Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: in which “law and order” means something other than whatever Republicans say it means.

Springfield, OH Haitian nonprofit files six charges under state law against Donald Trump and JD Vance for their role in spreading vicious lies about the Haitian community there, and I suspect at least five of them will stand up in court – pinning domestic terror bomb threats committed by others on Messrs. Trump and Vance would be difficult, but these two clowns sure did "knowingly causing alarm in the Springfield community by continuing to repeat lies that state and local officials have said were false," and they repeated those lies on TV whenever they could, and they caused others to think Haitians would threaten them, and if threatening to deport Haitians to Venezuela isn't an intimidating threat, I'm not sure what is. I wish the Haitian Bridge Alliance the best of luck in getting justice for law-abiding Haitians.

Ho hum, the Florida Department of Education has banned any instruction on consent and contraception in their sex ed classes, instead insisting on an emphasis on abstinence, which, yeah, I remember being a hormone-addled teen myself, so that won't work! And refusing to teach kids about consent? Either they're trying to convince the world that they're objectively pro-child molestation or they just assume they're raising a generation of kids that'll do what they're told, which always becomes problematic when they're older and everyone who told them what to do is dead. Jesus Mary and Joseph they've even banned the word "fluids" from sex ed classes so that kids won't know how HIV gets transmitted – in a state with more HIV diagnoses than any other! Sooner or later, good conservatives who actually want to grapple with the world as it is are going to jump off this train, and then what will the Ron DeSantises of the world do? Lose elections, that's what. Yes, even in Florida.

When I hear that good Americans spammed a Texas anti-trans hotline (one looking for "tips" on folks trying to break draconian anti-trans laws) with such things as the entire Bee Movie script, I remember that while trolling bigots is fun, useful, and honorable, Texas's anti-trans hate train still rolls on, with at least one woman actually de-transitioning back into manhood thanks to Texas law – and yet unable to be a man on their drivers' license, because that would violate the law! For about a quarter of the American population – and a rather larger proportion of the Republican Party – it really is all about the cruelty.

Rick Perlstein informs us that Presidential polling has just about always been laughably wrong, and though sometimes pollsters make honest mistakes (the future is the hardest thing to predict, correcting mistakes by fighting the last war, etc.), they're also pretty insular and arrogant, and ultimately you may decide (as I have!) that the only polling you ever want to see again is polling about issues, because horserace polling about candidates makes us all into bystanders, when we're not bystanders in a democracy. When you read about all those folks in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s going why do we even have an election when we know what's going to happen ha ha ha, that'll be reinforced for you.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court tosses the Pennsylvania state House's impeachment case against Philadelphia D.A. Larry Krasner, which makes sense – no legislative body takes up bills from last session (they reintroduce them!), and an impeachment is no different. So, you think PA Republicans knew this would happen when they filed their impeachment as a big-drama October Surprise, meant to rile up the voters about crime right before Election Day? I'd be a schmuck if I didn't wonder! In any case, it didn't work; one might even say (after Democrats scored numerous statewide wins, including the lower House) that it backfired. Meanwhile, nobody gives Larry Krasner any credit for that 17% reduction in the city's murder rate after blaming him when it went up.

In a peripherally-related note, Popular Information talks with Jeff Asher about why Donald Trump's complaints about FBI crime data are hogwash. Highlights: the National Crime Victimization Survey apparently has such large margins of error that you can't draw many useful conclusions about its findings, the FBI always doesn't get data from a few cities so complaining about it now is silly, "I don't think a secret like" the Biden Administration manipulating data "could be kept," and as far as people not reporting crimes because they think no one will do anything about them, "I doubt many prosecutors are refusing to prosecute murder." Remember: they whine about crime (and immigration, for that matter) because they have nothing to offer but hate.

Finally, New York City Mayor Eric Adams – once mooted by "liberal" media pundits as the Democratic Party's Future! – now faces five federal indictments for wire fraud, bribery, and campaign finance offenses. To think that some fool actually once suggested a "Manchin-Adams Democratic Party" as a Way Forward! And, just like all overrated center-right politicians, Mr. Adams, a Democratic Mayor indicted by a Democratic Administration, claims his indictment is political. Where are the Republicans who will squeal about the politicization of justice? I kid, of course – Eric Adams was always a tool of Our Glorious Elites, a tool to be discarded as soon as it stopped working, and if he doesn't know that now, he will soon. Will such a recognition scene spark good works, or more desperate chasing after power at some right-wing think tank? I think I know the answer, though I'd be happy to be wrong.

Around the table: the “free state of Florida,” and other absurdities.

How bad are union-busting campaigns these days? Compass Coffee baristas allege that their employers have hired nearly 125 new “employees” at seven locations to dilute unionization votes there. These “employees” include CEOs at other corporations – including one forced to pay $25,000 in back wages to five organizers they illegally fired – as well as friends and family of Compass’s CEO. Compass virtually stamped out previous organization efforts by, well, firing virtually all of their workers during the pandemic, but union organizers are back, because you can’t keep good people down. Hear that, Supreme Court? (As an aside, one Uber lobbyist’s suggestion that she was somehow misled into being hired is absurd. How do you know? By the phrase “Uber lobbyist,” which describes a class of person who typically does not need a barista job on the side.)

Shipt workers, frustrated by smaller paychecks, band together to prove their employers use algorithms to shaft them. The amount of work these folks had to do – along with a non-profit and a Ph.D. student – to prove their point is staggering, and I can’t help but point out that if, you know, these workers were organized they wouldn’t have to work as hard to protect themselves. I know, a lot of folks fall into this line of work, for some it’s not a primary source of income, and some even prefer what bosses like to call “flexible” work schedules, but Jesus Mary and Joseph do we really think corporatists don’t know all of this and exploit it? And should we really let them keep exploiting it?

Ari Paul rues that our “liberal” media – so concerned about the alleged anti-Semitism of opposing anything Israel does these days – has by and large missed (or, perhaps, “missed”) the story of anti-Semitism within the youth movement backing Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Could that be because our “liberal” media presents Ms. Meloni as a “pragmatist”? Yes, it could be. All of this is peculiar, since actual video of young morons sieg-heiling and celebrating Mussolini would be sensational in the manner of sensationalism our “liberal” media adores. Why, one might start to think our “liberal” media only likes sensationalism that makes right-wingers look better!

Washoe County, Nevada election commissioners refuse to certify a recount, presumably because it didn’t go the way they wanted it to go. After all, they didn’t exactly present a vast trove of evidence proving wrongdoing or incompetence! Although a “local activist,” with the unfortunate name of Robert Beadles, says “an artificial intelligence supercomputer” told him the election couldn’t possibly have gone the way it did. Mr. Beadles has been whining about nonexistent election fraud for years, and another name for “artificial intelligence supercomputer” would be Bullshit Machine.

Independent Presidential candidate/brain worm puppet Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says he “won’t take sides” on various 9.11 conspiracy theories, but I will! No, Tha Bush Mobb didn’t plan and execute 9.11 – seriously? Him? Plan a thing like that? It is to laugh! Besides, that’s not how power works anymore – the powerful see nothing but opportunity in failure, and they never see opportunity in success, plus they break everything, point out how broken everything is, and then posit themselves as the only people who can fix it, as if they weren’t the ones who broke it! Also, if Saudi Arabia did the deed, I think we’d know it by now; it’s hard to keep secrets like that, even in totalitarian states – and also in states like ours, where we’re all so damn proud of what we know.

Local media find Florida’s new “Welcome to the Free State of Florida” signs generating “mixed reactions” among the locals, but sadly we don’t learn as much about that as we deserve – just reactions from one liberal citing book-banning and one right-winger who almost certainly calls himself an “independent” talking about “people stuffing stuff down our throats,” and I’d lay money that “stuff” is deserved shame over his neanderthal opinions. Meanwhile, enjoy your freedoms, Florida – the freedom to die from COVID, the freedom to get run over by right-wingers, the freedom to lose your home to climate change, the freedom to get bullied if you’re gay and/or trans, the freedom to throw tantrums just to keep other people from reading books, and the freedom to die in mass shootings perpetrated by whiny young men, all because your government prefers the drama of a “Free State of Florida” sign to providing the services you pay for with your taxes.

Finally, a Republican strategist thinks Joe Biden – still being put through the ringer over a two-week-old debate performance – is actually in a “commanding position politically” against Mr. Trump, and though I wouldn’t blame you for thinking this is a false flag, it also rather resembles the truth. Incumbents are hard to dislodge anymore – why, you’d have to badly mismanage a pandemic to lose re-election these days! – and, as better minds than I have pointed out, the alleged “dementia” of Joe Biden (I’ve had family members with dementia, and he ain’t like that, period, end of, full stop) sure hasn’t manifested as chaotic governing. Economy still adding over 200,000 jobs a month, inflation down and wages still outpacing it, antitrust enforcement still vigorous and effective, wars in Palestine and Ukraine managed about as well as possible without American bloodshed – yeah, that’s some “dementia,” there.

Action: concerning airline refunds, corporate taxes, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject legislation that would make it harder for wronged airline customers to get their refunds, and pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act and the Equality 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.

Did we not just discuss our Department of Transportation making it easier to get refunds when your airline corporation delays or cancels your flight? Well, for Congress, no good deed goes unpunished, as two Democratic and two Republican Congressfolk have introduced legislation that would make airline passengers jump through multiple flaming hoops to request refunds, rather than force the airlines to issue those refunds automatically, as the Biden Administration rule would do. So, yeah, time to call your Congressfolk and tell them to reject this absurd idea, which of course comes from four Congressfolk who get lots of campaign donations from big airline corporations. They’ll never see it coming!

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, which may not prevent all conceivable corporate tax dodging, but which would end tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs, bring the top tax rate back up to 35% (still lower than it should be, but better than 21%), and stop corporations from hiding their profits in places like the Cayman Islands. Any Congressperson who opposes any of these things should lose their next election, period, end of, full stop. But that won’t happen unless we speak out.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Equality Act. Your Trumphole acquaintances may have said the Equality Act is all about letting boys take over girls’ sports in schools, an argument requiring everyone to forget what being a hormone-addled teenager was like. The bill is actually about preventing banks and landlords from discriminating against gays and trans folk – and guess what? Many Trumpholes actually don’t want banks and landlords to discriminate against gays and trans folk. But, again, if we want to break above the noise, we have to speak out.

Action: concerning antitrust funding, paid family/medical leave, and book banning.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase antitrust funding, pass real paid family/medical leave, and pass the Books Save Lives Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: Matt Stoller reports that Congress plans to reduce funding for our Justice Department’s Antitrust Division – and also plans to prevent Antitrust from collecting any fees from corporate mergers. I can’t blame Jim Jordan for this, because Democratic Sen. Shaheen wrote the legislation; yes, she’d fund Antitrust a lot more than Jim Jordan would, but we need to call our Reps and Senators and tell them to increase Antitrust funding, and not to destroy the merger fee funding mechanism. Fighting monopolies is Joe Biden’s greatest contribution to the world; corporations know it, and so do their lackeys in Congress, which is why they’re trying to destroy it. They can’t win.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real paid family and medical leave. Congressdolts know paid family and medical leave is popular, but they don’t really want to do it, so they’ve been dressing up crap policies as good policies, and we shouldn’t let them do that. The paid family/medical plan advanced by Sen. Gillibrand in recent years, which would fund 13 weeks of paid family/medical leave for all full-time workers with a tiny payroll tax, is the minimum we should accept, and though her proposed payroll tax would cost a mere $8 a month for a worker making $50,000 annually, I’d prefer to fund it by (surprise, surprise) taxing the rich like we used to. It’s OK to say so.

Finally, Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Books Save Lives Act, which would counter book-banning hysteria with federal force. When busybodies in your neighborhood raise their hackles about Black, Brown, gay, and trans books, the Books Save Lives Act would fight back by mandating that public school libraries carry books about/by “underrepresented communities” – and would make book-banning efforts into discrimination cases as well. Because that’s what they are! How many Moms for Liberty-types have been going after white male books? Tess of the d’Urbervilles was controversial, after all – and all the whining about it basically drove Thomas Hardy out of the novel-writing business, which was a profound loss to humanity.

Action: concerning right-wing drama, worker safety, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Missouri state House leadership to kill an anti-trans bill, tell Florida’s Governor to veto legislation that would hurt worker safety, and tell your Congressfolk to tax millionaire and billionaire income into Social Security. 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.

In Missouri, HB 2885 would make teachers register as sex offenders if they support a trans kid’s transition in any way – which would end their career as school teachers, of course. However you feel about transgender folks, supporting a trans kid is not in the same class as soliciting a minor for sex or using child porn. Gosh, what if terms like “sex offender” actually meant something again? Missouri House Speaker Dean Plocher’s phone number is 573.751.1544; Missouri Republican House Floor Leader Jonathan Patterson’s number is 573.751.0907. You know what you gotta do: tell them to end this manufactured drama before they embarrass themselves.

Meanwhile, the Florida state legislature actually wants to prevent localities from protecting workers from extreme heat. How conservative of them! The smallest unit of government knows best, they say – until those smallest units of government defy the will of big corporations that don’t care about workers dying from heatstroke, because worshiping mammon is more important than taking care of other people. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Gov. DeSantis to veto this legislation when it gets to his desk. Yeah, it’s a long shot, but with his Presidential run lying in the deep grave, perhaps we can get him to do the right thing. For once!

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to make millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes into our Social Security system. You know that income over $168,600 doesn’t get taxed into the system, but you may not know that several already-introduced bills would address this issue – the Social Security Expansion Act and the Social Security 2100 Act would tax income over $250,000 and $400,000, respectively. Better to point our Congressfolk to good bills that already exist than let them come up with some BS bill that doesn’t do what they say it does!

