Thieves in the Temple.

Readings for October 3, 2023.

So you’ve heard that our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has sued Amazon for monopolistic practices. You already know Amazon’s a monopoly if you’ve ever uttered the phrase “just get it on Amazon,” but our FTC’s complaint is a bit more complex. I’ll try to summarize: Amazon leverages its Prime service to trap small businesses into using its platform exclusively, and because they have nowhere else to go, Amazon can charge them whatever onerous fees they like, fees that now amount to half of Amazon’s revenue. There’s even more to it than that, but note well that it’s not necessarily about customers like us, but rather the customers who use Amazon to help sell their wares. I’m old enough to remember when it seemed like you could cut out all those pesky middlemen like publishers and advertisers and just reach out and find people on the internet. I was naive, of course – not solely because I didn’t fully grasp that there’d be new middlemen like Amazon, but that’s the only reason that’ll help you make this world a better place.

Billy Periggo at Time describes “What the Luddites Can Teach Us About Artificial Intelligence.” Reminding us that the Luddites weren’t anti-machine but anti-exploitation, Mr. Periggo – drawing heavily on Brian Merchant’s new book Blood in the Machine – explains how big corporations will use AI to make films that are plainly inferior to what today’s artists make, just as factory owners in the early Industrial Revolution made goods that were plainly inferior to what the day’s artisans could make. The factory owners ultimately muscled those artisans out of the market despite the Luddites’ best efforts, but it looks like the writers’ union has protected themselves from a similar outcome – for now. In any case, “if new technologies erode wages and increase wealth inequality, it’s a result of a political choice by the owners of that technology, not a result of the inevitable and unstoppable march of progress.”

Around the table: featuring one-third good news! (Unless IRL's shutting down counts; then it's half.)

When I hear that ”Close to 100,000 Voter Registrations Were Challenged in Georgia – Almost All by Just Six Right-Wing Activists,” I am reminded that citizens participating more in democracy is generally a good thing – but citizens trampling on the rights of other citizens just so their preferred candidates can win is a bad thing. If you’ve struggled with homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, or cancer – or were doing traveling work – you’d be pretty annoyed at some right-winger making you jump through extra hoops just to vote. And if you’ve got time to challenge tens of thousands of voter registrations at once, why aren’t you, I don’t know, feeding the poor?

Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect describes “Biden’s Unheralded War on Poverty,” one in which a few indices of economic inequality have actually reversed themselves by 25 percent. I think the pandemic made a lot of workers think a lot harder about their jobs, but I also agree that spending nearly $2 billion on an actual stimulus bill did a lot of good in just two years, and we’ll find out shortly what the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act were able to accomplish. And remember: when right-wingers complain that “no one wants to work,” they really mean no one wants to work for dung pellets.

The Progress Action Fund runs one of the greatest political ads ever made, in which a man and a woman about to get it on in their bedroom has their condom stolen by a Republican Congressperson who won’t leave. My description surely doesn’t do it justice, so go see the ad, and then wonder, as I often do, why Democrats don’t run ads like this all the time. OK, I know why they don’t run ads like that – because they still listen to the center-right consultants who tell them that “independent voters are turned off by incivility.” You know what really turns off independent voters? Democrat weakness.

Uh oh: event organizing software corporation IRL shuts down after an internal investigation finds that 19 out of every 20 of its users are fake – in that they’re either “automated or from bots.” Of course IRL raised $200 million and valued itself at almost $1.2 billion, lately laying about a quarter of its workforce a mere year after tripling its size, all of which means a big chunk of our financial sector are either unbelievably stupid or simply don’t care about doing the hard work of maintaining a civilization. Considering how much money banksters have thrown around over a company that’s not terribly innovative, I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

Florida veterans allege that the state’s recently-revived state guard is becoming a “personal militia” for Gov. Ron DeSantis. Why does an “emergency-focused, civilian defense force” need to be barked at by R. Lee Ermey wannabes? One of the veterans making the allegations thinks thinks Mr. DeSantis doesn’t know what’s going on or would disapprove of what’s going on, both of which I find highly improbable. Again, even though only a quarter of the electorate is bat-guano insane, that’s not the same all over America; I suspect fascism is what a majority of Floridians want. I hope the rest of them get organized.

Finally, speaking of fascist Florida, a Congressional hopeful tells an adoring crowd that what we really need to do in America is “extinguish the left.” I’ve been saying for a long time that right-wingers want to exterminate us, and now even they’re saying it out loud. This Anthony Sabatini fellow – with his stupid COVID “jokes” and his masturbating over a new civil war – is running in Florida’s deep red 11th district; current Rep. Daniel Webster has gone out of his way to court Donald Trump’s support, and while I would enjoy seeing Mr. Webster finish last in his own primary despite/because of his ass-kissing, that’d likely mean we’ll be getting more and more Sabatini drama over the next few years, and that isn’t a good trade.

Around the table: more lies exposed, more skepticism explained.

Nathan J. Robinson calls Michael Bloomberg "a Republican plutocrat" trying to "buy the Democratic nomination," and it's completely true: he is basically Republican-not-even-lite and he is trying to buy the nomination, as he has already bought (literally!) so many of his endorsements. He uses his money to obliterate dissent, he thinks banksters are an "industry" and not parasites, he thinks the income gap between rich and poor is a good thing, he uses the police to terrorize protestors, black folks, and Muslims -- basically, he's our President if our President was pro-choice and actually believed climate change was happening. And this is, apparently, who Democratic poobahs think voters will run through a wall for. (Don't quit before the end, because the last five paragraphs explain very well why we shouldn't let Presidential elections be a battle between billionaires.)

Next time you hear about "Obama's anemic job growth" failing to compare to our Great and Noble True American President's Greatest Economy Ever, you can respond that the economy has created fewer jobs over the last three years than it did during the last three years of the Obama Administration. And when folks protest that it's hard to create jobs when we're almost at what our government calls "full employment," remind them that, frankly, we're not at full employment if the U6 unemployment rate (which includes folks who work part-time who'd rather work full-time and folks who've simply given up looking for work) still stands at 6.9%. (As an aside, attend the list of things our President can't take credit but which he's taken credit for anyway in paragraphs 9 and 11. It's upsetting -- and the right campaign ad could obliterate him for it, if it's willing to have a little fun.)

I hate to say it, but I'm skeptical that enacting Medicare-for-All health insurance would result in pay hikes, even though a lot of the research says so. If we pay for it the way Sen. Warren would -- to tax employers the amount they've been spending on private health insurance for the last several years -- then the answer would definitely be no, and that's the best funding proposal I've seen. But then, I never wanted a raise from Medicare-for-All, and I do know that, under Medicare-for-All, health care costs would go down -- even the right-wing Mercatus Center says so! -- and health care costs are up there with household debt as the biggest drags on a household's freedom. All I ask for is a fighting chance, after all, and Medicare-for-All helps give us that fighting chance.

