Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: the continuing follies of our Big Baby President-elect.

Our big baby President-elect still plans to use our military against immigrants and protestors in contravention of our laws. Will our military refuse to obey illegal orders, as is their duty? Depends on whether or not our President-elect purges all the "disloyal" generals first, I suppose! See, all you suddenly tariff-skeptical voters? Actions have consequences, especially when they feel good.

Speaking of which, quite a few military observers absolutely hate our President-elect's pick for Secretary of Defense, noted misspelled white supremacist tattoo-wearer/germ skeptic Pete Hegseth. Recall that our President-elect also wants to get rid of "disloyal" generals and you might think nominating someone like Mr. Hegseth – a man who seems almost designed to provoke decent and competent people – was a mistake. But then a compliant "liberal" media could help him get away with it anyway, and given how they ran Joe Biden out of the race and "covered" that shitshow of a Republican campaign, they sure look awfully pliant.

Our President-elect can't stop whining and yelling as he says he'll seize the endowments of colleges "illegally" promoting DEI initiatives and give that money to "wronged" white people. You know DEI must be doing good, or else right-wingers wouldn't throw such tantrums about it! And would white people ever get reparations from Dear Leader? Of course not! That might make them happy, and the whole point is to keep them enraged!

Here's some good news, at least for the moment: our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) has ruled that bosses can't force employees to attend meetings about how bad unions supposedly are, since that's basically coercion. The bad news? The next President's NLRB could reverse the decision. The good news? That'll take a new case before our NLRB. The bad news? Big corporations no doubt already have a new case or 20 ready to file as we speak. BTW, no corporation has "First Amendment rights." Corporations are things, not people.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes says hell yes she's going ahead with her prosecution of the alleged fake electors scheme in that state in 2020. And since it's a state trial, Dear Leader can't legally stop it from happening, nor can he pardon any of the defendants if they're convicted – though, again, if Dear Leader manages to purge our military of "enem(ies) within," I suppose he could send troops down there to intimidate her.

Finally, It Begins: our President-elect "jokes" that he could serve a third term if our House decides "he’s so good we got to figure something else out." Not a joke, and not just because it's not funny. The 22nd Amendment to our Constitution is quite plain, and frankly Dear Leader's 75 million-plus supporters don't have the guts to force their will on the rest of us – but, again, if he reshapes our military in his image, he could serve additional terms until he's a brain in a jar. Remember, folks: once he's out of office, jail remains a very real possibility.

Around the table: love lives forever, hate consumes the hater.

Why won't MAGA ever let America "bring down the temperature," according to Amanda Marcotte? Because "Trump needs 'enemies' that he is forever threatening to conquer. But he can't actually conquer them, because if he ever achieved the alleged paradise of conformity he promises, his followers wouldn't need him anymore. So there will always be a new made-up baddie that is supposedly threatening the good white straight Christians." Why hasn't half of America figured out they're being played after all these years? Because they don't want to. So let's stop trying to "reach out" to them, to "understand" them. We already understand them. They whine because it makes them feel good.

Ruben Gallego wins the Arizona Senate race, and naturally right-wingers smell election fraud. I was going to respond, "an alternate explanation would be that Kari Lake is a fool," and she is, but (as I think we all understand a little better now) Ms. Lake also lost because she's a woman.

Shasta County, CA pays $300,000 to 11-year-old girl after shooting her pet goat. The girl thought she was taking her goat to an exhibit, but instead it was an auction! And a state Senator "won" the goat! And even after said state Senator said he wouldn't try to take possession of the goat if the girl really didn't want to give it up, the county sent two cops to seize and kill the goat! Remember that the cops who did this are exactly the kind of person our President-elect wants to empower even more – the kind of person who cares about nothing but their own feelings.

Ho hum, big home oxygen corporation Lincare has been defrauding Medicare (and therefore you and I!) for over 20 years, but Medicare can't seem to put it to a well-deserved death. Read the whole thing, and then remember that Lincare is exactly the kind of corporation our President-elect wants to empower even more – his "Department of Government Efficiency" would kill thousands of federal jobs but enable more corporate criminals to steal your money.

Finally, Fox News's Jesse Watters alleges that his own mother has not invited him to Thanksgiving dinner. Thus has Jesse Watters added his name to the list of people who'll die alone and unloved.

Action: vote!

Today is Election Day, though many Americans (in states that allow it) have already voted, either in-person or by mail. So if you have any problems voting today – including (but not limited to) finding your polling place, voter intimidation, accessibility issues, voting machine problems, and provisional ballot issues – call 1.866.687.8683, a.k.a. 1.866.OUR.VOTE. (In Spanish, that phone number is 1.888.839.8682, or 1.888.VE-Y-VOTA. See other phone numbers at the Election Protection website.) You may also call the U.S. Department of Justice's Voting Rights Hotline at 1.800.253.3931. I remain worried that bad Americans will harass good Americans at the polls, but if our enemies are smart (and, despite appearances, they are) they'll also try to obstruct the vote-counting wherever it happens, so you may want to go to your state's Secretary of State website, find out where they're counting the votes in your area, and call 1.866.OUR.VOTE if you see anything untoward. Don’t be skittish about making such calls, because our enemies sure aren’t skittish about preventing good Americans from voting.

Voting, as I've often said, is a citizen's minimum duty in America – this is our government, no matter how little it resembles a good government, and we must make it a good government, first on Election Day and then on every day thereafter. Our politicians would prefer that you vote for them on Election Day and then just shut your yap, but over the years, more and more of us have hounded our elected officials the way we should, and they listen more than they used to – certainly more than they did during the Bush/Obama years. The last four years have seen monopolies take a body blow from which they won't recover for at least six more years (when our FTC updates antitrust enforcement guidelines again); it was the right battle for Joe Biden to pick, and he most certainly paid for it by being hounded out of the Democratic Presidential nomination by his own party and by our "liberal" media. The last four years have also seen major climate change and health care reform legislation pass, as well as bipartisan infrastructure legislation that has at least made "government spending money to build good stuff" possible again, and a virtual neutering of House Republicans' ability to hold everyone hostage to stupid legislative demands. I wish I could say America is a more perfect union than it was four years ago, but only we can make it one, and I know for a fact it's a more perfect union than it would have been if we'd simply given up after 2016 – or "let Biden handle it" after 2020.

But while voting is our minimum duty, our work on every day thereafter will be much harder if we don’t turn all the bad politicians out of office we can. And there are only bad reasons for not voting. Negative campaigning is an especially bad one, though, frankly, the choice has been made easier by the major political parties this year, as Republicans have run mostly negative, empty, and angry ads and Democrats (perhaps having learned from Hillary Clinton's failed "just let Trump's ramblings write our ads for us" strategy) run mostly positive, substantive, and uplifting ads. So let's get out there and vote today – and then tomorrow, let's get back to giving our elected leaders, whomever they may be, the what-for they most definitely deserve. Sadly, that task will probably also include having to keep fighting for the electoral victories we’ve already won, as the Trump campaign plans to contest any vote-counting that doesn’t go their way. I expect, in fact, that their efforts will be worse than last time. But at least we can be prepared.

Action: concerning vote suppression, jobs, and electioneering.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate Florida's government for intimidating pro-choice voters and Elon Musk's SuperPAC for allegedly bribing people to register to vote, and tell Boeing's CEO to stop laying off workers and invest in them instead. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Civic Shout helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's anti-choice voter suppression tactics, including sending cops to the houses of folks who favor a ballot initiative that could enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution. On what probable cause? I kid, of course – those who know they're about to lose everything will do anything, law and order and morality be damned. America is full of law-and-order type who'll break the law and then say but my case is different! But this is only different in that it's overtly fascist to send cops to scare people into voting differently. So let's make sure he loses that vote – and let’s also hold him accountable for his fascism.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell Boeing's CEO to stop laying off workers and start investing in them instead. Let me guess: the Boeing machinist union strike is causing the layoffs! Because, after all, when you're already down workers, the obvious solution is to lay more off! They're really laying off workers, of course, so they can goose up stock prices and profits and indulge in more stock buybacks, none of which has anything to do with building planes that don't fall out of the sky. Would it be piling on to note that Boeing has gobbled up nearly $150 billion in corporate welfare handouts? No, it would not. Clearly Boeing needs us to help it see the light.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to investigate Elon Musk's SuperPAC for possible illegal electioneering. Apparently he's been paying Trump-leaners to register to vote in swing states, although these benighted folks are really getting a chance at a big payoff if they register; I guess that's how he'll claim it's not really a "payment," but a chance at a pile of money is still a bribe. We outlawed paying people to vote in the first place because the people with the most money can literally buy the outcome they want. Anyway, don't worry about exacerbating Mr. Musk's persecution complex; he'd find a way to do that anyway, and were he still so emotional, he could cry into his $200 billion.

Around the table: right-wingers behaving badly in public, part 733.

Former Republican Mike Lofgren recounts some of the friendships he's lost to Trump Derangement Syndrome (actual) over the years, reminding us, among other things, that "people who truculently parade their skepticism are actually the most gullible people on earth." The stories he tells won't surprise you, not if you've been living and breathing these last few decades; of course, for me the Rubicon was Tha Bush Mobb, not Donald Trump. One question: was the fellow who hated the Iraq War but embraced climate change denialism confusing symmetry with fairness – or was he embarking on his own quest to hold on to other friendships?

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, tells us "How Not to Get Shafted Out of Your Vote." First, check our SaveYourVote.org and make sure you're registered; second, vote in-person and early if you can (and avoid mail-in ballots); third, don't accept a "provisional" ballot, but "politely but firmly" demand a regular ballot and bring proof of your address (which could be an electric bill). Mr. Palast also cites 1-800-OUR-VOTE if you witness, or suffer, vote suppression at the polls. It's good to know that in 22 states (including Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan) have same-day registration, meaning that if you've been unfairly deregistered which will more likely happen to you if you're not white, you can demand a registration form (and thus a ballot) right then and there.

So how's Iceland's experiment with a four-day work week going? Quite well, thank you very much – lower unemployment and faster economic growth being just two of the boons Iceland has enjoyed. Of course you already knew that, but we would do well to remember that the only people who oppose a shorter work week are the overpaid executives who can't think past the next monthly report. So bold, they are! And don't ever believe the hype (directly counteracted by this article, I'll grant) that ZOMG HOWZ WILLZ WEZ EVAHZ RENEGOTIATEZ TEH UNIONZ CONTRACTZ!!!!! Right-wingers just love pretending that a minor bump is an insurmountable obstacle, and they only do it to gaslight you.

