Thieves in the Temple.

Penny Rants for June 28, 2022: you gotta read past the headline, and other concrete cold facts.

A lot of times you read a scary headline and expect the article’s text to explain it away, but the AP headline “More Than 1 Million Voters Switch to GOP in Warning for Dems” requires even more qualification than the article’s text gives. And that assumes that the research backing that finding (which relies at least in part on “statistical modeling”) is even valid! Only in paragraph 9 do we learn that while 1 million voters “switched” to the GOP, 630,000 others “switched” to the Democrats, which already makes the scare number smaller. And I keep putting “switch” in quotation marks for a reason: in the article’s one anecdote (I know, only one!), a Colorado man complains about vaccine mandates to explain his switch from Libertarian to Republican. You can thus easily imagine (more easily than the AP, apparently!) that many folks “switched” from independent or unaffiliated to Republican, and that most of them were probably already voting Republican. And finally, at the risk of piling on, this information pre-dates our Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and as I’ve said, people hate politicians who take away things they’ve come to rely on, as we saw during the Affordable Care Act debate in 2017.

You may appreciate the long and complex discourse here about a First Circuit Court panel splitting evenly over whether a warrantless telephone pole surveillance camera – which, in the case before the panel, took over eight months of video footage of a suspect’s front yard – violates our Fourth Amendment Constitutional rights. Or you may, like me, make up your mind at “warrantless.” Whenever law enforcement won’t get warrants, you have to wonder why, and you also have to wonder why the three judges who didn’t find eight months of pole cameras unconstitutional didn’t wonder why. And one judge’s notion that our government won’t abuse telephone pole camera surveillance because the polls are so expensive? That is to laugh. You can justify any expense once you tell yourself the world will end if you don’t, and law enforcement routinely gets exactly that apocalyptic about drug dealers. If only they felt that way about banksters or polluters! And if they did, I’d still make them get their damn warrants.

Finally, I don’t know what Ron Johnson means to accomplish by suddenly saying yeah, now that you mention it, he knew all about lists of “alternate electors” his office tried to give to Mike Pence and oh yeah, he got those lists from Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA). People don’t just feel sorry for guys who can’t get their story straight about an attempted coup. (Rep. Kelly, for his part, denies the story, but that’s just drama.) I guess Mr. Johnson just figures he’ll run another feel-good ad everyone likes (maybe this one, though he’s dropped it pretty early in the cycle) and get re-elected no matter what he says or does, and given how well Democrats have run against him in the past, I can see why he placed that bet. Though he’s not running against Russ Feingold this time. If Ron Johnson is the man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name, Russ Feingold is the master of tying one hand behind your back in a campaign.

Around the table: more thoughts about bad tax arguments and scare numbers.

Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, reminds us that the Louisiana blackout is "Not an Act of God, But an Act of Entergy." Good New Orleans residents' electric bills keep going up and up, while Entergy's infrastructure loss during Hurricane Ida was, somehow, something far, far worse than a power loss "in Bangladesh after a typhoon." Bangladesh, as you know, is not exactly known for taking care of its citizens very well, so ouch. After that, you won't be surprised by the corruption Mr. Palast details -- though you may be surprised that Entergy has been running this scam for decades. It took Entergy a year to get the lights on after Katrina, but only Kathleen Blanco faced any accountability for that.

Jesus Mary and Joseph "moderate" Democrats are actually saying we can't tax unrealized capital gains because TEH FAMILY FARMZ!!!! It was horseshit 20 years ago, and it's even more horseshit now, since the Biden plan literally exempts family farms and small businesses from its proposed capital gains tax changes, but God forbid we let facts get in the way of yet another rage-addled drama foisted on good Americans by the rich. (As an aside, former Senator Max Baucus, who wrote the Wall Street Journal op-ed foisting this zombie lie upon us once again, was a bankster shill for all of his 36 years in office, yet retired from our Senate as one of its poorest members. You mean he did all that work for banksters because he believed in it? Gosh, I'd have liked him better if he'd lined his pockets!)

Colorado's allegedly Democratic Governor, Jared Polis, told a "conservative" conference (you know they're "conservative" because their event had the word "freedom" in its title!) that he wants to get rid of Colorado's state income tax. Arthur Laffer praises him, which is a kiss of death if ever there's been one. Mr. Polis further said he'd rather tax "things you want to penalize in society," like pollution and cigarettes, and though I'm warm toward the former and cool toward the latter, I have spent almost two decades arguing that excessive, unearned wealth is one of the "things you want to penalize in society." Also, too, a flat income tax is a bad way to penalize excessive, unearned wealth.

No, Virginia, police officers are not quitting in droves due to being told they execute too many Black folks. What's that? You've heard your cop friends say that? Your cop friends rely on stories they heard, but here's the data: local police departments have lost 1% of their employees during the pandemic, versus 6% for the economy as a whole. Our brains may be hardwired for stories, as they say, but collecting stories ain't necessarily the best way to build a civilization. Oh, and not for nothing, but the American Rescue Plan Act, for which precisely zero Republicans voted, sent more money police departments' way; so much for the "defund the police" talking point, amirite?

If you've been hearing about ZOMG TEH 2000 BREAKTHROUGHZ DEATHZ FROMZ TEH COVIDZ!!!!!, Richard Tofel reminds you that 2,000 deaths (if indeed there have been that many!) represents about one in 82,000 Americans, meaning you're more likely to get killed in a dog attack and almost as likely to get killed by lightning. "A Call for More Proportionality in Pandemic Coverage," he entitles his argument, though given how well our "liberal" media does with numbers, they're as likely to say ZOMG 82,000 DEADZ!!!! I'm more inclined to blame said "media" than I'd blame our own national aptitude at math, given how often our media present scare numbers without context. Remember ZOMG 941,000 SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!!!!? One could go on.

Finally, when I hear that anti-vax protestors have disrupted, and even shut down, vaccination drives in Georgia, my first reaction is what happened to "it's a personal choice"? Oh, right -- like everything else, it's a personal choice only for them; it's not a personal choice for you, and certainly not if you're going to make a different choice than they would. Which means these protestors aren't "free speech martyrs," they're just fascists. No, really, if they're actually going to prevent you from getting vaccinated, then they're trying to impose their choices upon you, which is what fascists do. I don't just fling that word around.

Around the table: featuring vote "fraudits," corrupt bullies, and deficit peacocks.

David Gilbert at Vice profiles one of the ringleaders of the January 6 attempted coup, Amy Kremer, who now wants to conduct an Arizona-style "fraudit" of the Georgia vote. She does get around, I'll give her that -- she does a lot of pro-Trump rallies and events relying on financing of, shall we say, indeterminate source. And she's somehow just "a regular mom who loves (her) country" and a founder of the Tea Party, meaning she's been deeply involved in far-right causes for the last dozen years, including, you guessed it, birtherism. I wonder how her kids are doing.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) announces his intention to resign after a damning sexual harassment investigation and at least one criminal complaint, and Tim Murphy at Mother Jones reminds us that he was "a petty, corrupt bully." He only gives a few examples, but I'm sure the historians will have a much longer story to tell of the man who governed badly and covered it up with bluster and threats, though that's an ever-more familiar story, amirite, Trumpholes? My guess is we'll remember him as a meaner, grabbier Evan Bayh.

Suddenly faced with a mayoral candidate not of their choosing, the Buffalo Democratic party is seriously mulling getting rid of the Mayor's office just so actual liberal India Walton doesn't win. All together now: waaaaaaaaaah! Doesn't anyone have any damn shame anymore? And sadly, their machinations could defeat Ms. Walton -- as those familiar with Upton Sinclair's 1934 run for Governor of California, or Matt Gonzalez's run for Mayor of San Francisco in 2003, or Nina Turner's recent run in the Ohio 11th Democratic House primary, already know. Read the whole thing for some of the truly non-explosive charges against Ms. Walton.

In the wake of Senate passage of a $3.5 trillion budget resolution, Republicans ready their big spender charges against Democrats. The ad is total horseshit, as you would expect -- "record inflation" is to laugh if you're over 40, and without an ounce of shame they call letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices "control(ling) what medicines you can get"! But ooh, ooh! I know what to say in response: my Republican opponent would overthrow the government just because his guy lost and he's a big crybaby; do y'all want to be represented by a big crybaby? You're welcome, Democrats.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) voicing "serious reservations" about the budget resolution he'd just voted for is just another dull moment in American politics. Look at his stilted, repetitive diction and you'll see nothing "serious" about his argument, just as you saw nothing serious about his argument against the For the People Act which named exactly zero things he didn't like about the For the People Act. Recall that he also took the American Rescue Plan hostage for 10 hours at the beginning of this year so he could posture about "irresponsible" spending. Maybe Kyrsten Sinema is right, and Joe really does love the attention.

Finally, folks are telling a lot of stupid stories about the "Biden economy" -- folks who complain about gas prices have no memory of gas prices more than doubling under George W. Bush, apparently -- but it does some good to confront Teh Stupid. Case in point: the North Carolina restaurant owner who claims he spends $200 more every week just for mayonnaise, which some Twitter users happily calculated means this clown goes through at least 250 gallons of mayonnaise every week, which sure seems like a lot of chicken salad and Caesar salad dressing. Which reminds us, once again, that the only way to beat scare numbers is to do the math.

Around the table: right-wingers tell us how the world works, part 383.

You've heard of invoking the Defense Production Act to help fight COVID, and you may also have heard of activating FEMA to help fight COVID -- but you may not have heard of the Medical Reserve Corps, which our government created after 9.11 to help volunteer medical personnel help with national emergencies. We have almost 800 MRC units nationwide, but in recent years, and stop me if you've heard this story before, our government has barely funded the MRC, which, as you might imagine, hampers their ability to serve. Possible good news: the MRC is on Joe Biden's radar, suggesting that having nearly 50 years of federal government experience may not be an unqualified evil.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) gets upset after Vice President Harris pushes the American Rescue Plan in an interview at a Charleston TV station. (Ms. Harris did the same thing at an Arizona TV station, presumably to pressure Sen. Sinema.) One hopes this is a sign that the Biden Administration won't roll over for Mr. Manchin's dreams of being The One True King of Bipartisanship, dreams destined (or designed?) to fail. And there's really nothing wrong with "mak(ing) the case to the American people," though I can think of a certain former President who abused that privilege.

So you've been following the Reddit/GameStop brouhaha, and you know the trading app Robinhood stopped letting its users buy GameStop stock, a move which obviously protected the hedge fund corporations Reddit users have been making fools of lately -- but you may not know that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen made over $800,000 in speaking fees from Robinhood's owner Citadel, and when that came up at a press conference, Biden Administration Press Secretary Jen Psaki said of course Ms. Yellen wouldn't recuse herself from any advising or decision-making in this matter because "she's an expert and she deserves that money." Turns out Ms. Yellen's own ethics agreement from late December precludes her from interfering on Citadel's behalf here, but still, that's some serious tone-deafness on Ms. Psaki's part -- and in precisely a way Trump votaries can find an opening! I mean, nobody likes banksters! (Though if Trump votaries lard their attacks with anti-Semitism, they'll fritter away their chance.)

Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN) writes a letter to President Biden asking him to withdraw the nomination of Deb Haaland for Interior Secretary, citing (among other things) her support for a Green New Deal he swears would cost "$93 trillion annually." $93 trillion, as you may know, actually represents a 10-year cost, per the folks who promulgated the scare number, and that makes Pete Stauber sound like a really stupid person, though I'm sure that's what he wants you to think. Then sgain, he has apparently alienated virtually every Native American voter in his district with his opposition to Ms. Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo, so maybe he is stupid.

Politico finds Marco Rubio, the man who gives the empty suit a bad name, in an impregnable position going into his 2022 Senate re-election effort. Sure, if Democrats run their standard do-nothing-don't-offend candidate, they'll lose, but that's true just about anywhere in America, and though I'm sure more Florida Democrats salivate at the prospect of unseating the incompetent-and-arrogant-about-it Gov. DeSantis, I don't think folks avoid challenging Mr. Rubio because of his alleged political prowess -- I mean, the man looks like he's about to have a seizure whenever someone asks him a tough question. No, Democrats aren't lining up to challenge him because they know that if Ivanka Trump wants the job, she'll knock off Mr. Rubio in the primary like she's a cat and he's a salt shaker, and then she'll coast to victory in the general. We all just saw how well the name Trump does in Florida, after all.

Finally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA) also alleged, a little over two years ago, that space lasers funded by the Rothschild family and used at PG&E's behest caused California wildfires. Hence the "Jewish space lasers" you've heard about. I read her entire post -- since the final right-wing counter-argument will be "did you read what she actually said?" -- and I have three observations: 1) no amount of I'm-just-speculating-here actually excuses an allegation, 2) no amount of can-this-be-a-coincidence requires you to accept a theory, and 3) right-wingers will say anything to deny that our addiction to fossil fuels is destroying our planet.

Around the table: in which we confront yet another frivolous lawsuit.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asks Supreme Court to block Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan from voting in the Electoral College, alleging that pandemic-related voting changes in these states violated federal law. I would expect our Supreme Court to ask why Texas didn't file this lawsuit at the time the laws were changed, but we must also remember that, well, Mr. Paxton has plenty of reasons to distract us right now. Gosh, I wonder why state Solicitor General/fellow Republican Kyle Hawkins isn't arguing this suit before our Court. Please note that by "I wonder why" I mean "because he knows it's a frivolous lawsuit and wants to have a career after 2020."

Upon hearing that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has argued that her state is doing quite well handling COVID using "cherry-picked numbers," I kind of expected her to do some sleight-of-hand like saying OUR CASEZ AREZ TEH DECLININGZ!!!! when they're actually still increasing but at a lower rate. But no: her cherry-picked numbers describe how other states, that locked down more than South Dakota did, are handling COVID -- and she doesn't even get those right! When you're justifying your own actions by criticizing others' actions, you're on pretty shaky ground, but sadly, so many Americans are so intimidated by numbers that I don't expect her to experience very much of the shame she deserves.

Right-wing cable news outlet Newsmax beats right-wing cable news outlet Fox News in the ratings -- in one demographic in one hour of one day, to be sure, but the journey of a thousand miles, et cetera. And CNN's average viewership has been higher than Fox's over the last month, but since all cable news networks suck, none of this is really anything to celebrate -- unless schadenfraude is your only pleasure in life, which I hope it's not! After all, Fox might spend some time trying to chase its viewers who are running away to Newsmax and OAN -- or it might position itself as the "sensible conservative" alternative without changing anything it does, which would, you guessed it, help move the center further right, just like they all do. Give us a la carte cable packaging and this would all matter a lot less.

Don't get too excited about Sen. Romney calling a mooted House attempt to challenge the Electoral College vote "madness." His entire comment essentially legitimizes the nearly five dozen frivolous lawsuits our soon-to-be-ex-President has filed, and he knows as well as anyone else that no matter what happens in Georgia, Republicans will be able to obstruct a Biden Administration a great deal, just as they've been doing whenever they lose the upper hand. Also, too, if "(r)ecounts are appropriate," I guess he also thinks demanding a second recount from Georgia, or only recounting Wisconsin counties with a lot of black folks, are also appropriate.

Finally, our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) and 40 U.S. states say Facebook has monopolized social media and should be broken up. I'm old enough to remember when quite a few social networks existed -- I enjoyed Tribe and Orkut an awful lot, and I sometimes wish I'd gotten more into MeetUp, LiveJournal and Flickr -- so breaking up Facebook wouldn't exactly "break the internet." It doesn't sound like they're going to break Facebook up very much, though -- merely taking Instagram and WhatsApp away from them wouldn't exactly destroy their monopoly. But Facebook pointing to the existence of TikTok and Parler as evidence they're not monopolists? That is to laugh.

