Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

Around the table: love lives forever, hate consumes the hater.

Why won't MAGA ever let America "bring down the temperature," according to Amanda Marcotte? Because "Trump needs 'enemies' that he is forever threatening to conquer. But he can't actually conquer them, because if he ever achieved the alleged paradise of conformity he promises, his followers wouldn't need him anymore. So there will always be a new made-up baddie that is supposedly threatening the good white straight Christians." Why hasn't half of America figured out they're being played after all these years? Because they don't want to. So let's stop trying to "reach out" to them, to "understand" them. We already understand them. They whine because it makes them feel good.

Ruben Gallego wins the Arizona Senate race, and naturally right-wingers smell election fraud. I was going to respond, "an alternate explanation would be that Kari Lake is a fool," and she is, but (as I think we all understand a little better now) Ms. Lake also lost because she's a woman.

Shasta County, CA pays $300,000 to 11-year-old girl after shooting her pet goat. The girl thought she was taking her goat to an exhibit, but instead it was an auction! And a state Senator "won" the goat! And even after said state Senator said he wouldn't try to take possession of the goat if the girl really didn't want to give it up, the county sent two cops to seize and kill the goat! Remember that the cops who did this are exactly the kind of person our President-elect wants to empower even more – the kind of person who cares about nothing but their own feelings.

Ho hum, big home oxygen corporation Lincare has been defrauding Medicare (and therefore you and I!) for over 20 years, but Medicare can't seem to put it to a well-deserved death. Read the whole thing, and then remember that Lincare is exactly the kind of corporation our President-elect wants to empower even more – his "Department of Government Efficiency" would kill thousands of federal jobs but enable more corporate criminals to steal your money.

Finally, Fox News's Jesse Watters alleges that his own mother has not invited him to Thanksgiving dinner. Thus has Jesse Watters added his name to the list of people who'll die alone and unloved.

A few thoughts about the election.

First, we have some good news.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning health care and right-wing drama.

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

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

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

Around the table: half of what you see, none of what you hear, part 982.

When we contemplate the fact that in many Republican-dominated states, folks can spy on/rat out their friends and neighbors on abortion-, gender-, and race-related matters without ever being held accountable for their intrusions, we would be right to wonder how right-wingers imagine that these acts adhere to conservative principles. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when conservatives could be proud live-and-let-live types. Of course, right-wingers would also need to explain why abusive assholes deserve so much power to make other people's lives miserable. And none of them should ever get to whine about "cancel culture" again, since they support a Cancel State.

Matt Stoller sees Michael Jordan's antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR as evidence that "(w)hatever happens in the next election, the antitrust revolution is unstoppable." I hope he's right, but he highlights the Jordan lawsuit because it's a private lawsuit – one neither Lina Khan nor Jonathan Kanter has anything to do with – and Mr. Jordan has filed it after decades of folks rarely filing such suits because of bad court decisions that make them hard to win. Now, with even Google losing an antitrust lawsuit, the climate may be significantly better. Anyway, Mr. Jordan's lawsuit alleges a lot of bad behavior from NASCAR that can't be explained away by blithely presuming that sports leagues "should" have monopolies.

Ho hum, "liberal" media articles about the recent port strike quoted more investment banks, big ag lobbyists, and wine importers than union leaders. I would be ashamed of having such priorities! But I suspect our "liberal" media are, er, not ashamed, as they are so thoroughly captured by the corporate world; only people who make lots of money matter, their editorial decisions say to us. Maybe that's why the port workers accepted a short-term settlement that didn't address automation; in a less toxic business-reporting environment, they might have held out for everything they wanted, and if they had, they'd have won a big victory for all workers. (Also too: are union leaders ever as "rich, corrupt, and incompetent" as a bankster? Reader, the answer is no.)

In the middle of this article about how two right-wing billionaire pastors are turning Texas into a haven for Christian nationalism you will find this nugget about one of them describing how he "discover(ed)" his "charitable side": "part of our reward will be being invited into people’s homes (i.e., in heaven) to reciprocate for things we did for them in this life, and we’re supposed to make that part of our investment calculation." In other words, you give to others so that they give back to you! His weird phrasing (charity as an "investment calculation"? Seriously?) is a dead giveaway, but what happened to doing good works because good works help people?

Ho hum, the LAPD raids a medical lab after "deducing" that its "higher-than-usual energy use" must have meant it was hiding "unlicensed" marijuana – and a cop loses his rifle to a highly-magnetized MRI machine. No use saying "not all cops" or whatever, because the character flaws that led to this debacle – mistaking a stupid idea for a clever one, needing to prove a point or justify a budget, making up excuses to soothe one's conscience – plague all of us. Granted, not all of us would have gotten our rifle stuck in an MRI machine (after he emptied it! At what we may never know!), but we all still need to be better than our flaws – particularly if we're armed officers of law enforcement.

When I hear that Melania Trump has apparently offered a fairly emphatic defense of abortion rights, writing that "(i)t is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government," I still think that's all just right-wingers foisting more drama upon us. Republicans are objectively suffering at the ballot box because of their decades-long opposition to abortion – opposition that's had real-world consequences, including death, since our Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade – so they have to win contestable elections by conning people into thinking they're somehow nuanced on the topic. See, Mrs. Trump is pro-choice! Republicans aren't as bad as you think! I want to believe her advocacy is sincere, and I know it won't be useless even if it's not, but we all know how right-wingers operate by now.

You've been hearing that the President has been "using FEMA money" on "illegal immigrants"? Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post reminds us that the President who actually did that was Donald Trump! But wait, there's more! Mr. Trump did that in defiance of Congress's will as expressed in spending legislation, whereas the Biden Administration spent FEMA money (including money for FEMA's Shelter and Services program, which occupies a sliver of FEMA's budget) as directed by legislation — legislation the Republican House blessed. None of this will ever convince a Trump votary, of course, because rage is a hell of a drug.

Finally, another day, another scientific study demonstrating that social media content moderation actually has a “bias" against stupid and obnoxious content and not a “bias" against conservative content. Of course, if right-wingers don't seem to know the difference, perhaps that's because they purvey most of the stupid and obnoxious content! You know, I remember being younger and complaining about censorship all the time, but then I became a man and put away childish things, while too many of today's right-wingers prefer to whine about rejections they deserve. People who spew noxious crap and act like an asshole deserve rejection! It ain't that deep!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Social Security, inflation, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make rich folks pay their fair share into Social Security, pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act, and repeal the Comstock Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to make millionaires and billionaires pay more of their fair share of Social Security taxes, so we can expand the trust fund’s life and even expand benefits. Our “liberal” media will be all Henny-Penny over the latest Social Security trustees report, but I’m old enough to remember when Social Security was supposed to run out of money in 2016. Long story short, it hasn’t. But folks don’t pay into the system on income over $168,600, and if we want Social Security to be even better, we have to start making them do that. Really, it won’t hurt them.

Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act, and thus allow our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to go after corporations that shrink package sizes or quantities as a “deceptive trade practice.” Paper towels now cost almost 35% more than they did five years ago – but almost a third of that price hike comes from corporations making the rolls and packages smaller! Pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act and we can get our FTC to stop it – which won’t have much effect in the short run, but will in the long run, once corporations realize it’ll cost them to play packaging tricks on us.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, a law over 150 years old that would prevent our Postal Service from delivering any abortion-related material (including mifepristone, misopropol, and birth control pills) through the mail – but a law also made a dead letter by our Second Circuit Court of Appeals almost 80 years ago, when they ruled the Comstock Act couldn’t be enforced against any material a doctor specifically ordered. Think our Supreme Court will respect that? I kid, of course – now they’ll get all literal about the law, and to hell with a woman’s rights, or even a doctor’s rights! Hence we must communicate our will to our Congressfolk until they bend to it.

Action: concerning our Postal Service, student debt, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our government to get rid of Postmaster General DeJoy, offer student debt relief to millions of borrowers, and stop the proposed Capital One/Discover merger. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell President Biden to appoint two more members to our USPS Board of Governors who will finally fire Postmaster General DeJoy. We’ve gone over the reasons – he’s raised prices, slashed jobs, and cut services including the delivery of life-saving medicines to good Americans. But he’s also cut salaries for rural postal carriers (Republicans must think they’ll never lose rural voters!), and he’s done nothing about mail delays all across America (after all, if he did, how could he privatize our Postal Service?). We’ve actually been seeing a lot of good government lately, but we really need to see it here, too.

RISE helps you tell our Department of Education to offer student debt relief to millions of good Americans. To those who still all college kids are all baristas with gender studies degrees, I can only say a) you can learn a lot by actually listening to women and b) we offered them a rose garden if they went to college but gave them jobs shoveling shit. And I won’t even discuss those who oppose it simply because their pain is more important than everyone else’s. Our DOE has proposed forgiving $20,000 of student debt, plus all interest for some working families and some relief for folks with decades-old debt. Whom does a hand up offend?

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our Department of Justice Antitrust Division to stop the proposed Capital One/Discover merger. Not just because I like my outstanding Discover customer service, thank you very much! (And it will go away if Capital One buys it! Anything people do to make a corporation better always does!) Frankly, no bank should be as big as Capital One is, let alone as big as it’ll become if we let it assimilate Discover. And not for nothing, but Capital One banksters already charge usurious interest rates; think that’ll get better if we let them get bigger? So let’s help put a stop to that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Boeing, Israel, and AI deepfakes.

Long story short: tell our government to nationalize Boeing and stop selling weapons to Israel, and tell big tech corporations to stop people from using AI to hurt other people. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell the Biden Administration to nationalize Boeing. That’s right, our government should just take ownership of Boeing, because how could our government possibly run that corporation worse? Boeing used to care about building good planes, but now all they care about is making money, and if anyone shouts TEH SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! at this idea, kindly remind them that American taxpayers (via the Department of Defense) are already Boeing’s biggest customer and thus deserve more say in how it operates. Also maybe remind them that they drove roads and drank tap water and used electricity and breathed clean air today.

Demand Progress helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop selling arms to Israel as long as they’re committing genocide in Palestine. I actually think President Biden has handled this whole thing about as well as one can – especially given that he’s one of our most pro-Israel Presidents ever – but you don’t let up when you get some of what you want, you demand more. Hey, it always works for right-wingers! And our pressure has (finally!) driven a wedge between American politicians and the reflexively pro-Israel lobby, and has even prompted Sen. Schumer to condemn Mr. Netanyahu, so again, we need to keep up the pressure.

Finally, Ultraviolet helps you tell big tech corporations to stop people from using AI to create non-consensual deepfakes and thus harm other people. Is the genie out of the bottle here? Hell no! It should be laughably easy to limit folks’ access to AI apps, or to certain AI app functions, so it should be laughably easy to limit the harm AI apps can do. And not for nothing, but women bear the brunt of that harm, with their images used non-consensually in over 95% of all internet deepfakes. So don’t brook any folly from tech bros who call themselves “founders” and “indispensable men” but act all helpless when asked to stop the harm their products cause.

Action: concerning Social Security, AI porn, and affordable internet.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act and the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, and also tell your Congressfolk to renew the Affordable Connectivity Program. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act. Currently folks with a mere $2,000 in assets can’t get SSI benefits; you know how fast you can blow through $2,000, right? SSI limits literally haven’t gone up in over 30 years, though inflation has gone up almost 146% over that time. I don’t expect that argument to convince the folks who squeal STOP ALLZ TEH FRAUDZ NO MATTURZ TEH COSTZ!!!! But I don’t expect any reasonable arguments to convince haters, and I also don’t want haters to keep getting all the say about everything.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act. You’ve heard about people using AI to create pornographic images of Taylor Swift, right? Discerning consent among actors who actually make porn films is dicey enough; now imagine having porn of you, that you didn’t make, out there for everyone to see, with most folks either bad at telling what’s fake or unwilling to simply disbelieve anything they see. You’d hate to see people use AI just to make women’s lives worse; the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act will help put a stop to that.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to renew the Affordable Connectivity Program already. The Affordable Connectivity Program (or ACP) helps poor working families (including folks who receive Medicaid or food stamps) with $30/month ($75/month for folks living on tribal lands) to help afford internet. You’ve looked at your own internet bill, right? So you know that we could actually do more! But right-wingers want to end the program, claiming that internet access isn’t essential. Imagine saying crap like that not long after a year-plus of kids all having to go to school online! Again, let’s not let the haters get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning endless war, health care, and public banking.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to do all they can to get a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war, and pass both the EpiPen Act and the Public Banking Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you demand an immediate cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war. Pleased to see someone else refer to it as exactly that, since that’s exactly what’s happening – even the Iraq War’s most fevered supporters never called it the “U.S./al-Qaeda war,” and not just because that would have been absurd. But with the International Court of Justice lately saying that some of Israel’s actions might qualify as genocide – and with that court continuing to consider South Africa’s genocide complaint – I would think we have some momentum here. But we’ll only turn that momentum into good works if we speak out now.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the EpiPen Act. You recall how Mylan jacked up the price of EpiPens 500 – to around $600! – between 2009 and 2016, and controlled 90% of the EpiPen market back then? Well, the EpiPen Act would cap the price of two EpiPen doses at $60, or one-tenth of the price that made Mylan so much money, like any corporation should profit like that off a drug that people with anaphylactic allergies will die if they don’t have. Right-wingers love squealing about “price controls,” but I think most Americans would look a lot more sanguinely on the concept now – particularly with regard to live-saving drugs.

