know actual conservatives in our lives who find all our Administration's posturing distasteful enough that no number of federal judges is going to bring them back into the fold. And it's no use citing that time our President said he was OK with gay marriage, because our President says a lot of contradictory crap by design (so that there's something for everyone!), and also because, well, we need to look at what people do more than what they say.

Action: concerning a Wall Street tax, Medicare drug price negotiation, and consumer protection.

S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, would impose a miniscule tax on Wall Street trading -- a 0.1 percent tax, to be precise, which amounts to 10 cents for every $100 of trading. To review: that's a 0.1 percent tax, or one-tenth of one percent, not "1 percent" or "10 percent," "liberal" media! Personally I'd go for the 1 percent, because that's the hardest one to lie about, but even a 0.1% tax on Wall Street trades would net us almost $80 billion annually, more than enough to pay for, say, state and community college education for all citizens, or a water infrastructure rebuilding program. These would be investments in the American people, not "investments" in gilding the plumbing in some CEO's 19th vacation home. Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in our future by passing the Wall Street Tax Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1046/S. 377, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, would a) let Medicare negotiate drug prices on behalf of our seniors, and b) let Medicare manufacture a particular drug if it's not able to negotiate a fair price on said drug. Even if a big pharma corporation has exclusive rights to that drug! Maybe we ought to manufacture our own drugs and just cut out the big pharma middleman entirely, but in the meantime, this bill, if it becomes law, ought to reduce drug prices dramatically -- by some $85 billion annually, according to a study done by a Koch brothers-affiliated institute. Yes, I said "Koch brothers"! And yet our President blunders on, insisting that Medicare is the "real price-fixer" just because a bunch of big pharma CEOs told him to, when Medicare is literally prohibited by law from negotiating drug prices! CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support lower prices by passing the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act.

Finally, Rep. Waters (D-CA) has introduced the Comprehensive Consumer Credit Reporting Reform Act (Congress.gov has no bill number as of this writing), which would (among other things) ensure that any paid/settled medical debt doesn't show up on your credit report, give you a year to resolve complex medical bills before they show up on your credit report, and prevent credit reporting corporations from mixing up your credit info with someone else's. In a world where one out of every five credit reports contain errors of some kind, Ms. Waters's bill would go a long way toward preventing credit errors from ruining your life. What is the right's answer to that? That corporations should be protected from "frivolous" lawsuits exposing their mistakes and the damage they cause to real people? Don't laugh, because that was the Republican answer to the Experian identity theft scandal in 2017. Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumers from credit report errors by passing the Comprehensive Consumer Credit Reporting Reform Act.

Action: tax "reform."

President Trump finally released the broad outline of a tax "reform" plan, and it's an even bigger turd sandwich than we thought. We knew it would repeal the Estate Tax and the Alternative Minimum Tax, we knew it would slash corporate taxes, we knew it would deliver a massive income tax cut for rich folks and a piddling tax cut for working families, and we even knew it would raise taxes on certain middle class families in collapsing seven tax brackets down to three. But wait, there's more! The Trump tax plan would get mortgage interest deduction reform exactly wrong -- the home mortgage interest deduction gets abused by folks who buy up craploads of buildings just so they can take the tax break, but the Trump plan would actually only offer that deduction to folks who pay more than $25,000 annually in mortgage interest, meaning working families wouldn't be able to take it anymore and slumlords still could. Any reasonable person would try to accomplish the exact opposite in a reform proposal, but not our President -- his mortgage deduction proposal is perhaps the most despicable tax policy proposal I've ever seen, and anyone who supports it would be, in a sane and moral world, too ashamed to show their face in public.

But none of this has stopped Mr. Trump from claiming that the tax cuts wouldn't benefit him, which, thankfully, seems to more and more Americans to be the offensively absurd statement it actually is -- why, even our paper of record seems to have no patience with tax cut stupidity anymore. Mr. Trump peddles the same lie that repealing the Estate Tax "helps family farms," when the next family farm he finds that was ever destroyed by the Estate Tax will be the first, and he also peddles the lie that corporations just can't compete with other countries and their lower tax rates, but corporations have soaked up nearly all of the increase in income from this economic "recovery" and buy enough corporate welfare tax breaks that they pay a much lower effective tax rate. And I'm sure his minions in the right-wing media will peddle the lie that "everyone will get $1,600." That'd be based on the Tax Policy Center's finding that the average tax break will be $1,600, but averages don't pay the mortgage, and if I get a tax break of $40 and someone else gets a tax break of $3,160, that doesn't mean $1,600 flows into my bank account.

It gets worse. The Senate Budget Committee has drafted a budget proposal that includes the tax cuts, but doesn't offset about $1.5 trillion (over the next decade) of their cost. They're imagining that the Magic Unicorn Power of Tax Cuts will goose up the economy such that they'll collect an extra $1.5 trillion in revenues, but when they don't -- no, it's not even an "if," it's a "when"! -- they'll use the resulting shortfall as an excuse to cut budgetary programs that actually help good Americans, like food stamps, like Medicare, like Medicaid, like Social Security. And of course the House is, as we speak, putting together a budget proposal that would allow them to "fast track" such program cuts. You might call this rule-by-incompetence, but assessing their competence gives them far too much credit: they mean to do us harm, because doing us harm is the way they keep their power. Their plans represent nothing more and nothing less than a massive income redistribution scheme from working families to rich folks, and civilized people cannot, and must not, suffer such evil.

So of course we should be clogging up their phone lines with our will that they must not pass the Trump tax plan, that nearly every aspect of it is evil, that supporting it is absolutely toxic and will bring them down if they're up for re-election next November. But we should also, of course, argue for the world we want. If we bring back the 91% tax bracket and close corporate tax loopholes so that corporations actually pay 35%, executives won't pay themselves outlandish sums and won't let profits sit in corporate coffers to be taxed away, so they'll spend that money hiring people to make stuff. I know that's what'll happen because that's what did happen in the middle of the last century, when we created the greatest middle class that ever walked the Earth. And if we imposed a one percent tax on all Wall Street trading (a.k.a. the "Robin Hood tax," or the "Wall Street sales tax"), we'd raise hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and then we could actually, for example, develop a renewable energy grid in America, one built by, among others, all the fossil fuel workers who would be displaced. We could find other tax policy items to support -- I post about them all the time here -- but let's get our Reps and Senators on the line and make our will known about this matter, right now. Good luck, and God bless.

AUTHOR'S NOTE. See also my tax "reform"-related action alert from early September, which focuses more on the corporate tax angle than today's action alert does.

Around the table: when a pro-hearing aid bill becomes an anti-gun bill, and other absurdities.

Surprise, surprise, President Trump's boutique infrastructure plan would include tolls on existing interstate highway lanes and privatizing rest stops on those highways. One more time: the private sector doesn't do things better; it just redistributes income from workers to executives "better." And I bet Congress and the President aren't really "headed for a fight" about this matter -- one Republican Rep says "I don't like paying for a road twice," which, like, hallelujah, but then adds "(e)verything's on the table." Profile in courage!

Dean Baker calls a financial transaction tax (a.k.a. the "Robin Hood tax" or the "Wall Street sales tax") "The Best Solution to Income Inequality." Why? Because the cost will borne entirely by Wall Street, rather than Main Street. Mr. Baker also reminds us that a) folks don't care about the number of trades they make so much as the amount of money they make, and b) banksters can't argue that "more trades makes the market more efficient," as "(s)omeone would be hard pressed to argue that capital was better allocated in the housing bubble years than fifteen or twenty years earlier when volume might have been less than half of its current level."

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted" file: Oklahoma's state budgeting problems are so awful now that a lot of kids are only going to school four days a week. The good news? Not every kid in Oklahoma likes it -- some of them, for example, don't like all the rushing around you do when you try to cram five days of work into four. Still, I worry that too many of them will remember this as some kind of Golden Age, even after they're grownups and the ill effects of their education take their toll -- how many of them will say "a four-day school week never hurt me" as they suffer through their umpteenth consecutive year without work?

Hoo boy: former Fox News punditoid recalls how that network (among other things!) made the news "like pro wrestling" and "performance art," and how they "fixed" panel debates so that right-wingers always won. Fox News punditoids getting their scripted "last word" 24 hours beforehand, a Fox News "star" telling his guests what to say -- these are, of course, the hallmarks of folks who can't win arguments on the merits. And remember, kids: if we could buy cable channels a la carte, we wouldn't have to put up with this garbage.

Finally, from the "When Do They Feel Shame?" file, gun rights groups contort bill allowing over-the-counter hearing aids into an anti-gun bill, quite likely because Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is one of its sponsors. Go ahead and try to follow their reasoning, if you dare. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is also one of its sponsors, and has rebutted these groups' talking points, but apparently to no avail. What a shame that some gun rights groups make all gun rights supporters look bad.