I might agree that our President's trade dramas will "cost the average American family $1,277 this year," thus wiping out their gains from the 2017 tax "reform," but I hesitate because the CBO locates those costs mainly in higher prices for household items, when, frankly, cheap crap from China isn't an unqualified good, certainly not if the Chinese workers making the cheap crap continue to get paid in dung pellets. Not that our President cares whether his trade deals improve things for those Chinese workers -- or, even, for American workers! -- but we, as Americans, need to stop counting on "low prices" without counting the cost of low prices.

Finally, a Monmouth University poll finds that while only 42% of registered voters want our President get re-elected, an astounding 66% think he's either "probably" or "definitely" going to get re-elected. Again I weep at the voters' apparent inability to understand that if they believe a fellow doesn't deserve re-election, they have the power to keep him from getting re-elected. Voters have this disconnect in part because our "liberal" media trains everyone to treat politics like a horserace, and also in part because our civilization prizes drama over substance, but voters also have this disconnect because they're constantly worrying about what "other" people will think, rather than trying to persuade other people to come around to their way of thinking. Persuasion: it's the world's oldest profession.

Around the table: why Russiagate still comforts liberals, and other lessons.

Glenn Greenwald discusses with Daniel Denvir the "comforting answers" Russiagate "offers to despondent liberals." Long story short: "the Trump victory was a traumatizing and disorienting event for most people," leading folks to "crave an explanation that makes sense and that lets you feel like the world is safe and understandable again." Key reminder: the Russian troll effort was "primitive and pales in comparison to the amount of money spent on messaging by political campaigns, let alone US corporations and lobbyists." And regardless of who goes to jail over Russiagate, I still think the Democrat play-not-to-lose mentality and Republican vote suppression had more to do with the result than Russia could ever hope to have done.

Say, did you hear about that time the National Restaurant Association hired Frank Luntz's group to poll Americans about raising the minimum wage, which of course the "other NRA" opposes -- and found over 70% of Americans perfectly happy to pay restaurant workers more even if it meant higher prices? No? That's likely because the big restaurant lobby, as you might expect, isn't happy with the findings, even though it hired The Father of The Death Tax to get those findings. I am a little appalled that 29% of Americans opposed a minimum wage hike "even if the average food service employee can't make ends meet," until I remember that 25% of the electorate is batshit insane.

Jim Naureckas at FAIRNew York Times hack advising Democrats to be more like "liberals" and less like "progressives." Apparently "liberals" know better than to "eradicate" economic problems like the income gap -- apparently they'd be content with handing out welfare checks, rather than, you know, minimum wage hikes and job-creating taxes on the rich -- and "progressivism" is somehow "intrinsically opposed to conservation," which is as ridiculous as saying conservatism is intrinsically opposed to progress. Anyway, I've never called myself a "progressive," because it's long been the Democrat way of running away from the word "liberal," but articles like the Times's give liberals like me a bad name.

Another week, another Congressional special election in a deep-red district that's somehow a tossup in at least one poll, and we learn that the Republican nominee for Arizona's 8th, current state Senator Debbie Lesko, has "routinely" introduced bills that are little more than ALEC model bills with a few words changed. It'd be nice if her dependence on/work for ALEC scuttled her election bid, but certainly the news has arrived too late (the election's tomorrow), and besides, not everyone knows what the American Legislative Exchange Council is, or how nefarious their works have been over the decades.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted" file: Mitt Romney doesn't even get a majority of votes at the Utah Republican Convention to pick a U.S. Senate nominee (among others) for 2018, and will face a primary against a state Rep who got more votes. Mr. Romney thinks Utahns didn't care for him running at the convention and trying to get enough signatures to appear on the primary ballot anyway, and maybe he's right -- or maybe good Utahns, like everyone else, hate those whom they perceive as "Establishment" politicians.

Finally, in the wake of our newest Supreme Court Justice casting the deciding vote against a part of immigration law allowing detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants who have committed "violent" crimes, our President now wonders aloud if Justice Gorsuch is conservative enough. All together now: one counterexample does not destroy a trend. Also, too, why should a President expect Justices to toe his line? And why should we enable that sort of thinking? That's not what our Founders wanted, was it?

Around the table: our President isn't crazy but enables craziness in others, and other lessons.

President Trump slaps 30% tariff on imported solar panels, because of course he did. Yeah, I'd prefer to make solar panels here too, but I don't see him moving this quickly on the Chinese steel he uses in his own buildings, and it sure looks like he got up in the morning and asked around the office for the best way to piss off liberals -- which is an understandable political strategy, I suppose, if the only "liberals" you know are the Democrats in Congress. As policy, we'd best interpret his move not as a "pro-worker" move (what, he thinks robots install solar panels?) or even as an "end to corporate welfare" for solar corporations; we'd best interpret is as actual corporate welfare for oil, gas, and coal, three industries that are losing ground to solar.

I approve of data showing the income gap between rich and poor across the planet, but comparing the "1%" to everyone else, even when the 1% makes more than 80% of the world's income, just isn't the most effective comparison, even if it rolls off the tongue more easily. Try the 0.1%, since you're just not in the same club as Rupert Murdoch if you make $450,000 a year -- nor do you do the same amount of damage to civilization. It is, after all, all about restraining the most powerful from running roughshod over everyone else's rights, even if right-wingers call the most powerful "job creators"! (In fairness, the "just eight people own as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet" is the better comparison.)

Execrable "evangelical" right-winger Tony Perkins announces that evangelicals have given President Trump a "mulligan" and a "do-over" when contemplating the President's extramarital affairs and general vulgarity, as long as he "delivers" on evangelical policy preferences. That may be taking the Parable of the Prodigal Son too far. I presume, also, that Mr. Perkins means evangelical elites, not your evangelical friends and neighbors, have been handing out these "mulligans," since a lot of them already know that if you keep handing out mulligans to folks like Mr. Trump, you'll just have to keep handing them out. (Read the whole article, though -- the work of defending Mr. Trump makes Mr. Perkins, and others, sound utterly unhinged.)

Florida voters will get to vote on a constitutional amendment guaranteeing most felons the right to vote this November. I sure hope those voters do the right thing, which is give back what their government took away, and deal another death-blow to the notion that folks who commit crimes should just keep on paying even after they've completed their sentences and reintegrated into society, all so some politician or other can make everyone watch his balls swing. (But I still think murderers and sex offenders still deserve the right to vote -- rights are either for everyone or they're not really rights.)

Finally, one of the male Trump offspring says the recent government shutdown "is a good thing" for the Trump Administration politically. I don't presume to disagree with his assessment so much as I presume to excoriate a society that tolerates such cynicism openly expressed, a society that encourages folks to think of life and death matters as sporting events where one side is up and the other down, a society that too rarely evaluates events in terms of the harm they do to people. In other words, we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: how banksters are like parasites, and other stories.

Chris Hedges interviews Michael Hudson about "The Great Ponzi Scheme of the Global Economy." Among the lessons: where the moronic idea that "all income is earned" came from, how the statement "Goldman Sachs workers are the most productive in the world" is actually tautological in addition to being absurd, how Chicago's parking meters privatization scheme shows up as an increase in gross domestic product as it raises the cost of living. Also, we learn that when we refer to banksters as parasites, the metaphor is even more apt than it sounds.