Finally, Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Public Banking Act, which would more easily allow states and localities to open public banks like North Dakota’s, which has helped good North Dakotans weather recessions and depressions for over a hundred years. You may have noticed several members of the Squad – Reps. Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Omar – among the bill’s sponsors. Our “liberal” media concentrates far too much on their alleged anti-Semitism and not a whole lot on their actual populism; one has to wonder why that is. It’s because media outlets are objectively pro-bankster. That’s the reason. Also sexism.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act, expand Medicare to include all Americans, and stop trying to injure our CFPB’s ability to protect us from financial predators. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: law and order is for *everyone*, not just us little people! And other truths.

Scientists have recorded water temperatures over 100 degrees off Florida at least twice in the last few days. I’ve been in 80-degree water and that was warm, but 100-degree water is like hot tub water; though silty water does tend to trap light and therefore heat, you would not be audacious to blame climate change for the severity of the problem. I’d tell the citizens of fascist Florida that I hope they’re happy with the razor-wielding clowns they’ve been voting for all these years, except that other creatures actually have to live in that water.

Israeli Knesset passes a judicial “reform” bill, one that will handcuff the nation’s judges from striking down evil laws, despite hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens taking to the streets (and a thousand military reservists boycotting military service). The law the Knesset passed is considerably narrower than the one the ruling far-right coalition wanted to pass in March; you would not be audacious to credit the protests for the coalition’s change of tactics. It’s a damn shame Israel doesn’t even have a second strong political party. But it’s a good thing they have so, so many upstanding citizens. They deserve to win

Bryce Covert at The Intercept details how “(i)n the five years since the start of the #MeToo movement, a quiet but effective legal backlash has swept over those who spoke out about sexual harassment and abuse. The accused have turned around and sued their accusers, effectively silencing them.” Plus, generally the accused have money and their accusers don’t. Right-wingers will claim this difficulty proves all lawsuits are bad, but they’re lying, and even if they weren’t, I wouldn’t want someone who throws up their hands at the slightest difficulty in my foxhole. Anti-SLAPP laws (SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” meaning, essentially, its whole purpose is to silence you) would help. Guess which political party generally stomps its feet and refuses to pass them, and guess which other party hasn't worked hard enough to pass them.

Surprise, surprise, a fellow about to become Ron DeSantis’s next deputy campaign manager also worked on that infamous anti-net neutrality campaign from 2017, the one that created millions of fake comments opposing net neutrality. Is there any evil into which Mr. DeSantis won’t dig his fat little fingers? Remember that Our Glorious Elites couldn’t repeal net neutrality – which virtually everyone who has ever thought about it and who also isn’t a cable corporation PR hack supports – without faking comments from dead people. So next time right-wingers argue that dead people delivered the 2020 election to Joe Biden, you can say thou doth protest too much.

Our Senate Judiciary Committee advances a Supreme Court ethics bill without any Republican votes because of course Republicans wouldn’t ever vote for that. Sen. Grassley (R-IA), who used to be pretty good at his job, said the bill was all “about harassing and intimidating the Supreme Court,” while Sen. Graham (R-SC), whose one act of heroism was almost 20 years ago and did no good almost like that was the whole idea, called it an “assault on the Court itself.” Jesus Mary and Joseph what ever happened to “if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime”? Or is that only for us little people?

Finally, Rudy Giuliani did not contest lawsuit claims from two Georgia poll workers that he smeared them after the 2020 election, but still argued that’s somehow not defamatory. Trigger warning: the whole story is fucking triggering. Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are still afraid to go out to the grocery store out of fear that diaper-loaded racists will kill them, but don’t expect repentance, let alone shame or self-reflection, from Rudy Giuliani – he’s just saying what he needs to say to get this case moving to the conclusion he somehow thinks he’s going to get! And that’s why our justice system needs to slap his sorry ass down.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, worker rights, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase Medicare and Social Security funding, protect worker rights, and protect abortion rights. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would help improve Medicare and Social Security funding by taxing income over $400,000 into both systems, applying payroll taxes to investment income, and closing a loophole that hedge fund banksters use to avoid paying into the systems. These are all much, much better ideas than “going behind closed doors” and cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits without the people hearing about it. After all, you worked for it, you fought for it, you paid into it, and you deserve to enjoy your benefits when you get older.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would stiffen penalties for corporations that refuse to let their workers collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. The main problem with labor law in America is corporations can break it without paying for it, but that’d change with the PRO Act, which would make refusing to negotiate with unions, intimidating workers, and propagandizing them in mandatory meetings a lot more costly. And what’s the alternative? Letting corporations get bigger and richer and hoping that wealth will “trickle down” to workers? Hopefully we’ve seen by now that doesn’t work.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject a national abortion ban, while UltraViolet helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion Justice Act, which latter bill would keep abortion between a woman and her doctor. Strange how all the right-wingers who demanded that Obamacare stay out of the whole patient-doctor thing are all too ready now to get between women and their doctors. OK, I guess it’s not “strange” per se – the right-wing desire to turn women back into submissive breeders explains the “strangeness” away. It’s still hypocritical, though. Is it too much to ask that hypocrites don’t get all the say about everything?

Action: concerning corporate "personhood," debt limit dramas, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell tell Delaware state legislators to kill a bill that would give corporations the right to vote there, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal both the debt limit and the Comstock Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Delaware residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell Delaware state legislators to reject HB 121, which would give artificial entities – like corporations, trusts, and partnerships – the same right to vote in elections that actual people have right now. I trust I don’t have to explain why that’s the stupidest idea anyone ever had – corporations and other artificial “people” already have too much power to do evil, and if we give them the right to vote on top of that, we might as well just let fascism in through the front door. Now, this is a state bill, not a federal one, but this is also an idea that could spread like a superbug, first to other states and then to our Congressfolk. So, to quote a phrase, let’s kill it in its crib.

In the wake of this latest debt limit “deal,” Daily Kos helps you tell our President and Congressfolk to get rid of the debt limit for good. Because they only use it for evil, that’s why! And not just when Republicans have control of at least one House of Congress, either – you recall it was like pulling teeth to get it done in late 2021 when Democrats nominally controlled both Houses of Congress, right? And I bet you still have bad memories of the debt limit hostage crises of 2011 and 2013. Anyway, now’s probably the best time to tell your Congressfolk you never want to see a stupid drama like this again. We’ll have to tell them again and again, but no use holding our tongues now.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, which prohibits our Postal Service from delivering obscene materials or abortion medicines (among other things). With the fall of Roe v. Wade, right-wingers have gone crazy citing the Comstock Act, though Congress passed it in 1873 when the world was a lot different – one could argue that at that time that you would more likely get unsafe abortion medications through the mail than safe ones. You would have a tough time arguing that today, though right-wingers will try. Let’s not deign to argue with bullshitters, though – let’s just get rid of the law they want to use to hurt women.

Action: concerning the debt limit, Oak Flat, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican debt-limit bills and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act and the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

You want action alerts against the Republican debt-limit bill? I’ve got ‘em, from Coalition on Human Needs, Moms Rising, and Daily Kos. They’re trying to justify their whole debt-limit drama by cutting services good Americans actually need, which is evil. The Moms Rising alert deals mainly with work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid, and some folks think that’s common-sensical, but they’re wrong: work requirements aren’t a good idea for a program that’s supposed to help you when you don’t have work. And finding and punishing fraud is a separate issue. How about we cut the budget of fighter planes that don’t fight?

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would pretty much do what its title says – save the Oak Flat region of the Tonto National Forest from the Rio Tinto mining corporation. Numerous Native Americans consider Oak Flat sacred land – I guess religious conscience only matters when it’s right-wing corporatists not wanting to cover their employees’ birth control! – and the mining would also poison and deplete the water there. Despite Native Americans' heroic efforts in keeping Rio Tinto out, the project still isn’t dead; that’s why we step up, as we have before, and we keep stepping up until our Congressfolk act.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act. Banning anyone who might counsel abortion from providing health care overseas (as the Helms Amendment does) hurts our efforts to get birth control and other health care to other countries, so let’s not let philosophical purity murder what works – and, you know, let’s not let it murder people, too. I suppose right-wingers will try to hide their sexist objective by yelling AMURIKA FIRSTZ!!!!! But unsafe abortions and maternal deaths – which the Helms Amendment surely causes – are an atrocity anywhere.

Action: concerning abortion rights, transgender rights, and alleged corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, and tell your Senators to reject the so-called “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act” and investigate the gifts Justice Thomas has lately been reported to have received. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would codify abortion rights everywhere in America, even in the 12 states that have passed total abortion bans and the 15 that have restricted medication abortion. Remember when right-wingers were all about keeping things between you and your doctor? Abortion should be between women and their doctors, since state governments have proven so bad at doing it that they’re chasing gynecologists out of their states and preventing women who need an abortion to survive from getting one. And remember: if you’re against abortion, don’t get one.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” because it’s not a way to protect women and girls so much as a way of abusing transgender folks, plus it’s also a way to abuse women and girls by subjecting them to period police and genital inspectors at school. We worry enough about educators sexually abusing kids; how about we not give them a way to do that? And don’t listen to anyone who says “but this is a real issue,” because, really, it’s not – I mean, I would hope school sports aren’t the be-all-end-all for either kids or their parents! And really, do kids have a “right” to abuse trans folks? And do adults have a “right” to discriminate?

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Senate to investigate Justice Clarence Thomas for the luxury trips he’s received for free from his putative friend, Harlan Crow. He’s been all I-didn’t-need-to-disclose about it (and he’s likely wrong about that), and he’s also been all he’s-my-friend about it, to which I’d say if he was really your friend he wouldn’t have put you in such a compromised position. Seriously, these trips (plus the house Mr. Crow bought from Justice Thomas and his two brothers) all smack of the infamous “non-repayable loans” the Mafia used to give out. Maybe Justice Thomas is comfortable with that, but civilized people shouldn’t be.

Around the table: right-wingers eat each other, and other horrible truths.

Uh oh: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been accepting very expensive vacations almost annually from a single Republican donor, without disclosing a one, meaning he’s apparently broken the law and, not incidentally, failed to adhere to considerably looser ethics standards than other federal judges. Right-wingers will say “there’s no quid pro quo,” but a) that seems unlikely, given how people with money are so interconnected with each other, and b) in a civilized society we also avoid the appearance of corruption, particularly if we’re leaders, as Supreme Court Justices surely are.

I’d love to celebrate the discovery that injecting a heart failure patient’s own stem cells back into their heart reduces their risk of stroke and heart attack by almost 60%, but I’m also reminded that right-wing hysteria held stem cell research back all through Tha Bush Mobb years, has held us all back generally going back many centuries, and continues to hold us back to this very day. It’d be nice if our “liberal” media would stop covering right-wing hysterics like they’re jes’ folks; right-wing hysterics should have to fight for coverage, like they did in the old days. At least it’d build character.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reminds us that while our FDA did us a solid by making the overdose-reversal drug Naloxone an over-the-counter drug, the drug is still fairly expensive, which will limit the number of good Americans who can get it. You’re looking at between $42 and $100 per dose without insurance – health insurance corporations should really cover it, since dead people can’t buy any more health care – and a lot of folks (what right-wingers call “those people”) don’t have that amount of cash lying around after paying bills and buying food and raising kids. No use retorting well, don’t do drugs, then, since that’s not how addiction works. (Assuming Naloxone will “encourage” drug use is also not how addiction works.)

See if you can follow this Moebius strip of a story: three-fifths of a very, very right-wing school board resign after the other two-fifths won’t STFU about critical race theory and “grooming” – this, after said very, very right-wing school board had long eradicated any trace of anti-racist or pro-gay teaching in their classrooms. On second thought, this isn’t that hard to understand: right-wingers constantly cannibalize their kind, because what else can they do? Right-wing ideology still dominates American discourse, and still limits the options our political leaders will consider, so right-wingers must find ever-more fantastic enemies, lest the rageheads snap out of their wage. They sure got lucky back in the day when they hunted a President who was an actual serial adulterer.

Finally, a pair of researchers explain AI’s critical shortfall: because “it takes a body” to understand the world. We don’t analyze trillions of words to figure out how to smooth out wrinkles in a shirt or keep a fire going; we do it through seeing and manipulating objects with our hands. This maps on to what I’ve been saying: that AI is, at present, little more than a good bullshit artist. The problem, of course, will be when humans won’t see that because they can make good money not seeing it. I’m pretty sure that’s the dystopian future toward which we’re headed at present, not the one where “there’s so much AI no one can tell what’s real anymore.”

Penny rants for April 5, 2023.