Action: tuition-free public college yea, whistleblower protections yea, "right to work" nay.

S. 806 -- authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and known colloquially as the "College for All Act" -- would make four-year public universities and colleges tuition-free. (I don't have a House bill number yet, but Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, sponsors that bill.) If your right-wing friends get all ZOMG HOW WILL YOU PAYZ FOR TEH COLLEGEZ!!!!, tell them that the College for All Act would fund its aims with a financial transaction tax (or "Robin Hood tax," or "Wall Street sales tax"), one that would levy a 0.5 percent tax (not "five percent," and not "50 percent"!) on stock trades, a 0.1 percent tax on bond sales, and a 0.005 percent tax on derivative transactions. I think the bill should tax derivatives a lot harder than that, and I'm not a big fan of dedicated revenue streams either, but I approve of making public college-level education tuition-free for all Americans. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to support the College for All Act.

Meanwhile, S. 762, the IRS Whistleblower Improvements Act of 2017 -- an actually bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Grassley (R-IA) and Wyden (D-OR) -- would better protect whistleblowers who drop a dime on tax fraud at their workplaces. The IRS whistleblower program has recovered $3 billion in tax fraud since 2006, which doesn't sound like a lot in the context of trillions of dollars in revenues annually, but which also represents a dramatic improvement in recovered taxes since then, and really, we ought to protect the good folks who risk their lives and careers (and I'm not exaggerating when I say that!) to expose the people who are cheating us out of all the services our taxes buy. With all the hysteria from the right about the IRS over the years, it's awfully nice to see at least one Republican tune it out occasionally, and that's true even if you knew the one Republican who'd tune it out would be Charles Grassley. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support courageous whistleblowers by supporting S. 762.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject "right-to-work" legislation -- such as H.R. 785/S. 545, the National Right to Work Act -- then Sign for Good still helps you do that. Listen to folks who support such legislation and you'll be whisked off to an alternate universe where the National Labor Relations Act somehow deprives workers of their right to negotiate terms of employment (rather than enhance their ability to exercise that right!), and where a union bargaining on your behalf is somehow a "monopoly." Seriously, if you're already very, very wealthy and successful, you can negotiate terms of employment more or less to your liking, but absent unions and strong legislation, employers could dictate terms to the rest of us, or else we wouldn't have a job. And, ah, the union as a "monopoly within the workplace"? What a profound insult to all the people hurt by real monopolies -- including the monopolies that treat their workers the worst precisely because no one can compete with them. Sometimes right-wingers are clever with words. But not so much this time.

Action: opposing the Trump agenda -- and proposing our own.

The incoming Trump Administration has planned a litany of attacks on working families -- but its one neat-sounding idea is its infrastructure plan. When you look at his infrastructure plan and realize it's full of soup -- that it's a Rube Goldbergian contraption of a plan in which corporate tax breaks magically "attract" investment in infrastructure, and that the end result will be either boutique infrastructure projects in wealthy areas that don't need them or the privatization of projects in areas that do -- you'll no doubt say so to your Reps and Senators. And then they, or their "liberal" media lackeys, will demand that you "come up with a better idea." Of course, if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you probably already know a dozen better ideas off the top of your head, but in case you're new to this blog, Sign for Good presents this petition laying out a Real Agenda for Working People. The petition calls for (among other things) a real public works program that goes beyond infrastructure, a $15/hour minimum wage, ending forced arbitration in consumer contracts, fighting "free" trade deals that hurt workers and further enrich the already too-rich, institute a financial transaction tax (or Robin Hood Tax, or Wall Street Sales Tax), and raise the top income tax rate. All of these will do better than another round of crippling deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. So let's have at it!

Meanwhile, I've been passing along action alerts opposing various Trump Administration cabinet picks, but truth is they're all terrible, so Block Trump's Cabinet helps you tell your Senators to oppose all of Mr. Trump's Cabinet nominees. From the greedhead banksters at Treasury and Commerce to the practicing racist at Justice to the would-be Medicare destroyer at HHS to the would-be public school destroyer at Education (and here's a separate petition from MoveOn opposing Ms. DeVos, if you're so inclined) to the objectively pro-pollution politicians at State, Interior, and the EPA, it sure looks like Mr. Trump is actively trying to find the worst possible person for every single job -- even his most inoffensive nominee, Elaine Chao for Transportation Secretary, spent much of her tenure as Tha Bush Mobb's Labor Secretary trying to gut overtime and family leave rules. Of course, his nominees do face significant conflict of interest-related hurdles before they can take office, but the Office of Government Ethics has to enforce the relevant laws, and Congress could pull all kinds of shenanigans up to and including repealing the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 that created OGE. In the meantime, I suppose, Mr. Trump could try to intimidate OGE employees (all career civil servants except the Director, whose term doesn't end until January 2018) into leaving and packing OGE with his lackeys. In other words, sooner or later we're going to have to rely on ourselves.

Action: a "Wall Street sales tax" yea, official protestor harassment nay.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support an aggressive sales tax on Wall Street stock trades. Why? Because it would raise a lot of money -- until that point at which it fulfills its real purpose, to restrain lightning-fast computerized stock trading that adds nothing of value to the economy but which now makes up most stock trades. Trading in ever-more convoluted derivative products doesn't do as much for the economy as, you know, making stuff, selling stuff, and saving money. But though that may be obvious to you and I, banksters act like it's not, and pretend that a Wall Street sales tax (or financial transaction tax, or Robin Hood tax, take your pick) would somehow injure Mom-and-Pop stores and small businesses -- as if they're the ones creating all these hifalutin financial "instruments"! Of course, they don't really mean you'll injure them -- they mean they'll injure them, if they don't get their way. Remember when you were a kid, and acting like a spoiled brat got you shamed and put in the corner? Banksters have apparently never experienced such things. I guess it's up to us to teach them, then.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to investigate alleged attempts by the FBI and the DHS to intimidate peaceful protestors and activists, then Roots Action still helps you do that. Maybe it doesn't matter to these committees if the FBI has conducted "counterterrorism" surveillance on Occupy protestors or planted informants among Keystone XL pipeline protestors or compiled social media posts of Black Lives Matter protestors -- maybe they're all just "dirty hippies" (or worse!) to our Congressfolk. But you no doubt recall how our Congressfolk overreacted to reports of the IRS collecting information on Tea Party groups? This, when the Tea Party is a corporate-grown "protest" movement! Of course, corporate sponsorship explains Congress's priorities in most cases, but no matter -- our Congress has a duty to rein in the excesses of federal law enforcement officials, who will very likely never find a "terrorist" in any of these movements unless they make one themselves. And I'm sure that's come up in official meetings at the FBI and the DHS.

Around the table: Wall Street taxes, think tanks, robocalls, voter registration, and the Disappeared President.

Robert Reich instructs us as to "Why a Tax on Wall Street Trades is an Even Better Idea Than You Know." You probably know why it's a good idea (would raise a lot of revenue, reduce banksters' political power, restrict useless high-speed trading, et cetera) but you may not know that Wall Street's objections are also utter horsedoodle -- financial transaction taxes have not sent corporations away to other lands, or else England's financial sector would be a lot smaller than it is, and this tax (the Robin Hood tax? the Wall Street sales tax? Take your pick) also wouldn't "hurt small businesses" unless they're engaging in high-speed trading, which, news flash! They're not. Always the big corporations hide behind the small businesses when they're being told to do the right thing!

Adam Johnson at FAIR catches the central hypocrisy of the "liberal" media's sudden discovery that corporate money compromises a lot of think tanks: that the "liberal" media has been quoting these think tanks for years. And, in the New York Times's case, at least, it's much worse: the Times has been letting the Center for Strategic and International Studies write op-eds arguing for, you know, more war-making, more government spying, and generally more paranoia and hysteria, which I doubt will end now that the Times has reported extensively on CSIS's big corporate donors. Key insight: "the think tank industry...is often based on laundering influence through ostensibly neutral-sounding 'institutes' or 'centers'." "Laundering" is about the perfect way to describe it.

Chris Morran at The Consumerist tells you "What You Need to Know About New Rules Allowing Debt Collection Robocalls from Feds." The FCC's new rules (mandated by, you guessed it, a rider in the 2015 must-pass appropriations bill) allow our government to call us, on wireless lines, if we owe our government money. Thing is, with so many student loans federally-funded or backed, that could be a lot of people. And the rules allow your government to call you before you're even late, apparently because a student loan lobby told them it'd be good for you. At least you can tell them not to call you (though it you owe more than one debt -- if you owe to the IRS, for example -- you'll have to tell them once for every debt you owe).

Surprise, surprise, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner vetoes automatic voter registration bill, citing booga-booga about "non-citizens" being automatically registered to vote. Of course, he was for it before he was against it -- or, possibly, before he realized the bill would kick in before his 2018 re-election effort. And dig the state House Rep who thinks citizens will work harder to educate themselves about candidates if they have to work harder to register to vote! But I bet he still wants to make everything easier for his corporate donors, without any similar concern about how hard they're working.