In a related note, Richard Eskow, writing at the Our Future blog, reminds us that, as Sen. Sanders has said, "Wall Street's Business Model Really is Fraud." But even financial sector workers testify to the moral and ethical rot of that business model -- more than one in three admit that they've personally witnessed wrongdoing, and more than one in three say that the compensation structures in place at their place of employment "incentivize" wrongdoing. If roughly one in three folks will admit that they see it when their livelihood depends on them not seeing it, I guarantee you more of their compatriots see it, too.

Texas man escapes charges for assaulting a police officer -- after video footage from a camera he installed on his property reveals that the police who arrested him falsified reports. The bad news? It sure was a painful process for Mr. Faulkenberry to acquit himself -- though he told the police that very night what would happen -- and the officers who filed the false reports have not (yet) been charged with perjury. And I hate to say this, but I wonder if Mr. Faulkenberry would have even made it to jail if he were black.

Hillary Clinton aide suggests there won't be another Democratic debate if Bernie Sanders doesn't change his "tone." Sole evidence of this massive tone change in Mr. Sanders? "This is a man who said he'd never run a negative ad ever. He's now running them. They're planning to run more." I don't remember if "never ever" was Mr. Sanders's exact promise, but it doesn't matter -- if you're bemoaning the very existence of negative campaigning, you're either suggesting you don't know what political campaigning is like or you're whining, and whining doesn't often lead to winning. I suppose it's possible Mrs. Clinton is having this very conversation with her aide in the woodshed as we speak.

Finally, because you don't have enough Thomas Frank in your life, TomDispatch (not the same Tom!) presents another excerpt from Mr. Frank's forthcoming book, Listen, Liberal. Here he takes us to a place "where Democratic rule is virtually unopposed, a place where Republican obstruction and sabotage can’t taint the experiment" -- Boston, Massachusetts, "the spiritual homeland of the professional class." Spoiler alert: the income gap between rich and poor in Massachusetts is wider here than in at least 40 other states, the sectors foisting the most debt on the middle class (education and health care, naturally) thrive in all their privatized glory here, and "innovation" is less a buzzword than a hammer in the hands of folks who see only nails when they look at working families.

Around the table: illustrating the right response to various kinds of dystopia.

You've heard folks say "Donald Trump says the things other people wish they could?" Well, Lindy West, writing at the New York Times, surveys the xenophobia and homophobia rampant not just in Mr. Trump's utterings but among attendees of Mr. Trump's rallies, and wonders "What Are Trump Fans Really 'Afraid' to Say?" Conclusion: "They’re not 'afraid'; they’re leading Mr. Trump as much as following him. They called him into being, not the other way around." And he in turn calls them into being, and they call him into being, and so on, and so on -- until, God forbid, some Trump blueshirt just ups and kills someone at a rally. Or maybe not even then.

ProPublica continues to offer its (recently updated) "Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know About Voter ID Laws." It's pretty good, but it's not everything -- it doesn't mention the seniors born outside hospitals who don't have birth certificates or the massive DMV closures in Wisconsin after the Voter ID bill passed there (though it does refer to the mass DMV closures in Alabama). I think this is all going to be a bigger deal than most folks think -- Wisconsin, for example, won't be a slam dunk for Democrats in 2016 if turnout turns out to be a problem.

Suraj Sazawal, at the BORDC blog, writes about "predictive policing," where software "predicts" where crimes will occur and possibly even who will commit them. It sure is a good thing that past crimes occur in a vacuum mercifully free of contexts like poverty, population density, and police treatment. It's also a good thing that "predictive policing" could never result in a self-fulfilling prophecy where police arrest the same kinds of folks for the same kinds of crimes over and over again -- or, perhaps, arrest people wrongly to prove the software "works." Please, good readers, let me know if I'm not being sarcastic enough.

In a peripherally-related note, Bloomberg BusinessWeek's Robert Koller wonders what will happen when prohibitively-expensive surveillance equipment becomes cheap enough for anyone to buy. From text-message phishing in China to opposition party surveillance in India, we're already seeing some of the effects. And in America, "(l)ocating a Kardashian...is something any self-respecting TMZ intern would love to be able to do," and "there are lots of people who want to spy on their neighbors or their spouses or their girlfriends." Yeah, dystopia sure is going to be a lot of fun -- and I'm not sure it'll be better if everyone has the ability to spy on everyone else.

Finally, John Perkins has updated his 2006 book, The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, because "because things have changed so much during this past decade. The cancer has spread throughout the United States as well as the rest of the world. The rich have gotten richer and everyone else has gotten poorer in real terms." You'll likely nod in recognition at much of what he says -- that "we go deeply into debt" as "the World Bank and its sister institutions coerce other countries to go deeply into debt," that the "death economy" depends on "wars or the threat of war, debt, and the rape of the earth's resources," that this "death economy" is "driven by concepts that have become accepted as gospel." He has hope, though, as do we all, because how can we live otherwise?

Around the table: describing futures both bleak and bright.

In a revolting development, the World Bank is trying to attract Western corporations to Jordan so they can take advantage of Syrian refugees as a cheap source of labor, placing these refugees at risk of torture, wage theft, and human trafficking. And when all that happens, corporations will say they were driven to do it by the "high wages" of American workers! As the Pet Shop Boys sang many years ago, there are a lot of opportunities, if you know where to take them. Of course, the character who sang that line was about to get rejected by the mark he was trying to con. We should be so lucky with the World Bank!

Ho hum, Adam Johnson, writing at FAIR, tells us that "liberal" media accounts describing the murder of Honduran activist Berta Cáceres tend to ignore the Obama Administration's role in aiding and abetting the chaos in which she was swept up. I'd like to think that's merely because then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was playing her coup-what-coup game as the present Honduran government overthrew the last one, but I know it's much worse than that -- by reporting our role in that coup, the "liberal" media would have to acknowledge its own failures, a dicey proposition since they fail us so often.

Kim Zetter, writing at Wired, describes how hackers took down a massive power grid in the Ukraine last December, leaving more than 200,000 good Ukrainians in the dark in the dead of winter. Damn scary, especially since the Ukraine's power grid is apparently more secure in some ways than ours, but what can we learn? Not just that two-factor remote authentication could have slowed (or maybe stopped!) the hack, but that we should assign more tasks to people and fewer tasks to computers -- even as we speak, Ukrainian workers are still operating breakers manually at 16 substations, and maybe they should have been doing that all along.

Consumer advocates tell the FCC that Comcast is violating net neutrality principles by exempting its own content (specifically, its recently-launched streaming service) from its data caps. FCC Chair Tom Wheeler has seemed sanguine about these "zero-rating" schemes in the past, though the difference between zero rating and "paid prioritization" (the latter item expressly forbidden by the FCC's Open Internet rules) seems to me to be semantic.

