Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: enough with the drama and hysteria already! Part 992.

Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge partially blocks our FTC’s ban on non-compete clauses in worker contracts — clauses that prevent workers from getting new and better jobs! — and will probably strike it down not long before it goes into effect at the end of August. Saying our FTC “lacks the power” to make and enforce such a rule seems to me a conveniently narrow view of our FTC’s legal mandate to fight “unfair methods of competition,” and dig the right-wing view of this decision summarized in paragraph 12: “(b)usiness groups and many Republicans say that noncompetes are a crucial tool for businesses to protect trade secrets, confidential information and their investments in recruiting and training workers.” Horseshit! Laws prohibiting the revelation of trade secrets and confidential information protect those things, which right-wingers must know, or else they wouldn’t blunder on to whining about how hard it is to “invest” in and “recruit” and “train” workers. Look, either our corporate overlords are TEH GREATESTZ AMURIKANZ EVAHZ!!!! or they have trouble training and retaining workers; it can’t be both. Of course investing in workers costs money, money executives could use to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Another day, another reminder that right-wingers don’t “fear” a dictator so much as they want one. And that’s what folks do once they give in to masturbatory rage – though of course they deny wanting a dictator, or they say this time is different, as if no one in human history has ever said that before. Anyway, our Supreme Court, with its noxious ruling on Presidential immunity, has essentially declared the American Experiment over. But we will have something to say about that, and not just on Election Day.

Another day, another corporation hoping to gum up debate over its useless products with heart-tugging and ultimately meaningless statistics. This time it’s SoundThinking, which used to be known as ShotSpotter, until a bunch of cities who had invested heavily in its technology found it didn’t spot gunshots very well. Apparently no one’s tracking the data ShotSpotter, er, SoundThinking offers, and actually you can spot the lie, so to speak, in the grammar – “(f)rom 2022 to 2023, more than 380 lives were saved because of this technology,” not this technology saved 380 lives, which is the way folks would phrase it if they were sure of themselves. Again: always suspect the passive voice.

Want another reason to despise Project 2025? The Heritage Foundation’s proposed radical restructuring of our federal government would also steal earned benefits from our soldiers and convert that money into corporate welfare. They’re calling these benefits “extra compensation,” though if you had your leg blown off fighting for our country you’d probably see it a little differently. Project 2025 would also privatize our Veterans Administration, which is the only Medicare-for-All-style health insurance program our government offers. How many times must I tell these pimps! Privatizing always leads to higher costs in the long run! Our government couldn’t possibly do health insurance worse than private corporations do! The heavily-privatized system we’ve got, after all, causes the repossession of soldiers' prosthetic limbs.

In a sign that wielding the Big Stick of PR is working, Donald Trump has “disavowed” Project 2025. I never said the man was dumb – I’ve specifically said that he plays dumb just like every other right-winger does – but I’d be dumb to believe him, and again, you can tell he’s lying just by reading intelligently: “I know nothing about Project 2025,” yet also “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” and yet also “(a)nything they do, I wish them luck.” You don’t wish someone “luck” if they’re “ridiculous and abysmal.” If Donald Trump were King Solomon, he’d not only have cut the baby in half, he’d have enjoyed it.

Finally, I’ve avoided looking at political news this week because I know it’s all hysteria about Joe Biden’s age, but ex-Republican Stuart Stevens at The Atlantic provides exactly the right corrective. Long story short: Joe Biden’s done a good job, so Democrats should “(s)how a little swagger, not timidity” and “seize the day.” At least one Biden campaign ad demonstrates a clue on how to do this, contrasting Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions with Biden accomplishments like raising corporate taxes and lowering prescription drug prices. These could be better accomplishments, but they are accomplishments, and the only path to getting better accomplishments doesn’t run through replacing Joe Biden – or through voting for the fascist whose followers will throw bricks through your windows if you put a “Love Wins” sign on your lawn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning foreclosures, junk fees, and Twitter.

Long story short: tell our VA to help veterans stay in their homes, tell our FTC to fight junk fees, and tell big corporations to abandon Twitter. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Veterans Administration (or VA) to prevent veterans from being foreclosed out of their homes. Our VA allowed veterans to defer mortgage payments during the pandemic – you remember when unemployment was 14%? – but now our VA is telling veterans either to pony up five figures or refinance their homes post-haste, though they’d be refinancing at much higher interest rates now. Hence at least four Senators have asked our VA to extend the mortgage-deferment program and pause all VA loan foreclosures, which sure seems like kindness to me. I guess some folks would rather throw veterans out on the streets when it sure wasn’t their fault a pandemic slammed into America. But I think a capitalist system that benefits the rich more than it benefits anyone else can take the hit.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous anti-junk fee rule possible. Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is also working on an anti-junk fee rule, but out FTC’s purview is broader (i.e., not just the banking industry), so their rule could do even more good – but only if we speak out. And this ought to be a lay-up! No one likes finding out that the good or service they bought actually costs more than they thought it was going to cost, after all, and no use saying that’s just how things are, get used to it, not when you don’t actually have to get used to it, since no law of physics or morals compels us to accept any abuse a corporation heaps upon us in the name of TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!! People before markets!

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Twitter, or X, or whatever; plenty of corporations have stopped advertising on Twitter, but not all corporations, and no corporations should help fund a hellscape where assholes can bully the disadvantaged and then claim DISCRIMINASHUNZ!!!! whenever someone stands up to them. Beware of hostage-taking in opposing arguments! Plenty of disadvantaged folks still use Twitter or X or whatever, they’ll say, and they’ve spent years building audiences and making connections there, so boycotts only hurt them! But I suspect these disadvantaged folks would say the same thing anti-apartheid activists said in the late ‘80s: “seriously, you’re worried about things getting worse for us?”

Around the table: why we shouldn't sleep on a second Trump term as a "lame duck" term, and other lessons.

Thom Hartmann describes, in considerable detail, Republicans’ rightward march to fascism over the last 40-plus years, and I can only add two things: one, that Democrats could very easily link Mr. Trump calling our soldiers “losers” and “suckers” with Tommy Tuberville’s 80 million military holds in campaign ads, and two, it’s not enough to say Donald Trump will be a lame duck if he wins in 2024 (which will be how many Republican voters rationalize voting for him again), because if he can get his votaries to shoot enough people, he’ll be much closer to an America where folks like him can do what they like and no one else can. Which is, of course, the essence of the fascist impulse.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett has, on at least three occasions, sold millions of dollars in stock shares in which his corporation was trading, which would not only strike virtually anyone as a conflict of interest, but which Mr. Buffett has said out loud would be a conflict of interest. OK, I guess he’ll say that he said he shouldn’t be buying stocks Berkshire buys and he merely sold stocks Berkshire bought, but once you confront that time he boosted Wells Fargo stock on TV right after selling millions of dollars of Wells Fargo stock (or the fact that he’s called for higher income taxes on the rich but not higher investment taxes), that’d seem like hair-splitting. Anyway, so much for “the one billionaire we like”!

The good folks of the Pennridge School District in Bucks County, PA, managed to boot all five Moms for Liberty members from their school board on Election Day, and when I read that “Moms for Liberty, in the end, was a very expensive trap that the Republicans built for themselves,” I can’t help but respond that this trap is merely emblematic of the much larger trap Republicans have built for themselves – all they can do now is create hysterical dramas to win elections in the short term (which doesn’t always work; see “crime, hysteria about”), because once they have power, they either use it to directly hurt people (as the Moms for Liberty-dominated school board did) or create even more hysterical dramas. People hate book banning, after all, and people only “hate” Black/Brown/gay/trans folks because right-wingers want to distract them from the fact that their economic policies have taken their livelihoods and happiness away.

When I hear that “You Have a Right to Know Why a Health Insurer Denied Your Claim,” but “Some Insurers Still Won’t Tell You,” I’m reminded that a big reason we don’t let corporations get so big in the first place is so they can’t break the law with impunity like this. I mean, if the law tells a corporation to stop hurting people, and that corporation simply refuses to stop hurting people, that corporation is injuring our civilization, and deserves to die for it. (I mean, a corporation is a thing, not a person, so calling for its death isn’t “uncivil.” And don’t listen to folks who cry out “if you kill a corporation you’ll kill all the jobs!” Why, corporations spend virtually all their time killing jobs already! Think how many small businesses can start in their absence, doing work that actually helps people, and employing people they can’t regard as mere marks on a ledger the way corporations do.)

You know how Rep. James Comer (E-KY) has been banging his saucepan about a $200,000 loan Jim Biden paid to Joe Biden in between Joe Biden’s terms in the Executive branch? Well, guess what Mr. Comer has in his own past! “According to Kentucky property records, Comer and his own brother have engaged in land swaps related to their family farming business. In one deal — also involving $200,000, as well as a shell company — the more powerful and influential Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing. Other recent land swaps were quickly followed with new applications for special tax breaks, state records show. All of this, perplexingly, related to the dealings of a family company that appears to have never existed on paper.” Republicans have represented Kentucky’s 1st district since the 1994 wave, but the district actually has more registered Democrats; I presume a lot of these Democrats have been voting Republican for decades without bothering to change their affiliation, but I still see an opportunity for Democrats here. If he were to lose his 2024 re-election bid, Mr. Comer would no doubt whine about “the weaponization of the vote.”

Finally, West Virginia Democratic (?) Senator Joe Manchin won’t run for re-election in 2024, and rather than recount his various follies, let’s just say don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya. And no, I don’t care about the excuse that Mr. Manchin “represented a red state,” because Byron Dorgan represented a red state for 18 years, and he kept winning because he fought “free” trade, corporate crime, and bad media policy; everyone, liberal or conservative, approved of him for these good works. Yeah, I first said that over a dozen years ago, and I guess I’ll just have to keep saying it until our leaders finally learn.

Action: concerning voting rights and government shutdowns.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and stop all the government shutdown drama. 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.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would expand voting rights for all Americans, by restoring our government’s ability to stop vote suppression at the state or local level. Our Supreme Court ended that in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, by ruling that the Voting Rights Act (which gave our government the power to stop discriminatory voting rights laws) itself discriminated against Southern states – I know! – but the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would empower our government to stop vote suppression in any state or locality with a documented history of vote suppression. That sounds exactly the kind of thing Congress should be doing instead of indulging in shutdown drama.

Oh, yeah, speaking of that: both the National Women’s Law Center and the Coalition on Human Needs help you tell your Congressfolk to oppose brutal, hateful spending cuts and avert a government shutdown. I trust I don’t have to explain why, oh, but I will anyway: the folks who want to shut down government aren’t just evil, they’re also whiny diaper-loaded brats who act the way they do because they can’t win arguments on the merits. Government shutdowns mean no food inspections, no pollution inspections, no workplace safety inspections, and no soldiers’ pay. Anyone who wants any of that to happen just to prove a point about “spending” is an evil bastard whom we must oppose and defeat.

Around the table: the drama, it burns! Part 399.

Here’s some good news: a Leon County circuit judge has struck down Florida’s last gerrymander and told the state legislature it’ll have to do better. Right-wingers will appeal, but they’ll have to come up with something better than “Florida’s state Constitution violates our federal Constitution,” which argument sure doesn’t sound very states’ rights of them, does it?

Don’t get too excited that3M will pay $5.5 billion for selling defective earplugs to our soldiers, because that suit has 300,000 plaintiffs, working out to less than $18,500 each and that’s not counting the lawyers’ cut, and might we say hearing loss (not to mention betrayal!) is worth more than that? Anyway, file that under “Why We Shouldn’t Privatize Shit, Part 2399” and "The Private Sector is So Not Better Than the Public Sector, Part 3884."

It’s heartening to hear that most Americans – even most Republicans – support unions and strikes, but remember that those numbers will go down the minute corporate propagandists go on TV with their they get goodies you don’t get rubbish. The obvious answer to that is well, then organize for more goodies, and also punish bosses who refuse to negotiate.

When I hear that wannabe Nazis marched through a Florida park chanting “we are everywhere,” all I can say is no, you’re not. The article doesn’t note that there were no more than 50 marchers in that “terrifying” video. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to Nazis, of course, but how about we stop giving them the big dramas they want?

Be careful reading stories telling you that TEH EPA IZ REMOVINGZ PROTEKSHUNZ FORZ TEH WETLANDZ!!!!!, because our EPA is literally only complying with our Supreme Court’s will. That information should be in the headline, not just the lede. It’s not in the headline because our “liberal” media are lazy, stupid, or evil. But I repeat myself.

Finally, billionaires are having trouble building a “new green city” in Northern California because they’ve pissed off all the locals. This article is way, way too credulous, so I’ll say it: they want to build a “new green city”? That is to laugh! Billionaires just want to build a city that redlines Black and Brown out of it. They also want to be able to abuse the help with impunity.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, drama, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, stop Tommy Tuberville’s big military hold drama, and start taxing billionaires a lot harder. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would, as its title suggests, start taxing income over $400,000 into Medicare and Social Security and start taxing investment income into the system as well. The bill would also close certain loopholes that benefit hedge fund managers and fossil fuel corporations so they start paying more. I’ll never express any alarmism over these programs, because I’ve been hearing hysterical alarms about their "impending" "insolvency" all my damn life, but doing these things would help Medicare and Social Security be even better for good Americans. I know it’s Friday, but let’s get in our Congressfolk’s grills about this.

Care2 helps you tell your Senators to lean on Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville and tell him to stop blocking military nominations. He’s doing it, supposedly, because of our military’s policy to help soldiers who need abortions and who live in anti-abortion states with travel expenses, but Jesus Mary and Joseph how about just winning the argument and getting legislation passed? Could he be pulling this crap because he knows he can’t do these things? I kid, of course – this is exactly the kind of thing evil people do when they can’t coerce good people into doing what they want. Your Senators need to know this is evil. Your Senators also need to know that if they let this appalling drama go on, they never get to call themselves “pro-military” again.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaires a lot harder than we currently do. Ain’t nobody a billionaire through hard work – after all, you’ve done hard work, and plenty of it I bet, and did it ever get you as far as just sucking up to a bankster? No, it did not. And that’s a sad commentary on our civilization. We can start to fix our civilization by reversing our 60-plus years of cutting rich folks’ taxes and start taxing them again. No, they won’t “move overseas,” because even billionaires don’t just up and move whenever they like. No, they won’t “refuse to create jobs,” because they’re already doing that with all the light taxation they enjoy! Stupidity can’t keep winning in America.

Around the table: featuring foolish right-wingers and wise citizens.

Did a Florida school board really remove a movie about the first six-year-old girl to integrate into a previously all-white school because of one complaint from one parent who has admitted that she hasn’t seen the whole film? Yes, they did. Right-wingers have spent the last couple of decades claiming that liberals are weak, but only right-wingers are so frail they can’t bear to hear that racism exists. Get these people out of your life while you still can. If they can’t handle the most obvious truths about our nation’s history, why would they be there for you when you need them?

