Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns!

Remember the Hunter Biden whistleblower Rudy Giuliani said was dead? Apparently he’s not dead, and he now faces a litany of federal criminal charges. That fact doesn’t mean he’s wrong! The fact that he’s been convicted of crimes before doesn’t mean he’s wrong! But the fact that his most ardent Republican supporters can’t describe the case he’s making against President Biden? Yeah, that could mean he’s wrong. All the drama around his appearance doesn’t exactly inspire trust, either.

When you hear that “Right-Wing Websites Connected to Former Trump Lawyer Are Scamming Loyal Followers With Phony Celebrity Pitches,” you may well know what to expect: political operatives whose names you may remember, players who’ve faced criminal charges multiple times, corporations you can’t find at the addresses they give, even the excuse that “(w)e don’t care” about fradulent ads “because we think our readership is smart enough to not be scammed.” Yeah, this article’s got it all, sadly.

Here’s some good news: hedge fund corporation Insight has withdrawn from managing Pennsylvania’s public school pension funds, after Gov. Shapiro applied pressure. Insight has not only returned Pennsylvania pensioners little on their investment, it’s also been fined by our SEC and gotten mixed up in crypto. Mr. Shapiro also fought to get banksters out of Montgomery County pensions during his tenure as county executive a decade ago; why, he might be a good Presidential candidate in 2028! And if right-wing heads explode at the prospect of a Jewish President, that’s not exactly a drawback.

Sonali Kohatkar explains the simple reason we have homelessness in America: because “(t)he rent is too damn high” and “wages are too damn low.” You should still read her article from front to back, though – I should already have known that sexual and domestic assault was a significant factor in homelessness, and giving tenants and community land trusts first and second crack at buying homes (i.e., before hedge funds) is a good idea. But I think higher Fed interest rates, whatever their other merits or drawbacks, will drive down hedge fund involvement in home-buying – hedge funds do more damage when loans are cheap, after all.

When I hear that seven Republican Attorneys General have threatened Target with legal action over pride displays, in the name of “protect(ing) children from harmful content meant to sexualize them,” I feel compelled to respond that only an asshole assumes that pride displays automatically “sexualize” children. If watching cishetero couples kiss doesn’t “sexualize” children, then neither does a pride display showing no one kissing! We have to wonder, of course, whether Republicans’ real problem is that they don’t get to sexualize children the way they want to, by which I mean they don’t get to sexualize girls into permanent submission as breeders.

Finally, some bad news: the Trump-appointed judge overseeing his classified documents trial has taken steps to ensure jury selection will occur in the reddest part of her judicial district. We all worried a jury of 12 would have one secret red hat gumming up the works, and though I’m sure it’s possible to find 12 non-red hats even in an area that went 62% for Trump, it sure ain’t likely. The good news? These aren’t the only charges he’ll face!

Around the table: of Nazi wannabes, scaredy-cat Presidential candidates, and Democrat weakness.

So Rep. Paul Gosar’s (E-AZ) 19-year-old digital director is a superfan of Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes. This article helpfully leads off with eight paragraphs describing Mr. Fuentes responding to a rift (i.e., drama) within his ranks by demanding that his followers “pledge your allegiance to me forever.” Jesus Mary and Joseph anyone who makes you take an oath of loyalty to them should be shunned and shamed until they’re completely alone in the world. Being completely alone in the world is a horrible thing, so I don’t say that lightly. But hey, what you deserve is what you deserve. And Nazi wannabes deserve loneliness.

U Cal-Berkeley researchers find that, contrary to what right-wing economists constantly tell us, that counties that have hiked their minimum wage over the last few years have seen more job growth, not less. They also found that mid-wage workers did not see lower wages as a result of minimum wage hikes, though right-wing economists have warned about that, too. But the research finds this wage and job growth happens more readily in areas with fewer employers, another condition we shouldn’t let exist (and exists mainly because we let corporations get so big). Still, this is another lesson to ignore the Henny Penny tales of right-wingers.

Dig Nikki Haley’s utter inability to decide what she thinks about E. Jean Carroll’s defamation/sexual assault judgment against Donald Trump! “I have always said that anyone that feels like they have been sexually assaulted in any way should come forward and have their voice heard. I also think that anyone that’s been accused should be able to defend themselves. I was not on the jury. I am not the judge. I think that both of them had their voices heard. There has been a verdict and there has been an appeal.” And they say Hillary Clinton never says what she means! Seriously, you don’t need to be judge or jury to know Donald Trump is a predator, and if you’re that afraid of his votaries, don’t run for President.

Ho hum, House Oversight Committee releases 65-page report purporting to describe vast corruption in the Biden family but describing exactly zero criminal acts. Remember when last Wednesday was going to be “Judgment Day” for the Biden family? Good times! This should be yet another lesson about the right’s propensity to brutalize good Americans with lengthy, empty arguments – indeed, I feel like I’ve offered dozens of these lessons – but I have a feeling our “liberal” media will never learn it. Partly that’s because it requires reading, and not getting clicks or juicing up your stock price.

When I hear that “centrist” Democrats have privately assured Speaker McCarthy that they’ll vote for him for Speaker if far-right Republicans try to depose him, I must wonder: do these clowns understand how things work? Is there a hostage crisis they won’t help create by offering themselves up as hostages? Let far-right fools depose Mr. McCarthy and force Republicans to have a new Speaker every three months. Default doesn’t have to happen first; these “moderate” Republicans everyone talks about could step up and help prevent a default. But give in now and Republicans will hold the country hostage again and again and again. They deserve oblivion, but so do their enablers.

Finally, when I hear that Joe Manchin is still flirting with that independent Presidential run he’ll never actually embark upon, I’m pretty sure he thinks this particular drama (like his I’ll-scuttle-my-own-climate-change-law BS) will get him the right kind of attention in his inevitable West Virginia Senate re-election campaign. He might even be right about that! Of course, the easier path for him would have been to do things for his constituents and then explain to them why he did them. Given that West Virginians actually liked most of those parts of Joe Biden’s agenda that Mr. Manchin single-handedly scuttled (i.e., paid family/medical leave), this wouldn’t have been as hard as he might think.

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.

Action: concerning online privacy, child marriage, law and order, education, public water, and plastic pollution.

Long story short: tell the California legislature to pass a bill protecting children online, tell your Congressfolk to pass a child marriage ban, tell our FBI to investigate Jelani Day's death, tell state governments to teach the history of all Americans and not just white ones, tell BlueTriton's Chair to abandon his public water-stealing ways, and tell our government to stop buying single-use plastics. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will, and 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 Senators' phone numbers, where appropriate.

First things first: Sum of Us helps you tell California legislators to pass AB 2273, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which would help keep kids safer online. Specifically, the bill (per its abstract) would set standards for corporations "that creates goods, services, or product features likely to be accessed by children"; these standards would include "considering the best interests of children" at all stages of production and providing clear community and privacy standards, plus the bill would prohibit them from collecting and using kids' personal data. Big tech corporations want to kill the bill, but let's not allow them to have all the say about everything; kids deserve an internet that speaks to their needs, not one that contorts them into "adults" before they're ready, and certainly not one that bombards them with targeted ads before they can handle it.

Change.org helps you tell our Congressfolk to pass a national child marriage ban. Only six out of 50 states have a minimum marriage age of 18, and it doesn't matter that some religions approve of child marriage, because our civilization as a whole does not, because kids can't make adult decisions about consent to sex or marriage, and in any case religious "freedom" doesn't give anyone the "right" to abridge anyone else's rights, which child marriage most certainly does. Also, kids forced into marriage are too young to file for divorce or get into a domestic violence shelter, leaving them no options except abuse and molestation. If we want to earn the mantle of "civilized people," we need to outlaw child marriage; 300,000 children getting married in America between 2000 and 2018 testifies that we need to do better.

Daily Kos helps you tell our FBI to investigate the suspicious death of Jelani Day, a Black graduate student and aspiring doctor who disappeared last August and whose body was found face-down in the Illinois River 60 miles away from his school a week and a half later. That's suspicious enough, but local police declared his death a drowning three weeks after finding him, and claimed to find no evidence of foul play or intoxication, though they found some of his personal items in more than one location a mile away from his car, which had no keys or license plates. Local police have seemed strangely incurious about all of these suspicious events; perhaps our FBI will demonstrate that curiosity this tragedy, and justice, demands. But only if we demand it of them.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell state governments that our schools "must teach American history, not just straight white history." Right-wingers all over America have demanded that schools excise any teaching of American racism that might offend their frail sensibilities; right-wingers have a word for this kind of person (that would be a "snowflake"), but then they rarely demonstrate very much self-awareness. I quarrel, a little, with the petition's metaphor likening these right-wingers to a "squeaky wheel get(ting) the grease." I mean, it is apt, of course, but a better one would be the emptiest wagon makes the loudest noise. Over the decades, right-wingers have embodied this metaphor over and over again with their drama and hysteria. One does tire of it.

Sum of Us helps you tell BlueTriton Chair Dean Metropoulos to stop siphoning off public water everywhere he goes. BlueTriton bought Nestlé's water bottling operation in North America last year and renamed it, but you can't just put lipstick on any old pig, particularly when BlueTriton has kept up the old Nestlé habit of buying up all the public water it can on the cheap so it can put it in bottles and sell it as "spring water" or whatever. Why do we bother petitioning Mr. Metropoulos? I wouldn't blame you for thinking that's a little like petitioning the Riddler or Mr. Freeze, but we petition him to put him on notice that his name may, one day, be mud to future generations. If there are any! I mean, if folks like Mr. Metropoulos get their way, future generations may not have any water to drink unless they're very, very rich!

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our federal government to stop buying single-use plastics. More specifically, you'll ask the General Services Administration, which controls procurement, to prohibit federal agencies from buying these plastic products. Since they pollute the world and cause health problems for so many people and animals! Our federal government is the world's biggest consumer, and if they will stop buying single-use plastic products, then there'll be a lot less demand for them, and then there'll be a lot less of them clogging up landfills and getting into our air and water and bodies. I can already see the headlines on Fox News: Big Government Won't Let Defense Department Buy Bottled Water! But gosh, how did we ever hydrate before bottled water? They hope you don't ask.

Around the table: featuring stories about the power of organizing.

When I hear that far-right Christians aim to redeploy the "Astroturf" stratagem that worked so well for them in Virginia in 2021, I feel compelled to remind everyone that once we reveal such a stratagem (and I'll continue to reveal it as often as I can!) it becomes less effective, and also that as even E.J. Jackson knows, running against Terry McAuliffe isn't the hardest thing a candidate can do. Their stratagem might succeed, though, if Democrats don't point out all the Astroturfing going on in these races. People are too quick to accept that someone they know personally couldn't possibly be part of an Astroturf group! But too many of them are, and borrowing a hedge-trimmer from one of them doesn't make them more "real."

Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone not only digs up evidence that our FBI did, in fact, know a lot about the January 6 attempted coup before it happened, but also reminds us that our FBI professes that it simply doesn't have the legal tools to detect right-wing agitation before it happens but can detect and disrupt more peaceful liberal agitation with laughable ease. Which further reminds us that law enforcement agencies always use events like the January 6 attempted coup to justify even more surveillance power over the American people, when they hardly need it! They just don't focus very much on right-wing protestors, for some reason. Also, they don't seem to need to get warrants very often; there's a reason we get warrants.

On March 29, wind power produced more electricity than either coal or nuclear power for the first time; though not as much as natural gas. I can already hear the right-wingers squeal that TEH BIG GUMMINTZ GIVEZ TEH WELFAREZ TO TEH WINDZ POWERZ!!!!!, as if either coal or nuclear power would be able to provide any power at all without massive federal taxpayer support. Think how much power wind could supply if big corporations had done the smart thing and embraced it long ago! Versus the dumb thing of clinging like grim death to fossil fuel technology that's going to make our planet unlivable. (No, they're not "smart" merely because they've made a lot of money. Try taking money with you to the Pearly Gates.)

Luis Feliz Leon at New York Focus reminds us that the Amazon Labor Union organizing effort in the Staten Island warehouse "broke many of the traditional rules of labor organizing, while making history." The ALU had virtually no funding, no prior experience organizing, and no support from other unions; they also made "amateur missteps" like filing for an NLRB election before having majority card-signing support and refraining from home visits and door-knocking. So how did they win? They organized by talking to workers in break areas and in the cafeteria rather than at home -- since, as one organizer suggests, most folks look at their home as a safe space from work -- and used social media apps to specifically to reach workers whose command of the English language wasn't that great face-to-face. Besides, they're not the first independent union to win! In the '30s, those unions won all the time -- and after ALU won, more established unions supported them.

Mark and Paul Engler at Waging Nonviolence interview Rebecca Tarlau about "What U.S. Organizers Can Learn From Brazil's Landless Workers Movement." "(W)e need to contest power in all spaces of social life" (i.e., not just in the political sphere), "whether that’s in the media or the schools or with the land," and Brazil's Landless Workers Movement has been doing that for decades, whether through gaining permanent settlements or through establishing and maintaining health care clinics, educational curricula, and food processing plants. So they've essentially seized power without very much compromise by providing for their own needs as much as possible and through that service "prefiguring an alternative way of being" -- though when the Black Panthers (among others!) tried something similar in the United States in the '70s, our governments demonized them and our law enforcement took them down.

Finally, Indonesia's Parliament passes a bill criminalizing many forms of sexual violence, the first of its kind in that nation. Many observers think it doesn't go far enough -- it tackles domestic abuse, child marriage, forced marriage, and sexual exploitation but not rape -- while the religious right there complains that it doesn't include proscriptions against extramarital sex (like those guys really want that!) and "deviant" sexual orientations. My father would say if all the extremists are upset, it must be a good bill; I won't go that far, but I will call it progress, even if, as I suspect, getting it passed was (in Ronald Reagan's famous phrase) like crapping out a pineapple.

Around the table: "cancel culture" is drama, part 775.

Alex Pareene suspects that right-wingers "might start trying to do voter fraud on a mass scale." And if you're tempted to respond that they kind of already have -- the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database helped right-wing politicians de-register Black and Brown voters for years, after all -- we're talking actual voter fraud here, the kind of which former Republican House Rep./Trump Administration hack Mark Meadows now stands accused after all the accusations of "voter fraud" he's leveled. Add in all the stories of actual voter fraud you've heard, which all seem to come from the right (Mr. Pareene tabulates only a few of them!), and you can see where one might be concerned.

Carl Beijer at Jacobin reminds us that "Critical Race Theory Is the Right’s Latest Obsession" but "They’ll Have a New One Soon." Seriously, it's like right-wingers have this Lazy Susan of outrages and just as even other right-wingers tell them to STFU about it, they just give it a spin and see where it stops. But Mr. Beijer also reminds us that right-wingers love telling us about "a relatively obscure text or theory that, we are told, lays out the secret governing plans and doctrines of the anarchomarxistliberaldemocrat conspiracy." Eventually, you have to explain why you keep losing to the anarchomarxistliberaldemocrat conspiracy, so you have to keep "discovering" new "secret texts." How long before they get to these books?

The Biden Administration sacks the two members of our President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition -- Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz -- who are running for Senate. Mr. Oz wrote a bunch of stupid crap about it, neglecting to mention that the Hatch Act actually prevents government employees from using their position to campaign for public office. Maybe the aforementioned two individuals can prove in court that no one cares about the Council and therefore couldn't possibly have used it to promote their campaigns! And I'm sure they'll try, but in the meantime, they'll just whine about being "canceled."