Finally, Sam Pizzigati interviews the incomparable Gar Alperovitz about "alternate ownership structures" that could begin to alleviate the income gap between rich and poor in America. With more co-ops, worker-owned corporations, and competition from municipalities, we could have the institutions that back successful movements -- and the next President won't necessarily have to go to Congress for permission to make them happen. Attend, as always, the long line of success stories Mr. Alperovitz describes; they don't add up to a movement, let alone an institution, but they certainly describe the outlines of one.

Around the table: a startling prediction from a former NFL wide receiver, and other stories.

Oxfam says that the top one percent of the world's population now has more wealth than the other 99% combined. So if they're the "job creators," why do they have more than everyone else? If they were really "creating jobs," rather than redistributing our wealth upward to themselves via their casino economy games, the wealth would actually be "trickling down." But if something's trickling down, it sure ain't wealth.

Dean Baker tells us the economy is not about to go into freefall just because the stock market has gone down more than 10 percent over the last few weeks. The stock market, after all, is not much of an "indicator" of anything -- not even, apparently, of the skill level of its biggest actors, who were taken aback by the bursting of the Chinese stock bubble. In other news, "the remedy for weak demand is more demand," but don't expect action from Congress, since that would require spending.

Disgusted as we should be with the Michigan government's stupidity and venality in its handling of Flint's water, we should not excuse the EPA for suspecting Flint's water was polluted as early as nine months ago and then failing to act. Best I can tell, the EPA notified the state's environmental department, which wanted to do, you know, more testing -- but the EPA's regional administrator doesn't come off as very concerned in emails, frankly. Her head should roll, maybe?

Of course, it could be worse: Sen. Marco Rubio, running for the Republican Presidential nomination, claims ignorance on the whole Flint matter. I'd be less annoyed about that, except that it took him 30 words to say "I don't know," and then 46 more words to say "I don't know" again -- when the correct answer to any question about Flint's drinking water is "no government should enable the pollution of good folks' drinking water." Isn't this guy supposed to be the future or something?

Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel restarts his campaign funding apparatus, in advance of a (possible) Senate run in 2018. Mr. Mandel says this move "gives Ohioans an opportunity to support my style of leadership" while "not forc(ing) me to make a decision anytime soon on what I'm going to do next," which leads one to suspect that his "style of leadership" is not to lead. Mr. Mandel lost the 2012 Senate race by only six points, but it would've been a lot closer if not for the presence of right-wing "independent" Scott Rupert in the race; in a non-Presidential election year, a genuinely good man, Sherrod Brown, might well lose, and to someone who shouldn't even be elected dog-catcher.

Finally, former Pittsburgh Steelers wideout Antwan Randle El says if he had to do it over again, he'd play baseball instead of football. Mr. Randle El might have trouble getting down stairs and remembering things, but his analysis of pro football's problems -- "(t)he kids are getting bigger and faster, so the concussions, the severe spinal cord injuries, are only going to get worse...Football players are in a car wreck every week" -- is spot on. When he says pro football might be gone in a quarter century, he might be right.

Around the table: no we don't need to reassess the First Amendment! And other pronouncements.

Some legal scholars wonder whether we should expand the "clear and present danger" exception to the First Amendment, and thus curtail First Amendment speech, because of the rise of ISIS and their alleged success recruiting over the internet. Short answer: no -- the First Amendment doesn't run in one direction at a time, nor does it restrict free speech to one person at a time; someone can try to get you to blow things up, but other folks can also tell you why you shouldn't. Always Our Glorious Elites want to curtail your speech when some monster burns down a country, and always they think you're so weak that you'll easily succumb to anti-American propaganda. That's because they want to use their own anti-American propaganda.

Ho hum, Radley Balko at the Washington Post reminds us that 2015 did not bring some massive wave of cop-killing, nor did it bring some enormous crime wave. Sadly some 70 percent of Americans, according to Gallup, think crime is worse this year than last year. And simply presenting the facts won't help very much if the "liberal" media (not just Fox News!) foregrounds crime and violence in their programming as if nothing else ever happens in America.

Bernie Sanders says he can get Donald Trump supporters to vote for him. To which I respond: of course he can! That's why Our Glorious Elites convert the real grievances of Trump supporters into racism before folks like Mr. Sanders can get to them! But I do wish he'd make the most important link between terrorism and the income gap -- namely, that if we stop the rich from extorting debt tribute from us, we'll have a lot less terrorism everywhere. He'd better do that soon, too, so he has time to overcome the inevitable blowback from "liberal" media punditoids.

Fox Business host wonders how we'll ever be able to "get through these things that are going to happen" like the Tamir Rice shooting "and still be able to let the police do their job without any kind of real serious ridicule or things like Black Lives Matter?" OK, then: "Black Lives Matter" are not cuss words, "ridicule" (or, more precisely, oversight by the people) is not oppression, and the mere fact that corporate media can find black folks willing to brandish scare words like "the Ferguson effect" isn't all that interesting, the world being a big place and all. And courageous folks of all colors dare to imagine a world where shooting a 12-year-old boy with a toy gun isn't something that "just happens."

Finally, Donald Trump believes Bill Clinton's infidelities are "fair game" where Hillary Clinton is concerned, and even estimable liberals seem willing to let Mr. Trump achieve disaster with that idea, but I'm not sure he will. For one thing, while hitting Bill Clinton over his infidelities is a proven failed strategy, hitting Hillary Clinton over her toleration of those infidelities is something else entirely. Two, Mr. Trump, himself a committer of multiple infidelities, has clearly learned from right-wingers that you hit your opponents where you're vulnerable. And sadly, it's worked for plenty of them.

Around the table: "free" trade secrecy, corporate tax avoidance, paid family leave, and solutions for gun violence big and small.

TPP negotiators forced negotiators from Australia and New Zealand to keep TPP text secret for four years, in order to "facilitate candid and productive negotiations," naturally. The article doesn't say whether American trade negotiators also had to sign such a "gag rule," but if they did, it would violate American law (Sec. 106 (a)(1)(B) of Public Law No. 114-26, to be precise) mandating that the President make the TPP text public for 60 days after the President "enters into" a trade agreement. I suppose President Obama's end-around could be to make Congress ratify the agreement before he "enters into" it, which would obviate his legal obligation to publish the TPP's text. And that would just be one more reason to tell your Congressfolk to vote against it.

Citizens for Tax Justice reports that offshore corporate tax shell games are alive and well in 2015, as nearly three out of four Fortune 500 corporations maintain overseas tax havens -- over twenty tax havens each, on average -- and three out of five of those corporations maintaining tax havens maintain one in Bermuda and/or the Cayman Islands, both notorious tax havens. That's $2.1 trillion that could be fixing bridges, upgrading sewers, paying teachers -- or turning our fossil fuel-dependent energy grid into a more renewable one. And no, tax havens don't "create jobs," or we'd have more and better jobs right now.

D.C. City Council introduces bill granting workers in the city 16 weeks of paid family leave, which would be the most generous package in the country, if passed. It also means staff members working for the numerous right-wing Congressfolk who'll live here over the next few years will enjoy the best family leave plan in the nation as their employers try to destroy it everywhere else. I'd be surprised if this hadn't occurred to President Obama.