From the “Good News About Abortion From Red States” file: a Teton County, Wyoming judge has blocked that state’s abortion ban, ruling that a state constitutional amendment cooked up by right-wingers in 2012 to harness hysteria over the Affordable Care Act actually prevents the state from banning abortion. That amendment declares that Wyoming citizens have “the right to make their own health care decisions,” and though Wyoming legislators claim that abortion isn’t health care, you can guess how persuasive that is. You think right-wingers will start putting the brakes on their drama now that it’s bit them in the ass? I kid, of course – they have nothing to offer the electorate except drama.

When I hear that Republicans ought to get behind Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin because he’d be “a non-hostile alternative to Trump and a compelling centrist challenge to Biden,” I leap to say he’s not a centrist! Do centrists ban books, try to ban abortions, kill mask mandates, repeal protections for transgender kids, or put Andrew Wheeler in charge of regulating air and water? No, they do not. But this article is somehow even worse than its tagline – it acts like Mr. Youngkin should be proud of his ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth, rather than ashamed of it. And this is why people hate our "liberal" media – all they care about is the horserace.

In the wake of yet another school shooting, this one in Nashville, Tennessee, Rep. Tim Burchett (E-TN) says Congress is “not going to fix” the problem and adds that “I don’t see any real role that we could do other than mess things up.” Also, “as a Christian,” he thinks America needs a religious “revival,” one that electing ever more “religious” people to Congress somehow hasn’t achieved! If you took this flatugasm as an honestly-offered assessment, which I wouldn’t advise, you would still have to ask why anyone would want to be part of a body of legislators they profess to hate so much.

Finally, because the news can’t all be bad: Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has announced he’ll “pause” on his plan to kneecap Israel’s judiciary. The Netanyahu plan would reduce judicial review of the nation’s laws and give Parliament added power to overturn Supreme Court decisions, while also giving Mr. Netanyahu final say over judicial appointments, which I’m sure has absolutely nothing to do with his own pending corruption trial. This pause happened only after tens of thousands of good Israelis took to the streets in protest, the nation’s main union called a general strike, and soldiers threatened to avoid reporting for duty. They’ll all still need to work to make that pause permanent, but never let anyone tell you that speaking out doesn’t work.

Around the table: come get your poll tax, Ron DeSantis!

I’ll admit I had trouble imagining why Republicans are suddenly so hot to repeal child labor laws at the state level, and I still have trouble reconciling their loudly-proclaimed “concern” over children’s education with their apparent desire to send them all to mills and mines 10 hours a day. I guess they’re just trying to suck up to their corporate donors at any cost, especially since quite a few of said donors have been caught violating child labor laws lately. More kids in the mines also helps break labor unions. Last I looked, though, I don’t think any normal people think child labor laws are too strict, or lament that they didn’t work more during their own childhoods.

Amanda Marcotte reminds us that Republican’s apparent inability to define what “woke” means “is a feature, not a bug,” because they can pretend it means anything at all at any time. We learn that Gov. DeSantis is particularly good, or should I say “good,” at mining this vein of vagueness, and I totally mention that because he’s trying to criminalize bloggers' criticism of him as we speak. In any case, I suggest we all go ahead and tell our right-wing friends, to the degree we still have them, that once they use the word “woke” in an argument, they’re conceding the point.

In a related note, Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) claims that our military is too “woke,” and to support this thesis tells a story about a ship that had to stop “following a Chinese ship” so they could “train everybody on transgender.” One thousand U.S. dollars says this incident never happened, even if “a retired, I think, captain” really told him so – which I also doubt. (At present, the U.S. Navy can find no record of such an incident.) This is the same man who says that reducing Medicare costs amounts to “Medicare cuts” and that poor people should pay more in taxes so they have “skin in the game.” Only in the Fascist State of Florida could he keep winning elections.

Something I hadn’t considered about Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News: if Fox News loses – which possibility ain’t exactly far-fetched, given all those Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson texts and Rupert Murdoch’s own testimony – then shareholders will also be able to file suit against them, meaning Fox could lose a whole lot more than the $1.6 billion Dominion wants, or the $2.7 billion Smartmatic wants. I doubt its most-devoted viewers will abandon them, though. Rage is a hell of a drug, but rage mixed with nonsense is even more potent, particularly if they think it pisses off liberals.

Sandpoint, Idaho hospital says it’ll stop delivering babies in two months’ time mainly because of the “legal and political climate” there. You may recall that Idaho has one of them-there abortion bans where relatives may sue medical providers for performing abortions, such that obstetricians have been leaving the state in droves, with no replacements coming. See, when you’re evil to everyone around you, eventually everyone leaves you. Did these right-wingers really think we needed them so badly that we would put up with any and all abuse? I can only hope their loneliness makes them take stock of what they’ve done a bit.

Finally, might I say that I am beyond disgusted with all the “don’t indict Trump or you’ll make him win” talk? Here’s the worst example of that, from “OMFG why does anyone listen to” Mark Halperin. I won’t list every objection I have with this piece, since those objections would total approximately one per point made, but let’s just leave it at these two: he says it’s unfair that folks aren’t spending the same amount of time on Hunter Biden as they are on Donald Trump, which is rather like saying we should have celebrated the scoring prowess of Marty McSorley the way we did Wayne Gretzky, and he also exhorts us to keep Trump supporters’ feelings in mind if the Big Man gets indicted, to which I must say: fuck their feelings. Everyone has to grow up sooner or later, and that includes folks who wallow in masturbatory rage and the pundits who enable them.

Around the table: I have seen the future; brother, it is murder.

“Brain-computer interfaces” (or BCIs) might enable soldiers to fight remotely, and might even allow soldiers to “turn off” their fear, but here’s an idea: don’t do any of that! "What might soldiers accomplish if they just weren’t afraid?" is the wrong question to ask, particularly in this era of guerrilla warfare, where hackers will probably win the battle with BCI-enabled soldiers anyway! BCIs have more humane uses (i.e., helping the disabled), and some folks have given the ethics a great deal of thought; if only America had a way of stopping the unethical use of technology, you know, like with laws and such.

An artificial intelligence agent gets good enough at Stratego that it now outranks almost every human on Earth. Machines may not have egos like people do – study any military history and you’ll be amused and/or disgusted by how badly Our Glorious Elites have botched wars just to appease their own egos – but again, how about we don’t leave wars up to machines? I mean, yes, it’s interesting that an AI agent play a game with “imperfect information” so well, but instead of imagining how we could “fight wars better” – again, a dubious notion in the guerrilla warfare era! -- how about we imagine how we can avoid wars better?

Ho hum, right-wingers claim that vaccines kill people with blood clots, naturally by blowing one fact (that the J&J vaccine, accounting for 3% of all vaccine administrations, cause a kind of blood clotting in literally four out of every million doses) way out of proportion, pretending that postmortem blood clots aren’t common, and repeating a whole slew of other debunked claims. Also, too, just because someone dies after getting the vaccine, that doesn’t mean the vaccine killed them. If I shoot a diabetic in the head, no reasonable person would claim he died of diabetes, but right-wingers would make a movie saying exactly that if they thought they could enrage enough people.

Marion County (IN) Superior Court Judge blocks Indiana’s abortion ban – on religious freedom grounds! After all, mainstream Judaism and Islam both authorize it in certain circumstances, so banning abortion more broadly interferes with those folks’ exercise of their First Amendment-guaranteed religious freedom. Will our Supreme Court, with its stated concern for religious freedom, uphold rulings such as these? I kid, of course – nothing matters to the far right wing of our Court except imposing their will on America. Why, I bet they’ll figure out a way to rule that the Jewish/Muslim/other non-Christian women who filed the suit “don’t have standing” to challenge it!

Our Senate has passed the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill they passed wouldn’t compel churches to hold gay weddings, but as long as our government recognizes them, most folks couldn’t care less if churches do. The bill would also repeal the noxious Defense of Marriage Act, confer federal benefits to any gay couple legally married, and force states to recognize marriages legal in other states. However, the bill wouldn’t compel those 35 states that have anti-gay marriage laws on the books – laws those states will enforce if/when our Supreme Court overturns Obergefell v. Hodges – to legalize gay marriage, and that’s a thing that’ll come back to bite us. Verdict: it's progress, but it's not quite justice.

Finally, our Senate has passed a bill that’ll keep railway workers from striking – but also rejected a separate measure that would have given railway workers seven days of paid sick leave, which had (justifiably!) been a sticking point in negotiations. One has to wonder why our House put the seven sick days in a separate bill, one more easily rejected by our Senate, instead of daring right-wing Senators to oppose the whole package because they hate giving workers time off. Sadly, the only answers I can come up with are “cowardice” and “evil," which reduces to "evil" or "evil."

Action: concerning corporate taxes, health care, and homelessness.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to cut corporate taxes, to sustain expanded Medicaid and CHIP coverage, and pass the Ending Homelessness 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 not to cut corporate taxes during the upcoming lame duck session. Corporations are making record profits, said profits being responsible for half our current inflation, so why give them more handouts? We know cutting corporate taxes is unpopular, not just because Republicans cut them dramatically in 2017 and lost the House the next year, but also because our Congressfolk always leave corporate welfare giveaways until the end of the year, when they hope everyone’s tired and not watching anymore. Well, we’re watching, and fatigue doesn’t keep us from our duty, so let’s give them what-for.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect expanded Medicaid and CHIP coverage in end-of-year legislation. You know, instead of their aforementioned habit of handing out corporate welfare! You’d think our Congressfolk wouldn’t dare cut children’s health insurance – the first three letters of CHIP do stand for “children’s health insurance,” after all – but then Congress totally let the CHIP program lapse in 2017 because they were working too hard on tax cuts for rich folks and not hard enough for, you know, our children. So, yeah, we need to remind them to work for working families.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4496, the Ending Homelessness Act. Rents are shooting through the roof and folks are behind on their rent thanks to pandemic job losses, so yeah, we’d be cruel not to give working families more help affording a place to live. The bill also prevents our government from using criminal history to deny housing assistance – gosh, do we believe in rehabilitating people or not? – and would also prohibit housing discrimination because of a renter’s veteran status. Hey, it ain’t our soldiers’ fault we make them fight stupid wars, so let’s not injure them coming and going.

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: from the Buffalo mayoral race to an unwelcome plea to "move on" from January 6.

When I hear from Buffalo Democratic Mayoral candidate India Walton that "Democrats have gotten very comfortable doing nothing," I'm reminded of all the six-figure consultants who've urged caution and moderation to hundreds of losing candidates all over America, and I'm also reminded that the Democratic hold on power in American cities is also a right-wing complaint, though Republicans surely would run our cities far worse. Hopefully you'll read the article and find Ms. Walton a fairly incisive and eclectic analyst of current events, and you'll think more people like that should be running things. Even Chuck Schumer has gotten on the bandwagon (though he might merely have been trying to outpace Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, for whatever reason).

Kyrsten Sinema loses five members of her Veterans Advisory Council, all of whom slam the Arizona Senator for "answering to big donors rather than your own people," which is exactly how we should frame all discussions of all our representatives in Congress. I'm beyond tired of hearing about how Ms. Sinema's been "up front" with her fellow Senators during Build Back Better negotiations, when she obviously hasn't been up front with the good citizens of Arizona who are her bossese. Naturally she responds to her advisors' resignation by implying they should stick to military matters.

Arkansas hospital decides it'll grant religious exemptions to folks who don't want to take the vaccine -- if they also swear off Tylenol, Sudafed, Benadryl, Tums, and a host of other famous medicines! There's a point in there: folks who shun the vaccine because of its testing on decades-old fetal issue (not cells from last week's abortions, as they claim) must also in good conscience reject the aforementioned medicines because testing on fetal tissue figured in their development as well! Not that today's rage will matter to right-wingers after they get a load of tomorrow's rage.

In a related note, James Colgrove at The Conversation takes us through the history of vaccines and vaccine mandates in America -- and sees today's parents as less accepting of such mandates. A lot has happened in recent years, of course -- Andrew Wheeler and Jenny McCarthy made us all scared we'd have autistic kids if we vaccinated them, and then social media let us all pretend we're celebrities and pundits and its algorithms relentlessly amplified the right-wing content that results in more enragement, er, engagement. And not for nothing, but all these ask-your-doctor-about-this-drug ads on TV -- which didn't exist in the '70s -- are also helping to make people a bit too cocksure about their "knowledge." I think some humility about what you don't know is a good thing, though most Americans don't seem to agree anymore.

When I hear that a couple of pro-Josh Mandel super PACs are running ads appearing to slam fellow Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance as insufficiently pro-Trump based on what he said in 2016, I'm reminded that these ads could ultimately help Mr. Vance, if Republican voters become convinced over the next six months that Donald Trump is actually an albatross on their fortunes -- or if Republican poobahs merely decide that they've milked Mr. Trump all they can and are ready to move on. I also wonder why anyone, anywhere, let alone a super PAC, would favor Josh Mandel's election to any office. I hear even Donald Trump finds him a bit of a brown-noser.

Finally, dig the chutzpah from Condoleeza Rice, telling us that though January 6 was "wrong" (like that's some big gift to us!), we need to "move on" as a nation. First off, I read her plea ultimately as a thinly-disguised plea to "move on" from all of her sins as a member of the George W. Bush Administration; she can barely show herself in public after all of that, which is how it should be. Second off, I can't shake the feeling that when she says "what's happening to kids in school," she means we're forcing them to wear masks to keep from spreading COVID, which isn't an injury done to them no matter how many right-wing assholes think so.

Action: concerning monopolies, "fraudits," private militaries, paid family/medical leave, expanding Medicare, and expanding broadband.

Long story short: tell President Biden to enact vigorous anti-monopoly regulations, tell PA state legislators to reject another election "fraudit," and tell your Congressfolk to outlaw government use of private militaries, enact paid family/medical leave, expand Medicare coverage, and build out broadband. 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.

