Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: green shoots rise above the muck, part 883.

When you hear that growing different crops on the same land not only enriches the soil but repels pests, you should be tempted to say well, no duh! But big ag corporations, anxious to write over our collective memory, insist that pounding the soil with endless rows of single crops is the only "efficient" way to feed people, though the only thing it does "efficiently” is redistribute worker income upward to executives. And while you can't just put any bunch of plants together and get the best results, keeping plants apart is far too good a metaphor for the anti-cooperative framework Our Glorious Elites incessantly push on us.

U.N. buys 3D printer called the Crane WASP to build homes for the nearly-four million unhomed households in Colombia. Inspired by the Mason wasp, which creates nests using mud, the Crane WASP can make a home using mud, clay, cement, and even farming waste; the printer costs $180,000, but can print a home for about $1,000, so maybe it could also fight homelessness in America – except that American right-wingers would yell that surely nobody aspires to live in a little home like that! Of course, right-wingers would just build more McMansions, which does little for our civilization except give bloggers something to laugh at.

Another day, another reminder that AI sucks up so much energy that it causes "stress on local power grids" and "mass water evaporation," that latter item especially problematic, as it may take a year for mass amounts of water used in AI development to return to the planet, whereas the water you use to, say, brush your teeth goes right back into the sewer, and gets cleaned up and used again fairly quickly. Google, naturally, blames its excessive energy use on its suppliers. Remember all of this the next time some organization claims that YOU AREZ TEH OPPRESSURZ!!!! if you oppose AI, because they do that now.

From the Indianapolis Star we learn that not only has school voucher cost gone up almost twentyfold in a little over a dozen years, but now families that are in no way poor get to use them, which should make you suspect anyone who says don't get so upset about vouchers, because they help poor people. Helping people pay for private schools is, of course, nowhere near as good as funding public schools properly, even if it doesn't look as sexy. And when former Indiana Governor/Bush Mobber Mitch Daniels tried to reassure everyone back in 2011 that his voucher program wouldn't be so big, he was fronting – now he's proud of how big his program has become, even though it's just corporate welfare for private schools.

While it's true that Donald Trump should really stop saying on TV that he plans to interfere with the 2024 election if it doesn't go his way, particularly when Special Counsel Smith has just secured another election interference indictment, we would do well to remember that when he refers to "interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it," he's signaling to his votaries that they have "every right" to consider anything they don't have as something someone else stole from them – and that they have "every right" to hurt anyone who "stole" it. Certainly we shouldn't be surprised when folks throw bricks through the windows of neighbors with Harris/Walz signs on their lawn.

Proving, once again, that large amounts of money constitute no impediment to stupidity, Elon Musk endorses a theory supposing that only "high-status males" – and certainly not women or "low T men" – should get to run a Republic that's "only for those who are free to think,” which of course means "free to think exactly like us." Well, it sure is a good thing nobody in the world ever attains "high-status" by committing massive fraud or hurting as many people as possible! I kid, of course. I guess only "low T men" give a shit about anyone or anything other than themselves.

Gannett shuts down its notorious AI-infected bad journalism website, which would be good news if it didn't also mean a lot of actual human beings will lose their jobs. Then again, for today's big corporations, that's killing two birds with one stone – destroy journalism with bullshit machines that don't have families and don't need time off, and then fire all the real workers who do! Gannett's CEO, of course, made $4 million last year; I wonder how much he whines that other media moguls make more.

Finally, former Vice President/Sith Lord Dick Cheney says he will vote for Kamala Harris in November because "there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump” and because Mr. Trump "tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him” and "can never be trusted with power again.” So, two things about that: one, given Mr. Cheney’s role in the 2000 election, one can’t help but wonder if his real problem with Donald Trump is that he’s bad at coup-ing. Two, a lot of Trumpholes make fun of Dick Cheney now, but damn near all of them were war-on-terror voters who called their family, friends, and neighbors “traitors” if they opposed the Iraq War.

Penny rants for November 29, 2023.

Where does one begin with the observation that a lot of Republican state governments are trying to remove local Democratic officials and curtail governing power of Democratic localities? Really, one could say so many things! Like: so much for letting the voters pick their representatives! Or: so much for letting the smallest government make the most decisions about its constituents’ welfare! Or: so much for making sober decisions based on the data! I say that last thing because “runaway crime” is the reason right-wing governors remove liberal prosecutors and district attorneys from office, but both violent crime and property crime are half what they were 30 years ago, even if right-wing whining about it often seems like it’s double what it was back then. The good news? Many more people are willing to call out these things as “not conservative” now. I’m old enough to remember feeling like it was just me.

Amanda Marcotte criticizes the Washington Post for saying liberals won’t date right-wingers anymore like that’s a bad thing. If there’s one thing our “liberal” media still does that I can’t stand, it’s whine about how liberals refuse to engage with right-wing assholes – I mean, buying right-wing coffee or right-wing underwear is one thing, but who in their right mind would demand a woman lash herself to a Trumphole for life in holy matrimony because America needs her to? We liberals have suffered a lifetime of being told we’re worthless and weak and traitorous for our beliefs, and no, us calling right-wingers callous assholes simply doesn’t compare as an injury. And not for nothing, but I don’t hear our “liberal” media outlets demanding that white folks date Black and Brown folks or foreigners so that they, too, can appreciate “alternative perspectives”; only Trumpholes get this kind of affirmative action from our “liberal” media. Jesus Mary and Joseph haven’t we pandered to them enough?

You probably already know that sports writers will happily tell us that the Carolina Panthers’ bankster owner is much more of a problem than newly-fired head coach Frank Reich, and while we’d all have fun recounting the tale of how the owner spent a mint landing a talented-but-small quarterback and then surrounded him with bad blockers and receivers, we should also question the notion that hedge fund magnate David Tepper “made billions of dollars hiring smart business people to do smart business things.” Hopefully we all know by now that making a billion dollars requires reputation and connection more than “smarts,” and a brief perusal of Mr. Tepper’s PR describes a man who made a living buying big corporate stock when it's low and selling it when it goes up again, which anyone can do, if they have enough cash to start with. So, yeah, big shock that he’s running the Panthers into the ground.

Finally, when I hear that “Americans Are Angry About Immigration,” which is what a Gallup poll supposedly shows, I am reminded of two things: a) bad politicians whine about immigration just like they whine about crime when they realize they have literally nothing else to offer the electorate, and b) it helps to actually look at the data. The author infers "anger" from the fact that 40% of Americans say we’re letting in too many immigrants, but that number was still higher throughout most of the 2000s, and the only years it fell below the current level was when we had a nativist asshole as President; do we really want to go back to that just so four out of 10 Americans will feel better? Also, nearly as many Americans (37%) don’t seem to feel one way or the other about it; maybe getting those people mad at hysterical nativists would be a better strategy – politically as well as morally! – than constantly pandering to people who'll just find something else to be enraged about.

Action: concerning our "liberal" media and food safety.

Long story short: tell the New York Times to correct the record on Iran’s alleged nuclear program, tell your cable corporation to stop carrying the Fox News Channel, and tell our FDA to stop letting big food corporations add sesame to food just to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

FAIR helps you tell the New York Times to correct the record on our intelligence community’s findings on Iranian nukes, i.e., that we have not, in fact, proven that they are building them. Seem too much like inside baseball? I’ll bet the 2002 yellowcake uranium claim did, too, but it helped propel us into that stupid war with Iraq, the one where we accomplished nothing positive and helped create ISIS, and the one where numerous Americans felt perfectly fine accusing their friends and family of treason for opposing the war. Yeah, still sore about that, and if Donald Trump comes back to power, this stupid drama (did I mention stupid?) could play all over again in Iran. How about we strangle that drama in its crib?

Inequality Media helps you tell your cable corporation to deplatform Fox News, which is to say stop carrying it. This $787 million Dominion settlement sure couldn’t have come at a worse time for Fox News, as they’re about to renegotiate carriage fees with cable corporations, and the only channel that costs you more on your cable bill is ESPN. Thus it’s time, once again, to bust out the Big Stick of Bad PR. The good news? It works – popular pressure led both Verizon and DirecTV to stop carrying One America News Network. People who still want to mainline masturbatory rage can go to Fox Nation on the internet, but getting Fox on cable TV makes their bad habit harder to break, and we should help people break their bad habits.

Finally, the Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to stop letting big food corporations add sesame to their products just to avoid implementing stricter controls on allergens. Our FDA just started requiring that food corporations start telling you if their products contain sesame, but now these corporations are adding sesame to foods that didn’t have it before so they can avoid regulatory scrutiny! That’ll come as a big surprise to the million-plus Americans with sesame allergies. Don’t listen to the fool who says well they should just read the label then, like everyone reads every word on every label on everything they buy, and I'd lay money the fool who says that doesn't read any labels.

Action: concerning debt ceiling drama, high drug prices, and defunding the police.

Long story short: tell President Biden to demand a clean debt ceiling increase, and tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to jack up prices on life-saving medicines or defund the police at our IRS . Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to demand a clean debt ceiling increase from Congress, one that doesn’t cave to Republican attempts to take us all hostage. “Clean” means no Social Security cuts, no Medicare cuts, and no cuts to our CFPB, SEC, FTC, or DOJ Antitrust Division, all of which are doing great work attacking the monopolies that crush our civilization. We should win this fight, not just because Democrats control the White House and the Senate, not just because attempts at hostage-taking should always be met with maximum force, but because not even Barack Obama would negotiate with Republicans over the debt ceiling a decade ago.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any Republican attempt to roll back the drug price caps in the Inflation Reduction Act. Shame we have to tell our Congressfolk “don’t jack up prices on life-saving medicines,” but here we are – the Republican Party of George W. Bush and Donald Trump and In That Order, who do unconscionable evil, then gaslight you and call you traitor when you fight them. Whomever votes to raise prices on life-saving medicines should lose their next election. It’d help if Democrats nominate candidates who’ll actually fight for their constituents, and not be the Next Iteration of Pete Buttigieg.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican efforts to defund our police at our Internal Revenue Service. Doesn’t sound so populist when you put it like that, does it? And that’s exactly what Republicans want to do – they want to literally defund the police who catch the rich tax cheats who are their true masters. Oh, sure, they say ZOMG TEH IRSZ IZ COMINGZ AFTURZ YOUZ!!!!!, but that’s horsedoodle – our IRS hasn’t had the money to go after anyone but poor folks for years. Republican fake populism clearly didn’t work for them in the midterms, so let’s not let it work now, when everything counts.

Action: concerning insurrection, ethics, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban Donald Trump from elective office and reject any effort to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics, and tell President Biden to keep fighting for an expanded Child Tax Credit. 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 Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban Donald Trump from holding elective office again as our 14th Amendment demands. Y’all know I’ve been a stickler for the proper definition of “treason,” but “insurrection” and “rebellion” describe what Mr. Trump did pretty well, frankly. And if you’re still thinking maybe Mr. Trump was just a selfish dolt who blundered into January 6, recall that Mr. Trump knew he’d lost the election, and goaded people to storm the Capitol anyway. Also, seriously, enough with crybabies already. Yes, especially crybabies with guns!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempts to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics. They tried this crap in 2017, and we stopped it, so we can stop it again, even though clearly Republicans are counting on the chaos of the Speaker voting imbrogio to wear us out. We the people need to show our power to our elected “leaders” every minute of every day; our duty as Americans lasts forever, and we don’t get a vacation from it. But calling your Congressfolk ain’t hard and doesn’t take very long. And the work we do, the work of maintaining a civilization, is the most important work a human being can do.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell President Biden to keep working to get the expanded Child Tax Credit back. This may be a cynical time, with plenty of cynical people, but what a President says still matters. You know this because George W. Bush almost single-handedly made climate change denialism mainstream back in the day. You also know it because local poison control centers fielded so many calls about bleach killing COVID in the days after Donald Trump mused clumsily about it. And if President Biden keeps talking about the Child Tax Credit expansion keeping millions of kids out of poverty, that’ll make our job easier. And, after all, that’s his job!

Finally: I’ll continue to provide action alert links, but with Republicans in charge of our House now, I really think the best thing to do is to call them with our will and clog up their phone lines so they get it. Some of them will whine about it just like they did in 2017, but let’s have them whine in public, so we know who might be easiest to turn out of office in 2022.

UPDATE. Sadly, our House didn't listen to us, and basically gutted the Office of Congressional Ethics earlier today. Naturally George Santos, arguably the most ethics-challenged individual elected to Congress in recent history, said it was "fantastic," while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has an actual ethics complaint still to be resolved, called it "disturbing." That's a Goofus and Gallant strip right there, though I guess it would pain Mr. Santos not to be Gallant here. Anyway, today we flush it, and tomorrow we get up and go again.

Around the table: good people fight bad people, part 842.

This article’s headline reads “People Return to Offices, Productivity Plunges,” and though I would warn against worshipping at the Altar of Productivity, I’m quite glad to hear someone in our “liberal” media finally blaming bosses instead of workers. And when I hear that bosses are installing “productivity-tracking software” on their workers’ computers, I am reminded, yet again, that the good boss inspires more productivity while the bad boss acts like a damn fascist trying to control what he can’t control.

Right before midterm elections, we pick up another victory over monopolists, as a King County (WA) Superior Court Commissioner granted a temporary restraining order preventing two banksters from essentially looting the grocery chain store corporation Albertsons in advance of its proposed merger with Kroger. The banksters in question – the private equity corporations Cerberus Capital and Apollo – made the tactical error of making their looting, ahem, dividend recapitalization, a part of the merger, which puts the entire proposed merger in danger, if our government will be aggressive enough. And they might!

Ho hum, right-wingers push another activists-are-the-real-fascists narrative by saying the hundreds of writers and Penguin employees who spoke out against Justice Barrett’s $2 million book deal are the real “censors,” the real “book bann(ers),” and the real “cancel culture” practitioners, though we all know right-wingers are the actual censors, book banners, and cancel culture practitioners – as right-wingers themselves prove by calling for the “firing” and “blacklist(ing)” of everyone who has (so far unsuccessfully) protested the future Barrett book! Anyway, do publishers have a First Amendment obligation to publish every single conceivable manuscript? No, they do not. The end.

When I hear that Texas Republicans have been trying to suppress the vote by confiscating smartphones, looking over voters’ shoulders in voting booths, and going around to voters’ homes to tell them they’ve voted illegally when they haven’t – and I think that last item merits a slander lawsuit! – all I can say is that this is where the feedback loop of masturbatory rage leads. I’m also reminded that William S. Burroughs used to say all a junkie wants is junk – not food, not water, not sex, just junk – and today’s rage-addled right-winger is little different than a junkie. I guess that should call for more compassion on my part, but rageheads do a lot more harm than junkies do.

Elon Musk has run Twitter for a week and already he’s fired a bunch of employees after failing to give them the notice required by law, and now they’re suing him. These bazillionaires all think they’re so great – too great for our laws, apparently! – when in reality they trip over their own dicks more than you or I ever will. And though one hates to say bad things about someone who popularized the electric car, note well how that electric car hasn’t gotten any cheaper over the last 10 years. I’m old enough to remember when the Toyota Prius was too expensive for working families, but I’m also old enough to remember when it wasn’t anymore.

Whoa Nelly: the Republican candidate for North Carolina’s 13th U.S. House District actually wants to create “a community-level review process outside the jurisdiction of the federal government” that would evaluate whether a woman can get an abortion because of rape or incest, and though his campaign thinks that’s a compromise position (you know, from NO ABORSHUNZ EVAHZ!!!!), Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall had another name for it: a “rape panel,” which I expect will stick, though “Star Chamber” wouldn’t be a bad name for it, either. Think it might be much easier to, gosh, I don’t know, let the woman and her doctor decide the matter without state interference? Think that’d be a more small government solution than any “rape panel” would? Barry Goldwater would have said so.

Finally, Emily Oster at The Atlantic thinks we should “declare a pandemic amnesty” so we can all “move forward,” and, ah, no. There is no equivalence between yelling at someone who got too close to you on a hike in April of 2020 and the millions of Americans who simply wouldn’t get a vaccine in 2021 out of rage – the former may have hurt your feelings, but the latter reignited the damn pandemic. The author doesn't explicitly mention these latter folks, probably so we'd all avoid making the comparison I just made. I lump those latter folks in with all the other folks I’ll never forgive, like (for example) the Iraq war hawks who called me “traitor.” Don’t worry, God’ll sort me out in the end.

Action: concerning endless war, taxing the rich, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal Iraq War authorization, tax billionaires a lot harder, and pass the PRO 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.

Both Win Without War and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). Yes, it’s still on the books, though the Iraq War has been over for more than a decade and both Presidents Obama and Trump have abused it to launch more unwise and unconstitutional military adventures. No one calls them “wars,” of course, since wars kinda have a bad name now. Why do wars have a bad name now? Why, mainly because of the Iraq War, which the 2002 AUMF authorized, a profoundly evil war George W. Bush and his votaries used to tar all their political opponents as traitors. If you want to stop that from ever happening again, then raise hell about the 2002 AUMF.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire Minimum Income Tax. Billionaires made out a lot better than the rest of us during this pandemic, not because they’re “better people” or because they “worked harder” or because they “contributed more to society,” but because when you start out with billions of dollars, it’s much easier to make billions more, particularly when our civilization acts like “letting the rich do what they want” is not only a good idea but the only idea. A half-century ago we had only one billionaire, and (not coincidentally!) a much fairer America, and the Billionaires Minimum Tax will help us get that America back.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would outlaw state-level “right to work” laws, which we might better describe as “right to work for less money, fewer benefits, and fewer protections from bosses’ whims” laws, even though I suppose that's not as snappy "Right to work” laws allow workers to work in union shops without paying union dues, but no one who joins a union simply doesn’t know that dues fund the many services a union provides, and not for nothing, but the higher salary workers make when they're in unions tends to outstrip dues. Certainly that's been my experience for a few decades now.

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: when robots talk, and other horrors.