By now you've heard that former Trump Administration Chief of Staff John Kelly has called Mr. Trump a "fascist," which, like, duh, but let's look at his testimony that Mr. Trump used to say Hitler did some good things too "more than once." "Do an in-depth report on Adolf Hitler's term in office" used to be an exercise in some high schools, no doubt out of a misguided/evil desire to be "fair" to everyone. Remember that almost everyone does good things by accident! But if a guy kills six million Jews, you don't say you know, he sure had that economy humming for a while! about him unless you're an asshole.

Ho hum, MAGA hat-wearer punches Texas poll worker after poll worker tells him to remove his hat at the polling place. In other words, a right-winger responded to requests from a law enforcement officer to obey the law with violence; why, this is almost becoming a stereotype! Since the poll worker is a senior citizen, the right-winger – no, I'm not going to name him, why give him more attention than he deserves? – now faces a third-degree felony charge. I bet he gets all law-and-order about immigration, though I’d be happy to be wrong about that. I am almost certainly not wrong about that.

Finally, I bet you know someone who canceled their Washington Post subscription after that "paper of record" decided not to endorse a candidate for President this year, to get back to their nonpartisan roots yeah sure. While it sure seems like these newspapers are rushing to oblivion, I can't be too hard on them, because I never endorsed a Presidential candidate, either. So I'mma fix that: vote for Kamala Harris! And vote against every single Republican on your ballot! They've fucked shit up enough!

Action: concerning executive pay and betting on elections.

Long story short: tell our government to crack down on federal contractor CEO pay and outlaw betting on elections. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Other 98 helps you tell President Biden to crack down on excessive CEO pay in corporations that contract with our government. Because once you take taxpayer money, you have to play by taxpayer rules! And our laws already empower President Biden to mandate that federal contractors narrow the gap between executive pay and typical worker pay. What on Earth can right-wingers reasonably say to that? Nothing, but we'll still get a load of nanny-state-American-Caesar-kill-innovation-kill-jobs-wokeness nonsense. Just remember: we taxpayers should make the rules about how our government spends our money. And seriously, nobody likes overpaid bosses!

Public Citizen helps you tell federal regulators to outlaw betting on elections. You know how your friends and co-workers all say their favorite sporting events are rigged after they lose bets on them? Think of how bad that'll get when we start letting everyone bet on elections – and people in power will absolutely rig those, particularly if a lot of folks bet a certain way. Alas, the D.C. Court of Appeals just allowed betting corporation Kalshi to start taking bets on which party will control the House or Senate next year; Pandora never did anything so foolish. We already treat political races too much like they're sporting events, and if we don't start giving our democracy more respect, we'll be ruled by assholes forever.

Light posting notice plus warning.

Hello, good peoples! Posting will be light or nonexistent this week, so be happy and safe out there. Also, read Greg Palast’s report describing how December 11 could be the new January 6. Better to know two months ahead!

UPDATE. However! A Fulton County, GA judge has ruled that Georgia’s election board must certify election results, writing that “(i)f election superintendents were, as Plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so—because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud—refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced. Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.” This ruling might throw a wrench into right-wing plans to keep state Governors from sending slates of electors to the National Archives (which would essentially throw the election to the House of Representatives, which would be bad). Of course, whiners will whine and drama hounds will drama, so I expect there’ll still be riots in swing state capitals in early December.

Action: concerning voting rights, price-gouging, and worker safety.

Long story short: tell our government to investigate Ohio's recent voter purge, tell airline CEOs to stop using hurricanes as an excuse to price-gouge, and tell Tennessee to investigate hurricane-related worker deaths. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Civic Shout helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to investigate the Ohio state government for its recent voter registration purge. Brook no silliness about "a government's duty to purge voters who no longer live in Ohio," because purging voters from Black and Brown neighborhoods disproportionately (which several civil rights groups allege Ohio has done) is not part of that duty, and anyway no one should lose a right simply because they haven't exercised it in a while. "Oh, but they can just go re-register!" Ah, not if they don't know the state has de-registered them, and besides, making people jump through extra bureaucratic hoops just makes it harder for them to vote. Is that right?

More Perfect Union helps you tell airline CEOs to stop price-gouging for flights out of the way of incoming disasters like Hurricane Milton. It's a shame we even have to say such things out loud, but apparently United and American have done this exact thing, despite the fact that we now live in an age where virtually anyone with an internet connection can discover them doing this exact thing. If anyone tells you this is just how the "free" market "works," ask them how they'd feel if it were their own family members facing this kind of price-gouging. Some people love saying grandma needs to be "sacrificed" to make burdens lighter for the rest of us, but those folks don't mean their own grandma.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to, well, investigate Impact Plastics of Erwin, TN for telling their employees not to leave as Hurricane Milton was hammering them. At least three people died because their bosses told them the emergency just wasn't bad enough for them to evacuate, and then they were all trapped, and then when they tried to escape anyway they found themselves in the middle of a catastrophe. But good managers foresee catastrophes (like a hurricane whose approach has already been on the news for several days!) and plan for them. So we should keep demanding accountability for those who do not plan, and who kill their employees as a result.

Action: concerning Medicare, taxes, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect Medicare from privatization, pass the American Stability Act, and ban guns from polling places. 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 your Congressfolk to protect Medicare from Project 2025's privatization efforts. The notorious Project 2025 leaves a trail of slime wherever it goes, and when it goes to health care policy, it's no different! Project 2025 advocates making private Medicare Advantage plans the default option for new Medicare enrollees, although Medicare Advantage plans have rather notoriously denied or delayed coverage and pushed seniors' doctors out of their networks, all so corporate executives can redistribute even more income upward to themselves. Health insurance is supposed to be there for the people who need it, not just corporate executives.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the American Stability Act, which would raise the minimum wage to a "cost-of-living" wage of $20/hour and raise the personal exemption for federal income taxes to the same amount, plus it would hike taxes three percentage points on millionaire income (and five points on income over $15 million). I’ve said many times that I'd go at this problem a whole lot harder than that! I want the 91% tax bracket back on all income over a million bucks! But the American Stability Act would still do working families a lot of good, so we ought to do it.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban guns from all polling places. Hard to believe we have to do that, but we do, and who needs to bring a gun to the polls? Probably the same people who bring guns to the supermarket! (Who also rather incongruously call themselves "tough guys.") Brook no nonsense from the folks who say their right to bring a gun anywhere they want is absolute. Bringing a gun to the polls is a threat! Anyone who brings a gun to the polls intends it as a threat! And it ain't that far a walk from bringing a gun to the polls to waving it around at people you think won't vote the way you want them to.

Action: concerning voting rights and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and expand (not repeal!) Medicare drug price negotiation. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

People Power United helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The first bill would standardize early and mail-in voting, ban gerrymandering, and force disclosure of big campaign donations, while the latter would give our government the power to investigate and end racist voting practices more vigorously and allow our Justice Department's ability to pre-clear voting law changes in any state or locality that has established a record of vote suppression. Who's against these bills? Self-serving Republicans, and approximately no one else. Must they win again? If we speak out in numbers they can't deny, they'll lose, and we'll win. It's that simple.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate prices for more drugs not fewer. Because "fewer" is the Republicans' preferred position, apparently! Many Republicans are actually running on repealing Medicare's ability to negotiate prices for a few drugs beginning in 2026. Taking such a position, in public, used to end political careers, but not in this sick, immoral, and decadent world; how do we begin to bring a sane, moral, and decent world back? By demanding that Medicare should be able to negotiate the price of any drug, on behalf of both seniors and taxpayers, since that's our tax money they're spending. If we speak out enough, our Congressfolk will heed our will.

Action: concerning AI abuse and voting rights.

Long story short: tell California's Governor to protect citizens from AI abuse, and tell Georgia's Governor to investigate ethics complains against that state's election board. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Accountable Tech helps you tell California Gov. Newsom to sign legislation protecting us from AI abuse. If you need more convincing: big tech corporations hate it, and a legislature can always improve law in the future. Indeed, this is why right-wingers have always fought any voting expansion, because they knew once we gave (for example) non-land-owning men the vote, then everyone would eventually get the vote. Right-wingers don't like that, for some reason, just like big tech corporations don't like anyone telling them they can't just run roughshod over our laws.

Civic Shout helps you tell Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to investigate ethics complaints against Georgia election board members who just gave themselves the power to nullify election results. You might be saying to yourself: self, we're counting on Brian Kemp for this? But he's already survived the Wrath of Trump, having easily beaten back a Trump-blessed primary challenger/ex-U.S. Senator in 2022, and with Mr. Trump looking ever more vulnerable, Mr. Kemp may see political value in pushing him over. Of course he should just do the right thing for the right reason, but I want to help you imagine why he might.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, voting rights, and bankster bonuses.

Long story short: tell our government to stop arming Israel, tell our DOJ to investigate Texas's Attorney General for vote suppression, and tell our Federal Reserve to stop banksters from giving themselves big bonuses for their risky behavior. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our government to stop arming Israel's attempt to blow Palestinians out of existence. Yes, the terrorist attack of October 7 was evil, but so is the Israeli response, and because Israel is much more powerful than Palestine, the response will do more harm, almost as if Hamas intended that all along. And of course Benjamin Netanyahu has no intention of destroying Hamas – he needs an enemy so he can con good Israelis into clinging to him! Cut off his weapons and this house of cards will collapse.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to investigate Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for attempting to harass and intimidate voters. Which is against the law! Lately Mr. Paxton has threatened to sue Harris County and Bexar County over their plans to make sure eligible but unregistered voters get registration forms. Sounds like a frivolous lawsuit? It gets better – both counties have large Latin-American populations! No use arguing "prosecutorial discretion" when that "discretion" always seems aimed at non-whites.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell Fed Chair Jerome Powell to finalize rules prohibiting bankster CEOs from getting big bonuses for taking absurd risks with their customers' money. I'd say "finally finalize" if it didn't sound corny, but fact is the Dodd-Frank law authorized this rule almost 15 years ago, so our government's got to get to it! Otherwise we could have another bankster Armageddon like we had in 2008, and there might really be torches and pitchforks this time.

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.