President Biden, as you may know, issued an Executive Order late last week requiring Executive branch agencies to fight corporate monopolies a lot harder than our government has done for the last 40 years, but, as you know, the devil is always in the details, so Public Citizen helps you tell Biden Administration agencies to enact the most vigorous anti-monopoly regulations possible. Good anti-monopoly regulations wouldn't just mean cheaper hearing aids, though that's no small thing; it could also mean an end to early termination fees that keep you from choosing a different internet provider, an end to cellphone corporations "locking out" independent computer repair stores, and an end to "non-compete agreements" that keep workers in one place forever -- not to mention an end to big pharma price-gouging and big telecom mergers. We should fight for these things, and we should remember that the big corporations and the corrupt politicians who fight against them are evil.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators you don't want them to conduct a "fraudit" of the 2020 election like Arizona's doing. Like Arizona, Pennsylvania has already conducted multiple audits of the 2020 election's accuracy, so let's oppose any one Senator's efforts to waste taxpayer money just to do a "fraudit" that might tell sore losers what they want to hear. And don't believe the argument that "people have questions about this election," because they don't. What some people have are the same lies Donald Trump has been feeding them for over eight months, which other Republicans have repeated and amplified. And I'm tired of right-wing rage making all the decisions around here.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban any state or federal government use of private military. The news hook, of course, is South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who really must be completely unworried about re-election, using a Tennessee gazillionaire donation to fund a state National Guard adventure at our Southern border over 1300 miles away. Needless to say, this is a bad idea, regardless of how you might feel about immigration -- an army answerable only to a gazillionaire, rather than the American people who pay the taxes to fund said army? I wish I could say it was unprecedented; the use of mercenaries is as old as the hills, and you likely remember how many Blackwater mercenaries, who were paid much better than our soldiers, operated in Iraq. So this is a cancer we need to cut out.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to put paid leave in the American Jobs Plan. Yeah, I know what President Biden and 20 Senators negotiated, but they're supposed to negotiate with us, not each other. And things like paid family/medical leave, investing in child care programs, and making the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent are actually pretty popular -- a lot more popular than Republicans saying no to everything or insisting on investing in "real" infrastructure or thinking we're going to pay for it with more smoke and mirrors. Seriously, nobody would run through a wall for any of that, which is why Republicans constantly try to enrage and distract people with whining about transgender folks and critical race theory. If we make our voices heard above the din, then the din will lose. It's that simple.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare in the American Jobs Plan. Again: who cares what the politicians want? Lowering the Medicare age to 60 would be a good first step in lowering that age to zero, as we must eventually do, and expanding Medicare to include vision/dental/hearing is also the right thing to do. And you know expanding Medicare coverage also creates jobs. After all, who's going to be providing all that extra care? Robots? At the risk of piling on, the poverty rate of seniors before Medicare was a lot higher than it is now; what a shame that too many seniors continue to vote for the right-wing politicians who would take all of that away from them.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act in the American Jobs Plan. You recall how much time you had to spend on the internet just to do work this past year? And how much time your kids had to spend on the internet just to go to school this past year? And do you find, every time you get your cable bill, that you're paying more and more for less and less? That's why we need the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act -- it would not only help build out the high-speed broadband we all need more and more, it would help small communities create their own broadband systems that would compete with the big telecoms who constantly overcharge you and give you lousy service. Ask the good folks of Chattanooga, TN how much better off they are with that city's municipal broadband network, and you'd be even more eager to imagine a world without Verizon and Comcast dictating terms to you.

Penny Rants for Sunday, September 6, 2020: concerning right-wing violence and "suckers" and "losers."

Our "liberal" media finally get around to covering the armed right-wing violence at a Democrat-sponsored voter registration drive in Tyler, TX over a month ago -- but even now they can't get it right! Even with an extra month of lead time! Luckily Dorothee Benz at FAIR helps us sift through all the lousy reporting, where "fights break out" and "disturbances happen" without any apparent causes and "people on both sides" are always to blame, even in "liberal" media reports like the Washington Post report of August 27 documenting eight incidents of right-wing violence and one incident of left-wing violence. Ms. Benz also reminds us (because, sadly, we need reminding!) that "privatized violence aimed at popular democratic demands is a hallmark of right-wing authoritarianism," and we can rather easily document how this trend's operating right here in America right now. One more thing: given the truck caravans that have rolled through protests across America (not just in Portland), how long before the pick-up truck stops being a symbol of hard work and starts being a symbol of racism?

Speaking of right-wing violence at protests, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) opines that infamous militia member Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three protestors in Kenosha over a week ago, actually showed "incredible restraint." If you wonder why someone shows up to a protest armed, or have seen him shoot two protestors plainly trying to disarm him, you'll be surprised, but let's let Mr. Massie explain further: "(h)e didn't empty a magazine into a crowd." What a low bar to set! He "showed restraint" because he only shot three people instead of a hundred! I'm old enough to remember when conservatives demanded a lot more of us (and each other) than that! Mr. Massie would have earned more sympathy if he'd pointed out that Mr. Rittenhouse is only 17 and shouldn't be tried as an adult; instead, the man who wouldn't ban semiautomatics because someone-somewhere can turn a rifle into a semiautomatic seems, again, only to care about protecting guns. No, not even "gun rights" -- as Russell Kirk used to say, rights have responsibilities.

What's the worst thing about our President calling dead soldiers "suckers" and "losers"? He's wrong! I think soldiers who die at war are generally the best ones, and their officers more likely just figured out how to get others to die in their place. All of which means I'm not surprised by our President's remarks, for who is better at screwing other people over just to protect himself than he? Here's what surprises me: he's been way too slow to portray these remarks as anti-war -- they would be pretty damn clumsy anti-war statements, true, but not irredeemably so, and they might also get that sliver of the anti-war vote he's going to need to get re-elected. He seems content with calling everyone a liar and speculating about who might have "betrayed" him, as any drama king would do. So, when our President said all the generals were stupid, his votaries could tell themselves he wasn't talking about the rank and file, but now that he's said the rank and file are "suckers" and "losers," how will they respond? I kid, of course -- they just say whatever makes them think they're owning the liberals.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Russian bounties, and corporate welfare.

Happy Tuesday, good folks! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Your Senators do not need to reinvent the wheel here -- the HEROES Act already would extend unemployment benefits, already would give extra funding to states and municipalities, already would fund our Post Office through the end of the year, already would fund contract tracing so we can track the spread of COVID-19 better, already would expand working family tax cuts, already would repeal one big hedge-fund manager tax cut, and already would provide another stimulus checks to folks making less than six figures (plus it'd be a bigger check than the one the CARES Act cut for you). Our economy may have added close to five million jobs in June, but we still have over 11 percent U3 unemployment (18 percent by the more informative U6 rate, which picks up data the U3 rate doesn't), and the spike in COVID-19 cases lately, well, doesn't exactly predict continued expansion. So let's make sure our Senators do the right thing.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard that Russian officials paid bounties to Afghan rebels for killing American soldiers -- and, of course, our intelligence agencies told our President this in a Presidential Daily Briefing several months ago, which is most assuredly not called that because it's a thousand pages long and full of irrelevant data. It sure does seem like our President has a blind spot when it comes to Russia, but still, you'd think he'd be angrier about a foreign nation paying people to kill our soldiers. Alas, he expends all his anger these days on liberals who "shame" right-wingers for their bad behavior. Gosh, we finally get it through our heads that we're not too good for shaming and we're still wrong! It's like right-wingers will never be happy with us! Anyway, Secure Families Initiative helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the matter and punish the wrongdoers. We shouldn't fight wars like the Afghanistan war in the first place, but we shouldn't tolerate this offense, either.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop corporations' abuse of the CARES Act's small business relief fund by passing H.R. 7076/S. 3855, the CORE Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Imagine our government establishing a "Paycheck Protection Program," ostensibly to help small businesses continue to meet payroll during this pandemic, but then essentially giving away $500 billion of our money to banksters, which then handed out big chunks of taxpayer cash to their big corporate cronies. But wait, there's more! Now imagine our President getting rid of all the Inspectors General who might have actually overseen this program so it didn't become a big corporate welfare trough, and then imagine our government asserting that the people can't see which corporations got PPP money because such information is "proprietary" and "confidential." Sadly, you don't even have to imagine it -- it all happened. So we must stop it.

Action: concerning government spying, financial predators, and unsafe baby products.

H.R. 5675/S. 3242, the Safeguarding Americans’ Private Records Act (or SAPRA), would roll back many of the worst offenses of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act. It would, for example, end NSA hoovering of your private data, prohibit warrantless collection of your browsing and search histories and your geo-location data, and would sunset the National Security Letters program which the FBI has used to get information without a court order. Note very well words like "warrantless" and "court order" in the previous sentence; passing SAPRA would not "hamstring our ability to fight terror," but would merely make law enforcement follow our laws and our Constitution in fighting terror. Hate to pile on, but if we stopped treating people entirely like commodities, we'd have a lot less terrorism. Sure, we'll always have some nutjobs, but let's not create more of them with tax cuts for the rich and corporate tax cuts and mass incarceration, shall we? The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our privacy rights by passing SAPRA.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5050/S. 2833, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act (or VFCA), would extend the protections our soldiers and veterans enjoy from predatory lenders to all Americans. The bill would cap annual interest rates at 36%, so payday lenders couldn't trap good Americans in a death spiral of debt with loans that wind up having 400% interest rates. Banksters will no doubt complain that we just won't allow them to make money anymore, but nobody puts a gun to your head and makes you become a payday lender! I suspect folks become payday lenders because they see it's easy money. Besides which, lenders can still make money if the don't gouge their customers; we know this because veterans already enjoy the protections of the bill, and some states have passed similar protections, and is our economy in the toilet? No, it is not -- in fact, banksters continue to do quite well a dozen years after crashing our economy. Hence US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect all Americans from predatory lenders by passing the VFCA.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban the inclined baby sleepers that have led to over six dozen baby deaths, then Consumer Reports still helps you do that. The CPSC will take public comments on the matter until the end of February, though I have some difficulty imagining what pro-inclined sleeper comments you could write. I guess it would be priceless to learn that some stooge of the inclined baby sleeper lobby commented that banning inclined baby sleepers would be "the nanny state at work"! I suppose they'll say a ban is too extreme, that our CPSC should give them time to work out the kinks, as it were, but I would have a couple of things to say about that. One, the corporations making the sleepers knew for years that their sleepers were killers but did nothing about it. Two, if it were your baby, you wouldn't want it to happen to anyone else's baby. Three, there are other ways to put a baby to sleep -- ways that will not result in the baby's death, no less!

Around the table: in which we introduce, and then banish, a new character.

Looks like the government of China is reacting to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak by, sigh, arresting folks for criticizing government responses to the outbreak. The charge, of course, is "false information without verification," which sure does sound like something a snowflake government would concoct to arrest its critics. Thank God that doesn't happen here! Er, except that our President wants to change the libel laws and calls everything he doesn't like "fake news."

Who leads all Presidential candidates in fund-raising among soldiers? Why, Bernie Sanders, of course! What, you were expecting our President? I said it before and I'll say it again: our President doesn't get support from the military so much as he gets support from people who constantly preen about their own love for the military, and these are not the same thing. But, gosh, many of our soldiers seem to like a guy who has actually worked against all the stupid wars these soldiers have to fight. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

Two Cato Institute analysts remind us that maybe selling weapons to the countries on our President's Muslim ban isn't such a hot idea. You won't be heartened to learn that more American weapons get stolen during this Administration than previous ones, but the real question for our Administration is: if you think these countries are so dangerous, why are you selling them guns and bombs? Particularly since these countries will most likely use these guns and bombs on their own people and thus drive more of them to try to leave? Then again, I guess that question answers itself -- you can't expect to keep a "war on terror" going if you actually try to solve the problems that cause or exacerbate terrorism.

Montana state legislator says the Constitution gives him permission to jail or shoot socialists, then points out exactly where in our Constitution ha ha I kid of course he didn't. Seriously, though, a little over a year ago he introduced a bill which would have mandated the state of Montana to buy a flailing power plant, which would have made him what, class? That's right, a socialist! This Rodney Garcia represents Montana's 52nd legislative district, but hopefully not for much longer; how about, in the meantime, we never speak of him again?

Finally, the Iowa caucus meltdown demonstrates, to me at least, everything wrong with the Democratic Party -- the next time some Democratic politico tells a group of coal miners they should Learn to Code, they can retort well, I guess we couldn't do worse than Shadow! But you may recall that we didn't know the name of the real winner of the Republican Iowa caucus in 2012 for several weeks, and given that Ron Paul had a legit shot at winning that caucus, I can't help but wonder if the Democrats screwed this up on purpose to deprive Sen. Sanders (who had been leading in late polls, and who was leading the popular vote, albeit narrowly, in the first set of returns released yesterday) of any possible bounce. I know, these are Democrats we're talking about, but how often over the years have we seen malice pretend to be mere incompetence?

Penny Rants for Tuesday, January 21, 2020: of economic "prosperity" and Presidential immaturity.

Joseph Stiglitz reminds us that our current economy is not a "good" economy, regardless of any propaganda from our President or our media -- and also says we should be looking at indices other than Gross National Product or the Dow Jones Industrial Average to determine our economy's health. "Neither tells us what’s happening to ordinary citizens’ living standards or anything about sustainability," he says, and thus he offers life expectancy, disposable income, percentage of citizens with health insurance, and "deaths of despair" (i.e., deaths from suicide, alcoholism, and drug ODs) as better indicators of our economic health. We'd need more kinds of data to measure the effects of climate change on the economy, of course, though measuring property damage due to extreme weather events is a good start. (And if you're still wondering how to counter our Administration's constant bellowing about TEH LOWEST BLACK UNEMPLOYMENT RATEZ EVERZ!!!!!, consider that black wages still lag well behind white wages.)

Jonathan Chait reminds us that our President has long desired to weaken the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, even once saying, out loud, that "(i)t’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas." His economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, says the Administration is still "looking at" changing the law, though it's hard to imagine the House going along with that, having just impeached our President after he essentially tried to bribe a foreign leader with the prospect of getting more business overseas in mind. When you hear statements like we need to bribe people more -- and when you contemplate, frankly, everything else he's ever done -- you'll find it easy to conclude, as Mr. Chait does, that our President "actually approves of corruption." But, sadly, our President's votaries also approve of corruption, and not just because our President is Their Bastard -- it's also because they think they're a lot smarter than everyone else when they're just a lot more cynical than everyone else.

In the wake of reports that our President apparently called our highest-ranking military officers "a bunch of dopes and babies" to their faces, I feel compelled to remind you, again, that nothing will split the insane 25% of the electorate away from our President -- they'll insist that our President loves the soldiers so much that of course he hates their leaders, and I suppose that's what passes for class solidarity among that lot. They'll also point out that our President loves winning wars, and it's true that we don't dominate the world despite spending more on defense than the next eight big-spending nations combined, although, well, there may be another lesson in there. And naturally they'll also scrub their memories of all those times they slammed Barack Obama for "not listening to the generals enough," since being a votary of our President means (just as being a Bush Mobb votary meant) never having to admit you've ever been wrong about anything, ever.