While even “liberal” media outlets like CNN and the New York Times apparently don’t want to shill for Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro – despite all the “good” he’s done American corporations with his “reforms” – Fox News has proven it’s up to the task. Hilariously they’re using booga-booga about China as a reason to support Mr. Bolsonaro, when Brazil spend four times as much on Chinese goods as Americans do – and that number’s actually gone way, way up since Mr. Bolsonaro took office. Sadly, Glenn Greenwald has slipped further down the rabbit hole at almost as rapid a pace. I know, the guy who literally broke the Sergio Moro corruption story! But obsession with censorship über alles has ruined many a good thinker.

A University of Chicago Institute of Politics Poll informs us that one out of every four Americans feels so “alienated” from our government they think it “may soon be necessary to take up arms against it,” but let me be the one to tell you that this information is not that startling if you’ve long thought, as I have, that about 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane in the first place. It’s just that back in the day they wanted to put Iraq war opponents in jail for treason, and today they think they need to take up arms against their government. It’s not even much of a devolution, frankly, and if you’d asked folks this question in, say, 2004, I think the only reason that number would have been lower was because you had a Republican government then. Strange, isn't it, how liberals talk about changing government while right-wingers talk about burning it all down?

It’s easy to dunk on Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) for voting against protecting gay marriage at around the same time he was toasting his own son at his son’s gay wedding. And Mr. Thompson seems like a good guy – his resume includes decades spent as a physical therapist, a firefighter, and an EMT – so we’re better off saying that he’s the sort of Republican who should be forcing his party to do better. But I don’t have the power, I guess he’d say, and setting aside the fact that he’s in line to be Agricultural Committee Chair if Republicans take the House, the first power you have, as a civilized person, is the power of shame. It’s a great power, if we would but use it.

What do you call it when a long-time advisor to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán breaks with him over his latest speech decrying all the European “people of mixed race”? Same thing you call it whenever right-wingers fight: drama! I mean, I really do like to think the best of people, but right-wingers have spent decades making positive noises about courage without delivering any actual courage, and the evidence does pile high after a while. (Don't object with "but Liz Cheney," for reasons including, but not limited to, the fact that for every Liz Cheney there are a hundred Jeff Flakes who talk a good game but do nothing.) In any case, I’d lay money that Zsuzsa Hegedüs will soon go back to work for the Master Race in some other capacity.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of overtly anti-democratic BS that has crept into mainstream political discussion lately, let me sum up “mysterious” and “complex” concepts like “neoreaction” in three words: you don’t count. Seriously, if you’ve grown up your whole life believing that anyone can make it in America (or that anyone should be able to make it in America), you shouldn’t take up with statements like “all organizations – irrespective of size – are best managed by a single executive” even after Joe Manchin scuttles the 135th attempt at Build Back Better. Here’s another five words about wishing for strongmen: boys do that, not men.

Finally, Ohio Senate candidate/pretend redneck J.D. Vance has caught a lot of well-deserved flak for saying that folks shouldn’t leave violent marriages for the sake of the children will no one think of the children! And I guess some folks easily fooled by robot talk will find his “defense” of marriage convincing. But Mr. Vance presents a false dichotomy: he posits only two possible worlds, one in which you “stay with your abusive spouse no matter what,” and the other in which “people change spouses like they change underwear,” and a great nation needs not submit to these false choices. Besides which, neither choice describe America as it actually is – the divorce rate, for example, is considerably lower now than it has been in decades, maybe because real Americans navigate all these issues better than Mr. Vance wants you to think.

Around the table: good people need to overcome bad people, part 933.

I almost hesitate to summarize Matt Stoller’s July 7 article about how certain big media personalities are taking money from monopolists and thus soft-pedaling their criticism thereof, because, as usual, it’s worth your time for so many other reasons. Chief among them: he reminds us that “most people chalk up shortages to Covid,” but “brittle supply chains causing a lack of critical goods preceded the pandemic,” to the point where our FDA lists hundreds of drugs we’ve been short on for almost 20 years. Empty shelves at the supermarket get all the ink, but it is admittedly much harder to see the future we don’t have (like one where doctors have been able to prescribe what their patients really need!) because monopolists control everything.

Oh boy: our IRS actually approved the notorious Family Research Council’s application to become a freaking church back in 2020, and if you’re thinking well, look who was President, well, I couldn’t blame you – except that the notorious Focus on the Family made itself into a “church” in 2016. And they’re not the only ones! We might lay this imbroglio, also, at the feet of the Republicans who have aggressively defunded our IRS for the last decade-plus on spurious pretexts, and, of course, the Democratic President who enabled all of that. Still, if this ain’t against the law, it should be. I joke about creating a religion that excludes Republicans for a reason.

Because we don’t get enough good news in the world, note well that a little over a month ago, Kazakhstan voters approved constitutional reforms that effectively end Nursultan Nazarbayev’s notorious 30-plus-year stranglehold on power there. By a 77-17 margin, too, with almost 70% turnout! The good citizens of Kazakhstan fought hard to get here, suffering greatly at the hands of Mr. Nazarbayev's successor/puppet government this past January, and they deserve our admiration. Mr. Nazarbayev seems to be taking all of that relatively well – including the possibility that some of his relatives will go to jail on corruption-related charges – which I guess means Donald Trump will call him a loser shortly, if he even knows what Kazakhstan is.

In yet another development that makes me wish we could simply saw Florida off this great nation, the state of Florida now has a law requiring students and professors at public universities to submit to questioning about their political beliefs, with the threat of losing funding if folks don’t answer or answer incorrectly. Didn’t any of these idiots grow up watching The Twilight Zone? Or did they think it was all an instruction manual? And I never, ever get tired of hearing right-wingers whine about “socialism” and “oppression” they can’t describe. Florida liberals, this is your moment – get candidates for Governor, Senator, and state legislature with some fight in them, or else you're doomed to live in Trumpville forever.

Hoo boy, Sen. Lindsey Graham (E-SC) says he'll fight a subpoena that would force him to testify before a grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the voters’ will in Georgia in 2020. He also has the nerve to say that “(i)f we open up county prosecutors being able to call every member of the Senate based on some investigation they think is good for the country we’ll ruin the place.” Of course they didn’t subpoena “every member,” just the one who called Georgia’s Secretary of State to try to get him to change the vote totals.

Finally, former Trump Administration official Peter Navarro says that Mike Pence “is guilty of treason, to at least President Trump and perhaps to this country” over his refusal to go along with Mr. Trump’s plan to steal the 2020 election. Jesus Mary and Joseph there is no such thing as “treason to the President,” as anyone with a glancing acquaintance with Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution would tell you, and anyone who voices such a ridiculous notion should move to a place he’ll find his views much more well-received, like Turkey or Russia or Saudi Arabia. But not Kazakhstan, not anymore.

Around the table: on "solutions" and drama.

When you hear that police prioritized keeping themselves safe over confronting the Uvalde shooter as he murdered 21 kids, you may be tempted to think that makes sense, that your first duty to yourself is to keep yourself safe. But you must also remember that right-wingers dismiss any criticism of police shooting unarmed Black folks by saying hey, they put their lives on the line everyday! Plus we watch too many cop shows; fictional characters put their lives on the line 22 times a year with nary a scratch, and that, too, gives everyone the wrong idea.

Surprise, surprise, "YouTube’s Biggest Info Channels Carry Corporate News, Not Alternative Views," and could that be because Google owns it? It's a question worth asking! Corporations aren't necessarily early adopters of new technology, but they eventually come to dominate new technology because of their power, which sure argues against untrammeled corporate power as well as anything else. Should we be comforted that 81 of YouTube's 100 most-subscribed news channels come from the Global South (with more than half of them coming from India)? No, we should not -- big is big, and no matter what language it speaks, really it speaks the language of money.

Study finds that more than one out of every five Republican state legislators belongs to some far-right Facebook group. Some of these legislators defend themselves by saying the groups are made up of jes' folks -- certainly not by folks radicalized by right-wing politicians! -- but hopefully it's not news by now that right-wing groups go out of their way to find (and foreground) "normal"-looking people among their numbers. Hopefully it's not also news by now that right-wing politicians and media outlets manufacture a lot of the "wants" and "needs" jes' folks have. They also whine well, what about the far-left websites? Hopefully it's not news by now that far-left websites don't get the big social media welfare that far-right websites do, and besides, "well what about" equals "I can't win the argument on the merits."

Recall my joy that Jamie McLeod-Skinner unseated Kurt Schrader in the Oregon 5th Democratic House primary? Well, it works both ways, as a bankster-backed group has poured $1 million into defeating Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), declaring its aim to "elect solutions-oriented Democrats." Anytime you hear someone utter a phrase like "solution-oriented Democrats," understand that the only "solution" they'll tolerate is the one that lets big corporations make more money, no matter how much that hurts people. Also, hedge fund managers are speculators and who therefore shouldn't get all the say about everything, or even very much of a say about anything. The good news: Rep. Tlaib looks ready to win this fight.

The Center for Media and Democracy looks at the "Right-Wing Families" who "Bankroll (the) Most Extreme GOP Candidates Nationwide. See the Uhleins give money to folks like Rep. Paul Gosar (E-AZ), a man abandoned even by his own family, and see the Toppers indulge their love of racists and insurrectionists or do I repeat myself? I mention this in case you were thinking there's a significant difference between the "corporate wing" of the Republican Party and the "extremist wing." I'd say there's no difference -- the Republican Party has only one wing, the drama wing. And frankly it's a bit of an aerodynamic miracle that it's still airborne.

Finally, my fellow liberals have done plenty of chortling at Donald Trump's rally for Liz Cheney's opponent in the upcoming Wyoming House Republican primary, but I noticed that Mr. Trump continually attacked Ms. Cheney for being a war-monger -- her dad was Vice President during the Iraq War, after all -- which reminds us, I would hope, that Mr. Trump is nowhere near as stupid as folks think. But if Mr. Trump's anti-war argument resonates with large numbers of Wyoming Republicans, just remember that 20 years ago they were all calling you traitor for opposing the Iraq war, and if pressed about that matter now they'd almost certainly deny it. We all deserve, at the very least, that folks remember where they stood when it mattered.

Around the table: in which someone actually proposes saddling all elections with an Electoral College.

This FactCheck article does a pretty good job summarizing our recent baby formula issues. I'm reminded that when you hear "should immigrant babies get formula before American babies?" that a better question would be: so babies don't deserve formula merely because they're immigrants? And if the answer is "well, not before our babies do," then ask why the Greatest Nation on Earth should have to choose. Marcus Aurelius would shake his head at all of that.

Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate wants to bring the Electoral College to Colorado statewide elections! Why a man would think "doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials" is a winning message is a bit of a mystery. If he were to somehow succeed in this nefarious plan, I can't say for sure our Supreme Court would strike it down, even though precedent commands it. Perhaps Sam Alito would say one-person-one-vote isn't a deeply-rooted enough right.

An anti-price-gouging bill aimed at oil corporations -- not the Windfall Profits Tax Act, but not a bad bill -- barely passed the House, with four House Democrats joining all Republicans in voting against it. Naturally Democrat anti-bill arguments were all hostage-taking: if we fight price-gouging, what will we do when we need more oil later? Why, you could argue against almost anything that way! If we put this CEO in jail for butchering his secretary and drinking her blood and eating the flesh from her bones, what'll we do when we need his leadership later? Of course, a truly great nation wouldn't need to answer that, because a truly great nation would train its people up into greatness. Clearly we've failed there with folks like Rep. Kathleen Rice, last heard helping to scuttle efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times tells us that the Amazon Labor Union victory in Staten Island, NY, requires organizers to recognize that "all of the time unions spend arguing with one another over who has the right to organize which workers, in which industry, at which company is one gargantuan waste of time." You'd think unions would already have thought of that, being on the ropes for the last 40-odd years as the share of union workers in the economy has dwindles from around 33% to around 10%, but then being on the ropes against an economy that seems to grow more diabolical by the day may make you inclined to cling to what you've been doing and tell yourself you just need to do it harder. Still, as Mr. Nolan says, "(b)uilding multi-union coalitions requires unions to recognize the futility of arguing over jurisdiction, and instead do the opposite: combine forces and organize without freaking out over who gets to put their label on the end product."

When I read David Brooks telling us that liberals need to stop looking down on right-wingers and pretending that only they have a monopoly on understanding right and wrong, I am tempted to replace the word "liberal" with the word "right-winger" everywhere in that op-ed and guess what? It works about as well that way; liberals certainly have no monopoly on believing their way is the only way. David Brooks apparently didn't hear any right-wingers calling Iraq war opponents traitors 20 years ago, let alone right-wingers constantly calling liberals weak since time immemorial, and that's the kind of blind spot that'll never help you ingratiate yourself with your new Democrat friends. (And those of us who do not imagine a wall between what Mr. Brooks calls the "moral freedom" ethos and the "you are not your own" ethos won't be persuaded, or even enriched, by the last 36 paragraphs. We certainly won't be convinced that the conservative worldview's "existential()...crisis" is a recent phenomenon. That carcass has been stinking up the joint for years.)

Finally, a right-winger actually tells Congress, under oath, that "places like Washington, D.C." use fetuses to power street lamps. As with right-wing efforts to call everyone who doesn't beat up a gay person a "groomer," I think legal remedies already exist to redress such absurdities. Never mind that she actually said that under oath; anyone can pretend they thought what they said was true as far as they "knew." No, someone with standing to sue needs to sue her -- someone with decision-making power in the D.C. utility grid, perhaps? And no, her saying "places like Washington, D.C." won't give her wiggle room; everyone knows what she meant. Playing whack-a-mole with these lies won't save us, but getting the liars to pay in a court of law might.

Around the table: now with *even more* corruption and whining from the right!

No, it is not absurd to claim, as Sonali Kolhatkar does at Counterpunch, that "Policing Causes Violence, Not the Other Way Around." Not just because the science tells us it's true, and not just because you can easily recall recent incidents (like the recent New York subway shootings) that increased police presence did not prevent. I think we've all experienced the phenomenon where we make problems worse by paying much more intense attention to them! And I'm old enough to remember when conservatives said "you can't just throw more money at a problem and hope it'll go away." But even those conservatives told us out of the other side of their mouths that we should throw all the moneys at police because crime. Also too, if we stopped using them as the Swiss Army knives of the state, we'd have better police officers for less money.

Hard to believe, Harry, but big nursing home corporations have sued to stop a New York state law that would force them to spend more money on patient care. Because they'd lose money! What cojones! They think the very notion of losing money an apocalyptic drama, but the neglect they foist on their workers and their patients is the real apocalypse. See, this is why we don't "let business be business," or "let big business make the important decisions." Also too, the very existence of "profits" in such a business testifies to the amount of care patients don't get -- after all, patient care is an expense. Bring back the 55% corporate tax rate and I bet we see a change right quick.

McDonald's franchises used Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) money to pay rent to McDonald's. No, really! McDonald's, the parent corporation, owns the land upon which individual fast-food joints operate, and collects rent from them, so the franchises took money meant to keep good Americans working and used it to keep franchises more or less current on their rent. Nice work if you can get it! See? Government doesn't work! right-wingers exclaim, though it was their heroes who ran government so badly. Public Citizen's Lisa Gilbert must be being very polite to say that PPP had "noble intentions," because I never got that vibe, particularly after big corporations collected so much welfare. I mean, people don't think their local McDonald's is a "small business," do they?

In a related note, some policy bigwigs are now asking "whether the stimulus checks were a mistake" given all the inflation we're having now, and all I can say is: seriously? We're debating this? It's never a "mistake" to keep tens of millions of good Americans out of poverty they would have descended into through no fault of their own; I would have done it differently (less PPP, more CTC), but to say it's not worth it because corporations are now taking advantage of us and jacking up prices at will? And not for nothing, but those checks amounted to $3,200 total over 12 months, and I sincerely hope we all know by now how quickly we can go through $3,200.

Another day, another far right-wing whiner running for state Senate in Michigan who laments that he "(c)an't even watch a college basketball tournament without commercials telling me I have to feel guilty because I think a family should be a white mom, a white dad and white kids." Reminds me of all those years I couldn't even watch cable news programs without pundits telling me I was a traitor and a terrorist sympathizer! So yeah, Randy Bishop, fuck your feelings. I will say -- not at all in his defense! -- that while I approve of all the interracial couples I see in TV advertising, I fear that future historians will one day conclude that our society was a whole lot more accepting of interracial marriage than was actually true. But since (as Franz Boas used to say) racism disappears when interracial marriage becomes accepted, I hope that point will be moot in 20 years or so.

Finally, after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA) calls herself a "victim" of the January 6 attack, a Capitol police officer displays graphic photos of the actual injuries he suffered that day. That's some expert counter-trolling on the part of Aquilino Gonell, though I'm sorry he had to go through it at all. But we're all victims of Ms. Greene's slow-motion train wreck of a Congressional career.

Action: concerning anti-war protestors, law and order, pipeline safety, climate change, mercury emissions, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell the Russian government to stop hurting antiwar protestors, tell the Biden Administration to actually lead on trying Mr. Putin before the ICC, tell the Biden Administration to give up its fascination with "carbon capture" technology already, tell our EPA to bring back strong mercury emissions rules, and tell Travelers Insurance to stay away from Arctic drilling projects. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Roots Action helps you tell the Russian government to stop hurting Russian antiwar protestors. The news is full these days of stories of Russian citizens spouting pro-war propaganda, but there's a reason for that: the Russian government arrested all of its anti-war protestors and detained them! In America, our government just laughs at you when you protest them, but in Russia as in many other nations, you could lose your freedom, your livelihood, or your life. They probably count themselves as "civilized" because they don't just shoot them dead in the street! But it takes more than that to be civilized. And not for nothing, but if you've ever been called "traitor" for opposing the Iraq war, then Russian anti-war protestors are your brothers and sisters, and they need your help now more than ever.