Around the table: in which we are reminded what we must do to "push Biden left."

Kevin A. Young at TruthOut instructs us that "To Push Biden Left, We Must Build Movements to Challenge His Corporate Backers." The article draws from Mr. Young's book, Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It; historical examples include the civil rights movement boycotting local businesses in the '60s (which prompted them to pressure politicians), while more recent examples include all the massive civil disobedience (and pressuring of investors) that have stopped a lot of fossil fuel projects cold. Conclusion: "the best way to get better electoral outcomes is, ironically, to build strong non-electoral movements." Certainly we'll do better better donating to union strike funds than to center-right Democratic candidates like Amy McGrath who'll just light your money on fire while losing big.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Amazon uses Pinkerton operatives to spy on their workers. Which proves, yet again, that giving corporations more money doesn't magically cause them to "create jobs," but it just gives them more money to light on fire desperately trying to keep their workers from organizing for better pay and better working conditions. (Also, too, Pinkerton? Like we're all in an episode of Deadwood or Boardwalk Empire!)

Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker talks with Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, who claims that our soon-to-be-ex-President's "voter fraud" lies are actually good for his channel. This Isaac Chotiner fellow is damn good at his job -- his interrogation of Mr. Ruddy is almost as good as his interrogation of that COVID "contrarian" from March. I can only add that Mr. Ruddy's claim that Newsmax gets "one million people per minute" is a pretty useless statistic if the million people who are watching Newsmax the next minute are, as I suspect, the same damn people. Why, I might even call it a scare number.

Can it possibly be true that our soon-to-be-ex-President really thinks his lawyers arguing so badly before numerous federal courts are "fools" who "are making him look bad"? I mean, that ship has long sailed, has it not? But when you realize that he thinks laws are for us "little people" and he also thinks any fecal argument can be polished into gold if you just inject more money and more red-faced yelling into it, you can sort of see how he can blame everyone but yourself. You may have more trouble seeing how people who call themselves conservative still give their devotion to a man who always chooses chaos over order.

Finally, Carl Bernstein, who helped take down Richard Nixon with his Watergate reporting at the Washington Post, says that no less than 21 Republican Senators have "repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for" our soon-to-be-ex-President, though only a few have expressed that "extreme contempt" publicly. Out of those 21 Senators, I see 12 up for re-election in 2022; I sincerely hope Democrats don't try to ratfuck those races by pointing out these Senators' infidelity to Dear Leader, because that wouldn't be very civil of them, now, would it? (Sadly, I fear I have just explained exactly why Democrats would never do such a thing.)

Around the table: more bad behavior exposed, more bad arguments slain.

Our President gives our Secretary of Defense the power to simply dissolve collective bargaining agreements with over 750,000 defense workers because, get this, unionized workers present a threat to national security. A threat to the security of pampered, overfed Chief Executives who've never worked a real job, maybe! What do our President's unionized votaries think about this? That he must be referring to someone-else-and-not-them? Or do they merely care that he gets away with saying stuff they wish they could get away with saying? Bunch of big babies, all of them.

Ho hum, Dean Baker catches our "liberal" media dispensing a whole lot of scare numbers when discussing Democratic candidates' plans. 30 TRILLYUNZ!!!! 40 TRILLYUNZ!!!! 50 TRILLYUNZ!!!! They're awfully big, aren't they? But not necessarily when you consider a) our "liberal" media typically gives 10-year figures and almost as typically never says they're 10-year figures and b) our CBO puts the size of the economy over the next 10 years at $280 trillion. Also, too, you may recall that Ms. Warren's plan for funding Medicare-for-All would replace all spending by large employers on private health insurance, meaning it would cost more in the neighborhood of zero trillions of dollars.

From the "Because We Deserve Some Good News, Dadgummit!" file: Greyhound announces that it won't let Border Patrol agents conduct fishing expeditions on their buses unless they have a warrant. That is literally all we asked for! I do wonder why getting this news from Greyhound was like pulling teeth, though -- could it be they were actually embarrassed about contending that the law makes them let Border Patrol agents on board under pretty much any circumstances even though you don't need to be a Constitutional scholar to see that's utter horsedoodle? But for some folks, embarrassment shows evolution, and I do like to think the best of people.

Media executives gloat over how much money Michael Bloomberg is spending on ads on their stations. And they wonder why we hate them! All they care about is money! None of them care that pitting billionaire against billionaire recalls that point in the Roman Republic's history when you had to be a general to run for Consul, because none of them would know a history book if someone hit them over the head with it. (As an aside, I'm glad Les Moonves fell from grace because he stuck his prick where it wasn't welcome, but I'd have been even happier if he fell from grace simply because he was a prick.)

Finally, I won't tabulate every objection I have to Jonathan Chait's latest piece of Bernie-slam, since they number approximately one per point made, but Jesus Mary and Joseph does Sen. Sanders really have "deeply unpopular policy positions"? Like Medicare-for-All, which routinely gets majority or supermajority support in polling? How does majority or supermajority support equal "deeply unpopular"? Mr. Sanders's policy prescriptions might be "deeply unpopular" with pampered, overfed pundits, and maybe those are the only folks Mr. Chait ever talks to -- I mean, if he'd workshopped that appalling dog catcher metaphor before an audience who didn't care about pleasing him, he might not have inflicted it on his readers.

Penny Rants for Saturday, December 28, 2019: lies, damned lies, and "winning" arguments with liberals.

Our President has put up a website called "Snowflake Victory" -- hope or fear, I can't tell! -- which purports to tell you how to win arguments with your liberal relatives over the holidays. But clearly he's not trying to win arguments with liberals, who will not be won over by all the childishness, cherry-picking, baiting-and-switching, scare numbers, and outright lies -- he's looking to convert less politically-aligned folks who might be overhearing. After all, everyone agrees that it's possible to "have a strong economy and a clean environment at the same time," but not everyone knows that it's more possible when a) your predecessor's clean air and clean water regulations are starting to have a positive effect right as you take office and b) federal courts strike down most of your attempts to roll back those very same regulations! And I do find it highly amusing to see these folks talk about "winning arguments with facts and reason," when they're the first ones who tell you facts and reason don't matter after you confront them with actual facts and reason. It's almost as amusing as hearing the "Fuck Your Feelings" crowd constantly whine about their own feelings.

From the "Wrong Headline" file: an Economist/YouGov poll finds, according to Newsweek, that "Almost 50% of Americans Say Donald Trump Will Go Down in History as (a) 'Poor' or 'Below Average' President,", but add up the 40% who said "poor" and the 9% who said "below average" and that still leaves a majority (51%) of Americans who don't agree. Eight percent said history would regard him as "average" (I bet that verdict would really stick in his craw!) and nine percent had no discernible opinion, leaving 12 percent who voted "above average" and 22 percent who voted "outstanding," that last figure mapping quite well onto my long-expressed suspicion that a quarter of our electorate is insane. These figures won't predict the 2020 election very well, of course -- people who think he's "average" or have no opinion of the man certainly don't seem likely to vote against him because he got impeached, do they? They're more likely to get "sick of all the partisan bickering" and stay home, especially after our President runs the most negative campaign in American history regardless of how "spotless" his do-nothing, please-everyone opponent supposedly is.

Penny Rants for Sunday, March 31, 2019: concerning scare numbers and rhetorical hostage situations.

Dean Baker at Common Dreams reminds us that most Americans think huge amounts of taxpayer money go toward things like food stamps when, actually, they don't. People think we spend "20 to 30 percent" of our federal budget on food stamps and welfare when the actual figure is more like two percent. Mr. Baker essentially blames scare numbers: "(d)iscussing budget numbers in millions, billions and trillions is incredibly irresponsible reporting," particularly when reporters don't discuss these numbers in the context of, say, an annual federal budget of $4 trillion. Also, too, reporters regurgitate scare numbers about budgets without mentioning that they're budget figures over 10 years, and I'd be lying if I said that was solely a right-wing problem. And while some folks seem to think Americans are math-challenged, I don't -- I think Americans hate confronting the fact that they don't make enough money to pay their bills. We'd all be a lot better at math if we could make the math in our lives work.

When I first confronted the headline "Equality Act = Female Erasure," I said that of course it had to be written by Rod Dreher, the man who seems to think compassion and hysteria are interchangeable concepts. How would extending protections of the Civil Rights Act to gay and transgender folk "erase" "females"? By putting men in women's locker rooms, apparently. While it's true that women would fear a man in their locker room more than a man would fear a woman in theirs, women don't live very much of their lives in locker rooms, and locker rooms are not a law of physics unto themselves -- they're spaces that could be converted to single-person water closets with minimal difficulty. Anyway, leading with an anecdote about a transgender woman who acted badly in public (when will our laws ever protect property from destruction?) sure doesn't make it any more convincing. And the idea that men will call themselves women simply to win sporting events? Yikes, doesn't Mr. Dreher remember peer pressure?

When I first confronted the headline "The Liberal Case Against Bernie," I said that of course it had to be written by Eric Alterman, the man who hates Ralph Nader so much that he once dismissed his entire consumer protection legacy. And just as Mr. Alterman blames George W. Bush's Presidency on Mr. Nader and not, for example, on George W. Bush, he naturally blames Mr. Sanders for Mrs. Clinton's loss, and not Mrs. Clinton for her inability to defeat the worst Presidential candidate anyone can remember running. And he says the "take-no-prisoners" campaign Mr. Sanders supposedly plans to run would alienate the electorate? "Playing not to lose," by supporting candidates who don't mean what they say unless they say it to big corporate donors, actually alienates the electorate! This President's an ogre, but the professional hostage-takers on the left won't beat him. (I did click through to Mr. Eichenwald's summary of Republican oppo research on Sen. Sanders, but we all had worse on our President, and he still won.)

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 494.

We learn from Dave Anderson at TruthOut that the alleged "$100 trillion" price tag of the Green New Deal is a made-up scare number. When the man who comes up with the number admits, out loud, on Twitter, that he really doesn't know how to count the cost of installing renewable energy, then you know the number is complete rubbish. Then again, if you've noticed the cost of renewable energy almost achieving parity, or coming close to achieving parity, with the cost of fossil fuel production, you already knew it was rubbish.

Of course Daniel Larison at The American Conservative is right that our President's declaration that the U.S. will recognize Israel's "claim" in the Golan Heights is "a mockery of international law" and a "pre-election gift" to Israeli Prime Minister/Drama Hound Binyamin Netanyahu, who goes before the voters on April 9. But what if our President doesn't even intend to recognize Israel's claim? It's not like that's past him, you know. If so, he's given Mr. Netanyahu his "gift" a little early -- there's still plenty of time for a backlash to form in Israel over this naked giveaway.

Dane County, WI judge strikes down a law the Wisconsin state legislature passed to hamstring that state's incoming Democratic Governor and incoming Democratic Attorney General, but I'm not sure this decision will stand, since it asserts that "extraordinary sessions" violate Wisconsin's constitution, when the state has had about two dozen of them since 1980. I am sure, however, that the judge's decision does not require him to strike down every single law passed in every other extraordinary session that's ever been -- not if nobody's suing about those other sessions, at least.

Our Administration concedes that the 2017 tax "reform" won't goose the economy the way they said it would, and of course they now say they'll need "additional rollbacks in labor regulations, a $1 trillion infrastructure plan and another round of tax cuts." Remember when they said corporate tax cuts would deliver $4,000 into every family's bank account? Good times! And now that their predictions aren't coming true, they're telling us that since eating shit didn't make us healthy, we have to eat more shit.

Our President says a lot of things, having none of the character traits a civilized person would value, but the sight of the 46% President criticizing his "enemies" like Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller because they "never got a vote" and saying "my voters don't get" why they're even relevant really takes the cake. Where to begin with this? With "innocent people never need to attack their opponents like this"? With "you're President of all Americans, not just 'your voters'"? With "waaaaaaaah"? It's hard to know where to begin, and it's almost like that's the whole idea.

Finally, Michael Corcoran at FAIR delivers yet another tour de force about "liberal" media coverage of Medicare-for-All. Don't you love how they call Medicare-for-All supporters "hard-line," which would lead you to think that the majority of Americans are "hard-line"? Par for the course for the "liberal" media that called pulling out of Iraq an "extreme" position when more than half of America wanted to pull out. (Trigger warning: you'll also see, in a sidebar, an anti-Medicare-for-All reporter saying, in a since-deleted tweet, that "it's super weird how people are blaming their diminished sense of well-being on the (present) Administration. Personal events determine my quality of life, not who's in the WH." Spoken like someone who was born on second base but thinks they hit a double!)

Around the table: describing a couple of false alarms about Medicare-for-All as well as some instances of Our Glorious Elites acting badly.

We shouldn't be surprised that Medicare-for-All has lost some support as those politicians who've only recently come out to support it don't know how to answer basic questions about it, but check out the Wall Street Journal's statement that "net support" for Medicare-for-All has fallen among registered voters in polling from 30% to 12%. What is "net support"? "Net support" is a figure you get by subtracting opposition from support in poll numbers, meaning that 12% more voters support Medicare-for-All than support it -- and it's also a figure you trot out if you want to associate Medicare-for-All with a much smaller number than, say, the number of voters who actually support it, since that number's just about always above 50%. You might even call it a "scare number," since people use it so they can scare you into giving up the fight.

And here's a news item that helps explain the previous one: the day Rep. Jayapal introduced the new Medicare-for-All bill, stocks in health insurance corporations dropped by almost five percent. You need to be ready for right-wingers telling you that "yet another reason" we can't have Medicare-for-All is that it'll cause "too much havoc on the markets." Worse, you'll need to prepare for a Democratic President we settle for (who is not to be confused with the ones we might fight for) saying the exact same damn thing, and thus insuring nothing but continued Democratic electoral losses at the federal, state, and local levels.

Former Maine Gov. Paul LePage says getting of the Electoral College would effectively keep white folks from becoming President anymore, which is fitting, coming from the fellow who always strutted around like everybody voted for him but who only won two terms (with 37% and 48% of the vote, respectively) because a third-party candidate drew a lot of support. It's also fitting that he struts around openly defending "white people" when he undoubtedly experienced hate from other Maine residents due to his Franco-American heritage. Remember, good peoples: don't forget where you came from, because you don't want to be like Paul LePage.

Ho hum, our President says he was "misinterpreted" after saying that he accepted Kim Jong-Un's assurances that the latter simply "didn't know" about the late Otto Warmbier's treatment while detained in North Korea, despite his original comments (the ones that provoked the Warmbier family into speaking out) existing on tape. I guess it really would kill him to admit he's wrong about something, but of course that isn't a demonstration of strength, as his votaries seem to think; it's a demonstration of weakness. Strong people can admit they're wrong, make amends, and move on. Our President can't. What a role model.

Finally, dig Sen. McConnell (E-KY) trying to blame the imbroglio in North Carolina's 9th Congressional district (where the election fraud perpetrated by a Republican operative was so pervasive that they have to do the election over) on Democratic refusal to support Republican vote-suppressions schemes. Of course Mr. McConnell (I watched his little speech so you wouldn't have to!) mischaracterizes complaints about Republicans' vote-suppression efforts as a "lack of concern" about vote suppression, and of course we all knew sooner or later Republicans would step up and claim that only they could stop the voter fraud they seem to be the ones getting caught doing. But am I being too optimistic to note that, once again, it's Mob Boss Mitch delivering a message better delivered by a junior Senator looking to make his bones?

Around the table: Presidential actions both meaningful and meaningless.