Action: concerning payday lenders, pollution, and food safety.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to crack down on payday lenders. Part of the crackdown you would ask for would be a 15% cap on interest rates, and that would be a major reform -- and not even one that's "never been tried," either! After all, our soldiers already get this protection from the law, and they surely do deserve it (and are especially vulnerable to payday lenders), but so do we all. Of course, our Administration, flush in campaign contributions from payday lenders, has glommed on to this extremely unpopular sector of the economy just like they glommed on to the extremely small and entirely corporate anti-net neutrality crowd. Sometimes it's like they're trying to screw everything up, and sadly our "liberal" media won't ask our President a simple question: why does he think payday lenders need more welfare handouts from our government? Maybe they're afraid the answer will be rock stupid, but that's all the more reason we need to hear it. In the meantime, let's communicate our superior wisdom to our Congressfolk.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: despite the enduring unpopularity of pollution, and the enduring popularity of clean water, Pennsylvania legislators are actually trying to pass SB 790, even though it would let oil and gas corporations replace water they've ruined with unsafe water, even though it would let the state pre-empt local and municipal ordinances aimed at protecting clean water (now there's some small-government conservatism for you!), and even though it would let municipalities spray drilling wastewater on roads to keep dust down (that's a zombie that never seems to die no matter how many headshots it gets!). These corporate welfare proponents like to say it's a choice between creating jobs and creating no jobs, but you know what we call that, right? A manufactured hostage situation ("put up with corporate welfare handouts, or you'll all be out of work!"), and as Americans we should never tolerate that. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state assemblyfolk to protect us from pollution by rejecting SB 790.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation giving our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) the power to investigate food poisoning outbreaks -- you know, like the fifth E.coli outbreak in Romaine lettuce of the past two years -- then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. The bill in question would be S. 2958, the Expanded Food Safety Investigation Act, which would, in its own words, give our FDA the "authority to conduct microbial sampling on concentrated animal feeding operations as necessary to facilitate a foodborne illness outbreak investigation, determine the root cause of an outbreak of foodborne illness, or address other public health needs." You might better know the "concentrated animal feeding operation," or CAFO, as a factory farm, and you likely know that factory farms are justifiably prime suspects in food poisoning outbreaks. And small farmers don't run factory farms, so don't let anyone tell you this bill is "anti-small farmer" without asking them if they're pro-food poisoning.

Action: concerning Medicare for All and PFAS chemicals.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to enact Medicare for All health insurance, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Public Citizen also encourages you to share with your Congressfolk any stories of outrageous medical bills you've received, like the folks who've received bills for tens of thousands of dollars for a mere colonoscopy or close to a million dollars for the surgeries resulting from a surgeon's error. I really don't like to persuade with mere anecdotes, but surely these weigh at least as much as the desperate rubbish coming from right-wingers about how Obamacare oppresses them, or someone they know, or someone they heard about, or someone they made up. No one has any standing to whine about patients left to die by Big Gummint health care when big health insurance corporations leave patients to die all the time -- and sometimes try to extort them when they don't leave them to die. Seriously, our government can't possibly do a worse job than private corporations have done.

Meanwhile, both the Sierra Club and the Union for Concerned Scientists help you tell your Congressfolk to pass a defense spending bill that curtails military use of ubiquitous and dangerous PFAS chemicals. You've probably heard that Congressional Democrats are getting a bit wobbly about including defense bill amendments curbing use of PFAS-laden firefighting foam, so you might be thinking it's no use telling them to have some courage. But this is exactly the time to communicate your will to your Reps and Senators! Particularly over something that has actually attracted bipartisan support! But then, Democrats generally wouldn't recognize real bipartisanship if it slapped them across the face, though they sure seem to understand the fake "bipartisanship" of both parties coming together to do whatever their big donors want, which, apparently, is more PFAS and more health problems for our soldiers and their families. And this is why our Congressfolk need us to get in their grills -- someone needs to put the steel in their spines.

Around the table: no one here gets out alive.

Steven Rosenfeld at Salon wonders if the briefly-contested Kentucky gubernatorial election reveals a Republican electoral strategy for 2020 -- i.e., they'll hope it's a close race and then simply throw bogus claims of voter fraud against the wall until Republican-dominated state legislatures take over and re-elect our President. Of course Mr. Bevin did eventually concede the race after his allegations proved, ah, extremely unlikely, but if Democrats really want to beat this nefarious Republican stratagem (and it's not a certainty that they do!), they'd nominate a candidate who doesn't spend all his time kowtowing to rich donors and telling us why we can't fix any of our problems. This is going to come up again.

Surprise, surprise, another one of our President's "opportunity zone" tax cuts went to a superyacht marina in Florida. Superyachts aren't just regular yachts, as they can cost $100 million or more, and "opportunity zones" are supposed to help poor people, not folks who can buy 300-foot yachts. Naturally former Governor/now Senator Rick Scott seems to have hand-picked a lot of areas owned by some of his biggest donors for his "opportunity zones," and he's mute about the matter now. Why? Because fuck you I won, that's why.

Democratic leadership apparently abandons efforts to include amendment in defense spending bill that would force contractors to stop using ubiquitous and carcinogenic PFAS chemicals. Or, to put it another way, they stand ready to sacrifice the health of our soldiers and their families to the whining of defense contractors, all of which either knew or should have known about PFAS's deleterious health effects. Again: if you don't do good works with the power you have, you don't deserve power at all. If that's true for Republicans, why wouldn't it be true for Democrats?

Our Administration begins the process of using its fake national emergency to take control of privately-owned lands in Texas so it can build its vanity border wall. I bet some Texas landowners are rethinking their support for our President because now it's going to hurt them, but I don't blame people very much for only coming to the light when they're affected; after all, people don't learn everything via thought experiment.

Federal budget deficit hits $134 billion for the month of October, which projects out to over $1.6 trillion for fiscal 2020, for no particularly good reason. And the same people who squealed over similarly-sized deficits during those rough first years of the Obama Administration won't complain about it now, and only because Their Personal Lord and Savior is President. Worse, they'll tell lies about it -- probably not that the 2017 tax "reform" stimulated the economy, because no one believes that, but I'm sure they'll talk about all the secret stimulus bills their President passed once he starts talking about them on his magical Twitterphone.

Finally, Barack Obama tells rich liberal donors that we shouldn't move "too far left" in taking on Republicans, though surely he intended for everyone to overhear what he was saying. When he says we should avoid thinking that "the resistance to certain approaches to things is simply because voters haven’t heard a bold enough proposal and if they hear something as bold as possible then immediately that’s going to activate them," he's indulging in straw-man reasoning -- voters abandon the party because Democrats don't do anything for the people when they get power, and if solutions need to be "bold," that's because Democrats didn't solve problems before they became bigger problems. And it's only true that "(t)he average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it" when you put the question exactly like that -- when you ask said average American about individual fixes like Medicare-for-All, taxing the rich and corporations harder, and keeping banksters from preying upon us, the average American gets on board, and these fixes comprise much of the "big, structural change" that Our Glorious Elites keep warning us will "destroy the system." Of course, if we remember 2008, we already know that Our Glorious Elites can destroy the system very well on their own -- which is precisely why we need "bold enough proposals" and "big, structural change" in the first place.

Action: concerning payday lenders, welfare for the rich, and immigrant soldiers.

Still sick of payday lenders charging 400% interest on their never-ending cycles of debt? Did you know that the Military Lending Act caps all payday and car title loans at 36% for active duty soldiers? Well, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act (I can find no bill numbers at this writing) would expand this and other protections to all Americans. The bill would also let state laws stand if they offer stronger protections than the bill does. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families from predatory lenders by passing the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act. And the payday loan "industry" won't even be able to complain about being forced to "figure out" how to comply with the law, because they've already been offering loans to active duty soldiers under these rules! Oh, they'll cry a river anyway about market disruption, but to be frank, any "market" that relies on trapping working families in a cycle of skyrocketing debt demands disruption, if not obliteration.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the news that the 2017 tax bill's "opportunity zones" have delivered taxpayer money to far too many uber-wealthy developers who are not actually using it to boost depressed neighborhoods, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to end these "opportunity zones" and thus close off at least one avenue through which the wealthy get handouts. Actually, there's another news hook: our Treasury Secretary, Steve "the Foreclosure King" Mnuchin, apparently intervened personally so his buddy Michael Milken (who once did two years' jail time for insider trading and was apparently the inspiration for Wall Street's Gordon Gekko) could get a windfall from an "opportunity zone." "Opportunity zones" supposedly give out tax breaks to developers who help uplift poorer areas, but in practice they just deliver more of your hard-earned taxpayer money to the already-rich who are more likely to gentrify areas than they are to create real jobs and livelihoods. "Creating wealth" in the form of higher real estate prices is fool's gold -- and too often the fools get all the gold.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to protect our immigrant soldiers from deportation. If you're looking for a good-guy litmus test to determine who gets to come here and stay here, volunteering to give up your life for your country is a real good place to start. And if you're annoyed that we don't have enough volunteers in our Army to keep it, ah, home-grown, you may want to wonder if that's because of all the stupid wars we fight! Surely we don't want a country where we throw out active-duty soldiers because of their immigration status but allow folks with equally-rickety immigration status continue to work for dung pellets on our President's vineyards, because that's the kind of country he's bringing us -- a world full of flamboyant nativism, but also a world no less full of undocumented immigrants. Why, you have to wonder if that's the whole idea. (Full disclosure: you do not actually have to wonder. It is the whole idea. You can't keep people in a state of rage if you don't keep the objects of their rage around.)

Around the table: more notes about various kinds of corruption.

Independent media outlet unmasks a senior Twitter editor as a British psyops agent -- but our "liberal" media largely ignore the story. You'd think our media would be more interested that a government spy, whose specialty is influencing how people think, was that deeply embedded in a social media corporation that influences how people think, but no, and I doubt it's because some media organ no one ever heard of (which hopefully will change!) broke the story. More likely it's because our "liberal" media do not take their duties seriously, and are just looking to fill space between adverts and move up the corporate ladder. Hey, I like to think the best of people, but some people make it awfully hard.

Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliot at ProPublica describe how Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert managed to get "opportunity zone" tax breaks for his properties in Detroit even though they're not in particularly distressed areas of the city. You'll be depressed to learn that getting these tax breaks is mostly about who you know, and even if Mr. Gilbert or his cronies didn't actually break any laws, the result -- money intended to spur investment in poorer communities gets diverted to already-wealthy developers -- is unmistakably corrupt and evil. And of course the way the 2017 tax "reform" sets up these "opportunity zones" is remarkably free of oversight and disclosure, and therefore accountability. Don't right-wingers say they're all about accountability? Oh, they mean accountability for you, not for them.

U.S. Magistrate Judge holds Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt of court for "show(ing) only minimal efforts to comply" with a court order preventing it from collecting more Corinthian College loans. Which is worse: the DOE spokeshack who plays the but-we-didn't-mean-any-harm card, or the one who said, probably rolling his eyes, that "(w)e acknowledged that servicers made unacceptable mistakes," never mind the unacceptable mistakes committed by DOE? Your law and order Administration, ladies and gentlemen!

You may have heard that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been having dinner with a lot of right-wing blowhards lately, but The Intercept checks around and finds that, despite a stated desire to "meet() new people and hear() from a wide range of viewpoints" that Mr. Zuckerberg says drives his dinners with the likes of Tucker Carlson and L. Brent Bozell III, , he hasn't actually broken bread with any liberals. Dig the it's called learning! BS at the end of his twittergasm! I gotta say, these days, when I read about someone rich or famous, normally my first response is gosh, what a fucking asshole.

Bobby Lewis at The Guardian watches 44 months of the Fox News Channel so you don't have to. And also so that you can fully understand that Fox News "poisons" people, which, like, I've seen happen. I've long said that Fox and Friends is the worst program on Fox News, not just because it's so baldly stupid, but because the hosts all pretend to be regular folks. You can take comfort in knowing that most of the regular folks you know are better informed than this. No, really. Don't judge by the guy eating 10 eggs at the Wisconsin diner, who'll blame his next heart attack on socialism.

Another day, another Bernie-can't-win-Iowa article in which voters act like they're trying to predict the winner, not be the winner. Seriously, when you say you're "unsure" how Medicare-for-All "plays in small-town Iowa" (set aside that it actually plays pretty well!) and you wonder if the things he proposes are "achievable things," you're doing democracy wrong -- gosh, if you're a small town voter and you like Medicare-for-All, you can actually make Medicare-for-All seem less impossible by supporting candidates who might actually pass it! This horserace mentality too many voters still have is going to get us all killed one day.

Finally, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) tells reporters that "(i)f Turkey was planning on coming into northern Syria and trying to ethnically cleanse the Kurds, and U.S. troops were caught in the middle, I am not completely convinced that it was a bad idea to get them out of harm's way." I guess that sounded better in his head, though seriously, America afraid of a big bad Turkish invasion? He acts like we're up against Suleiman the Magnificent instead of some two-bit dictator/Presidential man-crush. As an aside, maybe Beto O'Rourke could run ads about this in a 2020 Senate race.

Action: concerning immigration, mandatory minimums, and fossil fuels.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Defense's Inspector General to investigate the militarization of our Southern border. When you hear that our Administration has deployed armed soldiers at our Southern border, you might reasonably ask: are we at war with someone? Our President would no doubt answer "yes," being a member of Our Glorious Elites, and therefore someone who uses the word "war" to mean all kinds of things it does not mean. But we are not at war with Mexico, and U.S. law actually forbids our government from using soldiers to enforce domestic laws. We don't use soldiers to enforce domestic laws because we don't want to become a tinpot dictatorship where people are afraid to be free. I suspect our DoD IG (Inspectors General still display a large amount of independence) will come to the same conclusion we have. But only if we speak out. After all, saying nothing and hoping for the best doesn't work.

Meanwhile, even though our Pennsylvania state Supreme Court overturned mandatory minimums many years ago, word on the street is that our state legislature wants to bring them back, in a four-pack of bills, HB 726, HB 1850, HB 1851, and HB 1852, that would target offenses committed with firearms. I understand that people want to "do something" about guns these days, but this is doing the wrong thing -- we should let judges do their job and decide case-by-case whether possession of a firearm really merits a longer sentence. I've been saying for a while now that we should make it just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons, and I'd rather support that solution than another set of mandatory minimums that wind up slamming folks of color harder and costing the taxpayer more money -- and feeding into the prison-privatization machine, too. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject more mandatory minimum sentences.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell big media corporations to stop taking advertisements from fossil fuel corporations and their flunkies. Sound harsh? Consider the simple fact that you already know whatever you need to know about fossil fuels -- you know what fuel your car needs and whether your house takes oil heat or gas heat and whether your stove takes electric or gas, for example -- and fossil fuel advertisements typically therefore extol the virtues of particular fossil fuel corporations; is it really too much to ask that ads give us information we can actually use? It's not particularly of issue that such ads tend to lie about fossil fuel corporations' commitment to renewable energy and about the real effects of pollution and climate change, but ads disguised as "news stories" or "opinion pieces"? They're a big deal, and any media outlet worth its salt would reject them out of hand. They don't do it now because they're corrupt, but that's why we're here: to show them a way out of corruption.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, factory farm waste, PFAS chemicals, and food safety.