Uh oh: Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) might have a primary challenger this year, and someone apparently using a computer in the Missouri capitol building has repeatedly scrubbed any mention of sexual assault allegations from this challenger's Wikipedia page. Mainstream media organs reported on both these accusations, in case you thought maybe some liberal rando added them to his page to begin with. Then the challenger's spokeshack called Wikipedia "an unregulated, unedited, largely unsourced mass of information that is often inaccurate because anyone can post almost anything," which smells of desperation, as any ad hominem attack does. Sadly, Ms. Bush has two other primary challengers, though perhaps they'll split the Anyone But Bush vote.

Paul Krugman says high inflation will come down, perhaps not for the "soft landing" our Federal Reserve envisions, but still a soft enough landing that won't result in near-11% unemployment. Why? Because the inflation that finally died in the early '80s was "self-perpetuating inflation" -- "(e)veryone was raising prices in anticipation of everyone else raising prices," and wages were going up a lot faster back then, too, for the same reason; today folks simply don't anticipate inflation will just go up and up and up, and they plan accordingly, and if enough powerful people plan accordingly, inflation will come down. Probably not in time for Democrats to brag about it in midterm ads, if they're even so inclined, but I'll take the word of the Nobel Prize-winning economist over any self-interested cable news pundit or social media "influencer" you can name.

Finally, Vlad the Bad has finally come out and said that everyone wants to "cancel" him, just like everyone wants to cancel Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling! (Ms. Rowling, for her part, distanced herself from Mr. Putin's remarks right quick.) The article reminds us that being worth over $1 billion, as Ms. Rowling is, isn't exactly like being "canceled," nor is being the dictator of one of the most powerful nations on the planet. Good Russian citizens might "cancel" Mr. Putin eventually, but in the meantime, remember what all this is: drama, which is what right-wingers do best.

UPDATE. A reader has convinced me that "hater of transgender folk" is a bridge too far when describing J.K. Rowling, and though I still suspect her, I've excised the phrase from the above paragraph.

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.

Around the table: concerning forced arbitration, Russian nukes, and other burning issues.

Let's lead with good news: late last week President Biden signed H.R. 4445, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, a bill for which you and I agitated and a bill representing a major accomplishment of the 117th Congress. Less than half the Republican House caucus voted against the law, and the bill sailed through the Senate on a voice vote, so one might even call it a bipartisan accomplishment, though it's only a bipartisan accomplishment because an actual bipartisan coalition of Americans wanted it. This isn't just a major step forward for sexual harassment victims; it's a major step forward for those of us who want to end forced arbitration entirely. I long to live in an America where we can all get the day in court we deserve when we're wronged, and not some artificial "day in court" where the corporation usually wins.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch tells us that "(t)he decision by President Vladimir Putin to put Russia’s strategic nuclear forces on high alert is even more dangerous than it looks because it is an act of desperation." True, but we're doing the right thing by not raising our own nuclear warning, because why let assholes hold the world hostage? If we do that, we're pretty much declaring that we will not defend civilization, and we'll make such a declaration over my dead body. Yes, I'm aware it may come to that if Mr. Putin winds up using his nukes. (It may not come to that at all, of course, if we're doing what I hope we're doing in Venezuela.)

In a related but important matter, our sanctions against Russia seem to be missing a lot of very rich Russians who have invested a lot of their money in Western nations. You might be tempted to nod at this information if you were an adherent of realpolitik, but note well that many of the actual targets of sanctions have hidden their money with their wealthy pals, who've invested it westward. Some folks have irresponsibly talked of giving Mr. Putin an "off-ramp"; maybe this is one plank of that ramp. But we shouldn't give assholes off-ramps. We shouldn't be adherents of realpolitik, either; it's a game for the cynical, and the cynical can only play games.

Half of Americans prefer the Biden tax plan (which really isn't that much of an improvement over what we've got) to two recently-touted Republican tax plans (which are both abominations unto the Lord). 50% doesn't sound like much, but somewhat less than 32% would get rid of the income tax (Madison Cawthorn's plan) or make poorer working families pay more taxes (Rick Scott's plan); that number doesn't map too well onto my old saw that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane, but I've heard plenty of non-insane people embrace insane tax plans. They're easier to convince than the nutjobs, obviously, and together we still outnumber the nutjobs, which means we should lose zero elections to nutjobs.

I fear that when our establishment media notes that Donald Trump endorsements don't necessarily win Republican primaries, they're not quite getting how a Trump endorsement is really supposed to work. I don't really blame them, I suppose. But the day a Trump endorsement matters most is the day after the primary! Look at how it helped Glenn Youngkin in Virginia -- he was able to get a Trump endorsement and then could pretend convincingly to keep him at arms' length! The ideal plan for both Republicans and Mr. Trump would be a) for someone "electable" to win the primary and b) for Mr. Trump to then endorse that candidate; at this point the Trumpholes will "know" they can "trust" these candidates no matter what they subsequently say to "appeal to the center." I'd call it a clever stratagem, except that only evil will result from it.

Finally, why is Tucker Carlson's sudden demand for Judge Jackson's LSAT scores racist, as opposed to merely partisan hackery? Look past his utter disinterest in the LSAT scores of Messrs. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett (or, for that matter, Elena Kagan); look past, even, his own inability to get through college without being soused much of the time. He says Ketanji Brown Jackson's name is "a name that even Joe Biden has trouble pronouncing," and I would hope we would all recognize by now that making fun of a non-white person's name is a pretty standard racist attack. Even if you "don't mean anything by it."

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.

Action: concerning tax evasion, pollution, rent control, pregnant workers, and forced arbitration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to give our IRS the resources it needs to catch rich tax cheats, permanently protect the Boundary Waters from pollution, and pass national rent control legislation, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment 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.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our Internal Revenue Service (or IRS) so it can catch wealthy tax cheats. You've heard that we lose $1 trillion every year in unpaid taxes, and you've also heard that our IRS goes after low-level tax cheats simply because they don't have the money to fight rich tax cheats and their well-paid lawyers. And that's why we should fund our IRS properly! It won't break the bank and it'll bring back far more money than it'd cost. If certain people would stop with the BS about how they'll come for the little guy if they come for the big guy, that'd be nice, too. I mean, again, our IRS can't afford to do anything but go after the little guy. So less drama, more reality, as usual.

President Biden cancelled two mining leases that would have polluted the famous Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, which is terrific, but it doesn't offer any guarantees about the future, so now the Wilderness Society helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Boundary Waters from mining for good. Among the many other reasons to protect the Boundary Waters -- like, that lots of wildlife lives there, and that it's a big, big tourist draw, which also means it supports lots of jobs and brings in lots of money -- the Boundary Waters is also sacred to several Native American nations. We still care about religious freedom, right? Or do we only care about religious freedom for bigots? You could forgive me for thinking that's all we care about. But I'd prefer to live in a better America than that.

Hot on the heels of a Senate banking committee hearing about the matter, the Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell your Senators to support various reforms that would curb corporate control of housing. These would include more investment in public housing and one of my personal favorites, national rent control. Only a few states and municipalities cap the rents landlords can charge, and most states actually prevent any of their municipalities from instituting any kind of rent control, but as recent events have shown us, we can't count on "market forces" to ensure everyone has a place to live any more than we can count on "market forces" to keep us healthy and well-educated. To those who would assert that "all price controls are bad," you need only retort "so paying less money is bad?" I think everyone can get behind that argument!

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require employers to make reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers at the workplace, including giving them less strenuous work and more bathroom breaks while they're pregnant, and I said the word "reasonable" with the italics hammer in a perhaps-vain attempt to forestall right-wing arguments like "they'll let pregnant workers run the place!" The bill would also prevent employers from firing workers just for being pregnant, and would also prevent them from refusing to consider a pregnant job applicant just because she's pregnant. It feels like we've been fighting for this bill forever; sometimes it takes this long, and we have to just keep fighting. I'd prefer not to wait until men can get pregnant before it passes, though.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4445, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. So many employment contracts mandate forced arbitration for all employee grievances, but forced arbitration more often than not results in your boss winning, and you losing -- and in some cases, you paying for the forced arbitration! You'd have a better chance of winning in a court of law, and H.R. 4445 would at least prevent corporations from forcing you into arbitration over sexual abuse or harassment charges. Yes, I'd prefer to end forced arbitration for all disputes, but bosses seem to go even further out of their way to ignore sexual assault/harassment charges, and passing H.R. 4445 would get our foot in the door toward that end. And that's worth doing.

Action: concerning corruption, health care, pollution, and forced arbitration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, the PASTEUR Act, the REDUCE Act, and the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment 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 pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. This bill would prevent any Congressfolk from engaging in most stock trades and from serving on for-profit boards, plus it would also include short sales. When someone sells a security intending to buy it back later, that's a short sale, and folks don't do this unless they think the value of that security is about to tank. You can imagine why we would want to keep our Congressfolk from doing that -- in their oversight duties, they may already know a particular security (or a particular sector of the economy!) is about to tank, and certainly they shouldn't profit from that. Why, it might lead them to pass laws that cause other securities to tank! And that'd be evil, so we should stop that.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. This bill would prevent Presidents from doing a lot of the awful things Donald Trump did while he was President, like limit national emergencies (like the vanity border wall "emergency"), prevent removal of Inspectors General without cause (like he did through much of 2020), and limits our President's ability to pardon the unworthy (like Steve Freaking Bannon!). It does a bunch of other things, too, like require Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates to provide 10 years of tax returns, without excuses! And no, this ain't "looking backward" -- particularly if Donald Trump comes back in 2024. Or if someone worse wins the Republican nomination!

Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act. This bill would fund $11 billion in grants to develop new antibiotics, and if that seems like a lot of money, consider that the bill would fund $11 billion once, not annually, and also consider that $11 billion a drop in the water in the vast ocean of a $4 trillion-plus federal budget, plus it would actually do a lot of good. The world is full of superbugs like the one we're battling now; antibiotic abuse has certainly made it a lot easier for superbugs to wreak their havoc, but we also need to develop new antibiotics that'll kill these bugs dead. Better to spend taxpayer money on that than on, say, welfare for oil corporations that already make crap-tons of money. We could make a longer list than that, but you get the idea.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5389, the REDUCE Act. Make sure it's H.R. 5389; there are other REDUCE Acts out there this term, of varying quality. This REDUCE Act would impose an excise tax on virgin plastic -- which is to say, plastic manufactured for the first time -- and would create a Plastic Waste Reduction Fund to help clean up the mess we've made from all the plastic that's in our oceans and landfills. Folks throw away, on average, 287 pounds of plastic every year, which is close to a pound a day (and this pandemic sure hasn't helped that figure, has it?), and our EPA tells us that less than 10 percent of the plastic we try to recycle actually gets recycled, so clearly we've got to do better as a civilization. That's why we have to reduce the amount of plastic we make to begin with.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4445, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. We should be ending forced arbitration for everything, but let's at least make our Congressfolk say I oppose giving sexual assault victims and sexual harassment victims their day in court. Don't let them say this is a boon for trial lawyers! If people don't want trial lawyers to prosper, they should do less evil! If your boss gropes you without your asking for it, your employment contract might require you to submit your complaint to an arbitration board that'll almost certainly rule in favor of your boss, but H.R. 4445 would simply prohibit that where sexual assault and harassment are concerned. So let's do that.

Around the table: yes, Virginia, there are world leaders even worse than Donald Trump was.

Supreme Court rules -- by a 6-3 margin whose six votes evenly split between nominally liberal and nominally conservative Justices -- that our government must inform immigrants of all details of a deportation process in one document, a purely technical ruling that may result in thousands of long-term immigrants avoiding deportation. It's a fascinating ruling -- Justice Gorsuch actually seems to have interpreted the law here, as has Justice Barrett, who came off in her hearings like she would never ever interpret a law ever, which made me say more than once then what are judges for? Naturally Justice Kavanaugh, the most evil Justice, and Chief Justice Roberts, the most literal Justice, joined the dissent, which says, rather inaccurately, that the Gorsuch ruling defies common sense. (As an aside, when we hear that someone, particularly someone of color, got pulled over for a "busted tail-light," we'd do well to assume the police busted the tail light themselves.)

Idaho passes law banning any sort of "critical race theory" in public schools, even though such theory helps us understand how pervasive racism is. I'm pleased to see a crap-ton of Idaho students protesting the legislation at the state Capitol, but I'm displeased, of course, to watch the Idaho legislature completely ignore them. Right-wingers piss and moan about "cancel culture" and then they actually cancel critical race theory? Gosh, they should just try to prove it wrong, and if they can't, well, they should just be grown-ups and concede the point. I know you don't see people on cable news shows do that, but it is what civilized people do. And I don't want whiners who can't accept that America's ever done any wrong ever in my damn foxhole. They're the kind of people who'd hear a squirrel skittering and leave my ass to die.

Some folks are asking "where's Joe Biden's Tea Party," especially given that Barack Obama already had Tea Party rallies to put up with by mid-April, but I'd say the movement's already here -- a mix of Trumphole and QAnon, and their persistence suggests that the next big right-wing "movement," a term I use with some trepidation, won't have to seem "new" and "fresh" like the Tea Party surely did to the vast number of inattentive Americans, and that the absence of such "newness" and "freshness" serves a larger Republican strategy to stay under the radar until 2022. Of course, Americans ain't as inattentive as they used to be, either. (Also, not to pick on the article, but the ACA wasn't "big" or "bold" legislation; if the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan pass, they'll both more easily qualify.)

Alexis Grennell at The Nation argues that "Just Because Cuomo Deserves Due Process Doesn’t Mean He Shouldn’t Resign." Yes, finding people guilty of crimes should be hard -- though it shouldn't be as absurdly difficult to find someone guilty of sexual harassment or rape as it is -- but while you have an inalienable right to defend yourself from accusations, that fact doesn't confer upon you an additional "right" to keep your Governorship while you defend yourself from those accusations. It sure doesn't help that Gov. Cuomo held former Attorney General Schneiderman (he had be investigated and resign!) to a tougher standard than the one to which he now holds himself (oh, a resignation would just hinder an investigation, never mind exactly how).

Chris Christie goes on Fox News to say Donald Trump deserves an A for his Presidency, but also says, and I quote, "(t)here were some things that happened specifically at the end of the presidency that I think had some things that clouded his accomplishments." That's some real straight talk, right there! And "an A, except for trying to overturn an election and then inciting an insurrection" is rather like giving Herbert Hoover "an A, except for the Depression" and George W. Bush "an A, except for 9.11, the Iraq War, the FISA Amendments Act, and the Great Recession."

Finally, when I hear that Brazil is having a lot more trouble getting aid from the rest of the world over its COVID troubles than India is, I'd be tempted to say waaaaaaaah!, because Brazillian President Jair Bolsonaro is now the biggest asshole among world leaders, so much so that even other assholes (cough Boris Johnson cough) can't stand him. But I can't be so evil about that, because good Brazilians are dying thanks to Mr. Bolsonaro's failure to lead, or be human. Every awful thing Donald Trump did to kill 400,000 good Americans, Jair Bolsonaro has done bigger and worse, and now Brazil may ultimately lose more of its citizens to COVID than we will -- and Mr. Bolsonaro will be able to cheat his way to re-election more easily than Mr. Trump could.