William Rivers Pitt reminds us what's missing from most mainstream accounts of the ongoing dissolution (if that's what it is!) of the Republican Party: the role of George W. Bush in that dissolution. Disappearing the man who made Trumpism possible is how the Republican "establishment" gets to pretend it's somehow fundamentally different from Mr. Trump. But it's also how the Democratic nominee -- who, you no doubt recall, refused to disavow her vote for the Iraq war almost five years after she cast it the wrong way -- evades her own complicity in the various messes we're in now.

Around the table: talking only to banksters about financial regulation, and other follies.

Dean Baker catches Bloomberg analyzing a proposed Wall Street tax by talking only to Wall Street banksters. Naturally, Wall Street banksters take "mom and pop" hostage, as if Mom and Pop are the ones indulging in the high-speed trading that does nothing for our economy except redistribute wealth upward. But it is stunning, that nominally intelligent people (I don't think it's an act of charity to assume reporters are nominally intelligent people) seem so blind to other people's self-interest. Can it be because they're paid to be blind to it?

Ho hum, Union of Concerned Scientists report due out tomorrow will tell us that "missile defense" programs the Pentagon has been laboring on all these years don't protect us from a damn thing. And, naturally, you'll discover that Barack Obama has been throwing good money after bad on "missile defense" just as much as George W. Bush did, without garnering any of the hero-worship the right bestowed on Mr. Bush back in the day. I wonder why "missile defense," despite its obvious problems and its rigged tests that still fail, still persists as a serious project. Cough corruption cough!

OpenSecretsBlog informs us that the Trump campaign will have serious trouble raising money from Wall Street this year, because Mr. Trump's running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has the power to select firm (or firms) to run Indiana state or local pension funds, and the SEC has, since 2010, forbidden campaign contributions from any firm that could be selected to run those funds! Hey, it's called the "pay to play" rule for a reason. I expect Donald Trump will decry the "pay to play" rule as Big Gummint Run Amok, and would, as President, appoint some stooge to the SEC to kill it -- until, of course, he needs it to defeat his 2020 challenger.

Government investigators say that HUD Secretary Julian Castro violated the Hatch Act by praising Hillary Clinton to Yahoo! News -- in his own office, with the HUD seal in the background. The Hatch Act forbids public employees from conducting partisan political business at public offices, and while not many folks know what the Hatch Act does, this could still dash Mr. Castro's Vice Presidential hopes -- if there's anything Hillary Clinton hates, it's an amateur crook. I'll be mildly interested to hear Donald Trump's howls of anger, since I expect he'll be violating the Hatch Act every hour of every day as President (and probably telling us it's different when he does it, too).

Finally, buried in this mountain of pre-Republican convention coverage from Politico is the spectacle of George W. Bush openly fretting that he will be "the last Republican President." All together now: we can only hope! Now Mr. Bush shouldn't worry so much about that, because Republicans will always have bajillions of dollars in corporate campaign contributions and thus will always have a shot -- but he should have a little more shame. Donald Trump isn't the reason to worry that Republicans will never win the Presidency again -- George W. Bush's eight-year reign of incompetence and arrogance is that reason, even if today's Republicans pretend he never existed. Republicans sure don't deserve any more Presidents after George W. Bush.

Around the table: Republicans are *objectively pro-financial meltdown*, and other lessons.

House Republicans introduce bill that would repeal the Dodd-Frank financial services reform law. This bill would repeal the Volcker Rule, which aims to prevent banks from engaging in risky financial speculation, and that should be disgustingly easy for Democrats to slam in campaign ads -- just show a bankster taking grandma's savings and blowing it at a casino, then show grandma losing her home, and say Republicans support this sort of thing. And they've actually called this monstrosity of a bill the Financial CHOICE Act -- forget that CHOICE is an acronym and ask yourself: are we going to have a "choice" about whether banksters shit on us or not? When I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

FAIR's Adam Johnson notes the irony of the "liberal" media asking Larry Summers, the "architect of the last recession," for his take on whether Donald Trump's election would create another one. You remember Larry Summers's greatest hits, right? Derivatives deregulation! Glass-Steagall repeal! Plus, I would add, his "advice" that we don't really need a financial transaction tax (a.k.a. the "Robin Hood tax" or "Wall Street sales tax") and his desperate shilling for "free" trade, including a lot of booga-booga about China. And another thing: should it really be "news" that someone opposes Donald Trump, like that's such a high moral bar to clear?

Adam Popescu, writing at The Guardian, profiles Cody Wilson, the "the face of open-source 3D gun design," who has sued our government for stopping him from selling gun blueprints over the internet. Mr. Wilson's arrogance is Trumpian ("I have developers for anything and everything, some of the best talent in the world. I know some of the world’s best hackers" yadda yadda yadda), but I hope he wins his case -- yes, these blueprints will be used to make guns, but guns are legal and their blueprints are legal, and if we taxed the rich as hard as we should, and used that tax revenue to provide real economic opportunity for Americans, we wouldn't be worrying about how much Cody Wilson might be contributing to gun violence.

Now Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is suggesting that prominent Republicans ought to rescind their endorsements of Donald Trump for President, since Mr. Trump has continued to bash the Mexican-American judge who's hearing the Trump University suit. But you may recall that not long ago Mr. Graham was privately telling Republicans to support Mr. Trump financially, in the name of party unity; the idea that Mr. Trump's continued bashing of Judge Curiel represents a sort of rubicon doesn't wash -- it may be hard to tell exactly how Mr. Trump is going to embarrass himself and his country next, but anyone with half a brain knows he's going to. So, no, I don't exactly trust Lindsey Graham's good intentions here.

Finally, John Oliver, star of HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, buys up nearly $15 million in medical debt for a mere $60,000 and forgives it on his show. He's not the first to do it (cf. Rolling Jubilee), but comparing himself to Oprah Winfrey assures that debt forgiveness and regulatory oversight will get a lot more attention than they've received thus far, and that's how you leverage mass media to do good works.

Around the table: leaner government, religious liberty, police extortion, stupid arguments, and "free" college.

"Want a Leaner Federal Government?" asks John DiIulio and Paul Verkuil ask. "Hire More Federal Workers." Their argument is actually a little obscure, but certainly if we stopped outsourcing and privatizing federal work, we would save the taxpayer money, which is the same as reducing spending, and hiring more federal workers would certainly reduce the amount of money we spend on the emergencies we have because we don't have enough workers to do the work. You could probably tell that to your boss, too.

Henry Rollins answers the question of whether to boycott North Carolina in an article entitled "North Carolina, I Love You, But Your Governor is an Asshole." Remembering the good folks he met as a youth and as part of "a broke band on the road," he finds himself wishing Bruce Springsteen hadn't canceled his Greensboro show: "I wish he had spoken to the thousands of people who were there about what had just happened to the greatness of their state, then told them where he was donating all that money. The cancellation, in a way, allows McCrory to end the conversation, which I think should be just beginning." I'm sort of halfway myself -- every time I think I don't want to punish good North Carolingians either, I remember that they elected that Governor.

ProPublica and the New York Daily News catch New York City police running stings in immigrant-owned stores and then using "public nuisance" charges to get what they want from them, including huge fines and the freedom to conduct warrantless searches whenever. The NYPD gets to close stores until the "public nuisance" has been "dealt with" in court, which is rather like punishment before the crime, and naturally the NYPD conducts these shenanigans almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods. In a sane and healthy society, heads would roll over this. In this sick, immoral, and decadent society, it took ProPublica and the Daily News almost three whole years to even put this report together.

Ho hum, South Carolina sheriff compares the NAACP to the KKK, and adds that "the most racist people in America right now sometimes are minorities." And then lists the multitudinous offenses committed by the NAACP that compare to lynching, intimidation, and murder! I kid, of course -- Sheriff Wright seems to think the NAACP is racist merely for concentrating on remediating the injuries caused by racism, which is a little like calling women who fight rape "sexist." Plus, he has a black friend too and just wishes we could all get along. But I don't want to get along with stupid people -- I want stupid people to better themselves, preferably out of sight and earshot.

Finally, in case you were taken in by all this sneering right-wingers do about "free college," Robert M. Nelson reminds us that state universities in New York were, in fact, tuition-free (and paid for by taxes) until the early 1960s. And the road to sky-high tuition rates and crippling student loan debt -- both of which have made banksters very, very rich -- began with a Democratic Congress and Republican President starting a student loan program that ultimately got managed by the banks but backed by the taxpayer, meaning banksters take none of the risk but reap all the rewards. Yes, a financial transaction tax (or Robin Hood tax) (or Wall Street sales tax!) would certainly do better at funding public colleges -- and Donald Trump's kids could still go to private colleges on their dad's dime, to address the noxious argument advanced by Mrs. Clinton.