Matthew Rodriguez at Mic offers "Six Surprising Ways to Curb Gun Violence That Have Nothing to Do With Gun Control." These are: increased access to drug/alcohol rehab, reforming sentencing guidelines for drug users, breaking the "school-to-prison pipeline," addressing structural racial inequality (this section is a bit low on actual solutions, though ending redlining would be a big start), narrowing the income gap between rich and poor, and addressing structural gender inequality. Yep, that ought to do it. And I'm glad someone is saying it.

In the meantime, a school in Indiana has implemented a number of reforms designed to thwart school shooters, including "hardened" doors and walls, doors that automatically lock, key fobs that contact the police faster than 911 calls, and smoke to disable shooters trapped in hallways. None of these require additional gun control measures or additional guns in the hands of school personnel, nor are they "Big Brother" measures, like forced ID for students and personnel. I wish them the best in preventing the next tragedy.

Around the table: starring a famous Governor's brother terrorizing his neighbors.

Hillary Clinton pitches her college affordability plan, which Bloomberg says could "do the same thing for higher education that the Affordable Care Act did for health care." And you know what? It'll probably work. But it's not the plan you pitch as a candidate -- it's the plan you settle for, if you have to, once you're President. And when voters get a choice between a super-complex plan that can't be explained in one sentence and her opponent's plan, which will likely be COLLIDGE KIDZ PULLZ UP TEH BOOTSTRAPZ!!!!!, no one should be surprised when voters pick the latter.

Paul Krugman notes the relative absence of Obama-bashing during the prime-time Republican Presidential debate last Thursday, and surmises it must be because "President Obama just keeps failing to fail." Of course, President Obama has run the country more or less as a moderate Republican would, raising taxes on the rich just a bit, passing a health care reform first pitched by the Heritage Foundation almost a quarter-century ago, and blowing the mandate the voters clearly gave him in 2008 to stop letting stupid people have all the say about everything. But no, it hasn't been the disaster Republicans forecast.

Hey, liberals who liked John Kasich after that debate? Dig this: Gov. Kasich says, in re climate change, that "(w)e don't want to destroy people's jobs based on some theory that's not proven." Apparently he prefers destroying people's jobs based on some theory that's been proven wrong, like laissez-faire economics.

Rand Paul says, in re his flat tax proposal, that "income inequality is due to some people working harder and selling more things" than those other people. In an era where banksters suck the equity out of corporations like the vampire squids they are, and no longer care about lending money to worthy businesses that improve products and processes, that's some cojones right there.

Finally, for some truly depressing reading, Gov. Sam Brownback's brother Jim has apparently been terrorizing his neighbors in the rural Brownback homestead of Parker, Kansas. Jim Brownback has, apparently, done it all -- threatened his neighbors, stolen their livestock, shot at their houses, and (I really shouldn't put this last) became a deadbeat on child support and on several six-figure loans, all while throwing around the Governor's name so he doesn't get in trouble. Warning: by the time you get to the part where he leaves a bull to die on the ground in pain for several days and says his insurance will take care of it, you may be in a fighting mood yourself.

Around the table: surveying the surveillance state, and other tasks.

Ken Dilanian at Talking Points Memo summarizes the USA FREEDOM Act, which passed on Tuesday after several sections of the PATRIOT Act expired late Sunday night. Does the USA FREEDOM Act represent a step forward for us in reclaiming the rights the PATRIOT Act took away? Yes. Was it a bill worth supporting? No. And if we had supported it, saying this is the best we can do -- which we did do, as late as November, with better versions of the USA FREEDOM Act -- then something worse would have passed, something that would have pleased Great and Bounteous All-Seeing and All-Knowing Real American President Mitch McConnell. We'll be talking about this matter again.

The New York Times finds that nearly three in five Americans (including one in three Republicans) think we need to take urgent government action to address the growing gap between rich and poor. The Times also finds that, contra Pew's rather optimistic assessment, more than half of Americans oppose "fast-tracking" "free" trade deals and that almost two of three Americans want "some form of trade restrictions." Left out in the article (which does link to the survey) is the news that nearly three of four Americans think corporations have "too much power."

Ho hum, CNN reports that some health insurance corporations are contemplating massive premium hikes for their policies on the federal exchange, and they're calling that "Obamacare sticker shock." We don't learn until paragraph 9 that most corporations won't get the rate hikes they seek, since state insurance commissioners can simply deny such hikes in 36 states; they could have put that information earlier, but then "Obamacare sticker shock" might have seemed like drama or something. (Click through, if you dare, to the article entitled "You'll Pay a Lot More to See the Doctor with Obamacare," which begs the question, "more than when folks were routinely taking their kids to the ER for the sniffles because they didn't have any insurance?" I mean, yes, a single-payer health care system would be a lot better, but Affordable Care Act hysteria is quite offensive.)

Hillary Clinton calls for at least 20 days of early voting in every state. The proposal is classic Clinton: it sounds bold, it would do some good, it would earn a lot of popular support, but it wouldn't solve the really big problems folks have when they try to vote, problems that begin and end with the malice of politicians who don't want the "wrong kind of people" to vote.

Pennsylvania state judge rules that McDonald's franchises therein can't pay their employees in prepaid bank cards, and Chase decides to refund said employees any fees they might have incurred by using the cards. The defendants plan to appeal, and might well find a judge willing to accept their argument that prepaid bank cards, which incur fees at the whim of the bank that issues them, are somehow exactly the same as cash, check, or direct deposit, but the current ruling and Chase's reaction are both causes for celebration.

Finally, Ted Cruz claims that John F. Kennedy would be a Republican today because he proposed a massive tax cut and Republicans are the party of tax cuts. You may recall that President Kennedy proposed cutting the top tax rate from 91% to 70% (which Congress didn't accomplish until after he died); the current top tax rate, that same tax rate which elicits so many don't-tread-on-me tantrums from the right, is 39.6%. For such a bright fellow, Ted Cruz sure sounds stupid sometimes.

Around the table: widening the income gap in the name of narrowing it! And other stories.

Joe Conason describes the gulf between Republicans' professed concern about the income gap between rich and poor and the actions they've undertaken over the last three decades that have widened that gap. And, I should add, the policies Republican candidates say they'll pursue in the future to address the gap -- repealing the capital gains tax, instituting a flat income tax, et cetera -- will further widen that gap. If it sounds like I'm beating a dead horse about this, it's because the "liberal" media will be too "polite" to notice the irony in its own coverage.

In a wide-ranging interview about his new science talk show, the estimable Neil deGrasse Tyson claims that denial of scientific truths constitutes "the beginning of the end of an informed democracy." I've got bad news for Mr. Tyson: denial of reason is the beginning of the end of an informed democracy, and that's been going on in right-wing circles for many years now. This notion that your "religious beliefs" allow you to nullify any law you like is just the latest iteration of that sad impulse.