Action: concerning banksters, Project 2025, and election workers.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Predatory Investing Act, which would close tax loopholes that enable big banksters to buy up homes and jack up rents, which keeps those homes out of working families' reach both coming and going. Vice President Harris has voiced her support for this bill, but don't get complacent, because the only voice that really matters in America is the American people's voice, and if the American people don't speak up, then bad actors can drown us out.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any of Project 2025's proposed cuts to nutrition and education programs. Project 2025 isn't just about installing Trump loyalists everywhere in our government! It's also about destroying our government's ability to help make our lives better, and if fewer working families can get food and schools all become private, how is that "government helping us"? Spoiler alert: it is not.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Worker and Polling Place Protection Act, which would establish fines and prison sentences for folks who intimidate and interfere with vote-counting. One wishes we could have had a law like this during the infamous "Brooks Brothers Riot" of 2000. Or during the 2020 election! Hopefully, punishing people who hurt election workers isn't some big moral leap for our law-and-order Congressfolk.

Around the table: the drama, it still burns!

Some 500 psychologists told ProPublica why they left health insurance networks; you won't hear from all 500 here, but the feeling you get – that good Americans can't get good mental health care because the big health insurance corporations can't make stupid money from it – will be no less oppressive. God forbid you or I find ourselves holding broken glass to our wrists while our therapists' health insurer cuts us off because our therapy's gone past whatever arbitrary deadline they demanded. Big corporations made efficiency their god and made the rest of us pay for it; what a work to take to the Pearly Gates!

Ho hum, our "liberal" media cares little that French President Macron is throwing a giant tantrum and refusing to form a new government respecting the fact that more French voters voted for leftist officials than for centrist or far-right ones. Of course you'll also recall that our "liberal" media also lost interest after right-wingers scored early polling leads that turned out to be completely illusory! But, you know, stability centrism sensibility compromise business-friendly. Remember that unreasonable people make things better.

Surprise surprise, car buyers surveyed by JD Power say that too much "advanced technology" in their cars doesn't do anything useful. People do like their rear cameras and blind spot monitors, but not their automated parking or their passenger screens, and certainly not their facial recognition systems (what, keys suck all of a sudden?) and their "gesture controls,” which I imagine good Italian Catholics like myself would find especially frustrating. Wait until JD Power gets to ask car buyers about their subscription-based brakes service!

No, Donald Trump will not vote for Florida's pro-choice constitutional amendment no matter what he says. He knows that some seven out of 10 Floridians will likely vote for it, but he also knows that his stated preferred position ("six weeks isn't enough") isn't actually on the ballot, so this is all noise, drama, misdirection, fodder for Trumpholes to gaslight people by saying Trump isn't as bad as you say he is, you know the deal.

In a related note, I can't decide whether that two-time Trump voters MSNBC talked to who now says she's actually "afraid" of him getting elected again has reached an unusually high level of wisdom or is just playing us. No, wait, I've decided; she's playing us. I mean, I try to believe the best about people, but I don't let that turn me into a schmuck, especially if Trump voters want to shoot up my house for having a “Love Wins" sign on my lawn.

Steve Benen asks why "Republicans keep forgetting who was in the White House in 2020," when the White House supposedly suppressed an anti-Hunter Biden report. Of course, Republicans pretend to forget – one might even say they perform a drama of forgetting – because they want you to forget. Remember all those Republicans who blamed Mr. Obama for the 2008 bankster Armageddon when George W. Bush was President? Remember all those Republicans who extolled Mr. Bush's record "protecting this country" after 9.11 happened on his watch? They hope you don't. But we do.

Finally, Rick Perlstein interviews David Neiwert about "the election story nobody talks about," that "a substantial bloc of American politics is talking about committing acts of violence and bringing down the government." Mr. Neiwert paints a very unpretty picture – vigilantes "helping" the Border Patrol, counterprotestors shooting at protestors if Mr. Trump wins, bad people trying to obstruct the vote-counting again, more domestic terrorism if Ms. Harris wins. Two things we need to do, then: one, vote Donald Trump into oblivion, and two, shame and ostracize his supporters until they remember they're not the only people who have ever mattered.

Action: concerning rich tax evasion, corrupt judges, and vote suppression.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the OLIGARCH Act and the High Court Gift Ban Act and reject the SAVE Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the OLIGARCH Act, which would create a four-bracket wealth tax (the brackets would be 2%, 4%, 6%, and 8%) on homes with at least 1,000 times the median wealth in America. So brook no silliness about how this would be a "100% tax" (like Donald Trump said in 2020), because the four brackets are right there, and none of them would even come close to breaking a billionaire. Why, Elon Musk could still spend $45 million a month trying to elect Donald Trump President! That's a hell of a lot of money to piss away, by the way. If I had $45,000< I could do a hell of a lot more good than he's doing with all his money!

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the High Court Gift Ban Act, which would ban gifts over $50 to our Supreme Court Justices (and limit aggregate gifts to $100 annually). After all the luxury vacations our Justices have gotten from billionaires over the years (which we've only learned about lately!), you'd think they'd know better than to say how dare you say we can't be impartial! You may remember that all it took to get Bank of Amerikkka clerks to foreclose on more homes were $25 cash gifts and Bed, Bath, and Beyond gift cards. So we've got to put some guardrails on our Supreme Court Justices.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject the so-called SAVE Act, which purports to be a bill protecting us from the scourge of undocumented immigrants voting – for the record, that's been illegal since anyone can remember, and no one can even prove it's happening – but would also turbocharge right-wing efforts to throw people off the voting rolls for the heinous crime of being Black or Brown (and therefore, in their minds, a Democrat voter). Look, if Republicans want people to vote for them, then maybe they should offer something other than hysteria and drama. It ain't that damn deep.

Action: concerning government spying, judicial corruption, and vote suppression.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to support Sections 1201 and 1202 of the Intelligence Authorization Act, impeach Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Alito, and pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to support Sections 1201 and 1202 of the Intelligence Authorization Act, because these sections will protect good Americans from the worst effects of government spying. These "worst effects" include, no lie, our government actually forcing Americans to spy on each other. Yes, you read that right – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (or FISA) now basically allows our government to expand the definition of "electronic communication service providers" to individual Americans, meaning they could one day serve wiretap orders to you and I. Turning Americans into “service providers” in order to spy on each other is evil, and we should fight that to the death. Its death, that is.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Congressfolk to impeach Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Alito over their fairly obvious and well-reported conflicts of interest. 20 years of luxury vacations for free for Justice Thomas, a luxury trip with Paul Singer for Justice Alito before Mr. Singer had no less than ten cases before our Court – Jesus Mary and Joseph Abe Fortas had to resign his Court seat over a $20,000 gift from a bankster under investigation for insider trading in 1969; of course $20,000 is a little over $180,000 in 2024 dollars, but I think that notation doesn’t smash a precedent, but sets one. If you're not convinced, remember that these clowns took away the right to an abortion and made Donald Trump a King.

Finally, the Workers Circle helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Our Supreme Court struck down our Justice Department's ability to pre-clear voting law changes from Southern states; they said it unlawfully discriminated against the South – don't linger too long on that, it'll just anger up the blood! – but they also said a law that didn't discriminate against the South would pass muster. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would let our Justice Department pre-clear voting law changes from any state or locality, Southern or not, that has historically suppressed the vote. So maybe we ought to put that to the test!

Action: concerning “Presidential immunity,” the Electoral College, and the minimum wage.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to outlaw Presidential immunity, abolish the Electoral College, and raise the minimum wage. 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment obliterating the whole concept of “Presidential immunity for official acts.” Because fighting despots is our heritage as Americans – remember, we fought a despot to gain our independence, and, since this is somehow topical in these times, we fought and defeated Hitler before he could subjugate Europe – and we sure don’t need our Supreme Court creating more despots. And since I know some tiny-minded fool will ask: it doesn’t matter that we asked for a bill last week and a Constitutional amendment this week! What matters is we communicate our will, as often as possible and in numbers they can’t deny.

LeftClick helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College and ensuring only national popular vote winners become President. They put together an Electoral College in order to keep the people from electing despots, but then Republicans who lost the popular vote in 2000 and 2016 somehow won the Electoral vote, and both proved to be despots! So the Electoral College does exactly the opposite of what our Founders supposedly wanted it to do – though of course they were more afraid of the people’s will than we are! Don’t brook any “but the Electoral College makes states more important” nonsense. We’ve already got Senators for that.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Raise the Wage Act, which would lift the federal minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $17/hour over six years and phase out the lower minimum wage for tipped workers. Over 17 million American workers make less than $15/hour, and more than one in three tipped workers report wage theft, but this isn’t just a good idea, it’s also a popular one – Democrats rode the minimum wage issue to midterm victory in 2006, and minimum wage hikes tend to pass everywhere they’re on the ballot. Also, how’s that infamous 2021 minimum wage hike thumbs-down vote working out for Kyrsten Sinema? She’s retiring, that’s how.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning law and order, voting rights, and financial predators.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to put limits on Presidential immunity, protect voting rights, and reject pro-financial predator legislation. 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.

Left Click helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation limiting Presidential immunity for crimes a President might commit while in office. Seriously, it boggles the mind that we revolted against a King who abused his power and hurt us, but now we have to immunize a President from facing any legal accountability for his actions when he hurts us while in office, so Congress has to act, lest our federal judges decide that a President who literally shoots someone dead on Fifth Avenue can’t be prosecuted for it because it’s an “official act.” And make no mistake: right-wing judges will not call any of Joe Biden’s “official acts” official. So we’ve got to step up.

The Workers Circle helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Our Supreme Court, as you know, struck down our government’s ability to scrutinize voting law changes in Southern states, on the pretext that such an ability “discriminated” against Southern states – don’t chew on that too long; it’ll just anger up the blood! – but the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would correct that mistake, in more or less the manner our Supreme Court prescribed, by subjecting any state or locality, Southern or not, to similar scrutiny if they’ve demonstrated a pattern of vote suppression. So don’t listen to the haters; just do good works.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislation that would repeal the Biden Administration’s newly-enacted “fiduciary responsibility” rule. I’m not sure what else I can say about this! The Biden rule forces financial planners – including those in charge of your pensions – to put your financial security ahead of their own. And that’s because they too often put their own financial needs ahead of yours! But Republicans want to pass a resolution nullifying that rule, meaning those Republicans are objectively pro-financial predation, since we enable financial predators every time we go easy on them. How about we not go easy on evil, then?