Action: concerning voting rights, trans kids, and anti-gay politicians.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights and protect trans kids, and tell Rep. Walberg of Michigan to resign over his pro-murder-of-gays comments. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former bill would give all Americans same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration, and expanded mail-in and early voting, plus it would criminalize many forms of voter suppression and create redistricting commissions in every state; the latter bill would restore our government’s ability to stop vote suppression in any area of our country that’s suppressed votes. Who opposes this stuff? Haters, that’s who. And why should haters win?

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject a Republican bill that would nullify the Biden Administration’s mandate requiring anyone who adopts children to acknowledge a trans child’s gender. Gosh, our government actually does something kind for once, and Republicans can’t wait to shit on it. And, seriously, if you don’t want to acknowledge a trans kid’s gender, then don’t adopt the kid. Why should this be so hard? Because right-wingers need an endless supply of “villains” to keep their supporters in a constant state of masturbatory rage? Sorry, that’s not a good enough reason to do a damn thing.

Finally, Civic Shout also helps you tell Rep. Tim Walberg (E-MI) to resign from Congress immediately. Rep. Walberg has already announced plans to tell everyone he’s just being oppressed for having reactionary, ahem, traditional opinions about gays, but, ah, no: he went to Uganda to tell Ugandan politicians to “stand firm” in support of laws that mandate the death penalty for folks in gay relationships. Even American homophobes generally don’t want to kill gays, but Rep. Walberg imagines he’s a martyr when he’s just objectively pro-murder. So, no, demanding his resignation ain’t about his “opinion.” And what a whiner! Will right-wingers ever stop whining?

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.

Allegedly trenchant analysis for September 5, 2023: Vivek Ramaswamy as Republican front-runner.

It’s now a few weeks after the first Republican debate, and I’m still sure the smart play for Republicans is to get behind Vivek Ramaswamy as their nominee and put someone on the ticket with him who might actually be able to run a country. Doesn’t matter that he’s non-white – evangelicals didn’t turn up their nose at Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, the number of liberals caught off-guard by conservative Black and Brown folks is very small now, and right-wingers may not love Black and Brown folks in the abstract or the tangible but they’ll defend their Black and Brown fellow-travelers to the death. Doesn’t matter that he sounds batshit, either. That fool Ron DeSantis actually thinks all his precious oppo research will make a difference? Was he paying attention in 2016? What does matter, though, is that Mr. Ramaswamy helps Republicans get the Trumphole vote without actually having to have Trump on the ticket. How stupid do Republican politicians sound trying to defend Donald Trump these days? Very, very stupid, that’s how. Now imagine a world in which they don’t even have to talk about Donald Trump anymore, let alone defend him, but can run someone who’s pushes all the same emotional buttons without having any of the Trump baggage. Then imagine those Republican politicians reassuring nose-holders that since someone like Tim Scott is on the ticket, things will actually get done. That sure is a better idea than letting Donald Trump run again (and again!), and it’s also a better idea than getting behind the trans-hating, race-baiting, book-banning, COVID-enabling Ron DeSantis.

That doesn’t mean Mr. Ramaswamy will beat Joe Biden. Joe Biden’s done a good job. Doesn’t matter that Mr. Biden’s approvals are low now, or even next year, because I suspect our economy will keep on chooglin’ into Election Day 2024. And it also doesn’t mean Mr. Ramaswamy will have the same coattails Donald Trump obviously had on Election Day 2020, when Republicans picked up 15 House seats and damn near held our Senate. But Republicans need to face facts: they are the party of masturbatory rage now, and nothing else. They can still win elections wherever they can gerrymander districts or suppress voting rights, but that’s a tough thing to do across an entire nation, and the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections – the exception being George W. Bush in 2004, who would never have been able to win re-election in the first place but for the Electoral College. So the best strategy for Republicans, going forward, is to nominate freak candidates for President. It’s not a good strategy. But it is their best one.

At the risk of opening up a hole in space-time, I will devote a small amount of space to understanding the Trumphole a little better. Like Amanda Marcotte, I am enormously tempted to say that Trump supporters are “deplorable bitter clingers” and nothing else, but I really think it’s more than that: just like murderers think of themselves law-and-order adherents facing extenuating and unprecedented circumstances, Trumpholes throw tantrums they feel perfectly justified in throwing – and yet would happily use the word “tantrum” on anyone else on the other side who ever got emotional. A lot of Trumpholes have been provoked, I suppose, but not by liberals, or immigrants, or transgender folks, or public school teachers, or whomever the Enemy of the Week is. Big corporations provoke them, and the politicians who suck up to big corporations – which has, as you know, been a bipartisan attitude for some time – also provoke them.

Many Trumpholes will agree with that analysis; some will even volunteer it – and then support candidates who have enabled their provokers, because Critical Race Theory Cancel Culture Bud Light Trans People Try That in a Small Town. Even this ain’t entirely stupid – everyone knows Democrats have been chasing big campaign donation money as much as Republicans, and Democrats have long pushed so-smart-they’re-stupid solutions to our problems (we’re going to teach construction workers to write code! No, I am never letting that go!) for decades. But Democrats have also come around a bit lately – Joe Biden is the most anti-monopoly President we’ve had since FDR, and it’s not exactly business-as-usual to see large-scale public investment (mainly through the Inflation Reduction Act, but also through the American Rescue Plan Act) that actually moves us forward as a civilization. That dilemma will impale Mr. Ramaswamy; he’s not stupid enough to oppose public investment or support monopolies, but saying “I’ll just do all of that better” won’t win hearts and minds, either. And yet he represents a better bet than hoping the Big Man himself survives all his interlocking indictments with all their interlocking co-defendants. In or out of jail, Mr. Trump could still get the nomination and win, though likely not if the economy’s still humming along. But if you’re a Republican politico, you’d rather not keep drawing to an inside straight.

Around the table: banksters, billionaires, and other people who ruin everything.

The Lever describes how private equity corporations are ruining health care. Long story short: banksters ruin everything. Long story somewhat longer: no, really, they’re a bunch of damn vampires, seeing every hospital, nursing home, and doctor’s office not as a thing that serves people but as a thing to bleed money from. Long story even longer: I really can’t say enough what evil bastards these folks are; I don’t even feel particularly blasphemous saying they’re going to burn in eternal hellfire. Let me know if I’m not making myself absolutely clear. I have been told I have a propensity to hold back.

Matthew Rosza at Salon reminds us that the heart problems caused by COVID way, way outnumber the heart problems vaccines cause. Remember when that latter item was all over the news a few years ago? Now it’s back, thanks to that fool Elon Musk, who heard about LeBron James’s son having a heart attack in practice and immediately said TEH COVIDZ!!!!! I’m old enough to remember when J.V. Cain dropped dead at an NFL practice due to a heart condition 30-odd years before COVID; in the meantime, COVID causes many more heart problems than vaccines do, and of course some folks exaggerate the problems caused by vaccines by confusing correlation and causation. So maybe some people need to either learn to STFU until they know what they’re talking about or stop running with salacious headlines.

I hate to say it, but I already know how our Supreme Court will rule on whether a disabled woman who has filed over 600 Americans With Disabilities Act lawsuits against various hotels actually has standing to sue -- they’ll rule she doesn’t, even though she’s, you know, disabled. Why? Because they didn’t let alone a First Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that she does have standing, because the hotel chain plaintiff whines incessantly about the “cottage industry” of “self-appointed testers” even though, in the words of her lawyer, “(n)obody complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act until they’re sued,” and because our Justice Department could just step in and enforce the law (although they generally don’t). I also know because they only care about preserving big corporate power – and sadly, that isn’t an exclusively right-wing disease in our federal courts.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (E-CA) now says our House might look into impeachment proceedings against President Biden. I’m not a hundred percent sure there’s nothing there – I do remember thinking Joe Biden’s brother Jim could be an anvil around his neck – but I am certain that all Republican attempts to demonstrate there’s something there have delivered way, way more drama than evidence, and most Americans hate drama, though perhaps not auite as much as I do. Anyway, Republicans always complained that impeaching Donald Trump would result in the opposition party just impeaching Presidents at will – and they were right! They were so right it's like they actually reached back into the past and impeached Bill Clinton!

Because we need the occasional reminder, Laura Clawson at Daily Kos delivers “A Partial List of Things People Screaming About Cancel Culture Want to Cancel.” Mostly it’s about the Barbie movie, which has (among other “sins”) a trans actress playing a doctor, though we could also the cancel-culture crowd wants to cancel the entirety of Black culture and history. I would say the hypocrisy is strong with right-wingers, but of course they don’t care about that, or about making rational arguments, even – slinging shit is their only aim. After all, they don’t have to clean it up – the rest of us do!

Finally, Sen. Tim Scott, running for the Republican nomination for President, confronts the slavery-with-benefits idea coming out of Florida thusly: “There’s no silver lining in slavery. Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives. It was devastating.” And I wish he’d stopped there! Sadly, he also said, of Mr. DeSantis, that “people have bad days,” even though it took more than a bad day day for the Florida State Board of Education to concoct these “standards,” and even though Gov. DeSantis’s “war on woke” has gone on for much, much longer than a bad day, and really, for most politicians a “bad day” is a day they yell at a reporter, not a day they insist we should teach “both sides” of slavery. If Tim Scott had gone all the way, and then ignored the inevitable right-wing whining about it, he’d be the front-runner for the nomination right now, but he didn’t, so he’s not.

Around the table: now with *even more* bile!

When I hear that some Republican House Reps claim to be preparing for a “World War III”-level fight against their own Speaker over spending cuts, I have a few reactions. First, none of these clowns would do anything but soil their pants in a real foxhole. Second, too many folks want to be war veterans without doing any of the hard work that comes with being war veterans. Third, when you’re throwing around words like “war” to describe negotiating with your own people, you’re showing your utter contempt for civilization. Not that item three is a surprise; these people hate civilization, because it repeatedly reminds them there are other people in the world who mean a damn.

Alabama state legislature redraws their Congressional maps, but doesn’t include a second majority-Black district “or something quite close to it” as our Supreme Court mandated. Well, that’ll teach people to count their chickens! Folks were salivating over getting another majority-Black district in Louisiana, too, but these states are just going to run out the clock on this matter, knowing our Supreme Court will allow them to use the maps they just made because “it’s too close to the election.” You think our Supreme Court knew that ahead of time? Of course they did!

Now the Florida State Board of Education has adopted “standards” which require public school teachers to tell students that slaves “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit,” and they deserve all the ridicule they’re going to get. There’s an upside to virtually anything, but generally the bigger the horror, the smaller the upside, and the mere existence of an upside doesn’t make just anything OK, and making slavery OK is of course what Florida fascists want. I eagerly await the first class clown to ask if surviving starvings and lashings from cruel masters was a “skill” that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”

People ask me what I think about Country Music Television (or CMT) yanking that Jason Aldean song about how us city folks shouldn’t try any of our putative shenanigans in a small town off the air. Long story short: my loathing for right-wing weaklings who act tough is bottomless, Republicans sure do have some cojones whining about “censorship” as they’re banning books about racism, and though I have only watched CMT for perhaps an hour out of my life, I’ve only heard terrific songs during that time – good, complex, hummable relationship songs – and I really doubt that’s just my dumb luck.

So Donald Trump is now obliquely threatening “to do things” to Special Prosecutor Jack Smith “that have never been done before” and also suggesting that since he has “a tremendously passionate group of voters” maybe it “would be very dangerous” to put him in prison. So Mr. Trump has become a surrealist, but instead of painting a pipe with the caption “this is not a pipe,” he’s issuing terroristic threats and saying “this is not a terroristic threat.” Anyway, his “tremendously passionate group of voters” are whiny diaper-loaded brats. A lot of them have guns, sure, but they’re about as ready overthrow a government as your average high school football team.

Finally, when I hear that former NBA superstar/current TNT analyst Charles Barkley has become a “role model” after all, I can’t help but think that whole thing’s quite overplayed. A handful of barfights got him negative press as a player, but everyone I know who’s met him say he’s kind, generous, and affable, suggesting, again, that maybe people treat you the way you treat them. The article doesn’t delineate his political transformation, either, from Friend of Rush Limbaugh to supporter-of-affirmative-action-but-also-for-poor-whites to “I was a Republican – until they lost their minds” (that was 2006!) to protector of diversity at Auburn and defender of gay and trans folk. I’m just grateful to know that someone, somewhere, didn’t let all that money make him an asshole.

Action: concerning discrimination, workers' rights, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Equality Act, the PRO Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Equality Act. The Equality Act, as you know, would prevent landlords, banks, and governments from discriminating against gay, transgender, and queer folks, which sounds like something we all ought to support, regardless of the right’s fearmongering about “boys in girls’ locker rooms” like boys will literally become girls just to grope some teenage T&A. But let’s also contemplate state governments conducting “underwear inspections” of kids to make sure they’re not trans and note that the Equality Act would also help us prevent schools from becoming state-mandated child molesters.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Wondering why Starbucks won’t negotiate with all their workers who voted to unionize? Because the price for failing to negotiate is a slap on the wrist! The PRO Act would change that, by setting deadlines for corporations to negotiate with a fair contract with workers, and getting our government involved in those negotiation if need be; the bill would also stiffen penalties for intimidating workers and forcing them to attend anti-union propaganda meetings. Most times when employers break the law, they don’t have to pay a dime; the PRO Act would change that, so Congress should pass it.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare for All Act, which would put everyone in America on Medicare and ensure we pay a lot less for our health care. As I’ve said before, levying an employer-side payroll tax (i.e., one not paid by workers) totaling the money corporations already pay for private health insurance would fund Medicare-for-All just fine, and even cover the 30 million Americans without health insurance. But just wait until you hear that CEOs at the seven biggest publicly-traded health insurance corporations took home over $330 milllion last year! I wonder how many surprise medical bills that could’ve paid for! Needless to say, we won’t have that problem with Medicare for All.