Around the table: the political correctness of right-wingers, and other stories.

Surprise, surprise, a lot of the businesses blasting the North Carolina government for its pro-discrimination law HB 2 gave big bucks to the politicians who made it possible. More precisely, these businesses gave millions of dollars to two D.C.-based organizations, including the Republican Governors Association, that then funneled that money to the North Carolina Republicans who brought about this monstrosity. Perhaps that's why it doesn't seem to occur to them that they helped enable the very thing they now denounce.

In a peripherally-related note, Ian Millhiser at Think Progress suggests that the Mississippi "religious liberty" law may die an ugly death at the hands of the Supreme Court. Why? Because the Court ruled, in Romer v. Evans, that Colorado's notoriously anti-gay Amendment 2 "singl(es) out a certain class of citizens for disfavored legal status," and Mississippi's HB 1523 does the same, granting "an unambiguous permission slip to engage in discrimination" that "religious" folks can use against "a certain class of citizens," and only that class of citizens -- namely LGBT folks. Question for far-right evangelicals: does sending a trans girl home until she comes back to school dressed as a boy sound remotely like a way to win hearts and minds for Christ? Or does it sound more like a way to act out about the world not being exactly the way you'd like it to be?

In case you were letting your guard down about this economic "recovery" of ours, the incomparable David Dayen tells us a Princeton/Harvard study on the "1099 economy" -- composed mainly of temp, on-call, freelance, and contract workers, but also of independent contractors -- grew from 10 percent of the workforce in 2005 to almost 16 percent today. Some right-winger, somewhere, will try to sell this as a boon of "freedom" and "independence," but it's not -- these workers get no health care, no workers comp, no overtime, no paid leave, and now there are 9 million more of them than there were a decade ago. So this development "certainly informs this anti-establishment, anti-business-as-usual political moment." One answer: multi-employer benefit plans.

Sarah Anderson has a good idea: framing the "financial speculation tax" as a "Wall Street sales tax," as in, "if we have to pay sales taxes, why doesn't Wall Street?" The "financial speculation tax," the "financial transaction tax," and even the "Robin Hood tax" haven't caught fire, so maybe the "Wall Street sales tax" will. I hesitate only because I oppose sales taxes generally, but this "sales tax" wouldn't even be like the sales taxes we put up with -- it would hit higher-income traders using computers harder, because they make more trades, often hundreds in a day. Now I'm thinking the "Wall Street sales tax" should be higher than 1 percent. After all, you and I pay over 8 percent on average.

Finally, Florida Gov. Rick Scott reveals his improbably thin skin by saying the woman who chewed him out at a Gainesville Starbucks "refused to Pledge Allegiance to the flag." No, that's a quotation, dropped in clearly to provoke his more rage-addled supporters. Apparently, in her previous life as a city commissioner, Ms. Jennings rose to say the pledge at meetings but did not always recite it. Gosh, and they say liberals are the Thought Police? They say liberals are politically correct? (As an aside, "one statement, inexplicable" was a pretty funny lede. Kudos to writer Jason Silverstein!)

Around the table: containing good news for law-and-order types.

Maryland Court of Special Appeals issues opinion stating not only that police must get a warrant before using a "stingray" -- a device that acts like a cell phone tower for the purpose of gathering cell phone user information -- but must "fully explain to the court what exactly the device does and how it is used." People who don't think that's an onerous duty for police probably opposed the Miranda ruling, too. Also, police can't apply for a pen registers (which only authorize collection of phone numbers) and then try to collect other info using the stingray, because that's dishonest -- almost as dishonest as cooking up nonexistent "informants" to "provide" the info a stingray gathered. And police can no longer hide behind nondisclosure agreements with stingray manufacturers to avoid doing the right thing. It's a shame that the "war on terror" and the "war on drugs" have complicated what really are very simple matters, but good for Maryland.

Economist Robert Pollin says "Bernie Sanders Will Make the Economy Great Again." How? Single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care would dramatically reduce our country's spending on health care; a $15/hour minimum wage would vastly increase worker spending power with minimal rise in business costs; a financial transaction (or "Robin Hood") tax would raise a lot of money and reduce financial speculation; and gross domestic product would go up in a way that would actually favor workers, rather than banksters, for once. You probably knew all that already, but it's good to have it all in one place.

Kate Gould, writing at TruthOut, proposes a "non-military" solution to the ISIS problem. More bombs and more ground troops might get right-wingers hard, but it also creates more ISIS militants, who look at the carnage all around them and decide ISIS must be right. Ending the wars in Syria and Iraq, stemming the flow of arms to these and nearby regions, stopping Iraq's oppression of Sunni-majority areas, and fighting poverty in the Middle East will (to use a simpler metaphor than the "artichoke" metaphor Ms. Gould employs) starve ISIS of the oxygen it needs to make fire.

The New York Times observes a considerable amount of infighting among nominal conservatives -- mainly about whether conservatism has become too intolerant and too prone to believing the wildest lies. Many of the folks who say conservatism is just fine, thank you, don't deserve to be called "conservative," and Jonah Goldberg weighs in by saying TEH LIBRULZ ARE WORSEZ!!!!!! And if you came across the phrase "epistemic closure" and decided it meant political correctness, well, I wouldn't blame you.

Finally, Trump supporters grope and pepper-spray a 15-year-old girl at a rally in Janesville, WI. Yeah, she was a protestor, but does that make it OK to grope underage girls and then spray pepper in their faces? Let's see Teh Donald talk his way out of this one. Is it too much to hope that praising his supporters' "energy" or saying the girl was "asking for it" just won't do this time?

Around the table: terrorism brings out the *worst* in Our Glorious Elites! And other stories.

Frank Barat, writing in Counterpunch, tells us some hard truths about the terrorist attacks in Brussels. You don't need to be completely against prisons (as some of my compatriots on the left and right are!) to remember that the OGs of ISIS all met in Iraqi internment camps. And it's funny that Turkish Kurds, who are actually beating ISIS on the ground, can't get any help from Our Glorious Elites. But you better believe they'll fight like hell to be able to break into your phones whenever they want.

Zack Cartwright, writing at USUncut, finds "Five Outrageous Examples of Voter Suppression in the Arizona Primary." You'll recognize number one -- the absurdly long lines of voters in Maricopa County, which for some reason opened less than one-third the polling locations they opened in 2012 -- from the long lines you saw in the more, ah, urban areas of Ohio during the 2004 Presidential elections. You'll also be very surprised to learn that the more Hispanic areas of Maricopa County hardly had any polling locations open at all. The other three examples aren't any better.

Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, finds a litany of Bush Mobb-era pro-torture punditoids "suddenly concerned with human rights" now that President Obama has visited Cuba. These include the coiner of the phrase "enhanced interrogation" and a "putative liberal" who "had not once tweeted out the words 'human rights'" in 6,000 twitterings until President Obama went to Cuba. I'm pretty sure that if a Republican President had gone to Cuba, they'd have made fools of themselves giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Ho hum, banksters are fighting the notion of a financial transaction tax (a.k.a. the "Robin Hood tax"). In other news, burglars don't think laws against burglary are necessary. And what is the banksters' reasoning? That it would prevent them from redistributing more money upward to themselves "weaken markets and hurt small investors." Always the big guy takes the little guy hostage when you try to take the big guy's unearned goodies! And the banksters "weaken markets" much better than any government ever could, with their hifalutin financial "instruments" that have nothing to do with loaning money to build businesses, create jobs, and improve processes.

Finally, Newsweek reminds us that Joseph E. Schmitz, who has actually been named as a "foreign policy advisor" by Donald Trump himself, had to quit as Defense Department inspector general in 2005, amid allegations (mainly from Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley) that (among other things!) he blocked investigations into Iraq and Afghanistan contractors. In other words, he was too corrupt even for Tha Bush Mobb -- so of course he's now he's a Trump advisor! Another fun fact: Mr. Schmitz's father was expelled by the John Birch Society -- for his extremism.

Around the table: chickens, coming home to roost, again.

Richard Clarke, one of the few who knew what was going on in the early days of Tha Bush Mobb, tells us that "encryption and privacy are larger issues than fighting terrorism," and that governments need to fight terrorism within limits. He's right, of course -- you need privacy every day of your life, but how long does terrorism last? Terrorists blow up a building or a disco or (even) carry out attacks in multiple places, and they have their little drama and get their dose of attention for a short time, and then life settles back down and no one addresses, or even remembers, their grievances. But our government punishes us for it. Funny how that works.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) notes the tide of public opinion against "free" trade, and says "it would be very damaging to the Republican Party to try to jam it through at the last minute after the elections are over." Well, unless Republicans have already won all the goodies, I suppose -- and then they can do what they always do and hope people forget about it in two years. And though I'd love to report that one of my least favorite Republican Senators did heroic work in stopping the TPP from ever getting passed, I really think he'll fold. If I'm wrong about that (and I'd be happy to be wrong about that!), you'll hear it here first.