Around the table: in which we confront completely-unsurprising findings about wages and taxes.

Uh oh: researchers allege that Florida has been undercounting its COVID deaths. Florida has officially lost 30,000 good Americans to COVID, but researchers say it should be more like 35,000, as Florida has undercounted deaths of folks with co-morbidities, although if you shoot a diabetic in the head, no one says they died of diabetes. Anyway, maybe this is why Florida law enforcement raided Rebekah Jones's house a few months ago, although it still seems to me that governing well is far easier than figuring out how to get re-elected doing as little as possible.

Fearing a "tsunami" of evictions at the end of this pandemic, Boston renters are forming tenants' unions to bargain with their landlords. And why not? Why wouldn't any good conservative prefer a tenants' union to the heavy hand of Big Gummint regulation and Big Gummint law-making and Big Gummint handouts? Oh, wait -- because, in these times, "conservatism" is only about manufacturing rage and protecting absurdly high wealth über alles. I must've forgotten which decade we're in.

Per Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut, "Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities." Of course they go after the humanities because they don't "make money," and of course you can see the gnarled hand of ALEC behind some of these efforts. But a civilization that only cares about mammon won't be a civilization for long, and as my 18th Century English Poetry professor used to say, you're going to spend your whole life inside your head, and you want that to be a well-furnished place.

New York state Comptroller data informs us that if our minimum wage went up as fast as Wall Street bankster bonuses, it'd be $44/hour. Should we tell Kyrsten Sinema? Perhaps we should, but she's been a tool of Wall Street since the 2008 meltdown, odd as that will sound to future historians. In a completely unrelated development, a Grinnell College study finds that out of every dollar in big corporate tax cuts, somewhere between 15 and 19 cents winds up in a CEO's pocket. This is, of course, despite politicians telling us that corporate tax cuts lead to more jobs, never mind that we had both a 55% corporate tax rate and full employment in the '50s.

A Good Jobs First study finds that corporate tax breaks at the state level cost public schools at least $2.37 billion in 2019. I'm glad they note, at the beginning of the report's summary, that this figure represents a 13 percent increase over the previous year and thus "came during the pre-pandemic period of economic prosperity." Stick a pin in that for next time the politicians say "the economy's bad, so we should cut corporate taxes" -- or, for that matter, "the economy's good, so we should cut corporate taxes." For the politicians, it's never a bad time to shift more of our tax burden from corporations to individuals and small businesses.

I was about to say I felt sorry for the couple who had Donald Trump crash their wedding at Mar-a-Lago and do his WAAAAAAAAH ME ME ME ME ME act, but then I realized that you take that risk when you decide to get married at Mar-a-Lago. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the happy couple expected him to show up, or even hoped he would. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn they paid extra for the experience! After all, if you're getting married at Mar-a-Lago, you're not working within a budget like the rest of us are.

Finally, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), facing sex trafficking charges, goes on the Tucker Carlson show (nice to be able to get that venue last minute!) and actually makes things significantly worse for himself, trying to debunk accusations that haven't yet been made and trying to draw Mr. Carlson himself into his story. When I first heard about this, I supposed the QAnon crowd would say Mr. Gaetz schlepped that 17-year-old girl around the country because he was fighting the deep-state child-sex ring undercover -- and, sadly, I was right.

Around the table: the right-wing drama never ends, part 892.

Micah Lee at The Intercept goes "Inside Gab, the Online Safe Space for Far-right Extremists," so you don't have to. You'll learn that the 20 most popular Gab groups are all Trump/QAnon/otherwise right-wing groups (sadly, I'm pretty sure even "HISTORY BUFFS" is a right-wing group, because note the shouty caps). You know, it should be hard to find right-wing extremists on the internet, just like it should be hard to find porn. I'm old enough to remember when you had to work to find both.

It begins: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott insinuates that if the For the People Act passes, people are going to go around buying votes with cocaine. That's a sign they can't win the argument on the merits! Mr. Abbott describes a case involving an "arrest" and a "prosecut(ion)," but was there a conviction? We'll never learn the answer from Mr. Abbott, which is understandable, because it's not like a former Attorney General would know the difference or anything.

At long last, someone in the "liberal" media asks: "When candidates make reckless statements just to get attention, should they get attention?" I can't complain too much that writing at length about why you're not giving Josh Mandel attention still gives him attention, because I rarely see "liberal" media types grapple with this question, let alone declare that "he-said-she-said" stories aren't the answer. Ideally, though, we'd point to Josh Mandel and say this is what he does. Don't be like him. And let's never speak of him again.

Former Kentucky state House Rep. Charles Booker, who came within an eyelash of knocking off Amy McGrath for the 2020 Democratic U.S. Senate nomination despite her tens of millions of dollars, says he's "strongly considering" running against Rand Paul in 2022. Note to national Democrats: how about letting the people of Kentucky pick their candidate for a change? And how about seeing if a Black Lives Matter candidate can win in the state that killed Breonna Taylor? I won't enjoy Rand Paul acting like he's better than Charles Booker, but that'd also be a sign he's scared to face him.

Finally, Missouri state Republicans profess to fear an Eric Greitens campaign for Senate, roughly four years after the former Governor disgraced himself, but maybe they're just playing. I mean, yeah, the worst version of Mr. Greitens's affair/sexual abuse story is profoundly awful, but does he worship at the Trump altar? Has he avoided getting himself convicted? Will he likely face yet another let's-all-get-along weakling Democrat? The answer to all three questions is yes, so I'd say Mr. Greitens's chances of succeeding Roy Blunt in the Senate are pretty damn good! Unless maybe Cori Bush decides to run.

Penny Rants for Monday, April 27, 2020: special "Our Glorious Elites still suck" edition!

When our President demands that our Post Office "raise the price" of its services "four times" or he won't approve any more funding, you have to remember that our President is demanding that our Post Office raise prices on us! He wants good Americans like you and I to pay more to send a letter though the post! The fact that our Post Office delivers good services so cheaply (despite all of our government's attempts to destroy it, I should add) is what makes it "a joke" to him -- it's just not serious, to him, unless some boss or other can parade his unearned wealth around. Consider, also, that "rais(ing) the price four times" is all that can make private mail-delivery corporations like UPS and FedEx competitive with our USPS -- they handle a fraction of the mail our USPS does, and frankly, they're not that much faster, not anymore. When right-wingers want to mismanage everything into oblivion to prove that "the private sector does it better," you should remember that when they do that, they are taking food out of your mouth. And how do you treat people who do that?

Right-wingers have their excuses for our President's apparent endorsement of injecting/ingesting disinfectants late last week, but they pale before the simple fact that calls about possible exposure to household cleaners more than doubled in New York City the day after. I have long hoped that our President would single-handedly destroy the Presidential bully pulpit merely through his bad behavior, and then folks would never trust what our President says again, as our Founders always intended. But I never imagined people might literally poison themselves first. We'll certainly never look at the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" the same way again. (As an aside, if we take his claim that "I was asking the question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen" at face value -- and when has divining his One True Intent behind his actions led anywhere other than rank absurdity? -- then you must conclude that a guy who would do that "just to see what would happen" is an evil bastard. And how do you treat evil bastards?)

Ryan Grim at The Intercept evaluates new evidence supporting Tara Reade's sexual harassment and assault complaints against then-Sen./now somehow presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden. As Mr. Grim reminds us, "(f)or Baker’s statement (denying that Ms. Reade had ever filed a complaint with Mr. Biden's office about his conduct) to be true, Reade would have had to have lied to her friend, brother, and mother about having complained to Biden’s office. There is no obvious reason Reade would make up a story to those closest to her about the Senate office not taking Biden’s harassment seriously, while at the same time resisting pressure to go to the press." Now might be a good time to remind everyone that Mr. Biden hasn't actually sewn up the nomination yet, and no one's advanced a sexual harassment/assault complaint against Sen. Sanders. (No, complaints of harassment and insensitivity against some of his campaign workers aren't the same thing, even if our "liberal" media did more pearl-clutching about that than they've done about Ms. Reade's accusation.)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Pat Robertson agrees with a viewer that God sent this pandemic to America as punishment for abortion, gay marriage, and anti-Israel sentiment. Oh, but not just that, his remaining defenders will say -- he also said "we have abused the poor," which most right-wingers consider a duty, not a sin. But listen to Mr. Robertson describe abortion -- "we have taken the life of the innocent, slaughtering them by the tens of millions, children made in the image of God" -- and then listen to him hesitate before saying "we have abused the poor" and then quickly turn to describing how the pandemic has ravaged us, and you might come to one of two conclusions: a) poverty just doesn't get his anger up like abortion does, or b) he threw "we have abused the poor" in there just to stave off criticism that he's just another heartless evangelical. But he's not very good at the latter -- does anyone remember him speaking out about the necessity of fighting climate change in 2006? No? Well, now you know all the good that did -- and maybe (especially since he's a denier again) all the good he intended it to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: more bad arguments destroyed, more questionable moves by Our Glorious Elites exposed.

Surprise, surprise, a Guardian investigation reveals that bots produced one out of every four Twitterings about climate change during that period in 2017 where our President was mulling pulling out of the Paris Accords, and surprise, surprise, the vast majority of these bot-tweets promoted climate change denialism. Cue Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: "but what is a 'bot,' really? Do we really understand the deep epistemological and ontological questions we raise when we say something is a 'bot'?"

I'm not sure I would call the litany of tax ideas our Administration is throwing against the wall in an election year as "pasta policymaking" -- I usually go for a more colorful phrase -- but it is apt. You'd be right to question why we need more tax reforms when we supposedly did a big tax "reform" in 2017, but the tax "reforms" they're floating -- invest your first $10,000 in the stock market tax-free if you make less than $200,000, like we all have money laying around to throw into the national roulette wheel! -- would continue our Administration's efforts to "preside over an upward redistribution of wealth." And if a minimum corporate tax is such a great idea, you have to wonder why they didn't go to bat over it in 2017, when Congress repealed it.

David Swanson puts the absurd hand-wringing over Medicare-for-All's "costs" perfectly: "How Are We Going to Pay for Saving Trillions of Dollars?" You remember, after all, that the Koch brothers-sponsored Mercatus Institute said Medicare-for-All would cost $32 trillion over 10 years, while the Centers for Medicare Services said our total health care spending, using the system we have now, would be $49 trillion over the same period, meaning we'd save $1.7 trillion annually (versus the $450 billion the Lancet study says we'd save, which number Mr. Swanson cites here). He goes on to describe how you might actually fund Medicare-for-All and other "impossible" initiatives, but I trust the point is taken.

Ho hum, our President's choice for acting (of course!) National Director of Intelligence used to work for a Moldovan politician who's now on the run and can't get into the U.S. because of anti-corruption laws. I guess we can't discount the possibility that our President put him there in order to get said Moldovan politician into the country! He only lets the best people in, after all. Naturally, we can find no shortage of qualified observers who will note that the new acting DNI broke the law, has exposed himself to blackmail, and shouldn't even have a security clearance, let alone lead an agency specializing in a field in which he has no experience. Imagine the whining from the right if Mr. Obama had done any of this!

Finally, we learn that a Republican Super PAC spent millions of dollars trying to promote a liberal in North Carolina's upcoming Democratic U.S. Senate primary, in the hopes that it'd help incumbent Republican Senator Thom Tillis. And this liberal asks: are you guys sure that's wise? They say they're taking a page out of Chuck Schumer's playbook, but when Democrats ran ads supporting Todd Akin in the 2012 Missouri Senate Republican primary, they promoted a guy who nattered on about "legitimate rape." On the other hand, Erica Smith is an ordained minister, an engineer, and a math teacher in addition to being a state Senator; Republicans had better hope there's something under that hood -- other than her support of Medicare-for-All, I mean! -- or they might have thrown all that money away, and thus provided yet another argument to those of us who think some folks have too damn much money.

Around the table: tabulating yet more Presidential drama and Democrat weakness.

Factcheck.org reviews our President's recent speech trumpeting his alleged environmental accomplishments, and finds it wanting. I'd almost hoped to report that our President was as clever a liar as George W. Bush, but some of what Factcheck tabulates are just flat-out lies easily refuted, and naturally our President regurgitates the $100 trillion Green New Deal number when even its originator has admitted he doesn't really know how to measure the cost (like, by, you know, tabulating how much we'd save in health care costs, disaster relief costs, and the like). Also, too, we still have clean air and clean water to a large degree because our federal courts have slapped down almost every Administration attempt to gut clean air and clean water regulations.

Our President twitters that certain liberal Congresswomen who emigrated here should stop "loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run" and instead "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." If you heard the ghost of go back to Africa!, I wouldn't blame you, and I doubt he really hears them as "loud" and "vicious" merely because they fight his evil -- rather, he hopes you do, so you'll live vicariously through him. Of course, people come here from "totally broken" places all the time -- often to avoid being murdered themselves! -- and then our First Amendment protects them when they opine, as we all do, about how we'd like to make a more perfect union. That's America, folks. And those who agree with our President really ought to consider, as always, whether constant enragement is really good for their health.

From Kaiser Health News we learn that despite federal laws that are supposed to prevent this sort of thing, rape victims still get billed for forensic exams they undergo afterward. Think of how you'd feel if you kept getting slammed with bills after you got raped! We need better, more precise laws -- the yet-to-be-reauthorized Violence Against Women Act cuts off certain federal grants to states that don't cover these costs, and maybe that was all that would pass in 1994, but a better idea would be to simply make it illegal to charge rape victims for rape kits. Sadly, that's the kind of thing politicians tend not to push on their own, but as part of larger legislative efforts. The next politician who does that might find it better to prioritize good works above "not stepping on other legislators' toes."

Please please please do not attend the "conservative" "reaction" to our President's apparent "cave" on his Census citizenship question, because like everything else with this President it's drama, and bad drama at that. His "conservative allies" can whine all they want about "whether they should support this guy if he's not going to fight," but rest assured they will all turn out for him in 2020, and they'll probably cite some unrelated, whipped-up drama about the Democratic nominee as being more important than whatever betrayal they've lately experienced.

Finally, dig this bit of moderate, centrist pandering emanating from Young Fresh Fellow Pete Buttigieg, who says (in re Medicare-for-All and student loan debt) that "we should be realistic about what’s going to work" and that "just flipping a switch and saying we’re instantly going to have everybody on Medicare just like that — isn’t realistic." If he'd read the Medicare-for-All bill, he'd already know that the bill won't get everyone on Medicare for four years, so discussing how we're "instantly going to have everybody on Medicare" is typical straw-man arguing. And of course saying Medicare-for-All is "pretty far out...from where Americans are" isn't borne out by polling consistently showing majority or supermajority support. The good news? The No-We-Can't caucus -- of which Mr. Buttigieg aspires to be leader, though his big-donor fundraising hasn't yet translated into better polling numbers -- ain't that big in America. The bad news? It sure does seem concentrated among Our Glorious Elites.

Action: concerning campaign finance reform, violence against women, and evil media.

Our Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC ruling -- which used the ancient and nefarious doctrine of corporate "personhood" to expand big corporate campaign financing -- remains a blot on our culture. But H.J.Res. 2 would amend our Constitution to allow Congress to "regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections," which would include "prohibiting" "artificial entities created by law" "from spending money to influence elections." Big corporate campaign spending is popular with approximately no one -- except the big corporations who buy votes this way! Yes, that's an accurate way of putting it: money isn't speech, it's property, and everyone but a pedant sees that big corporate campaign spending results in corrupt corporate lackeys in office. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to slow the flow of big corporate money into political campaigns.