Win Without War helps you tell the Biden Administration to lead the effort to put Vlad the Bad on trial at the International Criminal Court for war crimes against Ukraine. I don't need to recount the various war crimes Mr. Putin has committed against Ukraine; you can see them on the TV and on the internet. But despite what Mr. Biden has said, apparently off the cuff, our government generally doesn't have any appetite for prosecuting war crimes at the ICC, lest someone one day prosecute our leaders for war crimes! That's why we've got to speak out, and make no mistake, we're not just fighting Mr. Putin here; we're also fighting a future Donald Trump Administration (or a worse one!) when it enables our troops to commit rape and torture and mass murder in some foreign land to distract from some other evil they're committing against the American people.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell the Biden Administration that "carbon capture" technology is not a climate change "solution." What's wrong with "carbon capture," which aims to trap carbon emissions and store them? It never captures the amount of carbon they say it will, and big corporations use it as an "energy source" only to get more oil out of the ground. Carbon capture proponents will say it should be part of an "all of the above" energy strategy, but stupid ideas should never be a part of any strategy, ever. And if enough of us tell our government to scuttle its carbon capture dreams, our government will eventually have to explain to a federal court why they ignored us. Our recent experience in this area has suggested that wouldn't go well.

Environment America helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous mercury pollution rules possible. Environment America's email missive puts it most succinctly: "When power plants burn coal, mercury is released up the smokestack. That toxic mercury then rains down into our soil and waterways, poisoning fish and threatening our health. Mercury pollution is linked to increased risk of neurological illnesses and nerve damage. Kids are especially vulnerable to the impacts of mercury and can suffer severe developmental issues." Our EPA had a pretty good mercury rule once, and it cut mercury emissions by 85% between 2012 and 2016; I bet you just can't guess what happened next. Well, he's gone now, so now it's time to undo all his evil works.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell Travelers Insurance to refuse to insure oil and gas drilling projects in the Arctic. Because drilling in the Arctic is not only fraught with danger -- the inevitable oil spills are harder to clean up in that frigid region -- but because drilling in the Arctic will threaten actual, thriving industries, like Alaska's famous salmon industry. And oil drilling ain't just about digging a hole and shoving a well into it; it also involves clearing trees, paving roads, and running pipelines, all of which disturb and destroy ecosystems. And not for nothing, but given that Alaska already pumps out a ton of oil and more Arctic drilling doesn't promise that much more, think maybe big corporations just want to ruin protected areas? And should we encourage that kind of immaturity?

Action: concerning Medicare, forever chemicals, border walls, war-mongers, methane emissions, and Fox News.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to end a Trump-era Medicare privatization scheme, tell fast-food corporations to get "forever chemicals" out of food wrappers, tell our government to abandon the "digital border wall," tell the Washington Post to stop publishing op-eds by aging war-mongers, tell our EPA to crack down on methane emissions from factory farms, and tell big corporate advertisers to abandon Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Biden Administration to end the Trump-era program that allows private insurers to pay for some Medicare patient care. Without telling them, I might add! C'mon, you know Donald Trump: if it were such a great idea, he'd never STFU about it! He surely wouldn't have hidden it! Sadly, the Biden Administration seems to be doing just that, having (after a public comment period that I'm sure didn't go well for them) renamed the DCE program (for "direct contracting entities") as ACO REACH, and yes that is an acronym. ACO REACH won't be as odious a program as DCE was, but as one observer said, "you don't slap a band-aid on a tumor and call it cured," and whatever they call it, DCE will remain the tumor that threatens to spread the cancer of privatization to all of Medicare.

Consumer Reports helps you tell fast-food corporations Arby's and Nathan's to commit to getting the PFAS chemicals out of their food wrapping. Doesn't matter that you just throw it out when you're done with it, because they don't call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for nothing -- you find them in just about everything anymore, they don't break down into safer elements, and scientists have linked them to cancer. And not for nothing, but the longer you let your cheese fries just sit in that wrapper, the more PFAS you'll likely have in your food. Chick-fil-A and Burger King have lately committed to getting the PFAS out of their food wrappers, following McDonald's and Wendy's; now Arby's and Nathan's need to follow suit, lest we one day get to the point where we can't get PFAS chemicals out of our products and our bodies.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our government to abandon plans to form a "digital border wall." That's got to be better than Donald Trump's vanity border wall, right? Not so much -- the "digital" wall relies partly on facial recognition technology, and as we know, facial recognition technology has the hardest time recognizing the non-white faces that would comprise the bulk of would-be immigrants to the U.S. Also, the "digital" border wall uses drones, which I'm sure will never turn on us. If we must have fewer immigrants to the United States, then we must do three things: 1) make all jobs in America good-paying jobs, 2) stop interfering with other nations' efforts to do same, and 3) stop letting corporations make all the decisions in America. That'll make wisdom and compassion much easier.

Win Without War helps you tell the Washington Post to stop running op-eds from discredited war-mongers. The news hook here? On the eve of the possible resuscitation of the Iran nuclear deal, Post ran a John Bolton op-ed, as if Mr. Bolton hadn't orchestrated its destruction by President Trump. Mr. Trump, for his part, delivered perhaps the only guilt-free laugh line of his Presidency the day he said if he'd listened to John Bolton we'd be on World War V by now! He also pushed that war in Iraq, and if you're thinking maybe we should let bygones be bygones after almost 20 years (!), just remember that no one who pushed that disaster paid for their evil works, which included smearing half of America as "traitors." "Forgive and forget" works in our personal lives, but it just enables politicians.

Food and Water Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to start cracking down on the climate change emissions coming from factory farms. This was a big joke to right-wing hotheads a decade ago, but farms pump out more than a third of all methane emissions in America, and not through flatulence but through industrial production. Joke'll be on them when they realize that our EPA can-so regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, and can-so regulate it on factory farms. They won't do it, though, unless we tell them to do it, and given how much factory farms already get away with by threatening higher food prices, our EPA really won't want to do it, unless we get in their grills about it. And we may have to do it more than once, and we may have to do it in court.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. No, that's not "censorship"! Governments censor, but our First Amendment doesn't guarantee a "right" to be paid by advertisers, just as it doesn't confer protections against activism or criticism. Why, I'd call it "starving the beast," and if Fox News has to get by with MyPillow and Snuggy ads, that's just the churn of civilization. We don't have to tabulate every awful thing Fox News has ever done to deserve shame and shunning, I trust, though demonizing the half of Americans who opposed the Iraq war as "traitors" does stick in my mind. If you want to meet corporate executives halfway, though, I suppose you could tell them they should abandon Fox because Fox sucks up to Vlad the Bad, and that's a bad look these days.

Around the table: more thoughts about Ukraine, oil, dark money, and stupid right-wingers.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch reminds us that Vladimir Putin "Has Gambled Everything on His Snap Invasion of Ukraine" but "Now His Political Survival is in Doubt." "So why did Putin do it? Explanations that he has gone mad or plans to rebuild the Soviet Union are propagandistic. More convincing as a reason for him taking this present extraordinary risk is hubris, which is an occupational disease among those who have been too long in power -- 22 years in Putin’s case." I actually thought Russia would roll over Ukraine fairly quickly and then get worn down by years of guerrilla war, but now I'm not even sure Russia will do that well. Even George W. Bush could claim MISHUNZ ACCOMPLISHEDZ!!!!! for a few minutes.

In case you've been caught short by Mr. Putin's claim that his real aim is to fight "neo-Nazis" in Ukraine who practice "genocide," Jeffrey Veidlinger at The Conversation will set you straight. Long story short: Russians have more free speech rights in Ukraine than they do in Russia, and the neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine today have virtually no electoral power. I guess Mr. Putin is hoping you'll remember there were pogroms in Ukraine in the 19th century and that many Ukrainians collaborated with the actual Nazis, but these facts don't exactly make Ukraine unique (and the Ukranian pogrom occurred while it was part of the Russian empire, maybe that's a cautionary tale!). Besides, if Mr. Putin really wants to punish the sin of Nazi collaboration, why isn't he invading Norway or France?

If you've been thinking how refreshing it is that our "liberal" media has learned to hate imperialist wars, Jeff Cohen at Common Dreams will bring you back to Earth with the reminder that our "liberal" media never refer to American imperialism, except in quotation marks meant to be ironic. I'm still a bit puzzled that folks aren't thinking of the Iraq war when they think of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia has deployed 190,000 soldiers to take over a nation of 44 million people living on a little over 600,000 square miles; America deployed 150,000 soldiers to take over a nation of a little over 25.5 million folks living on a bit less than 440,000 square miles. The numbers ain't that different; I guess some Americans just want to forget it all, particularly that part where they called folks like me who opposed the war traitor.

When I heard that nationalizing the fossil fuel industry might be a good way of controlling inflation, I thought, well, with all the corporate welfare they already get, this isn't such a bad idea. We would (per Robert Pollin, who makes a lot of good suggestions in the article) spend about $350 billion buying a controlling interest in the three biggest oil corporations, but that's a one-time cost, of course, and it'll save the taxpayer a lot years down the line! I also remembered that the Trump Administration imposed (and the Biden Administration has, sadly, continued) imposed economy-crippling sanctions on Venezuela essentially because they had the same idea. Does that mean that if we nationalized the oil industry in America, our government would impose sanctions on itself?

You won't be surprised to learn that dark money is funding women's groups opposed to the nomination of Judge Jackson to our Supreme Court. I hope, after all these years of pretending the exception to the rule destroys all rules, we've learned not to devour every perceived irony as if it were manna from heaven. Women against women? Big whoop! The world's a big place, with lots of places for Teh Stupid to hide! I'm about as tired of hearing that right-wing judges always respect "the rule of law" while liberal judges are all "activists." Have they read some of these decisions coming from Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh? If it's not "activist" to ignore precedent, or to go on a fishing expedition for a precedent that fits your conclusion, I don't know what is.

Finally, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) spewed this forth on Twitter this past Sunday: "You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets." The rest of the Twittersphere roasted him, but I would like to point out that incoherence is a step up for this guy -- just five years ago, he was a first-term House Rep yelling that we "kill" "all" "radicalized Muslim suspects." To think this dude was a police captain and he still said, out loud, that we should kill suspects! And now he's a Congressdolt. I hope no one uses him as an example of "how people rise on merit in the Republican Party."

Around the table: "legitimate political discourse."

Republicans not only censure Reps. Cheney (R-WY) and Kitzinger (R-IL) for not marching in jackboot lockstep with the party's orthodoxy in re January 6, but go so far as to slam them for participating in the House January 6 Committee and thus, in their words, participating in the "persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse," which of course aims to gaslight you into thinking that an attempted coup is jes' folks talking in the public square. They tried to walk it back, of course, but they said what they really think about "ordinary folks" protesting -- as long as they're not protesting war or police brutality or climate change, of course. But trying to impale a cop with a Blue Lives Matter flag? Running a Confederate flag through the Capitol? Looking for AOC and Nancy Pelosi so you can kill them? Too legit to quit, apparently.

Matt Stoller's piece from late last week, "Mergers Ruin Everything," is one of his best. Not only does it go deep into why the AT&T/Time-Warner merger was bad for America -- roll call! Lost jobs! Broken promises! Higher prices! Content behind paywalls! Lost TV shows like Adam Ruins Everything! -- he makes a long, long list of economic sectors where mergers have made everything bad, including lab testing (where the duopoly "slow-walked the roll-out of more COVID testing" like that's something we should just put up with), audio streaming (need I say more than "Spotify"?), and movies (where Disney's, ah, made a few moves these last few years). The lists of corporations monopolists have bought (CVS bought at least 10 big corporations over the last 30 years, many of which you'll remember) are also quite startling. I think only a fool would believe monopolies are good after reading this article. There aren't that many fools in America, but they do seem to get far too much say about everything.

Ho hum, America's richest families will likely evade over $8 trillion in taxes over the next two dozen years, if we keep Estate Tax rates where they are. The Estate Tax is yet another area in the American discourse where the American people are in one spot and all the politicians are in another one, possibly because the politicians know more rich people than the rest of us do. Unfortunately, good Americans are still susceptible to big corporate gaslighting about higher taxes on rich families, trotting out that stupid family-farms-will-die trope, even though no one has ever found a single family farm that died because of the Estate Tax, and also, you know, big ag corporations kill family farms far more efficiently than any tax hike on the rich ever could. I don't expect any part of this argument will move someone like Kyrsten Sinema, to whom appearing like a "bipartisan" "maverick" is far more important than doing the right thing.

Last week I celebrated tumbling viewership rates for cable "news" channels, and while I still don't want to get in the habit of celebrating other folks' misfortune, damn Facebook lost $230 million in value in one day last week, mostly because Facebook itself trumpeted a gaggle of bad news items, like lost profits and fewer users. I'll never view Facebook as an unqualified evil -- I've met a lot of good folks I never would have met if not for Facebook -- but it has done a lot of evil, and anyway social media should only be a place where you start getting to know people; ideally it should all be like Meetup used to be (and still is, I'm told, though hardly anyone uses it anymore), and should help people who wouldn't otherwise meet get to know each other in real time. Also, email's a far better social media tool than what we call social media today. (And hate to pile on, but we already did the metaverse; it was called Second Life. I never saw a need for it, and most folks seem to agree with me now that the novelty's worn off.)

Finally, I'd hoped to be challenged by this article entitled "Progressives Who Want Joe Rogan Off Spotify Should Be Careful What They Wish For," but, alas, no. Claims that Mr. Rogan's politics are "more complex" should remind you of a 25-years-and-counting scam run by a certain loofah-loving right-winger who only did things like criticize Ann Coulter and interview Seymour Hersh respectfully so he could claim "independence." Also, no liberals "trust" corporations to keep stupid people off the air, which is why a massive online protest against Mr. Rogan happened in the first place! And we don't have to imagine what would have happened to anti-war voices if Spotify had existed in 2002, because weblogs did exist then, and they have persisted well after mainstream media ignored them and right-wingers vilified them as "traitors." Even when the article concedes that censorship and editing aren't the same thing, it suggests that Spotify is less like an editorial board and more like the Post Office, as if radio stations were mere "mail carriers" and never had editorial duties. Finally, as for campaigns like these getting "turned on the left," that already happens -- yikes, we're in the middle of a book-burning craze! -- and if we want to win those battles, we have to organize better.

Action: concerning war, education, student loan debt, violence against protestors, payday lenders, and social media.

Long story short: tell your government to avoid another senseless war, this time in the Ukraine; tell Florida state legislators to reject the "Don't Say Gay" bill, tell President Biden to forgive student loan debt, tell our Justice Department to fight anti-protestor laws at the state level, tell our FDIC to fight payday lenders, and tell Facebook to release its human rights assessment in re hate speech in India. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Do we want yet another stupid war, whose proponents will constantly accuse us of treason when we don't support it because it's stupid? No, we do not! Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk and your President to stop warmongering and fearmongering about the Ukraine/Russia crisis. Also, World Beyond War helps you find an anti-war protest near you. If Russia invades the Ukraine, they will quickly find themselves bogged down in the same sort of decades-long quagmire like we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet Western nations still go on about the "threat" to world peace if Russia invades. Don't worry that plenty of Trumpholes also oppose a war in the Ukraine; I welcome their help and their activism. Plenty of conservatives opposed the Iraq War, after all, not that you knew that from watching cable "news" at the time.

Change.org helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject HB 1557/SB 1834, the notorious "Don't Say Gay" bill, which would (among other things) prevent Florida school teachers from bringing up homosexuality in class "in the primary grades." The bill's sponsor says that's grades K-3, and goes on to lament that all third-graders need to learn about in school is reading and math, but guess what? All of my 3rd grade classmates back in the day knew what "gay" was, even if they didn't actually know what sex was. Right-wingers pretend kids aren't ready for that stuff, but they're not just wrong about that, they're insulting those kids. And it's never too early to learn to not alienate other people just because they're different from you. Next they'll say kids can't hack masculine and feminine articles in Spanish.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to release the memo detailing his authority to forgive student loan debt, and then forgive up to $50,000 of that debt per student. His office prepared that memo almost a year ago; I wonder why we haven't seen it yet! By which I mean, of course, that it tells us something he doesn't want us to hear. He promised to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt on the campaign trail, then told us he doesn't really have the authority to do that, but since our federal government holds most student loan debt, I really doubt that's the case. Why would we forgive student loan debt? Because we promised them a secure and lucrative life if they went to college, and they don't have it! We broke a promise to those students, so we ought to make that right.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to fight anti-protest laws at the state level. Because those laws violate our rights, that's why! Even if you're blocking a road, you don't deserve to get run over! That's something those anti-vax truckers are going to find out about next month when they come down to D.C., amirite? Of course, states aren't passing anti-protest laws because of right-wing protestors; they pass them because of Black Lives Matter protestors and anti-Trump protestors and climate change protestors, and we know this because of the timing. In Tennessee you can't camp out at the state Capitol or else you'll be convicted of a felony, which would then deprive you of your right to vote; in Georgia, folks can threaten protestors with violence with immunity. We have to stop all that stupid crap.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) to stop letting payday lenders use banks as a front for their usurious loans. Because it's illegal in addition to being immoral! The Trump Administration actually allowed payday lenders to evade state interest caps by essentially laundering their loans through banks from states without interest caps; even after courts overturned their rule, the Trump Administration let those payday lenders keep at it! Now our FDIC has a chance to actually enforce the law, but we still ought to tell them to do it, lest some future Trump Administration try this kind of crap again. If our FDIC enforces the law and keeps good Americans out of runaway debt, we can truly say they've helped drain the swamp.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to release the full internal human rights report assessing hate speech on Facebook in India. They did it in 2020, but they're not releasing it, and although that's kind of a way of saying Facebook bears a lot of responsibility for Muslims in India fearing they're going to get beaten up or killed, you'd still like to see that responsibility broken down to cases. Facebook has already taken some well-deserved PR hits over its facilitation of hate speech in Myanmar (helping to bring about an ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims there), and hell, its algorithms in America help Nazi wannabes find each other without folks even creating or administering a group! Facebook should come clean; I mean, if they've done nothing wrong, they've got nothing to fear.