Around the table: "law and order" my ass!

When I hear Ben Shapiro say, in re Donald Trump’s latest legal troubles, that “the only way that you actually restore the credibility of the justice system is to have Republicans prosecute Republicans and Democrats prosecute Democrats,” I note that folks who trap themselves in corners always make up new rules. Pledge allegiance to America, Mr. Shapiro, and not Donald Trump, and you won’t have to resort to such stratagems. Also too, Republicans have so thoroughly won the “law and order” propaganda war that even Democratic Presidents tend to appoint Republicans to law enforcement positions in their Administrations, so again we must ask: why does anyone listen to Ben Shapiro?

From Popular Information we learn that murder rates have dropped rather dramatically in at least 90 cities in 2023, and surprise, surprise! Our “liberal” media have basically ignored this development.” That’s partly because all they care about is sensationalism! But also, when they covered the 2020 spike in murder rates – when it was still much lower than in the relatively pandemic-free ‘80s and ‘90s – they argued that Donald Trump’s “law and order” approach was needed, even though the murder spike occurred on his watch. How else to blame liberals for everything? I did actually type the phrase “Donald Trump’s ‘law and order’ approach” without spritzing tea all over my keyboard. (Also too, think Larry Krasner will ever get any credit for Philadelphia’s 17% murder rate decline? I kid, of course.)

When I hear that a proposed constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights in Florida enjoys 70% support but “its passage is far from assured,” I’m reminded not only that Florida is a fascist state that deserves ejection from our Union, but that a lot of very, very popular ideas die once the big corporations, to quote a phrase, flood the zone with shit. And when I hear about the anticipated battle over whether the amendment should say “pregnant people” instead of “women,” I think we worry too much about offending other people – seriously, if you’re insistent enough on saying “women” that you’d rather see the amendment die, I don’t want you in my foxhole. Saying “patient” instead was a pretty good way to slice that knot, though. And rest assured that right-wing complaints about the amendment are far, far worse than any battle over diction.

Dahlia Lithwick at Salon argues that calling Justice Alito’s fishing trip imbroglio an “ethics” issue actually diminishes its evil, but since I don’t actually “tend to think of ‘ethics’ scandals in league with failures to use the correct shrimp fork,” I can’t say I agree. I do agree that “(i)t is a big-game safari for access to powerful people,” and that the Justices are actually “the hunted” in that safari. And I also say that we Americans like to flaunt our cynicism, particularly about ethics, because we have far less mastery over our lives than we did 50 years ago, and while we need to struggle to regain that mastery, we also need to shame cynics who strut around like peacocks. (Of course cynicism isn’t as great an evil as dishonesty or hypocrisy; it is a gateway drug to either or both, but maybe I hate it more than I should because I see so many good people become cynics.)

This 2019 article alleging that “Your Cotton Tote is Pretty Much the Worst Replacement for a Plastic Bag” seems like the sort of thing an editor demanded – while it’s true that manufacturing cotton actually uses up a lot more resources than manufacturing plastic does, you must also consider that plastic never breaks down and chokes our oceans and winds up in our bodies at alarming and unhealthy rates, which fact the article does disclose in paragraph 3, but almost dismissively. One might just as easily say that the Chicago Bears were a pretty good team last year except for all the losing, and you would not feel particularly informed by that statement. Also, what about hemp, which would be more durable and which uses up way less water and fertilizer than cotton does? If we ask our “liberal” media, we might never know!

Finally, the Georgia Elections Board has cleared pollworkers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss of all those ridiculous election fraud allegations, and in a sane and decent society, the knowledge that a Republican-dominated board cleared them would be enough to end all the stupid stories and death threats. Sadly, the only reason that’ll ever happen is that folks have moved on to some new outrage manufactured by their right-wing thought-leaders – dirty books, trans folk, it doesn’t matter. Have I mentioned that folks who make death threats are the weakest, most cowardly people on Earth? It is possible I have not mentioned that yet.

Action: concerning paid family leave, communications policy, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact a national paid family/medical leave program, confirm FCC nominees, and pass the Equality 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.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to create a national paid sick/family medical leave program. Yeah, like House Republicans will do that! But, as always, it doesn’t matter what they want; it matters what we want, and we’ve never gotten anything of consequence without demanding it, and sometimes we have to demand it for years. Thus it’s always a good idea to tell your Congressfolk that you’d like the thing that virtually every other nation on Earth has – the peace of mind that if you or your family member gets sick, you won’t have to choose between your job and taking care of them. And if you want to tell them to bring back the 91% tax bracket to pay for it – not that it’d cost that much! -- feel free.

Free Press helps you tell your Senators to confirm FCC Commissioner nominees Geoffrey Starks and Anna Gomez. Mr. Starks is already an FCC Commissioner whose term is about to end, so Senators really have no standing to say he’s not qualified! Ms. Gomez ain’t Gigi Sohn, who was railroaded out of a job she clearly deserved by decidedly lesser individuals like Ted Cruz and Joe Manchin, but she’s good enough – hell, if Tom Wheeler was good enough (as he proved to be!), then certainly Ms. Gomez is good enough. And with a fully-staffed FCC, we can finally spend infrastructure money fairly and we can finally get net neutrality back. Our FCC hasn’t been fully-staffed since Mr. Biden’s inauguration, so let’s get to stepping.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Equality Act. Yeah, Republicans won’t do that, either! And worse, they’ll make up stupid stories about what it’ll supposedly do – that it’ll oppress girls in their own locker rooms (with the “onslaught” of trans girls the bill will call into existence!), or that boys will change sexes merely to dominate girls’ sports (like nobody remembers what they were like at that age!). But the Equality Act would actually prevent governments, banks, employers, and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folks, and that’s enough reason to pass it. That must be why they make up stupid stories about it! God forbid our government actually protect people, after all.

Action: concerning education, monopolies, and banksters.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” block the proposed PGA/LIV merger, and pass the Failed Bank Executives Clawback Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to reject H.R. 5, the so-called “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which would enable parents to ban books, protest the mere existence of trans children, and block vaccinations of their children far more easily than they can now. I’ve long asserted that parents have the right to make decisions on behalf of their children, but parents don’t have the right to make decisions on behalf of everyone else’s children. Too many educators let one activist parent have veto power over every book in their library, so these folks hardly need any more help creating drama and chaos in our public schools. Don’t we teach our kids not to be so dramatic? Or did that go out the window now once we elected Donald Trump?

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk not to grant an antitrust exemption for the proposed PGA/LIV merger, or “alliance,” or “joint framework,” or whatever they’re calling it to make us think it’s something other than what it obviously is. This is the big golfing merger where the PGA Commissioner said out loud that the proposed merger would help “take the competitor off the board,” which is not the kind of thing you can explain away by saying oh, I was high when I said that. Probably Congress doesn’t have an appetite to let this deal go through, since Saudi Arabia is involved. But they shouldn’t let it go through because it’s bad for our economy, and we should remind them of that.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you pass the Failed Bank Executives Clawback Act, which would, as its title says, claw back executive income (including bonuses, options, and stocks) when their bank fails. Hard to believe our laws actually have to come out and say that banksters shouldn’t make money off of failure, but that’s where we are as a civilization. This is an obvious enough statement that the Senate version of the bill has two Republican co-sponsors out of four, while the House version has two out of five; one hates to wait for Republican approval of even the mildest reforms, but their approval does make it a bit more difficult for right-wingers to convince everyone this is all nanny-state.

Penny rants for June 7, 2023.

Ho hum, 11 Oregon counties want to secede from Oregon and join Idaho, and you know why. NBC doesn't report it this way, but I'm pretty sure these folks want to secede over immigration and transgender folk and STOP TEH STEALZ!!!! more than over feeling “used” by Multnomah County, and anyway when will they realize their real enemies aren't haughty cityfolk but big ag corporations making it impossible for them to make a living? And don’t be intimidated by maps showing the size of the counties that would secede, because fewer than 207,000 people inhabit them; for your reference, Congressional districts typically contain 640,000 residents. All 11 counties sit in Oregon’s already heavily-Republican 2nd district; their secession alone wouldn’t flip that seat, although the state legislature might see secession as an opportunity to redraw the boundaries to make the 5th district more friendly to Democrats. And I’ve just given this process way more thought than has anyone trapped in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage in the 2nd district.

When I hear that Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) has declared both his D.C. home and his Arizona home as his primary residence at different times and for different reasons, all I can say is maybe Kyrsten Sinema has a better shot getting re-elected than I thought! Partisan Democrats will tell me this is much ado about nothing, but even though Mr. Gallego appears to have adhered to the letter of the law, good Arizonans won’t just hate that he ever declared D.C. as his primary residence, they’ll also hate that he declared it to get a Veterans Administration loan a year after getting a refi on his Arizona home. And when he says hey, have you seen interest rates lately?, they’ll hate that he bought a $940,000 house with that VA loan, which sure doesn’t seem like the purpose of government assistance. Don’t any of these folks ever give a minute’s thought to how anything they do looks? So many “breaks” you can get in life just aren’t worth it, and if you make over $150,000 a year like Mr. Gallego does, you don’t need them as badly as most folks I know.

Nikki Haley, at a CNN “town hall,” blames the spike in suicidal ideations among teenage girls on – wait for it! – the possibility that there are trans girls in their locker rooms. I’m almost ashamed that I even bothered to look this up, but apparently she referenced a CDC study (CDC, tsk tsk!) saying that nearly a third of teenage girls contemplated suicide in 2021 (a hike from 2019), but you can look at the year 2021 and say maybe the pandemic, which arguably hit schools harder than any other institution, had more to do with that than trans girls in their locker room. You might also note that more Black and Brown girls contemplated suicide than white girls – and you might also imagine that Black and Brown girls had other reasons to contemplate suicide than trans girls in their locker room, like, you know, racism – and of course gay/lesbian/trans/questioning girls also had comparatively high rates. Because we treat these kids like shit, maybe? Anyway, I’ve got good news for you: even if she does another 10 CNN “town halls,” Ms. Haley will never get enough Trumpholes to vote for her.

Around the table: today featuring *half* good news!

Lo and behold, job satisfaction sits at a 35-year high, per a Conference Board survey. At the end, this article finally mentions “higher pay” (it hasn’t been keeping up with inflation, but when does it ever?) as a possible reason for the higher satisfaction, though we also know that folks who weren’t working during the pandemic had time to take stock of their lives and decide they didn’t need all that toxic BS at their particular workplace. (Makes sense, also, that folks with hybrid remote/in-person work arrangements were happier than folks doing just one or the other; now we just need to stop bosses from saying that folks absolutely must commute to work because the economy will die if they don’t, when mostly they just want to spy on workers a little better.)

Minnesota becomes the fourth American state to make phone calls free for prisoners. Big telecom corporations charge prisoners an arm and a leg to make phone calls to their loved ones, because prisoners are literally a captive market, but prisoners who can stay in contact with family members tend not to go back to prison, though private prisons may feel differently about this fact than you or I. Objections range from free phone calls? When did prison become Club Med? (yes, folks have said this to me, sigh) to but you can stuff a burner phone into a dead cat and throw it over the prison wall (that came from the man who served as FCC Chair from 2017-2021), and all I can say to such people is: when does your anger ever bottom out?

Ho hum, big pipeline corporations let their pipes sit out in the sun for years, often without the proper crack-resistant coating, though 50-year-old federal regulations outlaw this. But perhaps, like me, you see the gnarled hand of stock prices über alles here like everywhere else. I mean, these corporations have more than enough money, but they have enslaved themselves to the fiction that if stock prices don’t shoot up every month, they’re doomed. Don’t feel sorry for them, because they have the power to escape, and I rather suspect they just don’t want to, because this particular kind of slavery makes executives very rich – and the rest of us very miserable.

Surprise, surprise, a federal Department of Labor review finds that Iowa’s child labor bill (which Gov. Reynolds hasn’t signed) violates federal law, which seems obvious enough that one might momentarily wonder if Republicans were just creating drama here, by passing a controversial bill they knew wouldn’t see the light of day anyway. I might think that, too, except I can’t believe there’s a vocal minority of regular folks clamoring for kids to work in sweatshops, like there’s a similar minority clamoring to make all abortions illegal. Remember that when they say no one wants to work, the truth is that no one wants to work for dung pellets, which would be every executive’s preferred method of paying workers.

Speaking of actual Republican dramas, Sen. Ted Cruz (E-TX) has launched a very serious Senate probe – into Bud Light’s brief partnership with transgender actress Dylan Mulvaney! And he goes out of his way to refer to Ms. Mulvaney as a “he,” which is very grown up! Is this what you do ahead of a potentially tough re-election campaign? I know people are more ambivalent about transgender folks than I’d like, but at some point these right-wing dramas have to alienate so much of the electorate that Republicans will have to notice. At any rate, I hope Ted Cruz loses his race to a dead shrub. No point to telling me he’s smart when he won’t use his smarts to do good works.