Anthony DiMaggio at Salon – with help from the Marcon Institute at Lehigh University – has studied the link between white supremacy, “men’s rights,” and anti-abortion/anti-gay/anti-trans sentiment, and finds, sadly, that all of these are inextricably linked. Perhaps not all of them in every single toxic human being – even the batshit insane 25% of the electorate doesn’t buy all of the toxic crap the right peddles, as evidenced by (for example) the fact that a “mere” 11 percent of respondents won’t agree with one out of four given neanderthal viewpoints about women, gays, and trans folk. But we should be careful thinking that gives us an opening anywhere, because all it really means is that some of the rage-addled don’t think very much about, say, gays, not that they actively support equal rights for gays. And, as we know from the Murdoch empire’s recent anti-trans hysteria, someone who’s already addicted to masturbatory rage can have that rage redirected at anyone.

Speaking of the Murdoch empire, Friday was yet another bad day for Fox News, as Dominion won summary judgment on almost every point in their defamation lawsuit against Fox. Now Fox won’t be able to argue in court that they told the truth about Dominion, or that they didn’t falsely accuse Dominion of a crime; they won’t even be able to claim they were “just reporting” what other folks said or were “just expressing an opinion.” The one thing left to determine? Whether Fox had “actual malice,” and I always thought that’d be the tough nut to crack here – what are we going to do, cut Rupert Murdoch open and count rings? “59 rings, that’s a prime number, thus we have found actual malice!” And I guess Fox folks probably avoided saying in texts that they really wanted to destroy Dominion’s reputation, though given what they failed to avoid saying in other texts, I wouldn’t lay money on that. In any case, I hope Dominion cleans their clock. I fear it still won’t be enough payment for all the harm Fox News has caused America.

Penny rants for March 27, 2023.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: where there's no safe space for fascists, corporatists, and whiners.

Terrorists have apparently poisoned at least 50 girls’ schools in Iran over the last six months, sickening at least 400 girls, and I hope the attackers get the justice they deserve, even if they come from Iran’s fundamentalist government, as some folks suppose. And can you blame them for supposing? In the meantime, the mere notion of farther-right activists in Iran who oppose educating girls gives that government some quite-undeserved breathing space – look, they say, something to distinguish us from the Taliban! Of course, distinguishing between flavors of fascism for purposes other than scholarship is offensive, more suited to the likes of Richard Spencer than to civilized people.

At least one legal expert thinks Fox News might really be in the soup after Rupert Murdoch’s recent admission that he knew Fox peddled a lot of election-denialism crap though he didn’t believe it – and that they might even be in the soup for more than the $1.6 billion Dominion’s asking in their now-famous defamation lawsuit. Fox can throw all the fecal matter against the wall they want – “our executives didn’t specifically order it,” “ZOMG TEH FIRSTZ AMENDMENTZ WILLZ DIEZ!!!!!” – but few would lament Fox News finally getting some of the karmic blowback it’s long deserved. Its votaries, of course, will just slog on, their persecution complex intensified, and if we’re very lucky, they won’t blow up any voting machines.

Ho hum, former Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) has rejoined the bankster industry from whence he came in 2010. After spending a dozen years defending the notorious “carried interest loophole” (which allows hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate than just about everyone you know) from widespread public opposition, he has joined, dig this, a hedge fund corporate board, which is a step up from becoming a lobbyist, lately the more common landing spot for ex-Senators. At least this won’t be the job Kyrsten Sinema gets in 2025, since Mr. Toomey’s a considerably more accomplished shiller than she is. Yes, I know she’d be upset to hear that.

I shouldn’t be spending any damn time on this matter, but no we have not recently “concluded” that COVID came from a lab accident. Rather, another federal agency has issued a “low confidence” report asserting that COVID more likely came from a lab accident than from exposure from an animal; the very phrase “low confidence” should not inspire your confidence, but some folks either don’t read or only read what they want to read. Note well, also, that the Energy Department’s “low confidence” report didn’t prompt any of the four other agencies that have reported about the matter to change their conclusions. Personal to those already typing “BUT TEH DEEPZ STATEZ!!!!!” in response: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Good for Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, who runs an online service that gets abortion medication to those who need it. She operates from the Netherlands, which, as you might imagine, makes it a bit more difficult for right-wing drama kings in American state legislatures to get at them, and I wouldn’t hold out hope for a Republican President, either, since he’s going to be an incompetent drama king, too. Yes, even if their name’s not Trump! Anyway, this is all very simple: if you’re against abortion, don’t get one. I wish more pro-life folks followed that advice, instead of telling their doctor they’re going to hell for giving them the abortion they asked for.

Eli Lilly announced it would cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35/month, and though I, too, am happy to say this proves that shame works, Matt Stoller reminds us that our FTC also had a lot to do with Eli Lilly’s new cap, by declaring in June that it would start going after the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (or PBMs) that probably do even more to jack up drug prices than even big pharma does. (Basically, PBMs demand bribes in order to make drugs available to health insurance corporations, and the bribes are really big now.) Remember this the next time your right-wing uncle tells you that government doesn’t work. It does – if we make it work.

Finally, when I hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (E-GA) has literally demanded a “safe space” where right-wingers don’t have to listen to liberals anymore, I’m reminded that this isn’t a new tack at all: Nazi wannabes were demanding the exact same thing, using the exact same words, as long ago as 2016, and of course at the same time as they slammed liberals for demanding actual safe spaces for people who actually suffer from actual discrimination, and not just the shame and shunning of the community for bad behavior. These right-wingers probably think they’re satirists, too, but then a lot of awful people hide behind “satire.”

Action: concerning sexism, slave labor, monopolies, and product safety.

Long story short: tell Florida state legislators to reject legislation that would ban women’s studies courses, tell Volkswagen to get Uyghur slave labor out of its supply chain, tell our Transportation Department to stop the proposed JetBlue/Spirit merger, and tell our FTC to ensure that corporations only slap the “recyclable” label on actually recyclable products. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Care2 helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject HB 999, which would essentially ban all gender and women’s studies courses from state colleges. Because waaaaah! Really, is there another reason? My younger self had his share of faults, but he did me a solid by buying the text to a collegiate women’s studies class, so I could read it when I had time, and I have to tell you that when I read it, I didn’t cry like a diaper-loaded brat about all the harm men have done to women over the millennia, nor did I blame everyone but myself for my feelings. And what I learned, I’ll use to make our civilization better. Jesus Mary and Joseph the weaklings in charge of things in America disgust me. And this is why we fight.

Eko helps you tell Volkswagen to stop making money off Uyghur forced labor in China. The Uyghurs, you may recall, are Muslims whom the Chinese round up and send to concentration camps like they’re an aspiring Nazi Germany or something. You know, I think I may have accidentally mentioned something that the German corporation Volkswagen might not want brought up – like that Volkswagen was a Nazi project to begin with! Not a terribly successful one before the war, but how times change! China tortures over a million Uyghurs, but they couldn’t do it without Volkswagen’s help, which is why we’re busting out the Big Stick of Bad PR.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to stop the proposed Jet Blue/Spirit airline merger. Our laws already grant the Transportation Secretary the authority to apply a “public interest” standard to block mergers, and Mr. Buttigieg wouldn’t even have to put his case before a judge if he did, and surely airline consolidation doesn’t serve the public interest! More Perfect Union also points out that Spirit currently runs nonstop flights out of Detroit while JetBlue doesn’t; think JetBlue will keep those nonstops if they buy Spirit? I kid, of course. But Mr. Buttigieg might want to think about that before he runs for statewide office in Michigan.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) that we should only see “recyclable” labels on products that can actually be recycled. I’d say that sounds like common sense, but it actually sounds simpler than common sense. You’ve likely challenged our EPA to force corporations to stop putting the “widely-recyclable” label on products you can’t actually recycle widely, but this matter concerns corporations lying to consumers, so we can also make it an FTC matter. Don’t let anyone tell you this isn’t a big deal, because if you can’t recycle it, you have to incinerate it, and incineration pollutes our air and water with deadly toxins. So, yeah, we gotta do that right.

Readings for March 6, 2023.

Matt Stoller reminds us that Transportation Secretary Buttigieg actually has a lot of authority to fight mergers like the proposed Jet Blue/Spirit merger. Furthermore, Mr. Buttigieg can, by law, apply a “public interest” standard to mergers (versus the “may substantially lessen competition” standard the Clayton Act sets), which gives him a leg up over our Justice Department; while two more airlines merging in an already low-competition industry sure does seem like it would “substantially lessen competition,” our DOJ would have to get a federal judge to agree – which is, ah, real hit-and-miss even with Democrat-appointed judges – whereas Mr. Buttigieg wouldn’t even have to go to court. In a world where our FCC Chair kept a hedge fund from buying a cable corporation without even having a working majority – and read that, because that’s a great story! – Mr. Buttigieg is rapidly running out of excuses, not to mention time to recover in the public eye before he runs for President or Senate or whatever.

Constance Grady at Vox explains how “Brad Pitt was the only winner of the Aniston-Jolie tabloid battle.” How did he win? Mainly, it seems, by having a penis! Tabloid writers wrote about Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie largely in terms of their motherhood, or lack thereof – Ms. Aniston tried to have a baby with Mr. Pitt but couldn’t, and when she didn’t reveal her infertility issues at the time (maybe because they weren’t any of our damn business!), the tabloids said she “put career over family.” Ms. Jolie, meanwhile, adopted a child early in the 2000s, but even after mothering six children with Mr. Pitt, she found herself back where she started after splitting from him, even facing accusations of having a “white savior complex.” Mr. Pitt, meanwhile, gets kudos as a dad for merely expressing pride in his children, and tabloid writers transcribe word from “sources close to (him)” like Moses handed it down from Mt. Sinai. Ladies and gentlemen, your "liberal" media at work!

ProPublica tells you how you can file your taxes for free with limited interference from some corporation. As you may recall, our IRS must by law offer a “free filing” option for folks with relatively simple returns, but they let their “partner” big tax-prep corporations obscure that option (both in Google searches and on their own websites) so they could still make you pay. Nice work if you can get it! But ProPublica broke that story (as it related to TurboTax) two years ago, and our FTC has since taken action against TurboTax owner Intuit, so now things are a bit easier. Two key points: you have to make less than $73,000 annually to take advantage of this service (though some of our IRS’s corporate partners have more stringent requirements), and you have to start guided tax prep at irs.gov, not at a corporation’s website. It’s not ideal – ideal would be more like our IRS filling out the forms for you for free, since they already have all your info from your employer. But it is better.

Readings for March 1, 2023.

The MIT Technology Review tells us “Everything You Need to Know About the Wild World of Heat Pumps”. “Everything” may include the news that they work better at severely cold temperatures than you’ve heard. And if you’re wondering how you squeeze heat out of 25-degree air, well, long story short: the refrigerant starts out in liquid form, but has a very low boiling point (-15 degrees), so heating it even a little in a heat exchanger (and heating it with 25-degree air is surely heating it a little!) turns it into a gas; then putting that gas through a compressor it makes it considerably hotter, until its temperature reaches 100 degrees, and then it dumps off heat into your house via another heat exchanger, and in doing so turns back into a liquid, and the cycle begins again. And don’t let your right-wing uncle pooh-pooh it because it runs on electricity and thus equals fossil fuels, because that’s really only true in West Virginia (which gets some 97% of its electricity from coal), and you shouldn’t let the perfect murder the good.

Sonali Kohatkar at Znet instructs us that “Tipping Is Not a Reward – It’s an Insult,” and when you consider that tipped employees’ federal minimum wage is much lower than the standard ($2.13/hour, versus $7.25/hour), and that more than two-thirds of tipped workers are women, and that tipped workers are more likely to suffer in poverty than non-tipped workers, you’ll find it hard to disagree. When you find that other cultures think tipping is actually “rude” or “petty,” and you may find it even harder to disagree. And remember that tipping not only allows bosses to pay their workers less, but forces customers to evaluate their workers, when that’s surely a boss’s job. A male customer might decide not to tip a female worker who doesn’t respond positively to their come-on, which does not speak particularly well of tipping as an employee-evaluation tool. (No use responding that a boss could treat a female worker the same, because there are actually laws against that, and there are no laws against bad tipping.) It sure is amazing how much of what’s “just the way things are” in America don’t actually have to be.

Speaking of which: Steven Greenhouse at The Guardian explains how Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s have been able to avoid actual unionization at their stores, despite workers winning all those union elections. Long story short: because our laws don’t punish corporations for engaging in delaying tactics or other forms of union-busting. Naturally, the PRO Act would have fixed that, by giving corporations 120 days to negotiate a contract with a union representing their workers and forcing those negotiations into arbitration if they don’t meet that goal. Of course, even though the PRO Act passed our House, our Senate didn’t bring it up, since Republicans would have filibustered it as a unit. They still should have brought it up, and forced Republicans to go on the record as favoring endless delaying tactics after a successful union vote, a tactic of which I’m pretty sure even a lot of regular Republican voters wouldn’t approve.