Our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) rules that San Francisco janitors broke the law by picketing in front of their place of employment. By what labyrinthine reasoning did they arrive at this conclusion? By concluding that the janitors really worked for one of the subcontractors their workplace used to get workers -- and thus the janitors were picketing the "wrong" place! But given that the NLRB's attempt to repeal the joint-employer standard (which should have saved the janitors from this particular chunk of Kafkaesque fecality) hasn't been finalized yet, the courts may yet have the last word.

Hoo boy, our President thinks he can simply issue an executive order to deny birthright citizenship to those children of undocumented immigrants born on American soil. Personally I think the 14th Amendment refutes that notion so clearly even Chief Justice Roberts would disagree with our President, but then our President probably doesn't care whether his gambit works or not -- his gambit will inflame the flammable yet again, and that's the only thing he's good at. Like that's a thing to brag about! Yeah, that setting a pile of kerosene-drenched rags on fire, I was aces at that. Sadly, inflaming the flammable (though, as I've said many times, the flammable don't constitute more than 25% of the electorate) remains our President's best midterm strategy.

Alex Ward at Vox informs us what sending a military force to the border to meet the coming "caravan" will mean, i.e., very little. Soldiers won't be able to confront or detain immigrants (because that'd be illegal!), but they'll be able to help Border Patrol agents get to their destinations more quickly and give medical attention to whomever needs it. So, our President wants to issue an executive order he almost certainly can't enforce and is sending the military to our border to do things they can't do -- are you sensing a theme here?

Jim Hightower describes, in considerable detail, the Republican party's efforts to suppress the vote over the last decade or so. Mr. Hightower takes six paragraphs reminding you (and we don't get reminded enough of this) that efforts to actually prosecute voter fraud have yielded bupkus as far as results -- Kris Kobach, who's gotten quite rich off his efforts to find voter fraud, found a total of nine fraudulent voters in eight years as Kansas's Secretary of State. Mr. Hightower's list of actual vote suppression tactics, while fairly comprehensive, does leave off the notorious Interstate Crosscheck, which I bet does more than anything else to de-register folks without their knowing it until Election Day.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Administration press secretary Sarah Sanders says our President won the 2016 election "by an overwhelming majority of 63 million Americans," though virtually everyone who isn't willfully ignorant knows Mrs. Clinton won almost 66 million votes. They just keep lying; what else can they do? If we were a little more arithmetic-literate in America, we would also see that 63 million people isn't a majority (let alone an "overwhelming" majority!) of just about anything, not in a nation of 200 million registered voters. "63 million," in this context, is just a scare number, and we must expose all scare numbers.

Around our table: lesson #3088 in "why 'more Democrats' isn't the solution to our problems."

California state Assembly members blow massive holes in the state Senate's gold-standard net neutrality bill, to the point where the Senate bill's original author tries to withdraw it from consideration. And they announced their amendments late at night and then voted on them the next morning without debate, sorta like Daryl Metcalfe did to those anti-gerrymandering bills in Pennsylvania. And in case you were thinking all our problems would be over if we just elected more Democrats, note well that Democrats absolutely dominate both houses of the California state legislature, and they not only let this happen, they helped it to happen.

Here's something you may not know about our President's plan to let "small businesses" offer crappier health care plans that let insurers evade Obamacare coverage mandates: it has a loophole that allows big corporations to join "small business associations," as long as it doesn't upend a total size requirement, I presume. I mean, I'm not sure how else to read paragraph 17's report that "(u)ntil now, the Labor Department...often looked at the size of each company, rather than the group as a whole, to determine if it was a large or small employer." Thus will big corporations be able to foist crappy health insurance on their employees! (As an aside, it sure is odd that whenever we say "making insurers cover maternity care," our opponents say "burdensome regulations." I wonder why that is.)

Jessica Huseman's ProPublica report on the court case that struck down Kris Kobach's pet show-me-your-citizenship-papers-if-you-want-to-vote law catalogues a mighty dung-mountain of incompetence and malice, and is thus well worth the considerable amount of time it takes to read it, but I want to highlight, if I may, how Mr. Kobach came up with all those scare numbers about TEH THREE MILLYUNZ VOTEDZ ILLEGULLYZ!!!!! The academic who came up with that number found less than 40 folks out of 32,000 who said they were non-citizens registered to vote in 2008 -- and then said anywhere from 38,000 to 2.8 million folks had voted illegally, which is a range wide enough to be utterly meaningless. Naturally Mr. Kobach fell in love with the bigger number, just like our President. Look at them balls swing!

Ho hum, Factcheck.org reminds us that Presidents Bush the Lesser and Obama did not, in fact, separate families at the border with the sheer zeal of this Administration. And, you know, "they did it too" is bad argument even when it's correct -- it's a way of saying "I'm not going to defend my position on the merits, but I am going to subtly accuse you of hypocrisy for not crying out when the other guy did it." When they deflect to insulting you, they're announcing they're losers. I wish everyone understood that.

I was, frankly, hoping for more from this article, entitled "The Hope of a Blue Wave is Dangerous to Democracy." I take the author's point about everyone being overconfident about the 2016 elections, too (wasn't Chuck Schumer measuring drapes for the Majority Leader's office?), but I'd hoped for a larger message -- that "hoping to get more Democrats in office" has already disappointed the hell out of us, certainly, but more that democracy isn't about who we support but about what we do, every single day of our lives. It's a lesson those folks who went to townhalls to press their representatives about health care seem to have learned well, but we all need to learn it.

Finally, I do not believe that the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, VA, has a "right" to kick Sarah Huckabee Sanders out, even for being the face of our Administration's evil propaganda machine. People can eat where they like -- I mean, a big chunk of the civil rights movement was about that! And a big chunk of the gay rights movement is about similar matters! -- and the First Amendment right to free association does not flow in only one direction at a time. And, as any cook or waiter will tell you, there are subtler and more effective ways to get someone not to eat at your restaurant anymore.

Around the table: featuring health care scare numbers and tax code silliness.

The quite estimable Harold Meyerson likes Sen. Sanders's Medicare-for-All bill because it doesn't try to do everything at once. He makes a compelling argument for extending Medicare to children and workers 49 and over first -- for example, will right-wingers be very successful calling health care for kids "socialism"? Still, as you know, I prefer opening with what I want and then negotiating -- though of course this bill is way less of a pre-emptive compromise than the Affordable Care Act was.

Republicans respond to the release of the Medicare-for-All bill by pretending it would require $32 trillion in new spending. Over 10 years, of course, though nobody ever says that. Problem with that is that we spent $3.4 trillion on health care spending just last year, which projects to $34 trillion over 10 years -- or, if you account for premiums going up, $49 trillion. So the answer to the question WHERE DOEZ HE COMEZ UP WITH TEH MONEYZ!!!!! is "out of the much larger pile of money we're already going to spend."

The incomparable Bruce Schneier informs us that the only solution to big data breaches like the recent Equifax breach is (drumroll, please) government regulation. The "free market," after all, won't fix it: "The companies that collect and sell our data don't need to keep it secure in order to maintain their market share. They don't have to answer to us, their products. They know it's more profitable to save money on security and weather the occasional bout of bad press after a data loss. Yes, we are the ones who suffer when criminals get our data, or when our private information is exposed to the public, but ultimately why should Equifax care?" Particularly when Target, Yahoo!, et al, haven't suffered in the long term. Regulate and punish them and they'll learn through their suffering.

Another day, another analysis (this one from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy) showing us that the Trump tax cut plan would benefit the rich more than working folks. And no it doesn't deliver them bigger cuts because "they make more money"! Just look at the frickin' charts! And it certainly doesn't matter that President Trump himself says his plan won't deliver huge tax cuts to the rich -- it only matters to him that his votaries believe that, and that they scream it in your face when you try to argue with them. (You're not trying to argue with Trump votaries, though, are you? Don't argue with them; just outvote them.)

Finally, former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore -- who may soon be the Republican nominee for the Senate seat until recently held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions -- said back in February that the 9.11 terrorist attack was "divine punishment." For failing to restrain financial predators with tough laws and regulations, no doubt! I kid, of course. But can Mr. Moore be the next Senator from Alabama? Of course he can! He's a Trumphole even if Mr. Trump is officially pulling for his opponent. It'd be nice if the Democratic candidate, former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, runs on his successful prosecution of the last two perps of the 1963 Birmingham bombing that killed four black girls. The national party is no doubt giving him the exact opposite advice as we speak.

Around the table: describing Stupid "Liberal" Media Tricks, as well as Stupid Corporate PR Tricks.

Apparently all it takes is one Trump missile attack to make our "liberal" media forget all the things Barack Obama did in/to Syria during his Administration. We've been meddling there since time immemorial, not just in funneling American weapons and training to Syrian rebels during the Obama years, but in our century-old attempts to grab as much of the Middle East's oil resources as we can. And more cock-swinging about missile strikes isn't the answer -- the Founders' proscription against "foreign entanglements" is a far better answer.

Ipsos/Reuters poll finds nearly three out of four Americans still don't want their emails, text messages, phone records, or internet activities snooped on "if it would help the U.S. government foil domestic terror plots." Of course Ipsos/Reuters also found most Americans unclear about how much snooping our government is doing on us -- and one wonders what the results would have been if the poll asked about foreign terror plots.

Food industry lobbyists are trying to get the FDA to delay implementation of their new nutrition labels. Because of the financial burden of changing labels Jesus Mary and Joseph aren't these our best and boldest entrepreneurs always whining about the "cost" of new labels like they have to hire monks with quill pens to make them? (Also, that ZOMG $4.6 BILLYUNZ IN COSTZ!!!! is a scare number -- that would be $4.6 billion divided by 20 years and then divided by over 30,000 food manufacturers.)

Adam Johnson at FAIR catches a "liberal" media outlet falling all over itself not to come out and say a police officer allegedly beat up his wife. "Miami-Dade Police Officer Arrested After Wife Ends Up in Hospital," "his wife confronted him about the video which led to a violent argument," "(t)he argument turned physical," "Officer Bradley’s wife received serious injuries to her face area" -- it'd be funny if it weren't so awful.

House "Freedom" Caucus says it'll support another Obamacare repeal bill if "offers from the White House for changes to the bill" are included. These changes include letting states opt out of having to require insurers to cover certain kinds of health care, which will make health insurance worthless in addition to expensive. In other news, arsonists agree to back fire-safety bill if they get to burn more buildings down.

Finally, don't believe the hype that Mr. Trump is so "sick" of "palace intrigue" at his Administration that he's thinking of firing both Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon. The man lives for palace intrigue -- or, at least, lives for feeding the media palace intrigue, which leads to the same result -- and that includes the hasty denial coming from one of his spokeshacks. We need to deprogram ourselves from paying attention to all this drama -- which, unfortunately, means first acknowledging its existence as drama.

Around the table: Trumpcare raids Medicare, and other truths.

I'd resisted repeating the Trumpcare-raids-Medicare meme, because folks who deployed it tended not to explain it, but I was being thick: as Allegra Kirkland at Talking Points Memo reminded us a while back, the Trumpcare bill repeals most of the taxes that fund the Affordable Care Act -- and one of them is the payroll tax on high incomes that helps fund Medicare. As Atrios has reminded us, Republicans really won the House in 2010 because they ran ads claiming that the ACA "stole" $500 billion from Medicare, and now here comes a bill that will steal money from Medicare. Think Democrats will apply the good-for-the-goose lesson in 2018? I kid, of course.

Peter Maass at The Intercept reminds us that "For Donald Trump, A Terror Attack Will Be An Opportunity, Not a Curse." There's hope, of course, not least in the fact that we saw all this before with Tha Bush Mobb and that resistance to the fact of the Trump Presidency has already begun. We'd also do well to remember, of course, that he retreats to Florida to play golf every weekend, that he hardly attends Presidential intelligence briefings, that he's gutted the State Department and his budget would gut it further, and that he's generally acted like an arrogant prick, and so if a massive 9.11-sized attack comes, he will have failed America.

Dean Baker reminds us that "(o)ver the past two decades, the economics profession has compiled an impressive track record of getting almost all the big calls wrong." Paragraphs 17 through 21 explain scare numbers pretty well -- the ZOMG TEH WELFAREZ IZ $17 BILLYUNZ!!!! crowd never explain their numbers in any kind of context (in the context of a $4 trillion federal budget, for example), and of course they'd never suggest taxing the rich more, because when did that ever happen? Except back when most of the Tea Party were growing up, that is. Have I mentioned that I think psychology is a more rigorous science than economics?

The incomparable David Dayen reminds us that "Donald Trump Isn't Even Pretending to Oppose Goldman-Sachs Anymore," now that his brain trust, such as it is, includes no less than five Goldman-Sachs veterans. As Mr. Dayen suggests, there's no use protesting the Democrats hire Goldman-Sachs vets to run finance, too, since Mr. Trump said he'd be different and went out of his way to criticize banksters when he knew it would get him votes. The good news? Maybe some of his votaries will see this and be angry. The bad news? I thought a lot of those votaries were in it just for the Jew-hate anyway.

Finally, John Light at the Moyers and Company website shares "11 Ways the EPA Has Helped Americans." You don't hear much about the hole in the ozone layer anymore, nor the Cuyahoga River catching fire, nor acid rain nor DDT, and that's mainly because of the EPA's authority, derived from law, to regulate these matters. Nice also to know that right-wingers whined about blackouts and higher electricity prices when the EPA moved against acid rain. Seems like they're always whining about that, and they're never right. It'd be nice if the "liberal" media would give their whining the appropriate amount of oxygen, i.e., none.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: attempted criminalization of free speech, the fake robot revolution, and lots more Trumpslam.

Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post now counts 18 American states trying to criminalize protest in some way (including, of course, Arizona). Why? Because fear of democracy! Here's how it should work: when our government tries to hurt us, we meet in public to shame them. They become ashamed and not only stop hurting us, but start doing our will, not just the will of their biggest donors. It's not so damn much to ask.

Two Economics Policy Institute researchers reminds us that the robots are not, in fact, coming to take our jobs away. Corporations have to invest in information technology and the like in order to make that work, and that gets in the way of playing the various bankster shell games that actually make CEOs rich. And the fact that ZOMG TEH ROBOTZ!!!! is their answer every time folks say workers should make more money is a good thing -- it means they know they can't win the argument on the merits.

Factcheck.org pimp-slaps Trump Administration claim that folks from the seven banned countries conduct terrorist activity in America. Being "implicated" in terrorist activity isn't the same as being convicted of terrorist activity, of course, and "72" is just a scare number, one that loses its scare-power when you put it next to "since 9.11" (that's over 13-plus years, meaning approximately six "implicated" "terrorists" per year when it took almost two dozen to pull off 9.11) and, of course, next to the one million folks who came from those countries during those years.

In a related matter, President Trump dismisses a report from the Department of Homeland (sic) Security finding fault with his insistence that folks from the seven Muslim-majority countries pose a heightened terroristic threat. Sadly, the DHS spokeshack throws her report, and her department, under the bus. Add this to your list of points (skips intelligence briefings, purges the State department, attacks folks from countries that don't attack us, struts around like his balls swing like church bells) when Dear Leader fails to prevent a major terrorist attack on American soil.

Mr. Trump tells "bipartisan group" in D.C. that "(n)obody knew that health care can be so complicated." Well, that was a blast of pure Bush Mobb! Remember all those sentences Tha Mobb started with nobody could have predicted, almost invariably before describing something that someone not only could have predicted, but did predict? For such a big-balls guy, he sure does make a lot of excuses. If he wants health care that's a lot less complicated, of course, he could embrace a single-payer, Medicare-for-All system. What "complicates" everything, of course, is mammon-worship.