Finally, in the wake of its $787.5 million settlement with Dominion and with another sizable settlement with Smartmatic likely, Fox News has apparently gutted its entire investigative unit, and that’ll teach good Americans not to hold big media corporations accountable! Now, don’t be the one saying they had an investigative unit? because that would be very snarky. But the same Fox executives who trumpeted the Big Lie for the money and then lost a lot of money and now are taking out their mistakes on the rank and file probably think you don’t need to do “investigating” in order to do journalism; they’re wrong, of course, but their attitude is also the cable news norm now. Hence another reminder not to watch cable news, because it’s irredeemably evil.

Around the table: the drama, it burns! Part 398.

Florida Gov. DeSantis signs SB 1580 into law, which means that Florida doctors and health insurers can now simply refuse to provide any health care to anyone if it contradicts their “sincerely held religious, moral, or ethical belief.” Remember, the next time Mr. DeSantis says governing is less about “virtue signaling” and more about “results,” that all of his “results” are all about “virtue signaling,” even if his chief "virtue" is being an asshole. We’ll get another reminder of all that when Neil Gorsuch (the author of Bostock v. Clayton County, you may recall) rules that the bill’s proscriptions against discriminating on the basis of “sex” actually compel Florida doctors to treat transgender folks regardless of their "beliefs."

What is “The Ugly Truth Behind ‘We Buy Ugly Houses,’” according to ProPublica? That HomeVestors preys upon desperate homeowners and isn’t above flat-out lying to them to get them to sell their homes for less. That’s after you consider that HomeVestors does some of its most lucrative advertising in neighborhoods just slammed by a hurricane, and that HomeVestors might not stop bugging you if you just got divorced or if you’re a senior who just broke your hip. And I wouldn’t point to a 96% approval rating if I were them – 4% of your customers hating you is actually a lot.

Ho hum, a lousy ABC/Washington Post poll “Creates” the “Illusion of Public Opinion on Debt Ceiling.” The amazing thing is that even a biased poll which teaches nothing about the issue can’t convincingly argue that people prefer the Republicans’ position – which, to review, is “hold the debt limit hostage to force spending cuts that hurt people.” A mere 26% of poll respondents actually thought we should tie spending cuts to the debt limit, reminding me, once again, of my working theory that about 25% of our electorate is batshit insane. (58% of poll respondents said no to that, but don’t worry: somehow the Post was able to claim that folks were “evenly-divided” on the matter.)

Lengthy Office of Special Counsel report finds that the former U.S. Agency for Global Media “breached editorial firewall regulations, engaged in gross waste of public funds and abused his authority.” Before serving the public, such as he did, this individual was a right-wing documentarian, his most recent film being 2020’s Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, which should clue you in to which President appointed him. If you need another hint: the best people!

As if we needed another reason to rue CNN’s decision to give Donald Trump and his biggest supporters free airtime the other night: America’s Last Journalist, Greg Palast, reminds us that all of Mr. Trump’s ramblings about the “stolen” 2020 election may not have convinced very many good Americans – but it did prompt legislators in several states to pass laws suppressing the vote. They pretended it was all true! You’ll still want to read Mr. Palast’s extensive takedown of 2000 Mules. You won’t convince Trump votaries they’re wrong, because nothing can penetrate a feedback loop of masturbatory rage. But you might be able to stop someone else from entering that loop.

Finally, as if we didn’t have enough of a reason to abandon Twitter to permanent oblivion: Twitter apparently enabled the proliferation of animal snuff films through its autocomplete function. Put in the word “cat” and it would autocomplete to “cat in a blender” which would lead you to some truly evil video footage; put in the word “dog” and it would autocomplete to “dog stabbed by screwdriver” which would lead you to, well, you get the idea. Of course, Twitter responded first by ignoring the issue, then by responding to media inquiries with a poop emoji, and finally by taking down autocomplete for all searches, thus demonstrating that they don’t know what they’re doing and they’re assholes. I left Twitter years ago over much less than this, and I think you should leave Twitter, too, if you value your immortal soul.

Action: concerning debt-limit drama, drug treatment, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your Senators and our President to hold the line against Republican debt-limit drama, and tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject an anti-drug treatment center bill and pass an anti-discrimination bill. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The House passed their debt-limit hostage-taking bill last week – by a mere 217-215 margin – so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to reject any negotiation with the House over this bill and tell your Senators to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, while Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell President Biden to keep standing his ground against Republican hostage-taking. Even Moody’s tells us Republicans would kill three quarters of a million jobs, as they cut services good Americans need – and refuse to tax the rich and corporations any harder – so it's up to us to make Republicans back down. Remember: never negotiate with drama hounds. People who are dramatic all the time need to pay a price.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: People’s Action helps you tell your state legislators to reject SB 165, which would outlaw overdose prevention centers in the Commonwealth. Now you may read the bill and ask: do overdose prevention centers really let people shoot up? Yes – under medical supervision, because most folks don’t just quit drugs cold turkey; in fact, most folks relapse repeatedly while trying to quit, and they might as well relapse in the presence of medical professionals, versus an empty lot somewhere. When politicians try to get between doctors and patients just so they can “look tough on crime,” remember that looking tough ain’t gonna get nobody through the Pearly Gates.

Finally, also for Pennsylvania residents, the ACLU helps you tell your state legislators to pass HB 300, which would prevent Pennsylvania businesses and public places from discriminating against folks based on gender. That includes discrimination against gay/lesbian folks and also against transgender folks. Right-wingers have shifted their hatred from gays to transgender folks, largely because the public at large is more conflicted about the latter; I couldn’t tell you why women are so conflicted, but men are conflicted because men always like knowing who to fuck. I hope saying so at least makes a few people think; in the meantime, we should protect transgender folks from discrimination.

Around the table: the drama, it burns! Part 397.

From the “Our ‘Liberal’ Media Still Sucks!” file: “liberal” media outlets help right-wingers blow up Bud Light’s brief association with a transgender Instagram influencer into a “controversy.” Some folks will complain that FAIR mainly “picks on” articles in the business press, but the notion that business articles must be worse than regular news stories didn’t exactly get handed down on stone tablets from Mt. Sinai. And seriously, this is all a “warning” to big corporations that right-wingers will throw the biggest tantrums over the littlest things? I’ve got a better lesson: nobody should capitulate to tantrums from anyone, ever. Bud Light will learn that when their sales go back up.

When I hear that anti-racist teaching is actually picking up in blue states just as it’s dying out in states like Florida, all I can say is: well, that was always the risk of creating drama! If you go around attacking people all the time, as right-wingers love to do, nobody should be surprised when people strike back. And if you can’t handle the bad things about our nation’s past, like the Chinese Exclusion Act, how do you expect to handle the bad things about your own? How do you expect to grow and build character? Learning about racism, and accepting my role in both problem and solution, has sure built up my character!

Stephen Miller’s so-called America First Legal group has filed an EEOC complaint against Mars. Inc., claiming that its “efforts to increase diversity and representation of minorities within its workforce constitutes discrimination and a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.” This lawsuit looks like drama (after all, Mars makes the green M&Ms that aren’t sexy anymore!), but chances are better than even that they’ll find a right-wing judge, somewhere, with some lawsuit if not this one, who thinks efforts to address discrimination are themselves discrimination, and one sore on the body politic can too easily fester into a disease. If Stephen Miller ever read “Deutsches Requiem,” he clearly decided it wasn’t a cautionary tale so much as an instruction manual.

No need to think too deeply about Joe Manchin’s vow that he’ll help repeal his own bill if President Biden continues to use it to boost renewable energy production. His argument is a cluster bomb of stupid – he negotiated the damn bill; did he simply forget that boosting clean energy production was one of its main purposes? – but it’s also the kind of desperate posturing politicians do when they’re about to lose re-election by 20 points. When he leaves office, nobody will remember anything about Joe Manchin except the damage he did, and that’s a hell of a thing to take to the Pearly Gates.

From the “Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama Drama!” file: certain “friends” are supposedly encouraging former U.S. House Rep./lewd photo-taker Anthony Weiner to run for office again – to “take (the city) back from AOC,” according to his right-wing radio co-host, Curtis Sliwa. Trigger warning: by the end of the story, some Democratic pol will talk about “the crime wave we have” like that’s a real thing that’s happening. So let’s see, any regular Americans urging Mr. Weiner to run for office? No – only his celebrity “friends.” Still, it can’t hurt to remind everyone that if you’re the Medicare-for-All Guy, you can’t also be the Sending Dick Pics to Women Who Aren't Your Wife Guy.

Finally, from Rick Wilson we receive a dire warning that Tucker Carlson might actually be the individual best able to take on Donald Trump in the Republican Presidential primary. Why, it could even wind up as a Trump/Carlson ticket, which would make Mr. Trump a more formidable candidate, though Mr. Carlson could also win the nomination and Mr. Trump could then run as an “independent” because grift, and that might be enough to deliver even Texas to Joe Biden in 2024. In the meantime, I keep thinking we’re at the point where Fox will start replacing their on-air “talent” with actual rabid raccoons – and then I keep learning exactly how many hungry right-wing drama hounds there still are.

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

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

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

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

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

Penny rants for April 5, 2023.

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

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

Around the table: folly runs amok!

Matt Stoller details the angry exchanges he had with antitrust lawyers at a conference, and as I hear these lawyers make bad arguments about why things should have stayed exactly the way they’d been for the last 40 years, I’m reminded that virtually everyone who’s ever had to do their job differently has reacted angrily about it. Including me! But we shouldn’t coddle people when they do that, no matter how powerful they are. That also goes for the police officers who claim that they “can’t do their job” under reformer D.A.s.

G. Samantha Rosenthal at The Conservation reminds us that “gender-affirming care has a long history in the U.S. -- and not just for transgender people.” When you confront the fact that yes, some too-short boys and too-tall girls have received gender-affirming care to make themselves “more male” or “more female,” you’ll recognize the problem from all those abortion bans that won’t let folks with ectopic pregnancies get abortions. Why, it’s like this has been the right’s plan all along – create the drama now, watch as history and better argument win the day, and then rail against history and better argument to create more drama. Jorge Luis Borges wrote about similar themes in “Deutsches Requiem.”

Ho hum, many of the same right-wing “pundits” who call Donald Trump’s indictment “politically-motivated” played a totally different tune when former Senator/Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards got indicted for virtually the same crime in 2011. Of course, these clowns don’t care about their hypocrisy, or about history, or about memory, even, and whatever short-term gain they think they’re getting now, they’re not going to enjoy taking all of that to the Pearly Gates. In the meantime, let us recall that the woman Mr. Edwards wronged – his wife, Elizabeth – was the talent in that couple.

A U.S. District Court judge blocks Tennessee’s anti-drag law for at least two weeks, saying that “the Statute’s broad language clashes with the First Amendment’s tight constraints” and that the bill could ban drag shows “just about anywhere,” including “a citizen’s private residence,” “a camping ground at a national park,” or even the internet. I don’t know who gets to rule on it next, but perhaps Tennessee Republicans ought to declare victory and retreat here – I mean, as with abortion bans and anti-trans laws, they got their drama here, and the only way they’ll be able to create more drama about it is if the drag shows go on.

Finally, a jury convicts Douglass Mackey of conspiring to suppress votes in 2016. You remember those social media posts telling folks to “stay home” and vote for Hillary over text or social media? Well, that was him, and a few other “influencers.” Gratifying as it is to hear any of the “lock her up” crowd get justice, it’s still like they only put the little people in jail. Mr. Mackey would likely bristle at that characterization, what with his 58,000 Twitter followers or whatever, but it’s true: he’s small potatoes, and his hero Donald Trump would certainly describe him that way, though maybe not to his face.

Around the table: down with right-wing rage!

You need only remember one thing about all of the Murdoch empire’s recent assertions that trans people are causing all the mass shootings now: to paraphrase Neil Gabler, three incidents of chicken pox don’t make an epidemic. Now, the vast super-majority of angry white men mass murdering people? That’s an epidemic! While it’s sad to see right-wingers still doing the just-let-me-tell-you-three-stories shtick all these years later, it’s even sadder that trans hatred will be the gateway drug to right-wing masturbatory rage for some of your friends and neighbors once they suffer a few reversals in life.

Now speaking of actual drugs, our FDA approved naloxone, the drug that can reverse opioid overdoses, for sale over the counter this past week, giving the lie to right-wingers who constantly tell us that our government can’t ever do anything right. And while drug abusers may not have the presence of mind to use such a drug, their loved ones more likely will. No this will not become some “get out of death card” that will “cause more people to become drug addicts.” That’s not how drug addiction works, except in the rage-addled minds of right-wingers.

When I heard that outgoing Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, whom nobody likes, opined before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that Starbucks has never broken our labor laws! – at which point Sen. Sanders reminded him that he was under oath – I wondered if maybe our labor laws were so bad that there was actually a chance he might be right! Alas, even though our labor laws are pretty bad, he was still not right. I guess his next defense will be that he really doesn’t believe Starbucks ever actually broke the law, which is exactly the kind of post-modern sleaze right-wingers only ever tolerate from CEOs. Our best and brightest entrepreneurs, ladies and gentlemen!

Ho hum, a right-wing judge who’s struck down Obamacare before has struck down the law’s mandate that health insurance corporations cover preventative care for free, because what’s a judge for, except to cut down laws that actually help good Americans? Possibly this ruling will go down in flames just like his last one did – though our Supreme Court has gotten a lot worse since then, I’m pretty confident they’ll at least narrow its scope – but it doesn’t matter that an employer’s “conscience” tells them they’d be promoting homosexuality or promiscuity if they covered PrEP, because HIV can infect anyone. Gosh, even Nancy Reagan knew that.