Around the table: the evil, it burns!

Ho hum, January 6 rioters who express remorse for their actions change their tune after sentencing. Why, it’s like they were never sorry in the first place! It’s true that “there’s not much the legal system can do for an adjudicated defendant” (unless their “remorse” got them shorter sentences!), but there’s something we can do: stop inviting these people to our dinners, our cookouts, and our parties no matter how much “fun” they are. Because if we don’t go this far, they’ll never learn shame or accountability. Plus we’ll probably have to fight them in the streets later.

FactCheck.org, being cautious as usual, tells us it’s too soon to attribute last month’s storms in California exclusively to climate change, this after talking to actual climate scientists who, how about that, talk cautiously like scientists tend to do. Despite the headline (and the findings), some right-wingers will still say but why didn’t they ask the guy with no expertise and no credentials in climate science I saw on YouTube who just so happens to agree with me? I mean, they won’t put it quite like that. Or maybe they will, since they do seem to have even less shame than they did before.

Confronted with the question of why both state and national Republicans are “doubling down on abortion bans” even after Roe’s overturning clearly contributed to the absence of a “red wave” last November, I’m tempted to say it’s because Republicans are so used to their actions having no consequences at the ballot box. But yeah, Amanda Marcotte is right that it’s mainly right-wing sexism. Too many right-wingers need to divide the world into people they want to fuck and people they don’t, but that’s no reason to give them all the say about everything.

When I hear that Vladimir Putin has invoked the Battle of Stalingrad – and the battle against Nazism – to justify his invasion of Ukraine, I’m tempted to say really? But then I remember that America has no shortage of folks who wish they’d fought World War II, and who thus make every stupid war they want to fight another World War II, like they did with Afghanistan and Iraq; it’s all drama, bad drama at that, and we deserve better than drama. So do good Russians, and not just because they gave the world Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Nabokov.

Big oil corporations induce right-wing media bubbleheads to blame recent whale deaths on, you guessed it, offshore wind power. Amazing how often “populists” like Tucker Carlson do big corporations’ bidding. Even more amazing that Jesse Watters can say New Jersey’s hardly-even-begun wind power project is “probably” killing whales while the Fox News chyrons say things like (caps in original) “WIND SURVEYING IS KILLING OUR WHALES.” Note well that these whale deaths have been going on for at least six years, and New York and New Jersey ports have been unusually congested lately for reasons you can easily imagine, but as Ronald Reagan once said, facts are stupid things.

Finally, how about our “liberal” media reporting our economy adding over half a million jobs in a single month as bad news? You and I can think of half a million people who don’t give a rat’s ass about stock prices going down, and anyway why did they go down? Because of the fiction Our Glorious Elites have forced down our throats for the last 40 years, the fiction that cutting jobs leads to “efficiency” and thus "more wealth." More wealth for them, certainly! But you know what creates real wealth? When our economy gives everyone, including actual entrepreneurs, a chance to wow the world. Why would Our Glorious Elites fear such a thing?

Action: concerning methane emissions, screen time, and sales taxes.

Long story short: tell our EPA to issue the strongest methane regulations possible, tell our FTC to keep big tech corporations from manipulating children into staying online forever, and tell 22 states to stop levying sales tax on menstrual products. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue the strongest methane regulations possible. Our EPA has lately issued a proposal that updates their 2021 proposal, and that’s good, but it doesn’t go far enough – it could limit flaring and leakage from storage tanks more vigorously, to name two issues. Methane leakage is so prevalent in gas drilling that it's birthed an entire industry (the “methane mitigation” industry) to combat it. And it packs a climate change punch that’s 80 times worse than coal emissions, which are still pretty bad. Accommodating gas drilling corporations ain’t worth it if we don’t have a planet to live on.

Fairplay helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban website/app design that manipulates kids into spending more time online. Asvirtually every scientist not directly in the employ of a big tech corporations would tell you, kids don’t need to be spending all that time in front of screens, and they certainly don’t need apps and programs that reward them for spending more time onscreen. Too often we imagine ourselves so helpless in the face of evil. We should react to the news that big corporations manipulate children into spending all their time onscreen not with “well, that’s just the ‘free’ market at work, what can you do?” with “so stop them.” Children are our future, after all.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell 22 states to stop charging sales taxes on menstrual products. I’m not a fan of sales taxes anyway – they hurt working people harder than rich folks – but I’m even less of a fan of sales taxes on essential items, which is why states tend not to assess sales taxes on groceries, though not “luxury” items like coffee. If you’ve ever started bleeding uncontrollably out of your vagina without any warning, then you know that a tampon is not a “luxury” item. For most men, I’m sure it’s a matter of not thinking, though in my experience that statement doesn’t make women feel any better. But if the result is sexist, the intent matters little, and if it’s sexist, we need to fix it.

Around the table: of dictatorships and monopolies, and the good folks who fight them.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept assesses “The Dark Odds Facing Iran’s Brave Protestors.” Protests have followed the state’s murder of a woman for not wearing her hijab in strict accordance with new right-wing government laws, and though we want better for good Iranians, Egyptians and Syrians have failed to capitalize on the Arab Spring because “life under dictatorship had not allowed any alternative institutions to grow that could easily replace the tyrannies now in place”; Iran’s police state has similarly suppressed such institutions. That’s a cautionary tale for those Americans who think crime is the number one issue facing them because they’ve watched the same four or five clips on the TV news for two years now.

Matt Stoller assesses our progress in our fight against monopolies. Long story short: yes, our government loses antitrust cases in court, but has also made progress on right-to-repair, wage-fixing, and price-fixing. Still, “(i)n a highly concentrated economy, losing merger challenges simply shouldn’t happen,” but he also reminds us that we lose before very, very bad judging. Mr. Stoller remains hopeful that lawyers will figure out how to win cases even against bad judges, and that judges aren’t evil per se but “just operating on autopilot with antitrust. And he also reminds us that the “narrative of powerlessness is perhaps the most powerful weapon in the monopolists’ arsenal, because it causes us to give up on self-government itself.” We definitely need to hear that more often! The “phony war” metaphor at the beginning is a bonus.

When I hear that 80% of Americans want a federally-funded paid family/medical leave program, I recall that Newt Gingrich used to say if 70 percent of Americans want something, they should get it, though I bet he would just mouth a bunch of BS about it now and our “liberal” media wouldn’t challenge him on it. I’ll bet most of Joe Manchin’s constituents want a paid family/medical leave program, too, and if he’s scared that his approvals in West Virginia are upside down now that he’s helped bring the Inflation Reduction Act to fruition, I would remind him that his job ain’t just to do his constituents’ will, but to convince them when he’s actually done it.

Ho hum, Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State candidate wants to end mail-in voting because of alleged/nonexistent “voter fraud,” but not only has he voted by mail numerous times, he’s also done it while living in a different state from the one in which he was voting. In a sane, moral, and decent civilization, this news would finish his campaign; in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, he needs only hope he’s worshiped enough at the altar of His Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump to please the big man’s votaries. Having claimed to be a “victim of election fraud” as the Republican nominee for Nevada’s 4th U.S. House district in 2020 – he lost that race by over 16,000 votes and nearly five percentage points – he may be well on his way toward this goal.

When I hear that Republicans actually plan to campaign on repealing drug-pricing caps passed entirely with Democratic votes – and that they’re using the same horsedoodle arguments about “stifling innovation” and “drug takeover schemes” and “price controls,” phrases that anger far-right partisans and literally no one else – all I can say is that I guess they’re counting on gerrymandering to deliver them the House, because they sure ain’t counting on making winning arguments. The shame of it is that it might work, especially given our well-founded suspicion that Democrats don’t want to win elections as much as they want to raise campaign money.

Finally, how about some good news? Over 270 workers at the Roosevelt Boulevard Home Depot in Philadelphia have filed a petition with our National Labor Relations Board to form a union. Much like Walmart, Home Depot has unusually terrific workers they get to treat like crap because those workers don’t have the opportunity to take their skills somewhere else anymore – which, of course, is because Home Depot has crushed smaller, independent hardware stores everywhere it’s gone. So let’s add “balancing monopoly power” as yet another reason we need more unions.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight to keep U.S. Postal Service Jobs, tell our Department of Energy to force home-heating furnaces to be more efficient, and tell our Department of Education to fight for teaching against racism and sexism in classrooms. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

Around the table: some Democrats rise to the challenge, others don't.

The AFL-CIO puts out a report finding that CEO pay went up much, much faster than inflation in 2021, and while normally I’d ask how much CEO wages went up in previous years, when CEO salaries go up more than twice as fast as inflation and nearly three times faster than worker wages, that’s really all you need to know right there. They said income redistribution would wreck this great nation – and they were right! So stop listening to the pundits telling you worker wages drive up inflation.

A Democratic politico comes up with a way to beat Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: feed right-wing news sources with stories about how Mr. DeSantis has been insufficiently right-wing. But, off the top of my head, I can’t think how he’s done that, and though the right-wing capacity for rage seems endless, I can’t imagine right-wing media outlets wanting to conspire with Democrats to oust Mr. DeSantis, since he trafficks in the rage that keeps the cycle of doom going. All of this, of course, supposes Democrats really want to depose him. Too many of them are asking why not keep raising money off him? as we speak, a strategy that has never led to disaster before! I’ve got a better idea: run a candidate who’ll do things with their power.

It “May Surprise You” “What the Bible Actually Says About Abortion” – i.e., nothing directly, and both pro- and anti-choice forces can find Biblical quotations that support their cherished position, plus Jesus’s own feminism continues to impress! – but facts about the Bible won’t impress any right-wing Christians; they don’t read the Bible so much as imagine the Bible already agrees with them. I’d prefer a Bible that didn’t agree with me on everything, just like I prefer to hold and practice values that inconvenience me.

Science puts out a study that instructs us, among other things, that about 20% of Americans think violence in defense of one’s political aims is A-OK, nearly half of Americans think a Civil War is coming, and, dig this, 40% prefer “having a strong leader” to “preserving democracy.” That last one, especially, is a stupid choice – there is no law of physics that says “democracy” and “strong leadership” are incompatible, though you need strong leaders who will let the popular will lead them. So, not Kyrsten Sinema, then.

And not Pete Buttigieg, either: Matt Stoller creates a giant Goofus and Gallant strip about certain Biden Administration officials and their attitudes toward monopolies, and he finds our Treasury Secretary wanting, as he is. Dig how Mr. Buttigieg says his office has concluded “ten separate investigations” on airline refunds! The whole country is talking about how bad airlines are treating them, and he unfurls a typical right-wing trick, hoping you’ll think “concluding an investigation” and “doing something” are the same thing! Anyway, how about we start promoting Jonathan Kanter and Rohit Chopra as Presidential timber? Because those two know what they’re doing. Or is “knowing what you’re doing” not sexy enough?

Finally, ho hum, Trudy Busch Valentine’s family farm has hosted at least two fundraisers for Missouri U.S. Senate Republican candidates, although Ms. Busch Valentine is running for Senate herself, as a Democrat! And her family’s ties to Republicans go considerably deeper than that! In a sane and moral world, this news would finish Ms. Valentine’s campaign – particularly since her main opponent, Lucas Kunce, would be a much better candidate! – but we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society where we can never underestimate Democratic politicos’ ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Action: concerning abortion rights, health care subsidies, and bad airline corporations.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to codify Roe v. Wade in law, extend ACA subsidies, and expand Medicaid, and tell our Transportation Secretary to start punishing airlines that abuse their customers. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Left Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to codify Roe v. Wade into law, now that our Supreme Court has struck it down. Think of all the girls and women who won’t be able to get the health care they need now – women who survive rape and domestic abuse, women whose fetuses have no organs, women who created half a dozen fetuses through in vitro fertilization, women who won’t survive their pregnancy because of a placental abruption or an egg lodging in their Fallopian tubes, but also women with cancer who get pregnant and whose doctors can’t treat the cancer because their fetus won’t survive the cancer treatment. All the right’s holier-than-thou blustering can’t stack up to that.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies and expand Medicaid, so that 15 million Americans will still be able to afford health insurance. The American Rescue Plan Act expanded subsidies, but they’ll expire September 30 unless Congress acts, and given Republican/Manchinean/Sineman intransigence, it looks like Congress won’t act, though they could very easily extend the subsidies and fund them without raising taxes on anyone but millionaires. Who gets ACA subsidies and Medicaid? Why, the poorest among us, of course! And yet politicians still cut these programs and then retreat to their yachts. Unless we act, of course.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to use his lawfully-granted power (until our Supreme Court takes it away, I suppose!) to punish big airline corporations that abuse their passengers. Of course airline corporations got a lot of COVID relief money to keep folks working, and of course they used that money to cut workers, which has helped cause all the delays that have been in the news. Secretary Buttigieg can put aside burnishing his “bipartisan” bona fides in advance of his 2028 (2024?) Presidential run and fine airlines that delay flights more than three hours and schedule flights without enough workers. But he’ll only do that if he hears from enough of us.