Action: concerning safe elections, Social Security, and IRS funding.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect election workers, expand Social Security, and fully fund 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Worker and Polling Place Protection Act, which would, as you might imagine, stiffen penalties for threatening or causing harm to election workers and polling places. Shame we even have to pass such a bill! But we now live in a nation where whiny-ass sore losers threaten the lives and livelihoods of election workers who counted the votes in an election Their Personal Lord and Savior lost. I think the people who threaten election workers over Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss are the lowest of the low – and not least because they generally don’t even have the guts to carry out their threats. So it’s time to get all law-and-order on them.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect and expand Social Security by taxing the rich harder. At present, income over $168,600 doesn’t get taxed into the system at all! But if we did that, we could actually shore up the trust fund in the long term – not that I really expect the trust fund to ever fall short, but whatever – and we could also expand benefits so good Americans can enjoy their much-deserved retirement more. At least our “liberal” media isn’t giving so much oxygen to the ZOMG YOU MUSTZ CUTZ ALL TEH BENEFITZ!!!!!! crowd. That happens when you demand more justice! Now we just have to keep following through until Congress does our will.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to scale back IRS funding. The Inflation Reduction Act expanded IRS funding, as you know, but Republicans have pretended that’s some kind of existential threat or something – if they can come for rich folks, they can come for you ha ha ha ha our IRS has only been coming after us because they didn’t have the money to fight rich people’s lawyers! The good news? Republicans made our IRS an election issue in 2022, and it didn’t work out for them, much like whining about crime and immigration didn’t work out for them. Still, we need to put them on notice, since they’ll pretend we don’t matter the first chance they get.

Around the table: this week with 50% good news!

Good news, everyone! The state of Minnesota just killed a community broadband ban, joining the 34 American states that don’t ban community broadband networks just because big telecom corporations throw tantrums about it. Minnesota’s ban was especially offensive, in that big telecoms could claim it wasn’t an outright ban, but “just” a ban in areas where big telecoms operated, or pretended to operate, or “might one day” operate, which means, like, everywhere. Consider that another blow against monopoly power in America.

Speaking of which: our FBI raids a landlord corporation Cortland Management, which has allegedly schemed with national rent-fixers to keep rents absurdly high in at least two thirds of our nation’s apartments. You’ll recognize the national rent-fixers (RealPage) from an October 2022 ProPublica article, you remember, the one where a RealPage employee said landlords didn’t raise prices fast/high enough because they had “too much empathy”? That is to laugh! Also too, RealPage’s owner is a hedge fund firm, a.k.a. a bankster.

Baristas at coffee chain corporation Blank Street Coffee win a union contract for workers at 19 NYC locations, with hopes of winning over workers at the other 21. Of course banksters started Blank Street, of course they understaffed the locations and didn’t fix safety issues, and of course they hired a notorious union-busting firm once they got wind of how dissatisfied their workers were, but the baristas overcame all of that – plus the inevitable losses within their ranks – to get a contract negotiated in a relatively short period of time (nine months, versus the 15-month average per a 2022 Bloomberg analysis). Given how much everyone wants coffee these days, it made a lot of sense for union organizers to look baristas’ way long, long ago; glad to see that’s finally become obvious (albeit largely due to the baristas’ own efforts).

Because we need the reminders, Robert Reich runs down all the “nothingburgers” Republicans try to make big dramas about these days. Like “illegals” voting (it’s already illegal!) and crime that’s half of what it was 30 years ago and, of course, “wokeness,” the whine of people who think they should be exempt from change or accountability. And yes, the border counts as a nothingburger! And anyone that obsessed about it needs to start with the man in the mirror! It’s all drama, all hysteria, all the time from Republicans, and forget about Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene – the vast majority of this drama and hysteria comes from men, including the Republican Presidential nominee, the Shouter-in-Chief.

When I hear that a Texas woman almost died miscarrying because of that state’s draconian anti-abortion laws, I think maybe our sensation-hungry “liberal" media might run with it. I suspect I will be disappointed – our “liberal” media lives in mortal fear of right-wing nutjobs, and to the degree that’s justified (I’m not saying it isn’t), the correct response must be to defy the nutjobs, lest you remain hostage to their drama and hysteria for the rest of your life. Otherwise folks will think our “liberal” media only cares about stoking right-wing rage with their sensationalism, and “I didn’t tell the truth because assholes threatened me” is not a work you want to bring to the Pearly Gates.

From the “this is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD!” file: more Republicans now think it’s not so bad for a felon to be President than before their candidate got convicted of 34 felonies. What we don’t say enough about this case is that it’s a campaign finance issue – Mr. Trump thought, once upon a time, that fewer people would vote for him if they knew he had sex with a porn star, so he tried to hush it up. Apparently the “law and order” voters of his party no longer think that’s true. Anyway, we leave these people to God – the folks who more likely have a problem with all of Donald Trump’s legal problems are independent voters, and they’ll more likely decide Mr. Trump’s fate at the ballot box than all his shouty dittoheads.

In a related note, legal scholars think Donald Trump “has an opening” to appeal his 34 felony convictions to our Supreme Court, and that opening could involve federal campaign finance laws. Rick Hasen, as good a source of legal wisdom as exists in America, says that Mr. Trump could “argue that the New York election law that he was prosecuted under to turn the false business records misdemeanors into felonies improperly relied upon alleged federal election law violations,” since the judge specifically mentioned the Federal Election Campaign Act in his instructions. I can easily imagine at least four of nine Justices crying “injustice” at that, and they’ll probably whine about the “harm” done to his Presidential campaign like anyone should give a hoot about that – after all, our Constitution hamstrings the Executive branch for a reason.

Finally, the publisher of the notorious 2000 Mules film has announced it’ll stop distributing the film – because they face a defamation lawsuit from Mark Andrews, whom the film depicts as a “mule” but who was, as it turns out, legally dropping off ballots from his family. Let’s not let it pass that Mr. Andrews faced death threats from right-wingers after they saw him in the film. Anyway, though this is good news for Mr. Andrews and for America, the truly-devoted will continue to hawk “voter fraud” nonsense and keep whining about how everything’s stacked against them. If you’re wrong, everything should be stacked against you!

Action: concerning voter rights, safer investing, and birth control.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, protect investors from financial predators, and ensure folks can get the birth control they need. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight vote suppression by passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former would enact same-day and automatic voter registration all around America and vastly curtail partisan gerrymandering, while the latter would subject any state or locality with a demonstrated history of vote suppression (not just Southern states or localities, which seemed to be our Supreme Court’s problem in Shelby County v. Holder) to additional Justice Department management of their voting laws. And that’s how we get more Americans to vote! Not by stoking their rage, that’s for sure.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any resolution that would roll back the Biden Administration’s rule requiring financial advisors to put their customers’ interests first when giving financial advice. It’s a shame we have to spell that out, but we do – too many financial advisors only care about their own bottom line, even though they’re investing with your money. And it’s an even bigger shame that Republicans have such a hard-on to repeal this extremely common-sense rule. What’s wrong with them? Are they objectively pro-financial predators? Are they objectively pro-corruption? Of course they are! I don’t judge by their “intentions,” but by their actions.

Finally, the National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to Contraception Act. It wasn’t that long ago that Republican politicians told people that if you protect and promote birth control you’ll have fewer abortions, but today’s Republicans are against all of it! Why, it’s enough to make you think they were lying when they said they favored birth control! Anyway, the bill would generally prohibit any attempt to keep people from getting the contraception they need, and wouldn’t let folks claim BUTZ MY FRAGILEZ RELIGIZ CONSHUNZ!!!! if they try. Remember: religious freedom is all about your ability to practice your faith, not your ability to force everyone else to practice your faith.

Around the table: we find good news wherever we can! And don’t shrink from the bad.

Good news: our Supreme Court rules that our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism is-so Constitutional, with Justice Thomas (is this an election year?) writing the majority opinion, ruling that our CFPB’s funding mechanism – our Federal Reserve system not only funds it, but determines funding levels – has ample precedent in American history. Not least because Congress delegated this authority via legislation, I would think. Naturally Justice Alito, he of the upside-down flag flying in front of his house just after the January 6 insurrection, called our CFPB’s funding mechanism “unprecedented” in his dissent.

More good news! The Biden Administration has proposed reclassifying marijuana from Schedule I – reserved for the most dangerous drugs with the least medicinal utility – to Schedule III. Thus pot would still be illegal at the federal level, but the crippling restrictions on medicinal research would no longer apply, and the tax burden on marijuana businesses would also fall. You should know that the organization Smart Approaches to Marijuana – from whence came the article’s content-free argument against the proposal – opposes both legalization and research, which I would think rather reduces the number of “smart approaches” available to them.

I find good news even in this bad news: unionization effort at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Tennessee fails by a fairly sizable margin, after Mercedes indulges in the kind of relentless anti-union propagandizing that the PRO Act would restrict if Congress would pass it. But Mercedes also made sizable concessions to workers, including ending a two-tiered wage system, making temp workers permanent, and starting a new bonus system, although I wouldn’t blame you for seeing that $700 “performance bonus” they handed out last month as a bribe (and one that works too often on good Americans trying to scrape through another week). But if a corporation treats its workers better out of fear of unions, then unions are still doing their job. And the only thing that’ll keep things moving forward at Mercedes is the continued threat of unionization.

When I hear that a Georgia state law taking effect this July could actually make that state’s voter challenge process even worse than it already is – keep in mind that a mere six professional right-wingers have challenged 90,000 voter registrations in Georgia – I start to think that this stupidity won’t end until liberals start challenging right-wing voter registrations the way right-wingers challenge Black and Brown voter registrations. We wouldn’t have to challenge 90,000 of them, either, before they cry uncle. And then the professional centrists will clutch their pearls about how uncivil liberals are, but it won’t matter, because we will finally have justice.

Uh oh: a Spectrum News report alleges that “millions” of good Texans’ tax dollars got diverted to an out-of-state charter school network founded by Houston’s Independent School District Superintendent, and perhaps not coincidentally, his corporation’s Colorado schools are all struggling, one of them closing down with $5 billion in outstanding bond debt. And yet he apparently gets to Hoover up Texas taxpayer money; nice work if you can get it! I know a lot of folks who fall for the promise of charter schools because their public schools are so awful, but we should make our public schools better, not divert public school funding to someone’s crony private schools that could be even worse.

Finally, continuing with our “nice work if you can get it!” theme, Robert Reich reminds us that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav somehow made almost $50 million last year despite his corporation losing $3 billion and his stock prices being a third of what they were two years ago. So he’s failing even by the yardsticks he would prefer you use to measure his performance! Measure him by, for example, CNN’s commitment to actual journalism (Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, an arrangement that by the way should not exist) and he’d come off far worse. And luckily Fran Drescher’s there to remind us that his corporation cries poor when it’s time to pay their workers, but not when it’s time to pay the boss. A mere 50.8% of shareholders approved his pay package; one does wonder how management twisted the arms of that last 0.9%.