Finally, Trump Administration memo describing the danger of leaks gets leaked. And there's that how-can-we-get-candid-advice-if-people-know-what-we're-trying-to-do rubbish! Why do they do it? Because fear of democracy! Here's how it should work: when our government tries to hide stuff from us, our media should try harder to find it out. They all work for us, after all, even though they want us to think they don't. This, again, is not so damn much to ask.

Around the table: items concerning ethics, Social Security, free speech, and working families.

House Republicans withdraw their plan to destroy Office of Congressional Ethics by placing it more under Congressional control -- a plan they'd put together in the dead of the previous night, because putting an office that investigates Congressional ethical misconduct more under the control of the same Congressfolk the office might investigate is such a terrible idea that it wouldn't survive even the least bit of scrutiny. The Times acts like it was Mr. Trump's (rather tepid!) opposition that killed it, but don't you believe it -- good Americans heard about it, swamped their Congressfolk's phone lines, and got them to back down. This will, I hope, be the first of many pimp-slappings.

The incomparable Dave Lindorff describes some of the contours of "The Coming Assault on Social Security." The "liberal" media no doubt has already shouted from the hilltops that ZOMG TEH CBO SEZ TEH TRUST FUNDZ RUNZ OUT IN 2031!!!!, versus 2033, but the CBO (which House Republicans have spent the last couple of years gutting, thanks Obama) seems to be unduly skeptical about how well T-bonds will perform (they've outperformed expectations for years, though maybe a President Trump will "fix" that!), as well as how many folks will be working in the coming years (ditto!). The result? Scare numbers, pure and simple. Remember that folks constantly projecting the failure of pension funds almost never take into account that economies usually grow, often despite our government's best efforts.

Kazakhstan government jails man for three years essentially for calling Vladimir Putin a "fascist" and a "terrorist." The law proscribes inciting "social, national, generic, racial, class, or religious hatred" or insulting "the national honour and dignity of religious feelings of citizens," though Mr. Putin is not, as far as we know, a Kazakh, nor does calling someone a "fascist" or "terrorist" injure someone's "religious feelings." But this is not how free societies operate, and I know that cock-swinger Donald Trump wishes he could do the same thing. In this, I expect his Republican majorities will try to oblige him. But we'll be ready.

Tom Philpott at Mother Jones highlights Labor Secretary nominee Andrew Pudzer's attitude toward worker breaks. Long story short: he thinks "mandatory breaks" prevent him from opening up any more Carl's Jr. franchises in California! "Have you ever been to a fast food restaurant and the employees are sitting and you're wondering, 'Why are they sitting?" he asks. I'd answer: no, I just assumed they were on a break, because the world does not exist to stand at my personal beck and call, as Mr. Pudzer clearly imagines it does for him. And breaks, you know, keep you sharper for when you have to work the rest of the day; funny how these "big thinkers" all imagine we could all just be more efficient if we never rested! This is also not how free societies operate.

French workers win the right to negotiate with their employers for the ability to ignore phone calls and emails from work during off-work hours. The law seems rather like weak tea to me -- corporations apparently won't face penalties for continuing to pester their employees when they're at home trying to make dinner and relate to their families. And to those who would ask shouldn't we be able to solve problems at work whenever we think of a way to solve them? I would answer: no! Get your damn work done during work hours! Why should workers be slaves to their bosses' incompetence?

Around the table: more follies about health care, pensions, cancer research, and pollution -- plus bonus *It's a Wonderful Life* backstory.

Michael Corcoran at FAIR catches the New York Times calling the Republicans' health care plan, such as it is, a "universal" health care plan. Republicans have not actually offered anything that would approach "universal" coverage, other than the "opportunity" to buy health care coverage. But this "opportunity" has always existed -- yes, even in the days when 50 million people, not 30 million, had no health insurance -- and good luck getting decent coverage if you're not part of a pool, as employees of a corporation offering health insurance would be, or, indeed, as all Americans would be under a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health care plan, a plan which gets majority American support in poll after poll after poll, but can't even be mentioned in the "liberal" media articles about health care which all pretend the Affordable Care Act is TEH MOST LIBRULZ PLANZ POSSIBLEZ!!!!!

Institute for Policy Studies report finds that 100 American CEOs have, by themselves, more retirement security than 116 million Americans. Progressive Insurance's CEO, for example, can count on collecting over $1 million every month when he retires -- and he probably thinks it's not enough! Those who bellow that TEH CEOZ EARNED TEH RICHEZ!!!!! might want to describe how, exactly, they earned them, and will want to consider if "buying off politicians to get preferential tax treatment" is really "earning" anything. And those who go all Henny-Penny before corporate scare numbers about pension fund insolvency might want to consider whether these 100 CEOs could maybe do a little more about that than they're doing.

Matt Richtel and Andrew Pollack at the New York Times dive deep into taxpayer-funded cancer research and wonder, rightly, whether private corporations profit too much from that research, and at taxpayer expense. The corporate arguments in favor of feeding at the taxpayer trough (and, naturally, against any attempt by our government to hold prices down for consumers/taxpayers) are all typical rhetorical hostage-taking: our government can't do it alone (though we could if we brought back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income!), and private involvement ensures needed treatments get to the public, because there's just no other way. But sure, right-wingers, tell me again how gluttonous corporate executives "earn" their money, particularly when (in one hospital administrator's testimony) "(t)he market is so reliant on the knowledge and know-how that comes out of the government and academic labs."

A Daily Caller investigation finds that the EPA has failed to clean up over 300 Superfund sites, many with "unknown dangers." I wouldn't interpret this information (which describes foot-dragging from both polluters and the EPA) as a call to abandon all efforts at pollution regulation, as so many right-wingers would like us to do -- I'd more easily interpret it as a call to fund EPA efforts properly, which Congresses have generally refused to do for one reason or another, and to force polluters to cooperate with such efforts. Don't worry, though: when Donald Trump "drains the swamp," the EPA will do its job and polluters will finally meet justice! I kid, of course.

President Obama plans to withdraw most of the Arctic and parts of the Atlantic Oceans from consideration for new offshore drilling sales, using authority derived from the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953. He won't be the first President to invoke this authority, though right-wingers will act like he is, and it would actually be rather difficult for a President Trump to undo what he does here, though a Republican Congress could go ahead and change the law. For "energy security," of course, which for Republicans never seems to mean developing energy from the wind and the sun.

Finally, we learn from Nina Metz at the Chicago Tribune "How Jimmy Stewart's War Service Affected 'It's a Wonderful Life.'" Not many folks know this -- and certainly no one would have spoken of it to the public then! -- but Mr. Stewart suffered from PTSD after 15 months of air combat in WWII, and his first film afterward was "It's a Wonderful Life," a role he took reluctantly, as he'd hoped to do a comedy after what he'd experienced. If you've seen the film -- particularly that last scene with his family before he takes off in his car, where he's dripping with desperation and rage -- you can see the echoes of his war experiences. Given the extreme reluctance of most returning WWII American soldiers to talk about their experiences (Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five wouldn't arrive until the '60s), it's almost the only contemporary echo of that experience you can get.

Action: infrastructure spending, pension "reform," and Mr. Trump's Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

So there's Donald Trump's senior strategist Steve "Don't Call Me Racist" Bannon, talking to the Hollywood Reporter, suggesting he's maybe not what you think he is because "I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan." Then you look at the details of this plan to build out massive projects presumably for the public benefit (like building bridges and sewer systems), and you realize it's not particularly new or fresh at all -- it "works" by giving out over $140 billion in tax breaks in the hopes that will attract $1 trillion in investment in infrastructure projects, but only the kind of projects that turn a profit. That there is the wrinkle -- if a project must turn a profit, then it'll be one of two kinds of projects: 1) a boutique project in a wealthy area that hardly needs the help, or 2) a project in an area that does need it but will be privatized, and, as we know, privatization takes control of public assets out of the people's hands and drives prices up for the benefit of the new owners. But, as we know, this isn't the only way to build infrastructure -- we could also simply tax the wealthy much more than we're currently doing and pay for projects that benefit the public that way, or, heaven forbid, borrow the money, since, as even Mr. Bannon says, interest rates are pretty low right now. I think this matter merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators; use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page.

Meanwhile, our Congresscritters are trying to attach something called the "composite bill" to whatever must-pass appropriations bill emerges before December 9, and this bill would permit trustees of relatively well-functioning pension plans to worse plans that don't actually guarantee benefits to pensioners. In short: in a world where too few people make good on their word anymore, Congress would allow pension fund trustees to break the promise they made to their fund's workers. And the bill would also let trustees divert funds from their currently-healthy pension plan to the worse one, which would automatically make the well-functioning one far less healthy! It's almost like turning good pension funds into bad ones is the whole idea! Of course, composite bill defenders will probably brandish that ZOMG PENSHUNZ ARE TEH UNDERFUNDEDZ BY $4 TRILLYUNZ!!!! scare number, when that scare number becomes much smaller once you divide it by a) the 40-year period over which the scare number accumulates and b) the hundreds of federal/state/municipal pension plans in America. Hence the Pension Rights Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would help pension trustees break their promises to America's workers. After all, you paid into it your whole life, so you earned it.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell Democratic leaders to block any Donald Trump nominee who openly embraces bigotry, misogyny, or Wall Street greed. Tall order, I know, since these are Democrats we're talking about, and since the "culture" of Washington demands that the opposition party show deference to the Executive's picks (remember all those times Republicans showed the appropriate deference to Mr. Obama's nominees? I kid, of course), but I'm such a horrible person that I only care that the President picks qualified people who'll do a good job, and racists and corporate cronies don't do a good job of anything but making good Americans feel pain. Remember when George W. Bush made his cabinet about as diverse a group of folks as Mr. Clinton's cabinets were? Now Mr. Trump's "chief strategist" and Attorney General pick are known racists, his foreign policy picks all make a big drama out of their hatred for Muslims, and his financial advisors are the biggest bankster greedheads you can imagine. Democrats may be tempted to enable Mr. Trump, in the hope that they'll reap the rewards in the 2018 midterms. But they're going to lose big in those midterms -- and in the meantime they'll be abandoning their duty to do the people's will. More than 53% of American voters wanted someone other than Donald Trump to be President, after all.

Around the table: the "liberal" media, torture, voting rights, scare numbers, and one cray-cray campaign ad.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR notes the lack of "liberal" media coverage of October 11, the date of the voter registration deadline in 15 states and American Samoa -- odd, considering all the really unimportant things they choose to blather on about. Contrary to what you may have heard, the vast majority of folks who don't vote in American elections aren't registered to vote, and yet you don't hear very much about it anywhere outside of Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show; why, it's almost like that's the idea.

Three former detainees sue CIA contract psychologists who allegedly masterminded the CIA's torture program -- and can compel testimony from two former CIA officials. Not just any former CIA officials, either, but former a CIA Counterterrorism Center head and a former CIA acting general counsel. Now cue the right-wing whining machine about how "national security" will be compromised by such testimony. And folks also remember that the CIA torture program is one Donald Trump would bring back, right?

Erik J. Engstrom and Jason M. Roberts remind us (at the Washington Post) that, though the 4th Circuit struck down most of North Carolina's horrible Voter ID law, the court left in place the part of the law prohibiting straight-ticket voting. That may not sound like a big deal, when you think of the relatively short amount of time that'll add to one person's time voting, but more than one person will vote on Election Day, and that added time is going to add up to longer lines, voters going home, and voters failing to finish ballots. Do I need to add that this phenomenon tends to happen more in black areas?

Brace yourself, because this Hill piece about "States Confront(ing) Exploding Pension Costs" is a terrible article. Luckily, paragraph 11 gives it away when it describes Illinois's "obligations" as "due over the lifetime of current retirees and state employees who will be owed retirement benefits" -- at which point, hopefully, you remember that they typically give you the ZOMG $1.75 TRILLYUNZ!!!! scare number without adding "over 40 years," since that would, after all, make the scare number seem a lot less scary. Remembering that America has over 300 state and local pension funds would also make that number seem a lot less scary, as would recognizing that dividing a 40-year pension "liability" by tax revenues for one year is an absurd exercise. But there's money to be made in scaring people about pension fund "shortfalls" -- money that could be diverted to bankster hedge funds for the better returns that don't materialize, or money that could be diverted away from pension funds into corporate cronies' pockets for "job creation."

Finally, dig this campaign ad coming from Louisiana Republican U.S. Senate candidate John Kennedy. Unfavorable comparisons to Steve Martin's "What I Believe" routine are of course inevitable, but what to make of the last line? "I believe that love is the answer," Mr. Kennedy intones, as the camera pans over apparent photos of his family, "but you oughta own a handgun just in case." Ah, in case the family turns out for Charles Boustany on primary day? I sure hope not.

Around the table: water thieves, torturers, spies, bad journalists, and scare numbers.

Nestlé isn't just gouging public water in Oregon and California: the good citizens of Kunkletown, Pennsylvania, are also struggling against a Nestlé attempt to pump out 200,000 gallons of water daily and sell it as bottled water. Nestlé got the local government's help, of course, with an ordinance that suddenly allowed massive amounts of water extraction in commercial zones, which had heretofore been illegal. The good news? Local townsfolk sued the local Board of Supervisors over the zoning change; they'll probably win that, and it's only their backup plan.

Rebecca Gordon, writing at The Nation, describes that time the CIA tortured an innocent man for upwards of seven years. Among the horrors committed against Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, better known as "Abu Zubaydah": being waterboarded 83 times in a month, being thrown shoulder-first into a concrete wall though our government's rules clearly said "flexible, false wall," being deprived of sleep for upwards of six days, and losing an eye under never-explained circumstances -- and, as icing on the cake, the CIA openly declared him to be an experiment to see how well "enhanced interrogation techniques" worked. But, you know, bygones, looking forward not backward, ad nauseam. A President Donald Trump would bring all these horrors back just to prove he's got big balls.

Ho hum, Michigan state police have been monitoring social media for comments about the government-created water crisis in Flint. No, the First Amendment doesn't protect you from threatening the entire state government on Facebook, but the Fourth Amendment protects you from police conducting fishing expeditions for such threats, and I'd say maybe police would be better served looking for the people who poisoned Flint's water in the first place, except that everyone already knows who and where they are. And no the police don't need to know how people feel and what they're willing to do because their government poisoned an entire city's water. That's one of them-there "if you need to ask, you'll never know" things.

Just in case you were wondering if Mexico was a real place, and not just a punching bag for Donald Trump: Mexican human rights activists allege that a smear campaign may be operating against them in the media. At issue: in general, accusations of human rights abuses by Mexican police and military, and in particular, a 2014 attack on a fleet of student buses in Ayotzinapa that killed 3 students and resulted in 43 others going "missing." A report on that massacre, elaborating on an earlier report's finding that police and military may have been involved in it, is due, so the timing of unsubstantiated media reports alleging the report's authors are corrupt is, to say the least, suspicious. Dig the Mexican columnist who alleges that TEH REAL SMEAR CAMPAIGN!!! is against the police and military, and then says the release of video footage depicting actual police torture of a suspect somehow backs his claim. Dude's got spunk -- he could go work for our "liberal" media!

Finally, we learn that over 60,000 Pennsylvania Democrats have switched parties between the first of the year and yesterday's primary, ostensibly to vote for Donald Trump. 60,000; that's a big number; 145,000 new Republican registrations just since Election Day 2015, that's an even bigger number. Sadly, we do not learn until paragraph 29 that Pennsylvania has 8 million voters, and that registered Democrats still hold a 900,000 voter advantage over Republicans. That's not to say Mr. Trump can't win Pennsylvania, or even that Democrats haven't forgotten how to talk to blue-collar voters, but the numbers the earlier paragraphs give you are still scare numbers. (Oh, and by my count, the article tells 11 stories of Pennsylvanians who've switched over for Trump. Think they would have had trouble finding 11 Pennsylvanians who switched the other way for Sanders? Or did they just not look?)