George Lakey describes some of the right's most effective strategies in beating back progress. Main point: good lefties like ourselves should play offense, not defense. I call the "lesser-of-two-evils choice" a hostage situation, but Mr. Lakey reminds us to have a vision that slices through hostage crises like Alexander sliced the Gourdian knot. His description of the "good-cop-bad-cop" routine is also pretty solid (Republicans are the bad cop, Democrats the good, and I didn't even need to tell you, did I?)

From the "Not All People Who Display Their Faith in Public Are Jerks" file: a San Antonio chef who's been feeding the homeless for years evokes her religious beliefs in defying the city's feed-the-homeless-go-to-jail law. Of course she's breaking the law by doing that, but Rosa Parks broke the law, too, and a considerable amount of good came from that. These don't-feed-the-homeless ordinances are cruel and heartless, and while Ms. Cheever doesn't deserve a get-out-of-jail-free card because of her beliefs, the ordinances certainly deserve all the bad publicity they can get because of how they're treating her.

Finally, Zanna McKay at Yes! magazine describes the "slow cities" movement. If you live in a city (ahem!), you may be surprised to think of such a super-busy place as a place to "live slow," but cities have the advantage of being fairly compressed space-wise, which gives folks opportunities to engage in "slow" activities like walking. Even Tokyo has a "Sloth Club," though they're anything but the personification of one of the seven deadly sins.

Around the table: a Democrat is running for President, and his name's Lincoln Chafee! And other stories.

Philadelphia city government finally releases results of the "needs assessment" survey it conducted about Comcast in advance of a renegotiated franchise agreement. Spoiler alert: Comcast is less beloved by the residents of the city it calls home (or, more precisely, the city it calls "Kabletown") than by residents of other cities, and Comcast also charges Philadelphians more for its service, on average, despite getting tax breaks from the city. So we need to pressure Mayor Michael Nutter, who is about as corporatist as Democrats get, to use the city's leverage to get more out of Comcast.

I know someone else will announce their Presidential candidacy today, but this is more interesting: former Rhode Island Senator and Governor Lincoln Chafee, a Republican until 2007, has formed an exploratory committee to run for President as a Democrat in 2016. He did his share of union-bashing in 2011, which I find difficult to forgive, but he was an actual moderate once upon a time, one who voted against the 2002 AUMF that led to the Iraq War and joined a Democrat filibuster of Estate Tax repeal while still a Republican, and his rigidity on church-state separation and fierce opposition to charter schools, sadly, both qualify as courage these days. In other words, the Democratic primaries sure could use him, even if nobody would run through a wall for a moderate.

FactCheck finds an ad saying President Obama's immigration orders will result in taxpayers being "stuck with the bill," and responds, "what bill?" Give the ad's makers credit for the zipper-mouth graphic and for using it over virtually every candidate, Democrat or Republican (well, not Lincoln Chafee, but who saw that coming?). But they're clearly only counting the part of the "bill" that supports their claim, rather than the part where more immigrants means more tax revenue coming in, to the point where the same CBO from which they got their hysteria actually tells us immigration resulting from Mr. Obama's orders would reduce the federal deficit.

The ever-alert David Sirota informs us that a lot of the corporations appalled by Indiana's "religious freedom" law have been donating buku bucks to anti-gay politicians for a long time. Key finding: nine corporations signed a well-reported letter urging Gov. Pence to scale back the law -- and six of them have given to Mr. Pence's campaigns, some of them copiously. No use arguing that they gave to Mr. Pence because he thinks like them economically, because politicians who think like them economically are a dime a dozen, and if they really found his social agenda so appalling that they'd even think of cutting Indiana off, they'd have found some other candidate upon which to shower their largesse.

Ho hum, an apparent Tea Party protest against Florida state plans to turn Everglade sugar farms into conservation areas turned out to be a "protest" using paid actors. $75 per person (50 showed up) for two hours! Who can pay that kind of money, I wonder? I'll tell you who can't pay that kind of money: a real grassroots protest movement.

Finally, the Straight Dope reminds us "What Are Vaccines Saving Us From, Exactly?" They're saving us from diseases that used to ravage us, but don't anymore, but then that's always a possibility when things change for the better -- that what changes becomes status quo and no one will remember why things had to change anymore. The all-regulations-are-bad zombie meme won't die, for example, at least in part because no one's around who remembers a life without clean water, and President Reagan was able to slash the top tax bracket so deeply (for another example) at least in part because few folks still lived in 1986 who could recall how deep the rich-poor gap had become before the era of the high marginal tax rate.

Around the table: the Rahm Emanuel lifetime, the income gap, prevailing wage laws, the Rand Paul lifetime, Indiana whiners, and walkable communities.

Ho hum, incumbent Rahm Emanuel wins Chicago mayoral runoff over Jesus "Chuy" Garcia by a 56-44 margin. The story of Mr. Emanuel's re-election will be the money, though plenty of underfunded candidates used to win elections all the time, and can do so again, with superior messaging. And frankly, it looks to me like Mr. Emanuel's mea culpas before the camera worked (just as they did for Charles Percy in 1978!), and it also looks to me like Mr. Garcia let Mr. Emanuel define him before he defined himself, and I'm tired enough of that tale that I won't declare victory just because Mr. Garcia forced a runoff against a corporatist Democrat.

Nicholas Fitz at Scientific American reminds us that we, as Americans, don't quite understand how bad the income gap between rich and poor has become. Long story short: studies find that Americans think the rich have a much smaller share of American wealth than they actually do, that the income gap between CEOs and workers is much smaller than it actually is, and that upward mobility in America is much more common than it really is. The good news? Americans are good people, and would like a much less unequal society.

Wisconsin Republicans prepare their next attack on workers: a bill that would repeal the state's "prevailing wage" law for construction workers on state and local projects. That law ensures that governments would actually have to pay workers as well as similar local businesses do -- and would have to pay workers brought in from another locality as well as they'd be paid in their own locality. Instead, Republicans want government to use its power to drive wages downward. They really do love big government -- if they can use it to redistribute your income to their big donors.

Sen. Rand Paul is running for President, and John Nichols at The Nation reminds us that his populist/libertarian talk is just talk. We've gone over all the things he hasn't done -- like, that his supposed iconoclasm on drugs and war-making has yielded exactly bupkus as far as results -- but I did not know that he just about single-handedly derailed a bill that would have given Washington, D.C. residents more autonomy over their tax dollars (a small government sort of thing, amirite?) by attaching all sorts of amendments relating to guns, abortion, and "right to work." Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The Washington Post informs us that "Many Indiana Residents Feel Embarrassed and Misunderstood" over all the controversies (not just the "religious freedom" law) concerning their state over the past few weeks. Well, stop whining, Indiana, and then stop electing knuckle-draggers to office, and if you do these things, the medicine might taste a little better.

Finally, Jay Walljasper at Yes! magazine describes how walkable Arlington County, VA, has become, and suggests it might be a good model for other suburban areas looking to reduce auto traffic and attract more commerce. Improved transit helped, but only around train stops at first; the real boons came when the county committed to an "urban village" planning model, with wider sidewalks, bike lanes, median islands, and walking tours (among other things) helping folks slow down -- because, as one local lawyer says, "(y)ou notice lots more things, like kids playing, when you’re living at 5 miles per hour." Good for them.