Around the table: concerning abortion and conspiracy theories.

Surprise, surprise, Republicans getting everything they want out of the end of Roe v. Wade “complicate(s)” their efforts to take back Congress in the midterms. As I’ve said, people hate it when politicians take away the things they rely on, and legal abortion is one of those, more so, I think, than the Affordable Care Act was in 2017 and 2018, and when Republicans threatened that they lost the House. And if Republicans are worried now, just wait until inflation comes down! There’s a lot in this article worth commenting on, but I’ll just cite abortion clinics all closing in Wisconsin after Ron Johnson said things wouldn’t change that much. That’s a winning campaign ad if there ever was one – and, you know, if Democrats just have the guts to run it.

Uh oh: a right-wing evangelical gets caught on tape claiming that she prays with sitting Supreme Court Justices – who just so happened to have cited her organization’s amicus brief in their ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. I’m going to guess that this isn’t against the law per se, but only because we don’t hold Supreme Court Justices to the same ethical standards we hold all other federal judges. In any case, it sure looks like an obvious conflict of interest, and if your currency is objectivity, you would reasonably avoid even the appearance of such a conflict. Unless, of course, you don’t care because you’re just going to take everyone’s freedoms away ha ha.

Speaking of which, Maurizio Valsania at The Conversation reminds us that Justice Alito’s ruling in Dobbs “cherry-picks” American history in claiming that abortion rights aren’t “deeply-rooted” in American culture. I’m old enough to recall a time when “Blackstone condoned abortion” (let alone Ben Franklin’s abortion recipe!) would end all arguments on the matter, but fact is women had more autonomy over their bodies in the 18th century than they did in the 19th, and last I checked, America did exist during the 18th century. So add “originalism” and “textualism” to the pile of words so tortured by their utterers that they tell them exactly what they want to hear.

Martha Crawford writes about the uncertainty wrought by our Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade – and her own experiences navigating sexuality even with the support of Roe. “Roe meant my body could never be ultimately controlled by such men” as the funny uncle who looked up her skirt at the shoe store, yet her Ms.-reading mother still called her a slut after finding out she was on the pill, and her Christian teen group-running father told her she was “a spirited filly that needs to be broken,” preferably by “a man with a good set of spurs.” And if our Supreme Court gets the last word, women won’t even have the modicum of bodily control Dr. Crawford did.

Finally, Donovan Schaefer at The Conversation explains why folks like conspiracy theories. Long story short: “confronting conspiracy theories requires understanding the feelings that make them so appealing,” namely that conspiracy theories “let() you feel like you’re smarter than everyone” and allows you to see yourself as a “critical thinker.” There’s no small joy to knowing an “obscure” source, I’ll admit, and knowing something “no one else knows,” though you should also, you know, become an adult and put away childish things. And Q-holes’ ability to make any datum fit their conclusion should raise red flags for actual critical thinkers.

Action: concerning Medicare, insurrection, and abortion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strengthen Medicare instead of funding Medicare “Advantage” and investigate Sen. Ron Johnson’s role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and tell our FDA to make the abortion drug mifepristone widely available. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the Medicare “Advantage” program once and for all. Medicare “Advantage” siphons off Medicare funding to private health insurers, which are more costly and tend to deny care at the most inopportune times, so what’s the “advantage”? It offers vision, dental, and hearing care, which Medicare doesn’t. Well, here’s a better idea: have our Medicare offer vision, dental, and hearing – at a lower cost than some private health insurance corporation trying to insure its executives all have gas in their yachts. Your big campaign donation-sucking Congressfolk won’t like your logic, but keep bringing it to them.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Sen. Ron Johnson’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results. He’s gotten himself in the soup lately with the news that his staffers tried to hand a slate of “alternate” (i.e., fake) electors to Vice President Pence. He denied knowing anything about that at first, but then he said, now that he’d had time to think about it, he did know about it and got the list of fake electors from Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) – who, of course, promptly said he hadn’t spoken to Sen. Johnson in at least a decade. Which doesn’t preclude the possibility that Mr. Kelly's office provided Sen. Johnson with the lists! But let’s find out, and then punish the wrongdoers.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell our FDA to lift restrictions on the abortion drug mifepristone, which our FDA declared safe during the first trimester of a pregnancy over 20 years ago, but still lists in its most restricted category – along with fentanyl, among others! – and that’s a move that must have been an effort to pander to the pro-life industry. But mifepristone is much safer than that – in fact, medical studies have long found it to be even safer than Tylenol, a drug nobody thinks twice about taking. Widely-available mifepristone may be the only way for women in red states to get abortions now, so we should help them get it, lest Republicans succeed in turning all of them into mere breeders.

Action: concerning financial predators, sexual discrimination, and Medicare overcharges.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, and tell the Biden Administration to enact the most vigorous Title IX protections possible and rebate Medicare premium overcharges directly to seniors. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5974/S. 2508, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act. Our laws currently cap loan interest rates at 36% for veterans, meaning veterans don’t have to put up with 300% death-spiral payday loans, and we were able to get that for veterans because, hey, nobody wants to be seen voting against veterans! Now we should extend that cap to everyone, because, really, we all deserve protection from financial predators. And again, I’d make that cap lower! And you can tell your Congressfolk that if you want, without worrying about those poor, poor banks. But I’d pass this bill, too.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the strongest Title IX revisions possible. Title IX, as you know, governs discrimination on the basis of sex in public schools, and the Trump Administration, as you may recall, gutted certain Title IX protections concerning sexual assault, because, you know, “(i)t’s a very scary and difficult time for young men today.” Even more difficult for the young women they rape, he somehow forgot to add. The Biden proposals would fix those, and they would also extend Title IX protections to transgender students, which, I mean, the word “sex” has a pretty plain meaning that even Justice Gorsuch gets.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell the Biden Administration to fix inflated Medicare premiums already. How did those premiums get inflated again? By Medicare’s decision to insure an expensive (and not very good) Alzheimer’s drug; the American people spoke out against that, and Medicare changed course, covering the drug only for patients in clinical trials. But the inflated premiums still remain! Our Administration ought to be rebating our seniors the money they should never have had to pay. They’ll talk about the importance of making sure taxpayer money doesn’t get stolen, but our government already knows whom they’ve overcharged, so that’s bunkum. Never tolerate bunkum from your government.

Action: concerning women's health and women's rights.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, tell Google to delete the location data of women who seek or get abortions, and tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer to schedule a vote on a bill that would help ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women’s Health Protection Act. Sam Alito wants the people to vote on this? Then let our Senators vote on a bill that would actually protect the right to abortion all over America, plus it would get rid of the hurdles (ultrasound bills, waiting periods, etc.) that states put in front of women to harass them. Well, worse than harass – you know how much trouble you have getting a day off from your boss? Now try getting two or three or four to jump through all these hoops. Our Senators don’t want to pass this bill. So we gotta blow up their phones and make them shake in their boots.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell Google to stop collecting abortion seekers’ location data, and also delete it from their servers. Even looking up an organization that helps people get abortions can get you in trouble these days, thanks to Google’s thirst for data they can turn into unearned money, as well as law enforcement’s constant quest for ways to get data that don’t involve going before a judge and getting a warrant. And really, we-the-people should have a lot more control over our data than we do; thanks again, Republicans! But, in this reality, we must pressure Google to do more than just try to get milk this catastrophe for good PR like other corporations do.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer to schedule a vote on H.J.Res. 17/S.J.Res. 1, which would remove the expiration date from the original legislation passing the Equal Rights Amendment, and thus make it part of our Constitution. 38 state legislatures have passed the ERA, after all – a few of them very recently, well after the original legislation’s expiration date which no other Constitutional amendment had! Thus our Senators should be able to pass this bill, remove the expiration date, and finally make the ERA the law of our land. But Sen. Schumer has to call for a vote first. Let's blow up his damn phone about this, too.

Penny Rants for June 24, 2022: special "the main cause of inflation is corporate greed" edition!

Matt Stoller instructs us, in a piece provocatively titled “On Inflation: It’s the Monopoly Profits, Stupid,” that more economists are (finally!) coming around to the notion that we’re not in a “wage-price spiral” but a “profits-inflation spiral.” I mean, you and I just looked at rising corporate profits and rising prices and figured that out, but it’s still good to get some data behind it, not just from Josh Bivens at EPI (who said a few months back that price-gouging caused a little over half of our current inflation), but also at least two Federal Reserve banks and Mike Konczal and Niko Lusiani at the Roosevelt Institute. Also too, “the most financialized sectors of the economy are the ones most adept at exploiting pricing power during the pandemic,” likely due to “cheap money from the Fed sloshing around Wall Street.” In other words, banksters ruin everything. And don’t forget how many CEOs brag about their ability to raise prices!

It’s easy to laugh at Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) having an absurd amount of trouble explaining away why staffers in his office tried to hand former Vice President Pence an “alternate slate of electors” right before January 6, and indeed I don’t know how yelling “IT WAS ALL STAFF TO STAFF!” even sounded good in his head, but remember that this guy has won two Senatorial elections, albeit not with more than 51% of the vote, and with our “liberal” media doing its damnedest to create a Republican wave, Mr. Johnson is, once again, one really inspired TV ad away from winning an election, and maybe this time he won’t even risk getting peed on by his grandkid while changing his diaper. Still, even if he serves as long as William Proxmire God forbid, his underlings will get tired of him throwing them under the bus. I’d prefer not to wait for that to happen, though. Two terms is at least two terms too many for the man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name.

Finally, I don’t know if our Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade today – Friday’s a good day to do something like that, since our “liberal” media reporters will be trying to get out of town already – but if they do, I think two things will happen. One, right-wing politicians will not celebrate! Sounds counterintuitive, to say the least, but how can you celebrate victories when you’re constantly ginning up outrage among your votaries over what they’ve lost? Besides, right-wingers are hunting bigger game – making birth control illegal and domestic abuse legal in the short term, taking away a woman’s freedom to do anything but submit to a man’s whims in the long term. Two, if you remember how Obamacare suddenly went from Democratic liability to Democratic weapon in 2017 and 2018, you know that people really, really hate suddenly losing something they rely upon. Of course right-wing politicians will always be able to get abortions for their daughters and mistresses, but regular folks will not take well to having legal abortions taken away – and they won’t take well to the Republicans who took them away.

Action: concerning Iran, gas prices, drug addiction, our Supreme Court, and our past mistreatment of Native Americans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to support the Iran nuclear deal, lower gas prices, and pass the MAT Act, the Judiciary Act, and the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Peace Action helps you tell your House Reps to support re-entry into the Iran nuclear deal. Congressfolk on both sides have shown a disquieting unwillingness to re-enter that deal, and for what? To appease Trumpholes? To "put distance" between them and President Biden? To gain imaginary and irrelevant leverage over Iran's Republican Guard? Gosh, how about doing the right thing for the right reason for once? The Iran nuclear deal was keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but because Donald Trump decided to shit all over anything Barack Obama did that actually helped Americans, he took it away from us. And now Congress wants to make it harder to get it back? Tell them no.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to "protect Americans and keep gas prices low," because sometimes you gotta be simple and direct. And also sometimes because your Congressfolk are thick-headed because they only talk to each other and Beltway consultants! Recall Katie Porter telling us that her Democratic colleagues didn't talk about inflation because they didn't see anything about it in polling? The stupid is strong with some of our Reps and Senators! Anyway, if you want to deliver a more specific message -- like "pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, which would tax excessive oil corporation profits at 95%," you can add that to your signature.

People's Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 445, the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (or MAT) Act. All this locking people up for using and abusing drugs, tell me: has that worked? No, it has not, by the evidence that far too many Americans are still addicted to drugs. The MAT Act would remove certain bureaucratic obstacles to prescribing certain narcotic drugs that treat addiction. "Removing certain bureaucratic obstacles" may be the argument that seems to have attracted a stunning 46 House Republican co-sponsors! But only three in the Senate, meaning the Mitch McConnell Obstruction Machine may yet roll over it. Unless we speak out in numbers they can't deny, of course.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2584, the Judiciary Act, which would increase the number of Supreme Court Justices from 9 to 13. I've been saying we need four more Justices to keep up with 13 federal Appeals Courts, but recent events have made the necessity of getting better Justices up there more urgent to me. And I'm sure it's even more urgent for the women and gays and transgender folks who would be directly affected by Sam Alito's made-up "deeply-rooted" doctrine. I'm able to imagine such a thing because I possess the quality of empathy, a quality today's Supreme Court Justices seem to suppress. Surely Joe Biden can find four more Justices who get what it's like to be human.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5444/S. 2908, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Federal boarding schools aimed to "civilize" the Native American, but they separated families and abused students, which ain't exactly civilized behavior. Some folks will refer to this bill as an "apology tour" or "cancel culture" or whatnot, but admitting you've done wrong, and then righting that wrong, is about as American as America can be. Note well that the Quakers put out this action alert and the Quakers admit their own past wrongdoing in running more than two dozen boarding schools! That's how you do it.

Around the table: special "Pennsylvania primary drama" edition!