Around the table: in which airline corporations get a comeuppance.

Outstanding news for good Americans: big airline corporations tried to defeat a Biden Administration rule that would have mandated automatic refunds when airlines screw up – and not only lost, but lost big, when Congressfolk actually wrote the Biden mandate into law. “In other words,” Matt Stoller writes, “Airlines for America tried to use their clout in Congress to undercut a popular rule put forward by Pete Buttigieg, a rule designed to fix a problem they caused by screwing people during the pandemic after they got bailed out. But their plan backfired, because politicians, journalists, and policymakers were actually paying attention. So now instead of repealing a rule they don’t like, they got that rule written into law.” Ain’t that great? And if you’re one of those Americans who called your Congressfolk post-haste when you heard about it, you’re part of the reason it’s great. So go buy yourself a Buffalo chicken cheese-steak, of whatever it is you love.

Judd Legum, in “Elon Musk’s Piggy Bank,” explains in considerable detail exactly why Elon Musk doesn’t deserve the $50 billion compensation package a Delaware court invalidated this past January. They’re putting the compensation package – which they claim is necessary so that Mr. Musk “will continue to be driven to innovate and drive growth at Tesla,” how’s that for a hostage situation! – before the shareholders in June, and yes, virtually every argument every board member makes sits on a bed of corrupt self-interest. Aside from the litany of examples of how Tesla’s failing these days, I feel compelled to add that a working family still can’t afford a Model X after a dozen years. Toyota Priuses went from luxury car to working family car in half that time.

Factcheck.org gives us the lowdown on the H5N1 bird flu officials have found in our milk supply. Long story short: the chance of a bird flu pandemic is low right now, since pasteurization does a pretty good job killing it and H5N1 would have to change a lot more to reach humans – but that could always change. Not just because more folks drink raw milk now, but also because researchers have hardly looked at bovine flu – there hasn’t been that much of it, which is a bit ominous, given that H5N1 figuring out how to get to cows might make it easier to figure out how to get to people – and our FDA has apparently found more bird flu genetic material in milk than our USDA has. In the meantime, don’t drink raw milk, cook your meat and eggs well, and stay away from wild birds.

“Who Believes the Most ‘Taboo’ Conspiracy Theories?” asks Paul Rosenberg at Salon. “It Might Not Be Who You Think.” Spoiler alert: it’s white dudes with graduate-level degrees! They’re more likely to believe Sandy Hook was a “false flag” operation or that folks exaggerate Holocaust deaths “on purpose,” and while you may reasonably conclude that the experience of studying an area deeply makes some folks a bit arrogant about areas they haven’t studied very deeply, you still have to wonder why things like Holocaust/Sandy Hook denialism attract them particularly. They said a little knowledge is a dangerous thing – and they were right!

I doubt very much that Donald Trump is “disgusted” by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s story about how she put her dog down, especially since the story mainly describes Mr. Trump being “disgusted” with Ms. Noem’s poor grasp of “public relations.” Only one time does the article depict him asking why she put the dog down, and even that is still a bit of a walk to grasping that the dog was almost certainly failed by her humans – and I still suspect he only thought to ask in the first place because he observed the PR backlash against her. With this guy, it’s never about humanity; it’s always about the drama.

Come on, Politico, is crypto really “Trump’s New Weapon Against Biden”? There are two types of Americans: Americans who think crypto is a scam, and Americans who don’t think crypto is a scam yet, and unlike anti-vaxxers, the ones in the latter group don’t need to look only to crypto to salve their desperation, since they can run plenty of other garden-variety economic scams. If anything, this gives Joe Biden another opportunity to be The Real Law and Order President, though admittedly he’s flinched from discussing such matters (particularly with regard to monopolies). If I were him, I’d always wear hats saying I put corporate criminals in jail! But Democrats have never taken my advice, to their general detriment, I’d say.

Upon hearing that the Georgia state Republican committee has voted to remove one of its vice chairs, nine-time-illegal voter and convicted felon Brian K. Pritchard, I once again feel compelled to assert that Mr. Pritchard, even though he forged checks, should never have lost his voting rights, and thus shouldn’t be facing the setbacks he’s faced lately. And that’s true no matter how much I despise his politics! Rights aren’t rights if they’re so easily lost – and values aren’t values if they’re so easily amended just to stick it to people you despise.

Finally, New Hampshire’s state legislature raises the legal marriage age to 18, but the process is not without speed bumps, as at least one Republican state legislator defends his support for underage marriage thusly: “(w)hen we do this to people who are of ripe, fertile age and may have a pregnancy and a baby involved, are we not in fact, making abortion a much more desirable alternative when marriage might be the right solution for some freedom-loving couples?” Setting aside that he uses the word “freedom” as an amulet like the rest of them, or how much he sounds exactly like the person QAnon votaries profess to hate: he frames his support as an anti-abortion stance, a less popular stance now that it’s not as theoretical, but the only reason anyone will remember him will be for describing underage girls as “ripe” and “fertile.” We’d be better off remembering the state legislator who said this: “A lot of (Republicans) say oh, we were married at 16 and we turned out great, and my marriage was great, and I always say that’s really great, but all those child marriages don’t end in a happy ending. They end with someone having bruises and cuts and being pushed down stairs and losing their kids.” As a friend of mine once said, never let the living do all the testifying.

Action: concerning voting rights, actual frivolous lawsuits, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act, pass anti-SLAPP legislation, and repeal the Comstock 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act and thus end felony disenfranchisement in America. Some 4.6 million Americans can’t vote because of a felony conviction, and voting shouldn’t be conditional in America, because, you know, rights shouldn’t be conditional. And yes, that means even child molesters should have the right to vote! They just shouldn’t have the “right” to molest children. A certain “law-and-order” mindset says we should just heap punishments on people if we’re frustrated, but that’s not just uncivilized, it’s un-American.

Greenpeace helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass anti-SLAPP legislation. SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” a.k.a. when rich, thin-skinned pricks sue their critics just to shut them up. But why should good Americans get sued into poverty merely for criticizing some Donald Trump-wannabe? And why haven’t tort “reform” adherents embraced anti-SLAPP laws? Possibly because they think class action lawsuits against polluters are “frivolous” lawsuits, while the lawsuits rich folks file to silence their critics are good lawsuits. Or, maybe, they’re just evil. No matter: our duty is our duty.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, a 150-plus-year-old law that forbids our Postal Service from mailing anything abortion-related, a law right-wingers want to will back into enforcement so nobody can get mifepristone and misoprostol through the mail. Now, as you may remember, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held back in 1936 that the Comstock Act couldn’t prevent our Postal Service from shipping such medicines if a doctor ordered it. Our Supreme Court will almost certainly ignore that precedent, so we’ve got to speak out to our Congressfolk.

Around the table: suddenly, we’re the good news crew!

Good news, everyone! our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has outlawed non-compete agreements in most employment contracts, so now good Americans can quit their jobs a lot more easily. Our FTC did something so obviously good that even Matt Gaetz called it a “vindication of economic freedom and free enterprise,” but even though, as Matt Stoller says, “it just feels icky to stand up for the right to prevent someone from quitting and getting a new job,” bad actors are still throwing tantrums about it. Former Trump Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia made four arguments in a suit against the FTC rule, but, well, I’ll let Mr. Stoller summarize again: “(i)t’s not clear how any of Scalia’s points are relevant.”

More good news, everyone! the Biden Administration Labor Department has extended overtime protections to all workers making as much as $58,656 annually, or some $23,000 above the ceiling set by the Trump Administration, and over $11,000 above the ceiling set by the Obama Administration that a Texas judge struck down in 2017. Oh, and about that: I wonder how including managers and supervisors – an act spurred by employers inventing BS “supervisory” job titles just to avoid giving their workers OT – will play in court. Still, most arguments against this rule change are horsedoodle. Sen. Cassidy (E-LA) says this is “the exact wrong time” for such a “drastic” increase (it phases in over the next year-plus, but whatever); do you get the sense that, for Bill Cassidy and his kind, there’ll never be a “right” time for it?

And we’re still going! Our Department of Transportation has issued new regulations mandating transparency about junk fees and faster refunds for wronged airline passengers. I’d prefer an end to junk fees, but once airline passengers have everything they’re paying for itemized, airline corporations will begin to end junk fees on their own. Oh, and airlines used to be able to determine for themselves what a “significant” delay is; now it’s going to be three hours for a domestic flight and six hours for an international flight, so no more pretending sitting in an airport for seven hours isn’t “significant” enough for a refund. Pete Buttigieg still isn’t the best Transportation Secretary we could wish for, but he’s gotten better over the last year or so. Maybe all that negative publicity taught him a few lessons.

Arizona grand jury indicts 18 individuals – including former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Trump lawyer/hanger-on Rudy Giuliani – for trying to overturn the 2020 election results in that state. Those who are tempted to decry TEH WEAPONIZATIONZ OFZ TEH JUSTICEZ!!!!!! would do well to note that would-be election-overturners went zero for eight in their lawsuits about the 2020 election; only one of these lawsuits figures in this case, but the folks who filed that suit then went on to sign a document “certifying” Mr. Trump’s “victory” in Arizona in 2020. They must think they can just do whatever they like and then BS everyone about it until they get tired of fighting. They underestimate us.

Factcheck.org provides another update on “Biden’s Numbers” – no, not his poll numbers, which are horserace horsedoodle anyway, but his economic numbers, which befit the Best President of My Lifetime Even If That’s Not a High Bar to Clear. Seriously, much of this information could very easily be made into an ad targeting independent voters – 15 million jobs, oil production up, crime down, deficits down, carbon emissions down, food stamp use down, more Americans with health insurance, record highs in the stock market. I’d add that wages didn’t rise faster than inflation at first, but have done so every month since February 2023. The next ad they run: Joe Biden breaks up monopolies that raise your prices – but Donald Trump would let them do whatever they want to you!

Finally, because we can’t, we don’t, and we won’t stop, our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) has reinstated the net neutrality provisions the Trumpholed FCC repealed in 2017. I’m wary of the next Republican-dominated FCC simply overturning them again, but not so wary as to demand that Congress pass a law that corporate hacks will just water down anyway, since nobody but the politicians listen to corporate hacks. Don’t believe the hype that “nothing much will change on the internet,” because the only reason for that is the six states, including California, that passed their own net neutrality laws over the last half-decade-plus. Those six states represent nearly 60 million Americans; it’s hard to do things one way for one state and another way for the other 49, let alone six and 44. And net neutrality – like corporate crime and antitrust policy – actually unites liberals and conservatives in America, and gosh, shouldn’t that count for something?