Around the table: featuring a lot of right-wing whining and stupid plans.

Yes, Virginia, the Trump brain trust, such as it is, really did put their plans to overthrow our government into a PowerPoint presentation. Which begs the question: if Mark Meadows turned this document over to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attempted coup before he decided to stop cooperating, what far worse crap could he now be hiding? It's a question worth answering!

Right-wingers are wringing their hands over the fact that "young Democrats" don't want to date them or be their friends anymore, but what the fuck do they expect after the way they've acted for the last two decades? How many times should they be entitled to call people "traitor" and "weakling" without any consequences? I, for one, am glad that the youths have figured out that shame and shunning are real things civilized people do. And, last I looked, our First Amendment guaranteed freedom of association, which I guess right-wingers think is only for corporations.

Alex Pareene suggests that Elon Musk might be playing a long game by making his self-driving cars work so badly -- chiefly so that governments may further restrict the movements of folks who walk, "for their own safety," of course. Instead of actually punishing Tesla for developing bad technology, which would be a better way of insuring citizens' safety than walling off their sidewalks! Those of us who are trying to make our lives more walkable might take such things a bit personally. And folks who find themselves impressed at such "galaxy-brain thinking" should ask what good any plan does if its goal is "make one person richer." It's not a thing to take to the Pearly Gates, after all.

Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph now Fox News prettyheads want to call the burning of their Christmas tree outside a hate crime against Fox News! Which sure would take corporate "personhood" to a whole new level! Apparently that's about the only way to hold the accused arsonist on bail in New York City now; of course they blame TEH LIBRULZ!!!! for reforming bail laws, and whine about TEH CRIMEZ SURGEZ!!!! though not using actual facts, but seriously, it's not at all absurd to regard a guy who burns down a big Christmas tree as not much of a flight risk or a danger to others. Why, Fox News is whining so much I'm starting to suspect the whole thing was an inside job!

Uh oh: a publicist for Kanye West apparently threatened a Georgia poll-worker with jail if she didn't "come forward" with non-existent election fraud. Of course he didn't directly threaten Ms. Freeman; he just said "I cannot say what specifically will take place. I just know that it will disrupt your freedom and the freedom of one or more of your family members. You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up." And he imagines a court of law won't find that a threat? Would now be a good time to remind everyone that Kanye West's best riff comes from Phil Manzanera?

Finally, the president of California's medical board alleges that a group of anti-vaxxers, possibly associated with the notorious astroturf group America's Frontline Doctors, have stalked her, spied on her (by flying a drone over her house), and confronted her in a dark parking lot. If these allegations are true -- and local police seem to think they are -- I hope these individuals get jail time. After all, if we want to be a law-and-order country, we should go after the real enemies of law and order.

Action: concerning our Post Office, offshore drilling, "Instagram for kids," fossil fuel drilling, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell President Biden to reform our Postal Service and end offshore drilling, tell Facebook to abandon its plans to let children use Instagram, tell AXA's CEO to stop insuring fossil fuel projects, and tell AT&T to abandon One America News Network. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom and USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. He should have already fired Mr. DeJoy merely for slowing down the mail and charging more for it, because why should we tolerate paying more to get our medicine and ballots and Social Security checks slower? I'm old enough to remember when merely proposing such a thing would get you laughed out of the room. But apparently Mr. Bloom stands in the way of our USPS Board of Governors firing Mr. DeJoy, and even better, Mr. DeJoy has invested with a fund Mr. Bloom runs, which sure smells of corruption even if we never put either man in jail for it. If Mr. Biden replaces Mr. Bloom, we're all one step closer to replacing Mr. DeJoy, at which point hallelujah!

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell President Biden to end offshore drilling. You don't need to stop with the recent spill of the Southern California coast -- you need only remember the Exxon Valdez spill and the BP Spillageddon in the Gulf of Mexico, both of which were avoidable and took forever to clean up because corporations don't like paying to clean up their messes. President Biden wouldn't just be fulfilling a campaign promise by ending offshore drilling -- he'd also open up space for the wind farms he wants to line America's coasts, as I imagine it would be difficult to do both things in the same spot. And if I had to pick, I'd rather have the turbines out there -- no, they won't kill all the birds, and no, they won't make you sick, and no, they won't be so noisy you can't function. And we might get to keep our planet.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell Facebook to abandon its ill-conceived (and ill-concealed!) plans to hook children on Instagram. You no doubt know from multitudinous news reports that Facebook knew that young girls who used Instagram had much worse body images than girls who didn't, and it was still like pulling teeth to get them to "suspend" their plans for an Instagram for Kids app. And don't let anyone justify Instagram-for-Kids by saying "they're just going to find a way to get it anyway," not just because defeatism is unworthy of a civilized people, but because our job, as adults, isn't necessarily to play catch-up with social media so much as to give our kids spiritual nourishment so they don't run to social media for it. Old-fashioned of me, I know.

Sum of Us helps you tell AXA CEO Thomas Buberl to stop insuring new gas and oil projects. He's supposedly going to decide on that matter this week, and AXA (which operates mainly in Europe and the Middle East) was the first big insurance corporation to refuse to insure new coal projects, but we still need to let AXA know we're watching, not least because we also know big oil and gas drilling corporations are also watching, and preparing to drown out our voices with the power of big money. Oh, and also their "expertise," which is mainly expertise in BSing and gaslighting. When that's all they got, we need to oppose them, in numbers they cannot mistake. The only way to beat big money is to fight big money, after all -- and our victories today guarantee more victories in the future, as long as we keep working.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell AT&T to end financial support for the One America News Network. Just because AT&T might have wanted "its own conservative (sic) news network" years ago doesn't mean we have to put up with all the rage-inducing crap on TV news today -- and since AT&T is apparently OAN's sole funder, the first blow we strike might be the decisive one. OAN are the people who tell you lies about the 2020 election, lies about COVID vaccines, lies about the January 6 attempted coup, lies about Black civil rights activists, and lies about how "oppressed" white folks are. They're also the folks who think that people who "believe" Joe Biden won the 2020 election should be executed for treason. I want the assholes who say such things to get the oblivion they deserve. They sure don't deserve more corporate money.

Action: concerning health care, working families, slaughterhouse emissions, FDA regulation, Israeli occupation, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell big pharma CEOs to stop putting their own needs ahead of the world's needs, tell Hello Fresh you support its workers' unionization efforts, tell our EPA to issue strong slaughterhouse emissions standards, tell President Biden not to appoint a big pharma CEO and lobbyist to head up our FDA, tell Amazon and Google to end their support for Israel's occupation of Palestine, and tell AT&T to cut all ties with One America News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell big pharma CEOs to put people, not their own profits, first, and ensure everyone has access to COVID vaccines. No sense arguing that's not their job or they're only accountable to their shareholders, not when COVID could come back to bite us again and again and again, and overwhelm hospitals again and again and again, because vaccines aren't available in some part of the world. Oh, and putting profits above everyone and everything? Not civilized behavior. Seriously, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. The First Epistle to Timothy instructs us that "the love of money is the root of all evil." Big pharma CEOs putting their own profits above the health of the planet? That certainly qualifies as "the love of money."

Public Citizen helps you tell HelloFresh you support their workers' attempts to unionize and collectively bargain for better pay and better working conditions. HelloFresh has made over $2 billion in profits in the burgeoning meal kit business, but their workers put up with COVID outbreaks in cramped working areas, have their bathroom breaks times, can't hardly get a damn glass of water, and face anti-union propaganda at the workplace disrupting their work because of course they do. The PRO Act would clamp down on all of these things, but until our Senate deigns to pass it, we'll just have to get the Big Stick of Bad PR out for HelloFresh. They ain't been around so long they can just ignore it -- or us.

Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous slaughterhouse pollution regulations possible. Our EPA is mulling these rules as we speak, so if we speak out, we leave a paper trail that the courts can't ignore, if it comes to that. It should come to that less now that Joe Biden is President! Presidential elections do matter for some things, after all. Don't let anyone gaslight you about FOODZ PRICEZ GOINGZ THROUGHZ TEH ROOFZ!!!! if we demand that factory farms pollute less. No one will be sitting around a campfire in a hundred years saying yeah, sure, toxic farm pollution killed off all the fish and made our water undrinkable, but at least food was a little cheaper for a while!

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden not to appoint a big pharma CEO/lobbyist to run our Food and Drug Administration. We have just seen what happens when our FDA does the bidding of big pharma corporations, in their hasty approval of aducanumab for treating Alzheimer's disease, even though our FDA's own advisory board reviewed the scant evidence of its efficacy and recommended against approval; I would prefer not to have more of that. The particular executive/lobbyist on Mr. Biden's short list, Michelle McMurry-Heath, just so happens to oppose lowering drug prices. We've got enough of those people in our Senate; let's not have them in our FDA as well.

No Tech For Apartheid helps you tell Amazon and Google to pull out of Project Nimbus, which would provide cloud computing services for the Israeli government and military, and thus make them a vital part of occupying and oppressing Palestinians. Almost 800 workers at both corporations have already leveled this demand at their bosses, and their courage demands we join them. And remember: you don't have to unwind the entire history of the region until you figure out who committed the first injury before you decide what you do today. You need only remember that Israel is way, way more powerful than Palestine, and still treats every living Palestinian like a convicted terrorist. And all those nations that hate Israel sure ain't going out of their way to stop them.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell AT&T to cut ties with the fascist news network One America News, which is still pounding the absurd notion that Donald Trump won an election he lost by seven million votes, and whose on-air "personalities" tell us that we who recognize that fact should all be executed for treason. Like any of them have the guts! If AT&T were to withdraw financial backing from OAN, OAN would probably flounder, but hey, that's the genius of capitalism, is it not? If OAN is so great, and the demand for its "news" so undeniable, they ought to be able to survive without a big corporate sugar daddy! And if not, then we wouldn't have to put up with their drama anymore.

UPDATE. Now President Biden is reportedly leaning toward former FDA Administrator Robert Califf as his choice; I remember that being a bad idea at the end of the Obama years, and I can't imagine it's suddenly become a better idea now. Public Citizen has this alert as well.

Action: concerning COVID relief, drug price negotiation, abusive phone rates, abuses of power, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to stop Alabama from building prisons with COVID relief funds, tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, protect prisoners from abusive phone rates, and has the Protecting Our Democracy Act, and tell AT&T to drop OAN from the DirecTV network. 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. Presente helps you tell the Biden Administration to stop Alabama from using COVID relief funds to build new prisons. Yes, you read that right: Alabama actually used $400 million in money for COVID relief to build two megaprisons. Does building a prison sound like "COVID relief" to you? Only if you believe the absurd lie that TEH IMMIGRANTZ AREZ BRINGINGZ TEH COVIDZ!!!! and believe all immigrants should be thrown in prison. And, ah, Alabama has been rocked pretty hard by the Delta wave; maybe some hospitals could use it more than prisons? It's a question worth asking! Anyway, the Biden Administration should get all law-and-order on this effort post-haste -- but they won't, unless we demand it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Tired of hearing about this? Blame New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, who says he can't support Medicare drug price negotiation, not at all because New Jersey politicians have been in the death-grip of big pharma corporations forever, no, sir! In his view, the plan "does not guarantee...that the government’s going to save money, doesn’t guarantee that the consumer saves any money." But then he whines that "(w)e’re going to take anywhere between $3 and $400 billion from the industry," which is, basically, a guarantee that "the government" and "the consumer" will, in fact, save money; he's just trying to confuse you by phrasing it differently. Which is the devil's art, and we should never let the devil get all the say.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would end abusive prison phone rates. When families go into debt just trying to stay in touch with their loved ones in prison, then big telecom corporations are charging too much! It's that damn simple! It's cruel to them, and it's cruel to prisoners! If your right-wing nephew says then they shouldn't have raised a criminal ha ha ha snort, please tell him to do two things: 1) slap himself, and 2) consider that civilized people use prisons to rehabilitate prisoners, and all the science tells us that prisoners who can talk to their families while they're imprisoned are a lot less likely to go back to prison. If the little turd then tells you that scientists are all corrupt, ask him exactly how a scientist makes money arguing that people should spend less time in prison. Or tell him to go play with himself; I can't ask you to have too much patience.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which would rein in the Presidential behavior no one expected from a President until Donald Trump came along. Among the things this bill would do: it would limit a President's ability to declare national emergencies so they can build vanity border walls that can't stand up to a stiff wind, it would prevent Presidents from profiting from their office, and would require candidates to release 10 years of tax returns. The insane, tyrannical behavior of King George III prompted our Founders to create a state that restricts Presidential power; we're all too young to remember King George III, but hopefully we haven't forgotten King George W. Bush or King Donald Trump, both of whom laughed as they hurt hundreds of millions of good Americans.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell big telecom corporation AT&T to drop the right-wing extremist news network One America News (or OAN) from the DirecTV lineup. We only learned this week that AT&T basically created and funded OAN, a network which has lately suggested that folks who maintain that Joe Biden won the 2020 election by seven million votes should be executed as traitors. Remember opposing the AT&T/DirecTV merger from 2015? Well, this is why -- now AT&T funds OAN and carries it on the TV provider in which it still holds a 70% stake, exactly the kind of "synergy" and "partnership" that has turned those two words into near-cuss words. Apparently AT&T wanted another right-wing news network back in the day! Because who hasn't had enough not just of those, but of the "liberal" media outlets that ape them? Thus it's time for us to brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Around the table: more about the uselessness of moderates, the venality of contemporary media, and the evil of Republicans.

It continues: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) says she won't support any tax hikes on corporations and/or the rich in the budget reconciliation bill, while Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) says he won't support the Medicare expansion provisions in the bill. Shades of Joe Lieberman suddenly deciding he didn't support a Medicare buy-in back in 2009, at precisely the moment it looked like it might actually make the Affordable Care Act! And Sen. Manchin tells you he supports Medicare drug price negotiation as we all know Sen. Sinema doesn't, so it won't make it into the final bill! Welcome to another exciting episode of "The Uselessness of Moderates."

And now, another episode! Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) says she won't support the Women's Health Protection Act, just passed by our House. She says it would "severely weaken the conscious (sic) exceptions that are in the current law," exceptions that let health care workers who oppose abortion for reasons of "religious" "conscience" to opt out of abortion-related procedures (how about find another line of work?), plus she finds some of the language in the bill "extreme." I knew she'd find something if she looked hard enough! Oh, and she's endorsing Paul LePage for Maine Governor, because small businesses job creators hard-working families.

Charlie Sykes writes about the "sane Republicans" who are "purging themselves" from the political offices they hold, but are they sane, really? If they ever accused any Iraq war protestor of treason -- I heard that all the time from Republicans back in the day! -- then the answer is no. I know, that was almost 20 years ago already, but that's part of my point: Republicans constantly obliterate their own past as they push right. Why, Mr. Sykes himself was one of Scott Walker's biggest boosters, and the only thing Scott Walker really cared about was handing out corporate welfare, though he also broke public unions and suppressed protestors' free speech. True, Mr. Gonzalez's successor will be worse than him, but I'm more bummed about injury ending his football career than Trump ending his political career.

Dan Froomkin at Press Watch notes that the New York Times has hardly written a word about the Eastman memo that laid out Donald Trump's plan to steal the 2020 election despite losing by seven million votes, and helpfully cites non-coverage of the notorious Downing Street memo as a reminder of our "liberal" media's decided lack of courage. And just as our "liberal" media ultimately concluded that the Downing Street memo was "old news" -- no thanks to the folks who wouldn't make it news at all! -- I'm sure today's "liberal" media will look down on the Eastman memo similarly, particularly since Mr. Eastman now says he was just spitballing there. (Since Mr. Froomkin's article, the Times has published an opinion piece on the Eastman memo by Jamelle Bouie -- which sure doesn't mean they didn't drop the ball before then!)

Tucker Carlson, always looking for a way to convince his audience they're really not assholes, says immigrants, not unvaccinated Americans, are really clogging up our hospitals with COVID cases. I searched in vain for some support to that thesis, but then "supporting your argument" is never the point with people like Mr. Carlson -- the point is "making your viewers diddle their rage glands." Anyway, who are you going to believe -- all your friends and family and neighbors telling you that unvaccinated people are clogging up the hospitals where they work, or Tucker Carlson? (Also, too, folks ain't leaving health care because of vaccine mandates -- they're leaving because a 20-months-and-counting pandemic, one restarted by the immaturity of the unvaccinated, has burned them out.)

Finally, if you were wondering how right-wing crybabies were handling the Arizona "fraudit" report that actually said Maricopa County undercounted Joe Biden's vote count by a few hundred votes, well, they're handling it about as well as you'd expect -- by calling the whole thing "biased" (!) against them from the start, by yelling about problems and hoping you don't notice modifiers like "potentially" and "possible," by pretending that John Smith and Maria Garcia aren't common names but are names of criminals, and, of course, by calling for even more audits. In a sane, moral, and decent society, these people would be too ashamed to show their faces; in this insane, immoral, and decadent society, the Facebook "engagements" will keep on coming.

Around the table: in which the whole concept of negotiation seems to perplex some Democrats.

Sen. Sanders (I-VT), upon being told "moderate" Democrats might try to shrink the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, says "I already negotiated," adding that "(t)he truth is we need more" and "(t)his is, in my view, the minimum of what we should be spending." It's good to be reminded that when you ask for more than you want, you get more of what you want, even if Democrats like Sen. Kaine seem befuddled at how all of that is supposed to work. Now all we need to do is clog up our Reps' and Senators' phone lines so that the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis doesn't move the goalposts again.

Steven Rosenfeld, about as good a writer on voting rights issues as we have, notes that a lot of Republicans are starting to come out against the Arizona "fraudit" of Maricopa County votes. More important, though, is Mr. Rosenfeld's speculation that when the Cyber Ninjas finally release their report -- which they were supposed to do this week but couldn't, reportedly because three of the "fraudit" leaders got COVID -- the "fraudit" will not merely "revive debunked conspiracy theories" but "find small administrative problems 'that could be twisted into appearing to be evidence...of voter wrongdoing or voting irregularities,'" in the words of an American Oversight report. I sure am looking forward to another few months of people who never knew anything about how we count votes in 2019 breathlessly sharing every single report of a suitcase moving somewhere they didn't expect in 2020.