Around the table: beating down zombie lies about taxes (among other things).

General Electric and Verizon executives assert in recent op-eds that they do-too pay their fair share of taxes in America, but Citizens for Tax Justice tells us why they're wrong. Verizon's CEO claims his corporation payed a 35% tax rate in 2015, but we know Verizon has actually paid about 12% to our government over the last 15 years. General Electric's CEO swears that GE pays "billions" of dollars in taxes, but that's essentially a scare number -- "billions" out of many, many more billions in profits simply isn't as impressive as he'd like you to think.

Lynn Stuart Parramore, writing at TruthOut, says "The Biggest Threat to the 99% Isn't the 1%, It's the 0.1%," and I'm glad someone else is saying it. The top 1% tax bracket starts at around $350,000, after all, and folks making $350,000 annually are doing pretty well, but they're certainly not "in the club," as it were. "The one percent" is a spiffy idea, made to catch the elbow of folks having a lot on their minds. But a lot of Ms. Parramore's descriptions of the 0.1% life can catch those elbows just as easily.

Courtney Baleister, writing at Wired, tells us the supermarket is a "terrible way to get food," and that "app-fueled services" can help kill it. The theoretical ease with which we can all communicate now should help us cut out a lot of the middlemen that separate us from farmers -- and that would help us demolish the big ag food model -- but even the best of the services described (I vote for Quinciple, though you may prefer Farmigo) depend on buying and storing in bulk, which is the main reason the supermarket model needs to be supplanted. I'll stick with farmers' markets and my CSA share.

From the "Because It's Good to Be Reminded" file: Ted Cruz says he can get 5% GDP growth through tax cuts alone. His supporters (like Arthur Laffer, why is anyone still having him on TV?) like to tell you that President Reagan got 7% GDP growth in 1984, without reminding you that he signed massive tax increases into law in 1982 and 1984, and the economy has hardly seen 4% growth in GDP since then -- indeed, GDP growth has averaged less than 2% since 2000. And we routinely had 4% GDP growth in the 1960s, when (perhaps not coincidentally) top tax rates were much, much higher than they are now. Hate to pile on, but how did those Bush Mobb tax cuts work out?

Finally, Adam Johnson, writing for FAIR, tabulates the "liberal" media's "Ten Laziest Takes of Election Season 2016." Your mileage may vary on the ordering (Jesus Mary and Joseph how I hate the Tone Police!), but definitely the "liberal" media's habit of lumping the obviously-dissimilar-even-if-they-share-some-and-I-do-mean-some-supporters Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump together should be near the top. It's like they think symmetry equals fairness or something.

Around the table: what "free" trade is really all about, and other horrible truths.

Dean Baker reminds us that the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade pact "has little to do with trade" and more to do with "putting in place a pro-business regulatory structure." You see, tariffs aren't so much a "free trade barrier" anymore, but those pesky clean air and clean water and antitrust and fair use laws are, to the corporatists who drafted the pact -- not that they'll come out and say so, of course, since you'll want to punch them in the nose if they do. Rather, they'll use more scare numbers -- 18,000 OF TEH TARIFFZ DESTROYED!!!!, including the infamous Brunei ski boot tariff, a stain on civilization's honor since time immemorial.

Vulture capitalists -- those extraordinary folks who buy up a nation's defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar in order to extort vast sums governments can't pay without selling off public services -- have reached a "deal" with the new Argentine government. The shame of it is that Argentina actually did pretty well after its 2002 default, mainly by refusing to cave to outlandish creditor demands, but then 2009 hit, you remember that, and then another bad spell helped put a right-wing government in, one more willing to cave to folks like Paul Singer, until recently a Marco Rubio man and now standing to make nearly four times what he "invested." A certain American judge and a certain Obama Administration cabinet agency were also no help to good Argentinians.

In an unexpected development, the Department of Justice has apparently backed down in its fight to get Apple to create a key the FBI can use to unlock any encrypted cell phone. Sadly, not because they realized they were wrong, but because they think they can unlock the phone of the San Bernardino shooter another way -- hopefully a way that protects the privacy of the masses, though I'm not holding my breath. This "other way" might also fail, which means we'll be back to square one. We'll likely know in about two weeks' time.

Annalee Newitz, writing at ArsTechnica, describes Facebook's attempt to "establish an ethnic affinity," though not of course an actual ethnicity, to its users. Not to racially profile, but to make money, and praise the Lord it's only about making money! Also, like so many things in this Brave New World, this sort of marketing isn't opt-in: "(e)ven when a Facebook user says they like #BlackLivesMatter, they don't feel like asking to opt in to an ethnic identity," Ms. Newitz says, "it's just one of many interests that define that person." I wonder what "ethnic affinity" Facebook projects onto my newsfeed's endless stream of death notices and music videos.

Finally, Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall takes us in his wayback machine to the antics of southern California's Wally George, a right-wing TV host who presaged so many right-wing talk radio and cable news blowhards -- and Donald Trump. Helmet hair, limp liberals, wrestling-style bombast, security throwing guests out -- sound familiar? Of course I remember Morton Downey, Jr. gaining a similar following in the late 1980s with a similar act. Happily, "digging right-wing blowhards who yell and scream and throw things, ironically or maybe not" is one of the many childish things I've put away.

Around the table: the demographic hurdle Donald Trump may not be able to clear, and other curiosities.

Jim Tankersley at the Washington Post tells us that Republican support for "most favored nation" status with China has done more damage to American manufacturing than NAFTA did -- and helped bring about Donald Trump. It sure is a good thing Larry Summers took to this very same newspaper all those months ago to tell us we better support the TPP because China is too powerful. The last paragraph, which describes "free" trade advocates pointing to "a recent Gallup survey that shows near-record enthusiasm for trade," should have pointed out more explicitly that one can very easily be "pro-trade" without being "pro-'free' trade," or "pro-bad trade deals."

Ho hum, Dean Baker catches the New York Times flogging a Citigroup study suggesting that public pensions will constitute an untenable burden on world nations. And surprise, surprise, it has scare numbers: ZOMG 78 TRILLYUNS OF TEH DOLLURZ ALMOSTZ TWICEZ TEH NASHUNUL DEBTZ!!!! But that number represents 20 nations' public pension obligations over the rest of the 21st century, which will go on for another 84 years. And it also represents some four percent of those nations' estimated GDP over the next 80 or so years, meaning that GDP number is $2 quadrillion. Every time some bankster squeals about "underfunded pensions," you should pretty much count on scare numbers coming. And have I mentioned that emotional manipulation is evil?

Steve Vladeck, writing at the Just Security blog, finds Judge Merrick Garland's record on detainee treatment a bit wanting. Judge Garland has "never ruled for a detainee on the merits in a Guantánamo habeas case" (emphasis in original), and that covers more than a dozen Guantánamo-related cases. Why, even one of Mr. Bush's favorite judges, J. Michael Luttig, ruled against our government's detainment of Jorge Padilla at a critical point in 2005, and that probably scuttled his chance to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court! Mr. Vladeck tells us, essentially, that it's worse that Judge Garland defers to the government in detainment cases than that he rules consistently against detainees -- though he also says "the Court is too far gone" on a lot of national security cases for him to make that much of a difference if he were less deferential.

Even George Will finds Senate Republicans' blocking of Judge Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court "indefensible." His column is a morally-forceful laugh-line fest pretty much from start to finish, so much so that I'm willing to overlook that he praises Judge Garland for pretty much the same things for which Mr. Vladeck criticizes him. But consider how many of today's "conservatives" consider Mr. Will a dinosaur -- and how many of them would actually call him a dinosaur without realizing the irony of doing so. I used to find such things amusing; now I don't, and I don't know whether that's because I've matured, or merely because I've gotten old.

Finally, we learn one actually fairly compelling reason why Donald Trump might not be President: that he would have to, in Greg Sargent's words, "improve on Mitt Romney’s advantage over Barack Obama among blue collar whites by double digit margins, which is an astronomically high bar" in Rust Belt states that he could make competitive. I'm inclined to accept the force of that analysis -- but I also feel compelled to remind everyone that Election Day is over seven months away and a lot can happen in the interim, and that the "liberal" media, those expert buriers of memory, may well remain Mr. Trump's biggest asset.

Around the table: why the word "bipartisan" should make you afraid, and other life lessons.

U.S. Senate passes the nefarious CISA bill by a 74-21 margin. Yay bipartisanship! Democrats and Republicans coming together to screw their constituents! The good news? We managed to get it put off this long, and the Senate and the House still have to conference out a bill that can avoid the President's veto pen. One hopes they just say fuggedaboutit since there's an election on, but we're better off counting on our action than on their laziness.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches a factoid from a satire website making its way not just onto Sean Hannity's TV program, but Donald Trump's stump speeches and mainstream TV news. Real News Right Now is yet another "satire" site that just isn't good enough at satire to avoid this kind of confusion and you have to wonder if that's the point. Will Sean Hannity ever offer a correction to his viewers? Will his viewers ever wonder why Mr. Hannity might have been a little less-than-stringent about his fact-checking in that particular instance? I kid, of course.

The EPA will propose a rule that would compel plants processing natural gas to report their release of toxic chemicals. Gas drilling corporations get to keep the chemicals they use a secret from the public, thanks to that energy bill from 2005, but I presume that the plants processing the gas don't enjoy the same protection from the law. At best, it's a lateral move against gas drilling pollution; it may work, but I prefer to hit these things head-on.

Hey, were you just wondering how Gravity Payments, the corporation whose CEO decided to raise his employees' minimum wage to $70,000 annually over the next few years, was doing? Well, their revenues and profits have doubled since the announcement, while customer retention also went up and new customer inquiries went sky-high. Don't shed a tear for the two employees who quit, though, since (as you may recall) in July the New York Times was perfectly happy to air their grievances like they were the only grievances that mattered.

Finally, Ben Carson instructs us that not only wouldn't he sign a budget that raises the debt ceiling as President (though his wording leaves open the possibility that he'd sign a debt ceiling hike in separate legislation), but also that "I think the time to address that is at the beginning of the fiscal period, not at the end, because then you have other options." That's yet another statement that, back in the day, would have finished a Presidential campaign -- tell us, again, Dr. Carson, how it's more prudent to get things done early! -- but it also ignores the fact that Republicans wanted a government shutdown crisis and a debt ceiling crisis intertwined, because they thought it would make President Obama fold.

UPDATE. Mr. Hannity claims he got the "250,000 new refugees" figure cited above not from the Real News Right Now site, but from a September AP report quoting Secretary of State Kerry. I'll happily concede it's possible he got the number there, and maybe even that he or someone on his staff did the addition, but of course his defense opens him to new charges. For one, he did not previously say the 250,000 refugees represented three calendar years' worth of refugees, nor did he mention that the average number of refugees accepted by the United States annually since 1980 is about 83,000, which (surprise!) is almost 250,000 when multiplied by three years -- and both of these are, sadly, standard stratagems for folks both left and right who employ scare numbers. He is also incorrect to suggest that he had always said the refugees weren't just coming from Syria and Iraq; on both October 19 and 20, he offered the figure in the context of discussing Syrian and Iraqi refugees. One cannot read these statements differently without willfully misinterpreting them. So, as long as Sean Hannity commits larger crimes with numbers and context, he can take his little addition lesson and cram it.

Around our table: Howard Stern vs. Roger Waters, Jeb Bush vs. the truth, and other battles.

Howard Stern slams Roger Waters for boycotting Israel, pointing out that Mr. Waters lives in "America, a country that was founded on white people coming in and obliterating the native population," and asking, therefore, "why don't we all just leave?" That would be a trenchant criticism if Mr. Waters had actually demanded that Israelites themselves leave Israel, which he has not. Acting like any criticism of Israel is an existential threat is the kind of thing I don't tolerate from right-wingers, so why would I tolerate it from anyone else?

Sen. Sanders announces plans to revive the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have allowed workers to form a union using a card-check process instead of a secret ballot election, but he's calling it the Workplace Democracy Act. Which is wise, since the "liberal" media covered the Employee Free Choice Act so, so badly (often, back in the day, I felt like I was literally the only person in America debunking the zombie IT KILLZ TEH SECRET BALLUTZ!!!! claim). Once I get an action alert, you'll hear about it.

Speaking of Bernie Sanders, there's Jeb Bush flogging that ZOMG 18 TRILLYUNZ IN NEW SPENDINGZ!!!!! figure. He knows that number's been thoroughly debunked, right? Of course he does, and he doesn't care. "The Olympic gold medal for most promises made in the year before an election" is an effective meme, though. I can only hope he gets bad advice from his handlers about it.

And we now hear testimony from numerous combat veterans and federal agents that it takes more to foil mass murderers than being "a good guy with a gun." I welcome any expert testimony that shatters this notion we all succumb to sooner or later -- that we can be heroes in exactly the manner of fictional movie characters and fictional first-person video game characters. It takes more to be a hero than one well-placed shot. One might start by helping to change the world from a place where frustrations constantly beset us into one where we have the economic power we used to have as late as the 1970s, which is, luckily, the work we do at this blog every day.

Paul Theroux decries "The Hypocrisy of 'Helping' the Poor" -- the hypocrisy of big corporate titans helping the poor, that is. These are the "grotesquely wealthy American chief executives" who "made their fortunes by impoverishing whole American communities, having outsourced their manufacturing to China or India, Vietnam or Mexico." And then he tells you about his three-year tour of the Deep South, where some small towns have annual tax bases literally smaller than what a CEO makes in a few calendar days, where community organizers never hear from the Clinton Foundation. This is the kind of thing that would make me wish I had a lot of money -- if I didn't already know that the process of getting a lot of money would hopelessly corrupt my soul.

Finally, we check in with So Much to Read, where Erica Avery has nine new book reviews. She's wry as ever: about a book called The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, she notes that "'unspeakable' is a tall order." And I, too, have often wondered (particularly when contemplating the Eisenhower era) if I'd find "stifling conformity and obligatory self-effacement a fair price to pay for a society with the best education system in the world and no real poverty." (And for those of you in a hurry, there's still "Six Words.")

Around the table: possible homes for refugees, stolen health care for retirees, and other stories.

An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study concludes that using computers in the classroom hurts student performance instead of improving it. I wish I heard more from conservatives about things like this -- after all, wouldn't they be the ones preferring classics to moderns, novels to television, and Tennyson to Twitter? Then again, I don't hear much from conservatives at all these days -- and I hear more than enough from the reactionaries who claim to be conservative, who seem down for whatever makes their corporate paymasters more money, which computerized classrooms certainly do.

Michelle Goldberg asks if child protective services have "gone too far" -- a question the "liberal" media seems more eager to ask, Ms. Goldberg notes, now that relatively affluent white folks (not just working poor minority folks) are getting caught up in CPS webs. It may seem ironic that, as we've allowed governments to abandon responsibility for keeping the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us, that we've gone mad over keeping children supervised at all times -- ironic, that is, until you remember that Tha Bush Mobb couldn't save New Orleans from drowning but could wiretap your phones.

Alec MacGillis at ProPublica describes how over 200 Indiana miners and families "with no direct connection to Patriot Coal" somehow lost their retirement health care benefits as a result of the Patriot Coal bankruptcy in 2013. Their employer passed on the responsibility for their health care years ago to a subsidiary that may well have been "set up to fail." This is why we shouldn't let corporations own other corporations, and it's also why we shouldn't let the bankster economy rule our lives.