It's not just the American Dream and Promise Act, the For the People Act, the Equality Act, and the Save the Internet Act that aren't getting the proper attention from our Senate -- it's also H.R. 1585, the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act, passed by our House back in April but still sitting on the Senate's general calendar two months later. I suppose that's an improvement over the aforementioned bills, but your Senators could still use your counsel; hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to pass the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act. Are they refusing to pass it because it would give tribal courts more power to go after sexual violence, child abuse, sex trafficking, and the like? I sure hope not, because that would mark them as pedants -- and also as hostage-takers, since the bill would also help federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement entities communicate with each other about these issues.

CREDO helps you tell advertisers to drop the Fox News program The Ingraham Angle. CREDO cites Laura Ingraham's recent defense of evil white supremacist/anti-Semite Paul Nehlen as the immediate news hook (a simple graphic causes so much trouble these days!), but a better reason to tell advertisers to abandon her is everything she's ever done -- she's been an ambulance chaser for far-right causes for three decades now, and she doesn't obsess over nationalism and xenophobia these days because she's really given all that a lot of thought, but because she thinks that's where the money is. Let's prove her wrong. And while we're talking about it, Media Matters helps you tell advertisers to drop Fox News generally, since they're all pretty terrible. If you want to call your Congressfolk and demand that they pass a law letting you choose your cable channels a la carte so you don't have to pay for this rubbish, well, tools to find your Congressfolks' phone numbers are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Around the table: can we green and grow our economy at the same time? Of course we can! And other lessons.

Dean Baker says we can-so green our economy and grow our economy at the same time. Maybe we should abandon the growth ideology and maybe we shouldn't, but we certainly shouldn't refuse to consider solutions that might better bring about a renewable power grid because they also fit in with virtually everyone's notion that economies should grow; doing so would be a textbook example of letting the perfect murder the good. And Mr. Baker reminds us that economic growth doesn't necessarily depend on increased resource use -- advances in software, education, and health care, for example, create economic growth without necessarily burning more fossil fuels, and since folks do plenty of things that spur economic growth but don't depend on increased fossil fuel use, we can't even conclude that limiting our access to fossil fuels would grind our economy to a halt.

Some big health insurance corporations have taken to refusing to pay ER bills if they feel they don't "meet the definition of an emergency," in one big health insurer's words. No, this isn't the way to reduce ER abuse, particularly since people only take their kids to the ER for the sniffles when they a) don't have health insurance and b) can't get to other options like urgent care clinics. You know what would curb ER abuse? A Medicare-for-All system covering all of us, that's what. And where are the conservatives who would denounce insurance corporations for interfering with the judgment of individuals? (At least Brittany Cloyd's story had a happy ending, because she fought her insurer until she won. Might she want to run for public office?)

New York state Attorney General finds that state hospitals are charging sexual assault survivors for rape kits. Which is actually already illegal! You know, I think there's a solution to this problem, let me see if I can think of it -- hold on, still thinking -- oh, right: a Medicare-for-All system that covers all of us, and of course covers the cost of rape kits like any civilized nation would do. (To think that collection agents actually came after some of these women for the money! This is what happens when we decide the work of a civilized, striving people is just too hard and we "simplify things" by chasing exclusively after money.)

In other dismal health insurance news, the number of uninsured children in America actually ticks up for the first time in at least a decade. I figured that Congress's allowing CHIP to lapse at the end of September 2017 had to be a big reason why, but our Administration has been screwing around with health care policy in plenty of other ways, particularly where immigrants are concerned. (C'mon, if you're going to depend on their labor, you can't deny them or their kids health care. That's just cruel.) Let me guess our President's reactions: TEH FAKE NEWS IT'S TEH DUMOCRATZ' FAULTZ!!!!!

Finally, contractors seem to be bilking FEMA and good Puerto Ricans for rebuilding and repairs in the wake of Hurricane Maria. I wouldn't expect our President to ride to Puerto Rico's rescue, however, since he himself seems to have made a mint during the 1990s with that extortionate All County Building Supply & Maintenance contracting markup scheme. So, though it'd be easy for him to say "I can get a better deal," more likely we'll hear TEH FAKE NEWS IT'S TEH DUMOCRATZ' FAULTZ!!!!! here, too.

Around the table: downhill rolling, part 295.

Lawyer/Administration critic Michael Avenatti has apparently proposed a mixed martial-arts fight with our President's namesake son, for charity, of course. While I loathe the drama that surrounds our Administration, what I really hate about this is that it allows us to pretend our President and his offspring are just part of the human family, when we should be casting them out of the human family until they start acting human again.

Buried in this report about our White House getting ready for a subpoena storm if Democrats retake the House is this nugget from an official who worked in the Clinton and Obama Administrations: "Subpoenas flowing into a White House create paralysis...The White House doesn't operate optimally, and the policymaking process doesn't receive its due attention." How generous of him, to think this particular White House is "operating" very much at all.

You remember all those fake anti-net neutrality comments the FCC did less than nothing about? Karl Bode at TechDirt reminds us that sending fake comments to our federal agencies is not exactly a new thing. So when they say the public writes stupid comments and only the experts can write good ones, remember that too often "the experts" are so unsure of their expertise that they have to resort to un-American shenanigans like fake public comments to get their way. Yeah, "un-American" is a good way of describing it, in a democracy that's supposed to run on reading, understanding, and doing the people's will.

Multitudinous right-wing jerks compare what Brett Kavanaugh "went through" on his way to a lifetime appointment on our Supreme Court to a lynching. And here you always thought a lynching had to have actual ropes, actual trees, actual rifles, actual murders! After you read about National Review's editor pretending that To Kill a Mockingbird had nothing to do with race, you might want to remember that Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. was himself an avowed white supremacist at least through the mid-'60s.

Meanwhile, in the real world that doesn't touch the beautiful brains of right-wing jerks, Christine Blasey Ford still can't go home because she's getting too many death threats. Gosh, why don't they come forward sooner? And, seriously, cowards: you got your way. This is like all those folks who painted swastikas all over America after their man won the 2016 Presidential election! Nothing's important to them but diddling their own rage glands. May God have mercy on their immortal souls.

Finally, we could quarrel or not with Sen. Mitch McConnell's assessment that the Kavanaugh controversy was a "gift" to Republicans in that it stoked up their base -- I'm more skeptical about that than I was, frankly -- but note well that a man who calls any group of organized citizens a "mob" reveals himself to be a man who thinks "the right people" should run everything and most people should shutup and listen to their "betters." And a man who doesn't call Tea Partiers a "mob" when they proudly parade their ignorance in public reveals himself a hypocrite as well.

Around the table: in which we try to make now a *very scary time* for bad people.

The New York Times finds that our President "Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father." Yes, it's good to have it all laid out here -- particularly his utter dependence on his father's largesse, that's some self-made man there! -- but if you recall Tha Man Himself taking 9.11-related small business tax breaks for buildings of his that weren't even damaged on 9.11, we're not exactly in Whoda Thunk It territory here. (By the way, it's not a good look for our President's lawyer to say these allegations are all false and my client had nothing to do with any of these transactions in damn near the same breath.)

Are you of the mind that the robots will not, in fact, "take our jobs" except at corporations no one should work at anyway? Astra Taylor at Logic instructs us about "The Automation Charade," which threatens workers with obsolescence if they demand better pay and conditions -- and devalues the housework mainly done by women. Technology doesn't actually get rid of jobs very effectively -- at McDonald's, the order-taking kiosks change worker duties more than they "replace workers" -- and all too often technology merely creates more work. Also, I've been wrong to demand that social media corporations stop relying so much on "algorithms" to screen content -- I should have been saying social media corporations should stop paying content screeners in dung pellets. I mean, their CEOs are billionaires, so they can afford to pay real money.

So here's what to say when your Tea Party uncle repeats Judge Kavanaugh's contention that he's had all these FBI background checks already and none of them caught any of these allegations: Trevor Aaronson at The Intercept reveals that FBI background checks tend to be fairly limited in scope to begin with. You probably already suspected this, if you were scratching your head trying to figure out what enterprising FBI agent would ever have thought to ask Mr. Kavanaugh if he'd tried to rape someone in high school, but it's also good to be reminded that such background checks focus on a potential employee's professional behavior. Also, too, without subpoena power, FBI agents can compel approximately no testimony from witnesses even if they know what questions to ask.

From the "Ain't Nothing So Bad Our President Can't Make It Worse" file: our President, at a Mississippi rally, says "it's a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of." Well, I will say that it is a very scary time for young men who are, for the first time, confronting the fact that they are assholes and that there may one day be a price to pay for being an asshole. That sound you're hearing is the world's tiniest violin.

Finally, Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell fame writes an article excoriating both the New Jersey Turnpike and attempts to glorify it as the epitome of a civilization building itself up. If you've ever smelled the Elizabeth oil refineries as you approached Exit 13, you might find such glorification bizarre, and after you read about the infamous "House of Butterflies" and the "botanical trench-war" of "invasive plants out-invading each other" going on behind a veil of "tranquil greenery," you'll find it more bizarre. But I must confess that I, too, have sentimentalized the Turnpike's world-churning persona (I claim youthful indiscretion), and I regret it now. And "the rut left by civilization marching onward, over and over" is a great line of prose.

Action: concerning "free" trade, tax policy, and our Supreme Court.

Our government has struck a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada, but guess what we already know from mainstream media coverage? That our government, in order to appease Canada yeah-sure, kept the "investor-state dispute settlement" system that outsources our jobs and nullifies our laws. I had long feared that our President, having run against "free" trade, would give us a trade deal that was just as bad as all the others -- and, sadly, I was right. No use objecting that we'll get more access to Canada's dairy markets or whatever when this deal also allows foreign corporations to nullify our clean air and clean water laws if it "costs them money" and then exact tribute from the American taxpayer to pay for that "loss." You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and demand that they oppose the USMCA trade deal.

While you're on the phone with your Senators, you might also tell them to oppose H.R. 6760, better known as "Tax Scam 2.0," which the House passed late last week while we were all watching the Kavanaugh hearing. Did they plan it that way? Does it matter? Evil people know that bad drama will give them cover for something, whatever that might be at whatever moment. H.R. 6760 makes permanent a number of otherwise "temporary" changes to the tax code, including the pass-through business tax cuts and the high-end income tax cuts that go almost entirely to rich folks; per the Tax Policy Center, that'll increase our federal deficits by $3.8 trillion over the 20 years from 2025-2045. And then some President who makes our current one look like the soul of decorum will tell you he just has to cut Medicare and Social Security to cover over this massive hole in our budget! Let's forestall this tragedy by rejecting this new round of tax-cuts-for-the-rich.

Finally, you might also want to tell your Senators, if you've still got them on the phone, to reject the nomination of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court. You may feel a little overwhelmed by all the drama surrounding his nomination, but you don't have to be -- taken together, his stated belief that Presidents should be shielded from criminal prosecution, his long history doing Republican dirty work, his multitudinous misstatements during his confirmation hearings, the quite credible sexual assault allegation against him, and his volcanic temper when confronted with that accusation all reveal a man who believes that if you are not part of America's elite class, you do not matter. And a man who thinks so little of us won't exactly rush to protect the rights we've won through struggle and hard work. So let's get someone maybe a bit less privileged up there.

Around the table: more lessons about drama and duty.

Surprise, surprise, while the Senate Judiciary Committee created all that drama on Friday, the House passed yet more tax-cuts-for-the-rich. Not that they planned it precisely that way, of course -- but creating drama all the time does give folks cover to do nefarious evil, and I'm sure the folks who create the drama are quite aware of that. (The House did not pass the bill in question, H.R. 6760, as part of a budget reconciliation process, meaning our Senators can filibuster it, and of course we'll get on our Senators to do that presently.)

Natalie Shure at In These Times instructs us, in examining the collapse of alleged innovative corporation Theranos, that we're not going to "innovate" our way out of our health care problems. "Ingenuity isn’t what our healthcare sector needs," she writes. "We have plenty of it already, and it hasn’t managed to stop poor people from dying over 10 years earlier, on average, than their wealthy peers." I was going to add that "looking to private corporations to fix health care is more than a little like looking to banksters to fix the foreclosure crisis," but then I realized it wasn't much of a joke, because the Obama Administration did all of that. Didn't we used to think scientists, not entrepreneurs, were the big innovators?

Rebecca Solnit at The New Republic does a public service by reviewing three books about female anger. Male anger -- the kind that ends up in school shootings, wife beatings, and whole movements of men who never stop whining about woman constantly rejecting them I wonder why -- gets most of the ink in America, but it's well past time we acknowledged that women have a right to be angry, and that we need to stop telling them they don't. (I mean, I don't put up with oooooh why are you so angry? from the haters, and it never occurs to me that I should -- but we make women feel like they should.)

Jake Laperruque and David Janovsky at the Project on Government Oversight inform us that aerial drones may have reached a point where they're good enough and cheap enough to tempt local police departments to radically increase spying on the citizenry. And the more automated they become, the fewer people will be involved in their use and maintenance -- which means, yes, that aerial drones kill jobs. How many times must I tell these pimps! Ensuring that government spying doesn't violate our rights is the work of a democracy, and only people can do the work of a democracy -- and if that last part puts the fear in you, then your task as a citizen is to help create people worthy of that work, not throw up your hands and let machines do it.

You can get too hypnotized by the inside politics in this excerpt from Michael Lewis's upcoming book (The Fifth Risk) about how our Administration is destroying our government from within, but you'll probably agree that, regardless of the specific context in which he said it, "fuck the law...I want my fucking money" is pretty much the motto of our President and of the corporate executives he regards as his real constituency. Remember that motto every time our Administration tries to slash clean air, clean water, and product safety regulations.

Finally, we learn the amazing story of how Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) went from declaring his support for the Kavanaugh nomination to demanding an FBI investigation into the allegations against Mr. Kavanaugh after activists confronted him in a Senate elevator with their stories of sexual assault. That video is hard to watch, but "(l)ook at me when I'm talking to you!" is exactly how we must confront the powerful in America, and when we do, we have the opportunity to learn a simple lesson: that shame works. Never let the cynics and the haters tell you any differently.

Action: concerning cruel budgeting and our Supreme Court.

It may seem strange, but Republicans are talking an awful lot about cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and the protections of the Affordable Care Act -- Administration economic advisor Larry Kudlow told the Economic Club of New York that our Administration would be going after Medicare and Social Security after the midterms, and Republicans in Congress keep proposing budgets that would turn Medicare into a voucher program and cut trillions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid. You'd think with all the trouble Republicans had getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, they'd know better -- but then again, they're probably looking around the political landscape and seeing nothing but weakling Democrats who barely raise a peep in defense of popular and necessary programs. Thus it's up to us, as always, so Greyroots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court, then you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a smartphone) to call your Senators and give them what-for. The news is all about the sworn affidavit from a third woman accusing Mr. Kavanaugh of horrific sexual behavior toward girls while he was still a youth -- and, as other observers have pointed out, a sworn affidavit means perjury charges for the person who swears it if they're lying. But Justice Kavanaugh has already convinced us he'd do his damnedest to expand Presidential power, and I think we're all seeing how bad a proposition that would be right now. And these quite reasonable accusations over the last week also show us that Mr. Kavanaugh is too entitled to sit in judgement on anyone or anything.