California actually passed strong campaign finance disclosure legislation in 2017, but that law didn't cover everything -- it still lets big donors push out mass text messages without revealing themselves, and it also hides the big donors behind massive petitioning efforts. But AB 201 and SB 47 would close these loopholes, so the California Clean Money Action Fund helps you tell California state legislators to do more to expose big campaign donors by passing these bills. AB 201 would force candidates to put their names on text messages and PACs to put committee names or URLs leading to disclosure info; SB 47 would require petition gatherers to disclose the top three donors of that petition before soliciting a signature. We're looking at a few hundred million text messages and over two dozen ballot initiatives (in 2018) that require more sunlight, so this isn't a "solution looking for a problem" -- you know, like Voter ID or Interstate Crosscheck.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3844, the Farmer Fairness Act, would at least address this issue as it related to factory farm waste. As it is now, big ag corporations have gamed the system so that the small farmers who own the animals on factory farms take all the blame for the waste on big factory farms, while the big ag corporations make off with all the profit! But the Farmer Fairness Act would "require all persons exercising substantial operational control over the concentrated animal feeding operation," which would include anyone who "exercises any control over the activities, operation, or management of a concentrated animal feeding operation." Hence both small farmer and big factory farm would be on the hook for polluting nearby rivers and streams with their animal waste. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big ag domination of small farmers by passing the Farmer Fairness Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would better address the clean-up of ubiquitous and poisonous PFAS chemicals, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. Specifically, you'd tell your Congressfolk to support provisions of the must-pass defense authorization bill that would better track PFAS contamination and better coordinate PFAS cleanup efforts; this is a big deal -- not just because scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, thyroid disease, and liver damage, not just because you can find PFAS chemicals in so many commonplace items ranging from nonstick saucepans to food packaging, but also because firefighting foam is a major source of PFAS chemicals, and our soldiers do put out a lot of fires. So, for once, let's pass some defense spending that helps all of us, and not just some defense contracting corporation's CEO.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our Administration's plans to reduce safety inspections at pork processing plants, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. What on Earth has possessed our last two Administrations to try to mess with meat inspections? Do they not know that food poisoning always gets into the news? It seems like the best of our politicians listen too much to big agricultural corporations like they know everything, when mostly what they know is how to redistribute income upward from consumers (and farmers!) to themselves. Some "expertise," that. Of course, the worst of our politicians only pretend to be that stupid, but actually mean to make their big ag cronies richer and damn the consequences for everyone else. Oh, well, I guess Americans are only the people who eat the food. Seriously, we deserve better, from both our food processing corporations and our politicians.

Action: concerning good bills, soldier pensions, and mass shootings.

That stack of good House-passed bills keeps piling up on Mitch McConnell's desk, and he doesn't care what you think about that, but that's OK, because we don't care what he thinks! Go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act. Mob Boss Mitch ain't the boss of your Senators, after all -- you are. People say I'm naive for thinking we can get Republican Senators to pass bills supporting voting rights, civil rights, internet freedom, better paychecks, and secure elections. But what would they hate even more than passing these bills? Being humiliated and jobless, that's what, and if enough of us speak up, they'll either bow to our will or be humiliated and jobless. Having the better arguments ain't enough -- we also have to deploy them, in force.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court gave our President the green light to appropriate some Defense Department funds for his vanity border wall, and then the Pentagon announced late last week that it would divert almost $225 million in military pension funds toward the wall. Taking from our troops' retirement to keep drama going -- how utterly despicable! I wonder how our President's votaries will explain it away. Perhaps they'll say it's only $224 million, which I'm sure will comfort our retired soldiers as they make ends meet. Or they'll say they're taking a lot more from real defense spending, so shutup or he's cutting money for weapons we don't even use, and that's a good thing -- but neither of these arguments can magically convert taking pension money into a good thing. Our President's phone number is 1.215.456.2011. He doesn't care what you and I think, but he's also sensitive to bad PR, so doing our duty might actually yield a result here.

Finally, on the heels of yet another mass shooting perpetrated by yet another white supremacist asshole, too many of our politicians are offering "thoughts and prayers" again, apparently having completely forgotten the backlash they got over their "thoughts and prayers" last year. Hence Greyroots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to get to work and pass some common-sense gun control legislation for once. Since I oppose very much control of handguns and hunting rifles, I'm going to use Greyroots' contact tool to specify the common-sense legislation I want -- legislation that would amend the National Firearms Act to make it just as hard for folks to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons. And all that bill did was get tommy guns off our streets. Our main job as civilized people is to fix problems without resorting to violence; if we don't commit to that, we'll never have enough weapons for the resulting apocalypse anyway.

Around the table: more lessons in the abject folly of bipartisanship-above-all.

House votes down Amash/Lofgren amendment that would have curtailed warrantless spying on Americans by a 175-253 vote. Which means, of course, that a crapload of Democrats opposed both law and order and your right to privacy. Yay bipartisanship! That's why "electing more Democrats," which you can do once a year, is nowhere near as effective as pressuring your Reps and Senators to do the right thing, which you can do every day.

It's not particularly surprising that a group of billionaires has written an open letter all but begging our government to tax them more for the good of all Americans. If anything, it's more surprising that our irony-addicted media hardly notices when these things occur. Why, it's almost like their jobs depend on them not noticing it!

Fox News talking head tries to get job with our Justice Department, is rebuffed by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then calls Mr. Sessions America's most "dangerous person" because of his recusal from the Russia probe. Gosh, corrupt much? And cable news is notorious for asserting that they don't need to do conflict-of-interest disclosures about their hosts and guests because how dare you imply we're dishonest! Trying to get informed by watching cable news is like trying to get healthy by eating M&Ms.

From the "It's Not Only Inhumane, It's Fiscally Irresponsible!" file: Department of Health and Human Services official says it'd cost less money to keep immigrant children with their parents than separate them and put the kids in tents. Now guess which one our Administration is so proud of itself for doing! Remember: this is also the guy who puts his golf trips on the public dime and then turns around and says we can't afford health care for transgender soldiers.

Finally, Cenk Uygur tells us that Joe Biden isn't the "most electable" candidate but, in fact, the least electable candidate. Long story short: a candidate who overtly promises no change -- which is worse than merely "not promising change"! -- is profoundly misreading an electorate which is fed to the up. Also, too, as Mr. Uygur says, there's nothing actually "likable" about the Iraq war, mass incarceration, bankster deregulation, or bankruptcy "reform," but that's almost all of Joe Biden's Senate career right there. Recall, of course, that he didn't just "deal" with segregationists when he got to the Senate in 1972, but collaborated with them.

Action: concerning "national emergencies," unconstitutional war, abortion, and taxes.

Dig this: our President has used the Arms Control Act of 1976 to declare yet another "national emergency" so he can sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE without Congress's approval. If you're wondering what possible "emergency" could exist to justify such a sale -- presumably we don't need Saudi Arabia to protect us from invasion! -- you're not alone. Of course the "emergency" is Iran, though it's more likely kids on Yemeni school buses will feel the blunt end of the weapons sales. But if everything's an emergency, then nothing is an emergency -- and if a President faces so many "emergencies," it kinds reflects badly on him. You can 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 find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators, so you can call them and tell them to stand in our President's way on this matter.

In a related matter, CREDO still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2354/S. 1039, the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act. So far, our Administration's efforts to go to war with Iran have included lousy intelligence and boasting from elected leaders that a war with Iran would be easy; remind you of anything? I suppose a war with Iran would have important differences -- per John Bolton, we'd be sending 120,000 troops there, which is even fewer than we sent to Iraq in order to subdue a nation with less than half the population of Iran. Also, evacuating non-essential personnel from the Baghdad embassy is a dramatic touch I don't recall Mr. Bush contemplating. You know what else is different, though? Americans have seen this play already and have more vivid memories of their disgust with how the Iraq war turned out than they do of 9.11, which is almost old enough to vote now. Our duty now is to remind America of that disgust.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act, would prevent states from enacting medically unnecessary abortion bans that block women's access to health care. We don't "leave it up to the states" here, because our Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision explicitly prohibits leaving this matter up to the states. And that makes sense -- if our Constitution protects a right to abort a pregnancy, why would women need to get an ultrasound in one state and not another? Why would abortion be legal only up to six weeks into a pregnancy in one state and 24 weeks in another? Politicians could make all of this moot by putting a Constitutional amendment before us; wonder why they don't. And by "wonder why they don't" I mean "because they'd rather keep voters enraged than actually do something." The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect women's health everywhere by passing the Women's Health Protection Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to let our IRS offer free online tax-filing, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. You know that our government has an, er, arrangement with certain tax-filing corporations in which our IRS doesn't offer free tax-filing services online as long as these tax-filing corporations do -- and you may also know that these corporations do their damnedest to hide these free tax-filing services online so that you can't actually take advantage of them. But you may not know that TurboTax also diverts our soldiers from the free tax-filing services they're entitled to receive by offering "military discounts" that force them to pay for tax filing! That's a damn dirty trick, so go ahead and refer your Senators to the ProPublica article to which we've linked in the previous sentence. If they don't know about it, they need to know about it.

Around the table: a Presidential veto over Yemen, and other revolting developments.

Ho hum, our President vetoes resolution aiming to end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, calling it a "dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities." Ugh, one more time: Congress authorizes war, not the President. Also, too, he suggests the resolution will "endanger() the lives of American citizens and brave service members," which is, also, exactly the opposite of how it works -- no one kills us out of jealousy; they kill us because our government can't stop interfering in their affairs. And the safest way to protect our soldiers? Stop sending them off to stupid wars.

It's about time someone noted that our "liberal" media constantly insist that our agitation for better and more liberal policies constitutes a "purity test," but never use that term to describe the centrist insistence that liberals toe the centrist line. Of course the policies we advocate, like Medicare-for-All, just so happen to be popular across the ideological spectrum -- Medicare-for-All even gains support from a considerable number of conservatives. So "purity tests" means "elites being pressured in ways they don’t like." Well, waaaaaaah.

In a related note, Peter Bloom at Common Dreams says that Sen. Sanders's Fox News town hall "revealed a different way of bringing the country together" -- namely, a "new type of political unity -- one based on a shared desire to transform a corrupt system rather than tribal party allegiances." Centrists would no doubt agree that we can only create "national unity" by appealing to a broad cross-section of the populace, but they somehow think a broad cross-section of the populace wants Social Security and Medicare cuts and constant appeasement of the farthest right Republicans. I think we've spent a long time tabulating exactly what Americans do want, and it sure ain't whatever keeps Our Glorious Elites in power.

Proving once again that a little alliteration can be a dangerous thing, our Administration announces a new round of sanctions against the "troika of tyranny," Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Gosh, no one sits on their laurels like a right-winger does -- Venezuela is the only nation on that list that hasn't been a right-wing bête noire for decades. I also presume the inclusion of Nicaragua might be in advance of a few gazillion ads showing Bernie Sanders in Nicaragua in the early '80s, which they may be overestimating as a crippling blow.

Finally, Sen. Mitch McConnell (E-KY) launches his re-election effort with a jab at Democrats over that Obama Supreme Court nomination Mr. McConnell's Senate refused to take up. I'm not going to lie and say it's not funny, but whom, exactly, does this convert? This does nothing but anger up the already-angry, and at some point angering up the already-angry simply doesn't work anymore -- particularly if (not that this is likely!) Mr. McConnell gets a decent opponent in 2020.

Around the table: how our government shutdown actually ended, and other truths.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media sure do seem awfully anxious to overthrow the government of Venezuela. You don't have to love the Maduro regime to see where further American interference will lead, because you've seen where it has led -- to bigger and bigger problems "requiring" more American intervention, almost like that's the whole idea. You also don't have to love the Maduro regime to acknowledge that American interference has already helped send Venezuela's economy into a tailspin. I'm a little surprised that our President seems so transfixed on war with Venezuela as his ticket to unearned prestige and perhaps an unearned re-election -- although I guess it's easier than waging war with Iran! -- but then I wonder if that, too, is a feint, to take our eye off the next terrorist attack happening after the next government shutdown in a few weeks.

Eric Levitz at New York magazine reminds us that our Founders also regarded excessive wealth as evil, and regarded controlling the unbridled expansion of private property as a moral duty. Go ahead and read the article in its entirety; just don't get too distracted by infamous multimillionaire Sean Hannity's counterarguments, since they suck -- saying that you "better guard your nice things" from the "excess police" is weak tea, which testifies not only to the paucity of his arguments but the goodness of the American people, which has boxed him in with regards to what he can reasonably argue about the societal benefits of unbridled wealth. (And seriously, if your "dream" is to have the most money ever, you need a new dream, one that'll maybe benefit others in addition to yourself.)

Another day, another reminder that our Social Security program is most emphatically not "going broke" and that eliminating the cap on earnings to be taxed into the system would go a long way toward solving the "modest fiscal challenge" Social Security faces. No one said more people weren't retiring or that the system wouldn't face some additional strain, but today's politicians pretend the only solution is to completely raid the fund on behalf of big donors, even as they're instituting massive tax cuts for the rich that make the problem they're purporting to address ("runaway deficits," naturally) much worse. Social Security, having its own funding stream, doesn't actually contribute to the deficit, except in right-wing fever dreams.

Heather Vogell at ProPublica informs us that federal regulators have been slow to stop the flow of laundered money (i.e., from drug lords, terrorists, and the like) into and out of hedge funds. The PATRIOT Act mandated that our government write regulations requiring hedge funds to install anti-money laundering (or AML) programs, but here we are, over 17 years later, with no regulations written. Naturally, hedge funds "want" AML programs and federal enforcement, but just so happen to have eighty bajillion objections that of course must take precedence over the public good. I'd object that if they've done nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear, but I also wonder why our government doesn't simply do the regulating itself, instead of telling the hedge funds to do it (which, of course, they haven't done, either).

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fines a man who spent eight years swindling veterans out of their hard-earned pensions a mere one dollar, after said man swears he just can't pay more. They call it the "Mulvaney Discount," after former acting CFPB administrator/current acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, because it's not the first one. While it is possible that the CFPB will pursue action against the corporations this man owned, and maybe then swindled veterans will get some justice, a one-dollar fine makes a mockery of law and order in America -- particularly in a nation where (as the article makes sure to point out!) cash bail puts folks in jail for months without even convicting them of a crime.

Finally, we are reminded that the politicians didn't end the partial government shutdown at the end of last week so much as the workers who, after exhibiting great patience in working for weeks on end without pay, took action last week. Air traffic controllers slowed flights in at least three major airports, flight attendants visited their Congressfolk en masse, and 14,000 IRS workers didn't come to work, and regardless of what you hear from right-wingers about how workers who serve the public are supposed to serve the public even when our President has a massive temper tantrum, these workers are all heroes. It gives me hope that the next shutdown might be even shorter, and our President humiliated for real this time. (No, I think his "emergency declaration" will ultimately die in court, just like most of his other "bold" acts have died in court.)