With our Supreme Court striking down President Biden's attempt to extend the eviction moratorium, we learn that state and local governments have distributed a mere 11% of the money the American Rescue Plan Act allotted for helping folks withstand getting evicted. State and local officials cite the possibility of fraud as a reason to go slowly, but that's a little like saying you didn't pull the baby out of the fire fast enough because you were afraid you'd break its arm. Anyway, I think state and local officials aren't going fast enough because Republicans run most states, and they want the eviction assistance program to fail, so that Joe Biden gets blamed for it right before the 2022 midterms. Hey, it's not like Republicans can run on their superior ideas!

Republicans are already trying to make the Afghanistan withdrawal and all its problems "Matter in the Midterms,", but what is the "biggest hurdle" in them accomplishing this aim? The calendar currently says 2021, that's what! Which leads one to suspect that Mr. Biden -- who thus far hasn't budged on his August 31 deadline for getting the hell out, and if a Republican was similarly unmoved by circumstances, you know they'd be calling you "traitor" for criticizing him! -- is the real political animal here. Or maybe we shouldn't give him too much credit, since he really only had a choice of two different calendar years to withdraw from Afghanistan in the first place.

Yes, that was Donald Trump's former spokeshack going on Fox News to say that "when President Trump was President, you didn't see crisis after crisis. You just didn't see it." She adds, "I shudder to think about what COVID would have been like under Joe Biden," though Joe Biden's worst day for COVID cases is still January 20, and that was still only two-thirds as bad as Donald Trump's worst day. Anyway, remember when Bush Mobbers went on TV in 2009 and said you never had a terrorist attack while George W. Bush was President, no, sir? Well, this is even worse gaslighting. But I don't think Americans have forgotten how awful the Trump Administration was, or how he did actually have "crisis after crisis," most of which he manufactured, whether through his incompetence or through his insatiable thirst for drama.

Finally, notorious former Blackwater/Xe CEO Erik Prince offers to evacuate folks out of Afghanistan -- for $6,500 a pop! You've heard by now that around half of all Americans can't scrounge together $400 in an emergency; now consider that the poverty line in Afghanistan is around $700 annually, and that a little less than half (in the Asian Development Bank's conservative estimate) of Afghans sit below that line, and you'll start to think that Mr. Prince is only trying to get two kinds of people out: 1) rich people and 2) people he can make into slave workers. No wonder people say he has no soul!

Around the table: whiny brats with guns should not get all the say about everything, part 955.

A Washington Post report finds that FEMA doesn't aid a lot of Black families in the deep South because they can't produce deeds and wills to prove they own their land. You should not be surprised to learn that "the long-held tradition of informal land ownership" among Black folks was a necessary response to Jim Crow laws preventing Black folks from even getting wills and deeds to begin with. FEMA's insistence on such documentation doesn't actually come from the law, but from their apparent desire to keep scammers from getting federal assistance. We'd damn well better find another way, though.

University of Chicago neuroscientists find that rats will help their fellow rats escape a trap even when tempted to ignore them with chocolate. They put two rats in a cage, with one roaming freely and one not, and the free-roaming rat was "more agitated" when his cagemate was trapped than when he was in an empty cage, and the free-roaming rat also figured out how to open the trap after a lot of effort. They call it "(t)he first evidence of empathy-driven helping behavior in rodents," but I suspect the only reason we didn't observe this already is that we didn't look for it. You spend a lifetime trying to overcome prejudice only to find you've moved the needle only a little. Still, you do the work, because the work is worth it.

Tennessee fires the state's immunization program director, apparently after she gave completely sound and legal advice that teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 don't need their parents' permission to get the COVID vaccine. Of course this is the right-wing way -- to act like such drama-addled morons that the best of us throw up our hands and disengage from the fight -- but the best part of her story is the part where unnamed busybodies told her she should have been more "politically aware" that sharing the science after being explicitly told to do so by her superiors would be "pok(ing) the bear." People like that should a) slap themselves and b) contemplate a little more seriously the fact that anything "pokes the bear" as far as right-wingers are concerned. Next up on Fox News: Tucker Carlson comes out against oxygen.

Hard to believe, Harry, but an AT&T PAC gave $100,000 to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott the same day he called a special session to pass more vote suppression bills, even though AT&T has voiced support for improved voting access. You hate to say things like "good words mean nothing," but corporations make it so hard not to say such things. I sure hope they don't say "we gave to Greg Abbott to keep a real monster like Allen West out of office," because Greg Abbott is already a real monster.

Ho hum, Texas's February cold snap may have shut down that state's power grid and killed over 200 good Texans, but at least a couple of gas corporations made record profits. I can already hear right-wingers cluck-clucking that NO SUPPLIEZ PLUS HIGH DEMANDZ EQUALZ TEH HIGHZ PRICEZ DUHZ!!!!!!, and I suppose they are free to inflict their reasoning on the families of the dead. Plus they've always said that TEH FREE MARKUTZ!!!! would always prevent this sort of thing from happening, because people wouldn't stand for it. The Free Marketeers didn't imagine state legislators would simply ignore a cold snap to whine about "voter fraud" and transgender athletes and critical race theory. Or did they?

Finally, we learn that Donald Trump apparently thought whomever leaked the story of him hiding in the White House bunker while George Floyd protests went on outside the White House last year should have been "charged with treason" and "executed." Ever get the sense this is a man who says ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME all the time? Perhaps you have. If we ever get to the point where exposing the Emperor's cowardice is "treason," this democracy is doomed. And about a quarter of the electorate are there right now, actively trying to doom our democracy merely because it doesn't tell them only what they want to hear. But I would much rather die in a nuclear war than die because of whiny brats with guns.

Around the table: oh, look, another coup over "election fraud."

Myanmar's military seize power in coup, detaining democratically-elected leaders including Nobel laureate and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. You may be tempted to think that, ah, given recent events in our Capitol last month, Republicans would pause before saying very much about a military coup arising over alleged election fraud, but then you remember that nothing gives Republicans pause, and they're no doubt blaming all of this on Joe Biden as we speak. He was Vice President for eight years, what did he do? Seriously, I don't even need to check.

The Philadelphia Inquirer removed comment sections from all but some of its sports articles on Monday, for the following reason: "(c)ommenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring." In other words, assholes ruin everything, and though I wouldn't dismiss the idea that paid moderators could make it better, I also think we have many other ways to express ourselves than internet comment sections. Folks remember letters to the editor, right? Or blogs? Or email?

Another year, another record-setting year of profits for Netflix in which the streaming corporation paid almost nothing in corporate income taxes. Didn't they say lower corporate taxes would reduce tax avoidance and prevent corporations from going overseas? I may never have heard anything more false in my lifetime, and I hear a lot of false things these days, as I'm sure you do, too. Seriously, bring the 55% corporate tax rate back. It can't possibly do more harm than corporations do now that they're so "free" from the "burden" of taxation.

"Dozens" of Bush Mobb officials are leaving the Republican Party because they think it's become a cult of personality. They're right, of course, but (at the risk of beating a dead horse) these are still the same people who either called us traitor for opposing the Iraq war or did nothing while other people called us traitor, and I don't see any evidence that they feel any remorse over it. And George W. Bush had his little cult of personality, too. No, I think the RNC Chair is right, that the party's having a little "spat" and they'll "come together" again -- and now with even more crazy!

Finally, around four dozen protestors in Los Angeles shut down COVID vaccine distribution at Dodger Stadium for about an hour. Organizers apparently told protestors to "please refrain from wearing Trump/MAGA attire as we want our statement to resonate with the sheeple," and what helps you connect with folks better than calling them "sheeple"? Seriously, this is yet another reminder that right-wingers aren't about "freedom of choice": they're about their freedom of choice overruling your freedom of choice. In other words, they're fascists.

Around the table: in which liberals did not "almost lose" the election for the 443rd time.

Looks like I spoke too soon: the two Republican Wayne County (MI) officials who certified the vote totals have now changed their minds and want to "rescind" their votes. I should never have underestimated the right wing thirst for drama! And yes, when officials see the same "problems" in suburban districts as in urban ones but only want to certify the results in the suburban ones, that's drama, and it's not good drama, either. And they can sign all the affidavits they want, but they can't "rescind" their votes. Voting is like that.

When I hear that Joe Biden would rather not investigate our soon-to-be-ex-President's many alleged criminal acts, I sympathize to a point -- I do not wish the Biden Administration to be all about our soon-to-be-ex-President; I'd rather it be all about the American people. Still, when you smear feces all over our house, we should hold you accountable for it, through the Administration that replaces you. And I sure hope Mr. Biden isn't thinking of interfering with the state of New York's investigations into our soon-to-be-ex-President.

I was never a big "Green New Deal" fan -- it was a non-binding resolution, and I always preferred bills like the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, which would actually do the things the Green New Deal resolution merely aspired to do -- but turns out 92 out of 93 House Green New Deal co-sponsors won re-election in 2020. That includes three out of four in competitive House districts, with the fourth currently leading his race by almost seven points with about 85% of the vote counted. Who thinks "let's create jobs building renewable energy infrastructure" is a loser? Only the long-time Democratic pols who are used to losing.

A Government Accountability Office (or GAO) report documents how big corporations like Walmart and Amazon pay their employees so little that they require public assistance like food stamps and Medicaid -- as in nearly six million Medicaid enrollees and nearly five million food stamp recipients who worked full time. And there's Sen. Bernie Sanders telling Walmart to "get off welfare," which Democratic politicians still can't see is winning messaging that resonates with broad sectors of the electorate.

Another day, another Republican (this time former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, he sure was a big help winning Ohio, wasn't he?) claiming that "the far-left...almost cost" Joe Biden the 2020 election. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is exactly right in her response, of course (i.e., that the "far left" won Georgia -- Georgia! -- for Mr. Biden), and moderates lose elections not only because they don't excite people, but also because they don't fight for popular things like (hate to beat a dead horse) renewable energy and Medicare-for-All.

Finally, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that we can't "meet Nazis halfway." Yes, her feelings are pretty much my feelings, and I feel compelled to remind folks that you couldn't "meet halfway" with Tha Bush Mobb, either, once they said everyone who disagreed with their palpably stupid case for war with Iraq was a traitor and a weakling. And let's not try too hard to "understand" Nazi wannabes, either, as our "liberal" media outlets are inexplicably still trying to do -- hate doesn't require a whole lot of navel-gazing, and if Nazi wannabes have legitimate grievances, they sure ain't the grievances they're airing.

Around the table: in which politics continues to bring out the worst in some people.

Scientists from Georgetown University and the University of Warwick find the cost of climate change is actually considerably higher than previously thought. Models accounting for average rising temperatures count the cost in the many trillions of dollars over the next few centuries, but a model accounting for fluctuations in temperatures adds to that cost. I will say that even spending $50 trillion over the next 200 years is not something our politicians should be afraid to do, and not just because the alternative may well be annihilation.

Peter Montague at TruthOut reminds us that our President is "trying to scare (us) with the socialism boogeyman." People call you a "socialist" when they can't win the argument on the merits, but they also must hide from themselves all the socialism they take part in. Socialism isn't merely about shopping at Ace Hardware instead of Home Depot or dumping your bankster for a credit union -- when you drive a road, put out the trash, call the fire department, or head out to the local park, you're practicing socialism yourself.

Taliban leader says he hopes our President wins re-election so that he'll withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, though that's an aim we can accomplish without this particular President's involvement. Remember when right-wingers read Osama bin Laden's remarks right before the 2004 election as an "endorsement" of John Kerry even though the plain text said they weren't? Right now all those idiots are either silent or sounding like even bigger idiots trying to explain how "we hope he will win the election" somehow means the opposite of what it says.

Speaking of right-wing idiots, QAnon-supporting U.S. House candidate Marjorie Greene gave her own campaign nearly half a million bucks after getting a loan through the CARES Act's notorious Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP). And though of course she's not the only one -- Darrell Issa, who used to be the richest man in Congress, got a PPP loan himself! -- she is the only one whose nominal Democratic opponent dropped out of the race a few months ago because he decided to move out of the district, an administrative failure that makes you wonder how Democrats ever win races at all.

Commerce Township (MI) employee needs 13 stitches on his fingers after trying to remove a yard sign supporting our President with razor blades on its edges. The sign was too close to the road, thus violating a town ordinance, The homeowner said she had several yard signs "stolen" (did she put the others too close to the road, too?) but of course knew nothing about the razor blades! That just means it can get worse: one day soon a Presidential votary will happily confess that he electrified his yard sign, and not too long from now someone will confess to something similar after it harms a child or a pet.

Finally, Barron County (MI) sheriff says the recent kidnapping plot against Gov. Whitmer could well have been an attempt at a citizen's arrest. For what crime? For "treason," per the would-be kidnappers, but more likely for making them wear face masks or being a Democrat or not making them feel like they're the only people in the world who mean a damn. We have to stop coddling these diaper-loaded brats even if they're armed and even if some of our police officers seem awfully sympathetic to them. Shame still works in America, if we have the guts to do it.

Action: concerning war with Iran.

You've no doubt heard by now that our President ordered the assassination of Iranian Gen. Soleimani over the weekend, which has left many of us wondering if we're going to be involved in World War III just a few days into a new decade. But let's take wondering out of the equation by telling our Reps and Senators to prevent war with Iran -- you know, like they should have done in the defense authorization bill last month but were too chicken to do. Only Congress has the Constitutional power to declare war, after all, even if they've spent the last 60-plus years deferring to our Presidents in exactly the manner our Founders aimed to prevent. Demand Progress, Win Without War, and the Friends Committee on National Legislation all help you write your Congressfolk telling them to stop the march to war with Iran, but I advise you to call your Reps and Senators, too, because we need to clog up their phone lines, or they'll just pretend they didn't hear us.

Folks on the right will tell you that if you oppose our President's unconstitutional action, you don't know anything about the situation, but we're not schmucks and we don't need to taste dung just to make sure it's not really meatloaf. The House impeaches a President, then he goes after a Middle Eastern bogeyman -- gosh, where have we heard this tale before? But those of us who may be more charitably-inclined also may observe plenty of other signs this is all typical Presidential drama -- that our President just couldn't help but drop broad hints about the attack to fellow elites at Mar-a-Lago, that our Administration has absurdly tried to link Mr. Soleimani to the 9.11 attacks, that the Fredo Corleone aspirant who also happens to be our President's middle child actually told Twitter last week that his dad was about to "open a big ol' can of whoop ass," and that virtually every right-winger in America who has spent the last several days lecturing us about Gen. Soleimani never mentioned him before.

Of course, yelling about your supposed "ignorance" in failing to support our President's vanity military attack will only be the beginning -- next they'll tell us we're "weak," and that we're "objectively pro-Iran," and that we're "traitors." We're none of those things, of course -- we're Americans who love our country and hate what Our Glorious Elites constantly do to it. Seriously, they use America like toilet paper and then call you a "traitor" when you point that out. So let's make sure we let our Reps and Senators know how we feel, by using one of the action tools in the first paragraph above, or calling them, or both.

Action: concerning impeachment, government spying, and discrimination.

The full House votes on impeaching our President today or tomorrow, so call your House Reps and tell them to vote yea to send formal impeachment charges to the Senate. The charges are abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and Senate Republicans are eager to receive these charges so they can carefully and thoroughly refute them! I kid, of course -- Messrs. McConnell and Graham have both said they want to get this over with as soon as possible, truth and duty be damned. But don't be swayed by them -- if Republicans ever had a case in defense of our President, we'd have heard it by now, instead of endless whining about "process" and "politics." Don't be swayed by the long odds of ever getting a conviction, either. And certainly don't be swayed by reports suggesting that our President is really sweating the indignity of getting impeached. How likely is it that he's ever sweated any indignity? No, the man loves drama, and he loves playing the victim, too, so a short Senate trial ending in "vindication" won't necessarily be a boon to him.

Meanwhile, the Democratic House, in a fit of year-end budgetary capitulation that you'd think they'd know how to prevent by now, extended the notorious Section 215 of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act through March, so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to curtail government spying by repealing Section 215. I've been promoting the "even our NSA says it doesn't need Section 215" line for a while now, and it is significant that even our big spying agency doesn't want that particular spying power, but we also must remember that a) we have a President who openly tries to use our government to spy on his political enemies, like we should care about his problems or something, and b) we also have a President who loves calling people traitors and encouraging his votaries to call for the deportation of some of his political enemies, and surely we don't think a man like that deserves the power to collect email and phone data without a warrant. And certainly not in the name of "national security"! I keep saying he is not America, and maybe he'll never hear it, but mainly I say it so you do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to scuttle its own proposal to allow "religious" organizations to take part in government grants and still discriminate against people in violation of the law, then the ACLU still helps you do that. The ACLU sure does give some good examples of what might happen if our Administration gets its way: "Meals on Wheels and other HHS-funded community meal programs designed to support older adults could refuse to deliver food to older Americans who are LGBTQ. Federally funded foster care agencies could refuse to place children with families because of the prospective families' sexual orientation or religion, regardless of the children's needs. Head Start grant recipients and other federally funded childcare facilities could refuse to serve children with same-sex parents. They could also refuse to provide services to transgender youth." Ain't none of that ish cool, so let's make sure our Administration knows that -- because even if they defy us, we might help them lose in court.

Around the table: in which the calculus of defeat reveals itself, again!

Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada, who has shepherded numerous anti-gay and anti-transgender bills through that state's House over the last few years, has announced he'll resign his leadership post in the coming weeks. A Tennessean report revealed that Mr. Casada had exchanged sexually explicit text messages about women with his Chief of Staff; that's despicable behavior, obviously, but would it be too much to ask that bad legislators resign in shame after trying to pass despicable bills? (Mr. Casada says he'll keep his House seat; other Republican legislators have objected, but I doubt that'll amount to much.)