Former Trump Organization employees told New York Times columnist Maggie Haberman that they “were really happy” over the Big Man’s indictment, which is easily the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! Seriously, if you’ve ever worked for a bad boss – and I’d say the chances are close to 100% that you have! – you know this to be true. That’s before we even consider all the contractors Mr. Trump has stiffed over the years.

Finally, a jury finds Minnesota Republican operative Anton Lazzaro guilty of five counts of sex trafficking minors, plus one count of conspiracy. You can’t help but think it’s always it’s the right-wingers who accuse liberals of sex trafficking kids – but it’s always the right-wingers we find actually sex trafficking kids. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.

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: why we need Hell, part 744.

I hope they’re right that “A Four Day Work Week is Closer Than You Think,” though I hasten to point out that most of the studies done on the matter get done outside the United States, and that those studies tend to concentrate on white-collar work (blue-collar work still exists, you know!). But I also hasten to point out that a four-day work week is also a job creation scheme, since (again, more so in blue-collar jobs) there’s still going to be the same amount of work to do. (In case you were wondering, workers made the same pay for fewer work days in these studies.)

Ho hum, our Fed Reserve Chair, having lately justified bailouts for Silicon Valley Bank because of the “systemic risk” its failure supposedly poses, approved a merger between SVB and Boston Private Bank and Trust by claiming the resulting behemoth posed no “significant risk” to our banking system. Of course now he’s promising a “thorough, transparent, and swift review” of the whole issue, but I presume the resulting review will only be swift. At least we have anti-monopolists at our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for as long as Congress allows us to have that.

French President Macron tries to unilaterally raise that nation’s pension age from 62 to 64 – a matter the good citizens of France have been protesting in the streets for two months now – and as a result faces a no-confidence vote in Parliament. He thought he had a hostage situation ready to spring on them: don’t oppose my will, or you’ll get a Le Pen government! And it may work, but his actual duty – to adhere to the people’s very obvious will – remains undone.

From the “What an Understated Headline” file: ProPublica reports that “Wealthy Executives Make Millions Trading Competitors’ Stock With Remarkable Timing.” I can see why a major news organization would put it that way – the information comes from that leaked trove of IRS files ProPublica acquired in 2021, which won't alone prove to a judge and/or jury that the timing was more than “remarkable” – but we’re not schmucks, and we also realize that stronger laws against insider trading and executives serving on multiple corporate boards would help stop this, ah, remarkable phenomenon. So would not worshiping at the altar of the stock market the way we’ve done for the last 40-odd years.

The Iraq War turns 20 today, and Jon Schwarz at The Intercept asks, of the war’s architects, “Where Are They Now?” Short answer: doing quite well, just like they don’t deserve, even Judith Miller, who I guess is the Useful Idiot of this clown car since her water-carrying couldn’t keep her out of jail. You’ll also learn that Donald Rumsfeld’s last vacation home was once the home of Edward Covey, “notorious for breaking unruly slaves for other farmers,” and that Ms. Miller’s last piece for the New York Times had a hilarious title – hilarious, at least, until you remember how many people it helped kill, maim, or torture.

Finally, and this also risks being a ho-hum, right-wing “activist” who dressed up as Julius Caesar at school board meetings to make some kind of point about transgender kids actually had a long, long history of bad and criminal behavior. Much as I want to say he’s paid his debt to society and that arrests and accusations aren't convictions, I also want to say that his trajectory from armed-standoff-with-cops (for which he served 17 years in the big house) to incoherent transgender protestor suggests that he's spent most of his time on Earth lapping up whatever the right’s dealers of masturbatory rage serve up at the moment. In a civilized society, you have to pay your debts and you have to do better in the future.

Action: concerning banksters, anti-trans posturing, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strengthen banking regulations, reject the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, and pass the Ensuring Women’s Right to Reproductive Freedom Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to make our banking regulations stronger. Specifically, you’ll ask Congress to insist that banks with over $50 billion in assets follower stricter regulations; that’s what the Dodd-Frank Act did in 2010, but in 2018 Congress raised that limit to $250 billion – and one of the most ardent supporters of that change was none other than the CEO of the Silicon Valley Bank that recently failed! Why, it’s almost like that was the whole idea. We shouldn’t stop there – I eagerly await the “outlaw hedge funds” action alert – but we can certainly communicate our will on this particular matter right now, while the iron’s hot, as it were.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would merely prevent any transgender or intersex kids from participating in school sports. Too many politicians don’t want to solve real problems – like, hey, we fund boys’ sports way more than we fund girls’ sports, and too many kids get sexually abused by folks they trust – but they sure do have time to swing their balls in our faces about transgender folks. And for the umpteenth time, no boys are going to become girls just to excel in girls' sports that (at best!) they'll spend the rest of their life getting paid less to do! It's like they don't remember what being a hormone-addled teenager was like – or hope you don't.

Free and Fair Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ensuring Women’s Right to Reproductive Freedom Act. This bill would prohibit state law enforcement from preventing women from crossing state lines to get abortions where they’re legal, and would not only empower state Attorneys General to enforce such a law, but for private citizens to get civil relief under such a law. Maybe Marco Rubio will call such a thing a boon for trial lawyers! Which would be a clever way of saying nothing about abortion, I suppose. Anyway, why do we need so many trial lawyers? Because we have so many powerful wrongdoers!

Around the table: pushing back against bankster horror.

Biden Administration announces that the Deposit Insurance Fund, and not taxpayers, will make depositors whole after the Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed; DIF funds come from fees assessed to banks, not taxes per se. I did not know the DIF currently had $100 billion in it! So feel free to push back against know-nothing right-wingers who declare it “just another bailout,” and also feel free to ask if any of them did a damn thing in 2008. I mean, many right-wingers did, but many also did not!

Ho hum, Silicon Valley Bank employed two former aides to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to lobby our government for weakened banking regulations, such as the kind that permitted Silicon Valley Bank to fail last week. Yes, the 2018 legislation weakening Dodd-Frank reforms (which were themselves not so vigorous to begin with) was a bipartisan mess, but few lobbied for it harder than Rep. McCarthy did. Presumably he will feel the appropriate amount of shame and make amends for his mistakes. I kid, of course.

Norfolk Southern sure is having a bad winter, as another train derailed in Alabama as its CEO testified before a group of angry Senators, the second such derailment since the East Palestine derailment, though neither of those, thankfully, carried toxic and/or carcinogenic chemicals. But heartened as I am to see Sen. Vance (R-OH) actually argue for something that might make a difference, I sure hope this event doesn’t become another in a long list of times our Senators grilled a CEO hard before letting him do whatever he wanted.

Pew Research Center poll finds that a staggering 83% of Black folks think our economic system either “needs major changes” or “needs to be completely rebuilt,” and I’m sure right-wingers will use this data to assert that “Black folks can’t govern themselves.” But given most Americans’ experience with capitalism, particularly lately, that argument won’t convince anyone outside the Batshit Insane Quarter (hereafter referred to as the BIQ) of the electorate, and likely not all of them, either.

Jason W. Osborne at The Conversation notes that the seemingly-exponential growth of legalized gambling “may pose a threat to college athletes,” and if you’ve ever heard (name of sport) is rigged! in your work locker room, you already know there’ll be more and more threats against athletes perceived to have cost gamblers money. And it’ll get worse, as gambling replaces work as the main money-maker in our economy for too many Americans – not that I could blame them much, since we’ve all watched financial predation replace work as the main money-maker in our economy over the last few decades.

Finally, I guess I feel a little sorry for Tennessee’s Lieutenant Governor after he got caught slapping heart-emojis on photos of a particular half-naked gay man on social media, though I must also note that his “evolving” views on LGBTQ+ issues have done nothing about the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Tennessee. But his spokeshack’s suggestion that he was just connecting with a constituent demands mockery! We shouldn’t have to send butt-grams to get our elected officials’ attention, after all.

Action: concerning education and voting rights.

Long story short: tell Florida to teach the AP African-American studies course, tell North Dakota to stop targeting gay and trans books in book bans, and tell Pennsylvania to reject proposed sore loser constitutional amendments. 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 state legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Organize For helps you tell the Florida state Board of Education to let high schools there teach African-American studies. The AP African-American Studies program may be new, but that doesn’t mean it “significantly lacks educational value,” as Gov. DeSantis says. And don’t take it for granted that Florida already teaches the Black experience, not just because Florida Republicans have created a lot of education drama lately, but because a lot of Floridian crybabies pretend to be “offended” when someone points out the South embraced slavery and Jim Crow with both arms. But facts are facts, and Americans face them.

North Dakota residents, take note: state legislators want to throw librarians in jail if they don’t remove “sexually-explicit” books from public school libraries. And “sexually-explicit” includes any book about gay or trans issues, though those books aren’t “sexually explicit” just because of their subject matter. Another way of putting it: sexuality isn’t “explicit,” let alone “obscene,” merely because it’s different from yours, and certainly not if you’re not actually watching it. So Openstates.org helps North Dakota residents find their state legislators. And remember we have a word for book banning efforts that target folks oppressed due to race or sexuality, and that word is fascist.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause still helps you tell your state house Reps to reject the Republican suite of sore loser constitutional amendments that would enshrine Voter ID in our state constitution – remember when Tom Corbett’s government couldn’t make Voter ID work, even before our state Supreme Court struck it down? – and put the state’s (Republican) Auditor General in charge of elections. That latter item, especially, isn’t just sore loser thinking but short-term thinking – what if a Democrat wins the Auditor General race in 2024? Then Republicans will amend our state constitution again, I guess. You’ve heard that power without wisdom is evil? Republicans prove it every day.

Action: concerning social media, monopolies, and intrusive government.

Long story short: tell big social media corporations to stop spreading election-related BS on their platforms, tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, and tell Florida to stop collecting information on girls’ periods. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell big social media corporations Meta, Google and TikTok to stop passing along election-related BS. We’re all aware that lies spread on these platforms before the truth can even get its pants on, but if you recall Facebook’s role in helping Myanmar oppress Rohingya Muslims a few years ago, or have noted Meta’s rubber-stamping of ads calling for violence in Brazil (the runoff Presidential election is this coming Sunday), you know the situation is even more dire than that. And you also know that social media algorithms push evil right-wing content on you even if you’re King of the Liberals, so we need to brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR once again.

Both Demand Progress and Public Citizen help you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger. Mainstream media reports make it seem like it’s just Kroger and Albertsons joining together, but these corporations already own over a dozen big grocery corporations, so why should they get to consolidate their power further? Our choice is clear: either we allow big corporations to funnel even more unearned money toward their executives, which right-wingers seem to think is our only duty as a civilization – or we stop corporations from gaining even more power to price-gouge, which more closely resembles our actual duty as a civilization.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell the Florida High School Athletic Association (or FHSAA) to stop collecting information on female athletes’ periods. Yes, this is where we are in some areas of the country: where anti-gay and anti-trans insanity reaches a fever pitch, they start monitoring when you have your period, for your own safety and security, of course. How offensive: they do it for the “safety” and “security” of the small, weak people whom right-wingers herd from one manufactured outrage to the next, so they don’t ever connect with the real outrages that should drive them to act. “Leave girls alone” should be the motto of our public education system, even in places that aren’t Florida.

Action: concerning transgender, data privacy, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell the government of Paraguay to legally recognize transgender folks, tell our FTC to protect our data privacy, and tell our Justice Department to break up ticketing monopolies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Paraguay to recognize transgender folks there. You know how Republicans in America want nobody to play a sport with any folks other than those in the same birth gender? In Paraguay, they’d get their wish on that and many, many other things – trans folks literally can’t get the documentation that would match their gender identity, plus they get banned from protesting, or beaten up when they don’t get banned. Trans folks ain’t hurting nobody other than the testosterone-addled men who want to fuck everyone, so we should all be giving them what they need – which, for many, is the right to be seen and recognized and then left the hell alone.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to protect good Americans’ data privacy as vigorously as possible. Our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) issued pretty good privacy rules in 2016, but then the Republican Congress of 2017 repealed them using the “resolution of disapproval” process, and that’s an evil act for which far too few of them have been punished. Still, we ain’t powerless, especially now that our FTC has decided to weigh in on the matter, and especially now that our FTC isn’t packed with right-wing ideologues who think corporations should police themselves, even though corporations will never police themselves. So let’s get to it.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division to break up Live Nation Entertainment. Still known more popularly as “Ticketmaster” over a decade after Live Nation absorbed it in a 2010 merger, it now dominates over two-thirds of the ticketing and live events market, and that’s reason enough to blow them up. But if you’ve been to any live show lately, I bet you can think of a few other reasons – like huge surprise fees and higher prices that sometimes go up even after you put the ticket in your cart! And Judd Legum at Popular Information describes even worse behavior; you’ll definitely want to blow them up after reading it.

Action: concerning voting rights, discrimination, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell state Secretaries of State to make it easier for college students to vote, tell the Biden Administration to stop discrimination in health care, and tell our USPS to fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

RISE helps you tell state Secretaries of State to make it easier for college students to vote. You’ll hear right-wingers say college kids aren’t really invested in the area where they’re going to school, though, hey, nobody likes people who act like the Emotion Police! Right-wingers also love saying you should have to work harder, not easier, to vote, though if you have to “earn” rights, they're not really rights! Of course their real problem is that college kids don’t vote Republican very often, but if they don’t like how they vote, maybe they should try attracting their vote, instead of suppressing it. That's what a bootstrapper would do!