Action: concerning war in Yemen, soldiers' health care, and paycheck fairness.

Remember when the Senate passed a bill aiming to end our participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen last month -- but then the House promptly added a rider to the Farm Bill (of all things!) preventing a House vote on that matter for the rest of the year? Well, the calendar has turned and the House has changed hands, so why not let Roots Action help you tell your House Reps to vote to end our participation in the war on Yemen? A new year should create new possibilities, after all. Note well that the Senate's anti-war resolution probably got 56 votes last year because the Senate already knew the House wasn't going to pass it, making it a show of courage for a lot of Senate cowards, but Mob Boss Mitch will no doubt come up with a litany of absurd excuses not to even hold a vote on the bill if it passes this House. But that presents us an opportunity to embarrass them for their hypocrisy, and of course as good citizens we should not pass up such opportunities. They're teachable moments, after all.

Meanwhile, H.R. 663/S. 191, the Burn Pits Accountability Act, is back in Congress, with over 100 Congressional co-sponsors, and if the bill resembles past iterations (Congress.gov has neither a summary nor text for either bill at this writing), it would help our soldiers get the health care they need from burn pit exposure. Our military used burn pits to dispose of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those burn pits had all kinds of trash in them -- chemicals, paint, plastic, rubber, human and medical waste, even munitions! -- and burning them does what? Puts all kinds of toxic crap in the air our soldiers breathe, of course! The Burn Pits Accountability Act would require our Department of Defense to ask soldiers whether they've been exposed to burn pits during routine health exams and exit interviews so they can better assist our Veterans Administration maintain its Burn Pit Registry, and that, at least, is a start. Hence the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America help you tell our Congressfolk to help our soldiers by passing the Burn Pits Accountability Act.

Finally, the Paycheck Fairness Act is apparently back, too (Congress.gov doesn't even have a bill number for it at this writing), and if it's like past iterations, it would prevent corporations from prohibiting employees from discussing their pay with their co-workers -- since these are the very discussions that let women know they're being shorted by their employer! -- and would limit the factors employers can use to pay women differently to "bona fide factors" including education, training, and experience. The 79-cents-on-the-dollar figure is the one you're likely most familiar with, but even when you adjust the data for education, training, experience, you still don't get women making a dollar for every dollar a man makes. And that's only fair! If the bill passes the House, Mob Boss Mitch will just say "the bill only helps trial lawyers," though that does tend to be a side effect of injustice. You'd think he'd want to remedy that by fighting injustice or something. Anyway, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support fair pay by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Around the table: tabulating an unusually high number of setbacks to civilization, sorry.

Supreme Court stays various injunctions against our Administration's transgender military ban -- meaning the ban is in place until all the legal challenges thereto can be resolved. Seems to me the conservative thing to do would be to leave the injunctions in place and let the lower courts work it out, but apparently that's insufficiently conservative to this Court's "conservative" majority. Dig, also, our Administration Solicitor General whining about how many federal courts are now issuing used-to-be-rare injunctions against "major policy initiatives." That couldn't be because so many of your "major policy initiatives" break our laws, could it? What a snowflake.

Apparently because absurdity just isn't absurd enough, Vice President Pence compares our President to Martin Luther King, Jr., saying that both men have "inspired us to change." I guess he means to equate the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Open Housing Act with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which remains our President's only significant legislative "achievement." The only way our President has "inspired us to change" is that he's inspired so many more good Americans to confront corrupt bigoted assholes like him a lot more forcefully, but I don't praise or thank corrupt bigoted assholes for that, nor do I argue for their continuance in office because some good happens to come of their assholery.

Lo and behold, Senate Majority Leader/Obviously Great and Wonderful Real American Co-President Mitch McConnell, mere days after saying he won't allow a Senate vote on any shutdown-ending bill that wasn't obviously the result of spirited negotiations between Democrats, Republicans, and our President, now plans to bring a shutdown bill that meets precisely none of those criteria to a vote this week. No use lamenting that he has no principles, because folks like Mob Boss Mitch think principles are for us "little people," not their "betters," like him.

Buried in this article buying the Republican fiction that they can't get our President's nominees through quickly enough despite the fact that Democrats literally can't filibuster them anymore is Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) whining about how "(i)t's very difficult for a president to advance his or her agenda if you don’t have the right people in place." I also despise the holds and withdrawals of unanimous consent that comprise Senate Democrats' last tools to stall our President's nominees, but Sen. Young appears completely unconcerned about the people's right to advance their agenda through their representatives in Congress, or about our President's constitutionally-mandated duty to do the people's will. I don't give one rat's hind quarter about a President's "agenda," and that's how our Founders wanted us to be.

Finally, why does our "liberal" media suppose our President has ever been any kind of "deal-maker," like this shutdown mess should be some kind of surprise? It's not just that every "great deal" he's ever made only allowed him to suck out a bankrupt corporation's wealth like the vampire he is -- a good deal benefits everyone, not just the guy who makes it, but our "liberal" media haven't attended that aspect of deal-making in some time, so obsessed are they with "who wins" and "who loses" like everything's a damn horserace.

Penny rants for Sunday, December 23, 2018: concerning veterans' health care, right-wing drama, and "political correctness."

You remember when long wait times at the Veterans Administration were all over the news? And you remember how right-wingers said privatizing the VA would solve the problem? Well, surprise, surprise, a ProPublica/Politifact investigation finds the privatized part of the VA hemorrhaging money and subjecting our veterans to, guess what, longer wait times. Well, that's what happens when private health insurance corporations charge close to $300 for referrals! And dig one of the privatizers suggesting you calculate their overhead using "an average cost" rather than total costs! You know, like right-wingers tell you to calculate the benefits from their tax-cuts-for-the-rich based on an "average tax cut" that sure ain't making its way into your bank account. Maybe we should spend less on corporate welfare and more on soldiers' health care? Maybe we should stop making our soldiers fight stupid wars so they won't need so much health care in the first place? If you think these are big asks, well, that's not the attitude that abolished slavery.

You may have heard that our President has stopped following Ann Coulter on Twitter after she criticized him for (momentarily!) caving on his desired border wall funding, and you may have also heard that our President's beloved Fox and Friends hosts slammed him for announcing that our military will pull out of Syria, so before we go any further, let's all take a deep breath and remind ourselves that this is all drama, and bad drama at that. I mean, these aren't the kind of pissing matches that even make for good reality show drama, if such a thing can be said to exist. Right-wingers stage these "disagreements" to look "independent," so that when you accuse them of marching in jackboot lockstep agreement, as they do, they can point to that one time one of them yelled at another and hope you momentarily forget that one counterexample doesn't obliterate all trends. And, really, how "independent" can you be if you're coming at our President because he's not nativist enough, or not enough of a warmongerer?

"Liberal" media poll finds a majority of Americans oppose our nation becoming more "politically correct." So Americans oppose right-wingers constantly having swordfights over who's more conservative, or Nazi wannabes demanding "safe spaces" for their racism or demanding that everyone call them "white nationalists" instead of racists? Apparently not -- Americans believe that "there are too many things people can't say anymore," presumably about women and people of color, since the article insists that Democrats had better heed this poll. But folks losing their jobs over what they say at work is not exactly a new thing, since our First Amendment protects you from your government and not so much from your employer, and if folks really feel oppressed at the prospect of being shamed by their fellow-Americans, all I can say is waaaaaaaaaah. And I can't shake the feeling that if this poll had asked if Americans should be more sensitive to what other Americans go through just because they're women or people of color, it would have found a majority favored that, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: a potentially-major Presidential miscalculation, and other items.

House Democrats propose requiring a three-fifths majority to raise tax rates on the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers. Maybe this proposal makes raising taxes on higher incomes easier and maybe it doesn't, but anyway I'd prefer not to change House rules concerning majority votes for certain legislative aims, even if I agree with those aims (and I surely agree that working folks shouldn't pay more taxes). I'd prefer they reductions in middle-class tax rates with top tax-bracket income hikes, and then (since most Americans would support that program) just keep explaining past the haters and their lies.

Our Administration is mulling actually delivering an enemy of Turkish President Erdogan into his hands. Well, I guess we now know why Mr. Erdogan threw the Saudis under the bus over Mr. Khashoggi's murder. The good news? "Career officials" at three federal agencies were "furious" over the idea. The bad news? There are fewer "career officials" in our government than there used to be. And our President fist-bumped Mr. Erdogan not too long ago -- over his authoritarian tendencies, no less! I wonder how he'll feel about that if Mr. Erdogan persists in his requests.

ProPublica finds our Administration doing its damnedest to funnel Veterans Administration money toward private care for our veterans. Private health care is, of course, more expensive than single-payer health care (which our Veterans' Administration is), and the VA's well-covered problems in recent years started with Congressional sequestration dramas. This is how they win: they squeal TEH GUVMINT DOESN'T WORKZ!!!!! and then run our government badly to prove their point. I'm really surprised more members of our "liberal" media aren't on to this oh no wait I'm actually not surprised.

Speaking of our "liberal" media, FAIR catches them pretending they have no responsibility in reflexively trumpeting our President's squealing about caravans of foreigners coming to destroy us. Actually, their editorial pages exposed our President's racist game while it was going on, but their news pages covered it like it was real news! And then after the midterms, their editorial pages covered the caravan controversy like "everyone knew" it was BS! If I were more generous, perhaps I'd posit this schizophrenia as an improvement in media coverage -- over, you know, merely treating racism as something that "deserves a hearing." But I yearn for truth from our media, not coverage that's merely marginally better than awful.

I suppose it makes sense that our President would find Sean Hannity a suck-up who asks "dumb" questions, since the kind of loyalty he demands from everyone else seems to sicken him. You might even suppose (as the article's author does) that he keeps calling on CNN's Jim Acosta because he loves drama. But you might also suppose that reports of "discord" within our President's inner circle are also drama, and thus worth very little of our time. Still, I have to point this out occasionally, just as vaccines have to have a little bit of the disease they're fighting in them so they can teach your body what to fight.

Finally, Heather Digby Parton at Salon may have hit on something big here: that our President may be undercutting his obvious "Discredit Everybody Until Nobody Believes Anything Anymore" strategy by being completely untrustworthy himself. Indeed, this isn't a new strategy -- candidates always fill the air with BS so that more independent-minded voters throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. But given the highest midterm turnout in 52 years earlier this month, we also have evidence that his strategy is not working. So when's that terrorist attack coming?

Action: concerning war in Yemen, pollution, and whistleblowing.

Late last week, the Saudi-led coalition bombed a school bus in Yemen, killing upwards of 29 children. And our own Defense Department can't say whether the coalition used U.S.-supplied munitions to do the deed, or if we refueled the planes that dropped the bombs, because CENTCOM doesn't track these planes. I have to say that seems awfully convenient. And for decades Congress has let Presidents do pretty much what they like overseas, and even now is mulling a bill that would abdicate even more of their Constitutional responsibility to declare war. And if you thought this President would "be different" and "put America first" and "be laser-focused on fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS," recall that the Houthi rebels Saudi Arabia keeps fighting are some of the finest fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth. Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end American support for this undeclared and unconstitutional war that has put over two-thirds of Yemen's people in need of immediate humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, you know all about the nefarious "cost-benefit analysis" that right-wingers constantly use to say regulations are "too costly" for businesses? Well, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) is now proposing to make their cost-benefit analyses even worse, by forcing the EPA to consider the "harm" its regulations might do to corporate profits before considering the health benefits of its regulations. Scott Pruitt may be gone, but this particular proposal, somehow entitled "Increasing Consistency and Transparency in Considering Costs and Benefits in Rulemaking Process," surely comes from his gnarled hand. One can only hope that this particular Administration initiative, like so many of their pro-pollution initiatives, will die an ignominious death before a federal judge, but in the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell the EPA to reject its plan to put polluters before people, and mammon before life.

Finally, the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our government to do a considerably better job protecting whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing at the Veterans Administration. We can't reasonably blame this state of affairs on our most recent President, but on his predecessor, Barack Obama, who seemed to have a visceral hatred of whistleblowers across our government, including VA whistleblowers. But hatred of whistleblowers is a bit hard to understand on the face of it when you consider that a whistleblower's complaint will either be proven in a court of law or it won't; you may be tempted, as I am, to consider that our government must hate whistleblowers because our government can't win the argument on the merits. But we the people have an absolute, inviolate right to stop our government from screwing us over, and whistleblowers are often our only way of knowing our government's doing that. So, as civilized people, we protect whistleblowers with laws.

Around the table: with at least four lessons in how evil works.

Our Health and Human Services Department has been diverting funds earmarked for other purposes to pay to reunite the families it separated at the border. Among the programs affected are rural health programs, which reminds me that this whole imbroglio isn't a bug, it's a feature -- our HHS is literally taking money from rural Americans and giving it to immigrants so that rural Americans will conclude that ITZ TEH IMMIGRANTZ FAULTZ!!!!! Hey, you gotta keep the hate machine running somehow.

Administration "loyalists" are replacing long-time Veterans Administration employees at a rapid pace. And here, too: replacing good employees (including an "experienced scheduler," remember all those wait lists that were in the news in 2015?) with unqualified loyalists helps assure that the VA runs down, and when it does, our Administration will say THIS PROVEZ THAT TEH GUBMINT DOESN'T WORKZ!!!!! and privatize everything. When I say "incompetence is malice," this is kinda what I mean.

Former Sen. Joe Liebermann, himself a victim in a 2006 Democratic primary, rues the "outside the mainstream" politics of NY-14 Democratic House nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and urges NY-14 residents to vote for the man she vanquished in the primary instead. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez sure is making a lot of enemies among folks who are actually outside the mainstream -- if we measure the mainstream by what regular Americans think, rather than the fake "mainstream" of the Beltway chattering class. I didn't realize, though, that Mr. Crowley was on the Working Families Party line, which conjures up the prospect of a lot of right-learning Democrats voting the Working Families Party line. That could be trouble, but maybe some good can come of that, too -- like hard hats remembering that they actually have a lot of liberal opinions.

From the "How Reassuring Is This?" file: Janelle Shane tells us that "The AI Revolution Will Be Led By Toasters, Not Droids," since artificial intelligence works a lot better when it has a lot fewer tasks to handle. Which makes sense, though it also seems that the more single-task-centered AI bots aren't that good, either. The human mind, as I've said many times, is a wondrous and complex thing, and we barely know how it works, so we're probably not going to be creating C3POs anytime soon -- though a lot of banksters will make a lot of money off dumb investors before that's too obvious, and more than a few big corporations will fall because they move to AI far too quickly. (As an aside, that AI-generated "Spread Chicken Rice" recipe made me laugh out loud. Never, ever forget to seed your hearts before cooking!)