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) becomes the first Republican House Rep to call for impeachment of our President, and Mehdi Hasan at The Intercept wonders why more Democrats aren't calling for it. They probably think it's "smart politics," but then they also think that running yet another center-right milquetoast who wants everyone to "get along" in the name of "bipartisanship" will beat our President in 2020, just like it didn't do in 2016. And they're also wrong, as Mr. Hasan says, to suggest that they don't want to do anything to rile up our President's base, because anything riles them up, and bases don't win elections without a lot of help. (And Jesus Mary and Joseph our President needs to shut up about "TREASON!" He's going to make the word meaningless, and that's one of those words we need to define accurately and precisely.)

I don't know that the Venezuelan media offer "far more diversity" than American media, but Lucas Koerner and Ricardo Vaz at FAIR make a fairly compelling case that the Venezuelan press is far more diverse than our "liberal" media would like us to think. No, I think imputing malice to our "liberal" media is entirely appropriate there -- weren't they just doing their damnedest to create the impression that a coup was about to take down the Maduro government any second now? Yes, they were. And the "facts" our "liberal" media often presents are easily refutable by folks who've actually spent any time in Venezuela. Maybe there's a solution in there, somewhere.

Fresh off his pardoning of a bankster who wrote a glowing book about him, our President is apparently thinking of pardoning a few actual American war criminals on Memorial Day. On Memorial Day! Could it be that our President really is a Democratic plant trying to make the very idea of ever voting for a flag-waving jingo again revolting? That's not the way to bet, of course, and (as Sen. Graham might say, if he weren't such a toady these days) the whole idea of being an American is most emphatically not to prove that you can act just as uncivilized as your enemy. (As an aside, I think the Times is rather optimistic to suppose that Attorney General Barr might be trying to prevent this from happening; Mr. Barr is, after all, the man who helped Bush the Better pardon all those Iran-Contra conspirators. I'd be happy to be wrong, of course!)

Finally, a warning about polls suggesting that folks feeling good about our economy won't help our President get re-elected: ask them again in late October of 2020. If the economy's still "good" then, and the Presidential candidates have spent six months tearing each other down, then I suspect a fatigued populace will be more likely to ascribe the drama to "both sides" and return our President to office, a tragedy continued Republican vote suppression will facilitate. But who knows? Maybe Democrats will nominate someone who changes the conversation away from our President and towards a just, sustainable, and hopeful future. I kid, of course.

Around the table: featuring yet another reason we need *a la carte* cable packaging.

The incomparable Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs reads South Bend Mayor/Democratic Presidential aspirant Pete Buttigieg's autobiography, finds it wanting. There are literally dozens of insights here, but let's just say that Mr. Buttigieg is just another guy who wants you to think he's a liberal -- since liberal policy prescriptions are actually quite popular! -- but is actually just another center-right technocrat who values "bipartisan cooperation" with the political party that thinks cooperation equals capitulation. Also, too, when folks complain about "out-of-touch" elites, the Harvard- and Oxford-educated, consultant firm-groomed Mr. Buttigieg is really what they mean, no matter how nice he seems or how many languages he speaks. Every time he mentions "smart sewers" in the first debate, take a drink.

Study finds that employment in the solar power industry fell by a little over 3 percent last year, largely due to tariffs on Asian imports. I'd prefer we made the solar panels here, too, but I'm sure some fossil fuel CEO or other told our President that this would happen if he slapped tariffs on the nations that produce these panels (or the materials the panels need), and our President laughed with glee at the thought. But not only do these tariffs come down gradually and then disappear after 2022, federal tax credits will also come down gradually and then disappear after 2022, which means solar job creation will likely go back up in the short term, so I guess our President gets to take credit for that, too. Seriously, none of this is beyond his ability to calculate -- the man only wins political battles by manufacturing crises like these. Just like Mr. Bush.

Almost-bankrupt corporation Sears hands out $25 million in bonuses to executives, then cancels life insurance for its retirees. Bonuses for what? For finding a hedge fund to grind the corporation into the ground for good while sucking the marrow out of it for the executives? Always they demand loyalty, but never do they show it to us "little people." When a man realizes he needs to live in a gated community for his own safety, does he start to think that maybe the problem is him?

Our President, less than a week after saying he wanted to completely destroy the Affordable Care Act and make Republicans the "party of health care," has announced that Republicans won't vote on their new plan, whatever it is, until after the 2020 election, which sure isn't the textbook definition of courage. Also, why does he imagine that "private health insurance" is "beloved"? The only people who really like their health insurance are the people who haven't had to use it lately, and it's a long walk from "like it, I guess" to "TEH BELOVEDZ!!!!!"

Finally, Fox News's Jeannie Pirro returns to the air after a short hiatus, and declares that folks who accused our President of colluding with Russia are "traitorous" and "treasonous." I sure am glad she said both words, or I wouldn't have understood what she meant! Seriously, two things: one, Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution doesn't call accusations, or attempts to prove accusations, "treasonous." Two, don't people hate TV pundits who yell all the time? I'm old enough to remember when on-air meltdowns ended careers. This is yet another reason we need a la carte cable packaging -- we're paying for all these tantrum-throwers on our TV, even if we're not watching them, and if we could stop paying for them, they'd clean up their act right quick.

Around the table: featuring a series of unsurprising developments.

It may be surprising at first to contemplate a study concluding that social media usage actually has very little effect on folks' beliefs, but when you think about it, most of us seek out sources that we already more or less agree with (and can do so more easily than ever before). The study's author concludes that something else compels Americans to hold to ridiculous beliefs; I submit that cause is a Republican party that makes ever more desperate and hysterical arguments to hold onto power it hasn't earned.

Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us that "Renouncing Violence is a Demand Made Almost Exclusively of Muslims." After all, can you remember CNN dragging a white nationalist on to renounce violence? More likely CNN will wring its hands over whether the KKK can "rebrand" after 150 years of murder! We should also remember that only folks with socioeconomic privilege have the option to renounce violence; George W. Bush never had to commit violence himself because he was able to get other people to commit violence on his behalf.

Our Supreme Court stops execution because Texas wouldn't allow a Buddhist cleric to attend, a far cry from last month's decision not to stop a different execution because Alabama wouldn't allow a Muslim cleric to attend. Boy, I really wish it were more complicated than this -- the word "Muslim" juices up a rage gland the way "Buddhist" doesn't. Didn't conservatives tell us that confirming their judges would ensure that judges wouldn't interpret the law however it suits them?

U.S. District Court Judge strikes down Administration plan to water down the definition of "Association Health Plans" so that virtually any organization or corporation could evade the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Requirements like, you know, making health insurers cover certain health conditions that everyone but this Administration and its cronies want to cover. Sometimes this Administration's animus -- in this case, toward pre-existing condition bans -- is really hard to understand. Except, of course, as wanton evil. But voters won't punish them, as long as Democrats keep putting up candidates who don't mean what they say.

Lisa Beach at Yes! magazine describes an Orlando, FL farmers market that helps fight teenage pregnancy, crime, and dropouts. Not just by "putting those ungrateful kids to work," but by putting them to work maintaining our civilization, as farmers markets most assuredly do, far more than, say, penny stock trading. And this farmers market just so happens to serve a primarily African-American community largely bereft of grocery stores. This would be a thing that would help stop school shootings, too -- as I recall from my youth, kids desperately need something to think about other than themselves, and running a farmers market would surely do that.

Finally, speaking of folks who clearly never thought very much about other people as a child, our President thinks the two FBI officials having an affair with each other and exchanging negative texts about our President while investigating his ties to Russia should be in jail for treason. How many times must I tell these pimps! Working with someone's political enemies -- and we'd still have to prove that Messrs. Strozk and Page actually did that! -- does not violate Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution, which requires an actual enemy, not just "someone the President doesn't like." File this, too, under "The President is Not America."

Around the table: no, our President is not a traitor! And other lessons.

FCC Chair Ajit Pai suspends the proposed Sinclair/Tribune merger, saying he's afraid Sinclair will sell some of its stations (in order to get under an FCC ownership cap) in "sidecar arrangements" allowing them to keep a stake in programming and revenues -- thus retaining control over stations they don't own, which is against the law. Next will be a hearing before an administrative judge; Comcast and Time-Warner abandoned their efforts to merge rather than face an administrative judge in 2015. I still wouldn't be surprised to see this deal come back from the dead, though. And why do we allow any person or corporation to own more than one station again?

Look, I want to believe just as badly as anyone else that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) could vote against the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. After all, Mr. Kavanaugh believes a President should be exempt from criminal prosecution because he's-so-busy, and he has also stated that our government's metadata-vacuuming program is "entirely consistent" with our Constitution's 4th Amendment (and also spoke of the program's alleged "critical national security need," as if he hadn't convinced himself of the previous statement). But Mr. Paul could be the deciding vote here -- Republicans have 51 of 100 Senators, but John McCain is gravely ill and hasn't voted on anything in months -- and my guess is he waits for Sens. Manchin, Heidtkamp, and Donnelly to vote yea before he votes nay. Because the best time to vote on principle is when it makes no difference!

Just as we should take the term "fake news" with about a pound of salt, Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that we might actually credit social media with the leftward shift in voters' beliefs over the last few years. And just as we figure our President calls things "fake news" because he doesn't like being criticized, we should also figure that the "liberal" media doesn't like social media first and foremost because it's upended their authority -- social media has allowed good Americans to filter the news they get more to their liking, and maybe traditional "liberal" media sources, corporatist and cowardly as they are, aren't really to anyone's liking. Also, too, social media certainly isn't worse than the "right-wing noise machine" that drove voters rightward during the '90s.

Uh oh: looks like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker also met with Marila Butila, the Siberian woman recently charged with trying to collaborate with certain Americans to influence American elections. They met during Mr. Walker's Presidential campaign launch in 2015, which reminds me, mainly, that we really dodged a fucking bullet when Mr. Walker's campaign went kaplooey later that year, because Mr. Walker would be doing all the things Mr. Trump is doing and doing them in a way that would probably seem civilized to most Americans. But I'd be perfectly happy if this revelation helped finish his try for a third term later on this year.

Our President sure did put on a show two days ago in Helsinki (no, this won't be the straw that breaks the camel's back for Republicans, either), but no no no a thousand times no our President did not commit treason by throwing our intelligence agencies under the bus and sucking up to Vladimir Putin. He committed a thousand other sins, certainly, but not that one, because Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution still says what it's always said, and Congress has not declared war on Russia. And just as we remain wary of our "liberal" media regardless of how much our President constantly whines about them, we should remain wary of our intelligence agencies, as we have always done, out of our duty as citizens.

Finally, I was profoundly disgusted with our President fist-bumping that notorious Turkish dictator wannabe, Mr. Erdogan. "Do(ing) things the right way," according to our President, doesn't just explicitly mean steamrolling over our Constitution's mandate that spending bills originate in Congress -- it also explicitly means firing tens of thousands of civil servants, sending hundreds of judges to jail, torturing and raping detainees, and arresting 60 children for treason. Think of all that the next time you think of President Big Balls fist-bumping Mr. Erdogan.

Action: farm policy, GMO labeling, and the Iran nuclear deal.

The House plans to vote on the nefarious H.R. 2, the "farm bill" that'll set farm policy in the United States for the next five years, and Moms Rising helps you tell your House Rep to reject the House Farm Bill. Don't worry about people suddenly having nothing to eat if the Farm Bill doesn't pass, not just because that won't happen (Congress will just extend the old Farm Bill for a while if they can't pass a new one, as they've done the last two times), but because Americans don't let themselves be taken hostage, do we? The current Farm Bill is a cornucopia of evil, not just in cutting food stamps and imposing work requirements on them (for people who very likely either already work or are children or seniors, no less!), but in giving more subsidies to big farms, less assistance to farms trying to get off chemicals and monoculture, and more loopholes to corporations trying to put out pesticides, and more welfare handouts to factory farms. This bill deserves a humiliating death, so let's give it one.

Meanwhile, the USDA is considering labeling requirements for foods made with genetically-modified organisms (or GMOs), and surprise, their draft rule sucks! The USDA's standard would basically exclude sugars and oils (allowing more than two-thirds of GMO foods to go unlabeled!), would require labelers to use the nearly-unknown initials "BE" (for "bioengineered") instead of the far more well-known initials "GE" or "GMO," and would allow corporations to use various electronic means of labeling their food, without just, you know, writing some variation of this food has GMOs in it on the food label you're actually holding. But the USDA still has to take public comments on the proposed rule -- which they'll do for 60 days, in the hopes that well-organized food corporations will swamp us out. Let's destroy that hope by letting Just Label It help you leave a public comment opposing the USDA's inadequate GMO labeling proposal.

Finally, our President may have removed the United States from the Iran nuclear deal -- remember, when they tell you he's acting crazy like a fox, that George W. Bush's "crazy like a fox" act got us ISIS -- but the other six signatory nations can still keep the deal going, hence Roots Action helps you tell the other signatory nations to keep the Iran nuclear deal together. It is actually working, after all, and our President can't say it's not working without telling bald lies about it. Some will tell you you're "undermining America" by doing this, particularly by contacting Iran; others will even call you a "traitor." They can all go diddle their rage glands somewhere else. You never "undermine" your country by speaking out about what you think is right, and anyone can call anyone a "traitor," instead of taking the effort to persuade people they're right. And if this Administration's defenders resort to name-calling, they won't convince anyone of courage and character that they're right.

Around the table: the stupid, it burns! Part 818.

If you've noticed that you hear an awful lot of criticism of alleged "radical leftists" in the mainstream media but you don't actually hear these "radicals" themselves, well, you're not alone: Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs wonders why we can name virtually every talking head who slams "political correctness" and "social justice warriors" but hardly anyone who's politically correct or a social justice warrior themselves. You can answer this question in at least two ways: 1) because these talking heads who style themselves as "dissidents" are actually card-carrying members of Our Glorious Elites, and how do you get people to go along with ridiculous ideas if you can't deflect to some "common enemy"? And 2) waaaaaaaaah! (I remain convinced, by the way, that the real reason so many right-wingers use the "SJW" shorthand is that it shares two letters with "Jew.")

We learn from George Joseph and Liam Quigley at The Intercept that plainclothes police officers in New York City commit a rather disproportionate number of police shootings there: they comprise around 6% of the force, yet commit over 30% of the shootings. Why? Some observers suggest that plainclothes cops can get mistaken for robbers, but many others suggest that the lack of a "blue suit" gives them the "freedom" to "act like gangsters" -- and it is more difficult to get a badge number if it's not displayed, or a unit number from an unmarked car. Just so happens they don't wear body cameras, either.

Michigan state legislators push a Medicaid work-requirement plan that just so happens to target majority-black cities while leaving majority-white rural areas alone. I'm happy to oppose Medicaid work requirements for blacks and whites myself, and not just because most folks on Medicaid are already working like we should be proud of that as a civilization -- no, really, we should be proud of a civilization where everyone can get good-paying work and only need programs like Medicaid when times get tough, as times do for virtually everyone except the crowd who constantly hector us to work harder. (Also, dig the Chamber of Commerce lobbyist's "(w)e were just trying to be helpful" act. She must think we're all suckers.)

Ho hum, the New York Times reports on how "national Democrats have been embracing recruits near the political center" in red states. What's the definition of insanity again? And what authority do the same folks who lost 2016 all over the map now have to say "but here's how you win in Kansas"? After all, a liberal Sanders acolyte came within six points of defeating Rep. Ron Estes in Kansas's 4th early in 2017, in a district Mike Pompeo used to win by 30 points. The Times might even get this, at some level, because they simultaneously describe Rep. Conor Lamb (D-PA) as one of those "moderates" and as someone with a "populist economic message." (I will concede that Clarke Tucker, the star of this article, has a good shot in Arkansas's 2nd since if he makes health care his issue, as it looks like he'll do.)

Finally, our President wants to help out a Chinese corporation punished by his own Commerce Department. A corporation punished for violating sanctions against Iran and North Korea, no less! What will the President's votaries say when they learn he's suddenly so obsessed about Chinese jobs? Wait, let me guess: leave him alone give him a chance he knows what he's doing he got a great deal but her emails but Benghazi he shoots from the hip both sides do it fake news shutup traitor.

Action: "free" trade, bankster regulation, and Presidential ethics.

Public Citizen's latest email missive reminds us of "the growing chasm between Trump's fiery trade talk and his lack of deliverables as president to date," and helps you tell your Congressfolk to put people before corporations when considering whatever "free" trade deals might come our way in the future. President Trump did withdraw us from the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," and deserves credit for that no matter how many "liberal" media punditoids squeal BUT THE CHINAZ WILLZ CONTROLZ TEH PACIFIKZ!!!!, but trade deficits are still going up, the evidence that corporations are "bringing back jobs" remains just as anecdotal as it was under Mr. Obama, and Mr. Trump has pointedly refused to demand an end to the most odious mechanism in "free" trade deals, the "investor-state dispute settlement" system that nullifies our laws and forces us to pay tribute to "wronged" corporations. So we have to make sure our Congressfolk remember how unpopular "free" trade deals are.

Meanwhile, S. 2155, the so-called Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, would reduce regulatory scrutiny on too-big-to-fail banksters, and so Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from financial predators by rejecting S. 2155. Republicans have really done a number on our protections against financial predators this year -- Congress nullified the CFPB's proscription against forced arbitration clauses in customer contracts with banks (because what's more popular than taking away someone's right to a trial and forcing them into a private court in which they'll most likely lose?), and the President installed a far-right-wing crony, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, as CFPB's head, and Mr. Mulvaney has promptly scuttled an investigation into Equifax, since customers having their identities stolen is also so, so popular. They act like they can do whatever they like! But we can remind them otherwise, and in volume.