Around the table: the further adventures of our intrepid President.

Remember when our Secretary of State "certified" that the Saudi/UAE coalition was doing its best to protect civilian human rights in its war on Yemen? Well, he may have done that after the State Department's legislative affairs team told him that ending the war in Yemen would cost corporations too much money in arms sales -- and a former lobbyist for a defense contractor just so happens to head up that team. Nice to know that the matter of right and wrong enters into our government's deliberations so frequently! Remember this when your Tea Party uncle says our President is conducting a "different" kind of foreign policy, or that you should put businesspeople in government because they're the best people and they know everything.

Our Administration lifts a penalty for a coal corporation that has repeatedly violated mine safety laws -- and may have broken the law in doing so. And the fellow who made this decision -- our Administration's Mine Safety and Health Administration chief -- is a former coal executive whose corporation repeatedly violated the safety of its workers because of course he is. Again, let your Tea Party uncle explain how businesspeople "know everything," or, better yet, how making coal mines less safe "helps out coal miners." (And yes, I noticed the Russian connection to Pocahontas Coal -- but which would be worse: the fact of a Russian connection, or more coal miners getting sick and dying because our Administration doesn't think it has to play by the rule of law?)

A U.S. District Judge blocks a North Carolina law aiming to slash farmworkers' rights. Confront the details of the bill the court struck down and you'll likely think of it as legislators throwing fecal matter against a wall to see what sticks. But you know, it sure would be better for all of us if farmworkers weren't exempt from the protections of the National Labor Relations Act, and recent pro-worker legislation at the federal level, while pretty commendable, hasn't gone as far as that.

North Carolina passes law mandating voting places stay open from 7am to 7pm on weekdays -- but this has the unintended consequence (or do I mean "unintended consequence"?) of forcing almost half of that state's counties to close early voting locations. If you're thinking more hours open means more access to the polls, consider how far some rural folks have to go to vote and how little it matters that polls might be open a little earlier or a little later, and then accept the wisdom of having more voting locations.

Ho hum, Facebook now relies on two government-created propaganda outlets to stem the spread of "fake news." Or do I mean "stem"? Too many folks are using the spectre of "fake news" to censor good liberal news outlets, and (as I've said to more than one troll!) crying "fake news" at everything is a way of saying you can't win arguments on the merits. I'll admit I've barely noticed Facebook's doings on my news feed, but that's because I don't use them as a news feed -- I use email, still the greatest social network ever created, as a news feed.

Finally, we now know of four women who are accusing Brett Kavanaugh of various kinds of sexual assault, and rather than attend Mr. Kavanaugh's unlikely denials or our President's expected hysteria, let us instead attend Sen. Lindsey Graham's declaration that he doesn't want to "ruin this guy's life based on an accusation." If Mr. Kavanaugh didn't get on our Supreme Court, would that really "ruin" his life? He'll still serve on the D.C. Circuit Court, he'll still be the beneficiary of (I suspect wholly unexamined) white privilege, he'll be able to get wingnut welfare forever if he chooses -- yeah, our lives should be so "ruined." And, as I've suggested, a lot of people not so afflicted by a sense of entitlement must have the skill and ability to fill this position. Maybe even our President could find one.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court and a vicious e. coli strain.

If you haven't done so, already, today would be a good day to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject the nomination of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court. I've said that the entirely plausible accusation of sexual assault, regardless of how long ago it was, is reason enough to sink his nomination -- I mean, we're only trying to fill one spot; think we can't find a qualified judge who doesn't have the sense of entitlement you'd have to have to try to rape someone? But we must remember that Mr. Kavanaugh poses a far greater threat to law and order: he has demonstrated, through his multitudinous writings, that he would expand Presidential power and Presidential prerogatives far beyond what our Founders intended or what a free society would tolerate. And that should upset you no matter what our President's name is.

Meanwhile, researchers at George Washington University have found a particular strain of E. coli (ST131-H22, to be precise) found in chickens seems to be migrating to humans and causing (among other infections) up to 40,000 urinary tract infections annually -- a mere one half of one percent of all UTIs Americans get in a year, but that won't comfort you if that number becomes 100 percent of you. And, of course, it could get much worse -- ST131-H22 has apparently developed some resistance to tetracycline, which it encounters frequently enough because factory farms tend to pump it into their chickens. Anyway, Penn PIRG helps you tell our USDA to start testing poultry for this strain of E. coli. The USDA can do this without additional authorization from Congress, and yes the big poultry producers will very likely stamp their feet and try to drag this out in court, but really, this is an appropriate time to say if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear.

Around the table: R.I.P., *Village Voice*.

Uh oh: woman accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault while both were in high school, and Sen. Feinstein (D-CA), after some apparent dithering, refers the matter to the FBI. In a sane, healthy, and normal society, this allegation would finish his nomination; in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, I'm not even sure if this allegation gives some Democratic Senators (Heitkamp, Manchin, Donnelly, Jones) cover to vote against him. Of course, the right would no doubt prefer the story be about how Democrats handled it, and I bet our "liberal" media enables that narrative, since it's got drama and a penis in it. I'd be happy to be wrong about all of this, but I fear I'm not.

Speaking of sickness, immorality, and decadence, big pharma CEO says he had a "moral requirement" to jack up the price of a urinary infection drug by 600%. He also falls back on the old MUST! REWARD! SHAREHOLDERS! saw, and pretends that the choice we face as a civilization is either price-gouging or oblivion, which is what, class? A hostage situation, that's what -- don't prevent me from taking advantage of sick people, or the American economic system gets it! Gosh, how did businesses ever succeed in the days when you'd be ashamed to call price-gouging "moral"?

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says he could, theoretically, mind you, take on our President in an election and win, because he's "smarter." Of course he quickly backtracks, optimistically assessing that anyone other than a beltway insider was crying out for a Dimon 2020 campaign! Seriously, though, would Mr. Dimon be the first to crucify himself on his own pride against our President? No, he would not. (Also, too, he should check his I-earned-my-money routine -- even when comparing himself to the billionaire President who started out with a "small loan" of a million bucks from "Daddy" -- because all Jamie Dimon does, for real, is redistribute other folks' hard-earned wealth upward to himself.)

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), who's now what passes for a moderate Republican in the House, falls all over himself suggesting that staying in an orphanage might be better for kids than getting adopted by gay parents. Politicians ought to remember that high school kids are a) smart and b) not compromised by their employers, because they don't have them. I'm not sure this puts the kibosh on his re-election, though -- yes, New Jersey is one of the few states where being anti-gay is an electoral anchor around your neck, but Mr. Smith hasn't been as obvious about it as former Rep. Scott Garrett, one of the Republicans' few House losses of 2016. As persistent? Perhaps. But not as obvious.

I find the tale of how our President supposedly demanded that his architect remove braille signs from his building's elevators (in contravention of federal law) because "no blind people (were) going to live" there far more instructive than whatever came out in a book this week. If he was just screwing around with the architect, whom he also apparently called "weak," then he's a mean bastard, and if he actually demanded that someone else break the law on his behalf, then he's a coward. And his animus toward regulations "telling him what to do" (cf. all those health code violations at the "second White House," Mar-a-Lago) makes him the emotional equivalent of a 12-year-old boy.

Finally, on the occasion of the demise of the Village Voice after 53 years of greatness -- at the hands of yet another vulture capitalist who swore he'd revive it -- Art Forum treats us to remembrances of the Voice from some of its greatest writers, including Gary Indiana, Robert Christgau, J. Hoberman, and Greg Tate. Mr. Hoberman (I still remember his skeptical Schindler's List review!) calls the Voice "everything I loved about New York" and its writers "an indescribable mix of brilliant, talented, impossible people," and while I stopped loving New York long ago, I still love the work of at least two dozen of these impossible people (I hoped someone would mention Alisa Solomon, who used to be my go-to on gay rights). R.I.P., Voice.

Action: concerning "free" trade, consent, and campaign finance disclosure.

As NAFTA renegotiation drags on, Sign for Good still helps you tell your Congressfolk that any NAFTA renegotiation (which they'll have to approve, after all!) must put people before corporations and protect our clean air and clean water. "Free" trade defenders claim the problems we diagnose with these trade deals are "theoretical." But our recent experience proves they're wrong! In 2015, the World Trade Organization ruled that our country-of-origin labeling laws violated at least two "free" trade deals -- and then Congress rushed to repeal those laws rather than face punitive tariffs. Why should we let "free" trade deals nullify our laws like that? And why should we tolerate the existence of "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanisms that let corporate investors nullify laws that would protect our clean air and clean water -- and then exact tribute for the "hardship" of having to follow them? Given the low character of our corporate elites, none of this is "theoretical."

Meanwhile, this Change.org petition helps you tell the Virginia state House to impeach state 12th Judicial Circuit Court Judge T.J. Hauler for allowing an 18-year-old man to serve no jail time despite being convicted for raping a 14-year-old girl. I have just described everything you need to know about that case -- the age of consent in Virginia is 18, and any kind of "carnal knowledge" with youths between the age of 13 and 15 is a felony in Virginia, which means this was rape the moment he knew how old she was. No, there is literally no imagining that "she secretly wanted it" or "she asked him to tie that belt around her neck" or even that she said yes at any point -- we have age of consent laws precisely so we can protect younger people against the older people who'd abuse them. Still, Judge Hauler gave the offender zero years in jail, and wouldn't you know it, Judge Hauler has a history of going light on sex offenders. But maybe not for much longer!

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6239/S. 3150, the DISCLOSE Act, then a consortium of good-government groups including Common Cause and Issue One still helps you do that. The DISCLOSE Act would, as its title suggests, force more campaign finance disclosure for political ads that target a candidate for office -- for example, it would force disclosure of campaign ads that target a candidate's character without explicitly also endorsing another candidate, and it would force corporations to run an "I approve this message" disclaimer the way candidates for office have to do. In this, the "Age of McConnell" -- that is to say, the age of virtually unrestricted campaign contributions leading to virtually boundless corruption -- most folks want to know who exactly is spending buku bucks trying to manipulate them. And even our Supreme Court, notorious for conflating money and speech, says that's not too much to ask.

Action: concerning drug pricing and private prisons.

H.R. 6505, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, would (as the title suggests) allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices for its Part D drug benefit program. You've no doubt heard of studies suggesting that letting Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices wouldn't actually bring drug prices down, but if that's true, how does the Veterans Administration pay 40% less for drugs than Medicare does? It boggles the mind that folks could argue that allowing the buyer of almost one-third of prescription drugs in America to negotiate drug prices "will have little effect on drug pricing." Maybe if the Medicare negotiators are complete incompetents! But we can replace them if they're incompetent, because they work for our government, and therefore for us, but all big pharma corporations will ever do is push everyone around and steal your money. Hence both Public Citizen and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to help lower drug prices by passing the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop using private prisons to detain immigrants, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Again, letting private prison corporations house immigrant detainees is a way of putting a wedge between the American people and the government that presumably works for us -- oh, sure, governments always promise to oversee private corporations that take on government functions, but how has that worked out for us? When private prisons put immigrant children in jail, sexually and physically abuse them, and force them to take psychotropics, what does our government do? They say how horrible all that is, and then they do nothing about it, since private prisons are, after all, doing necessary work. But if we make our government house immigrant detainees, then we can more easily shine a light on, and get rid of, serial abusers. And as a bonus, we'll have far less corruption -- and the corruption we do encounter we can more easily punish, since it's our government.

Around the table: starring a bunch of bad people, acting badly!

Ari Paul writes quite the elegy for the New York Daily News after its owner, a media corporation somehow named Tronc, fires half of its editorial workers. The Daily News has given tabloids a good name, by focusing on the local government issues the other New York papers are either too haughty (cough New York Times cough) or too crazy (cough New York Post cough) to cover. But killing off editors and expecting writers to do-that-job-too is a good way of crippling a paper's ability to cover local politics. And even a Times editorial board member says that now "(u)nscrupulous developers and corrupt politicians can breathe a sigh of relief." In a sane and moral society, such people would never have a moment's peace. And you know what that means.

Federal lawsuit digs up evidence of Michigan Republicans actively trying to give their party an advantage in redrawing House districts; one of them boasts of concentrating "Dem garbage" into a small number of districts. If you're the hopeful kind, as I generally advocate you should be, you might think that spelling out how you're trying to create a partisan advantage -- versus, you know, redrawing districts to better represent the people -- might raise a red flag even with someone like Chief Justice Roberts. But lately our Supreme Court has been far less interested in the actual animus of right-wingers than the "animus" supposedly generated by liberals.

What's left for charter school advocates now that their failure is plain? Well, according to Jeff Bryant at the OurFuture blog, all that's left is to "recast their failed agenda as a success." And, I guess, to claim they're "fact-based" and then not produce any facts -- or, at least, any facts that stand up to scrutiny -- and claim that you're the one who's "ideological." Nice work, if you can get it! When your Tea Party uncle tells you that charter schools "do better" than public schools, you can remind him that charter schools can take anyone they want and kick out anyone they want, and yet they still can't win a 500-yard dash with a 490-yard head start.

Beleaguered U.S. House Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) plans to run for Speaker of the House if Republicans still hold the House after the midterms. Because when no less than eight former Ohio State University wrestlers come forward and say you knew about the team doctor sexually abusing wrestlers 30 years ago while you were assistant wrestling coach and you did nothing about it, not only do you not resign, not only do you not "retire at the end of your term to spend more time with your family," you run for Speaker of the House! Moral values!

Finally, our distinguished gentleman of a President slams the FCC's sudden unwillingness to rubber-stamp the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, saying that it would deprive America of a "great and much needed Conservative voice for and of the People" (odd capitalization in original). I guess he means the merger would provide yet another "conservative" "voice," since we only have (aside from Sinclair as it's currently constituted) Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Newsmax, World Net Daily, Breitbart, and am I leaving any of them out? I wouldn't expect our President to grapple with Chairman Pai's stated objection to the merger, but the more pertinent question, of course, is whether one corporation should own so many media outlets -- a phenomenon which tends to annoy conservatives as well as liberals.

Around the table: melting snowflakes since 2005.

And just like that, Congressional Republicans cave to our President and decide not to reimpose penalties on Chinese corporation ZTE, which, lest we forget, violated American sanctions on Iran and North Korea. The next time you see a Republican slamming our President, remember that this Republican does what this President wants him to do 99% of the time. But would it kill a Democrat to simply say "law and order!" sarcastically whenever these things happen?

University of Alabama study finds that terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims get 357% more media coverage than terrorist attacks perpetrated by anyone else. And before you retort that TEH MUZLIMZ COMMITZ TEH MORE TERRORIZMZ HA HA HA SNORT!!!!!, attend the finding that, actually, "white and right-wing" terrorists commit twice the terrorism of Muslim extremists. If, upon reading that, your next retort begins with "well, what about," stop. Just stop. And admit you're wrong. You'll feel a whole lot better.

"States Purged 16 Million Voters From the Rolls Before the 2016 Election" does indulge in scare numbers a bit -- some 12 million voters got purged from the rolls before the 2008 election -- but the problem it describes is real. And the Brennan Center for Justice found that voter purges went way up in areas that used to be subject to pre-clearance under Sec. 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, the section our Supreme Court struck down in 2013. I sure hope whomever takes Interstate Crosscheck to the Supreme Court does a better job arguing our case than the folks who argued Husted and Janus did.