What is "The Unexpected Cause of Water Crises in American Cities," according to Carrie Sloan at TalkPoverty? Banksters, naturally! Who took advantage of crumbling infrastructure and decreasing revenues to trick American cities into using interest rate swaps to alleviate their spending woes in the short term -- but of course these swaps had all kinds of penalties built into them that cities were going to trigger sooner or later. Anyone else think taxing speculation and outlandish wealth is a lot easier than depending on hifalutin financial instruments?

Amber A'Lee Frost, writing at FAIR, catches more than a few "liberal" media outlets attacking Bernie Sanders's proposal to use financial transaction taxes to pay for college tuition as unfair to the poor. How? Because "free" college which it's not if taxes pay for it Jesus Mary and Joseph is also "free" for the wealthy, meaning taxes will have to go up on everyone -- even though Mr. Sanders has dedicated a specific revenue stream to pay for it! Of course, dedicating specific revenue streams to specific programs is a bad idea; better to just say I'm going to raise taxes on millionaire income big time and keep pounding that message until people get it -- which they will, with or without "liberal" media help.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie misses a slain state trooper's funeral because he's out campaigning for Donald Trump. I mention this not to pick on the guy (Lt. Gov. Guadagno did attend the funeral, after all), but to point out that all your right-wing friends on Facebook -- the ones who excoriated President Obama's "silence" on certain police officer deaths he actually condemned in public, the ones who slammed Mr. Obama for not attending Nancy Reagan's funeral when precisely zero Presidents have attended First Ladies' funerals since World War II -- will pass around precisely zero memes excoriating Gov. Christie for this oversight.

Finally, a few "conservative" "establishment" types have gotten together to plot an alternative to having Donald Trump as the Republican Presidential nominee. But two of them are a former Bush Mobb aide and Red State's execrable founder, Erick Erickson -- two men who don't seem to think they've done anything to stoke the rage in the populace Mr. Trump is now exploiting. One more time: this is chickens-coming-home-to-roost territory for the Republican establishment. They not only deserve no sympathy for their predicament, they deserve no empathy -- they should have known they were playing with fire all those years they happily called their political opponents "traitor."

Action: the People's Budget, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

As an alternative to incremental Obama budget proposals and reactionary Republican budget proposals, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has introduced the People's Budget. Long story short, the People's Budget would tax millionaire income harder than our government does now (though having five separate tax brackets separated by one percentage point each is a head-scratcher, at least to me) and would spend more on maintaining our nation's infrastructure than our government does now. It would do a crapload of other good stuff, too, like institute a financial transaction (or "Robin Hood") tax, permit Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, tax investment income at the same rate as income derived from work, fund public campaign financing, replace the Affordable Care Act's "Cadillac" tax with a public option, and crack down on corporate tax avoidance -- all things we fight for every day. The Economic Policy Institute joins with Sign Here Now to help you tell your Congressfolk to support the People's Budget.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2654/S. 1512, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would prevent employers from failing to accommodate their pregnant workers (except where such accommodations would impose undue hardships upon the employer, which I mention because right-wingers will pretend that part doesn't exist in the bill), and it would prevent employers from refusing to hire, or retaliate against, their pregnant workers. The bill would also keep employers from forcing unnecessary accommodations upon their workers. And no, John Kasich, pregnant workers can't "just work from home" -- not if they're cashiers, not if they're waitresses, not if they're health care workers, not if they're warehouse workers. And when even the Supreme Court recognizes the need for pregnant folks to have reasonable accommodations at work, Congress has no business holding their fingers in their ears.

Around the table: Tony Blair, higher education, Sam Brownback, Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and "slower money."

British ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair admits that the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which he supported wholeheartedly, helped create ISIS. Awfully big of him to say that, being so safely ensconced from the consequences of his decisions. Plus, he says "(i)t's not clear to me that, even if our policy did not work, subsequent policies have worked better," as if "our policy" didn't make the pursuit of alternate policies much, much more difficult.

Paul Buchheit at Nation of Change writes another link-filled primer, this time on what's wrong with higher education. Long story short: the number of administrators has exploded, more and more faculty members are becoming low-paid adjunct professors, tuition has increased three times faster than inflation, and college sports have become "modern minstrel shows." Long story somewhat shorter: this is what happens when you have a captive market, and governments abdicate their responsibility to oversee it on our behalf.

Ft. Hays State University poll finds a mere 18 percent of Kansans were either "somewhat" or "very" satisfied with Sam Brownback's performance as Governor, with 61 percent specifically saying his cut-taxes-for-rich-people-and-create-unicorns economic policy is either a "failure" or a "tremendous failure." Kudos to the many commenters on this article who said that as long as Democrats don't offer a viable alternative, they'll never beat people like Sam Brownback. Sadly, when Mr. Brownback finds he's only 10 points lower than Barack Obama, he'll just claim that the President is dragging all of our ratings down.

David Corn at Mother Jones suggests that evangelicals may want to reconsider their support of Ben Carson, given that his devotion to his church, the Seventh Day Adventists, who believe that most evangelicals will fight the godly when Jesus returns. But evangelicals voted for a Mormon for President in 2012; it's not so much whom they're voting for as whom they're voting against. If purity were more important to them than winning (which would be my hope!), then Rick Santorum wouldn't be in 223rd place right now.

Ho hum, Donald Trump describes how hard a time he's had of it by telling you how he went into Manhattan with a "small loan of a million dollars" from his father back in the day. You'd think a guy so legendarily sensitive to how people talk would know how "a small loan of a million dollars" would sound to them. But then, his supporters have already made up their minds, and you know how it is with people who've already made up their minds.

Finally, Keith Harrington tells us "Why Slower Money is the Key to a Real Economic Recovery." It's not enough to merely decry the more-and-faster economic model of the Wall Street casino economy; we must also design new models that slow down or prevent speculation, like the Direct Public Offering (or DPO) that can't be sold back to companies right away or to third-party buyers at all. (The financial transaction tax, or "Robin Hood tax," gets a mention here as well.)

Around the table: Homeland Security spies on police brutality protestors! And other surprises.

Surprise, surprise, Homeland Security has been monitoring protests against police brutality (and other events that might involve large numbers of black folks). Of course, protestors aren't terrorists -- if they were, they wouldn't be out in public protesting. Worried that today's protestors will throw up their hands tomorrow and start bombing police stations? Then let's not have police officers kill so many black folks.

Hillary Clinton has been attacking the "short-term" thinking of our bankster elites, but Robert Borosage finds her actual proposals "underwhelming" -- no Robin Hood tax, no closing the "carried interest" loophole for hedge fund managers, no breaking up too-big-to-fail banks, and weak (or classically overcomplex) proposals elsewhere. Remember, folks, stuff just ain't that deep, and if it takes too long to explain your sliding scale capital gains tax scheme, it's probably crap.

Paul Krugman reminds us that Medicare isn't "actuarily unsound," as Jeb Bush said the other day -- its costs have always risen more slowly than private health-care spending, and with the Affordable Care Act, these costs have risen even more slowly. The lesson? Even when you meet Republican arguments head-on, they wilt. If the rest of the "liberal" media would figure that out, we might have more of a chance avoiding the privatization of Medicare "for our own good."

Ian Millhiser at Think Progress tells us about a lawsuit filed in Indiana that asserts, essentially, that the folks who would make county clerks give out wedding licenses to gay folks despite their "sincerely-held religious beliefs" are the real bigots. Mr. Millhiser, quite generously, calls this argument "clever," but I maintain that people who claim they're being "discriminated" against by laws preventing them from discriminating against other people are just whiny diaper-loaded brats. I've gotten too old to value the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I "cleverness" of weaklings.

Finally, the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce plans to spend buku bucks in House primaries taking out the Republicans who have been holding up their big-corporate priorities. Ms. McCarter reminds us that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce helped bring this state of affairs about, by lurching far to the right upon the ascendance of Barack Obama. I'd go further and say whatever "anger" the Chamber has at "intransigent" teabaggers is fake -- the more "mainstream" Republicans they'd support were too far-right just 10 years ago, so the "anger" is just their way of pushing the mainstream ever further right.

Action: a financial speculation tax, better drug policy, and stricter controls on foreign meat.