Around the table: Mitch McConnell vs. the law, Republican fancy talk vs. Republican actions, Stephen King vs. Paul LePage, and other battles.

Yes, Virginia, Mitch McConnell has written a letter to every state Governor telling them to ignore their responsibility to craft a carbon emissions plan as mandated by the EPA, because the EPA's plan is "probably illegal." Everybody who wanted to jail Rosa Parks for breaking the law back in the day now thinks they're Rosa Parks! But Rosa Parks did eventually help change unjust and unconstitutional laws, while Mr. McConnell defends the right of corporations to hike your prices when they're told to pollute less. You wouldn't tolerate such behavior from your children, so why tolerate it from corporations?

E.J. Dionne notes that the House Republican budgets prove that Republicans are completely dedicated to making the income gap between rich and poor worse. You already knew that, but it's still good to hear it from the "liberal" media -- it increases the possibility that we might actually hear it again, and perhaps even again. And though the rich have gotten richer under President Obama, Republicans who fight tooth-and-nail even his modest efforts against that trend also deserve much of the blame -- and when they call the Affordable Care Act "socialism," no one should take them seriously when they suddenly say they care about the poor.

Paul Buchheit describes "How Privatization Degrades Our Daily Lives." Long story short: privatizing public services doesn't save money, it costs money. Long story somewhat longer: privatizing health care makes us captive to whatever health care corporations want, privatizing public housing gives that over to hifalutin bankster schemes, privatizing the internet gives us slower, more costly service, and the U.S. Post Office is so "terrible" that FedEx (a.k.a. Newt Gingrich's favorite corporation) uses it for three out of every 10 ground shipments. If you think privatization is a scam designed to enrich some politician's cronies, you're not alone. Ironic, since privatizers long argued that public corruption could be avoided by privatization.

Paul Krugman says pro-austerity arguments still hold sway in British media a mere six weeks ahead of its national elections. He's right about that, but I think he's a little too sanguine about how far we've come. I admit it feels like we've moved past reflexive pro-austerity arguments, but listening to Republicans try to rebrand their pro-austerity policies as "policies that help the poor" isn't very far from yesterday, and it only takes one more economic meltdown electing one more Republican President for it all to come back hard.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates fears the spread of artificial intelligence. But he sounds like he's simply been asleep during every one of Windows's multitudinous updates and patches. Duplicating or surpassing the human brain is a lot harder than folks realize, and software needs fairly constant maintenance -- especially with regards to security -- and I think the latter task, especially, is big enough that humans will need to do it for quite some time, even if arrogant CEOs disagree. We don't live in the future with jetpacks and men on Mars and Second Variety-style war machines -- we live in the future where a Space: 1999 reboot would have to be retitled.

Finally, Maine somehow-still-Governor Paul LePage really steps in it by claiming that author/Maine resident Stephen King moved to Florida to avoid Maine's taxes -- when Mr. King actually still lives in Maine most of the year and pays those Maine taxes. Democrats who actually want to win elections should listen to Mr. King's words here, because they're that good. And Democrats who want to continue losing to people like Paul LePage -- who himself has apparently forgotten that he grew up dirt-poor and needed the help of Olympia Snowe's late husband to get into college -- can go on paying their million-dollar consultants to help them craft a "message" that inspires nobody.

Around the table: good news about gay marriage and antibiotic-raised chickens, plus Scott Walker's anti-Wisconsin idea, revealed.

His removal of the phrase "the search for truth" from the University of Wisconsin's mission statement got all the ink, but Gov. Walker's plans for UW are more nefarious than that. By getting rid of programs such as the "institute for excellence in urban education" at UW-Milwaukee and the "center for environmental education" at UW-Stevens Point, and adding the phrase "to meet the state's workforce needs" to the mission statement, Mr. Walker plans to turn the state college system into "a glorified technical school that produces workers for corporations," which conjures up the unhelpful image of an actual university system replaced with a system little better than the for-profit schools that disappear into the night with your money.

Good news in Nebraska: a U.S. District Court judge has ruled that state's same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional. The bad news? This judge has struck down the ban once before, in 2005, and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed it a year later. But, as you know, a lot has happened since then -- not just 37 states legalizing gay marriage, but the Supreme Court striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, not to mention Prop 8's death at the hands of Judge Walker and President Obama's endorsement of gay marriage. So stay tuned.

Even the International Monetary Fund says "(t)he decline in unionization in recent decades has fed the rise in incomes at the top." "While some inequality can increase efficiency by strengthening incentives to work and invest, recent research suggests that higher inequality is associated with lower and less sustainable growth in the medium run," they go on to say, leading one to wonder exactly how right-wingers can justify more than three decades of "strengthening incentives to work and invest."

After a New York City TV program captures a terminally ill man's dying moments on camera, New York state Assembly mulls whether filming patients receiving medical treatments without their consent should be a felony. I don't think we deter crime very well simply by making punishments bigger, but since Mr. Chanko's death doesn't qualify as a snuff film (he would have died whether a film crew was there to record his last moments or not), and his family found a surprising number of obstacles to their attempts to redress the resulting heartbreak, the legislature clearly needs to do something, if not precisely this.

Finally, McDonald's announces that it will phase out, over two years, chicken made with antibiotics used to treat humans. That may not be as big a deal as it sounds -- the illnesses antibiotics target really don't care which species the antibiotics are for, and McDonald's hasn't yet made similar commitments for its beef and pork products, or its overseas eateries -- but it is progress.

Around the table: the income gap, corporate taxes, water privatization, TV ads, income redistribution, and food co-ops.

FAIR finds a New York Times columnist arguing that the income gap between rich and poor hasn't gotten worse since the 2008 financial services meltdown. The proof? A graph depicting various income groups' pre-tax income which starts in 2007 -- which was a year before the meltdown and a year when high-income earners made a lot of money from the soon-to-burst housing bubble -- and which compares percentage drops between classes of income and not drops in actual dollars between classes of income, as if we pay our electric bills with percentages. Naturally, a different graph (one that, among other things, starts before 2007) shows a more complex picture.

Citizens for Tax Justice demonstrates how federal "tax extenders" enable California-based utility corporation PG&E to pay negative $84 million in taxes despite making $1.8 billion in profits. Yes, you read that right -- PG&E's tax rate for 2014 was -4.6 %, or 14.6 percentage points lower than the lowest income tax rate. CTJ points specifically to the "accelerated depreciation" handout, which lets corporations pretend its machinery wears out much faster than it actually does. Remember that the next time some Congressperson starts ranting about "creating jobs" by letting corporations pay literally less than nothing in taxes.

The Consumerist informs us that cable TV channels actually play programs faster so they can put more ads in. This is after they cut scenes from the program and run closing credits underneath the start of the next show. Desperate mammon-worship aside, the semiotician in me says this is not the offense to artistic license its detractors say it is -- running Seinfeld 7.5% faster didn't exactly make everyone sound like they were on helium, though I will concede that when I heard "Freeze Frame" at around 47 rpm on hit radio back in the day, I was actually disappointed when I heard it at its proper speed on MTV.