Finally, given the recent news that HUD Secretary Ben Carson might have abused his position to aid business interests belonging to his son and daughter-in-law -- and, well, a few dozen other news items over the past year-plus! -- People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Trump Administration for its alleged ethics problems. Keep in mind that when I say "alleged," I don't mean to imply there aren't that many allegations, because there are plenty -- when Tha Bush Mobb's own ethics chief says we've never seen "financial conflicts of interest...with foreign governments" like this, you're better off assuming the problem is more in the proof than the discovery. Don't worry about right-wingers getting their shorts in a bunch defending "their President" -- this President just said that not clapping at his State of the Union address is a treasonous offense, so the right has shot its wad here.

Around the table: further describing our struggle with an incompetent President and a cowardly opposition.

It's about time someone put it like this: "Trump's Policies Won't Bring Back Coal Jobs -- They Will Kill More Miners." President Trump has not only vastly overestimated how many new coal mining jobs the economy has created over the last year (50,000? More like 1,000!), but if he succeeds in rolling back clean air and clean water regulations -- including regulations that specifically protect coal miners from black lung! -- then a lot more coal miners will die. The "happy ending," here, is that bosses will be richer, and bosses are the only people who matter to Mr. Trump anyway.

Ted Rall at Counterpunch reminds us that, yes, Virginia, "Democrats Could Lose Again This Fall." It's good to hear other folks saying that Democrats' complete lack of an agenda and the fact that Clintonistas still run everything (even as Sandernistas have all the energy!) may cripple them, but I doubt that Americans will vote Republican if they "vote their pocketbooks" -- hey, if the economic "recovery" of the Obama era didn't save Hillary Clinton, I don't see it saving Republicans, either -- and when more and more folks find out that the tax "cut" bill didn't cut their taxes very much, I see tax "reform"'s numbers going back down.

Joe Emersberger at FAIR catches the "liberal" media slobbering all over Ecuador's President, who ran as a liberal populist and has, of course, revealed himself to be a right-winger upon taking office. Odd how the "liberal" media calls a man who does whatever his big corporate cronies tell him to do "his own man." Also odd how they call the actual populist a "strongman" but leave that word in its sheath when the right-winger actually bullies judges. The good news? Actual liberal policies are actually so popular all over the planet that you have to at least pretend to be one to get anywhere. Why, if Mr. Trump had bashed banksters more consistently during the campaign, he might actually have won a popular vote majority.

Surprise, surprise, the Trump Administration is letting a corn syrup lobbyist help the USDA set dietary guidelines. And perhaps, like other sugar-addicted corporations like Coca-Cola, she'll use her "expertise" to downplay sugar's nefarious effects on our health! And what a surprise to learn, in addition to learning that our government gets "advice" from precisely the wrong people, that waivers to Mr. Trump's already-weakened ethics rules are so, so easy to get.

Finally, President Trump tells Ohio ralliers that Democrats who failed to applaud at his State of the Union should be considered traitors. Almost as bad, he equates their failure to applaud with a failure to love one's country, as if America is Donald Trump and Donald Trump is America, a feat of ego-stroking (among many other kinds of stroking!) the Founders would have found appalling. And I guess it's no use citing Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution to our President, though it sets the bar for treason considerably higher than he does. Memo to Trump votaries: if you support calling your enemies "traitors," particularly for the crime of not clapping at Dear Leader, then you are damaged beyond my ability or willingness to engage with you.

Around the table: the last refuge of pro-Trump scoundrels, and other lessons.

Mark Karlin at TruthOut interviews America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, about vote suppression in general, and the shutdown of the Trump Administration's Voter Integrity (sic) Commission in particular. Why does Mr. Palast think the Commission shut down, with its "mission" to be taken up by the Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic)? You won't like the answer: "Kobach also bought lists of [Latino] voters. The purpose is clear: Match any José Garcia on voter rolls with José Garcia on deportation orders and purge an American for the crime of having a common [Latino] name." Deporting American citizens so you can win elections! It's what people do when they can't win arguments on the merits!

Ho hum, Matthew Gardner at ITEP reminds us that Disney's $125 million in employee bonuses is a little over one-tenth of its expected total haul from the Trump tax "reform." And those bonuses are a one-time thing -- I mean, only the boss's bonuses ever get repeated from year to year! -- while Disney's $1.2 billion haul from the (permanent, you remember) corporate rate tax cut will magically appear every year. I guess it'll lose its novelty after the first year, and they'll set about getting corporate welfare in other ways, but $1.2 billion every year is still $1.2 billion every year.

John Nichols at The Nation chronicles Gov. Scott Walker's continued crusade against democracy in Wisconsin -- including his refusal to call special elections for a vacant state Senate seat and a vacant state Assembly seat. All because "the legislature won't be that busy," when in fact the Governor has already called a special session for several thorny issues! This couldn't possibly be because a Democrat just won a special election in a previously Republican-held Senate seat by 11 points, could it?

EPA suspends its plan to allow mining in Alaska's Bristol Bay area, home to one of the world's largest and most profitable sockeye salmon industries. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt sure talks a good game about "the abundant natural resources" that deserve "the utmost protection" from the "unacceptable" risk of a Pebble Mine, but note that the EPA is still taking mining applications for the area, which could mean they're just fishing for the right crony investors. And if that takes a few years and we get complacent in the meantime, all the better!

Finally, with things going so well for the Trump Administration, quite a few right-wing punditoids are officially calling for people to be tried and convicted of treason. If patriotism isn't the last refuge of the scoundrel, as Dr. Johnson said it was, then calling your enemies traitors surely is. These idiots -- many of whom work for basic cable stations, which we all pay for whether we want to or not -- deserve nothing so much as a spanking. Unless, of course, they enjoy that sort of thing.

Around the table: about the folly of obsessing over civility, and other lessons.

You could find a hundred articles describing how stupid the Republican tax cut plan is, but here's just one, from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. In order: no the U.S. is not "the most-taxed country" but actually one of the least-taxed, no corporations are not "overtaxed" since they can buy loopholes from their Congressfolk seemingly at will, and yes the rich will accrue most of the benefits from the Republicans' tax cut plan. Oh, and no repealing the Estate tax won't "benefit truckers." I guess in a roomful of zombies he'd have said it'd "benefit zombies."

Let's not give George W. Bush too much credit for obliquely criticizing the Trump Administration for fomenting nativism and isolationism, not merely because opposition to "free" trade isn't automatically racist, but because his toadies spent years telling us we were traitors and terrorist-sympathizers and haters of America and he had not word one to say about any of that. And when they crossed that line, they made it easier for their successors to cross more lines. (Of course, Mr. Obama's own commitment to civility is mainly a way of letting a lot of wrongdoers off the hook -- mainly banksters and torturers.)

Wisconsin Governor/King of Corporate Welfare Scott Walker starts gearing up to run for a third term. And though the Foxconn imbroglio will blow up in Wisconsin's face sooner or later, he will benefit from both a very low unemployment rate and his own considerable political skills. And the Democrats will no doubt run a get-beyond-partisanship, let's-all-get-along center-right loser, and no wave can bring that boat to shore.

After exposing Mr. Trump's questionable methods of "consoling" a dead soldier's family, Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL)'s office has to send constituent calls to voicemail after getting thousands of calls, a striking number of them threats against their person. I am not looking forward to hearing the twisted reasoning of right-wingers who still insist that TEH LIBRULZ ARE TEH REAL VIOLENTZ!!!!! And if Ms. Wilson holds even one town hall after this, she'll have outclassed virtually every one of her colleagues across the aisle. (By the way, if you're about to leave a rage-filled comment about this matter, please read this first.)

Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore took $1,000 from something called the Foundation to Defend the First Amendment, which turns out to be one of the many slush funds of a now-deceased Nazi wannabe named Willis Carto. This should inspire a Goofus and Gallant-style ad from his opponent: Doug Jones fights Nazis! Roy Moore takes their money! But if Mr. Jones has thought of it, I'm sure the national party is already working to convince him not to run it, because civility.

Trump Administration spokeshack Sarah Huckabee Sanders, responding to a reporter who actually asked tough follow-up questions, says it's "highly inappropriate" to "get into a debate with a four-star Marine general." I suppose she was trying to be funny, but she failed, instead coming off as someone who thinks reporters shouldn't "question" generals. Epistemologically speaking, it's assholes all the way down with this Administration.

Penny Rants for Thursday, July 13, 2017: of "treason" and higher education.

Rick Hasen at the Election Law blog lays out the possible charges Donald Trump, Jr. could face for allegedly soliciting "dirt" on Hillary Clinton from a well-connected Russian lawyer. Chiefly, Trump the Younger faces a fairly serious campaign finance charge, by soliciting a contribution "from a foreign individual or entity." And "contribution" doesn't just mean pile of money -- a contribution can be "anything of value," and "some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia" (as Trump the Younger's email contact put it) would qualify. And Mr. Trump isn't going to get off the hook by saying the emails don't actually show him asking for that information -- it's hard to imagine that a Russian official simply emails you with such an offer out of the goodness of his heart, and I doubt he'll convince a judge that "I love it" doesn't mean "I can't wait to see it." Mr. Hasen lists other charges Trump the Younger might face, but n.b. that none of them are "treason," a charge Sen. Kaine (D-VA) floated a few days back. Sorry, folks, that kind of thing really sticks in my craw. Isn't potential lawbreaking enough of a reason to act?

In a strange reversal, Pew finds that a stunning 58 percent of Republicans say that American universities have a "negative effect on the way things are going in this country." That's up from 37% just two years ago! And Democrats' attitude toward higher education has remained fairly constant (they're generally for it), which must mean they're the conservative party in America now. The Pew study (which also has much to say about Democrat/Republican feelings about other institutions) doesn't tell us why Republicans have come to hate college so much, but you could be excused for thinking it's all because of "political correctness," i.e., because right-wingers can't get a "safe space" for their ideas, and by "safe" I mean "safe from criticism." And dig Gov. Walker (E-WI) praising a bill allowing college administrators to expel students who "disrupt" speeches given at the University -- for its "commitment to free speech"! Call me old-fashioned, but I think protestors who are actually disruptive damn themselves in the eyes of all who see them, and that people who actually have something to say can handle criticism from any quarter.

Around the table: in which we are reminded to define terms like "treason" and "free markets" precisely.

Well, this timing sure is suspicious: not long before the ongoing five-nation terror campaign against Qatar began, the Trump family tried to get a Qatari billionaire to put half a billion dollars into their failing 666 Fifth Avenue property. So just remember that the next time President Trump says Qatar "has been a funder of terrorism at a very high level" -- if the vaguely-put "at a very high level" doesn't already strike you as coming from a man who's lying. And maybe the next time your Republican Senator rushes from his car to a meeting of rich people, you could ask him whether President Trump's real estate failures are going to dictate our entire foreign policy from now on.

Speaking of Trump and failures, Charles Pierce at Esquire looks at Trump the Younger's apparent attempts to get "dirt" on Hillary Clinton before the election and concludes that when the Trumps deal with Russian mob figures, they're "punching out of (their) weight class" and are little more than "compliant minnows in a shark tank." As a bonus, we may have learned why the Trump Administration really fired former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Study, though, the works left behind by Sergei Magnitsky, because he was obviously an extraordinarily courageous man, facing as he did certain death by exposing Russian corruption on an almost unimaginable scale.

But Jesus Mary and Joseph can Sen. Kaine (D-VA) stop with the "treason" talk already? It sure looks like Trump the Younger broke the law by soliciting "dirt" on Mrs. Clinton, but is that treason? Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution instructs us that "(t)reason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Has Congress declared war against Russia? No, it has not -- and I refuse to distend the definition of "enemy" further than that. Anyone who's ever been called a traitor for no damn good reason -- and their numbers include not just you and I, but this nation's Founders -- appreciates the importance of defining terms precisely.

Sam Pizzigati at the OurFuture blog reminds us that the ongoing downfall of Sears more or less reflects our ongoing downfall as a civilization. Wasn't that many decades ago that Sears executives didn't make silly money and its employees got good treatment -- though the 91% tax bracket kept executive salaries down and Sears treated its employees well to keep them from joining a union. Today, of course, the top tax bracket is over 50 points lower and unions have a third of the membership they used to have, so of course a vain bankster runs Sears into the ground and you might find more rats than employees in a store on a given day.

Charles Ornstein at ProPublica describes yet another way right-wingers injure Medicaid users: by demanding that the folks who get it verify their eligibility twice annually instead of once. And here you thought being conservative was about streamlining government services and reducing paperwork! Sadly, today's "conservatives," who we'd better describe as reactionaries, would only reduce the "burden" of "bureaucracy" for corporations, not people. Plus they think any program that works for everyday Americans is evil. Am I beating a dead horse? In these times, beating a dead horse is an act of courage.

Finally, Dean Baker reminds us that "Paul Ryan Hates the Idea of a Free Market in Health Care" and "He Wants to Give Money to Rich People." "There are no government-granted patent monopolies in a free market," Mr. Baker reminds us. "It is possible to argue for the merits of government granted monopolies...but it is not possible to deny that these monopolies are a government policy, not the free market." More to the point, this policy doesn't make people free, not if we pay $360 billion more every year for prescription drugs. Of course, the intellectually-bankrupt Mr. Ryan doesn't oppose any of that, nor does he oppose big pharmaceutical corporations taking taxpayer money to make drugs in the first place (which entitles us to rather more oversight than we've got!).

Around the table: the importance of blaming the right people, and other lessons.

Ken Levy at Counterpunch says that "Sorry, But It's Entirely the Right's Fault" we're such a polarized nation now -- and it's mainly because right-wingers argue and reason so badly. I'm pleased to see he offers "Exhibit A" as Newt Gingrich, as I found Real Change to be one of the most poorly-argued books I've ever read. Please pray very hard that I never decide to describe exactly how awful it is in excruciating detail, possibly in an e-book. (I would argue, by the way, that the "brainwashed right" comprise a smaller percentage of the American population than Mr. Levy says -- no more than 25%, not "35-40%.")

TruthOut talks to Noam Chomsky and Ha-Joon Chang about some of the "Myths of Globalization." It's tempting to blame globalization for the world's problems, particularly since "free" trade deals that foment globalization are so awful, but it isn't really the problem -- untrammeled corporate power is the problem. You'll also be reminded that you can't just turn displaced auto workers into software programmers, regardless of what the Democratic Party's said since the Clinton era. (Mr. Chang says the Scandinavians do job-displacement retraining well, so that's a subject for further research.)

Shawn Boberg at the Washington Post finds that President Trump's "hard power" budget slashes programs that combat homelessness -- except for a subsidy that goes right to private landlords. And, of course, Mr. Trump collects that subsidy, and while experts are right to caution that we can't yet prove Mr. Trump actually insisted on keeping that particular subsidy in his budget, I'm also not a schmuck. Let me guess the Trump votary response: give him a chance he knows what he's doing but her emails he shoots from the hip both sides do it fake news shutup traitor.

Amarnath Amarasingam and Jacob Davey at the New York Times reminds us that the vast majority of terrorism in America comes from the far right -- almost three-quarters of it since 9.11, per the Government Accountability Office, even if terrorism from groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda get more ink. (Though wouldn't we call them far-right, too?) Of course, part of the reason they get more ink is that right-wingers get their shorts in a bunch whenever they hear that most terrorism comes from the right, and then the "liberal" media stops talking about it after that. But, hey, facts are facts.

Finally, Wired provides a brutal timeline of Uber's rise and fall, with particular attention to the events of 2017. With all the ink spilled about the "gig economy" and "changing with the times," more folks should have realized that Uber has always acted like a corporation that doesn't perform a service for anyone, but instead just bullies other people into giving them money. The reason it's not obvious to so many observers, as Upton Sinclair might remind us, is that their salaries depend on them pretending it's not obvious.

Action: Social Security and Medicare cuts, and the Pompeo nomination.

The Alliance for Retired Americans is sponsoring a national call-in day today, to tell President Trump to keep his campaign promise to protect Medicare and Social Security from benefit cuts, so call 1.202.456.1111 to do that. You may also want to call your Reps and Senators (as always, you can find their phone numbers using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page) to notify them that you have communicated your will to President Trump, and that they should follow the people's will by rejecting Medicare and Social Security benefit cuts themselves. The aptly-named Johnson plan (named either for its sponsor, Rep. Sam Johnson of Texas, or for that body part Republicans keep swinging in our faces) would cut Social Security benefits dramatically, and Paul Ryan's plan to privatize Medicare would do the same to Medicare. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the 54% of Americans who voted for someone other than Donald Trump do not want their Medicare and Social Security benefits endangered -- and I bet the majority of Donald Trump's 46% vote share don't want that, either. See? Keeping Medicare and Social Security strong enjoys actual bipartisan support. And since I mentioned it, how come I'm not hearing anything from the "liberal" media about the vital importance of bipartisanship these days? Is "bipartisanship" only important when Democrats control the Presidency and Congress?

Also, the Senate is planning to vote on Rep. Mike Pompeo's nomination for CIA chief today, so you may want to get on the phone to your Senators and tell them to reject his nomination. The Senate hoped to confirm Mr. Pompeo on Friday, but Democrats apparently managed to delay that for one more working day, and that gives us one more chance to stop the nomination of a man who believes that government spying on innocent Americans is A-OK, that Mr. Snowden's whistleblowing of NSA spying on innocent Americans is "treason," that we should keep Guantánamo Bay open for all the "terrorists" we can't even press charges against after all these years, and that people who use email encryption are probably terrorists. And he's also another one who thinks Muslims don't condemn terrorism enough. Aren't you tired of hearing your Tea Party uncle say that all the time? Less than 30 seconds of googling will reveal literally thousands of instances of Muslims actually condemning terrorist attacks, but why do all that work, when there are Trump votaries to be enraged? Yeah, I know, Mr. Pompeo said he was against torture at his confirmation hearing. But given that he thinks the Bush administration didn't torture, and that he said he "can't imagine" Mr. Trump giving him an order to torture someone (he must think we don't remember a thing!), I find his professed opposition suspect. And so should you.