Action: concerning voting, monopolies, and protest.

Long story short: tell our government to ensure safe and secure mail-in voting, reject the proposed Capitol One/Discover merger, and break up the Ticketmaster monopoly, and tell Columbia University to right the wrongs it did to pro-Palestinian protestors. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Save the Post Office helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors, the USPS Inspector General, and the Postal Regulatory Commission to force our Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots safely and securely this year. Because you can’t count on Postmaster DeJoy to do it! He’s been busy raising prices, cutting services, and slashing jobs, and that’s not exactly the combination that ensures mail-in ballots get where they need to go, is it? Of course, he cares little about the Constitutionally-mandated service he runs – he wants it all privatized, ideally for his cronies. But if our government won’t fire him, then they need to rein him in.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Justice Department to stop the proposed Capital One/Discover merger, while More Perfect Union helps you tell our Justice Department to break up the Ticketmaster monopoly. If Capital One buys Discover, it’ll have even more power to charge higher interest rates, and it’s already charging the highest in the industry. And Ticketmaster already has the near-monopoly power to charge high prices, saddle buyers with junk fees, and bully smaller venues and artists into accepting whatever terms they impose. Why, this all sounds like a job for our government! Which is why we must speak out.

Finally, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell Columbia University to fix the mess they caused when they used the NYPD to clear out a student-created protest encampment, which would include amnesty for the 100-plus protestors arrested. Protestors demanded that Columbia divest from Israel; this is not exactly a loony-tune opinion in America – you know, the way “Biden stole the election” is a loony-tune opinion in America – so why bring out the big guns? Because our elites, even those in academia, are very slow to recognize shifting winds, and cling to their wrong-headed ways; what can we do but help them see that the winds are shifting?

Action: concerning voting rights, public education, and our care economy.

Long story short: tell your legislators to protect voting rights, stop diverting public school money to private schools, and invest in our care economy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would subject any voting law change from a state or locality known for vote suppression to Justice Department approval. The Voting Rights Act used to do that – until our Supreme Court struck that part of the law down because it “singled out” Southern states and localities for extra scrutiny. You can imagine why, I trust! But since the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act says any state or locality, not just Southern ones, our Supreme Court will have to come up with some other reason to oppose it. Not that they should take that as a challenge!

Daily Kos also helps you tell your state and federal legislators to stop diverting public school funds to private schools. Want public schools to do better? Well, certainly don’t hamstring them further by using public school money on private schools that don’t necessarily do a better job! And don’t tolerate anyone saying “we have to do something,” because we don’t have to do something but we have to do the right thing, and the right thing to do is fund public schools well and teach kids all they’ll need to learn – like the kind of BS detection that would prevent our tax money from going to someone’s private school crony so our public schoolkids suffer even more.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest more in our care economy, particularly into making sure workers like home health aides and nursing home aides get paid well for the work they do! Our care economy will only get bigger, and we’re all going to need it one day, so we’d better get ahead of that before big corporations do, because they’d pay everyone in dung pellets if we let them. And that’ll be hard to fight – not impossible, but it’ll be so much better not to have to fight it, so we can better fight other evils.

Action: concerning voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement 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.

RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to Vote Act, which would establish a right to vote in law and thus make it harder for states to pass laws suppressing voting rights. Do you get tired of right-wing smartypantses saying TEH CONSTITUSHUNZ HAZ NO RIGHTZ TO VOTEZ HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!? I know I do! And of course they’re wrong – the 15th Amendment says “(t)he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” which, ha ha, means there’s a right to vote. But let’s at least make right-wingers come up with some new line of BS. They’ll just get dumber and dumber.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would plug the hole in the Voting Rights Act our Supreme Court blew open in their notorious Shelby County v. Holder ruling. They said, essentially, that since more Blacks vote in the South now, the Voting Rights Act now unfairly discriminated against Southern states by singling them out for having their voting rights laws pre-cleared by our Justice Department. This bill would fix that error, such as it is, by subjecting any state or locality, from any region, with a history of vote suppression to submit to Justice Department scrutiny. So we ought to do that.

Action: concerning abortion rights, voting rights, and shrinkflation.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect abortion rights, protect voting rights, and attack shrinkflation. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, a 150-year-old bill which outlaws mailing abortion or abortion-related information through our Postal Service. In 1936, the Second Circuit Court of appeals, in U.S. v. One Package, ruled that our government couldn’t stop the shipment of contraceptives if a doctor ordered it – how about that, they weren’t willing to come between a patient and her doctor. But today’s swordfighting right-wing judges will almost certain discard that precedent, hence we’ve got to get Congress to repeal the law.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act, which would ensure that all folks with felony convictions can still vote. Because they’re not rights if governments can take them away from you! And one of the right’s more shameful gerrymandering practices is to shoehorn as many prisons into a right-wing district as possible – so that a district has the requisite number of people, but fewer of them can vote! And folks who want to take other folks’ voting rights away because TEH CRIMEZ!!!! may need to ask if they’re emotionally stunted. I’m serious.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act, which would empower our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to go after notorious “shrinkflation” practices, including putting fewer goods in a package but still charging the same price (or a higher one!). Republicans will complain that this is a waste of our time, but that’d be a heckuva political move, being objectively pro-inflation! I guess they’re counting on Democrats not to run ads about it. Democrats: this is another suggestion.

Around the table: now with approximately 29% good news!

Connecticut State Superior Court judge upholds Public Utilities Regulatory Authority’s order reducing Aquarion water bills by 11% – Aquarion wanted a 9% rate hike – and boy does he sound pissed: between “(i)t bears repeating that PURA possesses broad regulatory authority and equally broad discretion in setting rates” and “PURA is permitted to make its own factual determinations and is not required to accept evidence presented by Aquarion,” it sounds like he had to stop himself from writing how dare you waste my valuable time over and over again for 100 pages. Naturally Aquarion responds that keeping it from raising prices now means will only force it to raise prices in the future. Those who create rhetorical hostage situations deserve their own circle of Hell.

New York state settles with two Republican operatives for $1.25 million over their robocall campaign to keep Black voters from voting by mail. The playbook – telling Black voters that voting-by-mail means getting “tracked” for credit card debt and outstanding warrants – won’t surprise you, and though our FCC also fined them over $5 million, I really wish the state hadn’t settled on this; I really want folks like Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl to get jail time. And were they to emerge with a newfound zeal for getting better treatment and rehabilitation for prisoners, all the better!

When I hear that agents and brokers are switching good Americans out of their Affordable Care Act plans and into new ones without their consent, all I can say is: nice work if you can get it! Seriously, our civilization lets too many people who don’t do a damn bit of work just hurt good Americans over and over again. Getting defrauded in this manner means, among other things, not being able to see your doctors because now because they’re in a different network. Would it be piling on to to mention that if we expanded Medicare to include everyone, we wouldn’t need so many middlemen? No, it would not.

You may be familiar with most of the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) “playbook” on fighting and busting unions – “right-to-work,” prohibiting dues deductions from paychecks, like that. But you may not know about a new ALEC model bill called the “Uniform Worker Classification Act,” which, according to them, “ensures that the 80% of workers who prefer their independent contractor status are able to keep it, rather than being forced into traditional employment models.” You know, because California makes corporations to classify gig workers as “employees” (who get benefits) and not “independent contractors” (who don’t). I bet that 80% figure (if it’s not, you know, made-up) is about as useful as the 75%-prefer-their-private-health-insurance canard – people usually “prefer” the status quo until hard times find them and they learn how the status quo actually hurts them.

Mississippi state legislators can’t seem to pass a bill that would bring back ballot questions, even in the weak form (requiring supermajorities to pass, leaving abortion and the state constitution untouched) they obviously prefer. The 2021 state Supreme Court ruling – which held that ballot questions are unconstitutional, since the state constitution requires them to get signatures in five Congressional districts and Mississippi now only has four – may be the worst court ruling I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty in my lifetime. In the meantime, the legislature seems to telling the good people of Mississippi to go fuck themselves. I wish I could count on them paying for that with their jobs.

Jesus Mary and Joseph now Disney asserts it has a First Amendment right to fire Gina Carano for her social media posts. No, a corporation doesn’t have a First Amendment right to do a God damn thing, because a corporation is not a person, period, end of, full stop. And in the absence of a collective bargaining agreement that protects employees from being fired for their speech, Disney would already have the right to fire her for her speech. We’ve never had First Amendment rights at our jobs – though, as I’ve just suggested, we could organize and get them, or at least get some protection for our political speech, however noxious it might be. As long as we still have the right to organize! Louisiana Republicans are about to take that away from public sector workers as we speak.

Finally, the Oklahoma state House has overwhelmingly passed a bill criminalizing the “intentional or reckless” spread of sexually-transmitted diseases – which could make literally everyone in Oklahoma a felon! I’d think “intentional” would be hard to prove – though admittedly so many folks treat emails and texts like they’re not written records these days! – but “reckless” might be too much in the eye of the prosecutor, especially given that the bill doesn’t define “reckless.” Think any good Oklahomans will get tested for syphilis or chlamydia or the like if this bill passes? No, you do not. The state Senate hasn’t passed the bill yet; maybe they’ll at least pretend to be shamed by the media coverage. Seriously, though, Republicans can’t offer solutions unless they punish good people who don’t deserve it.

Action: concerning elections and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect election officials, cap insulin prices, and pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that’ll protect local election officials from the harassment and threats that have become far too commonplace after the 2020 election. Too many election officials have quit after all the Trumpholes threatening to kill them after their Personal Lord and Savior lost the 2020 election by seven million votes, so we’ve got to do what we can to protect the ones we’ve got left. That’ll entail, among other things, outlawing intimidation and keeping election workers’ info confidential. It’s not that much to ask, no matter how Trumpholes feel about it. Seriously, fuck their feelings.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap prices for life-saving prescription drugs, including, and especially, insulin. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, Medicare recipients now pay no more than $35/month for insulin, but everyone deserves that, and you can let your Congressfolk know that, regardless of their fealty to Big Pharma. And if they don’t want to do it, ask why they won’t. I bet the answers would be hilarious! And by “hilarious” I mean “profoundly irritating.” Especially hilarious, er, irritating, would be capping the price of insulin would amount to price controls. I think after the events of the last few years, most folks would respond: we can only hope!