Moms Rising helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to enact the most vigorous rule possible prohibiting discrimination in health care. Moms Rising also helps you describe how you’ve faced discrimination in health care; chances are, if you’re Black or Brown or female or gay or transgender, you have, whether it’s a doctor dismissing symptoms because “Black women always exaggerate” (yes, some doctors say that!) or a doctor refusing to treat a trans patient because of his “religious” “conscience.” I’ve said it before, but if you won’t treat people because of your “religious” “beliefs,” you need to find another profession – maybe one that doesn’t involve service.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell President Biden to install two more members of our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors so the Board can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Who really, really deserves it – he’s cutting services, raising prices, and slashing jobs like this is some private corporation he can bleed for his own benefit or his shareholders’. But our Postal Service is a government agency that belongs to us, and thus should serve us, not some corporatist ideology. One of the main reasons they should serve us? They deliver a lot of our life-saving medicines through the mail. And if we want our Postal Service to do that right, we have to get rid of the bosses who’d do it wrong.

Action: concerning political prisoners, discrimination in health care, and climate change.

Long story short: tell the government of Egypt to release Alaa Abdel Fattah, tell our HHS Department to prevent discrimination in health care, and tell our DOT to properly measure the climate change emissions caused by our transportation system. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Egypt to release Alaa Abdel Fattah from prison. So let’s play “what are the charges?” In 2013 he got 15 years for, dig this, “organizing a political protest without a permit”; any government that’ll give you 15 years for that is a snowflake government which will resort to any tyranny to oppress its people. Eventually they shortened that sentence, but in 2021 gave him five years for “broadcasting false news,” another charge favored by snowflake governments. They even tried a “shooting at soldiers” charge in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, but couldn’t make it stick! They should let him out before they embarrass themselves further.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the most vigorous anti-discrimination-in-health-care rule possible. The Affordable Care Act authorizes our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to enact rules protecting good Americans from discrimination, and a lot of folks experience it, from the person who doesn’t speak English well getting post-surgery instructions only in English to the transgender person not getting care because their doctor doesn’t like them, or the Black woman getting her symptoms dismissed because their doctor doesn’t like them. All of that’s horrible, and nobody’s “religious” “beliefs” should allow them to inflict it on their patients.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our Department of Transportation to issue the most vigorous greenhouse gas emission tabulation rules possible. So we can better fight climate change! You can guess the Republican response to DOT’s proposed rule – that it would be a “burden” on corporations. They’re so law-and-order about detaining Black folks indefinitely, but not so much about corporations polluting your air and water. Funny how that works; you might almost think the amount of corporate money they get for their campaigns warps their thinking! And that’s why we have to get in their grills about it.

Action: concerning Afghan refugees, credit reporting, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, reform our nation’s credit reporting system, and pass the Equality 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.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8685/S. 4787, the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would let more good Afghan citizens escape the Taliban, as long as they meet certain requirements, like serving in our military or the former government’s military. If anyone asks you why we care more for refugees than Americans, just ask: why does it have to be either-or? I mean, are we a great nation or not? A great nation is good to all people, and that includes those who a) have already met fairly stringent requirements to stay here and b) were displaced by our military adventures in the first place. When our leaders won’t be accountable, we have to make them be accountable.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to overhaul our credit reporting system in America. It’s bad enough this three-digit number aims to define us – particularly when it also stands in the way of us getting a good house or a good job – but in America credit scores don’t even define us particularly well! Credit reporting corporations often get those scores wrong – through incompetence or malice, does it really matter? – and about 20% of credit reports have mistakes. One of the things you’ll ask for is a public credit scoring agency; that’s a terrific idea, and I bet the Equifaxes of the world sling a lot of BS about it.

Finally, the Human Rights Campaign helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The bill passed 18 months ago, and just because we’re trying to get 10 Republicans to vote for the Respect for Marriage Act doesn’t mean we should hold their feet to the fire about this bill, too, because this bill would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)” would be one of the reasons bankers, landlords, and employers (among others) couldn’t discriminate against you. So if folks come at you with rubbish like TEH BOYZ WILLZ PLAYZ TEH GURLZ SPORTZ!!!!, remind them what the bill’s really about – preventing the powerful from hurting good Americans.

Around the table: centrists, right-wingers, and liars still suck, part 833.

Factcheck.org issues an expansive report “Correcting Misinformation About Dr. Fauci,” which has unfortunately proven to be an Augean task. Read the whole thing, since he’s going to be a Republican villain in this year’s midterm elections even though he deserves better – and, more importantly, we deserve better. Even when he said (in February 2020) that “right now” COVID infection risk was “low,” he was, strictly speaking, right – and he’s always acted with more honesty and integrity than all his critics who pretend to mishear what he’s saying or cast aspersions upon his motivations with no evidence other than the rage they want to provoke in others.

Had you been thinking that the Sinemanchin axis hasn’t done much to foil President Biden’s appointees in a 50-50 Senate? Turns out they’ve just been picking their spots, with Sen. Sinema, in particular, personally scuttling the appointment of an Elizabeth Warren ally to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sounds like an unimportant office, right? It’s not: it helps federal regulations get written more quickly and efficiently, so I guess this is another reason corporations call Sen. Sinema “heroic.” Now would be a good time to remind everyone that if she goes into lobbying after her Senate term, as some expect, it won’t be because of her relationships with Democratic Senators, since those are all in flames. It’ll be because of her relationships with Republican Senators. Have you seen her photographed with anyone else? No, you have not. There’s a reason for that.

Ho hum, Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters has been scrubbing his campaign website of any claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election, even though he’s trafficked in such claims plenty of times. That’s what you’d have to do, I guess, if you know (and if I know, I’m sure he knows) that election denialism turns off independent voters. Still, he said it, so Mark Kelly should run ads about it. Note well, also, that Mr. Masters will have a much tougher time “scrubbing” his remarks about privatizing Social Security, which exist on tape, and therefore the internet, and therefore forever.

BFD that more Pennsylvania Republican politicians have endorsed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro, because Republican voters don’t listen to their “leaders” anymore, not when Dear Leader Trump (or his Chosen One, Doug Mastriano) speaks. These Republicans know that as surely as I do, and they also know that the more outspoken Republican support Mr. Shapiro gets, the more he’ll feel pressured to move rightward. I don’t even think these Republicans would be unhappy if Mr. Mastriano wins! In any case, I hope Mr. Shapiro understands that his high-profile Republican supporters don’t hold many cards here.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph now right-wingers are harassing children’s hospitals in at least five cities for supposedly performing gender-affirming surgery on trans teens which they’re not even doing. I’d say have they no shame?, but really, that ship sailed when they started calling everyone who opposed the Iraq war a “traitor.” Just imagine the worst thing a human being can do, and in a few short years (or months!) you’ll see a right-winger proudly doing it. I’m not even anxious to blame social media for spreading lies about children's hospitals, because assholes only care about setting other people off, and it doesn’t matter with what.

Finally, did I say just two days ago that maybe Mehmet Oz’s Senate campaign isn’t going as badly as we all think? Well, scratch that: Mr. Oz tells a radio interviewer, in re recent attacks on the health of his opponent, John Fetterman, that “(t)he campaign’s saying lots of things. My position is – I can only speak to what I’m saying.” Few Americans care about the difference between what dark money groups say and what candidates say, so they sure ain’t gonna care about the difference between what candidates say and what their own campaigns say. And if there really is a difference, then the candidate doesn’t know what he’s doing! It’s his own campaign! These Trumpholes always strut around when things go well and then act so powerless when they screw up; I’m sick of it.

Around the table: from bad airlines to bad education leadership.

Matt Stoller explains why airlines run so badly these days, and proposes a number of solutions to make them run better. Long story short: re-regulate them, and not just for our good, but for theirs, since regulating them as a public utility also guarantees them a certain amount of income, and the airline industry actually does suffer a lot more from external events (cough COVID cough) than other industries do. I bet the airline CEOs won’t go for it, since all they really care about is how much unearned money they’re making, but at some point we gotta talk to them like the whiny little brats they are.

David Moore at FAIR explains why polling “telling” us that most Americans think what’s happening at our Southern border is a “crisis” or an “invasion” is bunkum. If you ask “do you think what’s happening at our Southern border is a crisis” without giving respondents any other response option like, say, “a serious problem,” respondents will feel more pressure to say “crisis.” The “invasion” question was a true-false question (which pollsters rarely do, people hesitating to say “false” as they do) which gave you four options: “completely true,” “somewhat true,” “completely false,” or “don’t know,” and if you counted two “true” options and one “false” option, you know why that question’s bunkum, too – and you know more than at least two major media outlets, apparently. Hate to pile on, but “invasion” is one of those words right-wingers torture until it tells them what they want to hear. You know, like “caravan.” Or “conservative.”

Wondering if maybe a college degree is prohibitively expensive on purpose? Then you’ll want to note that an Eisenhower/Nixon/Reagan advisor said in 1970 that we were in “danger” of having an “educated proletariat,” and that right-wingers like then-Governor Reagan were already laying the groundwork for what the National Review called a “system of full tuition charges supplemented by loans which students must pay out of their future income.” James Madison, as it happens, had a much more sanguine view of publicly-funded education than those who would claim to be his ideological descendants – though Edmund Burke, you may know from his Reflections on the French Revolution, thought the working classes were incapable of deep thought. I don’t blame Mr. Burke very much for that – by the measure of his time, he was a liberal, and if you don’t believe me on that, believe Russell Kirk, who said he was a liberal up until his Reflections. I do blame contemporary right-wingers, however for not absorbing over two centuries of intellectual progress. The good news? They’re worse at covering up their evil than Ronald Reagan was.

In a peripherally-related note, here’s another reason the Biden student debt relief plan won’t increase inflation: because “debt payments are spread out over years, if not decades. The inflation impact depends on the extent to which savings in monthly payments are channeled into consumer spending.” (Italics in original, believe it or not.) Also too, canceling all student loan debt would free up an amount consumer spending equaling less than one-quarter of one percent of the total amount of consumer spending, so yeah, don’t listen to anyone crying BUT TEH INFLASHUNZ!!!!! Besides, if the payment moratorium ends in January, as the Biden Administration has proposed, then inflation ought to come down a tiny bit, shouldn’t it?

I think suggestions of Mehmet Oz’s impending downfall in Pennsylvania’s Senate race this year are a bit premature. Does attacking John Fetterman for his recent stroke mean Mr. Oz has “just had it,” or does it mean he’s actually counterpunching effectively for once? If he’d ever eaten a vegetable he wouldn’t have stroked out does have a crude humor about it, after all, and though many folks would think going after a guy’s near-death experience a low blow, others would be annoyed to hear that guy was sick and maybe hasn’t been fully truthful about it. And the article doesn’t mention Mr. Oz’s other recent counterpunch – that John Fetterman lived off his parents until he was 50. Neither of these counterpunches is true, but they still might resonate with low-attention voters. Some of them might even feel sorry for Mr. Oz, even though all his wounds are self-inflicted. I mean, seriously, did you see that bag of carrots? He wonders why it’s $4? It’s bigger than my left thigh!

Finally, a school district just northwest of Dallas, TX, votes to forbid any discussion (or recognition) of transgender issues in their schools. It’s like they said waaaaaaaah don’t make me expand my mind or heart! The good news? Most of the 200 comments from actual community members about their proposal opposed it, which means, once again, that the people are far wiser than their leaders. It’s almost like that’s been a theme here in America for decades now. It’s a shame we have such problems getting rid of bad leaders; part of that problem, of course, is we don’t get very many good leaders stepping forward anymore – maybe more than we used to, but still not enough.

Around the table: how billionaires could ruin even more of the world, and other horrors.

Surprise, surprise: Work Opportunity Tax Credits – which aim to help marginalized folks get permanent jobs – too often go to corporations that give such folks temporary work. Which makes it what, class? Corporate welfare! Turns out this is especially true for workers with felonies in their past, which is why we’ve tried to “ban the box” on job applications. Right-wingers will cite this example as YET ANOTHURZ REASONZ TEH GUBMINTZ DOESN’TZ WORKZ!!!!! – even though the Work Opportunity Tax Credit is a right-wing policy prescription from the ‘90s! – while reasonable people will more likely say we ought to at least reform the program.

Ho hum, Pennsylvania Republicans appear to be rallying around their gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano, despite Mr. Mastriano’s long history of being a right-wing extremist. This is not exactly unexpected! I often chide Democrats for their lack of courage, but we shouldn’t underestimate the cowardice of Republican politicians, either. Still, Mr. Shapiro leads by 26 points among independents in one poll, which is the clearest sign that while Democrats should stay on their guard, they shouldn’t panic. I also think (contra at least one GOP operative) that concentrating on abortion and election denialism is a winning combo for Democrats pretty much everywhere this year. People hate having their rights taken away, and independents hate people who can't stop whining about things that happened two years ago already.

When I hear that Arizona and Nevada will probably have their share of Colorado River water cut, and all 40 million Americans who rely on the Colorado will likely face some pain in the near future, I’m reminded that when I was in Arizona over a decade years ago I thought the Colorado River was running awfully low, and that less than a decade before that when I was in Nevada I thought the same thing, though it wasn’t as pronounced. I also thought that maybe running all those fountains at Las Vegas casinos wasn’t such a good idea. I mean, between that and everyone’s drinking and bathing water, the choice should be easy.

3rd District federal judge blocks Utah law barring trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams, writing that blocking trans girls, but not cis girls, from sports teams represents “plainly unfavorable treatment.” Sadly, Utah still “vets” transgender athletes by “evaluat(ing) a player's wingspan, weight, and height – and whether a player is taking hormone blockers – to determine if a transgender girl, in particular, might have an unfair advantage in a sport by being born male,” which isn’t just creepy, it’s stupid. One player with a wider-than-expected wingspan for her age automatically spells victory, as if no opponent could possibly strategize around her? Gosh, too many people want to win before they even play anymore.