Are you tired, good citizens, of seeing banksters continue to flourish in Our Ongoing Economic Armageddon, while the rest of us scrape by? Of course you are. And do you want an America where our financial titans engage in activities that actually help small businesses succeed and that actually help create jobs and better products and processes -- rather than simply enrich its biggest actors in an ongoing game of roulette? Then Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a financial speculation tax (or "Robin Hood tax") that would slow down all the volatile, software-driven, "high-speed" trading Wall Street does. While Rep. Ellison (D-MN) has introduced a bill that would institute this tax -- or, rather, reinstitute it, since such a tax did exist in America until the early '70s -- Public Citizen wouldn't make you support that particular bill, if you think (like me) that a financial transaction tax should be higher (say, one percent) than the figures that get bandied about in the Beltway, which range from 0.03% to 0.5%.

Lately, the House of Representatives voted against letting VA doctors discuss or recommend medical marijuana to their patients for the next calendar year. But does good news come from this development? Of course it does -- despite the Republicans' current 60-vote majority in the House, the vote itself failed only by a mere three votes, and that's called progress, especially in a society that has long completely overreacted to the threat posed by pot. Though these wheels grind slowly, the powerful are coming around to the superior wisdom of the electorate in this instance. And H.R. 1538/S. 683, the CARERS Act, would let states legalize medical marijuana without worrying that the federal government will shut them down, would let VA doctors recommend medical marijuana to the soldiers who need it, and would let researchers work on pot without worrying the feds are going to bust their door down. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to loosen medical marijuana restrictions so the people can benefit.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to keep unlabeled Chinese chicken out of our school lunches, then Food and Water Watch helps you do that. How does this happen? As we noted earlier this week, country-of-origin labeling for meat, fruit, and vegetables began in America in 2008, but the law doesn't require country-of-origin labeling for processed foods from other countries, and though the USDA has banned Chinese raw chicken from coming here, noting the Chinese government's laxity with food safety regulation and inspection, the USDA still green-lighted shipments of Chinese processed chicken here, though the same lax regulation and inspection regimes apply. The good news? Your Congressfolk are as sensitive to the Big Stick of Bad PR as anyone else, and with the recent news that American fast food eateries in China somehow got Chinese processed chicken for their nuggets, it'll be harder for even the most noxious teabagger to wield the Big Stick of Let the Corporations Do Whatever They Want.

Action: the Robin Hood tax, the Grand Canyon, and coal mining on public lands.

H.R. 1464, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, would impose a financial speculation tax (better known as a "Robin Hood tax") on stocks, securities, and derivatives, and the bill would also exempt folks who make less than $50,000 annually ($75,000 for married couples) from paying any taxes on their financial transactions. Banksters think folks should have more "skin in the game"? You know, when they're not busy figuring out which bills to pay this month? Well, that latter tax break would help accomplish that. I think H.R. 1464's tax rates are too low, and taxing derivatives less than stocks and other securities strikes me as backward, and I would also raise the exemption for married couples -- I know your bills don't double when you get married, but $75,000 still seems a bit low to me, and it's no wonder Republicans got so much mileage out of the "marriage penalty" meme back in the day. Generally, though, H.R. 1464 is on the right track. So Friends of the Earth helps you voice your support for H.R. 1464 and the principles contained therein. Their action tool lets you advocate for a stronger bill, like I've done above.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell property developers to abandon plans to build a big shopping mall in the Grand Canyon, then Sum of Us still helps you do that. That's right, Confluence Partners plans to deposit malls and hotels and fast-food eateries and the like into the middle of America's largest national treasure (not to mention Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni holy sites). Does the Grand Canyon really need a mall? Have Americans decided that looking into the Grand Canyon has ceased to be a profound and humbling experience? Has tourism fell off so badly that Americans just need more to occupy them when they're in the Canyon? Of course not -- all that's happened is that some private corporations decided they wanted to get in on the action; in essence, they aim to be parasites feeding off the great body of the Canyon. But though right-wingers might call me "quaint," there really are some things more important than mammon. One of these things is holding onto our national treasures so that future generations can know where we came from and where we're going. And a big fancy IMAX theatre doesn't do that.

Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior has actually noticed that our government charges a pittance in royalties to coal developers who mine on public lands -- a pittance that amounts to, well, we could call it any number of things, like a tax break, a welfare handout, or even a bailout. No, seriously: when coal corporations effectively pay about half the mandated royalty rates on coal, they're getting more than they deserve, and they're only getting it because they already have the money to lobby our government into doing their will and not ours. You know there'll be right-wingers who oppose closing the loopholes because ZOMG TEH GUBMINT INTERFEREZ IN TEH MARKETZ!!!! Yet it's exactly that government interference (at the behest of corporations, remember) that opens these loopholes that cost we-the-taxpayers money. So Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell the Office of Natural Resource Revenue to close these loopholes. Wild Earth Guardians does say closing these loopholes will "keep the coal in the ground," but even if we don't pursue that as a policy goal, closing the loopholes is still the right thing to do.

Action: the Greek elections, the Robin Hood Tax, and fracking in the Chaco Canyon area.

Voters in Greece gave the leftist party SYRIZA a near-majority of Parliament seats on Sunday, and then SYRIZA then promptly formed a coalition government with the far-right, anti-bailout party Independent Greeks; some of the Independents' platform is unpalatable, but it would be nice to see populists on left and right come together to do some good for once. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell our government to encourage foreign governments to negotiate fairly with Greece. What's there to negotiate? Greece has had three-count-'em-three bailouts, but with austerity policies forced down its people's collective throat as a condition thereof, hence Greece still has a 25% unemployment rate. Syriza won the elections after promising more public investment, less cutting of public services and jobs, and a better debt repayment deal -- in short, Syriza promised a path that might actually result in economic recovery. We can help them on this path by encouraging European nations to negotiate a deal that better ensures Greece's self-sufficiency, versus the continued enrichment of EU cronies.

President Obama will submit a budget proposal to Congress soon, and Public Citizen helps you tell the President to include a financial transaction tax, also known as a "Robin Hood tax," in that proposal. Republicans will declare it DOA, but let's at least make them oppose what's actually in it -- let's make them argue that an 0.03 or 0.5 percent tax (that's respectively three one-hundredths of one percent and half of one percent, "liberal" media) is a job-killer or an economy-killer. Fact is, the vast majority of all Wall Street stock transactions are now done by computer software, and they don't build or re-build economies -- these transactions don't loan money to businesses so they can develop innovative products or processes, but merely allow banksters to make money without doing any of the work that helps great nations rise. And even the tiniest Robin Hood tax will raise billions of dollars annually in revenues, without hitting working families with higher taxes or Medicare and Social Security cuts. Why are these such bad things again?

Meanwhile, Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to protect the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico from fracking. Chaco Canyon, in the Four Corners region where four Western U.S. states meet, sits on a motherlode of shale gas, but gas drilling corporations have already demonstrated that they can't perform hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking") anywhere without polluting the air and water. They also can't do it without exacerbating the ill effects of climate change, because fracking releases a lot of methane into the air, and methane is much, much better at trapping heat than even carbon dioxide. There's a law and order element to this, too -- by its own account, the BLM has never properly researched the effects of fracking in the Chaco Canyon area, and its own resource plan forbids fracking in that area, but they've still approved nearly 120 fracking wells and have also leased some 20,000 acres in the Santa Fe national forest for gas drilling. If you can't ensure drilling in our national treasures is safe, maybe government is not the right place for you.

Around the table: what happens to Muslims when they condemn terrorism! And other stories.

The New York Times's Charles Blow details "How Expensive It Is to Be Poor." Long story short: a lot of folks work but don't make enough money to get out of poverty; poor folks spend a bigger slice of their income in taxes, transportation, and fines for minor infractions of the law than rich folks do; and poor folks have far less access to banks than others and thus pay a lot of money in check-cashing fees and money order fees, and it's a lot tougher to get credit if you can't get a bank to serve you. If you find you can't relate, you might do better considering yourself blessed than finding fault with others who can relate.

Remember the "zombie cookies" we talked about last week, the ones you can't really delete from your computer, tablet, or smartphone? Well, after ProPublica reported on that last week, the corporation that makes those cookies has said it'll stop using them by early next month. Did they finally figure out how stupid they sounded when they said "clearing cookies is not a reliable way for a user to express their desire not to receive tailored advertising"? Sometimes it's actually a blessing when corporate executives and/or their PR hacks are so rock stupid.

Katherine McFate at the Center for Effective Government tells us that Rep. Van Hollen's bill resuscitating the long-dead "Robin Hood" tax on Wall Street transactions doesn't go far enough -- that it would spend the $100 billion or so it would take in every year on tax cuts for working folks, rather than on infrastructure repair. Of course I'd rather assess a much higher Robin Hood tax (1%, versus Van Hollen's 0.1%), and while I don't generally like to earmark revenue hikes to particular initiatives, I think we ought to be spending more on infrastructure improvements anyway -- for at least as long as interest rates are going to be close to zero.

The incomparable Duncan Black suggests that coverage of the recent huge drop in oil prices hasn't happened very much from an oil consumer's point of view. Personally I think the media coverage has been too apocalyptic, and likely because a Democrat's President (if oil prices had dropped under George W. Bush, the "liberal" media would be doing the helicopter dance in front of us as we speak), but it hadn't even occurred to me that the human interest aspect had been strangely missing from media coverage.