From NBC News we learn that "moderate Democrats" held a retreat last week to try and figure out how to neutralize the more progressive movement within the party. Like the French building an ever-longer Maginot Line, the Third Way types drone on and on about how they're "tired of losing" without ever realizing that they're the main reason Democrats lose. And three words for folks who think folks like us couldn't win in the Midwest: Sanders won Michigan. (As an aside, did NBC really call the convention a "safe space" for moderates? Yes, they did! What snowflakes they must be!)

How terribly surprising to learn that the EPA went to great lengths to protect former Administrator Scott Pruitt from a desk cleaned with formaldehyde, at virtually the same time the EPA also went to great lengths to bury an EPA report warning about the dangers of formaldehyde! It gets better: the new desk Mr. Pruitt ordered came from California, where formaldehyde is more strictly regulated, so the EPA aired the desk out in a warehouse for a week out of an abundance of caution! So, long story short: snowflake EPA workers protect their snowflake Administrator while having no intention of protecting, say, the American people. Did I mention snowflakes?

Finally, we learn how a Facebook group for sexual assault survivors got taken over by trolls who promptly started harassing the victims. With threats to call their abusers or call child protective services on them, among other evil works. Facebook sure seems anxious to apply just about every solution to this problem except hiring more workers to monitor groups, which they could do if only they'd break off some of that billionaire income in the front office. Hire humans to do jobs! It really does make a difference. In the meantime, if you think it's "funny" or "subversive" to pull stunts like harassing sexual assault victims online, could you do us all a favor and scratch "ASSHOLE" into your forehead with a knife so we all know to shun you when we see you on the street?

Around the table: in which another fight between right-wingers gets exposed as drama.

Our President pulls the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, incorrectly calling the deal "one-sided" and presuming that he'll get a "better deal" out of Iran than one that already verifies the absence of nuclear weapons development. Incomprehensibly he also seems to think this strengthens his hand with North Korea. The other five nations party to the deal have said they'll continue it (and Iran remains a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons), so it's just possible this is another meaningless ball-swinging exercise from our President. But the smarter bet would be to prepare for a PR offensive ending sometime in October with war against, ahem, regime change in Iran. This, after we all remember how regime change went in Iraq and Afghanistan!

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says the stock buybacks which are the main result of Republican tax "reform" are actually good for the economy, because they "return capital to shareholders," who then "recycle() that capital through the economy." Of course, we already know that corporations were already sitting on a ton of capital they weren't "recycl(ing) through the economy," and we also know that giving a shareholder a ton of money in no way guarantees they'll actually spend it, either on jobs or cheeseburgers. Is there a lie too evil for the Foreclosure King to tell?

In a related note, Dean Baker at TruthOut gives us some hope in These Interesting Times: with stock dividend yields falling, and with so much CEO pay tied to stock options, CEOs may -- just may -- be screwing themselves out of the absurdly high salaries to which they've become accustomed! And "the sight of top management getting rich while providing mediocre returns (for shareholders) may provide sufficient motivation for shareholders to organize." Ah, but I can just see Congress passing another stupid bailout if CEOs lose too much money. We should be out in the streets if that happens.

Don Blankenship's little "Cocaine Mitch" ad (in which he infamously talks about "China people") may have aided his effort to win the Republican Senate nomination in West Virginia, but Alec MacGillis at ProPublica reminds us that when one of Mr. Blankenship's corporations spewed out a larger-than-the-Exxon-Valdez coal slurry spill that polluted the water of over 25,000 good Kentuckians back in 2000, none other than Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell was there to help him avoid taking any significant responsibility for it. Which should remind you that a lot of these "outsider" candidates are really insiders, and a lot of their "fights" are just drama. And they're not even good drama.

Finally, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman quickly resigns his position after several women accuse him of sexual assault. They call it physical abuse, he calls it "role-playing," but with his resignation a mere three hours after the New Yorker's initial report of the accusations, I guess we know which one it was. What a damn waste -- Mr. Schneiderman's resignation won't make financial predation popular or anything, but folks who do good works in the public sphere need to stop making other people's lives hell in the private sphere. I really don't care how hard that is. Anything worth doing is hard.

Around the table: concerning tax "reform," religious "conscience," and sexual harassment.

If you've been tempted to think that the "liberal" media has really turned a corner in its coverage since the Trump Administration descended upon us, Ben Norton at FAIR will remind you that the "liberal" media, with its coverage of the passage of the Senate tax "reform" bill, still prefers to cover everything like it's a damn horserace. Lost in all the "victory" headlines are the simple facts: it's not a "tax cut" for anyone but corporations and the very rich, it'll create bigger deficits, and it'll prompt Congress to cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security to make up for all the "economic growth" that'll never come.

Eric Levitz at New York magazine reports that Senate Republicans seem to have accidentally killed many of their big corporate donors' favorite deductions, by retaining the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, which just so happens to be 20%, which is exactly the same as the regular rate! Since Republicans would be trumpeting we closed corporate tax loopholes from the mountaintops if they'd done it on purpose, maybe it really is incompetence. But remember the lesson of The Bush Mobb years: incompetence is malice. And if the bill that comes out of conference puts all the corporate welfare back, then I suppose it'll be no-harm-no-foul for Mr. McConnell and his caucus.

Apparently the U.S. Supreme Court is trying to figure out a way to rule against a gay couple denied a wedding cake due to the wedding cake maker's "religious beliefs." I figured they'd just give the opinion to Justice Gorsuch and let him write whatever, but it seems Justice Kennedy, author of quite a few pro-gay rights opinions in his time, is ready to leap on the absurd idea that the Colorado statute that prevents this sort of discrimination evidences an "animus" toward religion. It doesn't: it has an animus toward discrimination, which it should. Justice Sotomayor's argument in paragraph 9, which describes the real free-association freedoms the First Amendment protects, is far more convincing.

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) announces resignation after multiple allegations of sexual harassment -- though he also says he may have given folks a "false impression" that he admitted to any of them, and that a Senate ethics investigation would ultimately have cleared him. Maybe I'm too demanding, but the fact that he won't do his job and fight the accusations against him prompts me to dismiss his assertions of innocence. And while Anthony Weiner was a liberal (and an ineffectual one) only on health care, Mr. Franken has championed, and made a difference on, many issues, including forced arbitration, net neutrality, and financial regulation. Thus his fall is far more disappointing than Mr. Weiner's.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Trump press hack Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Mr. Trump has endorsed Roy Moore for the Alabama Senate race because having "a person who supports his agenda" is more important than the possibility that said person has sexually abused teenage girls. She also says, of course, that it's "something for the people of Alabama to decide," which raises the question of why Mr. Trump said anything at all. Why is "his agenda" important in the first place? Is that what the Founders wanted? Did they give us Senators merely so they'd rubber stamp a President's agenda?

Around the table: tabulating threats foreign and domestic.

Brian Barrett at Wired finds the threat of an electro-magnetic pulse from North Korea "overhyped." The 90 PERCENTZ DEADZ IN A YEARZ!!!! number you've heard actually comes from science fiction, not science -- EMPs are real, as you know if you've ever lost a radio signal while driving under a power line, but the hysterical death/destruction numbers aren't, and they'd have to be for North Korea to even try blowing up a nuke over the United States, because if you don't take out our nation's entire counterstrike capability, well, you've lost.

Now Saudi Arabia wants to embark on an allegedly peaceful uranium extraction program, for the purpose of creating nuclear energy. Without even ruling out the possibility that they'll develop nuclear weapons, a prospect that doesn't seem to chill the hearts of American right-wingers as much as Iran developing nukes. Indeed, I've heard just about nothing from the right-wing usual suspects about the possibility that Saudi Arabia would develop nuclear weapons.

Workers at the Gothamist and DNAInfo voted to unionize, and then their owner, TD Banknorth CEO Joe Ricketts, shut them both the hell down, and thus Kate Aronoff suggests that Mr. Ricketts is a "Walking Case for a $1 Million Maximum Income." A 91% tax bracket on millionaire income would have essentially the same effect, and before your Tea Party uncle calls it "class warfare," remind him (as Ms. Aronoff reminds us) that the Republican tax "reform" plan would reduce Estate taxes on wealthy folks while restricting the ability of working families to take tax breaks on their property taxes and on state and local taxes, which is a better way of describing "class warfare."

It's entirely true, as Tegan Jones says at FAIR, that the "liberal" media have been making excuses for President George H.W. Bush's "cop-a-feel" attacks on women, but the really stunning thing, to me at least, is the excuses Bush the Better's handlers make -- that he's wheelchair-bound, that "his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures," that "he has patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner." These sound totally like '80s excuses! Haven't they looked at the man currently occupying the Oval Office and realized that you can say fuck-you-I'm-the-President and get away with it?

In a peripherally-related note, Energy Secretary Rick Perry says that fossil fuels can help prevent sexual assault. Because they keep the lights on! Jesus Mary and Joseph is it possible he was actually trying to tell a joke? If so, it's nowhere near as funny as a Dad joke. (Right-wingers, don't object that he was really talking about energy problems in Africa, as he'd obviously stopped talking about Africa at the point he tried to make his attempt at a joke, or whatever that was. Juxtaposition does not automatically create context.)

Finally, Shoshi Parks at Yes! magazine tells us about the ancient acequias system of water management in the Southwest, which aims to distribute water resources democratically, in stark contrast to Colorado and New Mexico law, which allows water owners to sell their water to the highest bidder. That latter system, of course, favors big mining and big agriculture concerns over smaller farmers. And yet today's right-wingers, presented with these concepts, will not only conclude that the mammon-worshiping system is superior to the democratic one, but would scoff at anyone who thinks we should do anything for any reason other than money. They'll get their punishment at the Pearly Gates, but they'll punish us in the meantime, so let's keep fighting them.

Action: tax "reform," and pro-rape laws.

Since many Republicans seem anxious to move on to tax "reform," use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Congressfolk and tell them to oppose the Republican tax "reform" "plan." As always, they'd give the biggest share of their tax cuts to the very rich -- and that's true of both their income and corporate tax cuts, since if corporations get to keep more of their profits, who do you think they're going to give it to? Their rich executives, of course. And if Congress repeals the Estate Tax, which doesn't affect estates under $5 million, who benefits from that? The very rich, again. No use telling me TEH RICHEZ CREATEZ TEH JOBZ!!!!!, not only because corporate executives never create a job if they can get away with it, but because higher taxes on the rich and on corporations create jobs -- when corporations have no incentive to hoard money or pay their executives outlandish sums, they'll hire more workers to make more stuff and call that an expense. I mean, that's how it worked in the country I grew up in -- you know, that place teabaggers keep wishing we could go back to?

Meanwhile, Jordan's Parliament may consider, as soon as today, repealing a law forcing rape victims to marry their rapists in order to "protect family honor." One wonders why the rapist doesn't bring dishonor on his own family through his action, or, you know, upon himself. (I presume we don't need to gender-equivocate about this matter as it occurs in Jordan or the seven other nations that still have such laws on their books.) But this is not a matter that should be left up to "cultural relativism" -- if a woman gets raped and then gets forced to marry the man who raped her, that's abominable simple and plain, not least because it takes away her freedom to be who she wants to be. And if the victim is a minor, who could not legally consent to sexual relations at all in America? That's even worse. So don't feel like a scold or a snob for telling people how to be civilized if they need to hear it. And of course some Jordanian lawmakers want to keep the law, because, I guess, change is hard and we can't just ignore tradition. But, ah, yeah, we can, in fact, ignore "tradition" that places a family's "honor" ahead of a woman's freedom and a civilization's justice. So Avaaz helps you tell the Jordanian Parliament to get rid of their pro-rape law.

Around the table: right-wingers ramp up the hysteria!

Adam Johnson catches Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen comparing folks who protested a eugenicist to "fascists" and the Manchester bomber. Charles Murray deserves protest everywhere he goes (though he doesn't deserve violence), but Mr. Cohen has been a long-time backer of Mr. Murray's work suggesting that black folks are "naturally" less intelligent than white folks, which may explain why Mr. Cohen plays the fascist card so quickly. (No, you need a little more than an act of violence to be a fascist. After all, many fascists are well-placed enough that they never have to commit acts of violence themselves.)

From the "Don't Call It Stupid" file: the Trump Administration's little immigration database appears to expose some undocumented immigrants to (further) domestic violence and sexual abuse by putting their personal info out there. Remember: when they respond WE WERE JUSTZ TRYINGZ TO HELPZ TEH VICTIMZ!!!!!, don't believe they didn't know what they were doing -- our government still has a few lawyers in it, despite Mr. Trump's best efforts. And if you're tempted to defend Mr. Trump here, ask yourself if immigrants deserve to be raped or beaten up merely because they don't have papers.

Ain't no terrorist attack so bad a Republican's self-pity can't make it worse, and so it goes with the Multnomah County, Oregon GOP Chair, who says Republicans maybe ought to go out with private security forces like the notorious Oath Keepers because things are so "dangerous" for them. A racist attacks two women of color on the train and then kills two folks (and injure a third) who defended those women, but Republicans continue to think everything is all about them. Of course he goes on to talk about "a closing of the mind" to viewpoints we fought World War II over. I guess he's sad we won that war. Waaaaaaaah!

Ho hum, Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE) refuses to tell an NPR reporter -- three times! -- whether Americans have a "right" to eat or not. That and his incomprehensible grammar ("I would hope that we can look to"?) would be career-ending in a sane and healthy society -- but in the one where the Nebraska legislature has so gerrymandered Mr. Smith's district that he typically wins re-election with 75% of the vote, he will never suffer the consequences. And if someone who says Americans have no rights were to knock him off in the primary, that wouldn't be anything to celebrate.

About half of the 8th-graders from the South Orange (NJ) Middle School refuse to have their picture taken with House Speaker Paul Ryan. Adults seem to have no idea what civilized behavior is anymore, but children still do, and that's something. I haven't checked, but I bet that as we speak more than a few right-wingers are attacking these kids, either as pretentious fools or (worse!) "pawns of their parents." After all, attacking children is one of the last refuges of the scoundrel.

Finally, comedienne Kathy Griffin is 500% wrong for putting a photo of her with a severed and bloody Donald Trump's head on her Twitter feed. No one who really believes in the promise of America would murder the President, or joke about it. Also, to hell with her apology, because too often in America we see someone getting attention for doing or saying something awful and then getting more attention for the apology. That's not "the way the world is," or even "the way the business is" -- it's merely another indicator of our sickness, immorality, and decadence.

Around the table: governments torturing citizens, banksters exploiting prisoners, and Donald Trump.

Amnesty Internation announces they have "credible evidence" that the Turkish government is cracking down on the Turkish people with arbitrary detainment, torture, and rape. That followed President Erdogan's emergency declaration, which followed the "suspension" of some 50,000 civil servants, the detainment of almost 1,000 judges and prosecutors, and the suspension of over 2,700 more judges. Also, too, they detained 60 schoolkids for treason. Arresting kids for treason! You might say Mr. Erdogan's actions are explicable, given the apparent coup attempt in mid-July, but I'd just say a leader who feels he must go to such lengths to restore "order" is no kind of leader at all. Not that he was a peach to begin with, of course.