Beenish Ahmed at Think Progress wonders if abandoned European villages could help house the world's refugees. Villages are dying out all over the continent, after all -- a lot of hamlets sell so cheaply that you or I could almost buy one -- and an influx of refugees could boost flagging economies. But you would hope European corporations wouldn't take advantage of these refugees and pay them in dung pellets, because that would be cruel (and, as it happens, doing so wouldn't stimulate local economies very much, either).

Finally, FAIR catches a Washington Post writer "analyzing" Bernie Sanders's platform. Read the whole thing and digest all the ignorance, scare numbers and the unspoken hypocrisy of the Sanders haters, but note well also: "government control" is your control, because this is your government, regardless of who's President or which party controls Congress. Why do I have this nagging feeling that you acting like your government belongs to you is what the "liberal" media really fears?

Around the table: scare numbers, Bernie Sanders's speech at Liberty, "childlike" policy proposals, the Brill Building v2.0, and the further troubles of Scott Walker.

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post debunks a Wall Street Journal claim that Sen. Sanders's programs will cost $18 trillion. You know the first thing I'm going to say: it's a scare number! And how is it a scare number? Well, the WSJ, like everyone else, doesn't say right off that it's $18 trillion over ten years, and gets that figure by including the supposed $15 trillion cost of a single-payer health care program, without noting (as Mr. Sargent does) that we currently spend $42 trillion a decade on health care now, and would spend rather closer to $15 trillion if we implemented the Sanders plan.

Speaking of Bernie Sanders, D.D. Guttenplan at The Nation describes how Mr. Sanders's address at Liberty University went. Long story short: not bad, considering. Mr. Sanders deserves our praise for going to Liberty and not trying to pander to them; I thought the Liberty crowd would be more responsive on economic issues, but I didn't expect them to respond on racism. As pleased as I am to see less vestigial racism in far-right evangelicals here, I still find it frustrating that they still think banksters are just people who work hard, when banksters just redistribute the income of people who work hard upward to themselves.

Dean Baker finds a New Yorker writer calling new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's populist-left economic proposals "childlike." We could just as easily call Republicans' devotion to tax-cuts-for-the-rich "childlike"! The difference? We could also point to the failure of Tha Bush Mobb tax cuts and the Brownback "experiment" in Kansas, as well as the rise in federal revenues following the return of the 39.6% tax bracket in 2013. But all right-wingers have is the name-calling.

Nathaniel Rich, writing in The Atlantic, pulls the curtain on the virtual unknowns who write almost every song in this week's Billboard Top 40 countdown. If you want to persuade people that today's popular music is all crap (you know, the way every older generation, mine included, likes to do), you could do worse than point to the big hit songwriting now being so concentrated in so few hands. Of course, there's so much music out there now, and so many different ways to consume it, that you can also expend far less effort ignoring the Top 40 than you used to.

Finally, Scott Walker can't name a single time he's stood up to a "conservative special interest" on CNN. He instead talks about how many small donors he has, but if you're running for President, you should answer the question put to you, and then extrapolate. You know what else? "Unintimidated" is the worst word to describe him, because it's easy to act like your opponents don't "intimidate" you when you've got all that Koch brothers support at your back. In fact, given that Mr. Walker's devotion to corporate welfare programs hasn't exactly made him rich, you have to wonder if he has been intimidated -- by corporations.

Around the table: meet the new Bush, same as the old Bush! And other stories.

Ishmael Hossein-Zadeh writes about "The Age of Finance Capital and the Irrelevance of Mainstream Economics." Sadly, you'll find this a familiar story: the finance sector used to "grease() the wheels of the economy" when they got stuck, but now "buying and selling of ownership titles, instead of producing real values, has become the primary field of investment," and "(n)ot only has this slowed down the traditional flow of national savings (through the banking system) into productive investment in the real sector of the economy, it has, indeed, reversed that flow of funds into productive investment." All is not hopeless, of course -- Henry Ford used to complain about banksters, too.

"After 25 Years," says Patricia Schaefer at Nonprofit Quarterly, "Teach for America Results Are Consistently Underwhelming." Long story short: the organization that finds teachers for distressed urban and rural areas makes a lot of money, but can't argue persuasively that it really does any good for the students there, or that it delivers teachers who'll stay in the profession. One of the drawbacks of taking school reform efforts out of our public schools is that you, the public, can't extract very much accountability from private concerns.

Ho hum, Jeb Bush has a tax "reform" plan that cuts taxes for rich folks, cuts taxes for corporations, and "limits loopholes" in such a way that rich folks benefit while working families don't, plus it does some new, just-as-harmful things. But you remember how this went last time: deficits shot up, and corporations didn't use their largesse to create jobs. Still, he's got some cojones talking about getting government off your back and then using government to put corporations even more on your back. Be sure to visit Jeb Bush's campaign website at nochance2016.org.

A Mennonite discusses what a "religious objection" might really look like, versus what Kim Davis's "religious objection" to issuing marriage licenses for gays looks like. "Living out your faith doesn’t mean always getting your way without consequence," she says. "And, subsequently, it isn’t always easy or comfortable." Also notable is this quotation from a right-winger at the Washington Examiner: "a death penalty opponent doesn’t have the right to a job as an executioner, and a conscientious objector has no right to a career in the military."

Finally, Radley Balko again reminds us that there is no "war on cops,", as police deaths from firearms remain very, very low, and felonious killings of police per 100,000 officers is at its lowest level in 25 years. Mr. Balko also debunks some scare numbers and reminds us that some folks say there's a "war on cops" merely because cops get criticized, which Mr. Balko rightly notes is tantamount to "saying that exercising constitutional rights and participating in democracy are in and of themselves acts of violence." But please, right-wing rage heads, don't listen to an actual conservative like Mr. Balko; just keep hopping from one rage to another. The "liberal" media will still enable you.

Around the table: the so-called "Ferguson effect," and other follies.

The state of California agrees to move close to 2,000 inmates out of solitary confinement as part of a lawsuit settlement. California has long used solitary to control violent gangs, supposedly, but anyone who thinks about that for a moment knows that's not what solitary's for -- to the extent we use it at all, we should use it to punish stuff prisoners actually do in prison, not for having the wrong tattoo or based on another inmate's say-so.

FAIR finds the "liberal" media wondering whether a "Ferguson effect" is causing a "murder wave" in America. Funny that the "liberal" media would never think to attribute, say, a rise in harassment of black folks by police officers to a "Ferguson effect." Anyway, long story short: the "murder wave" may or may not exist and may or may not have begun before Ferguson, and the "liberal" media buttresses its case with incomplete data supplemented by scare numbers and bait-and-switch argument. They should be ashamed to call themselves "journalists."

Speaking of people who should be ashamed of themselves, dig the rhetorical contortions Texas history books now employ just to try to make out that slavery isn't so big a deal. Bad as this is, I'm old enough to remember that history textbooks used to be a lot worse, when they pretended the antebellum South was a Golden Age and its demise a crime against memory, and obliterated black history altogether. We should not excuse "history" like "some slaves reported that their masters treated them kindly" -- as if "some" equals "all," or as if such testimony could never be compelled from someone who literally has no rights! -- but we ought to note the progress we've made as well as the work we still have to do.

U.S. District Court judge places Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who still refuses to issue marriage licenses to gays, in federal custody. In case you were wondering (as I was!), no, the state can't just fire her for refusing to do her job -- the state legislature has to impeach, convict, and remove her, and none of that looks likely, not when the state Senate President attends rallies in your support. Unless good Kentuckians pressure their legislators, of course.

Finally, Bernie Sanders tells DNC politicos that he's a candidate "who can substantially increase voter turnout all across the country." I think he's right -- the things he's talking about, and the way he's talking about them, resonate with folks across the spectrum, regardless of what the "liberal" media thinks -- but a note of caution: turnout will continue to be an issue in states with Voter ID laws, or states using the "Interstate Crosscheck" database.

Action: healthy pensions, vigorous whistleblower protections, and continued conservation funding.

H.R. 2844/S. 1631, the Keep Our Pension Promises Act, would take away the ability of pension trustees to force potentially debilitating benefit cuts -- an ability they only just gained in last year's disgusting "cromnibus" spending bill -- and the Pension Rights Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support it, and thus keep pensions as strong as those who provided them promised they would be. I have no patience for folks who squeal ZOMG TEH PENSHUNZ AREZ UNDERFUNDEDZ BY TEH TRILLYUNZ!!!! They employ scare numbers -- if someone tells you pensions are "underfunded" by $2 trillion, for example, they're not telling you that that's $2 trillion over 40 years, and they're not telling you that America has over 300 state and local pension plans. Do all that division and the number suddenly isn't so scary! And they're also not telling you that these projections depend on the economy not growing at all, which is pretty much against everyone's self-interest. And let's not get started on the massive fees state and local pensions are paying to hedge fund managers for thoroughly mediocre advice. As Paul Craig Roberts said many years ago, pensions are about all that's left for our elites to steal. So let's fight to keep them.

Meanwhile, S. 1599, the Criminal Antitrust Anti-Retaliation Act, would, as its title suggests, protect workers from retaliation if they report antitrust law violations, whether they report such criminal acts internally or to our government. The bill (a Chuck Grassley/Patrick Leahy production) would also let workers file antitrust whistleblower claims with the Department of Labor, plus it would let them get a jury trial, like we all deserve no matter what corporatists or "forced arbitration" apologists think is "better for the economy." And the bill would also guarantee certain rights to the whistleblower, such as the rights to reinstatement, attorneys' fees, damages, and back pay. Barack Obama may not agree, but folks who blow the whistle on corporate or governmental wrongdoing are extremely courageous, knowing, as they do, that their employer or their government can turn their lives upside down, to the point where they're destitute and their families are pretty sure none of it was worth it. So the National Whistleblowers Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1599, and thus support good citizens risking a lifetime of trouble to do the right, honorable, and lawful thing.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to permanently authorize and fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund, CREDO still helps you do that. The LWCF, 50 years young now, expires in September, but some Congressfolk have lately been acting like they got a mandate from the electorate in November to gut it. Of course, the only mandate that matters to these Congressfolk is the one that comes from their corporate paymasters -- the mandate that mining and drilling corporations need more land to mine and drill in, and some CEO's 29th vacation home needs its plumbing gilded, the public be damned. Clean water, clean air, wildlife protection, big game hunting, fishing, camping, caving -- all useless to Republicans in their quest to service their big donors. Of course Republicans don't say that, because then they'd lose the argument -- they say that states should buy up private land for such uses, not our federal government. Rep. Bishop (R-UT) even says that when our federal government buys land under the LWCF, it takes revenue from states and localities (well, specifically, from children, nice hostage-taking there!). Like those states and localities aren't falling all over themselves to give up those revenues to induce corporations to do business there!

Around the table: greed is still evil, and John Glenn is still pretty awesome.

The New York Times provides us with one of the worst-ever examples of punditoids scolding Democrats for going too far left. But maybe it's good news, in a way -- apparently, at this moment, the Times can't find anyone willing to perform this scolding but a veteran of three Republican administrations (one who's clearly angling for a fourth, or he would have mentioned that skepticism of tough-on-crime laws comes from both parties these days). Still, hearing Democrats are going "too far left" when they won't fight "free" trade, won't bring back the 91% tax bracket, won't expand Medicare to include everyone, and won't pass even modest labor reforms is profoundly insulting to actual liberals.

PR Watch notes that Gov. Scott Walker (E-WI) has been removed from his position as the chair of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. But I wouldn't get too caught up in the did-he-jump-or-was-he-pushed argument (as both the "liberal" media and Mr. Walker would want, I'm sure), because if you get caught up in that, you might not notice just how corrupt the WEDC got once Mr. Walker privatized it. When a man contributes to the Walker campaign and then his corporation gets buku bucks from the WEDC even though some days his corporation's credit cards worked and some days they didn't, that should be a lot more interesting than whether Mr. Walker resigned from the WEDC or got fired.

U.S. District Court of New York judge throws out lawsuit filed by for-profit colleges against impending Department of Education rules aimed at reining in their abuses. For-profit colleges maintain, somehow, that limiting the size of student loans "hurts students." Why? Because if they told the truth -- that such rules actually limit the amount of vacation homes in which for-profit college CEOs can gild their plumbing -- no one would go along with it. Well, except maybe Marco Rubio, since these are his "constituents."

Report says that private health insurance corporations' overhead costs have "exploded" under the Affordable Care Act. But the report's authors employ scare numbers: the $273 billion figure is over 10 years, and $1,375 per newly-insured person per year works out to less than $115 per month; think very many insurance plans are that cheap? Still, I take their point that Medicare's overhead is less than one-tenth that of private health insurance corporations on the exchange; indeed, it's just one reason I've long supported Medicare-for-All.

Finally, former astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn said this to the Associated Press: "I don’t see that I’m any less religious by the fact that I can appreciate the fact that science just records that we change with evolution and time, and that’s a fact. It doesn’t mean it’s less wondrous and it doesn’t mean that there can’t be some power greater than any of us that has been behind and is behind whatever is going on." No truth to the rumor that he then dropped his mike and walked away.

Around the table: President Obama's new "sanctimonious purists"! And other stories.

The Washington Post describes the change in President Obama's rhetoric on "free" trade. Long story short: he's gone from raising booga-booga about China to insulting the intelligence and honesty of his liberal opponents, though that will surprise no one who remembers him calling critics of his 2010 tax-cut giveaway "sanctimonious purists." And he's still playing a shell game -- the first question in your mind, after hearing of his desire to "make sure this is the strongest agreement possible," should be and in what universe would fast-tracking the agreement accomplish that?

David Sirota informs us that cities and states investing their pension funds in private equity firms may be paying as much as $10 billion annually in "management fees." And though the banksters managing these funds say they're doing just fine, we don't actually know that for sure. Remember this the next time your Tea Party uncle complains about how underfunded pensions are -- after you remind him that the scare numbers he got from right-wing think tanks are numbers compiled over decades and are actually quite small compared to the number of state and local pensions that exist.

The Washington Post's Robert Sameulson, not normally mistaken for a liberal, bashes Congressional Republicans for passing legislation aiming to repeal the Estate Tax. Mr. Samuelson's refutations of pro-Estate Tax arguments may not be as vigorous as I would have made them, but they're successful, and the fact that he's even taking the trouble makes me think we really have moved the discourse in our direction, not that we should get complacent.

Oregon legislators mull limiting antibiotic abuse in farm animals. Memo to the veterinarian who says you have to treat the herd at the first sign of disease: maybe if your employer didn't all but stack animals on top of each other, or make them live in tiny and disgusting pens, disease wouldn't be the problem you describe. And if we keep going on this track, disease is going to be a much worse problem for all of us.

Finally, the formerly charismatic Mike Huckabee -- who may or may not run for President, but it won't matter -- instructs us that "we are moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity." Remember when Fox News punditoids called the Valerie Plame investigation the "criminalization of politics"? You don't? Well, this should be about equally effective. And his claim is only true if Christianity equals discriminating against gays and nothing else. I can tell you from personal experience Christianity is much, much more than that.

Around the table: voter suppression, tax "reform," job creation, deceptive advertising, "rehoming" adoptees, and Clintonian secrecy.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's march from Montgomery to Selma, Greg Palast describes the new frontier in suppressing minority votes. Long story short: "Interstate Crosscheck" purports to list voters who may have voted twice, but actually just lists voters with similar names across state lines -- voters more likely to be minorities (and vote Democrat) than other voters, what a coincidence -- and enables state officials to toss their voter registrations. State officials have been loath to release the lists, saying the names on it are under criminal investigation -- but note well how many of these "investigations" have even come to indictments. (Hint: more than negative-one, but less than one.)