Our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) certifies a switchblade flying car (so named because the wings could fit under the car’s chassis) as airworthy, meaning it’s ready for test flights. I’ll admit flying cars have always intrigued me, and not just because I don't ever want to sit in a traffic jam again again. Many regulatory obstacles remain, and of course the proper attitude toward those obstacles isn’t DITCH ALLZ TEH REGULASHUNZ!!!!! but “let’s make a flying car that’s safe on both ground and air.” After that, it’ll take a long, long time for regular folks to be able to afford a flying car – unless gajillionaires buy up the corporations that make it, in which we’ll never be able to afford it.

Finally, some very good news: our FDA has greenlighted over-the-counter hearing aids, which could be in stores as early as October. The most expensive OTC hearing aids will cost a little less than one-eighth as much as prescription hearing aids, which most health insurers, private and public, don’t cover (you remember Sinemanchin being on the wrong side of that policy discussion last year too, right?), and while even $300 (for the cheapest OTC hearing aid) is a lot of money, more folks will be able to get them – not least because they’ll be dealing with the pharmacists who are both more plentiful and more accessible than audiologists. One also hopes they’ll eventually come down in price and help break the hearing aid monopolies. But again, if billionaires buy them up, all those bets are off.

Action: concerning agriculture, law and order, and gay rights.

Long story short: tell our USDA to make contracts between big ag corporations and small farmers more transparent, tell our Justice Department to prosecute Donald Trump for his naked attempt to subvert the will of the people during the 2020 election, and tell 15 states to let gay and trans folks adopt children . Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to force big ag corporations to be far more transparent in their contracts with small farmers. Yeah, I’d break up the big ag monopolies myself, but USDA Secretary Vilsack – yeah, he’s back, after such a great run the first time! – has shown little appetite for that, and you can go ahead and mention that in your comment if you like. But forcing big ag corporations like Tyson to spell out what’s in the contracts they sign with poultry farmers ain’t nothing. And we really should be prioritizing the farmers that grow the food over the corporations that sell it. I hope that doesn’t sound too old-fashioned.

Common Cause helps you tell our Justice Department to prosecute Donald Trump. If we’ve learned anything from the January 6 Commission over the last few weeks, it’s that Donald Trump knew he lost the election but tried his damnedest to nullify the will of 81 million voters anyway. I love how they always talk about the “75 million voters” who felt “disenfranchised” by the result. Of course, it was 74 million voters; one million voters isn’t a rounding error. But we should never allow this man near our sacred public offices again, and we need to hold him accountable for abusing the trust we solemnly placed in him in 2016, even though he lost the popular vote then by three million votes.

Finally, Care2 helps you demand that gay and trans folks can adopt children everywhere. If they want to outlaw abortion and say “just put the kid up for adoption,” then anyone who otherwise meets state requirements for being a good parent should get a chance to adopt the kid! It’s stupid to bring more unwanted children into the world and then say “not you” to folks who want them! And yet 15 states still prohibit gay and trans folks from adopting, and they include only two states (Virginia and Pennsylvania) that gave their electoral votes to Mr. Biden in 2020. That makes the job daunting, doesn’t it? But duty is duty, and right is right, and our duty to communicate what’s right doesn’t change because it’s a heavier lift.

Around the table: "woke heat maps," "suck on that," and other absurdities.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph now Democratic “moderates” in the House want to pass a reconciliation bill without even the mild tax reforms the Senate appears to have agreed upon. Someone needs to remind Rep. Gottheimer that the only reason, and I do mean *only* reason, he's a House Rep is that many conservatives in his district found former Rep. Scott Garrett too homophobic. He could lose in 2022, and he’ll blame the liberals for it – even though those same liberals, at least in our House, are not making themselves a nuisance by advancing an alternative tax plan that would tax the rich harder. And they should!

Matt Stoller reminds us that even though President Biden’s put antitrust opponents at our FTC and DOJ, he’s put a lot of corporate-friendly folks on the courts. Since these judges will rule on antitrust cases pumped out by our FTC and DOJ, I couldn’t blame you for thinking putting solid people at our FTC and DOJ was part of a plan to mislead us into thinking things were really going to change. And when you realize that some of his other appointments (i.e., Secretaries Buttigieg and Vilsack) haven’t shown the same hunger to confront monopolies, you might feel that more acutely. Mr. Stoller won’t go that far, of course; I hope he’s right to pull his punches.

When I hear that a right-wing group in Missouri has created a “woke heat map” to target “groomers” and folks who actually believe racism is a real thing, all I can say is: assholes ruin everything. That’s before I get to the part about how right-wingers took a map of trans-friendly clinics and turned it into a tool for harassing those clinics. Remember, also, that when they talk about “grooming toddlers with sexually explicit books,” that the only thing “sexually explicit” about those books is that they include gay or trans folks at all. First time I saw that particular stratagem, a certain loofah-loving Fox News “independent” was flogging it.

Ho hum, Steve Bannon gets caught on tape characterizing Mr. Trump’s plans on Election night thusly: “at 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that,'” actual election results be damned. Well, he’s been telling good Americans to “suck on that” for decades now; why should Election Night 2020 have been any different? Given Mr. Bannon’s habits, he won’t bother saying he was taken out of context, but will merely add Mother Jones (which unearthed the tapes) to his ever-lengthening list of enemies he’ll “crush” or “destroy” or whatever.

Surprise, surprise, Amazon has handed over data from its ubiquitous/notorious Ring doorbell camera 11 times to law enforcement this year, without requiring a warrant or getting consent from Ring owners. Amazon of course says it only does so in “emergencies,” without defining what exact emergencies prompted these 11 incidents, but we all know that, as Josephine Gattuso Hendin once said, “once you cross a line, you keep crossing.” You can enable end-to-end encryption on your Ring device, though really end-to-end encryption should be the default setting, not something you have to turn on. It’s almost like they know you’re too busy to consider this issue carefully or something.

Finally, John “The Mustache of Evil” Bolton went on CNN and, as part of an attempt to prove that Mr. Trump’s January 6 actions were not part of “a carefully-planned coup d’état,” actually claimed that he personally “has helped plan coups d’état, not here, but, you know, other places.” We all knew that, of course, but still, nice to have a confession. I’m actually a little more annoyed that Mr. Bolton apparently thinks incompetence at planning a coup means you didn’t really do it (he did insist on saying “carefully-planned,” after all), and I’m tired of right-wingers pretending that stupidity mitigates or excuses evil.

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: the plain truth about evil.

When I hear that a truck-driving prick in Iowa went well out of his way to hit pro-choice protestors, injuring one, and then got released without charge after questioning by police, I feel compelled to ask how police would have responded to a liberal aiming his car at pro-life protestors. Because I think they would have moved heaven and earth to detain and charge that liberal. I hope I’m wrong, and I also hope my supposition forever remains a thought experiment.

Ho hum, the New York Times runs an article about trans health care that talks only to doctors and not to actual trans people. And it also gives far too much voice to those poor, beleaguered “reasonable” people who think “both sides” are too “extreme,” when only one side passes bathroom laws and examining-children's-genitals laws. And Jesus Mary and Joseph the number of kids who yearn to join an oppressed group so badly they mistakenly think they’re one of them is a grain of sand next to the mountain of kids who say nothing about their trans nature because they’re afraid of being bullied or killed. Sometimes I wish we weren’t so hard-wired for stories.

Whoever runs against Ron DeSantis for Florida Governor had damn well better run ads about his administration’s successful efforts to reduce care at nursing homes. Seriously, the phrase Ron DeSantis will kill your grandma would not be untoward! But Democrats would rather keep pretending they’re impotent as a fund-raising tactic. Of course, going for the throat wins races, and it even raises campaign funds, but most importantly, it stops evil. All we have to do is stand up to evil, and evil will fold. You know why? Because evil is a fucking coward, that’s why.

When I hear corporate executives say they’ll pay for their employees to get abortions, I think they're just trying to get the good PR they can't earn any other way. I'd be happy to be wrong, but when Amazon said it, I said it might be a way to fire employees who don’t get their paperwork exactly right, but it could even be worse – do you really want your boss to know you’ve had an abortion, when a new, more hostile boss could come in at any moment and make your life hell whether it’s legal to do that or not?

Department of Education agrees to cancel $6 billion in student loan debts of 200,000 folks who had sued the department alleging that their institutions of higher learning had misled them. This comes on the heels of our DOE’s decision to cancel all student loan debt for students who had attended the now-defunct-and-for-good-reason Corinthian Colleges – you remember, the for-profit college chain Marco Rubio called a “constituent” as if nobody Corinthian screwed over could have been his constituent? I can say little more, except that this is why we fight!

Finally, Arizona Republican Senate candidate/Trump endorsee Blake Masters has said we need to privatize Social Security, and the comment exists on video. Again, Sen. Kelly would be guilty of political malpractice if he didn’t run ten thousand ads about this. And between this and the fact that Mr. Masters has a face even a mother would punch, can the good citizens of Arizona please declare this guy’s chances of getting elected nil?

Action: concerning Medicare, mass murder, the war on Yemen, discrimination, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell President Biden to rebate seniors for wrongly-inflated Medicare premiums, and tell your Congressfolk to address gun violence and end the War on Yemen, and tell your Senators to pass the Equality Act and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Social Security Works helps you tell our Biden Administration to give seniors rebates on their inflated Medicare premiums. What happened? Our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) hiked Medicare premiums this year, in anticipation of being forced to cover a bad and expensive Alzheimer's drug -- but then massive popular pressure forced our Administration to cover that drug only for clinical trials, meaning those premium hikes don't need to be there. Hence, our Administration should rebate those premium hikes to actual senior citizens using Medicare. Really, it's pretty simple math, both morally and politically, so let's make sure they do it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to do something effective about gun violence. There will be room, at the end of Moms Rising's long missive, for you to say Congress should a) amend the National Firearms Act so that it covers semi-automatic weapons as well as automatic weapons and b) require gun owners to register guns, get shooting licenses, and buy liability insurance, just like we all have to do with cars. And what a burden that is upon us, I tell you! Seriously, the only "burden" is on those gun corporations that manufacture weapons of mass murder, and we must of course weigh their imaginary "burden" against our actual burden of possibly being shot dead by some rage-addled man at any moment.

Both Daily Kos and the Center for Rights and Dissent help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 87, the War Powers Act resolution aiming to end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. It's well past time for Congress to assert their war-declaring powers and put an end to this madness. One sentence from a Roots Action missive about this matter really hits home for me: "If Yemenis were treated with the value accorded Ukrainians by U.S. media, this war would have ended long ago." Yes, it would have -- millions of Yemeni children have either died from or suffered from malnutrition. So let's get our government to -- finally! -- do the right thing.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Ohio has lately passed a law allowing school officials to inspect children's genitals to make sure they're not trans athletes -- this, from the state that sent Jim Jordan to Congress. But the Equality Act would put a stop to such insanity, by adding "sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)" as one of the classes of folks you can't discriminate against in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- which would also prevent banks, landlords, and employers from discriminating against gay and trans folks. If our Senators won't stop injustice, what good are they?

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Our Senators worked so hard to obstruct her nomination that it expired at the end of 2021; President Biden dutifully renominated her, and our putative Democratic majority finally worked through all the obstructions to clear her for a vote back in March, but here we are, three months later, waiting for our Senate to put a real internet freedom warrior on our FCC like we deserve. And their excuses for inaction are getting even lamer -- oh, the Fraternal Order of Police doesn't like her? Please. West Virginia and Arizona residents will want to target their Senators especially -- and we should contact our President, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: in which we contemplate various legal matters.

Elon Musk says he'd reverse the Twitter ban on Donald Trump, calling the ban "a morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme," and if I can think of an even clumsier way of putting that I'll let you know. His point is that the ban didn't silence Mr. Trump, though, actually, it kinda did -- not totally, but we don't let the perfect murder the good, do we? And none of Mr. Musk's nattering on about "free speech" changes the fact that Twitter is a publishing house -- whether he likes it or not, whether our laws recognize it as such or not -- and no belief in "free speech" requires that Twitter publish Donald Trump's ramblings any more than it requires that Random House publish mine.

Normally we turn to Patrick Cockburn for incisive analysis of foreign policy, but here he writes about "Mistakes I Made in Response to My Son's Mental Illness." Mr. Cockburn quit his job in order to "devote all efforts to helping Henry recover," not realizing that "I could not do much more than I was already doing and being jobless simply added to the strains on the family." He also didn't realize his son wasn't taking his meds for several years, which matters because "few therapies help until a person is stable on medication." The good news: coming together as a family or community helps "frequently a lot more than (people) think." And Henry has "done far better than most" in his predicament.

Folks are whining way too much about protestors holding vigils outside Brett Kavanaugh's house and the like; while I object to directly petitioning courts to rule the way I want them to; I certainly don't object to good folks taking to the street. Not too many months ago right-wingers waxed rhapsodic about a bunch of obnoxious truckers honking their horns all day and night because they didn't want to wear masks or get vaccines. (Naturally Susan Collins called the cops after someone wrote a chalk message outside of her house. Those poor, oppressed politicians! Sure, it's brightly-colored sidewalk chalk today, but what about tomorrow?)