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act, so that individual states can start their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems. Canada’s health insurance system started in Saskatchewan, after all, and wouldn’t it be nice if we could repeat that story? Don’t tolerate any BIG GUMMINT TAKEOVURZ!!!!!-style crap — as Paul Craig Roberts has said, government couldn’t possibly do health insurance worse than the private sector has. And don’t tolerate any how will we pay for it? crap, either. (By converting what corporations already pay private health insurance corporations into an employer-side payroll tax, the end.)

Around the table: behold, the *anti-sex party*!

Good news, everyone: the Biden Administration adds back most of the teeth to the Endangered Species Act that the Trump Administration knocked out, by extending the same protections endangered species get to “threatened” species, and by ignoring the “economic impacts” of endangered species protections, “economic impacts” really only meaning “whether some rich CEO gets even richer” to Donald Trump and his kind. The Biden Administration did not reverse a Trump-era rule allowing agencies to essentially disregard any predicted impact that wasn’t “reasonably certain,” but get the right people in agencies – i.e., not industry people – and you can mitigate that error, as well. Joe Biden hit the big targets, and good for him – and good for you if you left one of the 450,000 public comments telling President Biden to roll those Trump-era rules back.

Oregon government ends its experiment with drug decriminalization, by making possession of hard drugs in small amounts illegal again, though they also increase funding for drug treatment programs. I’ve always been wary of legalizing, for example, heroin and fentanyl, but Oregon used the legislative process to overturn the will of the people as expressed in a ballot question, and that’s more than a bit unnerving. South Dakota did it much worse by overturning a campaign finance ban mere months after good South Dakotans approved it, whereas Oregon waited three years, but I’m sure they could have better respected the people’s wishes. Yes, I know, the people elect representatives – but the people speak more clearly and directly through ballot questions.

Ho hum, Elon Musk passes around yet more “extremely concerning” information about voter “fraud” that doesn’t actually qualify as “information,” let alone “extremely concerning,” because it’s utter bunkum. No, anyone getting a Social Security number is not automatically an “illegal” registering to vote illegally, and a state could submit information about a citizen to a voting database more than once; Jesus Mary and Joseph what is wrong with just shutting the fuck up until you know what you’re talking about? Or is that something only “little people” like us, and not the richest man on Earth, have to worry about? Undocumented immigrant voting in elections is extremely rare, and that finding meshes well with actual common sense – folks here without papers tend not to give out very much personal information about themselves for reasons you can easily imagine. Apparently that finding does not mesh as well with some folks’ desire to be constantly enraged about anything and everything – or with certain rich individuals’ strange desire to show off for such people.

Just Security reminds us that most of the D.C.-held January 6-related inmates Donald Trump wants to release assaulted a police officer. (No, really – 10 of the 29 have been convicted of it, while another 10 have already pleaded guilty to it, which makes 20 of 29.) Well, so much for I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!! And so much for law and order, too. Of course, nobody thinks of themselves as law-breakers, and most folks who break the law tell themselves (and us) that their circumstances were “unique” and they had “no choice.” That is all, of course, very convenient reasoning. Please allow me to keep believing that I’m doing some good by pointing this out.

Newsweek asks if DEI – a term describing efforts to increase diversity, equality, and inclusion in corporations and academia – has become a “racial slur,” now that right-wingers blame literally every bad thing that happens on it, but remember that some people are so evil they’ll turn everything into a bad word. Remember when Barack Obama said he wanted his Supreme Court nominee to possess “empathy”? Oh, how the right-wing media pissed and moaned about that! And if they’d kept it up for longer than a day, they might have succeeded into making “empathy” into a cuss word, too. I wish I'd had as much success trying to turn “bold” into a cuss word during the George W. Bush era.

Donald Trump won’t tell Hugh Hewitt – about as sympathetic a media audience as he could hope to get – that he’s “100% with Israel” even after being asked twice, and while I know a lot of people in America are saying Israel might be wrong to themselves for the very first time (and Donald Trump knows that just as well as I do), just imagine what our “liberal” media would say if a Democrat refused to say directly he was “100% with Israel.” They’d call them weak, or a flip-flopper, or whatever – all things they refuse to say about Mr. Trump, because then they’d have to explain why he’s not actually a “strong leader” like all the polls they conduct say he is.

Finally, the incomparable Rebecca Solnit argues that Republicans – with their opposition to abortion and birth control and their embrace of fascism – have become an “anti-sex movement.” They’re saying it out loud! The Heritage Foundation wants to “restor(e) sex to its true purpose,” i.e., procreation, which means they want women to be breeders and nothing more (plus they want women to have no say over their breeding). Has the sexual revolution has been an unqualified good? No. But it doesn’t have to be for us to protect what women have won over the last half-century-plus, and calling Republicans the anti-sex party would be weapons-grade PR – most people still like sex, after all. I’ll whisper it into as many ears as I can.

Action: concerning voting rights, taxes, and paid leave.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to Vote Act, expand the Child Tax Credit, and pass the Protected Time Off 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.

RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to vote for the Right to Vote Act, which establishes a “fundamental right to vote in elections for federal office” in law, per Sec. 2(a), and would prohibit any “diminishment” of that right unless it were “the least restrictive means of significantly furthering an important, particularized government interest,” per Sec. 2(b). The Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act still deserve our support, but the Right to Vote Act at least would give us a fighting chance in court every time right-wingers want to suppress votes. And all we ever ask for is a fighting chance.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Senators to expand the Child Tax Credit for working families now, without poison pill amendments. Even our Republican House approved a CTC expansion – one weighed down with corporate welfare, to be sure, but we’ll get no better out of this Congress – and yet some Senators want to pile on even more harmful and unpopular legislative initiatives they could never get passed on their own, so we need to stop that. Is this CTC expansion as good as the 2021 CTC expansion? No. But will it lift half a million children out of poverty? Yes, and that’s worth doing.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protected Time Off Act, which would guarantee two weeks of paid time off for all full-time workers, which they may use for any reason, including caring for themselves or sick family members. Would that be as good as the 13 weeks Sen. Gillibrand’s bill would have offered, or the four weeks off the 2021 Build Back Better Act offered at one point before the Sinemanchin Axis killed it? No, it would not – as Andy Reid might say, we can all count. But would it be better than the zero weeks some 20 million American workers currently have? Yes, it would. So we should take it, and then fight for more later.

Around the table: today with one-quarter good news!

Biden Administration reverses a lot of changes former President Trump made to short-term health insurance plans, requiring more transparency about what they don’t cover (because that’s a lot!) and shortening the maximum period folks can have short-term health insurance from 36 months to four. That’s good news, but it’s also another argument for putting all Americans into Medicare, because short-term health insurance is, frankly, a shit product, and no, good Americans shouldn’t have the “option” of shit products, nor should our government even tout shit products as an “option.”

Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in the big house for fraud over his cryptocurrency shenanigans, so it’s starting to look like law and order has actually come to the cryptocurrency field, despite its votaries claiming it’s just too complex for us regular folks to understand (but don’t pass any new laws, because that would “crush innovation”!). Can our “liberal” media stop calling him a “cryptocurrency guru,” though? We don’t need to mystify cryptocurrency any more than its votaries already do. I’d also be happy if we stopped calling him by his initials, like he’s FDR or JFK or LBJ. He’s not even OBJ.

I missed this, because I watch very little TV news, but apparently some TikTok attention hound has been telling everyone how to “legally” squat in buildings and homes, and our “liberal” media covered it rather credulously. Because crime and immigration! It’s a two-fer! I imagine TikTok is no better or worse than other social media, but between this and birth control, one day soon we’re going to ruefully speak about folks with degrees from TikTok University, just as, not that long ago, we rued folks with degrees from the University of Google. In the meantime, our “liberal” media might remember that covering TikTok videos breathlessly as if they mean a damn thing doesn’t make anyone any cooler, let alone smarter.

Surprise, surprise! Our government recently sanctioned the corporation that chartered the cargo ship that took down the Francis Scott Key bridge, and for what? For violating the rights of whistleblowers alleging safety violations. You wish that had done more to prevent the bridge’s destruction, but it still represents a welcome change from the War on Whistleblowers waged by the Obama Administration. Of all the wars (coal, jobs, etc.) right-wingers accused the Obama Administration of fighting, they were strangely silent about the war they were actually fighting. What is the moral of this story? Right-wingers are useless, except maybe to teach us how not to be. I said “maybe.”

The good folks at The Conversation inform us that ”For-profit nursing homes are cutting corners on safety and draining resources with financial shenanigans − especially at midsize chains that dodge public scrutiny.” If, like me, you think banksters ruin everything and corporations shouldn’t own other corporations, you must also accept that nursing home chains shouldn’t exist. (That doesn’t mean nursing homes shouldn’t exist; it means they shouldn’t be part of big chains.) And while some folks would balk at our government taking over Boeing, I bet many, many fewer would balk at our government taking over some of these midsize nursing home chains. People find tales of abuse at nursing homes persuasive, after all. They also hate middlemen. And banksters.

We just talked about how squatting wasn’t really a thing, but it’s still always a good time to be reminded that even though Donald Trump says “violent crime has skyrocketed in virtually every American city,” actual FBI statistics tell us that crime is down, and violent crime is down 11% in cities with more than a million people. And what does the Trump campaign spokeshack say in response? “Joe Biden is trying to convince Americans not to believe their own eyes.” Yes, people do watch a lot of crime on TV, but anecdotes aren’t facts, no matter how many anecdotes pile up. And on the count of Donald Trump trying to convince Americans not to believe the facts she is strangely silent. I will not read her inevitable tell-all about how she came to be disillusioned with the Big Man, either. Seriously, anyone still working for him after January 6 is just a fool.

Ho hum, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s running mate has called intravenous fertilization (or IVF) “one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today,” and I wonder how the millions of Americans born via IVF feel about that, let alone their mothers. Naturally there’s a personal angle – because what good is our personal experience if we don’t get to smother everyone else with it? – as IVF practitioners apparently turned her away many years ago. This is why Donald Trump has been working overtime to call Robert Kennedy, Jr., a liberal – so his votaries would know they shouldn’t vote for Kennedy/Shanahan no matter how much their, ah, unorthodox medical opinions might appeal to their false pride.

Finally, Georgia Republican party official gets hit with a $5,000 fine for illegally voting nine times. Now, I could gloat (and have gloated) about how only Republicans ever seem to get caught voting illegally despite how much they whine about Democrats doing it all the time – and Mr. Pritchard sure has whined about that latter item, despite never proving it! – but I think it’s far more important to note that the state should never have taken his voting rights away in the first place. No, not even for forging checks! Even though I imagine that’s one of those crimes murderers beat people up for in jail.