Finally, our Homeland (sic) Security (sic) Secretary says, in re the Nazi wannabes rioting in Charlottesville last year, that "it's not that one side is right, one side is wrong" and "(a)nybody that is advocating violence, we need to work to mitigate." What stunning wishy-washiness, and not just because our President's votaries squeal when liberals use words like "mitigate." Fact is, more people commit violence than advocate violence, and just about everyone who commits violence feels they had no choice! And, in this debate, one side is right and one side is wrong -- and these sides are, respectively, "everyone but white supremacists" and "white supremacists." Remember when I said we had to unlearn the post-modern notion that "there's no such thing as good and evil"? Yeah, this is why.

Action: concerning the Supreme Court, immigrants in the Army, and offshore drilling.

Our President has nominated D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice Kennedy's retirement. I've received numerous emails exhorting me to tell Republicans to follow the "McConnell Rule" and refuse to consider the nomination until after the people seat a new Congress, but amused as I'd be to attack Mr. McConnell's bald and abject hypocrisy, and aware as I am that literally the only reason we have the President we have is the patently-undemocratic Electoral College, I will not be induced into hypocrisy myself; I called for hearings on Mr. Garland, and the Senate should hold hearings on Mr. Kavanaugh as well. But nothing prevents us from using 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) and calling our Senators and telling them to vote the Kavanaugh nomination down. For Judge Kavanaugh will do a lot of damage if the Senate confirms him -- among so many other things, Judge Kavanaugh has written that Presidents should be immune from criminal prosecutions while in office, which is exactly the sort of thing that warms our President's heart, and chills ours.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the AP's report that our Army is kicking out immigrant enlistees without warning or justification -- immigrants who had enlisted in part so that they could get on an expedited path to citizenship, no less! -- Win Without War helps you tell our Defense Secretary, James Mattis, to stop these discharges and investigate previous ones. We've offered an expedited path to citizenship to immigrant enlistees for over a dozen years now (that's right, right-wingers, you can't blame TEH OBUMMERZ!!!! for this one, either), but now, in the name of "zero tolerance" of immigration, we're going to break this promise, too, because AMURIKA!!!!! Mr. Mattis -- who could be getting fired over Twitter soon, being the last remnant of sanity in our President's foreign policy apparatus -- has shown courage in the face of our President's ball-swinging before; with our counsel, he could do so again. (BTW, right-wingers: none of these immigrants are slackers "taking advantage" of our good nature, because nobody thinks putting themselves in the way of bombs and bullets is an "easy" way to get citizenship more quickly.)

Finally, our President has issued an Executive Order loosening regulations put in after the Deepwater Horizon Spillageddon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, like we have no damn memory of anything at all. Because they "kill jobs," I suppose our President will say if he ever gets around to deciding he ought to justify what he's doing, but of course that'd be a lie -- clean air and clean water regulations create jobs for people who help corporations comply with them; what they don't do so well is redistribute income upward to oil and gas drilling bosses. Our President believes bosses are his only real constituency, but in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, becoming a boss doesn't even demonstrate superior talent at managing people or making good products or streamlining processes anymore -- it only demonstrates superior talent at corner-cutting, employee-screwing, and job-killing. Also, you know, the American people are the boss of the President, not the other way around. Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to halt all offshore drilling off America's coasts.

Around the table: the President of France is not a good President either! And other lessons.

Good news, everyone: prosecutors have dropped all remaining charges against the J20 protestors. As you know, prosecutors tried to ring up over 200 Inauguration Day protestors on felony rioting charges, but they failed abjectly to do so. Of course, their own lipstick-on-a-pig statement that "21 people have pled guilty to charges for their conduct that day" hides the fact that they brought so little evidence to trial that they would have had to count on guilty pleas to get any guilty verdicts. I wonder how they got those guilty pleas.

Our Army has started discharging immigrant soldiers who joined the Army so they could establish a firm path to citizenship. Our Army told a few of them they were "security risks" because they had relatives abroad (why, nobody could have predicted that immigrants would have relatives in other nations!) or because the DoD hadn't completed background checks, which are, of course, more extensive for immigrants. Is there any promise this Administration won't break just to diddle the rage glands of its votaries?

Shira Tarlo at Salon reminds us that Andrew Wheeler, the coal lobbyist replacing Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator, won't be any better than Mr. Pruitt. He may not have Mr. Pruitt's peculiar taste for low-level perks, but a former colleague assures us he "does things by the book," which may mean he'll move more slowly than Mr. Pruitt, which is good -- or it may mean he knows all the loopholes he can use to make our air and water dirtier again, which is bad. Apparently he doesn't really want the job, either, though he might be doing it for a while.

Surprise, surprise! Juliette Legendre at Inequality.org finds the Presidency of France's Emmanuel Macron to be "an old-fashioned, right-leaning neoliberal determined to overhaul France’s hard-won social model under the guise of modernism and emancipation." Cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations, gutting labor laws, partially privatizing the national rail system, and declaring his opponents to be "slackers," "cynics," and "do-nothings" -- how preferable, really, is all of that to the shitshow we're enduring here in America?

Police union President talks of "an influx of tremendous outrage" from the community over the inclusion of two books on an eight-book summer reading list for incoming students at a South Carolina high school. Dig how he calls two books "almost an indoctrination toward distrust of authority figures" -- gosh, I wonder how many of our Founders complained that our Constitution was "almost an indoctrination toward distrust of authority figures." My favorite part is when we learn that one of the books this fellow fears actually has a good police role model in it. All together now: waaaaaaaaah!

Finally, Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic says Democrats will have to choose in 2020 between mobilizing whiter, Republican-leaning voters disgusted with Trump or mobilizing younger, less white, more liberal voters. I can make that decision for them! Mobilize the voters who are sick of an economy that serves only the richest Americans, because disgust with that economy pretty much resonates across age and race groups. Hell, it might even remind some Republicans that they're really Democrats.

Around the table: describing yet another measure of the cost of this Presidency.

Ho hum, our Administration plans to try, again, to force utilities to buy their power from otherwise-failing coal and nuclear power plants, under the guise of "national security." You'd think a truly strong nation wouldn't be so reliant on power sources that are losing more and more money (particularly nuclear power plants, which rarely if ever make money and too often require "loan guarantees," which we might better describe as "taxpayer bailouts"). And no, this isn't about protecting coal miner jobs; it's about gilding the plumbing in coal and nuclear CEOs' 19th vacation homes.

Gregory Shupak at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media, when covering the Israel-Palestine conflict, just about never considers a one-state solution within which Israelis and Palestinians would have equal rights. No use telling me that these folks "just can't get along," when you know as well as I do that all kinds of folks get along quite well until some selfish actor starts blaring in their ear. Also, too, one side having vastly superior firepower and foreign economic support does tend to make conflicts "historic."

Beth Schwartzapfel at The Marshall Project explains why those $2 or $5 co-pays prisoners need to see doctors are actually quite onerous. Long story short: because they hardly make any damn money to begin with! Long story somewhat longer: when you make literally five cents an hour, as those at the bottom of the wage scale do in Oklahoma, a $4 co-pay is more like a $580 co-pay. And if you're tempted to say well, co-pays discourage unnecessary doctor's visits, you may want to consider whether it actually discourages necessary doctor's visits, and thus increases inmate health care costs, which of course are borne by the taxpayer one way or the other. How about that -- the compassionate solution is also the fiscally-responsible solution.

I'd taken it for granted that the NFL could force its players to stand and "respect" the flag and the national anthem, however stupid they'd look for doing so, but Kathy Wilkes at In These Times argues that the NFL owners' recent actions might actually be illegal. Suing our President for attempting to "influence or threaten to influence a private employment decision" might be an uphill battle (even on the merits!), but the players have a much better case against the NFL if it imposed its ban without bargaining with the players at all, as sure seems to be the case.

Finally, in a truly shocking development, we learn that the cost to the taxpayer of sending our President to his Mar-a-Lago resort has so far exceeded the cost to the taxpayer of Robert Mueller's investigation of said President's possible lawbreaking in re his ties to Russia. Now guess which "cost" our President has been whining about on Twitter. You may also recall that the cost of sending our President to Mar-a-Lago also dwarfs at least one other "cost" our President has found onerous -- that of taking care of the health care needs of our transgender soldiers. The good news? His venality, though it knows no bounds, doesn't reflect on the American people -- it reflects on American elites, who have spent the last several decades screwing everything up. They deserve each other.

Action: internet freedom, farm policy, veterans' health care, and automatic voter registration.

Word on the street is that tomorrow Democrats will force a vote on S.J.Res. 52, the "resolution of disapproval" that would roll back the FCC's net neutrality repeal, so today's as good a day as any to call your Senators and tell them to vote in favor of the resolution, and thus support real internet freedom for all Americans. The FCC had the stones to call their net neutrality repeal "Restoring Internet Freedom," but their repeal only "restores" internet "freedom" for big corporations -- as in freedom to prevent you from visiting websites, freedom to slow down the loading of websites, and freedom to demand tribute from websites in order to prevent either of these things from happening. What about your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than let some corporation tell you where to go? Clearly, that actual freedom is not as important to the FCC as those other corporate "freedoms." But with S.J.Res. 52, we can begin to take our freedom back.

Meanwhile, Congress is mulling another farm bill, since that needs to be reauthorized every six years, and in H.R. 2 they've concocted a real stinker of a farm bill: one that stretches the definition of "family farm" so that huge farms can take even more farm subsidies they don't need, one that rolls back incentives that help farmers get off chemicals and one-crop farming, one that exempts pesticides from clean water and endangered species protections, and one that tramples on state-level efforts to control factory farms. Oh, and it also imposes new work requirements on food stamps, as if too many working families aren't already on food stamps because their employers don't pay enough. In short, this is another pro-corporation, anti-people bill from Congress, and it deserves a humiliating death. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support small farmers and healthy food choice by rejecting H.R. 2.

In other news, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5671, the Burn Pits Accountability Act. So what are burn pits? Burn pits are what we used to dispose of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan, waste that could include human and medical waste, chemicals, paint, plastic, rubber, and even munitions. If that doesn't sound like an utterly toxic stew, I don't know what does! For all that, scientists haven't yet established a firm link between burn pits and Iraq/Afghanistan veteran illnessess, but the Veterans Administration maintains a Burn Pit Registry which can make establishing that link far easier, and H.R. 5671 would mandate that our Department of Defense ask soldiers whether they've been exposed to burn pits -- which they can do during health exams and separation interviews -- and then automatically register any veteran who answers in the affirmative. Thus the research -- and the healing -- can get a kick-start.

Finally, voter registration is now automatic in 13 states -- meaning citizens in these states become registered voters whenever they use state services like the Division of Motor Vehicles -- and Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to enact an automatic voter registration law. You know what some right-wingers say when confronted with the common sense notion that we ought to make it easier for people to vote? They say voting should be hard! No: the work of citizenship should be hard, but it does not logically follow from that statement that each and every task associated with citizenship should be hard. You shouldn't have to spend endless time on hold when you call your Reps and Senators, you shouldn't be completely deprived of townhall meetings because your Rep is a criticism-hating snowflake, and you shouldn't have to fill out piles of paperwork in order to register to vote just because some politicians want fewer people to vote.

Around the table: special "somewhat better news" edition!

In opening arguments against the first of the J20 defendants -- you know, the ones who face decades in prison on absurd felony rioting charges -- prosecutors somewhat inauspiciously concede that they have precisely zero evidence tying the defendants to any actual property damage. Ordinarily that wouldn't bode well for an attempt to convict people for, you know, damaging property, but the prosecution has plodded on, demanding that the defendants "intended" to destroy property (a claim which would surely raise the ire of Zombie Justice Scalia) and repeating random phrases as if mere repetition would rally folks to their side. In short, the prosecution is a textbook right-wing prosecution, and sadly it might succeed in Trump's America.

Bess Levin at Vanity Fair reports on all the rich-people tax loopholes that somehow made it into the House-passed tax "reform" bill. They largely describe hedge-fund managers, who as you know are very popular, and folks hiding money in large estates, who are similarly popular. Is it too much to ask that anyone who voted for this monstrosity be turned out of office in 2018? No, I do not believe it is too much to ask, even in an era where legislatures can gerrymander individual homes out of districts.

A second U.S. District Court judge blocks the Trump Administration's attempted ban on transgender soldiers in the military. Somewhere James Mattis is breathing a sigh of relief! And which gay-humping, flag-burning, income-redistributing Democrat President appointed this judge to the federal bunch? Why, Bush the Better, of course. I wish that made me feel better about the reactionary jerks Mr. Trump is putting on the federal bench at an accelerated rate.

Sammi-Jo Lee at Yes! magazine describes how the "internet co-op," of which there are now currently hundreds across the land, could be a bulwark against the FCC's attempts to destroy free speech on the internet. And of course these internet co-ops succeed in areas filled with Trump votaries, which matter they may want to attend, particularly after their hero helps make their corporate internet experience miserable. But let's not expect any consistency about "states' rights" from the man who would prevent the FCC from nullifying state-level anti-community broadband laws, but would also prevent states from enacting their own net neutrality laws.

If you've any benefit-of-the-doubt left for Roy Moore because he married his wife when she was an actual adult, note well that Mr. Moore himself says he first laid eyes on her when she was around 15 or 16, and that she made a strong impression upon him then. So either he really believes it's better to pick a mate who's not old enough to consent to sex yet so he can mold her more easily into a "good wife," or he sublimated an urge society can't tolerate by picking a girl when she was young and then keeping his hands off her until she was an adult capable of consent. I'm sad that believing the best about him requires accepting the latter choice.

Finally, Michael Arria at In These Times writes about the "Affordable Housing Movement" "Rising from the Wreckage of the Foreclosure Crisis." You'll read about successful efforts to protect renters in San Jose, Seattle, New York, and Minneapolis, and you'll be reminded that right-wingers sold Proposition 13 in California in the 1970s by arguing that capping property taxes would be a way of capping home prices and rents. Forty years on, exactly the opposite has happened, almost like that was the whole idea!

Around the table: the transgendered soldier ban gets blocked, and other stories.

U.S. District Judge blocks President Trump's transgendered soldier ban, at least until a lawsuit against the ban can be resolved. Well, Secretary Mattis must be breathing easier this week! It's also very possible that Mr. Trump himself couldn't care less whether his ban actually succeeds, but that fact is no cause for celebration, because it means he riled up all those right-wingers only so they can be riled up again by his failure. Is it too much to ask that our leaders stop ruling through failure? Civilized people deserve better, after all.

Trump Administration Chief of Staff John Kelly, in extolling the alleged virtues of keeping Confederate statues around, claims that the "lack of an ability to compromise" caused the Civil War. The good news? Our Glorious Elites have been trying to erase slavery as a cause of the Civil War almost since it happened; the fact that this effort has failed so miserably is almost as heartening as the fact that the New Testament, despite being written by monarchists, calls a man who cared about the poor the savior of humankind.