So Donald Trump endorsed state Sen./January 6 attendee Doug Mastriano for Pennsylvania's Republican nomination for Governor mere days before the Tuesday primary, and one feels compelled to ask: what took him so long? Mr. Trump sure does like to get behind a winner, and Mr. Mastriano has had a pretty hefty lead in most polls for a few weeks now; that probably explains it. State Republicans say he can't win, but surely they understand things better than that! Republican wave or no, Mr. Mastriano has a decent shot against state Attorney General/presumptive Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro, particularly if Mr. Shapiro does the Democrat thing and act like he's got it in the bag.

Meanwhile, does the Trump camp seriously expect us to believe, in re Kathy Barnette's late surge in the PA Republican Senate nomination race, that "no one saw this coming"? I saw this coming, and I get paid by the hour! Of course, I mistakenly thought Jeff Bartos would benefit from "not being one of the two rich out-of-state guys in the race," but apparently his role in this drama has only been to take front-runners out, first Sean Parnell (he leaked the news of Mr. Parnell's divorce proceedings, you may recall), and then Messrs. Oz and McCormick (if I saw the ad he ran on that topic once I saw it a hundred times). Still, anyone could have seen this coming, particularly students of Deb Fischer's 2012 Senate campaign in Nebraska.

Much has been said about Ms. Barnette's loose tongue on Twitter since she's become a thing, but I take particular exception to her claim that "homosexuals LEAD with their sexual preference" (shouty caps in original). No, Ms. Barnette, you "lead with their sexual preference" by only talking about gays in terms of sex, which is but one aspect of anyone's life. I don't know how many more ways I can put this. Fun fact: Ms. Barnette lost in Pennsylvania's 4th House district in 2020 by 19 points -- and not only wouldn't concede defeat, but launched at least one frivolous lawsuit to stop it from happening!

And yet Republican efforts to stop Ms. Barnette's candidacy reek of desperation, as would any last-minute effort to stop a candidate whose surge you didn't see until it was far too late. I can't get away from that "Crazy Kathy Barnette" ad on TV (and if she were a man, think they'd call her "crazy"?). The ad not only takes alleged "praise" for Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter way, way out of context, but repeats phrases like "white racism" and "structural racism" with a sneer, as if that alone makes them "crazy" things to say! I could never vote for Ms. Barnette in the general election, but I hope she beats her opponents' asses beet-red in the primary, because the "Crazy" ad is exactly the kind of thing that should bring shame and shunning upon anyone who creates it.

Finally, the New York Times wonders why Rep. Conor Lamb, despite "Ha(ving) All the Makings of a Front-Runner," is not actually the front-runner in the race for the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nomination. I wouldn't blame you if you shot out because liberals are sick of this shit, that's why, but at least the Times did cite that (not in those precise words) as one of the two reasons, the other being the Lamb campaign's own "missteps." What were these "missteps"? Taking front-running status for granted, trying to appear "above the fray," calling yourself the "most electable" candidate -- in short, all of the things Democratic consultants always tell their candidates to do! If folks like John Fetterman and Lucas Kunce and Gary Chambers and Charles Booker can win their Senate elections this year, maybe folks will stop listening to the defeatist pablum of Democratic consultants. Why, folks might even realize that they're the reason Democrats went from (in Paul Begala's words) "the party of the factory floor to the party of the faculty lounge."

Around the table: more fallout from our Supreme Court's draft ruling.

What's even worse about Justice Alito's draft ruling overturning Roe v. Wade? That it opens the door to our Supreme Court doing so much more harm! As one observer writes, the ruling "disavows the entire line of jurisprudence upon which Roe rests: the existence of 'unenumerated rights' that safeguard individual autonomy from state invasion. Alito asserts that any such right must be 'deeply rooted' in the nation’s history and tradition, and access to abortion has no such roots." Of course abortion was legal in the United States until the early 1900s, so it actually has "deep roots." But can you think of any other rights they'll say aren't "deeply-rooted" enough? Yes, reader, you can! Like the right to gay and interracial marriage, the right to use birth control, and the right to keep your government out of your bedroom. As another observer put it: "Requiring civil rights to be 'deeply rooted in history' is a great way to say 'if you didn’t always have civil rights, then you should never have them,'" never mind that there is such a thing as arguing you should always have had these rights in the first place.

You heard Justice Barrett wonder why we even need abortion when we've got adoptions and no-questions-asked baby drop-offs? Kathryn Joyce at Salon tells us why that's more ignorant than it sounds. Long story short: relinquishing a baby for adoption is actually very traumatic, to the point that almost no one does it at a drop-off, plus the processes we've used for adoption (including "homes for unwed mothers" and, more recently, "shepherding families") have brutalized women, plus a lot of families want the "right" babies and you know what that means. Too often our Supreme Court Justices sound like aliens from another planet -- remember how Antonin Scalia asked what's the big deal with taking a day off to get your voter ID sorted? I'll bet that man never have had to ask for a day off in his life! So Barack Obama wasn't so dumb to say a Supreme Court Justice have a sense of what someone else's life is like. The right-wing majority on our Court sure doesn't have enough of a sense of that.

What is The Hidden Reason for Starbucks Worker Organizing, according to Armando Vega at The American Prospect? The pandemic, of course! A lot of Starbucks cafés shut down at pandemic's onset, which cut the workforce and, perhaps more importantly, cut workers off from each other. Then the sharp increase in mobile ordering didn't drop off once cafés reopened, meaning Starbucks had far more work than it had workers to do the work. Then Omicron hit, and workers made dozens of reasonable suggestions for protecting themselves from the vastly increased risk of contracting COVID -- only to have management "laugh() in our face," in the testimony of one worker. So it goes far beyond workers simply getting a little distance from their jobs and seeing things more clearly.

Four writers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation discuss ways Elon Musk could improve Twitter, and yes they're all good ideas, even though I already know how Mr. Musk feels about "less automation" and more humans in content moderation, "humans" being something only to be "authenticated" in his now-infamous phrase. (And authentication has its own problems, as you know if you know people in any kind of trouble anywhere on Earth.) But why isn't "starve the beast and let it die" an option? I think Facebook, terrible as it is today, was a net positive 10 years ago, but Twitter is a swamp and has always been a swamp, even in those days it wasn't particularly eager to amplify the voice of white supremacists. I'd advise everyone on Twitter to leave and go back to using email listservs. It's harder work, but so are most things worth doing. And photos and videos don't slow down your connection as much as they used to.

Kimberly Tower and Camille Gélix at The Conversation discuss how Marine LePen "gain(ed) ground with youth voters" -- and why American right-wingers have so far failed to do same. They don't come out and say it, but where American politicians make a show of fighting corporate power, Ms. LePen makes a better show, with actual proposals supporting French "economic self-sufficiency," financial assistance for student workers, and tougher food-safety regulations on meat. Meanwhile, American right-wingers love energy exports more than energy independence, lambaste college students for not bootstrapping enough, and want corporations to do their own food inspections. Broadly speaking, Ms. LePen lost more decisively to Mr. Macron than I expected, but she also lost by less than she did in 2017, and unless folks like Jean-Luc Mélenchon can get more traction, I don't see this story ending well.

Finally, a Democrat decisively wins a special election in a Michigan state house seat that has been in Republican hands since time immemorial -- at least partly because her Republican opponent has lately said rape victims should "lie back and enjoy it," a "joke" I first heard 40 years ago and one which sure doesn't play well given, ah, recent developments at our Supreme Court. And yeah, that's not the only stupid thing that guy has said lately, but more interestingly, Carol Glanville seems fairly focused on things that might actually get people to vote for her! Now, I'm not saying this is a bellwether race. But I am saying that defeating evil is possible in any district, anywhere, if we but imagine it.

Around the table: full of helpful reminders and helpful warnings.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) says Democrats will lose midterm elections if they don't do "big big things" "that are both badly needed and very popular with all Americans." You know, like we've been saying for a while, but still, it's good to hear a Democratic Senator say it. It's also good to hear a Democratic Senator say "Democrats cannot bow to the wisdom of out-of-touch consultants who recommend we simply tout our accomplishments." This is the woman who won re-election in 2018 by 30 points without running a single campaign ad on TV! Which at least one out-of-touch consultant then said was a big mistake if she wanted to run for President. Sexism sucks.

Alex Pareene provides yet another helpful reminder that right-wingers fully understand how journalism works, but simply don't want anyone to actually do it. "This new right fundamentally doesn’t want 'newsgathering' to happen," he writes. "They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda." As late as 2006 you couldn't get away from right-wingers who insisted, in America, that a journalist's only job was to write down what the President said and report it. I didn't think it could get any worse than that; as usual, I was far too optimistic.

When you confront the headline "Southwest Missouri high school teacher accused of using critical race theory loses job," I wouldn't blame you for thinking you mean she wasn't even "convicted"? But then, using a worksheet called "How Racially Privileged Are You?" isn't a crime, even if it makes some parents sad, and boy does the school come off as a bunch of cowards! Ms. Morrison refuted all their arguments and still heard but I'm hearing you're teaching CRT. Too many people value what they're "hearing" over what is. And some parents need to grow up.

If you needed more evidence of how cool Prince was, now you can watch the Purple One defend striking public school teachers as an 11-year-old boy in 1970. The Minneapolis public school system had a world-famous music program, which not only produced Prince and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and (of course) Morris Day but also Hüsker Dü and Alexander O'Neal who could sing a phone book. (Seriously! First time I heard "Saturday Love" I said is that Howard Hewitt?)

When I hear that "anti-woke" "warrior" David McCormick not only condemned "structural bigotry" right after the George Floyd shooting but went out of his way to make transgender folk more welcome at his hedge fund than anywhere else, all I can say is, well, buh-bye, David McCormick. Such are the wages of trying to con knuckle-draggers into voting for you. Now Pennsylvania Republicans can either have the Trump-certified candidate (Mehmet Oz) or one of the candidates Mr. Trump will happily certify if they win the primary (Jeff Bartos or Kathy Barnette).

Finally, I know Ted Cruz thinks he's funny when he says that Disney's (recent) opposition to Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law will lead one day to "Mickey and Pluto going at it," but he's not funny just like he wasn't funny when he was bashing Lisa Simpson, and Jesus Mary and Joseph one does get tired of slippery slope arguments. It's bad enough that folks still think homosexuality somehow leads to bestiality somehow, like a dog could conceivably consent to have sex with a human, but to assert that a rare corporate stand against bigotry will lead to the depiction of animal sex in a cartoon is ludicrous. I'd call it surreal, but surrealism has more rules than this.

Action: concerning anti-trans bills, Wall Street looting, campaign finance, conflicts of interest, big tech monopolies, and crack/powder sentencing.

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to reject anti-trans legislation, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, amend our Constitution to allow reasonable campaign finance regulation again, investigate Justice Thomas's possible conflicts of interest, pass antitrust legislation aimed at big tech corporations, and pass the EQUAL Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: H.B. 972 is yet another state-level transgender athletic ban, and the ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to oppose it. Look, this thing they pretend to fear, where boys become girls so they can dominate girls' athletics and bump girls out of scholarships to college? This does not happen, not just because federal regulations already require parental approval for trans kids to play sports. The people who pretend they think this happens display no evidence of ever having been a hormone-addled teenager, nor do they understand basic human greed -- people don't change sexes to dominate a sport only to be paid less than male athletes for the rest of their lives! Right-wingers love lecturing us on "human nature," but those of us who actually get it need to speak out.

Stop Wall Street Looting helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. You've heard enough over the years about banksters buying up corporations and draining the wealth out of them like vampires until all the workers are out in the street. The Stop Wall Street Looting Act would respond to that reality by taxing "carried interest" as regular income rather than investment income, forcing bankruptcy proceedings to take care of workers first, and stiffening penalties when banksters break the law. Note well the word "looting" here, as it reminds us (intentional or not, I couldn't say) that Ayn Rand, the right-wing thinker so many banksters worship, wouldn't call them "makers" but "looters." Hell, I'd call them takers! What a shame that today's elites would disappoint even the worst of our long-dead elites.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 80, which would amend our Constitution to overturn our Supreme Court's notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision and allow our government to restrain campaign finance again. Here's the amendment: "Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to forbid Congress or the States from imposing reasonable viewpoint-neutral limitations on private campaign contributions or independent election expenditures, or from enacting systems of public campaign financing, including those designed to restrict the influence of private wealth by offsetting campaign spending or independent expenditures with increased public funding." Virtually everyone in America supports this! So we should get it done.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Justice Clarence Thomas's behavior, particularly in re the January 6 attempted coup. The news hook there, of course, is his wife's incessant texting with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about the need to overturn the will of 81 million voters in 2020, but Justice Thomas also failed to recuse himself in 2000, even though his wife worked with the Bush transition team, or 2012, when his wife lobbied against the Affordable Care Act, or 2017, when his wife made money from one of the organizations working to uphold the Trump Muslim Ban. He'll insist that he's done everything above-board, but hey, if it looks bad, we should at least see if it is bad.