Sens. Rubio (R-FL) and Lee (R-UT) have released a tax "reform" plan that, get your surprised face ready, would do the exact opposite of what it supposedly aims to do. Corporations don't invest in their physical plants or their workers not because they're being taxed at 35% -- the biggest corporations pay about a third of that, thanks to all the loopholes they buy from our representatives in Congress, and if we actually did tax them at 35% and close all the unearned loopholes they enjoy, they would actually spend more on their physical plants and their workers just to avoid paying taxes. Would it be piling on to note that their "simplified" two-bracket income tax system would raise taxes on lower-income workers and cut them for wealthy workers? No, it would not be piling on.

Robert Borosage provides "a sober look" at the jobs numbers from February. February saw nearly 300,000 jobs created and the official unemployment rate go down another tenth of a point, but worker wages are just now starting to go up a tick, and anyway "12 months of job creation over 200,000" and "five years of consecutive job growth" sound a lot less impressive when you recall the job losses in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, and you realized that a lot of these newly-created jobs pay less than the ones we lost.

Allstar Marketing Group, Inc. -- maker of such as-seen-on-TV staples as Snuggies and Magic Mesh door covers -- agrees to pay $8 million over the deceptions it perpetrated on its customers. Which were more convoluted than you might expect -- I'm sure "separate processing and handling fees" is old hat to most of us by now, but not allowing customers to bypass the buy-one-get-one-free process over the phone or the internet or even edit their own orders before placing them might be news to you.

By now you probably know the story of the Arkansas Tea Party state Rep who "rehomed" three children he and his wife had adopted, one of them to a man who subsequently raped her. At least two details are worth repeating: one, that "rehoming" is somehow legal in a lot of places, and two, that the Harris family feels very, very sorry -- for themselves. If, indeed, reactive attachment disorder took place, then you still must wonder why they were so unprepared for it that they handed off one of their adoptive children to a pederast.

Finally, Hillary Clinton has really stepped in it by conducting our government's business on her own email server while Secretary of State. If your best defense is that you want State to release all the emails you haven't lost or erased, and also other people do it, too, well, that's not a good sign. Her defense even has a scare number in it -- "55,000 pages of emails" may sound all big and bad, but if that comprised all the emails, she would have said so. Still, nobody who defended Tha Bush Mobb when they "lost" all those emails pertaining to their U.S. Attorney shenanigans has any reasonable claim to outrage now.

Around the table: "right to work," "free" trade -- does anything happen in America without ironic quotation marks anymore?

Wisconsin is about ready to enact a "right to work" bill, despite Gov. Walker's stated reticence to do so -- but now Gov. Walker says his pledge not to push for right-to-work only applied to his first term. He's normally a much better liar than that -- Jesus Mary and Joseph he's on record as touting his "partnership" with private-sector unions -- but since there's no penis or Botox in this story, the "liberal" media won't make much of it, so you have to hope his Republican primary opponents hammer the "you can't trust him" line to death out of mere self-interest, and then his eventual Democratic opponent does the same.

New York state Labor Department orders minimum wage hike for tipped workers to $7.50. And if the state legislature adopts Gov. Cuomo's proposal to allow New York City to hike its own minimum wage by another dollar per hour, tipped workers would see that hike, too. Of course, New York City Mayor DeBlasio is shooting for $15/hour, but he may not get that out of the legislature. Meanwhile, the restaurant trade groups advance not only the ZOMG TEH WAGEZ KILLS TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!!! line, but the "extreme, unprecedented 50 percent increase" scare number, though surely not all restaurants pay their employees that little.

Ho hum, the Obama Administration is selling the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal "with literally the same promises" as President Clinton used to sell SHAFTYA, er, NAFTA. More jobs, more markets for our exports, blah blah blah. What actually happened? A "$181 billion U.S. trade deficit with NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada and the related loss of 1 million net U.S. jobs under NAFTA, growing income inequality, displacement of more than one million Mexican campesino farmers and a doubling of desperate immigration from Mexico, and more than $360 million paid to corporations after 'investor-state' tribunal attacks on, and rollbacks of, domestic public interest policies." Conservatives should note that last one -- it means "free" trade agreements can nullify American laws.

Michelle M. Francl at Slate describes some of the more ridiculous claims of the Food Babe (real name: Vani Hari). I hadn't spent any time on her before, believe it or not, and though she seems to have done some good, you don't have to be Bruce Willis's character in Fast Food Nation to be annoyed with her obsession with the nether-regions of animals winding up in your food (which happens with much less regularity than she says). She may just not know that coal tar hasn't come from coal for some time, but she should, and anyway maybe she does and is just like all the others.

Finally, some good news: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel not only didn't escape a runoff in Tuesday's primary election, but did considerably worse than polls supposed, while the second-place finisher, Cook County Board of Commissioners member Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, did considerably better than those polls supposed. Maybe Chicagoans are profoundly tired of Mr. Emanuel's relentless shoveling of city resources into his cronies' pockets, some of which, apparently, doesn't even happen under the guise of "privatizing city services," though that's how a more cautious crook would do it. I wonder if his BFF, President Obama, comes out to help him in the April runoff. My hope: Mr. Obama would regard that, at least officially, as unbecoming of the office.

Around the table: in which we finally learn why we need fast-track! (Spoiler alert: we don't need fast-track.)

U.S. Trade Rep. Michael Froman finally addresses the question of why Trans-Pacific "Partnership" negotiations have to be carried out in secret: "We can always do better on transparency... (but) there is no area of policy where there is closer collaboration between the executive and Congress than trade policy." That's just as good an argument for more transparency as for more security, but worse than that, "collaboration between the executive and Congress" is not transparency. Telling the American people, the owners of government, what's in the deal would be transparency. Strange how our government always wants to leave us out. You have to wonder if that's the idea.

A Haaretz editorial suggests that the machinations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are actually anti-Zionist. How? By eroding Israel's alliance with the United States, by fighting battles of choice rather than necessity, and "crumbling the country's social cohesion," which I put in quotation marks because I'm still not sure exactly what it's supposed to mean. But I do suspect Mr. Netanyahu's obvious disrespect for President Obama, who's been exactly as pro-Israeli as the last five Presidents, does injury to country's well-being, this though a similar level of disrespect hasn't injured the Republicans' well-being.

Good news from South America: the Chilean Supreme Court has prevented the Chilean government from transferring citizen data from judiciary databases into one giant "Unified Data Bank," on the grounds that doing so violates data protection law, particularly the law that forbids the Chilean government from using citizen ID numbers as a "data point." Sadly, legislation could swiftly "fix" that, but if you believe that your government should have to jump through extra hoops to investigate you, or that big databases are like gingerbread houses to hackers and unscrupulous government officials, we should still celebrate the wisdom of the Chilean Supreme Court in this matter.

"Fast Food Companies are Invoking 'Main Street' to Fight Unions," announces the Washington Post. Well, you wouldn't expect evil to act otherwise, but the crux of this Main Street invocation? Suggesting their franchisees are small businesses because, well, they're franchises -- hence anyone trying to change working conditions at these franchises is HURTING TEH SMALL BIZNIZZEZ!!!!!! It's classic hostage-taking! Trouble with that line of reasoning, if we can call it that, is that nobody believes it -- nobody thinks of McDonald's as a chain of small businesses, especially once they're acquainted with all the decisions McDonald's makes for their franchises.

Health care premium growth has slowed under President Obama, but how do Republicans phrase this phenomenon? ZOMG TEH PREEMIUMZ GOEZ UP OVER $5,000 UNDER TEH SOSHULIST PREZNIT!!!!! That's $5,000 over six years, of course, and though the Affordable Care Act has had some success slowing the growth of health care premiums (and may yet have more), the lack of inflation generally also has a lot to do with that. Still, Republicans do love their scare numbers. And the punchline? Health care premiums grew a lot faster under their Former Personal Lord and Savior, George W. Bush.

Finally, the Fox News (sic) Channel embeds on its website a 22-minute video showing ISIS terrorists burning a Jordanian pilot alive. Some observers think FNC will boost ISIS recruiting, but I think that's overblown -- people who become terrorists are just looking to be set off by something. I think Fox really takes aim at their own viewers, who have to be fed these dramas so they don't direct their rage at more clear and present dangers, like banksters and corrupt politicians. And yet I still think if you want to see a video like this, you ought to have to work for it, and going to some news channel's website isn't "work."

Around the table: tales of right-wing scare numbers, plus game-changing observations about debt and drugs.

The Center for Effective Government notes how the Jan. 17 50,000-gallon oil leak near Glendive, Montana contaminated the town's drinking water, and reminds us that a Keystone XL pipeline would bring a lot more of the same. I pity the fool who says why do you talk about individual pipeline spills, when the vast majority of pipelines don't break? Because pipeline spills cause a lot more damage than their relative infrequency would suggest, that's why. It would be like someone causing a car accident that killed people and then huffily pointing all those other days this year he didn't cause an accident.

The Washington Post finally evaluates Rand Paul's claim that half of those on Social Security disability programs aren't really earning their benefits, and gives his claim "Three Pinocchios," which I find rather generous, given their analysis, which is well worth reading in full. But note that Mr. Paul's spokeshack tries to defend his boss by claiming he was answering a "spontaneous" question in public and speaking "without prepared remarks," as if it's too much for citizens to expect Senators to answer questions upon which they haven't been specifically briefed that day, or to speak extemporaneously without distorting issues.

As a public service, Yes! magazine distills five tips for getting and staying out of debt from the Occupy movement's Debt Resisters' Operations Manual. They are: avoid payday lending and other "fringe" loan services, make an offer to pay part of your debt (since selling your debt to a debt collector actually makes creditors very little money), know and defend your rights, think of other ways to get what you need without a credit check (like references and portfolios), and try alternatives, like bartering networks and local time banks. It's good to have options, especially in These Interesting Times.

CBO estimates that the Affordable Care Act will cost 20% less than previously forecasted over the next decade. Some of that's due to low inflation and some of that's due to states refusing Medicaid expansions, but the right wing is already squealing ZOMG TEH OBUMMERCARE SPENDZ $56,000 PER PERSON!!!! (They're dividing the $1.35 trillion price tag by 24 million expected insured.) This is, of course, a scare number -- they never tell you that's $56,000 per person over ten years, which means $5,600 per person annually, which is very likely a little over half what your employer pays to insure you.

Finally, Johann Hari argues that the main cause of drug addiction isn't necessarily the drugs themselves, but a life unconnected to people and things you love. Inspiration: a scientist follows up on a famous rat experiment -- the one where a rat in a cage drinks from a heroin-laced water bottle all day rather than a just-water bottle -- by putting a rat in a cage with all sorts of toys and food and tunnels and other rats in it, and finding that the rat never drank from the heroin-laced water bottle though it was always available. Could this be the paradigm shift we need in ending the War on Drugs? Perhaps, but we'll also need serious change in economic policy, too, so people have more opportunities to have the good life that'd keep them off drugs. At the very least that means talking taxing the rich, hard, so we can pay to provide those opportunities, and also because they're the ones standing in progress's way most of the time.

Around the table: gay marriage, corporate taxes, restaurant worker wages, home health care worker wages, and another punditoid giving "values voters" a bad name.

U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear challenges to pro-gay marriage rulings made in 14 states -- effectively legalizing gay marriage in those states. Now, this Court could just be waiting for the right case to come along and undo all the good work they've done lately on marriage equality, but for now, we've got justice, and we ought to cherish it as we preserve it.

Elaine Kamarck tries to tell us that the solution to problems like corporations reinventing themselves as "foreign" is to reduce the corporate tax rate. "Our highest-in-the-world corporate rate means that American companies, on average, pay 40 cents on each extra dollar earned," but that's utter bullshit -- the multitudinous loopholes corporations enjoy mean that American corporations, on average, pay about 12 cents, not 40 cents, on each extra dollar earned. The rate "means" nothing if hardly anyone pays it. People should spend less time "wondering" why corporations invert and more time stopping them from inverting.

Two Philadelphia restauranteurs decide to discourage tipping in their new venture and pay their waitstaff an hourly wage well above the industry median. They say they'll do more, too, like cover their waitstaff's healthcare benefits in their entirety and offer both paid vacation leave and paid sick leave. I wish them good luck -- certainly they'll be further along if the city of Philadelphia ever follows in Seattle's footsteps and enacts a $15/hour minimum wage.

Almost two dozen Congressional Republicans ask the Department of Labor to suspend the rule extending minimum wage and overtime protections to home health care workers, citing the cost to Medicaid. Yes, they're creating another hostage crisis (don't pay hard-working home health care workers fairly, or I'll blow Medicaid's brains out!), but the "76 million baby boomers" "reaching retirement" is a scare number -- 76 million babies were born between 1946 and 1964, so no, a full quarter of Americans are not retiring all at once. Our Glorious Elites are full of bad excuses for not doing the right thing, aren't they?

Finally, Erick Erickson tells a no-doubt-breathless audience at the Values Voter Summit that people who embrace evolution are just jealous of people like him who are going to Heaven. But I've never found science and faith incompatible, and Mr. Erickson's butchering of evolutionary science (oh, that was supposed to be a joke? Boys hide behind jokes, not men) doesn't convince me otherwise. And "(t)here is a last day, pick a side and the right side wins" tells me his own faith is pretty shallow -- to think of God arranging the world as you and I would arrange a football game! Loving thy neighbor demands more of your faith than that.

Around the table: ladies and gentlemen, the smartest man in the Republican Party! And other follies.

In the middle of explaining how he'd replace the Affordable Care Act with a "free-market system" with vouchers and risk pools, Rep. Paul Ryan unfurls this gem: "Whether they choose to do that or not (that is, whether good citizens actually buy health insurance with the voucher he'd give them or not) is not really something you can necessarily actually capture in scoring." In other words, he can't prove his plan works -- which is understandable, because you can't score bullshit. He also doesn't explain why the Affordable Care Act is "so fundamentally flawed in its architecture," though I guess he figures if he uses the word "architecture" you'll just take his word for it. He really is, as someone once said, the dumb person's vision of a smart person.

Joe Conason says Americans appear to have amnesia about national security issues, as they seem to prefer Republicans to handle foreign affairs right now. Of course we'd be fools to discount the possibility that Mr. Bush knew his little Iraq adventure would blow up in someone else's face and that Republicans might benefit from that, but it'd also help to explain why this appears to be "amnesia" -- it'd help to explain, for example, that our "liberal" media has virtually no attention span, and carried water for the Bush war in Iraq while helping to demonize those of us who opposed the war from the beginning.

Remember that bankster CEO who complained that most folks who hate banks just don't have enough "skin in the game"? Robert Reich reminds us that ordinary folks already have too much "skin in the game," in that we suffer from Wall Street disasters while banksters don't. Fun fact: even gamblers can get their gambling debts forgiven more easily than regular folks can get their student loans forgiven. And if a Senator were to introduce a bill correcting that obviously absurd state of affairs, the banksters would strangle it in its crib.

Another year, another putatively pro-business association claiming that federal regulations are much more expensive to businesses than they really are. Long story short: like previous reports, they brandish scare numbers (ZOMG $1.7 TRILLYUNZ!!!!!) without telling you that their big, bad numbers accumulate over decades, that they count penalties for breaking the rules that most businesses don't break as "costs," and that they don't count the health benefits resulting from following the rules against the "cost." After all, hours (and therefore work) not lost due to illnesses from dirty and air and water don't help the CEO buy his 19th vacation home.