Arun Gupta at The Nation describes the latest (legal!) scam perpetrated in the prison system: they take the prisoners' cash and give them ATM cards when they get out -- ATM cards that are larded with hidden fees. Anyone else think law enforcement will get money from banksters to arrest people on bogus charges, take their money, and given them fee-laden ATM cards when they put them back on the street that night? Of course, prisoners who serve longer sentences get this done to them, too. Don't be the fool who says who cares? They shouldn't have done anything wrong! After all, you might spend a night, or a year, in the clink someday -- maybe for something you can't even imagine could be a crime now! -- and then you'll see what it's like to keep paying after you thought you were done paying.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence tells right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, apparently with a straight face, that "name-calling" has no "place in public life," all because President Obama called Donald Trump a demagogue. Examples of Donald Trump's own name-calling are, of course, easily accessible, apparently, to everyone except Mike Pence (and Hugh Hewitt, who didn't question Mr. Pence on "name-calling" any further). But I wouldn't presume (as the Politico writer does) that this is Messrs. Trump and Pence "getting tangled up in mixed messaging on tactics." I'm pretty sure the "mixed messaging" is the tactic -- being a Republican (let alone a Trump votary!) requires exactly this sort of mental disconnect all the time.

Finally, speaking of Mr. Trump, what to make of his declaration at an Ohio rally that "I'm afraid the election's gonna be rigged, I have to be honest"? That he's not so confident in Voter ID laws delivering him unearned victories in Wisconsin and North Carolina after all? That he's trying to gin up anger and resentment among votaries who can't possibly see how he could have lost? Or that, like a baseball manager in last place by mid-May complaining about injuries, he's just getting his excuses ready? Number three sounds the most reasonable, but I bet it's number two. Then again, with Donald Trump, it's always number two.

UPDATE. I originally identified Mr. Erdogan as the Prime Minister of Turkey, a position he held until 2014; he is now that nation's President. I've corrected the error.

Action: net neutrality, and sexual assault.

The American people, across the political spectrum, have spoken, and we want net neutrality -- but that doesn't stop our nominal representatives in Congress from trying to kill it. Not that they have the cojones to come out and say they're trying to kill it; normally they just try to defund the FCC, or demand more "study" on matters they've had over a dozen years to study. But it really is sobering, contemplating the message behind their attempts to kill internet freedom. Our Congressfolk apparently believe that the only kind of freedom that matters is freedom for corporations to herd you into some junk-news corner of the internet -- rather than your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet, unfettered by the gnarled hand of corporate gatekeepers. It gets tiring, speaking out to defend the victories we've already won -- but freedom is never cheap, nor do its enemies ever stop trying to destroy it. Hence both Free Press and the Electronic Freedom Foundation help you tell your Congressfolk to stop attacking internet freedom. Be sure to remind them you're not going away, either.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5571/S. 2566, the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act, would help rape survivors get the justice they deserve. We all just watched the Stanford swimmer get a mere six months for a dumpster rape that two other men stopped from being much worse, but any sexual assault survivor will tell you that even getting a rape conviction is almost astronomically difficult. But the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act would help reduce the possibility that rapists will go free, by ensuring that law enforcement entities store rape kits until after statutes of limitations expire, test rape kits without charging the victims for them, inform victims of medical information from their own rape kit unless it compromises an active investigation, and give victims at least 30 days' notification before destroying the rape kit. The bill would do other things as well, but the rape kit is, basically, where all the evidence is, and if that's gone, so's any chance of justice. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act, and thus help reduce sexual assault in America.

Action: health care, and sexual assault on campus.

I've resisted passing along any "make sure the Democrats put this in their party platform" action alerts, as I'm generally more interested in telling Congressfolk to enact policy, but I'll point you to this one from National Nurses United, which helps you tell the Democratic Party to put Medicare-for-All in its 2016 platform. Why? Because Medicare-for-All, like Medicare, is actually fairly popular across the political spectrum -- NNU's petition says 58% of Americans support a single-payer, Medicare-for-All health care system, and that number is in line with virtually every other poll I've ever seen. Of course, popularity isn't the only criteria for enacting policy; it also has to be good policy, and single-payer health care systems all over the planet provide better care at lower cost than our current system of privatized health care (and mandating citizen participation in that privatized system). Don't believe the hype that Medicare-for-All will make it harder to get good care, or that Medicare-for-All will add to the bureaucracy -- certainly not when our system already does both these things quite well! (Yes, private health insurance corporations have bureaucracies, too.)

Finally, H.R. 2680, the HALT Campus Sexual Violence Act, might have an awkward acronym, but it would do a lot of good -- it would provide more federal funding for investigations of Title IX and Clery Act violations relating to sexual assault on college campuses. (The Clery Act, passed in 1990, mandates that colleges participating in federal financial-aid programs disclose data involving crime near or on their campuses. Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered at Lehigh University in 1986; her parents sued the college, arguing that if Ms. Clery had known about the rash of violent crimes afflicting the university in previous years, she wouldn't have attended the school, and thus wouldn't have died there.) H.R. 2680 would also permit sexual assault survivors to sue universities under the Clery Act as well as Title IX, would revamp the penalties colleges face when they violate Title IX and the Clery Act (for these penalties are either too onerous or too lenient to be effective at present), and would survey students anonymously across the country about sexual assault, and publish the results of those surveys. Hence CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to support the HALT Act.

Action: forced arbitration, and justice for rape victims.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed ending "ripoff clauses" in customer contracts. "Ripoff clauses" force customers file any grievances they might have against a corporation not in the courts but in private arbitration, where, as you know, the customer has little chance of prevailing against a corporation from which the arbitrator really, really would like repeat business. Naturally, big corporations hate the proposal, because corporations make money from ripoff clauses and imagine that their "right" to make money supersedes your right to have your grievances heard in court. Don't believe your right-wing uncle when he tells you if you don't like forced arbitration, you shouldn't have signed the contract -- not unless he first scolds the big corporation for putting the forced arbitration clause in the fine print where folks aren't likely to see it. Remember: blame the perp, not the victim -- even if the perp calls himself a "job creator." Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the CFPB to implement the most vigorous "ripoff clause" rule possible.

Meanwhile, you've heard about Stanford student/athlete Brock Turner, who got a mere six months in jail for raping an unconscious co-ed near a dumpster early last year, but Portland, OR resident Darius Adams's motivation for starting a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the NCAA to ban violent athletes from competition is personal -- four Oregon State football players drugged and raped his mother in 1998. The details get more sordid from there: the four players got community service and a one-game suspension for their crime, and local police appear to have lost the rape kit (and "lost" may very well mean "threw away" in this case). People who really, really like sports excuse this kind of behavior too easily, probably because it means an abrupt end to a promising career through which one can live vicariously. Even Mr. Turner's father wondered aloud why his kid got six months for "20 minutes of action" (how cute, that pop thinks he's capable of keeping it up for 20 minutes!). But wrong is wrong, evil is evil, and everyone should know by now that lives can change in a second.

Around the table: government spying, frivolous lawsuits, euthanasia, corporate taxes, and the "liberal" media.

Philadelphia Police Department admits it put a Google Maps logo on a spy van. I'd be less annoyed about that if I knew the spy van was being used in an investigation on a specific matter using a warrant from a judge -- but the van was chock-full of surveillance equipment that has "fishing expedition" capabilities. Yes, we liberals already know the "right balance" between surveillance and privacy; it's called getting a damn warrant and collecting only the information you need to fulfill that warrant.

Alabama landfill operator sues three Uniontown activists who had been making noise not merely out of concern that the 10-year-old landfill was making residents sick, but out of a quite understandable sense that the landfill only got sited there because it was a historically-black area. If the landfill's suit sounds like a frivolous lawsuit to you, you're not alone -- but this is how corporations roll, calling any allegation, reasonable or not, part of an ongoing investigation or not, a "threat to their livelihoods." (In case you were wondering, the activists Alabama state regulators may have broken federal law -- specifically, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act -- by taking federal money and then allowing corporations to site numerous landfills right next to black neighborhoods.)

Dutch doctors allow a woman in her 20s to euthanize herself; she had been a sexual abuse victim through most of her childhood, and the doctors declared her resulting PTSD incurable. I'm no squealer about death panels, but I tend toward optimism in wondering if folks can recover from even the worst abuses, so of course I wonder if she chose to end her life, unencumbered by the self-interest of others -- we can all think of a number of folks (doctors looking to prove a euthanasia method works, insurers looking not to pay for chronic conditions) who would have some self-interest in having people kill themselves.

Donald Trump says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is using the Washington Post (which he also owns) to attack him -- apparently because he would "tax Amazon like they should be taxed." As you may know, I'm not sanguine on anyone owning more than one corporation, or any corporation owning any other corporation, but I have no idea what Mr. Trump actually means (a higher corporate tax rate? More sales tax collection?). But I do know that whatever he means, he'll be able to deny it later, depending on his audience. That's because he's a flip-flopper.

Finally, Atrios snaps out on "liberal" media types who somehow underestimated Mr. Trump's chances to become the Republican Presidential nominee. "First of all, we all didn't (underestimate him), you and your circle jerk did," he says, and sadly, "circle jerk" describes "liberal" media punditoids pretty accurately. And those Democrat voters who are also "blithering idiots" "aren't treated as Real Americans by every mainstream news outlet," "aren't given their own response to the State of the Union address," and "don't make up a third of the House of Representatives." A thorough and inspiring analysis, though not safe for workplace reading.

Around the table: warrantless wiretapping receives a challenge, and other stories.

The FISA Amendments Act, which codified Tha Bush Mobb's warrantless wiretapping program into law, may finally receive a Constitutional challenge. Our government has notified at least 10 terror suspects that some of the evidence against them came from warrantless wiretapping -- and a lawyer for two of them says he'll try to get that evidence thrown out. You have to wonder why our government suddenly started notifying suspects they're being warrantlessly wiretapped. If you're an eternal optimist, you might conclude that this is Barack Obama's way of finally killing the program dead, by getting judges to do it for him. Entertaining as that notion is, I'm not sure I'm that much an optimist.

At least two Oklahoma courts assert in a criminal case that if a girl gives oral sex while unconscious, it's not "forcible sodomy." under the law. Apparently, state law does not list "incapacitation due to the victim drinking alcohol" as one of the ways to put the force in "forcible sodomy." "We will not, in order to justify prosecution of a person for an offense, enlarge a statute beyond the fair meaning of its language," the appeals court said. Left unanswered is how an incapacitated person could possibly consent to sex, or how the "fair meaning" (not the "literal meaning," you notice) of "forcible sodomy" fails to include, well, forcing yourself on someone who's too drunk to fight you off.

Bill Scher, writing at Politico, offers Minnesota Sen. Al Franken as the best choice for Democratic Vice President. I'm by and large impressed with Sen. Franken -- he's written a lot of great bills that haven't become law mainly because Republicans hate good government -- but the idea that he's somehow "politically incorrect" in the manner of Donald Trump is as ludicrous as the idea that Rachel Maddow is a "liberal version of Sean Hannity." And the "liberal" media won't back off on this alleged "political incorrectness" just because they've given Mr. Trump a pass to say far worse things -- they'll report on them like they're "just as bad," because that's what's "fair." But yes, he's more liberal than Mrs. Clinton, Democrats don't have very many great choices, et cetera.

Consultant working for Sen. John McCain's re-election campaign gets busted after police find a meth lab, one within the reach of small children no less, in her home. Emily Pitha has, apparently, been a mainstay of Arizona Republican politics for many years, having also worked for former Sen. Jon Kyl and his successor, current Sen. Jeff Flake; the McCain campaign, of course, terminated its relationship with her after the arrest. None of this will surprise you if you watch House of Cards, and I don't expect this will be an issue in his re-election campaign, but if something this bizarre happens to him, say, two more times, that might be a sign he's done.

Finally, Donald Trump delivers an allegedly substantial foreign policy address that, in the words of BBC reporter Anthony Zurcher, is "essentially a calmly intoned reprise of the views he has expressed throughout the campaign." Mr. Trump may have figured out what Republican establishment-types have really been telling him: that if you say what's in the hearts of angry white dudes without sounding like an angry white dude, you'll do a lot better. He even read from a teleprompter this time, I understand. Of course, when Mr. Trump says he won't tell ISIS how he's going to beat them, he forgets -- just like they all do! -- that he's supposed to account to us, the American people, about things like that.

Action: female genital mutilation, and food stamps.

Good news: Somalia's government is working on banning female genital mutilation, which is pretty much as dire as it sounds. The practice used to be known as "female circumcision" -- or, in some parts of Nigeria, "having your bath" -- but these days, though FGM still occurs in some 30 countries, Somalia seems to be one of its last major strongholds, and FGM, as you might imagine, puts girls at risk of infection and death, not to mention PTSD and difficulties with childbirth and menstruation. Why did anyone do this in the first place? I was about to look it up, but then I supposed it had something to do with societies controlling women; then I looked it up anyway, and it turns out it mostly has to do with societies controlling women, and the fact that women generally supervise FGM (or cite cultural concerns about hygiene and social standing) doesn't change that. I don't think we need to be anthropologists to condemn this practice, though some anthropologists are out there giving open minds a bad name as we speak. Avaaz helps you tell Somalia to keep working on a full ban on FGM.

Meanwhile, states across America, no doubt squealing WE'RE BROKE!!!!, plan to reinstate cruel laws that would cut food stamp access for hundreds of thousands of good Americans. Congress can prevent this catastrophe with legislation, but I doubt they will unless they hear from us, so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep food stamp access open for good Americans on the rocks. If you're about to tell me that too many Americans simply don't want to work hard, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) contemplate whether you're blowing the handful of lazy people you know way, way out of proportion, and 3) take the economy back from the real lazy, good-for-nothing Americans, the banksters. As long as we're going to have an economic system that crushes jobs and redistributes working family income upward to CEOs, we're going to need a large food stamp program. When we have a more equitable economic system, one that really rewards work instead of rewarding people whose only "work" consists of ingratiating themselves with Our Glorious Elites, we'll talk again.

Around the table: the art of the apology, and other matters.

Comcast and AT&T lobbyists kill a Tennessee bill that would have allowed city-owned electricity utilities to offer broadband services outside the reach of those utilities' electric service. Because Big Gummint regulations are just fine when they allow big corporations to make more money without earning it! No, really, they're not earning it -- what, are they providing better service at lower prices than Chattanooga's famous municipal broadband service? No, but they are paying their executives a lot more.

Surprise, surprise, ProPublica finds that doctors who get more corporate cash really do tend to prescribe more name-brand drugs even when generic versions exist. Right-wingers like to tell you that it's OK that doctors take money from corporations, because they won't let that cloud their judgment. What, don't you trust people? they like to say. But when it comes to sex, these same people believe people (particularly women, I've noticed) are irredeemably corrupt.

Study of federal data finds that charters schools suspend black kids four times as often as white kids. (Disabled kids get a similarly raw deal, which is unnerving when you consider they hardly get into charter schools in the first place.) If you're inclined to think black kids are just that much more ill-behaved than white kids, please slap yourself, and then consider that black kids get suspended for things that white kids don't. Public schools aren't much better at the racial disparity, as it happens, but as a citizen you have more control over that.

Bingham County, Idaho sheriff objects to state legislative efforts to mandate rape-kit testing because, in his words, "the majority of our rapes that are called in, are actually consensual sex." And then he provides reams of data to support his claim! I kid, of course -- you can't prove what ain't. Sheriff Rowland then took to Facebook to apologize, sort of -- he says he "misspoke" but also says he was "misunderstood," and adds that "I did a 10-minute interview and this is what came out of it," when I don't suppose he'd excuse a middle-aged murderer because he lived a 50-year life and the murder is "just what came out of it." He also said he'd been "cyberbullied" and his family threatened, which is repugnant, but you don't solicit pity while you're saying you're sorry. I can't be the only person who sees that.