What's really wrong with Kevin Spacey's decision to come out as gay at the very same time he apologizes for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy in the late '80s, when Mr. Spacey himself was in his late 20s? What's really wrong is that homosexuality and pederasty aren't the same thing; in fact, they aren't even similar things, and by deciding to, I don't know, kill two birds with one stone I guess, Mr. Spacey has assisted the far right's ongoing program to suggest that homosexuality is as despicable as pederasty. Mr. Spacey would be appalled to think so, but it'd be no less true.

Ho hum, Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Ed Gillespie runs racist campaign, then whines when he gets called a racist. It's not like it's some great leap of logic from "runs racist ads" to "is racist himself." I sure hope this campaign permanently lays to rest the notion that Ed Gillespie -- who told Republicans in 2003 to call every criticism of George W. Bush "political hate speech" -- is some kind of "moderate," or "civilized person." (I also hope he loses his race, which could happen, since Virginia doesn't have an electoral college.)

Right-wing preacher agrees with right-wing interviewee that, get this, women are guilty of "sexual assault" merely by wearing "sexually suggestive clothing around a man." All together now: waaaaaaah! I suppose if I'd actually listened to this live, I'd be hysterically laughing at the notion that this "involuntary surge of pleasure" a man feels when he sees a scantily-clad woman is actually a "chemical sexual assault." But Jesus Mary and Joseph they just sound like two guys who can't handle themselves around attractive women.

Finally, when I heard about the indictments of three Trump campaign officials on various charges including conspiring against the United States, my first reaction was: so when's that terrorist attack coming? But now I wonder if it'll ever come -- the more law enforcement seems to back President Trump into a corner, the more his most strident votaries cry TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!! in his defense. Maybe Mr. Trump doesn't need a terrorist attack to keep stoking the wave of rage he plans to ride to bigger majorities in Congress and to re-election. And if he's looking at the same Democrats I'm looking at, I can see why he'd think rage is all he needs.

Action: transgendered soldiers, climate change, and fuel efficiency.

You've heard of President Trump's notorious ban on transgendered soldiers, which should go into effect in a few months? S. 1820 would prevent our government from kicking out (or denying re-enlistment to) any soldier merely on the basis of gender identity. Barry Goldwater once said he didn't care if soldiers were straight as long as they could shoot straight, and it's good to see that sentiment resonating with Americans, and it's also good that even "liberal" media outlets were so quick to report that the "health care costs" associated with transgendered soldiers don't compare even to the cost of sending the President to his Mar-a-Lago resort every weekend. So Freedom for All Americans helps you tell your Reps to reject the President's ban on transgendered soldiers and support S. 1820. And remember: the arc of history bends toward justice, even if that arc looks awfully flat while you're standing under it.

Meanwhile, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt -- another one who thinks "listening to the people" means "only listening to big polluters" -- has announced his intention to roll back the EPA's Clean Power Plan, which mandated reductions in carbon emissions from power plants. "The war on coal is over," he said, no doubt proud of himself for invoking a "war on" something so that he can distract you from the actual war he's waging on clean air and clean water. In the last month, two American states got hammered by hurricanes, Puerto Rico got absolutely destroyed by two hurricanes, and California suffered wildfires of unprecedented size, and if you're ready to argue that that's just one bad month, I'm ready to argue that the bad months are getting a whole lot worse thanks to climate change. Of course the EPA has to take public comments on its plan to roll back the Clean Power Plan, so the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to support efforts against pollution by keeping the Clean Power Plan.

Finally, as the EPA and the DOT both try to roll back federal fuel efficiency standards that reduce pollution and save good Americans money at the fuel pump, H.R. 4011/S. 1273, the so-called Fuel Economy Harmonization Act, would open up a loophole in these standards. Currently automobile manufacturing corporations get credits for exceeding those standards, and can use those credits to offset substandard performance in other years; this bill would increase the number of years they can use those credits, and would double the size of the credits in the short term and triple them in five years -- all of which means automakers could skirt the standards a lot more easily! If that all sounds a bit esoteric, that's only because the bill is the product of pedantic minds who go looking for loopholes everywhere instead of just doing the right thing. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them to reject the pro-pollution, pro-hurting-people's-wallets Fuel Economy Harmonization Act.

Action: fighting "free" trade, discrimination, and pollution.

"Foreign corporations shouldn't have the power to change our laws," reads the first sentence of Food and Water Watch's latest email in my inbox, and there, in 10 words, you have the most compelling reason to tell your Congressfolk to demand trade agreements that protect us from untrammeled corporate power, as Sign for Good helps you do. We speak, of course, of the hated "investor-state tribunal," which allows corporations to sue America for "causing it to lose money" by passing laws that, for example, force them to spend their own money to clean up any mess they cause in our air or water -- which not only means they can nullify our laws, but they can demand tribute from the taxpayer as "compensation" for the "harm" we supposedly caused them. President Bigballs, of course, decided against demanding an end to the "investor-state tribunal" in NAFTA -- and his very own hand-picked Commerce Secretary said, out loud, that he'd like NAFTA to look more like the hated TPP. So you know what that means: it's up to us to stop it.

Meanwhile, President Trump's got a jones for getting transgendered soldiers out of the military, supposedly since their health care is "so costly," though not really, since, as you may recall, a year's worth of health care for transgendered soldiers costs less than flying the President to his Mar-a-Lago getaway every weekend for a month. But an actually-bipartisan group of Senators have introduced legislation that would prohibit our Department of Defense from discharging soldiers (or preventing them from re-enlisting) solely because they're transgendered. I won't lie, it sure is nice to see Sen. McCain (R-AZ) saying "we should welcome all those who are willing and able to serve our country," not seven years after mouthing stupid platitudes against letting gays serve in our military. Still, Congress needs to act -- which means we need to act. So Freedom for All Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to support defense and oppose discrimination by keeping transgendered troops in our military.

Finally, with all the horrible storms we've had, and will continue to have, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund the Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) fully, so we can properly deal with the damage from these "once in a lifetime" storms. There are plenty of other reasons to fund the EPA fully -- hey, you need boots on the ground if you're going to stop corporations from spewing filth into our air and water! -- but certainly the power of these elephantine hurricanes to (for example) flood toxic waste dumps carries with it the sort of urgency that should convince your Congressfolk. Hurricane Harvey itself flooded more than a dozen toxic waste sites in Texas alone, and the weather sure in hell ain't gonna be done with us anytime soon. (The email tool specifically asks you to oppose President Trump's proposed EPA budget cuts, but you can amend the wording, if you like, to tell them to increase EPA funding.)

Around the table: contains *Game of Thrones* spoilers! (No, really.)

President Trump's decision to rescind Obama-era flood standards for federally-funded infrastructure projects is all in the news now that Houston's going to need a lot of infrastructure rebuilt, but one critic kinda blames President Obama for the mess, saying that if Mr. Obama had described his flood initiative as "a sensible taxpayer-protecting land-use measure" rather than a climate change regulation, it might still be in effect. I, too, would rather describe things simply than pretend I'm smarter than everyone else like elite Democrats do, but, ah, when is it going to start being Mr. Trump's fault that he's going after everything that says "climate change" on it?

After getting criticized on Fox and Friends, of all places, for failing to staff his government in advance of a Category 4 hurricane, President Trump takes to Twitter (of course) to tell critics his aim is to "reduce size of government." Which, as you know, is synonymous with reduce the people's ability to realize their will, since our government belongs to us. Meanwhile, Trump votaries still believe his refusal to staff our government is all the Democrats' fault, even though Democrats literally cannot stop any Trump nominees without Republican help.

Defense Secretary Mattis will allow transgendered soldiers to continue serving in our military until he can submit a plan describing how he'll enforce the President's proposed transgendered ban, which he has a little less than six months to do. And boy is his statement drenched with bureaucrat-talk, which may tempt you to hope he could be stalling, but remember: you should regard any reported infighting between Republicans as an attempt to distract you from your agenda. Besides, this whole matter could well be decided in court before then.

John Baer at the Philadelphia Daily News wonders if Rep. Lou Barletta can "make history" by upsetting Sen. Bob Casey in the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania. Mr. Baer says it's possible, but I say it's probable -- even before he was a Trumphole, Mr. Barletta made his name bashing immigrants, so he's got the edge in voter enthusiasm. Mr. Casey could help himself, I suppose, by running a thousand ads saying Lou Barletta tried to take away your health care -- and if Mr. Barletta whines about it, then run a thousand ads saying Lou Barletta whines in the face of accurate description of his actions. Well, make it snappier, I suppose.

Finally, maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think this six-paragraph complaint about the Jon Snow/Danaerys Targaryen sex scene from the Game of Thrones season finale is less than useless. "I didn’t spend countless hours watching and rewatching episodes of Game of Thrones to suffer through this!" the author complains, as if we should care -- and as if sex scenes can never have any dramatic function whatsoever. Think the episode might have intercut the sex scene with the truth about Jon's birth (and the lie that started the Baratheon rebellion) for a reason? Or could it be that Jon and Dany shouldn't be together, and that they can both sense it even as they're getting it on? Too much sex on TV is merely celebratory, which, frankly, conditions us to be as sex-obsessed as our President.

Around the table: featuring a busy President, war-hungry media, a depleted EPA, and evangelical racists.

President Trump pardons former Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff/infamous racist Joe Arpaio, convicted of ignoring a judge's order to stop detaining Latinos merely on suspicion of having immigrated to America illegally. But you know, this is the kind of thing that won't hurt Mr. Trump or his fellow Republicans at the polls, as long as Democrats keep trotting out these little Ossoffs who stand for nothing and stand up to nothing. 2018 won't be the year the "sane" politicians strike back; it'll be another year for "shoot from the hip" outsiders to clean up, and weakling establishment Democrats will realize this too late, if at all.

President Trump prepares to give formal instructions to the Department of Defense in re his plan to ban transgendered folks from serving our country in the military. But, in what he may imagine to be a compromise, he'll leave it up to the military to decide whether to expel transgendered folks based on how readily they'll be able to fight wars or complete lengthy missions, which sure sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Again, heckuva job, establishment Democrats who counted on Donald Trump to lose the Presidency all by himself!

FAIR finds too many "liberal" media types still getting all hot and bothered about how "Presidential" Mr. Trump was when announcing his expansion of the Afghanistan war. It isn't as bad as it was the last time Mr. Trump dropped some bombs (or didn't yell at the top of his lungs on TV!), but any amount of enthusiasm over war-making is too much -- a lot of folks who make war for a living will tell you that, too! -- and slamming the "liberal" media for forgetting all about Mr. Trump's enthusiasm about Afghanistan mineral resources is of course entirely appropriate.

Eric Katz at Government Executive reports that the EPA has lost about half of its criminal investigators over the last decade. Folks who constantly shout about law-and-order should be quite upset; if they're not, I guess that means they don't think pollution is really a crime -- or they're buying into New Democrat bullshit about the technology for this kind of crime detection being so much better than it used to be. Call me old-fashioned, but I think people are the best "technology" for crime-fighting.

On that note, we learn that Google's Artificial Intelligence (or AI) project aimed at curbing toxic online commentary isn't very good at what it tries to do. To the degree that we should be doing this, why in the world aren't we hiring people to do it? People are, after all, a lot more subtle than the subtlest computer, and the number of people who alienate everyone around them is actually very small. Maybe they use AI because they don't have to pay AI. But if you want nice things, you have to pay workers to maintain them.

Finally, Randall Balmer at the Los Angeles Times instructs us that "Under Trump, Evangelicals Show Their True Racist Colors." His business roundtables have abandoned him in Charlottesville's wake, but his big-name evangelical supporters haven't, except for the one Clinton/Obama voter who had one foot out the door anyway. Good, also, to be reminded that racism, not abortion, was the original driving force behind right-wing evangelism -- and a lot of these old school evangelicals are still with us. Maybe we could isolate their supporters from them?

Around the table: in which we contemplate a tale of burner phones and dead cats.

Trump Administration abandons effort to defend FCC rules capping prison phone rates from multiple lawsuits. FCC Chair Ajit Pai not only uses anecdotal evidence (that someone could stuff a burner phone into a dead cat and throw it over a prison wall!) to defend his inaction, but uses anecdotal evidence that actually obliterates his argument (lower phone rates would, I would think, obviate the need to use dead cats to smuggle burner phones). Anyway, letting corporations charge usurious phone rates because prisoners and their families literally can't do better isn't the definition of "free market conservatism," no matter how many of today's "conservatives" confuse their ancient philosophy with "letting corporations do whatever they want."

Five transgendered American soldiers sue our government over President Trump's declaration on Twitter that "the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military." It's possible the lawsuit gets thrown because Mr. Trump hasn't apparently lifted a finger to actually enforce this declaration, but his whining about the "cost" of health care for transgendered soldiers when it costs more to send Mr. Trump on the taxpayer dime to Mar-a-Lago every weekend would support the plaintiffs' "arbitrary and capricious" claim.

California farmers are losing money, and letting some of their crops rot, apparently due to the lack of migrant workers available to pick the crops. Let's not tacitly accept the notion that only-a-migrant-worker-would-pick-strawberries, though -- instead, let's ask whether maybe folks who would pick fruit (and Americans aren't as loathe to do dirty work as Our Glorious Elites are!) might have a little more leverage now when it comes to getting better pay and working conditions. No use complaining that higher wages cause higher prices when, ah, not having enough workers to pick the fruit already causes higher prices.

Let's not obsess too much over a Democrat's 54-44 win in an Iowa House special election on Tuesday -- President Trump took this district by over 20 points, but it was still a Democrat hold (the previous state Rep died in office earlier this year) and turnout just eclipsed 40%. It is good that the ZOMG TEH TRANZ PEEPULZ WILL USEZ TEH BATHROOMZ!!!! hysteria didn't work here (and could have caused a backlash, for all we know!), just as it didn't get North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory re-elected. The better lesson to learn? Social wedge issues all the way up to abortion won't work against Democrats who can convince people they won't sell them out to Our Glorious Elites -- but Democrats won't try this in large numbers, either out of weakness or out of a desire to keep that Glorious Elite campaign cash coming.

Finally, I've been churning over President Trump's continued refusal to denounce or even acknowledge last week's bombing at a Minnesota mosque, and I've concluded (not that this was a difficult analysis to undertake) that his silence is a dog whistle to his votaries. I've also concluded that when he does denounce the attack, as I'm sure he'll do soon, that act will be another dog whistle to his votaries, as in I tried to ignore a matter that certainly doesn't concern you, but look what PC culture made me do! Of course, I'm sure Mr. Bannon is counseling continued silence, but I bet Mr. Trump knows what's best for those poor beleaguered racists.