Finally, a Muslim group holds a conference entitled "Stand With the Prophet Against Terror and Hate," and find themselves confronted by some of the, er, classiest counter-protestors ever. But there's a silver lining: the next time any of these morons holding up signs saying "you are not Americans" complain that TEH MUZLIMZ NEVER SPEAK OUT AGAINSTZ TEH TERRORISTZ!!!!!, we get to remind them of how bratty they acted when Muslims did just that.

Around the table: the NYPD slowdown, the "liberal" media, economic solutions, government welfare, and the leisure time problem.

The Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi points out that, in a sane and moral society, we would find room to applaud the NYPD slowdown -- that police officers would be heroes for refusing to "collect() backdoor taxes because politicians are too cowardly to raise them" or "bust() people in poor neighborhoods because voters don't have the patience to figure out some other way to deal with our dying cities." Of course, in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, these cops engineering a "slowdown" act like whiny diaper-loaded brats because Mayor DeBlasio won't say they're always right about everything, and right-wingers love the slowdown even though the slowdown gives the lie to their pet "broken windows" policing cause.

Media Matters provides a Harper's-style list of "liberal" media numbers for 2014, and the list ain't pretty. 975 segments on ebola during the four weeks before the midterms, and a mere 49 in the four weeks afterward? Nah, nothing to see here. Of course, if we want more economists on to discuss economics and more educators on to discuss education, it'd help to disclose conflicts-of-interests your guests have before they spout their idiocy. And if Chuck Todd is right that asking a powerful guest a tough question would guarantee that guest would never go on the show again, then such absences would also give actual qualified people more openings on "liberal" media programs.

Dean Baker comes up with some ideas aiming to fight the very rich's efforts to redistribute more worker income upward to themselves. Some of them are surprisingly backward -- he doesn't say it, but letting more "qualified foreign physicians" practice here in the U.S. is a way of paying doctors less -- but some of his suggestions are fairly novel and innovative, like imposing a Robin Hood tax on mortgage transfers (i.e., between securities firms) at the state level, or having state and municipal governments actually compete with "sharing" services like Airbnb and Uber.

Surprise, surprise, despite consistent budgeting problems and a bunch of regressive tax hikes to fix them, outgoing Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer handed out $160,000 to nearly two dozen staffers as "bonuses" in 2014, while also overseeing pay hikes for over 170 workers that, well, often rather outstripped inflation, not to mention worker wage growth. Let me guess: bonuses are to reward a job well-done, but I must have missed the part where Arizona got out of the budgetary woods. No one in government seems to understand the whole concept of self-sacrifice anymore. The good news? The first one who does will start a trend.

Finally, the Economist explains why so many contemporary workers actually work more hours and have less leisure time than our forebears like John Maynard Keynes predicted. The article is well worth your time, as it were -- tracing the line from "knowledge workers hav(ing) few metrics for output" to women workers still getting the shaft in re promotion is but one of its incisive moments -- but the article's experience of lower-paid workers having more leisure time may differ from your experience, and the article failed to say that workers feel overworked because there aren't enough of them, because corporations go so far out of their way to avoid creating jobs (workers being, after all, a "drain on profits").

Around the table: the horrible truth about Our Glorious Leaders, part 333.

Good news, everyone: the FCC votes to ban TV stations from owning other TV stations in the same market by "recruit(ing) or creat(ing) a separate corporate entity to own the station" in order to evade media consolidation rules. TV owners (some of whom, like Sinclair and Gannett, are actually very big) complain they need loopholes like these to "compete with pay TV giants," which -- since they do not actually address any of our complaints about the slashed newsroom staffs and cookie-cutter news reports -- translates roughly as "we deserve more money for not doing any useful work."

The Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch) puts out a report enticingly entitled "The Disappearing Corporate Tax Base," which shows us how we could get corporations (which just enjoyed another year of record profits in the middle of Our Ongoing Economic Armageddon) to pay more of their share. Hopefully you'll recognize the good ideas -- a financial transaction or "Robin Hood" tax, taxing investment income the same as almost every other kind of income, ending deferral of offshore profits. Also, hopefully, you'll be able to answer the inevitable BUT HOW WILLZ THA CORPORASHUNZ CREATEZ TEH JOBZ!!!! line with "well, look at what a terrible job they've been doing at that for the last dozen years when we haven't been treating them like the wayward brats they are."

Ho hum, another year, another Paul Ryan budget proposal that makes massive cuts to programs people need, gives millionaires yet more tax cuts they won't use to spur the economy, thinks repealing the Affordable Care Act will save money, and assumes that all the deficit-cutting will spur economic growth, when we all know by now that you have to spend money to make money. I'll admit the Washington Post, in its article, doesn't fawn over him like it used to, but where is the investigative reporting from our "liberal" media that will expose this new budget for the fecal blast it is?

The incomparable Alex Pareene writes about "The great Tea Party swindle: How to make lots of money off the naive." Long story short: "They just raise money and spend it on themselves and their friends." Long story somewhat longer: "they are all spending quite a bit on overhead and 'office expenses' and travel and not that much on actual candidates." Ever hear right-wingers complain that liberal policy initiatives are little more than handouts for liberal cronies? Nice to see the Tea Party is so much different than all of that.

Finally, Duncan Black, who's written a lot about the Iraq war, reminds us why we opposed it, and why we still oppose it. To wit: "Those of us who were against it were against it, in part, because it didn't make any fucking sense at all...The stated reasons were bullshit, the implicit reasons were gibberish." The historians will do little better.

Around the table: approximately evenly divided between good news and bad news.

French Constitutional Council gives go-ahead for a 50% income tax on income over a million Euros -- though the same Council kills other proposals aimed at curbing tax evasion. UK Reuters would do better to curb their obvious pro-business bias -- President Hollande's "2012 supertax election pledge" can't be that unpopular, or he'd have lost the election. And why do I care that soccer clubs might go on strike, or that Gerard Depardieu threw a tantrum and left the country?

John Randall at the Roosevelt Institute explains why Comcast's "Internet Essentials" program doesn't benefit low-income families the way they'd like you to think it does. Long story short: Internet Essentials speeds are horrendously slow, very few folks even qualify for the program, and the program doesn't actually force Comcast to build out new network infrastructure, meaning it's "pure profit" even at $9.99/month. That's what we get when we leave it to the corporations to solve everything. Well, that's not all we get -- we also get the monopolies that kill actual low-cost alternatives to Comcast.

After some public pressure, Medicare plans to take some steps to halt prescription drug abuse in its Part D program -- including referring doctors with suspicious prescribing patterns to state medical boards. Still, I'd like to see our government actually run Part D, rather than private insurers -- you can do more about the fraud your governments commits or enables than you can about the fraud some big pharmaceutical corporation commits or enables, because that corporation sure feels no obligation to you. Maybe not even if you're a shareholder.

Finally, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone notes that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will join with the Republican establishment to stop the party from nominating "fools" in House and Senate races. But Mr. Taibbi also reminds us that the same "establishment" that wants to keep people like Ted Cruz from winning primaries "practically invented the politics of stupid" during Tha Bush Mobb years, mocking the regular folks who protested "the invasion of the wrong country in retaliation for 9/11" (italics in original) as being from the "reality-based community." The subsequent invention of the Tea Party was a drama, of course, as is this "civil war" among Republicans -- it's all so they can sell corporatists like John Boehner as "moderates."

You thought it was bad enough that our government could collect all our data? Behold: a New York federal judge will allow Chevron to vacuum in nine years of activists' email data in its never-ending quest to reverse a $19 million judgment against it for crapping all over Ecuador in the late 1990s. Judge Kaplan says it's not a First Amendment issue because Chevron isn't asking for the metadata of any American citizens -- except that, whoops, their dragnet does sweep up some Americans. Don't judges have to know the facts before they judge? And don't feel safe that Chevron targets mainly non-Americans -- under a Trans-Pacific "Partnership" regime, your First Amendment rights won't mean very much before the "investor tribunals" who'll replace our courts and our laws.

Paul Buchheit puts forth a fairly concise and impassioned case for a financial transaction tax. It might take a few years before a financial transaction tax (Mr. Buchheit talks .01% here, and that's one one-hundredth of one percent, "liberal" media) actually discourages all the unnecessary faster-than-light trading in America -- but it'll raise a good chunk of change in the meantime. Too bad our President listens to Larry Summers (now apparently jockeying for Ben Bernanke's job!) about such matters.