Mob Boss Mitch suggests that Republicans will pursue a federal abortion ban if our Supreme Court overturns Roe as expected, and we say "suggests," of course, because he's trying to say it without actually saying it. And for good reason -- polling has lately told us that Democrats are doing better on the generic Congressional ballot, and do even better than that once voters figure out whicn one's the pro-choice candidate. In the meantime, Mitch ain't fooling anyone -- there's a reason he is literally the most unpopular Senator in America. Sadly, there is also a reason Democrats haven't given him the humiliating retirement he deserves. More than one reason, actually.

So why does Tucker Carlson say Disney's "behavior" "sounds like the behavior of a sex offender"? Easy -- because he knows actually coming out and calling them a sex offender might erase his family fortune in a lawsuit. The guy with the ZZ Top beard who calls you a "groomer" may not be so careful. Seriously, "grooming" is actually a thing, and if someone accuses you of "grooming" because you're not a complete asshole to gay and trans kids, get their name and sue them for slander. Right-wingers would call that a "frivolous lawsuit," even after you win it, so ain't nothing you can do about that. (What behavior was Mr. Carlson talking about, anyway? Your guess is as good as mine!)

Finally, speaking of the relationship between truth and lawsuits, One America News airs a 30-second statement stating, in part, that "Georgia officials have concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020" -- including, of course, the two workers who filed defamation lawsuits against the network. A settlement between the two parties forced that statement, and though the plaintiffs had the right idea there, I would have demanded a stronger statement -- "Georgia officials have concluded" gives OAN too much wiggle room -- and I'd make them read that statement on-air once every three or four hours every day for the rest of their lives. Hey, I've had enough.

Action: concerning taxes, abortion, discrimination, and ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand the Child Tax Credit, protect abortion rights, pass the Equality Act, and strengthen ethics provisions for our Supreme Court Justices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk not to pass a massive research and development tax break for corporations without first bringing back the expanded Child Tax Credit. You can also say expand the CTC and reject that slab of corporate welfare in the first place! But really, this is simple: working families should pay fewer taxes, because it's harder for them to make ends meet, while corporations flush in record profits should not get any tax breaks. They can write off their research and development already, because it's an expense; why are we letting them deduct that twice? And where's Joe Manchin's concern about inflation whenever the topic of corporate welfare comes up?

Both MoveOn and Change.org help you tell your Congressfolk to protect abortion rights in America. Abortion is health care -- for the woman whose fetus has no brain or organs, for the woman raped by her brother, for the woman who will die if she gives birth, for the woman terrorized by her partner over her pregnancy, and yes, also for the woman who knows she can't raise a child now because she has no money (not everyone can just go work for a hedge fund, after all!) or because she knows she won't raise that child right. And we've lately learned that between 60 and 66% of Americans (depending on the poll) think abortion should be legal in most circumstances, so I think the people have spoken here; now we must remind our representatives to listen.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. By the reasoning, if you can call it that, of Justice Alito's draft opinion, they'll overturn Obergefell v. Hodges at the first opportunity, so we need to codify equal rights for gays and transgender folks in our laws -- otherwise right-wing governments will continue to use the specter of gay and transgender folks to induce rage in our weakest Americans. Plus banks and landlords will be able to deny services to gay and transgender folks just because of who they are. That's what'll continue to be if we don't pass the Equality Act, and that reality should offend all of us.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation holding our Supreme Court Justices to the same ethical standards to which we already hold all other federal judges. It's tempting to blame Sam Alito for all of this -- since his draft ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade has convinced just about everyone who can still be convinced that our Supreme Court is just another political body -- but actually it's Clarence Thomas who didn't recuse himself from a decision involving his wife's involvement in the January 6 attempted coup. Remember: your job, as a citizen, isn't to "trust your government"; it's to make your government worthy of your trust.

Around the table: in which the right-wing dramasphere remains aflame.

Greg Palast absolutely skewers Dinesh D'Souza's new film, 2000 Mules, which aims to "prove" that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election he lost by seven million votes. Long story short: Mr. D'Souza says he has a crap-ton of evidence of election fraud but, strangely, doesn't present it -- I'm old enough to remember when we all considered that a tell! -- and even the geolocation data "proving" Black men visited vote drop-off boxes 20 times each actually is only "accurate" within 93 feet! The argument gets much, much worse from there, as you would expect if you were even distantly acquainted with Mr. D'Souza's work. But for some Americans, the only "truth" is their own unquenchable rage, and they're clearly Mr. D'Souza's intended audience here.

Another day, another FAIR article reminding us that our "liberal" media talks to far too many right-wing rageheads about transgender issues and not enough to, well, transgender folks themselves. Yikes, pimps, talk to trans kids! They know more about themselves than you do! And certainly more than folks who present themselves as "influencers" but just want to hook you on another rage drug. (As evidenced by the fact that Breitbart "covered" the Texas "child abuse" directive more than most other media outlets. They're probably spinning it as "we got more trans sources than the Washington Post!" They're hoping you don't know how to read a chart.)

New York and California bills would create workers' councils so that workers' viewpoints can be heard a bit better. California's proposed Fast Food Sector Council would also include franchisees, who are also pretty put-upon by their bosses. I don't have nearly as many problems at work as fast-food employees -- they work, after all, in an industry that "literally cannot comply with wage, hour, safety and health law and still make a profit" -- but for the last decade or so, my bosses have all seemed to understand not one part of the work I do, so I heartily applaud such a move. And I bet when you think about it, you do, too.

Uh oh: the Staten Island, NY District Attorney actually used asset forfeiture cash to buy facial recognition software. Why, that's two fists of evil, right there -- it's like selling arms to the Iranians in order to get the money to arm the Contras. Even better, Staten Island has stopped using it, because it, you know, sucks, which you or I could have told them for nothing. Also too, they used asset forfeiture cash so they wouldn't have to use tax money, because politicians have been selling us a no-tax fantasy the last 40 years or so. Ideally, taxes pay for things we all may need at some point or other. Ideally, they do not pay for facial recognition software that can't tell Black folks apart any better than your right-wing uncle can.

Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-OR), justifiably facing a primary challenge from his left, runs ads touting his support for overturning our Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling -- without mentioning that he's directed close to $400,000 of Super PAC money to his own campaign. There's the world I want and the world I live in, I can already hear him intoning, but don't you love how these center-right politicians run left once they get a primary challenge? His vote late last year for the Build Back Better Act -- after he vowed to vote against it! -- I would similarly not attribute not to a Damascus moment on his part.

Finally, right-wing media outlets have reported that Justice Alito has removed himself to an "undisclosed location" after his draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade leaked -- based on a single source who said it on Fox News but now can't remember "whether I saw in on Twitter or somebody told me." And for that the right-wing dramasphere blew up yesterday. Don't cry any tears for poor Ilya Shapiro; I'm sure this all went down exactly the way he wanted it to. It may take him years to figure out how thoroughly Our Glorious Elites have used him.

Action: concerning abortion, equality, ethics, power, health, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to codify abortion rights protections into our laws, pass the Equality Act, ensure Supreme Court Justices adhere to ethics standards, pass the Palestinian Children and Families Act and the PASTEUR Act, and confirm Alvaro Bedoya to our FTC. 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.

Avaaz helps you tell Congress to codify abortion rights protections into law. The easiest way for Congress to do that, in theory, would be for our Senate to pass the already House-passed H.R. 3755, the Women's Health Protection Act, but they've already refused to do that. Sen. Schumer says he'll bring it up for a vote again, so that (if nothing else!) everyone will see how their Senators voted, which could be a big deal on Election Day 2022, though I can't say for sure. One thing I can say for sure: it won't end here! If the leaked ruling overturning Roe v. Wade turns out to be the actual ruling, it will give our Court a pretext for going after gay marriage, birth control, and anti-sodomy laws, too. We'll have a very busy time fighting for what we already had, and we'll have to keep fighting for them. Which we'll do, because duty is duty.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act, which would protect gay, transgender, and others from discrimination. Because right-wing state legislatures have been attacking these folks just as surely as they've attacked voting rights and abortion rights the last year and a half! And, as I've said, it'll soon be open season on rulings like Obergefell Griswold, and Lawrence, so we've got to codify protections against discrimination into our laws. Gay and transgender folks don't deserve to be fired, frozen out of apartments and homes and loans, or hounded out of public restrooms merely because they are who they are, so let's stop politicians from enabling all those evil things. And quickly.

In a related note, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure our Supreme Court Justices follow the Federal Judge Code of Conduct. Once there was a time we could convince ourselves that it'd be somehow uncivil to make the highest Court in the land adhere to the same standards as all other federal courts, but no more. And I'm not the only person who thinks so! Polling has told us for years that more and more Americans look at our Supreme Court as a political body, with its own policy aims; Justice Alito's leaked draft sure hasn't helped that look! Neither has Justice Thomas's wife's actions in support of the January 6 coup, or Justice Thomas's alleged poobahs with Gov. DeSantis; it ain't just about Justice Thomas, though. All judges must bow to civilization.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2590, the Palestinian Children and Families Act, which would start to extract some accountability from Israel in exchange for American aid. The government of Israel continues to oppress the Palestinian people -- lately in the form of separating families and detaining Palestinian children in prisons where they're more likely to get COVID -- and yet we continue to give them military aid, apparently out of a belief that "support" means lockstep agreement with every policy. Support doesn't mean that, and neither does friendship. And Israel is the far more powerful actor here! Being the far more powerful actor means you must not use your power to oppress others, even if that oppression looks like "security." It never is.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Up-surging Resistance (or PASTEUR) Act, which would help fund the antibiotics of the future. And we're gonna need them! We presently use seven out of every 10 antibiotics not on sick people or sick animals, but on nominally healthy feed animals, and that means more superbugs and more of a possibility that we'll bring back the days when the next cut on your hand could kill you. All so big ag executives could make more money! (They'll say it was so we could have cheaper meat, but is that really a lot better if you can't survive a cut on your hand?) I'd spend directly on making antibiotics, rather than grant money to corporations to do it, but we can fix that later. We need action on this matter now.

Finally, today's as good a day as any to a) call Senate Majority Leader Schumer (here's his contact info) and tell him to schedule a vote on President Biden's nomination of Alvaro Bedoya to our Federal Trade Commission, and b) call your Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) and tell them to confirm Mr. Bedoya. Mr. Bedoya's opposition to government spying and expertise in digital privacy issues would be enormous assets to our FTC, plus he'd provide a likely third vote in favor of more vigorous antitrust prosecutions; perhaps for this last reason he couldn't get through the Commerce Committee (which deadlocked on his nomination twice), and required a discharge petition to get his nomination considered by our full Senate. But now they must act. We deserve no less.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: fighting the good fight, part 865.

You may want to see what some of your fellow Americans are telling our FTC and DOJ about how they want stronger antitrust enforcement. First off: in 2010, our FTC received 32 comments about antitrust enforcement rules; so far they've received over 100 times that amount! Second, a lot of these folks really know their stuff, and a lot of them have suffered serious abuse from their monopolist employers; after reading them, you will not be able to tolerate some corporate lobbyist telling you that most public comments come from people who don't know what they're talking about and only corporations really know what's going on.

From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: a whistleblower informs us that privatized Medicare plans are stealing millions of dollars from Medicare (and therefore the taxpayer, i.e., you and I). You may not read anything that surprises you -- OK, the woman who got diagnosed with prostate cancer might surprise you -- but the "aggressive medical record coding" will likely strike you as a euphemism for "inventing diseases so one can overbill for treatment." Remember that if Republicans take control of Congress, they'll refuse to fund going after Medicare fraudsters because "we can't afford it," just like they did last time. Law and order!

Should I have anticipated that a propagandist would one day slap the word FAKE over real video footage of dead war victims, as Russia has done in its war on Ukraine? Maybe, but if I'd put a detail like that in a short story back in the day, my creative writing professor would have rapped my knuckles. If I'd put in details about TV talking heads describing the dead bodies as "actors" or people Ukrainians supposedly killed after the Russians left to make the Russians look bad -- or about the whole "fact-checking" organ that just regurgitates state propaganda -- he'd still have rapped my knuckles, though he might have at least applauded all the effort I put in. The way things are now, I wouldn't even write satire about any of that.

David W. Moore at FAIR advises us not to trust polls on Florida's notorious "Don't Say Gay" law, mainly because pollsters tend to give folks incomplete information about the law when they ask them about it, rather than simply asking them about it. They give really incomplete information about the law, too -- how many Americans would support it if they knew it actually restricted instruction about sex through 12th grade and forced school counselors to rat on kids who tell them they're gay to their parents? I suspect folks don't actually approve of those things regardless of how they feel about gay and trans students.

Ho hum, TV ad claims that illegal ballot harvesting delivered both of Georgia's U.S. Senate seats to Democrats in 2020 -- as a way of attacking incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp, whom they see as inadequate to the task of fighting "voter fraud." Even the notorious True the Vote, which lodged the ballot harvesting complaint to which the ad refers, would not say the ballots harvested were themselves fraudulent, but of course that's only because saying so absent evidence would invite a lawsuit they'd almost certainly lose. Still, that doesn't prevent the masturbatory rage machine from churning onward, which I think is the whole point anyway.

Finally, people will give you a lot of reasons Donald Trump endorsed J.D. Vance for the Republican nomination in the Ohio Senate race, but let me be the one to say: don't believe any of it! Donald Trump latched on to J.D. Vance because Mr. Vance was starting to gain ground on Josh Mandel in polls, and with the primary less than three weeks away, Mr. Trump didn't want to get left behind, or be seen endorsing a "loser." I especially don't believe that Mr. Trump was "soured" by the Josh Mandel/Mike Gibbons chest-to-chest moment; the only thing that would have "soured" him about it, I would think, would be that it didn't come to actual blows.