Both Public Citizen and Antitrust Day both help you tell your Congressfolk to pass antitrust reforms in re big tech corporations. Specifically, both tools help you ask your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act; the former bill would stop big tech corporations from favoring their products in your search results, while the latter bill would stop those corporations from forcing their users to use only their app store. That latter item might be a bit mind-blowing -- you're likely used to getting all your apps from one store, and you may imagine that there's just no other way to do it! But this is America, the can-do country, and too often we see that the world is a whole lot bigger than big corporations would like it to be. That's why we keep pushing them.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1693, the EQUAL Act, which would at long last equalize crack and powder cocaine sentencing in America, without amendment. Our House already passed the EQUAL Act by a huge, actually bipartisan margin; look over the list of Republicans who voted for it and you're bound to find at least a dozen names of people you really don't like. (Yes, Matt Gaetz was one of them.) It's almost like they've finally figured out that there's no reason to make sentences bigger for crack than powder, except racism. The main danger, I fear, is that some Senator or other will attach some poison pill amendment that would never survive the light of day on its own; feel free to communicate your will about this particular matter more forcefully in your email.

Around the table: today with mostly good news!

Good news, everyone! Staten Island, NY Amazon workers vote to form a labor union and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, and worker safety from their employer. It ain't over, of course -- Amazon is a big corporation, able to spend millions on lawsuits alleging union election improprieties -- but this vote represents a major victory for workers everywhere. Folks who still look down on warehouse workers (and baristas!) should remember that, many years ago, folks looked down on unionized manufacturing workers -- and now that they're all gone, we lionize them. Why, it's almost like we saw manufacturing workers as "unskilled" because they were unionized! And we learned to see warehouse workers and baristas that way, too, as a sort of preemptive strike against their eventual unionization.

More good news, everyone! A U.S. District Court Judge has blocked large parts of Florida's recent anti-voting law, SB 90, and moreover has required judicial preclearance for all Florida voting rights changes over the next decade, which requirement he may impose under the Voting Rights Act. Choice slab of understatement: "At some point, when the Florida Legislature passes law after law disproportionately burdening Black voters, this court can no longer accept that the effect is incidental." Plenty of folks think either the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals or our Supreme Court will overturn this decision, but I still applaud Judge Walker's courage. It's a shame that applying the law is an act of courage these days.

Our House passes a bill capping the price of insulin -- with only 12 Republicans voting in favor! I, too, thought Republicans wouldn't dare oppose something popular even with Republican voters, but again I find my optimism thwarted, not that I'll abandon it. Alleged moderate Republican Cathy McMorris-Rodgers of Washington state actually said, out loud, "today, it's the government fixing the price of insulin. What's next? Gas? Food?" Hey, while we're at it, how about cable? Seriously, that's what you're left arguing once you've decided to become the objectively pro-killing diabetics party. And you know how the likes of Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert occasionally vote for the right things when you least expect it? Ah, not this time -- all 12 Republicans who voted for it are the kind who'd pass for "moderate" today. Nobody's asked me, but I'd run ads about this bill against every last Republican who voted against it.

Senators refuse to even begin debate on the House-passed Women's Health Protection Act, and the 48 Senators who wouldn't even begin debate include, of course, the Penguin of West Virginia and reputed "moderates" Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both "pro-choice" but, well, not that pro-choice, actually. And just as Republicans don't actually win a whole lot of elections by "energizing the base" with doomed votes, I don't think Democrats will energize the base nearly enough like this, either. Now, that insulin vote, which I presume won't get enough Republican support in the Senate? That's something that'll energize people (not just "the base"!) to vote against Republicans. Too many analysts say "the Democrats need to move to the center to win" instead of Democrats need to support the things everyone supports to win. A lot of them have done that, on insulin and elsewhere; now they just need to promote that.

Rep. Conor Lamb (D-PA), running for Pennsylvania's open Senate seat in 2022, accuses Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (who's seeking the same seat) of avoiding a Democratic candidate debate because he doesn't want to answer questions about the time he pulled a gun on a Black jogger in 2013. Mr. Lamb is right that Republicans will make an issue of that incident, but you may also notice that he launched this attack with a full month and a half to go before the primary, which makes me think he's actually doing the party a favor. And if he were doing it just to bolster his campaign, he'd have waited until the last two weeks (or at least the late April debates) before bringing it up.

Finally, ain't no good news Joe "the Penguin" Manchin can't shit on, and so it goes with his hysterical pronouncement that President Biden's decision to rescind Donald Trump's anti-immigration Title 42 "health order" is a "frightening decision." "Frightening"? Really? I thought this was a salt of the Earth guy who didn't frighten easily! Mexicans ain't bringing COVID with them to America, as we would know merely by remembering how high immigration was late last spring and how low COVID numbers were. And Americans have done well enough keeping the COVID pandemic going on our own, thank you very much, largely by throwing tantrums about masks and vaccines; how does Joe Manchin not know this? Oh, I forgot: despite all his strutting around about how Only He Understands the Common Man, he doesn't talk to voters, only to oligarchs.

Action: concerning COVID, gas prices, scientific integrity, no-knock warrants, abortion, and pot.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to approve emergency COVID funding and pass the Stop Gas Price Gouging Tax and Rebate Act, the Scientific Integrity Act, the Amir Locke End Deadly No-Knock Warrants Act, the EACH Act, and the MORE Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to approve additional funding for fighting COVID. Another omicron variant is on its way, and our government has run out of money for testing and vaccines; Congress didn't include more COVID funding as part of its last appropriations bill, apparently because they feared Republicans would object to it and scuttle everything. To which I respond: make them! And though I know the Lancet predicted, a few months ago, that the pandemic would be over soon, that's still a prediction, not a certainty, even if pretty good science buttresses it, so one should be prudent and prepare for the possibility that things could go wrong. Apparently it takes a liberal to preach prudence these days.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7099, the Stop Gas Price Gouging Tax and Rebate Act. Similar to the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, the Stop Gas Price Gouging Tax and Rebate Act would impose a 50% excise tax on crude oil-producing corporations on profits that exceed 10% over their average profits from 2015-19. The bill would then deliver the proceeds back to working families as monthly rebates. House Democrats should pass this bill posthaste and then put Senate Republicans on the spot. Let them say they can big oil corporations may not be price-gouging; people will love that! And let them be the ones to snatch monthly checks out of good Americans' hands; people will love that, too!

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 849, the Scientific Integrity Act. You remember how the Trump Administration EPA stacked its scientific boards with pollution industry hacks? Well, the Scientific Integrity Act would fight that, by making all executive branch agencies develop and enforce a scientific integrity plan that keeps politics out of scientific decisions. In practice, that means polluting corporations won't be able to dominate decisions about stopping pollution, a sentence that probably seems self-evident to you, but a lot of politicians seem to have trouble understanding the whole concept! Plus the bill would keep political employees' grubby mitts off scientific findings and give whistleblowers more power to expose wrongdoing. These are good works, and we should make Congress do them.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6877, the Amir Locke End Deadly No-Knock Warrants Act, which would, as its title indicates, vastly reduce no-knock warrants (and therefore deadly ones). It wouldn't outlaw them -- the court issuing the warrant would have to establish "clear and convincing evidence, supported by particularized facts, that...notice prior to entry would substantially endanger the life or safety of the law enforcement officer or other persons," which is the exception for which any reasonable person would ask -- and which most right-wingers will pretend doesn't exist in the bill, though it's in Sec. 3(a)(2). The bill would also outlaw no-knock warrants for drug cases, which would curtail (though not end) unannounced entry.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2234/S. 1021, the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (or EACH) Act, which would make federal health care programs cover abortion services, and make federal health care facilities provide access to abortion. Because abortion is a legal medical procedure, that's why! And if we don't provide abortion, we will make women breeders, and we're not much of a civilization if we do that. Pro-lifers would say we're not much of a civilization if we tolerate abortion, but all civilizations have to choose between greater and lesser evils. When men can give birth, and science can progress beyond using abortions to save would-be mothers' lives, we can think about all of this again.

Finally, Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement (or MORE) Act. Yes, Democrats will bring it up for a vote, thanks to our pressure; now we have to convince our Reps to pass it. They'll quake in fear of Republicans saying they're "soft on crime," but consider that Republicans say we should have fewer laws preventing polluters from befouling our air and water; why don't we call that "soft on crime"? After all, dumping poison in a lake or river hurts far more people than a burglary does; it doesn't feel that way to the burglary victim, obviously, but pollution still hurts more people. We should think of punishing polluters (or banksters, or tax cheats, or Medicare fraudsters) as being "tough on crime." I'll keep saying it until we do.

Around the table: of despots, oligarchs, and unwanted comebacks.

Remember how we were saying Vlad the Bad's oligarchs don't mess with his political dealings because he leaves them alone in their financial dealings? Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, goes deeper into that story, revealing how the billionaires picked Mr. Putin in the first place back in the 1990s. Incredibly, the Russian oligarchs actually went looking for a "Russian Pinochet" (this, while the actual Pinochet faced murder charges related to his nefarious rule!) to replace Boris Yeltsin, not just with Mr. Yeltsin's acquiescence, but with the actual help of Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, last seen telling America to fight inflation not by fighting monopolies (as the Biden Administration would do) but by pressing down even harder on the throats of working families.

Homeless folks and their advocates have begun an Occupy-style protest in none other than Boise, ID. Since the Ninth Circuit rules that Boise couldn't just criminalize homelessness, particularly if they weren't going to give homeless folks a place to stay, Boise police appear to be shaking down the homeless, often under the guise of "welfare checks" (which don't require warrants), hence the occupation of the state Capitol Mall. I wish them luck in persuading a state (and a nation) that they do matter and that our treatment of them matters, if we want to call ourselves civilized. Hell, Utah's as right-wing as Idaho is, and they do much better by their homeless.

Richard C. Gross at Counterpunch summarizes the right-wing stratagem in America about as succinctly as I've seen it done: "suppressing voting rights, restricting abortions, curbing teaching about race and identity, banning books in schools and libraries and picking on one of the most vulnerable in society – LGBTQ youths." After all, as he suggests, right-wingers not only can't win elections with superior ideas, they can't win arguments on the merits. Democrats would do well to use a similar summary in political ads -- in conjunction with their own accomplishments, which I expect to be more apparent by mid-summer -- though I doubt they have the guts. The Jesse Jackson epigraph -- "In politics, an organized minority is a political majority" -- is as stark as it is instructive.

Ho hum, Wisconsin Elections Commission won't do anything to the 10 Republicans who tried to pass themselves off as Presidential electors in 2020. I shudder to think the real reason they laid off was that one of the 10 was also one of the Commissioners, but you know what would be worse? If they actually believed the 10 fake electors' claim that they were just "keeping their options open" in case Mr. Trump won any of the 60-odd frivolous lawsuits he lost. And the Commission says Wisconsin state law doesn't prevent "alternative" electors from "meeting"; does it prevent them from pretending they're the real electors in a race their man obviously lost? Law and order!

When I hear that the Alaska legislature is contemplating a bill that would outlaw state IDs that comply with the national REAL ID system, all I can say is at last, the vaunted Alaska libertarian streak returns! The bill, HB 389, would give good Alaskans the option of using a driver's license photo that can't be read by facial recognition software, plus it would force Alaskan state government (namely the DMV; we'll get to them) to destroy all of its current drivers' license photos and prohibit "bulk sharing" of any of said photos -- a big deal since the Alaska DMV decided all by itself and in defiance of state law to upload all of its REAL-ID-compatible photos to the national database in 2017. I don't know if I've said this here, but folks who obsess over other people's papers are pretty much telling the world they don't know how to do anything about anything important.

Finally, recently-disgraced Andrew Cuomo says he not only might run for a fourth term as Governor of New York, but might create his own political party to do so. To which I must ask: why does he think people love him so much that he could create his own party? That man has always needed Democrats more than they have ever needed him. And boy do I wish he'd STFU about "cancel culture" already. He didn't "say" stuff so much as he did stuff, the First Amendment doesn't protect you from your employer, and we've accepted sexual harassment in the workplace is wrong for over three decades now. Hate to pile on, but I'm tired of hearing that "we have to reduce the anger in politics" from the people who stoke the anger with their wrongdoing.

Action: concerning sanctions, abortion, drug prices, the war on Yemen, and conservation.

Long story short: tell President Biden to lift sanctions on Venezuela, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women's Health Protection Act, lower prescription drug prices, end the war on Yemen, and pass the Recovering America's Wildlife Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, reminds us that it we really want to hit Vladimir Putin in the family jewels, we should lift our sanctions on Venezuela, which could produce more cheap oil than Russia ever could if our sanctions weren't crippling them. You can still contact President Biden here; I'd say call him at 1.202.456.1111, but that number only operates between 11 am and 3 pm on Tuesday through Thursday. Did Venezuela invade someone to get sanctioned by our government? Of course not -- we're sanctioning them for wanting to nationalize their oil and levy taxes against big oil corporations, which they have the right to do, being a democracy and all. Yes, they are a democracy; can we say as much about Russia, let alone the numerous other nations we enable? So let's tighten our grip around Mr. Putin's neck and correct a serious injustice in one fell swoop.