Bloomberg suggests that Mitch McConnell is "shrinking from his longtime role as a broker of high-stakes congressional deals" now that he's getting a primary challenge from his right. Ah, can you think of a single "high-stakes deal" Mr. McConnell has "brokered" over the last few years? Me neither.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) says he and a dozen other Republican Senators would be willing to "shut down the government" so he can block implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Boy, think of how mad they'd be if Mr. Obama had spent six months ramming through a moderate or liberal health care plan! Seriously, though, these clowns think a bajillion Americans would run through a wall to defeat the Affordable Care Act, but unpopularity just doesn't translate directly into rage. And the Clown Car already shot their wad with the "death panels" lie.

And finally, a naked, 42-year-old Iowa man got busted for breaking car tail lights last week, because "red means danger to the republic." Next week, he'll get a ladder so he can bust up some traffic lights -- and then those Commies all around him will take notice!

By now you've heard that Congress, confronted with airport delays on their way out of town for the week, acted to fix that with a quickness -- but have left every other odious thing about the sequester in place. Normally I'd say anything that gets Congress out of town is a good thing! But Congress has done nothing about food inspections getting slashed or folks getting thrown off food stamps, so NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you email your Congressfolk with your displeasure. Oh, but NETWORK's not done with you yet, Congress! NETWORK also helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1579, the Inclusive Prosperity Act. H.R. 1579, you may recall, would enact a financial transaction tax (alternately called a "Wall Street tax" or "Robin Hood tax") that would vary from 0.005% to 0.5%, depending on the transaction. That latter number, of course, is not "five percent" or "fifty percent" but one-half of one percent. Any "liberal" media hack who gets that wrong really should never be able to work in media again -- and wouldn't, in a sane, decent, and healthy society.

Speaking of sickness, immorality, and decadence, Key Bank won't forgive Cameron Akers's student loan, even though he killed himself a year ago. Dude went to college, joined the Air Force -- becoming a cryptologist! -- and made all his payments on time for six years, but then had an accident, suffered brain damage, and quickly spiraled downward into depression and suicide. That's too damn familiar a story by now, yet Key Bank still harasses Mr. Akers's mother, because she co-signed the loan, even though they've been known to forgive loans on a case-by-case basis. This is one of those cases, maybe? One couldn't argue -- not reasonably, anyway! -- that forgiving this loan will open the floodgates to forgiving all sorts of loans from all sorts of stragglers. Once more: college, soldier, cryptologist. And who will dare say that's the price you pay when you co-sign a loan, as if your son's suicide is so likely an eventuality that it should keep you from helping him out? Change.org helps you pimp-slap Key Bank for its lack of compassion.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Pennsylvania state government to declare a moratorium on fracking, Public Citizen also helps you do that. Fracking in this state is a real clusterfrack for so many reasons, not just because gas drillers drill in a state that has a hundred thousand unplugged water wells, or because gas drillers dispose of their carcinogenic refuse in unlined pits, or because methane makes its way into your tap water. Gas drillers have committed over 3,000 environmental violations in a state whose own DEP has shown a disquieting willingness to look the other way. Oh, and that same DEP still gives homeowners incomplete water test results. The homeowners who asked for them! From their government! Government owes us more than the back of its hand, does it not? And legislators can't claim they don't know fracking is dangerous -- why else would certain state Senators have slipped a fracking moratorium in Philly-area suburban counties, and nowhere else, into last year's budget resolution? Don't people who live in the T deserve clean air and water, too?

"Imagine if Facebook, Google and Twitter built a privacy-killing surveillance machine to help the federal government spy on us," the latest missive from Free Press begins. I don't think I've explained CISPA better than that. Free Press goes on to remind us that the law currently forbids Facebook, Google, and Twitter from sharing your personal information with our government unless our government gets a warrant, and that the law currently allows you to sue Facebook, Google, and Twitter if they violate your online privacy. Guess what two things will no longer be true if CISPA passes? That's right -- Google could send your emails and search history, Twitter could send your physical location, Facebook could send your photos and status updates, all to our government, all without a warrant. And CISPA would give the big telecom corporations immunity from prosecution if they assert they made an honest mistake in sending your government all your personal data. So Free Press helps you tell your House Reps to reject CISPA.

Meanwhile, Congress is working on another Farm Bill, but why wait to do good works? H.R. 1414, the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act, wouldn't end the nefarious corn subsidies that keep junk food cheap in this country, but it would direct more of our government's efforts toward sustainably- and locally-produced healthy foods like fruits and vegetables, and it would help folks use their food stamps at farmers' markets and other places where you stand a chance of getting good food. Railing at people for spending their food stamps on Pepsi and chips doesn't do us or them any good -- people don't do that because they're stupid or lazy; they do that because our government has completely distorted the market with corn subsidies. If the price of apples had stayed exactly the same for three decades, as the price of a two-liter bottle of Coke and Pepsi has done, folks would eat a lot more apples. So the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to support healthier food.

Finally, with yesterday's tax deadline an irresistible news hook, I've a slew of tax-related action alerts for you. CREDO helps you tell your House Rep to co-sponsor the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which Rep. Ellison (D-MN) plans to introduce this week; the bill would tax stock deals at 0.5% (not "five percent," and not "fifty percent," "liberal" media) and other financial instruments somewhat less. I'd flip that script and tax derivatives more than simple stock trades, but any such tax would discourage the lightning-fast computerized Wall Street trading that doesn't really do any work, and the bill would also exempt households with income under $75,000. (I'd even be happy to raise that exemption somewhat, to be honest.) Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell Congress and Mr. Obama to close the corporate tax loopholes that allow corporations to stow some $32 trillion offshore. $32 trillion in hidden money won't create any jobs here, but putting that money under threat of confiscation might, finally, induce some CEOs to use it to create some jobs. Hell, they might even build some factories.

Republicans are very serious about convincing Americans they're not the same old Republicans who hate everything. Case in point: they're voting on the Ryan budget in the House this week -- the budget that blows up Medicare, the one that gives more big tax cuts to the rich, the one that cuts good social programs to the bone. Yup, sure looks like they've turned over a new leaf to me. NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your House Rep to vote "no" on the Ryan budget and "yes" on the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget, a.k.a. the "Back to Work" budget, which would do a lot of terrific things, like taxing Wall Street speculation, hiking taxes on millionaire and billionaire income to over 45%, treating investment income the same as dividend income, cutting corporate deductions for moving jobs overseas, and letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices. Also, the "Back to Work" budget would simultaneously invest $2 trillion in three years and cut the deficit. If you invest in people, and not some CEO's gilded plumbing, you can do both.

Meanwhile, Moms Rising helps you tell the Obama Administration's Department of Labor to extend minimum wage and overtime protections to home health care workers. Yes, these laws currently exclude these workers, though they do some of the hardest work anyone could do, which you know if you've ever taken care of a very sick relative. Now home health care CEOs claim that if we gave minimum wage and overtime to home health care workers, it would kill their business. Let me put this succinctly: if giving your workers minimum protections will kill your business, then your business deserves to die. And letting home health care workers make minimum wage and overtime will not only result in better care for sick folk, it'll result in fewer workers having to resort to public assistance programs like food stamps. Don't the folks who complain about people on public assistance all the time want fewer people on public assistance? Or do they prefer to dream that they, too, could make a lot of money exploiting other people? I prefer to believe the best of Americans, but some people make that so hard.

ProPublica writes about "The .03% Solution," otherwise known as the financial speculation tax as proposed by H.R. 880, the Wall Street Trading and Speculators Tax Act. H.R. 880 would assess a 0.03% tax on most Wall Street trades -- that's three cents on every $100. It doesn't sound like much (though at least when the "liberal" media calls it a "3 percent tax," people won't go that insane), and I'd prefer a one percent tax myself (which the "liberal" media will have to report as a "one percent tax"). But thanks to all the high-volume trading on the internet nowadays, H.R. 880 would still raise over $35 billion a year, and H.R. 880 exempts initial public offerings (or IPOs) from taxation. I still think .03 percent is what I'd settle for, rather than what I'd start with; your mileage may vary. You can use the tools in the upper left-hand corner to discuss the matter with your Reps and Senators. Word is they have a lot of time on their hands.

Speaking of time on their hands, Congress still hasn't done anything about the U.S. Postal Service's troubles, which will lead to the end of Saturday delivery (except for some packages) in a few months' time. And, like so many other things Congress just can't seem to do anything about, the solution here is fairly simple: repeal the part of the 2006 postal overhaul that requires the USPS to pre-pay 75 years' worth of pension funding every year. Going that far to keep your pension solvent is like trying to kill an ant with a sledgehammer, and smashing your own foot in the process. I don't have to mention that this is yet another Republican effort to destroy a good government program, do I? And I don't have to mention that email is not "killing the Post Office" for folks in inner cities and folks in rural areas who don't have access to gazillionbit broadband, do I? Maybe I do. Maybe we take the stuff we have for granted sometimes. Let's not do that. CREDO helps you tell Congress to fix the mess they caused with the USPS.