It's not just local police departments that get killing gadgets from our military -- school districts get them, too. School districts! That's not a comment on Kids Today, since every generation has complained about Kids Today. That's a comment on how little faith our educational system has in its ability to manage our children, who surely cannot be that threatening to adults. The good news? Most school districts are sending them back. And that's a comment on the awesome power of bad PR.

Finally, after much public pressure, Google executive Eric Schmidt has said Google will end its association with ALEC, the state legislative affairs group responsible for so much right-wing legislation at the state level over the years. I'm such a stubborn bastard that I still wish ALEC's regressive views on economics, rather than their regressive views on climate change, prompted Google's executives to quit -- but I'm not so stubborn that I won't take it. Next up on Fox News: Google joins the lynch mob against ALEC!

Around the table: good news about community broadband, plus some pretty dumb Republicans.

The city of Rockport, Maine, population 3,321, has built a community broadband network that's 20 times faster than any offered by a big corporation. They built it with about $60,000, half of that coming from "unused town tax funds," which, yes, still exist in These Interesting Times -- largely in places that haven't handed out very much corporate welfare, I bet. Teabaggers may want to note that Rockport contracts with private corporations to provide the broadband service to -- nah, never mind. Haters gonna hate.

ProPublica notes that the Obama Adminstration's SEC Chair, Mary Jo White, hasn't done very much good. Some of that has to do with a hostile House in a defunding mood, and some of that has to do with the workload mandated by Dodd-Frank, but still, to have alienated the SEC's most liberal Commissioner to the point where she votes with Republicans against your rules takes a special talent. This is the agency, after all, which will either prevent the next economic armageddon or won't.

Colorado Republican U.S. Senate candidate claims that "Obamacare" pushed him off his health insurance -- but that's not very likely, since Mr. Gardner actually declined the health care coverage offered to Congressfolk before the Affordable Care Act's exchanges even came online, and then bought rather expensive coverage in its place. And the "335,000 Coloradans had their plans cancelled" bit is just a scare number -- since at least 300,000 of them were actually able to keep their plans.

I gotta hand it to David Sirota; he really breaks it down, here asking, in re campaign finance, "Is Corruption a Constitutional Right?" His article mostly concerns Wall Street managers of state pension funds making campaign contributions (which actually violates federal law), but we could well call any opponent of campaign finance reform "objectively pro-corruption." Also, money isn't speech.

Alaska Senate candidate Joe "I've got my own police force!" Miller, currently running third of three in most Republican primary polls right now, apparently hopes to rectify that with this incredibly racist mailer, which includes plenty of images of tattooed brown-skinned men, so he can come off as the "100% pro-gun, 100% against amnesty" candidate. I shudder to think how "100% pro-gun" relates to immigration law, but if I were Democratic Sen. Begich, I'd be making sure this mailer gets into the hands of every Republican voter in Alaska, because that'd be my best shot of facing Joe Miller in the general election.

Finally, the Republican National Committee denounced the College Board's new AP History exam framework, because it's not positive enough. I sure wouldn't want any of these idiots in my foxhole -- what whiners and weaklings they must be, apparently unable to accept that Americans have ever done anything bad, or that a reasonable person could find patriotism in speaking out and fighting for change.

Around the table: the turmoil in Iraq is not spiking gas prices! And other truths.

Been hearing that the turmoil in Iraq will send your gas prices sky-high? It's bullshit -- first off, "five cents a gallon more" is not something most folks are going to notice, and second off, Iraqi oil provides four percent of our oil. Those "liberals" at CBS Evening News take the cake for a) putting together a graph that would make Fox News ashamed of itself and b) deploying a scare number. ZOMG IRAK COSTZ TEH PEEPULZ $163 MILLYUNS EVERY WEEK!!!! My God, that's a little more than 50 cents per person. No chewing gum or classic pinball games for you this week, Joe American! Seriously, it's a shame the "liberal" media never points to oil speculation as the cause of high gas prices, though they'd be on safer ground there.

The Tax Justice Blog describes the sordid recent tax-avoidance history of the medical device corporation Medtronic. Medtronic's famous for trying to repeal the ACA's medical device tax, about which they should stop whining already, but although the Hastert/Frist Congress made it considerably harder for corporations to reincorporate as "foreign" corporations (and thus pay no American income tax), they still left open a loophole for corporations that buy foreign corporation and then reincorporate in that other corporation's home nation. Hence Medtronic plans to buy Covidien and become "Irish," though Covidien is itself an "Irish" corporation actually doing all its work in Massachusetts! Sláinte!

The city of Miami sues J.P. Morgan Chase for engaging in "a continuous pattern and practice of mortgage discrimination in Miami since at least 2004 by imposing different terms or conditions on a discriminatory and legally prohibited basis." The specific complaint: that J.P. Morgan Chase made high-cost loans to minorities, then wouldn't refinance them like they would for white folk. Knowing what a great example of humanity J.P. Morgan was in the Gilded Age, nobody could have imagined his namesake corporation would turn out so badly!

The Bureau of Labor Statistics informs us that the greatest job growth in America has occurred in -- are you ready? -- areas of the country where taxes are high or have increased. That's not a reason to hike all kinds of taxes everywhere -- that 30% national sales tax the FAIR tax people keep calling a 23% tax? Still a bad idea -- but it is something to fling in the face of your Tea Party uncle when he goes on about how TAXEZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!!!!

Ho hum, well over half of Americans polled by Consumer Reports think the Comcast-Time Warner merger is a bad idea. It gets worse for corporatists: a mere 11% think it's a good idea, and many of the folks who don't come down on one side or the other still think the merger will jack up prices and reduce programming choices. You know what we need right now? A Comcast lobbyist who'll come out and say the majority of his potential customers are stupid.

Finally, Robert Reich opines that "real business leaders" are as concerned about the gap between rich and poor as the rest of us are. Even without a list including Lloyd Goddamn Blankfein, I'd tend to agree -- since I generally don't think the folks the "liberal" media call "business leaders" are real business leaders. (Since I still have a few lines, let me say I don't think we should sling around the phrase "income inequality" -- it implies we should all make the same amount of money, which we shouldn't. I prefer "economic opportunity.")

Around the table: crushed by the wheels of industry!

London School of Economics anthropologist David Graeber tells us how modern-day workers got to be overworked and overproductive. He also explains how "the more obviously your work benefits others, the less you’re paid for it," and how the right turns workers against other workers. Finally, he describes the conflict in left-wing movements over the value of work -- and then slices through it: "I’m thinking of a labor movement...that manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people." There's a lot to think about there.

As the reactionary North Carolina legislature gets together to pass a budget before adjourning for the year, Moral Monday protestors plan a massive sit-in. Fun fact: South Carolina's reactionaries have bellowed that implementing the Moral Monday movement's "Five Point Moral Framework" would cost as much as $10 billion (over 10 years, which scare number purveyors never say), but the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center put the price tag at $1 billion, with the revenue easily raised by (surprise!) reversing the legislature's tax cuts for the rich and for corporations.

ProPublica informs us that public schools use physical restraints on children over 250,000 times annually, and three-quarters of the time, public schools use them on disabled kids. What a shame that "tough love" weariness hasn't yet migrated to the public schools. Personal to those who ask how do you handle little monsters? Well, first off, autistic kids are not monsters. Second, look to the man in the mirror when asking that question, and you'll usually find who's to blame when children act cray-cray.

Counselors (if you can call them that) at famous fundamentalist college Bob Jones University have been telling rape victims to "repent for their sins" first, with at least one just coming out and saying "we have to find the sin in your life that caused your rape." And not the sin in her rapist's life? No, rape victims should not look to blame themselves first, because nobody should be raped, and forcing sex on someone is always wrong. The end.

Finally, Norm Ornstein says a new Pew study should settle the debate over who's to blame for our polarized politics. Spoiler alert: Pew says right-wingers are mostly to blame for the polarization. Note well, also, the graph near the top of the page, which suggests that House Democrats have moved leftward over the last 70 years (though not as far rightward as House Republicans have moved). We must remember that, for a long time, conservative Southern Democrats made up a big chunk of the party, thus dragging House Democrats significantly rightward at least until the '70s, when Southern Democrats started to become Republicans.

Penny rants for Sunday, June 22, 2014: three potential Presidential candidates and a stupid pro-coal ad.

At last! Prosecutors place Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) at the center of a scheme to violate state campaign finance laws. Previous "John Doe" probes have snared at least half a dozen Walker associates, but this is the first time prosecutors have put Mr. Walker himself in the driver's seat, of an "expansive" criminal enterprise, no less. The juicy part, I suppose, is the email Mr. Walker wrote to none other than Karl Rove in 2011, boasting that "(w)e are running 9 recall elections" and suggesting that his aide R.J. Johnson would coordinate all of them. But if that all sounds a little like inside baseball to you, it probably will also sound that way to the Wisconsin voter as well -- unless Mr. Walker's opponent, Mary Burke, sounds the outside interests vs. Wisconsin interests alarm, which she doesn't sound eager to do. More likely, Mr. Walker will whine that he's the target of a "partisan witch hunt," and in the absence of an inspiring Democratic opponent (or a conviction, since these things take time), the voters will give him a pass. If Mr. Walker does wind up going to jail after getting re-elected, which isn't farfetched, that could dampen his 2016 Presidential ambitions somewhat. And I do mean "somewhat" -- quantum physicists tell us that all things imaginable will one day come to pass, after all, and the Republicans haven't yet trotted out an actual convicted criminal as their Great Conservative Hope.

Meanwhile, I'd thought former Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer (D) would topple the Hillary Clinton Inevitability Machine Mach 2016, but after some of his comments to reporters in this National Journal profile, I'm not so sure anymore. In my experience, most of Mr. Schweitzer's zingers zing someone who deserves it, but suggesting that Eric Cantor set off his "gaydar" and obliquely comparing Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) to a hooker were punches that had no chance of landing, and anytime you allow someone like Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) to call you a "sexist scumbag" you've really screwed up. It gets worse: he walked the "gaydar" comment back so quickly and clumsily he could have been in a Kids in the Hall skit. And doesn't he know whores are working girls? I call bad people "pimps" for a reason -- because pimps don't "work," and because the "work" you do as a Senator greasing the skids for big government spying isn't "work" any more than selling your bad bets as good bets to other investors is "work." I don't mind trying to convince Republican voters to vote for better politicians, but you do that by being a populist about economic issues, not by actually being a jerk. That Mr. Schweitzer chose the latter road tells me he's forsaken the former. (At the risk of piling on, his pro forma apology doesn't exactly recall the man who once said he needed to bathe in tomato juice after trips to Washington.)

In other news, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler gives four Pinochios to a National Mining Association radio ad claiming that the EPA's proposed carbon emissions standards for existing power plants will "nearly double" electricity prices. I'm annoyed whenever people claim we shouldn't do the right thing because it will cost too much, not just because the time to do the right thing is always now, but because when folks like that say something will "cost too much," they generally mean it will cost their corporate paymasters too much, and why should they get all the say about everything? Mr. Kessler breaks it down pretty well, though -- the radio ad gets the 80 percent figure by assuming coal plants would have to recapture 100 percent of its carbon emissions, when the EPA's proposal calls for less than half of that, and the ad also acts like most energy corporations only rely on coal to produce electricity (or won't diversify further), which also isn't true. The best part, though, is when the NMA spokeshack, defending the radio ad, claims (breathlessly, I'll bet) that California energy prices could go up 47 percent over the next 16 years! That, folks, is just another scare number -- California energy prices might well go up about three percentage points every year just because of inflation, or because, oh, I don't know, some energy corporation decides to turn power plants on and off for financial gain.

Finally, the latest assertion that Ronald Reagan wouldn't recognize today's Republican Party comes from an unlikely source: Rick Santorum. Liberals have been saying that Mr. Reagan must be turning in his grave for as long as he's been in it, and I'm old enough to remember when Mr. Santorum was one of the reasons for that, so he's a bit late to this party. And if he was smart enough to note that Mr. Reagan preceded "government isn't the solution, government is the problem" with the phrase "in this current crisis," I have to wonder why he wasn't smart enough to foreground a populist economic message in 2012, when he actually had a decent shot at getting elected President. Instead, we got the guy who said "I'm for income inequality," and who only complained that the middle class "built it too" -- a meme so devastating you have to wonder why the putatively smart Obama team never deployed it -- well after Mr. Romney lost. But fast forward to 2016, and his anti-gay, anti-woman messaging will be a bigger weight around his neck than ever, and his "openness" to raising the minimum wage, for example, won't sway liberals who are too used to finding they're Charlie Brown and the Republicans are Lucy. Rick Santorum ain't no Richard Nixon -- it'd take an Obama screw-up of Biblical proportions to make him President in 2016.

Around the table: hope for Parkinson's sufferers, but otherwise mostly bad people acting badly.

FAIR notes that the "liberal" media seems to be giving President Obama a lot of credit for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan -- without noting that he's sent a lot more troops to Afghanistan than Mr. Bush ever did. In fact, we have as many troops there now (roughly 32,000) as we did when Mr. Bush left office -- and we had a staggering 100,000 troops there in between mid-2010 and mid-2011. The fact that Mr. Bush tried to win that war on the cheap even more than he tried to win the Iraq war on the cheap doesn't mean the "liberal" media should forget how to do math.

Dean Baker reminds us that when right-wingers trot out the ZOMG $1 TRILLYUN FUNDING GAP IN TEH PENSIONZ!!!!!, it's just a scare number. How is it a scare number? Well, the part right-wingers never tell you is that pensions have this funding gap over thirty years, which makes the number much smaller, doesn't it? They also don't tell you that we have over 200 state pension plans and well over 3,000 local ones. How big and scary is that number again? Mr. Baker goes on to ask why the pension alarmists never ask about the fees pensions pay to the folks who manage them, since, you know, some of those folks might be ripping pensions off.

Also from the "necessary reminder" file: Wil Wheaton's Daily Kos blog tells the story of a cancer patient who needed emergency chemo and had that procedure deemed "not medically necessary" by a bureaucrat at Anthem Blue Cross. And Anthem Blue Cross put a gynecologist in charge of the review, too, as opposed to, oh, I don't know, an oncologist, maybe? Since the "liberal" media has a strange aversion to health care horror stories like these, please remind your right-wing friends that the "death panels" you have to worry about these days serve in private health care corporations.

Iowa U.S. Senate candidate Joni Ernst (R) says the states should determine whether gay marriage is legal, but also that she'd support a federal ban on gay marriage. How do you get to be for states' rights and for federal pre-emption at the same time? As long as the end result is that someone gets hurt, I guess Ms. Ernst just shrugs and says "who cares?" But this error could haunt her in a general election -- not with the far right, who no longer accept even the logical certainty of a tautology, but certainly with the more independently-minded Iowan.

Microsoft billionaire Steve Ballmer bids an eye-popping $2 billion for the Los Angeles Clippers, which owner Donald Sterling must sell now that the NBA has banned him for life after his recent spate of racist comments taped by his girlfriend/"archivist." That's nearly four times larger than the previous record NBA team sale, set just a few weeks ago when the Milwaukee Bucks sold for $550 million -- and it's enough to make you wonder if Mr. Sterling, who paid $12.5 million for the team back in 1982, planned the whole damn thing.

Finally, engineer Anupam Pathak designs a spoon that counteracts the tremors associated with Parkinson's Disease -- such that folks with Parkinson's can actually eat and the aides who now have to help them eat might be free to get other things done, though I bet a lot of bosses will look at the spoon as something that will give them an excuse to fire people. It costs $300, but I bet a lot of folks with Parkinson's buy it anyway, and anyway the price will come down in time. Good show, Mr. Pathak.