UPDATE. And the Presidential comments line isn't taking comments right now. Apparently it was turned off during the transition, but it's almost Tuesday already, so I have to assume turning it back on and hearing good Americans' comments is not a priority for the Trump Administration. You can contact Mr. Trump here, I suppose, and maybe also tell him to turn on his phone.

Around the table: peaceful protest as "economic terrorism," and other absurdities.

Spencer Woodman at The Intercept runs down five-count-'em-five bills proposed by Republican state legislators that aim to criminalize peaceful protest. The one from Washington state that would equate certain protests with "economic terrorism" is my personal favorite, and please understand that by "favorite" I mean "the bill I'd most like to see humiliate its author to the point where he never shows his face in public again." Don't figure that cooler heads will prevail and none of these laws will pass, because your representatives are nothing without you communicating your will to them.

In case you've been hearing that TEH DONALD IZ CREATINGZ TEH JOBZ ALREADYZ!!!!, please note that most of the corporations that have announced big job-creation plans in recent days are mostly announcing job-creation plans that have been in the works for some time. I mean, I'm as big a fan of public shaming as anyone, and if Mr. Trump were really shaming corporations into creating jobs, I'd be all for it. But when Sprint re-announces big job creation plans that they already announced long ago, or WalMart announces their regular amount of job creation not too long after cutting jobs, or Bayer announces job creation if their merger with Monsanto goes through (and that's some hostage-taking right there!), you have every reason to believe this is all snake oil salesmanship.

Oh, and if you're hurrying to protest the above paragraph by saying TEH AMAZON IZ ADDINGZ TEH 100,000 JOBZ!!!!, please note, as Greg LeRoy at Good Jobs First does, that if Amazon adds 100,000 jobs to its warehouses, that still won't make up for the loss of 200,000 jobs at brick-and-mortar retail stores over just the past four years. Yes, we can draw a direct line from one to the other, particularly when we remember that Amazon has been around since 1994, and we all remember the obliteration of medium-sized bookstore chains like B. Dalton Booksellers, Waldenbooks, and Encore Books (not to mention Borders!). (Also, too, Amazon sure gets a lot of corporate welfare handouts from states. How libertarian is that, Mr. Bezos?)

Outgoing FCC Chair Tom Wheeler explains why we should keep net neutrality rules. He wasn't that much in favor of them until millions of Americans spoke out, but Mr. Wheeler makes a case that should persuade folks who don't know much about net neutrality, and that's no small thing. Seriously, it doesn't have to be all freedom-from-corporate-interference all the time -- sometimes you need to hear someone say that net neutrality hasn't slowed capital investment or injured corporate profits, and sometimes you also need to hear someone cite "the desires of a few ISPs to be free of meaningful oversight," since that's what net neutrality opposition is really all about. And why should a few big telecoms get all the say about everything?

Finally, Michael T. Klare at TomDispatch describes the "four flash points" that could develop into an international crisis Mr. Trump will have to deal with as President. None of them will surprise you -- "North Korea, the South China Sea, the Baltic Sea region, and the Middle East," and it's good to be reminded that Gen. Mattis (Mr. Trump's Defense Secretary nominee) wanted to attack Iran back in 2011. But don't worry; somehow, for Republicans and their "liberal" media enablers, whatever happens will all be Mr. Obama's fault. And the same people who would blame Mr. Obama will call you a traitor if you blame Mr. Trump.

Seven things *not* to do when Donald Trump takes office.

A great many of us fear the next four or eight years of a Donald Trump Presidency, and for good reason. But this moment in our history also offers a unique clarity: we can't fantasize about Democrats protecting us from the worst that Republicans do, not merely because, well, their record there is pretty poor, but also because they can't now. Only we can protect ourselves, and the sooner we understand that, and practice that, and live that, the better. Hence I offer seven things we should avoid doing when Mr. Trump ascends to the Presidency.

1) Do not bother with media horserace coverage. If the media obsess about something, assume it's not worth your time -- or that they want to distract you from something more important. When they report on fissures within the Republican party, you should assume any such "fissures," or reports about them, are feints, designed to lull you into a false sense of security so that you don't perform your duty to your country by giving your counsel to your elected representatives. Certainly do not bother with media speculation on how much of the coming horror is Mr. Trump's fault and how much is Mr. Pence's, or that of Republicans, or Democrats. If we're all hurting, it doesn't matter -- it only matters what we do about it.

2) Do not accept the narrow choices Our Glorious Elites offer in policy debates. When they talk about government deficits, the only choice they offer is spending cuts; about Social Security, benefit cuts; about Medicare, privatization. But we know better: we can (for example) improve Social Security by lifting the cap on payroll taxes so income over $117,000 can be taxed into the system; we can improve Medicare by letting it negotiate its own drug prices and by hiring more investigators to stamp out fraud -- hell, we could improve Medicare by expanding it to include all Americans (or, if we must compromise, by allowing folks 55 and up to "buy into" Medicare). There are always good alternatives to the moronic ideas Our Glorious Elites peddle -- after all, isn't America the can-do country that always finds a way?

3) Do not support Democrats. Not just because they're weak, and not just because their weakness has enabled the coming horror, but because it's not your job, as a citizen, to "support" a politician -- it's the politician's job to support you. They're supposed to do our will no matter what party they belong to or what ideology they profess to hold, so don't concentrate on getting more politicians in office who might listen to us: just call them and email them and demonstrate in front of their offices until they have no choice but to listen to us. Now, Democrats will ask you to soft-pedal your demands, because it doesn't "help" them appeal to the "center," or something. Ignore them when they do. Seven short years ago, they held the Presidency, a 70-seat majority in the House, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and they still lectured us about "the art of the possible," rather than widening the palette of the possible, as Republicans always do, no matter their numbers in Congress. Your will is your will, your duty to express it to your representatives is inviolate, and any Democrat who insinuates otherwise deserves defeat.

4) Do not "give Donald Trump a chance." Of course we all want him to do well, despite the multitudinous indications that he won't, but "giving him a chance" is, again, beside the point of a democracy -- our duty is to express our will, and Donald Trump's duty is to execute that will. There is no "waiting and seeing" in the country we love; there is only doing, and people who tell you to "give him a chance" (or "accept the results," or "get over it") really have a different aim in mind: they want you to be silent, because they fear that if you're not silent, you'll derail their little gravy train. They're right to be afraid. And, seriously, Mr. Trump is going to be a terrible President. You wouldn't look at a pile of dung in the middle of the sidewalk and "give it a chance" to magically transform itself into meatloaf, would you?

5) When terrorists inflict a 9.11-sized (or larger!) attack upon us -- and they will, we just don't know where or when -- do not "pull for Trump" the way we all pulled for Mr. Bush. In fact, when they do attack, your solemn and immediate duty as an American citizen is to criticize Donald Trump for failing to keep us safe. And when I say "immediate" I mean "the minute of." He deserves no less, having already strutted around like he knows everything (more than "the generals," even!) while ignoring most of his early intelligence briefings. All this, after 54% of Americans voted for someone else for President! If his cock-swinging arrogance means anything, it means he gets no grading on a curve when it comes to protecting our country. And don't flinch when Our Glorious Elites then say "how dare you attack the President at a time like this!" Criticizing the President, at any time, is one of your inviolable rights as an American, so do not be silent when Our Glorious Elites bid us be silent -- be ten times as loud. For America is stronger than any one President, and criticizing a President does not injure our country. And anyone who thinks it does is a weakling. Make sure you let everyone know that, and make sure you use the word "weakling." They love calling us weaklings, so they deserve some of their own.

6) Do not take slurs on your character lying down. When they say "you hate America" or "you're a traitor" or "you're with the terrorists" or "you want Donald Trump to fail," do not be courteous in response -- be fierce, and don't be afraid to shame those who attack you. Too many liberals think shaming is something only conservatives do, but it's not -- it's something civilized people do, to anyone who's injured their community. And certainly don't worry whether you seem "too angry" or not, because slurs against your character deserve nothing but anger -- and your enemies will attack you for "being angry" even when your voice is perfectly even and low. But when they attack you, remember this: Our Glorious Elites are morally and intellectually bankrupt, and their program of austerity-for-the-people-but-gluttony-for-themselves has led to nothing but disaster all over the world, so they can't win arguments on the merits anymore -- all they can do is lie about our patriotism, our strength, our intelligence, our knowledge, and our commitment. Don't be afraid to give them hell when they do. Because hell is what they deserve.

7) Do not allow Our Glorious Elites to sow doubt inside you. You are right, and they are wrong. It's that simple! If you want our government to provide the good services we've paid for with our taxes and then get out of our way, you are right, and the people who want to cut your services and funnel your hard-earned taxpayer money to their cronies and spy on your every move are wrong. And if you have learned (either from emotionally manipulative people or from post-modern literary theorists) that there is no good and evil, unlearn it now. Our Glorious Elites are evil, and they know we know that, so they're going to try to take everything from us -- our right to dissent, our right to privacy, our right to clean air and clean water, our right to an economy that works for all of us and not just banksters, our right to protection from financial predators, our right not to get the crap kicked out of us by police, and our right to a safe and secure old age. Taking away these things is evil, and the people who would take them away are evil. So the time for navel-gazing is past. The time for civilized people to act is now.

Most of us have now twice experienced eight-year Democrat Administrations that consistently failed us. A far-right Republican Administration, one that ran roughshod over our rights and listened only to its super-rich cronies, followed the first one, and by all indications, a worse far-right Administration will follow the second. That could wind up being 32 years of America vacillating between weak Democrats and malicious Republicans, and we need to break that wheel. But we won't break that wheel by trying to help the damn Democrats. We will only break that wheel by saying no to Our Glorious Elites' attempts to keep us spectators in our democracy, in our country, and by speaking out so powerfully that politicians in both parties will have no choice but to follow us. So when your friends and relatives and neighbors ask you "what do you think will happen?" you should give one answer and one answer only: whatever we make happen. Because that is the stone-cold truth. Either we, the American people, stop Our Glorious Elites from destroying the country we love -- or no one does.

Around the table: tales of rage and hubris -- and hope.

Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept reminds us that the evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election is really quite scant at present -- amounting to nothing more than anonymous leaks to the "liberal" media. That's not to say that we won't find out more, or even that we won't find out we were totally played by Russia's government, but we've had many, many years to learn to be more skeptical (remember when George Tenet said the WMD case against Iraq was a "slam dunk"? Good times!), and calling anyone who disagrees with you a "Russian stooge" is really not how civilized people act.

In a related note, former U.N. Ambassador/complete asshole John Bolton insinuates that this whole Russians-hacking-the-election-thing might be a "false flag" operation coming from the Obama Administration. I was going to say, "imagine what a right-winger would say if you called 9.11 a 'false flag' operation," but I don't have to -- any deviation from Dear Leader Bush's vision was a treasonable offense to his votaries back in the day. And that's some cojones Mr. Bolton's got there, saying the Obama Administration has "politicized" the CIA, after Tha Bush Mobb purged all those CIA personnel at the beginning of his second term.

From the "Don't Look Now, But" file: Emma Grey Ellis at Wired tells us that "Thousands of Invisible Oil Spills Are Destroying The Gulf." The big spills (like Deepwater Horizon) get all the ink, but actually we suffer around 30,000 oil leaks annually (that we know of, that is -- our Coast Guard kind of relies on an honor system for oil leak reporting), and that means less clean air, less clean water, and more health problems. (By the way, after you read this article, you'll know what to say when some right-wing gaslighter comes along and says oil leaks are natural and have been occurring forever -- that those leaks are so slow that nearby life forms have evolved to adapt to it, and anyway, that's no damn excuse for the far more massive pollution perpetrated out of greed.)

James Fallows at The Atlantic reminds us that Donald Trump's victory in the Presidential race is not, as his spokeshack put it, a "historic" "landslide" or "blowout." Mr. Trump's electoral vote margin ranks a mere 46th out of our 58 Presidential elections, and his popular vote share -- 46%, in case you missed it the first 221 times I said it -- outpaces only two elected Presidents. I recall Rutherford Hayes being called "Old 8-7" by contemporaries, because of the narrow vote on the Commission that awarded him 20 contested electoral votes; why not constantly call Donald Trump "The 46% Man"? He'll get angry, but everything gets him angry. And this is one hornet's nest I think we should prod, over and over again, because we're stronger than he is.

Finally, Zenobia Jeffries at Yes! magazine profiles a Detroit woman who's trying to turn her block into a "solar-powered ecovillage." One that provides important resources for her community, too, like after-school meals and homework help for local kids. I'll admit that buying up distressed properties and turning the area into a renewable-energy hub has long been quite attractive to me, and I wish Ms. Harris the best in her endeavors. After all, who's going to do it if we don't? Big corporations ain't gonna do it, and big government ain't gonna do it, either, until we make it impossible for them not to.

Around the table: banksters, "treason," soda taxes, the Supreme Court, and sexual harassment.

Certain sexual harassment-recent events have dominated the news cycle the last week-plus, as you know, but Wikileaks' latest dump of hacked DNC emails shows Hillary Clinton making far too nice with banksters in thoser six-figure speeches she's never wanted to talk about. How one could possibly have witnessed the banksters crash our economy in 2008 and still suggest that "the people who know the business best should tell us how to regulate it" is mind-boggling -- I mean, that level of spiritual corruption should really pay a lot better than six figures. And banksters don't know how to do anything but redistribute our wealth upward to themselves. Let's have them work in a farm or a factory or a hospital or a group home for five minutes and see how they do.

Conservative borough councillor starts petition to make opposing Brexit a treasonous offense. Oh, splendid -- another moron who equates disagreement with treason! Though of course we Americans would recognize this petition as noxious simply because our right to give our counsel to our elected representatives is inviolate, the fatal problem for this effort in England is that the Brexit vote was legally non-binding, and thus defying that vote does literally no injury to the popular will, regardless of whether or not the British government would dare defy the Brexit vote. Britain may have a wider expanse of treasonous offenses than we do -- including adultery with the king or queen or with the king or queen's partner, or otherwise interfering with the line of succession -- but at least these have some history behind them; all this clown's petition has behind it is self-pity and insecurity.

Ho hum, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola have, in recent years, donated millions of dollars to health-focused groups -- but have also spent millions of dollars trying to defeat legislation actually aimed at curbing our soda intake. I'm no fan of soda taxes myself -- they hit working families the hardest, and we really should be going after the corn subsidies that make soda sell for the same amount of money it did 35 years ago -- but the behavior of Coke and Pepsi is noxious. They actually offered CHOP $10 million if the city government dropped its push for a soda tax! And they spent nearly $40 million defeating a federal push to institute a soda tax in 2009! Think maybe they could have created some jobs with that money?

Sen. McCain suggests that Senate Republicans would unite against any Hillary Clinton nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, then walks his remarks back a few hours later, saying through a spokeshack that of course he'd evaluate every nominee on the merits. Even if a Democrat wins Louisiana's open Senate seat (which, in a jungle primary with at least two Republican candidates at each others' throats, could actually happen), they have no shot at a filibuster-proof majority, so only shame will keep Republicans from blocking the next Supreme Court nominee until a Republican wins the Presidency again, however long that takes. But this sure sounds like an unforced error for John McCain, one I presume his opponent -- Democratic House Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who really should be doing a lot better than she is right now -- will exploit.

Finally, Buzzfeed finds a 2013 radio interview in which Donald Trump, Jr., suggests that women who "complain" about sexual harassment aren't tough enough. Where to begin with this? With the casual equation of a locker room with a workplace? With the notion that sexual harassment is "basic stuff"? With the male predilection for being "tough," when merely not-being-a-prick will get you through most workdays? With the absurd belief that coming forward about sexual harassment isn't tough? Or with the suggestion that "teaching kindergarten" isn't tough, or isn't a real job in a real workforce? That's the problem with these Trumps -- they fling so much crap at you it's hard to get around it. And they're probably proud of it, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: what the other side's public comments are *really* like, and other hard truths.

Tired of your Facebook friends telling you whom to vote for? Well, Atrios tells you to "Vote For Whoever The Hell You Want." Most of his rant concerns arguing about politics with people on Facebook and writing manifestos about your vote and why you made it, and those are two largely useless pastimes. But he is also correct that we invest too much of our own ego in our vote, when voting is really the beginning of our duty as citizens, not the end. (Full disclosure: I've been guilty of most of the sins I've summarized here.)

In case you were wondering what the other side's public comments on government regulatory proposals were like, dig this account of several oil corporation flacks testifying that deadly oil spills are actually job creators and not so bad for birds because fewer of them will be hunted to death. That's a little like saying cancer is good for you because it reduces the possibility you'll die in a car crash. And the fact that some good may come from evil is not a reason to excuse or propagate evil. When people say that "experts" leave better public comments than us dirty rubes, is this what they mean?

Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall says he "can't respect" people who think it's a good idea to boo Leon Panetta at the Democratic National Convention -- because "we're in the middle of a battle simply to make sure a dangerous -- uniquely dangerous -- figure like Donald Trump doesn't become President. Sorry, but I call that a hostage situation -- don't boo chickenhawk Democrats, or America gets it! And if "(e)very little bit and moment counts," someone should have told Terry McAuliffe that before he said Hillary Clinton will betray liberals on "free" trade. But then, rules are only for little people, like us.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio seems to think Donald Trump can learn how to be President "as he settles into this role as the nominee and ultimately the president." Because the Senate will act as a "check" on his power (if they're really interested!) and because "once you’re actually in that position, once you’re actually working at this thing, and you’re in there, and you start to have access to information that perhaps you didn’t have before, especially for someone that’s never been in politics, I think it starts to impact your views a little bit." And they say liberals use hundreds of words to say nothing? He gives empty suits a bad name.

Finally, in case you were wondering, Donald Trump did not commit treason by "hop(ing)" that Russia finds deleted emails from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State. What does our Constitution say about treason, again? "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." If Russia and China aren't our enemies, then Mr. Trump hasn't committed treason. He's only committed his usual sin, that of being an asshole, and let's not heap additional charges upon him merely because what the Buddhists might call his asshole-nature hasn't yet earned him the appropriate punishment.