Finally, a Republican writes an open letter entitled "This is Not My Republican Party." You probably can guess the gist of it -- the party he knows isn't xenophobic, violent, undignified, etc. -- and it's a better apology than the one from the previous paragraph, but this act played a lot better 12 years ago, when the Bush Mobb was a much worse parasite on the GOP host than Donald Trump will ever be. Indeed, I'm tempted to say, now you're sorry? Where were you when Republicans called anti-war Americans traitors and terrorist sympathizers and haters of America?

Action: Guantánamo Bay, rights for rape survivors, and the Charter/Time-Warner merger.

You remember President Obama promising, way, way back in January of 2009, that he would close the Guantánamo Bay detention center? That he would wipe away the blight of our nation imprisoning people without charging them for years on end? Well, here we are in 2016, and Mr. Obama (who, to be fair, ran into a lot of not-in-my-backyard nonsense from Congress) has submitted another close-Guantánamo plan to Congress, but this plan would allow indefinite detention within the borders of the United States, which we may have suspected was already happening, but it's one thing to suspect it's happening and another thing to see it codified into law. But President Obama can accomplish a lot toward the end of closing Guantánamo without having to run to Great and Awesome Real American President Mitch McConnell for permission -- he can expedite review hearings for prisoners and speed up prisoner transfers, and the ACLU helps you tell him to do that. Really, if you can't charge someone with something after holding him for 14 years, let them go.

Meanwhile, you know that rape kits often go years without being tested -- but you may not know that some states can destroy your rape kit and never tell you, and some states won't even put together a rape kit for you if you can't pay for it (and you can be charged as much as $2,000 for a rape kit!), and some states won't even let you have access to your police reports after you've been raped. All that is completely unacceptable, and when your access to justice depends on your geographical location, then it's time for our federal government to step in. So Rise founder/President Amanda Nguyen helps you tell Congress to pass a common-sense bill ensuring basic rights for rape survivors. Close to 1 out of every 12 Americans is a rape survivor (and that's just the ones we know about; how many men, for example, are likely to come forward about being raped?), and these survivors all pay taxes like everyone else; it's about time we got our governments -- federal, state, and local -- to get them the service, and justice, they deserve.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed Charter/Time-Warner merger, then No More Mergers still helps you do that. If the FCC approves the merger, Charter and Comcast will serve, such as they do, nearly 80% of all American homes, and that's not a recipe for lower prices, better service, or job creation. But I'm pleased to no end that No More Mergers has been sounding the alarm about a less well-known aspect of the merger -- the fact that Charter will take on some $27 billion in debt to buy Time-Warner, and Charter's carrying a lot of debt already. Dana Floberg theorizes that once the new Charter/Time-Warner behemoth is carrying over $1,000 in debt per customer, it'll jack up prices. But though some price hike is no doubt in the offing, what if Charter executives are taking on debt merely to jack up stock prices and divert more revenue to shareholders? They could ultimately bleed the corporation dry this way, and ultimately leave their customers with no service, which is in no customer's best interest.

Around the table: human trafficking, terrorism, Republican hawkishness, criminal justice reform, rape kits, and collective bargaining.

Lengthy Associated Press investigation finds widespread human trafficking in Thailand's shrimp-processing industry. Those who would argue that "free" trade pacts are the only way to deal with this sort of thing would do well to note that Thailand actually has laws against human trafficking, and that the Big Stick of Bad PR can be employed against Thai officials (and their corporate customers) when they fail to enforce those laws. They should also recall how hard the State Department tried to get Malaysia off its human trafficking blacklist so that country could join the TPP. And finally, they should also know that no one in America puts a gun to your head and makes you eat cheap shrimp.

Ho hum, the CNN Republican Presidential "debate" went on-and-freaking-on about "radical Islamic terrorism," but no one, including the moderators, talked about terrorism by white people. No Dylann Roof, no Robert Dear, no James Holmes -- and you'd think at least a few of these guys (John Kasich and Chris Christie, maybe, but certainly Rand Paul) would want the opportunity to beat up on someone like Dylann Roof, if for no other reason than to look like people who are capable of thinking. But I guess we all live in Trumpland now -- a place of such energy!

In a related note, the Washington Post wonders if Republican Presidential candidates' "strikingly hawkish stances" will wind up alienating "swing voters." Setting aside that the Post talks about "hawkishness" as if they weren't the most hawkish major newspaper in the country a dozen years ago and thus helped cause a lot of the messes we're dealing with now: the only way to get voters to vote against their interests is to make them think they have to, and Republicans have another 10-plus months to do that.

Brendan Fischer at PRWatch instructs us that the Koch brothers' support for criminal justice reform is not only self-centered, but dangerous. The Koch brothers care less about drug sentencing reform or mass incarceration of folks of color than they do about "overcriminalization" of white-collar crime, though you've surely noticed that not very many folks are going to jail for white-collar crimes these days. They also push a tougher "intent" standard for crimes, as if intent matters more than result. Generally, it should be hard to convict folks of crimes, but that doesn't mean it should be easier to put people in jail for having a dime bag of coke than for rigging financial markets, especially when the latter destroys civilizations more than the former.

Memphis, TN has constructed a brand new facility for processing rape kits, and as a result has significantly cut down its 40-year backlog in just a few years. Out of 12,000 rape kits, the city has examined, or is in the process of examining, over 8,000 of them, and while the city still has to perform additional analysis on a little more than half of the ones they've started or finished, they're setting a good example that I hope other cities will emulate.

Finally, the Seattle City Council votes to allow for-hire drivers (like the ones that drive for Uber or Lyft) to bargain collectively for better pay and working conditions. The "sharing" economy is born of nothing other than corporate opportunism, and collective bargaining seems to me a First Amendment right, but I shudder to think that some folks out there will cite this development as the First Sign of an Irreversible Apocalpyse, just as some people did at the creation of Medicare. People like that are dead souls, but I'll keep praying for them, just as they're praying for me, I'm sure.

Around the table: the "Pharma Bro" bungles again, and other stories.

Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli has gone back on his promise to cut the price of Daraprim -- the drug whose price he raised from $13.50/pill to $750/pill, you remember -- to "a point that is more affordable and is able to allow the company to make a profit, but a very small profit." Actually, he's not going to cut it at all for consumers and will make an almost meaningless 50% cut to hospitals, "almost meaningless" because folks who need Daraprim are far more likely to take it at home than at a hospital. The good news? Daraprim's patent expired long ago, so Imprimis Pharmaceuticals has had some success selling a 99¢/pill version.

Clare Foran, writing in The Atlantic, describes some of the "Lifelong Republicans Who Love Bernie Sanders." But it's still based on anecdotal evidence, no matter how many good anecdotes it has, and doesn't even count the possibility that Republicans could be looking to screw with Hillary Clinton's chances in primaries. And though conservatives and liberals actually do agree on plenty, I would have liked to hear why more than six of 10 Republicans think corporations are too powerful. (Evaluating the hypothesis "because conservatives hate concentrated power anywhere" would have been a good start.)

Spike Lee suggests that women should go on "sex strikes" over sexual harassment and rape on college campuses. These are big issues, but Mr. Lee also has a film to promote that just so happens to center around a sex strike, and wouldn't a sex strike protesting sexual harassment and rape on campus wind up punishing the men who have consensual sex with women, rather than the assholes who actually commit the crimes?

Yale University study finds that corporate funding has driven the climate change denial movement. Which will not surprise you, but it's still nice to have some data behind it. Yale's Dr. Farrell found several "themes" behind corporate propaganda -- namely, that "climate change is cyclical in nature" (though you'd need to go an extra step to prove that this warming is cyclical; wonder why they don't!) and that "there were positive benefits to carbon dioxide" (there are positive benefits to pooping, but that doesn't mean you eat your own poop).

Factcheck.org analyzes whether ethanol use results in higher or lower carbon emissions, since, as you might expect, people with a vested interest in either result are arguing about it. They don't actually come down on one side or the other, but you probably already know that replacing a significant part of our gasoline with ethanol (which we haven't done yet, and may never do) would wreck American farmlands, and you probably also already know that the big corn lobby seems to care about little other than making more money off corn.

Finally, outgoing Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear issues an executive order restoring voting rights for 14,000 non-violent felons. You'll be pleased if you believe, as I do, that disenfranchisement after someone has paid their debt to society is cruel. Of course, Mr. Beshear's successor, Matt Bevin, is a teabagger, and despite the positive noises he's made thus far, he might well decide that cruelty is a bold new idea or something.

Around the table: from reduced rape kit backlogs to the ever-changing moods of America's worst Governor.

First, some good news: the city of Detroit has tested more than 9 out of 10 rape kits, some of which had been waiting for over 30 years to be tested. At least three years of investigations will follow, according to the Wayne County prosecutor, but justice is at last a hope for some of these victims. It would have been hard to do, of course, without a few million dollars in state and federal help -- but that is, of course, the kind of funding right-wingers try to kill because GOVMINT DUZN'T WORK!!!!! If only they'd be so zealous about corporate welfare.

Jim Hightower confesses to wanting to "tear out my hair" after reading some former PR firm chair suggest that his fellow CEOs would pay their employees more if they just got subsidies from our government to do that. I sympathize with his frustration (though I sure wouldn't tear out my own hair because someone else acted like a moron), and of course he's right to remind us that higher pay for working families is in no way "charity," but I'm a bit surprised that he didn't remind us that these corporations already get massive welfare handouts from our state and federal governments. They sure got some cojones asking for more.

The incomparable Dave Zirin tells us why, as union-lovers, we should celebrate Judge Berman's decision rescinding Tom Brady's four-game suspension from the NFL. Long story short: even though the NFLPA's contract with the NFL allows Commissioner Goodell to essentially arbitrate grievances over player punishments he has issued, the law still demands a certain amount of fairness, which Mr. Goodell -- by failing to allow Mr. Brady the opportunity to examine evidence, among many other things -- didn't demonstrate. Yes, if it weren't Tom Brady, we'd probably see the worker rights issues a lot more clearly. That's just one reason we shouldn't think of politics the way we think of sporting events.

It had to happen sooner or later: right-wingers promote the Kentucky county clerk who still won't issue gay marriage licenses an "anti-gay Rosa Parks." It isn't just that people want to be black without doing the hard work that comes with being black, or that Ms. Parks broke a law anyone not heavily-invested in the status quo could have seen was unconstitutional in 1955, or that her freedom to sit somewhere other than the back of the bus oppresses no one else -- it's also that Rosa Parks couldn't walk away from being black, but Kim Davis can walk away from being a County Clerk. And resigning her job because she won't do her job isn't some unconscionable hardship, either -- Ms. Davis would certainly get to suck at the teat of wingnut welfare forever.

Radley Balko administers a spanking to Scott Walker after Mr. Walker suggests that heightened scrutiny of police officers has made the job more dangerous than it was when he was a kid. The facts, as you might expect, turn out to be precisely the opposite: whereas more than 30 officers per 100,000 were murdered in 1975, that rate had fallen to five officers per 100,000 in 2013. "Moreover," Mr. Balko adds, "you’d think that someone who professes to believe in limited government would welcome more oversight of a government institution." And if Mr. Walker doesn't welcome that, we might conclude that oversight gets in the way of funneling taxpayer money to cronies.

Finally, speaking of America's worst Governor again, Mr. Walker now claims he has "never talked about a wall to the north," though his statement that a border wall with Canada "is a legitimate issue for us to look at" is well-documented. Watch the whole clip; Mr. Walker's stories have more wiggle in them than a plate of jello in an earthquake. Seriously, there are two rules about word games: 1) people absolutely hate them, and 2) unless they come from a particular politician to whom they are absolutely devoted. I think Mr. Walker has overestimated the devotion the electorate has for him, or could have for him. Of course, if he had a soul, he'd know all of this already.

Action: country-of-origin labeling, war in the Middle East, sexual assault in the military, and Keystone XL, Jr.

First things first. The House of Representatives plans to repeal country-of-origin labeling (or COOL) laws for meat, fruit, and vegetables -- laws we've only had for a few years -- today, ostensibly because the World Trade Organization ruled last month that our COOL laws violated the TBT and GATT, but I suspect they're using the WTO's ruling as an excuse to gut laws they wanted gutted anyway. And isn't this the kind of thing we've been complaining about with "free" trade? And wasn't that President Obama telling us a few weeks back that when "critics warn that parts of this deal would undermine American regulation -- food safety, worker safety, even financial regulations," that "(t)hey're making this stuff up" and that "no trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws"? Well, that sure came back to bite him. Just remember, though: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want. So Consumers Union helps you tell your House Reps to keep our country-of-origin labeling laws, even if it means we have to bow out of "free" trade agreements.

Meanwhile, Reps. McGovern (D-MA), Lee (D-CA), and Jones (R-NC) have introduced H.Con.Res. 55, which would direct President Obama to "remove United States Armed Forces deployed to Iraq or Syria on or after August 7, 2014, other than Armed Forces required to protect United States diplomatic facilities and personnel, from Iraq and Syria," no later than the end of 2015. Once the House takes up this bill -- and they will, since it invokes the War Powers Act -- they'll finally be compelled to debate the unilateral war President Obama began in Iraq and Syria against ISIS 10 months ago. But we shouldn't let Congress mouth off that they'd have given Mr. Obama more power if he only had an inkling of how to fight ISIS, because that evades the point: that they shirked their Constitutional duty to authorize the President to fight the war, as well as their responsibility to tell him how to fight it. Change the subject, lose the argument, that's what I say. I think H.Con.Res. 55 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators. They'll never see it coming.

In other news, the Senate filibustered the Military Justice Improvement Act last year, but it's back this year, as an amendment to the defense authorization bill (specifically, it's S.A. 1578 to S.A. 1463 to H.R. 1735, H.R. 1735 being the House-passed defense auth bill and S.A. 1463 being the Senate's amended version of the House bill). S.A. 1578 would help reform the military's ability to handle sexual assault cases (and other cases) by taking the decision to prosecute sexual assault out of the chain of the command and giving it to military prosecutors. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that most of the 45 filibustering Senators' views of the Military Justice Improvement Act were of the "who cares it's women" and "let's not give Obama a victory on anything" variety, but I suppose some Senators are truly concerned about taking power from commanding officers. But do we expect the President to micromanage affairs in the legislative branch, because he's "above" them? So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to vote for S.A. 1578 and help sexual assault victims in the military.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Obama Administration to exercise its authority on the people's behalf to conduct an environmental review of Enbridge's proposed expansion of its Alberta Clipper tar sands pipeline, then the Sierra Club helps you do that. President Obama has made much of the State Department's process in evaluating the Keystone XL pipeline -- he made so much of it, in fact, that he vetoed Congressional legislation designed to make him approve the bill, while leaving open the possibility that he'd approve it once the State Department's evaluation was done. But the State Department approved an Enbridge scheme to move nearly twice as much oil through its pipeline, and then build a bypass of that pipeline, without the required environmental impact review or public notice -- required because the Alberta Clipper passes through northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Did I mention that the pipeline that burst into the Kalamazoo River in 2010 belonged to Enbridge? Let's see if we can put a stop to this madness.