Columbia (SC) City Council rejects proposal to privatize its municipal water system. Choice quotation from Columbia citizen Jim Reid: "That term (public-private partnership) is the same as privatization. This friendly-sounding term is used by large water corporations just to make privatization sound better to the public." Selling off what belongs to the citizenry is what bad politicians do after they've run governments into the ground, and maybe not by accident, either.

Speaking of which, Daily Kos diarist Akadjian tells the not-terribly-heartwarming story of "How Ohio Pulled $4 Billion from Communities and Redistributed It Upwards." Long story short: they cut taxes for the rich and for corporations, then came cuts to government services like schools and diversion of taxpayer funds to voucher and charter school cronies. And, since none of this has actually created jobs in Ohio (which has lost jobs since 2005, whereas the nation as a whole has gained), the prescription will no doubt be more of the same.

Finally, Yes! magazine profiles the Our Table Cooperative of Sherwood, OR, which has modified the co-op model in order to create stronger bonds between consumer and producer. These include: ensuring importers are from Oregon when they can't ensure the food comes from Oregon, and making farmers and food processors into co-op members, which latter item not only ensures that consumers "get to know" all the folks who make their food, but also encourages farmers and food processors to cooperate instead of compete with each other. Their grocery store just opened three months ago; I wish them the best in their efforts.

Around the table: how Democrats might actually win elections, and other stories.

According to an NSA document, Iran apparently learned how to conduct cyberattacks from the United States. Well, that happens when you deploy cyberattacks against nations with which you're not actually at war. And "national security" doesn't justify keeping the process secret, since any adversarial nation has scientists and engineers just like you do, and with computer security, it's not a matter of whether your computers are safe, but how long they'll be safe before bad actors adjust to your security, and then how well you adjust to them.

The American Prospect instructs us in how certain Democrats bucked the 2014 Republican wave. We already know that Sens. Merkley and Franken were able to (in Richard Kirsch's words) link their liberal initiatives to a "story" with a clear "villain" -- in this case (and in Sen. Shaheen's case), Wall Street banksters -- but the story of Ann Kirkpatrick's unlikely victory in an Arizona district Mitt Romney won in 2012 is perhaps even more instructive. Rather than run away from Obamacare, she pointed out how many folks in her district now had health care thanks to the Affordable Care Act, and she even defended pork by showing how many jobs it supported in her district. You'll come away thinking the consultants know even less than you thought they did before -- that they are the ones most responsible for kicking away Democrat victories, in fact.

In the wake of the murder of three Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, we learn that the alleged shooter, self-described "gun-toting atheist" Craig Hicks, was (according to his ex-wife) obsessed with the 1993 movie Falling Down. And I immediately thought, I should have known! Falling Down is quite possibly the most offensive film ever made by a major film studio, a film that supposedly addresses the psychoses of modern life but is (intentionally or not) completely psychotic on its own.

Washington County (OR) judge rules that, though he really doesn't like it, a man who used his cell phone to take a photo up a 13-year-old girl's skirt in an aisle at Target didn't do anything illegal. Apparently state privacy law prohibits "clandestine photographs" in private places, but not in Target, since Target isn't a private place. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no one expects people to take out their cell phones and try to photograph their underwear. Also, the defense attorney in this case makes Saul Goodman look like Thurgood Marshall.

"Is Republican Concern About Middle-Class Stagnation Just a Big Con?" asks Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. Spoiler alert: yes. And anyone who falls for it in 2016, having remembered how things went after the 2000 Republican standard-bearer declared himself a "compassionate conservative," is an utter fool.

Saudi Arabian historian argues that his nation's ban on women driving derives from concern about women getting raped. Naturally he doubles down, suggesting that American women don't care so much about sexual violence, and even says folks who disagree with him "should listen to me and get used to what society thinks," which suggests he confuses society with himself. Anyway, you know what really saves women from rape? Men not raping. Let's add Saleh al-Saadoon to the ever-lengthening list of people we never speak of again.

Around the table: from a "divisive" veto threat to actually divisive punditry.

The Hill's headline about President Obama's expected veto of the Keystone XL pipeline calls the putative veto "divisive", and even has the nerve to speculate that Republicans could successfully paint Mr. Obama as "obstructionist" if he vetoes too many bills. Strange how the "liberal" media didn't call Republicans "obstructionist" when they won all those Senate votes 41-59, or when individual Senators put holds on countless bills and judicial nominees that actually had broad bipartisan support. Republicans essentially nullified the 2008 election, but apparently, for the "liberal" media, the 2014 election is the only one that really counts.

David Dayen chronicles the failure of the Obama Administration's infamous Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP. HAMP gave banksters "financial inducements to modify loans for at-risk borrowers," but let the banksters determine how to disburse aid and to whom. And this is a program Mr. Obama didn't even need Congressional approval to do right! Naturally Obamanoids would counter that reducing principals for underwater homeowners would have put trillions in derivatives at risk. You recognize that, right, from your Debt Ceiling Studies class? That's right, it's a hostage situation -- it's as if they're saying, don't help homeowners, or I'll blow this economy's brains out!

"Don't Listen to Anyone Who Says the Unemployment Rate is a Big Lie," advises Matt O'Brien in the Washington Post. I wouldn't go that far -- like Mr. O'Brien, I've been cataloguing the U6 unemployment rate (still nearly twice the official U3 rate, in case you were wondering) with the appropriate regularity. Here's what I would say instead: "Don"t listen to anyone who says the unemployment rate is a 'big lie' if that person was completely silent about the matter during the Clinton and Bush years."

In a related note, Democrats still aren't prepared to handle our ongoing problem with the income gap between the very rich and the very poor. The very notion that Democrats would still listen to Larry Summers about anything tells me the Democrats don't listen to the American people -- or would like to convince the American people they're listening without actually listening. And that is why Scott Walker will be America's next President.

Nick Hanauer tells us we should prevent corporate executives from spending so much money on stock buybacks. Stock buybacks do little for the economy except drive up stock prices -- they don't, you know, result in higher wages for workers or more money lent out to enterprising businesses with good ideas -- and it turns out stock buybacks (which account for nearly $7 trillion in GDP since 2004) were almost nonexistent until 1982, so it's not like this is some radical idea. You know, the way that building a massive, leak-prone pipeline over heartland drinking water is a radical idea, or claiming a corporate "right to privacy" justifies not telling consumers about your products' dangers is a radical idea.

Finally, Fox News (sic) blowhard Eric Bolling instructs us that only Muslims have ever killed in the name of religion. Setting aside the half-dozen examples the author, David Perry (whose blog is a great read) lists at the bottom of the post: one couldn't even win that argument by saying BUT TEH CHRIZTIANZ NEVER SED THEY KILLED INFIDELZ IN TEH NAMEZ OF TEH JESUS HAHAHAHAHA!!!! But Eric Bolling may be the biggest asshole on television, and that's saying something. I can't remember if we've decided to never speak of him again, but let's resolve to do that now.