Our Senate votes today on H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act, so Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass this bill. If you call your Senators, and you know you're calling one who'll likely vote against the bill, all you need do is list the good things the bill would do, such that they would be compelled to answer: yes, I want clinics to dispense harmful information just to lead women away from getting abortions, and yes, I want forced ultrasounds on all pregnant women, and yes, I want abortion clinics to adhere to absurdly-high standards just so most of them close, and no, I don't want women to be able to get abortions even if their pregnancies threaten their lives. Seriously, let's make them put it like that.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices. 80% of Americans want Medicare to be able to negotiate drug prices, just so drug prices can be lower for everyone, and even Newt Gingrich says if 70% of Americans want something they should have it, but because Kyrsten Sinema and Bob Menendez don't want it -- two people -- we can't have it, even though one in three Americans are currently rationing their medicines because they really can't afford them. That includes one in four Americans rationing insulin, though insulin is literally a life-saving drug. So this isn't just about doing the will of the American people, it's also about fucking saving lives. Sorry, these Senator Galaxybrains bring out the cuss words.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Remember when Donald Trump would conduct a "different" kind of foreign policy? Well, he didn't stop our involvement in the war that's driving a nation to famine and killing some of the best counter-terrorists on Earth, so you know that was a lie. And remember when Joe Biden said he'd be ending military support for the war? That's still going on, sadly, so you know that was a lie. A War Powers Resolution would at least take back (and use!) the power that Congress should never have delegated to Presidents (including Barack Obama, you didn't think he was off the hook, did you?) to begin with.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2773/S. 2372, the Recovering America's Wildlife Act. What would this bill do? It would fund our most pressing wildlife conservation efforts, and it would draw that funding from the folks who violate our clean air and clean water laws and pay fees and fines because of it. The Senate version of this bill, you may notice, has an equal number of Democratic and Republican sponsors at this writing (16 of each); even the House version counts 37 Republicans among its 164 sponsors. Presumably Republican politicians support this bill because it lets states dictate which are our most pressing wildlife conservation needs; I might do it differently, but I wouldn't let the perfect murder the good, either. So let's get this done.

Action: concerning rape, pollution, taxes, and law and order.

Long story short: tell Honduras to sign a bill allowing rape victims to access emergency contraceptives, tell Chile to start regulating the clothing industry, tell New York's Governor to extend clemency to Robert Webster, tell President Biden to end offshore drilling, tell our IRS to simplify free tax filing, and tell our Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for the January 6 attempted coup. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell Honduran President Xiomara Castro (Honduras's first female President) to sign a bill that would repeal Honduras's ban on emergency contraception. She's under a lot of pressure not to sign the bill, and you can guess how that pressure reveals itself: "this is too risky a move for a President not even a month into her term," "the first female President shouldn't appear to be too friendly to women," "don't you know we only outlawed the killing of women in 2013 and we barely prosecute it?" But right is right and wrong is wrong, and you know what's wrong? Raping 12-year-old girls and demanding they carry any resulting pregnancies to term, that's what. And that happens in Honduras all the time. Good Hondurans bear the primary responsibility for getting their President to do their will, but nothing prevents us from helping out.

Sum of Us helps you tell Chilean President Gabriel Boric to stop allowing big clothing corporations to use Chile as a dumping ground. You've heard of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," a massive floating island of plastic trash now three times as large as France floating in the Pacific? Now acquaint yourself with the mountain of clothes growing in the Atacama Desert, made up of clothes manufactured largely in Asia, unsold in Europe and America, and dumped as trash in Chile. Ugly, to be sure, but you may not be convinced that this is a big deal, particularly for a new President who, having declared that "(n)eoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die," might be looking for bigger fish. But nobody wants their country used as someone else's trashcan. Indeed, Mr. Boric may owe his election to that sentiment.

Change.org helps you tell New York Gov. Hochul to free Robert Webster, currently serving a 50-year sentence for arson. You'll recognize most of this story -- a conviction based entirely on witness testimony, exculpating evidence not fully explored at trial, a judge failing to account for Mr. Websters' status as a minor during sentencing -- but you may also be wondering: half a century for arson? The arson's aftermath involved a police officer's murder, which may have induced a longer sentence for Mr. Webster -- a much longer sentence than the one given for the police officer's murder, if you can believe it. Has Mr. Webster been even better than a model prisoner despite spending two-thirds of his life in prison? Yes, he has. So let's help him out.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell President Biden to end offshore drilling. The Administration has just started leasing a million acres off Alaska's Cook Inlet for gas and oil drilling, and I've recited the problems with Arctic drilling enough over the years -- oh, hell, one more time: oil spills are even harder to clean up in the Arctic's frigid waters, we know little enough about the Arctic ecosystem that we don't know all the harm drilling would do, and fishing is a big industry in Alaska that would be endangered by the inevitable oil spill. A federal court stopped the Biden Administration's big Gulf of Mexico leasing plan, but the Administration ought to see the writing on the wall by now, not just in court, but in a warming world where other, more renewable technologies can shoulder more of our energy burden.

Public Citizen helps you tell our IRS to implement free tax filing for good Americans who have relatively easy tax filing to do, which is most of us. Our laws already authorize our IRS to do this! And if you have relatively straightforward tax issues, our IRS already has all the information it needs to fill our your damn tax return for you! I suppose the objection would be that "tax-filing is a big business in America," but if a big chunk of that business doesn't need it, does that business deserve to be so big? Of course not! That business will have plenty of work for folks with complex investments and the like. But charging folks hundreds of dollars every year for doing work they don't need to do? That's profoundly wasteful, and our economy shouldn't churn money from waste.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for his actions leading up to the January 6 attempted coup. We have lately learned that Mr. Trump was already preparing to fight a 2020 election loss in court three months before Election Day, and while I'm sure his votaries call that "being prepared," it also means folks like John Eastman (who wrote the infamous memo laying out how Mike Pence could have invalidated 2020 election results on January 6) and Cleta Mitchell (who participated in Mr. Trump's infamous "find 11,780 votes" call to Georgia's Secretary of State) might have more to tell, since they advised these legal efforts from the start. And look, we all know he would have done anything to win; now we need only know what laws he might have broken.

Around the table: Republicans have an agenda! (Spoiler alert: it sucks.)

When I hear that women fight reactionary forces in Kuwait who call the mere presence of yoga classes an affront to Islam, I can't be too proud that at least American women can go to yoga classes largely unmolested, not least because American women still had to get their husbands' permission to get credit cards during my lifetime. These right-wing drama hounds may say they're "defending the daughters" of Kuwait, but American right-wingers sound no different, and I'm pretty sure they look at how much further Kuwaiti women have to go and wish they could start America from there! I wish the women of Kuwaiti luck, and how about the rest of us stop appeasing assholes?

Sanitation workers in San Diego County win a fairly substantial raise after going on strike for seven weeks with enthusiastic community support. Yes, even though they weren't getting their trash picked up, to the point where the city of Chula Vista actually declared a public health emergency. The new contract did not resolve many of the workers' grievances -- like poorly-maintained garbage trucks, that's a big one -- and I think it'll take many, many more strikes to get those issues resolved, because they don't actually work for the county government, but for Republic, a corporation that collects trash in 40 states and pays its CEO $12 million annually. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's yet another argument against privatization.

Jim Hightower describes "Corporate Profiteers' Pandemic Strategy" thusly: "Gouge Consumers and Blame Joe Biden." "What the GOP bemoans as America’s inflation problem," he writes, "is actually a corporate greed problem" (italics in original, I swear!) because "our economy doesn’t remotely resemble a competitive marketplace." You'll be familiar with the record-profits-but-still-raising-prices-story, but you may be less familiar with corporate monopoly's effects on small businesses, such as the cattle ranchers who get less money for their beef as meat processors charge consumers more. Read to the end so you can do something about all of this, versus just staying angry.

John F. Tooker at The Conversation warns us that we are overusing seeds coated with insecticides. Coating a seed with insecticide? What will they think of next? With neonicotinoid-coated seeds now being planted in just about all corn and cotton fields and about half of soybean fields, the answer to that question is, as always, "whatever allows big ag to hire fewer workers." Pretty soon nobody's going to have the money to buy food! Mr. Tooker isn't anti-neonic per se, but would prefer that farmers use integrated pest management, which I sure hope wouldn't involve introducing any more invasive species (after all, the spotted lanternfly is one of those species that makes neonics useful).

From the "Who Greenlighted This?" file: a bitcoin "mining" corporation rescues a Montana "zombie" coal plant which had operated on only 46 days in 2020, and perhaps not unexpectedly, the climate change emissions skyrocket. "This isn’t helping old ladies from freezing to death," one observer notes, "it’s to enrich a few people while destroying our climate for all of us." So how did Marathon get its gnarled hand around the Hardin plant? Oh, the usual way -- by promising JOBZ!!!! Though we read yesterday about how fossil fuel corporations' job promises typically fall well short. And while wind isn't the zero-sum game coal is, I'd prefer wind turbines power homes and businesses rather than speculative investments. No, I will not call it "currency," because it's not currency. Words mean things, after all.

Finally, Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) releases an 11-point agenda for Republicans if they take back Congress in 2022, and most of it makes you realize that Mitch McConnell's refusal to issue any agenda makes him the brains of that outfit. I've already got the ad written: "Sir, what would Republicans do about inflation?" "We'll finish the border wall and name it after Trump!" "I see. So what would Republicans do about high prescription drug prices?" "We will make a law saying there are only two genders!" "Don't see how those relate; so what would Republicans do about paid family leave?" "We're going to take critical race theory out of the schools!" "OK, so family, schools, I guess -- what would Republicans do about corporate monopolies?" "We will make private corporations do everything government does!" "Uh huh. Oh, and what's this I hear about Republicans wanting to raise taxes on half of all Americans?"

Action: concerning January 6, tax cuts for working families, raising taxes on the rich, voting rights, and abortion.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump for the January 6 attempted coup, and tell your Congressfolk to extend the Child Tax Credit expansion, tax billionaire wealth, protect our voting rights, and pass the Women's Health Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. The first anniversary of Trump supporters attempting a coup against our government was yesterday, and Attorney General Merrick Garland made a point of addressing the nation about the investigation the day before, but if you're thinking the investigation will ensnare a lot of the folks who paraded through our Capitol with their Confederate flags while letting the coup's planners off, well, I wouldn't blame you. Hence Public Citizen helps you remind our Justice Department to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 attempted coup. He's the top dog, after all, no matter how much he avoids taking any responsibility for his many mistakes. And our House's January 6 committee has been uncovering a whole lot of probable cause for that investigation.

Both Daily Kos and Moms Rising help you demand that our Congress pass the Build Back Better Act and thus extend the Child Tax Credit expansion that has kept millions of kids out of poverty. Yeah, the pundits say the Build Back Better Act is dead, but it ain't dead until we say it's dead. Also, fuck the pundits! And seriously, if Joe Manchin wants to be The Man Who Took Your $300 Checks Away because his CEO buddies told him people just use their CTC expansion on drugs, should we allow that argument to win the day? No, we should not, and that's why we need to tell our Congressfolk to act. Yeah, we've told them a hundred times already. And we may have to tell them a hundred more! Might as well get to it, then. Nobody said democracy was easy. Nobody worth listening to, anyway.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to include a billionaire wealth tax in the Build Back Better Act. Because billionaires are making money hand over fist during this pandemic while you're just scraping by, that's why! They're not more talented than you, and they don't work harder than you, a matter in which I have received a 30-plus-year education. Now, both Joe "the Penguin" Manchin and Kyrsten "the Joker" Sinema have made positive noises lately about taxing billionaire wealth! But don't believe it -- they have thoroughly enjoyed pulling the football back at the last second (OK, that's a lot of childhood comics metaphors in one paragraph), and they'll do it again and again and again, unless we make our will unmistakable.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to do whatever it takes to protect our voting rights, including ditching the filibuster. Because with these Republicans it'll come to that! And when Joe Manchin says changes to the filibuster should be "bipartisan," remind him that you have communicated your will to him and that his entire job is doing the will of his constituents, none of whom give one rat's hind-quarter about whether rules changes are "bipartisan." And when Kyrsten Sinema talks about "changing behavior" rather than "changing rules," remind her that you have communicated your will to her and that her job is doing the will of her constituents, who won't care about her hair-splitting when they get turned away at the voting booth for no good reason.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. Let's list some of the things states have done in recent years: they've forced women to undergo ultrasounds and state reasons for getting an abortion before getting one, they've allowed entities to disperse lies about abortions to prevent women from getting them, they've held abortion facilities to higher standards than other hospitals for no health-related reason, and they've prevented doctors from giving abortions when the woman's health or life is threatened. The Women's Health Protection Act would sweep all of that (and more) away. Most, if not all, women would appreciate that. Those who get off on telling women what to do won't appreciate, but that's their fault.