Action: concerning voting rights and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and reject any legislation that would create a “fiscal commission” for Social Security and/or Medicare. 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would restore our Justice Department’s ability to pre-clear election law changes from any state or locality that has demonstrated a pattern of vote suppression – which answers our Supreme Court’s ruling that the old pre-clearance formula from the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states. That’s a little like saying laws against burglary discriminate against burglars! Anyway, this bill would actually improve on the Voting Rights Act, so Congress should pass it.

The Alliance for Retired Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any “fiscal commission” legislation for Social Security and/or Medicare. Want to make Social Security better? Start taxing income above $168,600 and then hike benefits! Want to make Medicare better? Tax corporations what they’re paying for private health insurance and then admit all Americans into the system! All of that is much better, than empowering some special “commission” to cut our benefits without the scrutiny of debate. If that was such a great idea, they wouldn’t have to do it while we’re not looking!

Action: concerning election workers and Native American lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect election workers and sacred Native American lands. 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.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Worker and Polling Place Protection Act, which would enact criminal penalties for folks who harass, intimidate, and threaten election workers when their guy loses. Let me be clear: the folks who went after workers like Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman (and all the good Americans who quit being election workers after the 2020 election) aren’t just assholes, they’re whiners, and frankly, being a whiner is worse, and I’m sick of folks getting their way by whining. And if we don’t put people in jail when they threaten election workers, then why do we even have laws?

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would once again protect the famous Oak Flat region in Arizona from being polluted by big copper mining corporations. Oak Flat already sits within federally-protected land, and that’s a phrase that should mean a lot more than it apparently does, otherwise we wouldn’t need this bill. You know another phrase that should mean more than it does? Religious freedom, not as in right-wingers’ “right” to tell you what to do and think, but as in protecting lands sacred to Native Americans.

Action: concerning government shutdowns, price-gouging, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end government shutdowns, fight corporate price-gouging, and protect voting rights. 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.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to end government shutdowns forever, by passing laws eliminating the debt ceiling and authorizing spending to continue at current levels whenever Congress can’t agree on continuing resolutions. Seriously, the only people in America who want government shutdowns are people who worship chaos and drama, and they shouldn’t get all the say about everything, or very much of anything, frankly. And stamping feet and preening about “runaway government debt” in order to cut Social Security and Medicare? Folks who do that should have their own circle of hell.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Shrinkflation Prevention Act, while Inequality Media helps you tell them to pass the Price Gouging Prevention Act. What’s the main cause of inflation? Not supply chain issues, not stimulus checks, not higher wages for workers – it’s corporate greed simple and plain, and these bills would make it harder for corporations to be greedy, as far as giving you less for your buck (the former bill) or raising prices higher than inflation or using inflation as a cover to raise prices when no other cost pressures would cause that (the latter bill). Ignore free market votaries; people matter more than ideology.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The former bill would advance a slew of reforms nationally, including same-day voter registration and fairer redistricting, while the latter bill would allow our Justice Department to strike down new vote restriction laws from any state or locality that has demonstrated a history of vote suppression. These bills would help more good Americans vote; that may not be the Republicans’ goal, but so what? Duty is duty, right is right, and wrong is wrong.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect voting rights, let states create their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems, and reject any Social Security/Medicare benefit-cutting commission. 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would give our Justice Department the authority to pre-clear voting rights law changes from any state or locality with a demonstrated history of vote suppression. That would replace the section of the Voting Rights Act our Supreme Court struck down because it supposedly discriminated against Southern states (which then instituted a slew of voting restrictions the next day, which nobody could have predicted!). With this bill, we could act against any state or locality, anywhere in our country, that discriminates for real against certain voters. And that’s a good work worth doing, so we should tell our Congressfolk to do it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act. Since our federal government won’t pass Medicare-for-All legislation, perhaps we can get a state to do it; indeed, Canada’s Medicare-for-All-style system started in Saskatchewan. Vermont passed such a system last decade, but then-Democratic Gov. Shumlin abandoned it, citing the “cost.” I’ve gone over how easily we could pay for it many times, but Mr. Shumlin was really just trying to support Hillary Clinton at Bernie Sanders’s expense. This story has a happy ending! Hillary Clinton lost, and Vermonters have sent a Republican to the Governor’s office four times since then! Maybe serving the people is the way to keep power?

Finally, the Alliance for Retired Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose any fiscal commission legislation concerning Social Security and/or Medicare. Because it’s just their way of trying to cut your earned Social Security and/or Medicare benefits without subjecting themselves to very much public scrutiny! Think of that the next time some knuckle-dragger on TV says we have to have the “courage” to cut these benefits, because hiding behind a commission that fast-tracks legislation without proper debate is the very definition of cowardice. If they were so “courageous,” they’d do it through the legislative process we’ve been using for centuries! I’d never want someone like that in my foxhole, and I hope you wouldn't, either.

Action: concerning abortion rights, election workers, and corporate “personhood."

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to protect abortion rights, and tell your Congressfolk to protect election workers and overturn Citizens United. 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Moms Rising helps you tell your state legislators to enshrine abortion rights in our state constitution. Because you can’t just count on our state Supreme Court to protect them! I mean, as currently constituted, they would if they could, but replace two Democrats with Republicans and that’ll change right quick. Explicitly put abortion rights in our state constitution and everyone who wants to ban it will have a much tougher time doing so. And not for nothing, but anti-abortion laws mainly prevent poor folks from getting abortions, not rich folks. That’s not fair, and we ought to put a stop to that.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Worker Protection Act, which would, as its title suggests, protect our election workers from terroristic threats much better than our laws currently do. Shame we have to do that, but we do, now that so many good American election workers resigned over the last few years because Trumpholes threatened them – or, in the case of one Arizona election worker, poisoned their dogs. If you poison someone’s innocent animals because they wouldn’t ensure your preferred candidate won, you’re a special kind of evil. But the Election Worker Protection Act would help prevent such atrocities.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment overturning our Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United v. FEC ruling and let America regulate campaign finance again. Citizens United, you may recall, told us that corporate campaign spending is free speech because corporations are people. I know the whole “corporations are people” thing is 150 years old, but Jesus Mary and Joseph the idea beggared belief then and it beggars belief now. A corporation is a person like my chair is a person, and money ain’t “speech,” either. It’s money!

Action: concerning voting rights, Medicare privatization, and IRS funding.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restore voting rights, prevent Medicare privatization, and fund 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.

The Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore voting rights in America, by passing both the Freedom to Vote Act (which would expand early voting and automatic voter registration, among other good works) and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (which would allow our Justice Department to pre-clear voting law changes from any state or locality which establishes a record of vote suppression, not just Southern ones). If Congress passes these bills, more good Americans will be able to vote – which politicians often don’t like, but they don’t get all the say around here.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all efforts to privatize Medicare. Privatized Medicare Advantage has become more and more a yoke around Medicare’s neck over the last few years – or maybe we’re just more aware of it – but we could take all the corporate welfare we’re handing out to private health insurance corporations so they can do a worse job serving seniors than Medicare does, and we could, you know, improve Medicare. I know, I know, insisting that government do things right is so uncool. Call me old-fashioned, then. I’ve been called much worse.

Finally, Demand Progress also helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any and all attempts to cut IRS funding. Right-wingers love asking aren’t you afraid if our IRS has more money, they’ll come after you? But what a stupid question! When our IRS was underfunded, they were only going after working families, because working families can’t hire lawyers as easily as rich folks and corporations can. Now, with our IRS funded much better thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, rich folks and corporations are starting to feel the heat – and Republicans have made cutting IRS funding their line in the sand! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Republicans only care about tax cuts for the rich.

Action: concerning voting rights, stock buybacks, and SSI asset limits.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act, the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, and the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination 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.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act, which would end felony disenfranchisement across America. You know who wants to keep folks with felony convictions from voting? Folks who know our justice system is biased against Black and Brown folks and want to keep them from voting, folks who know that if everyone could vote they’d never win elections, and folks who want to look “tough on crime.” Now those are usually all the same folks! But a right only works if a) everyone has it and b) we enforce it. And a civilization only works if folks have rights.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would increase the tax on stock buybacks – passed in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 – from 1% to 4%. The 1% tax hasn’t discouraged rich executives from using corporate profits to concentrate nominally public stock in fewer hands, which is why it needs to go up. I really don’t want taxes to be onerous on anyone! I just know they have to be, on some people, or they’ll create a dystopian hellscape where they live in gated communities while we slave away just to pay our bills.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, which would raise SSI recipients’ asset limits have so they can have real breathing room. Currently SSI recipients can’t have more than $2,000 in total assets, but you know how many emergencies can steal two grand from you just like that, and that limit hasn’t gone up in over 30 years though inflation has gone up nearly 150% over that time. And if we’d indexed the limits to inflation in the ‘60s, the limits would be even higher than the bill would make them! So we know what we need to do.

Around the table: good news about gerrymandering, bad news about corporate spying.

State legislative elections are about to be a little fairer in Wisconsin, as the Republican-dominated legislature voted to adopt Democratic Gov. Evers’s proposed district map, one which nominally gives Republicans a slight edge in holding both chambers, but not with near- or actual supermajorities, as they have now despite generally getting fewer votes than Democrats in the aggregate. Other proposed maps might have given Democrats a greater advantage (and, more to the point, been fairer), but with the end of Roe v. Wade I wonder if Republicans even have the edge observers think they have in the Evers map. I also wonder if a Trump ticket will boost downballot races (as it did in 2020) or be a drag on them.

Kate Wagner at The Nation tells us that the camera that yells at you after you trigger a motion sensor – I’ve experienced the “Hi! You are being recorded!” in my own neighborhood while bicycling, how obnoxious – “is an escalation of an already omnipresent aggression.” “It intrudes into our consciousness, induces paranoia and anger, makes us feel unwelcome in public life, furthers the idea that one’s private property extends beyond the stoop, and suggests that by owning property one has earned the right to curtail the rights of others.” And that prompts another reminder that both property crime and violent crime are half what they were 30 years ago, even if some folks obsess about it even more than they did then.

In a related note, private data-collecting corporation tracked visits to Planned Parenthood and helped anti-abortion groups do ad targeting with the location information – but the corporation apparently told investors it obtained that location information with user consent, which at least one highly-placed officer says isn’t true. Would have been nice to have all that information in the lede! Our SEC might sanction the now-bankrupt corporation for lying to investors – our SEC, you may recall, exists to protect investors from bad actors – while our FTC might sue to keep the now-bankrupt data-collecting corporation from selling off its location data without users’ consent. Note well that a second Trump Administration would pack our SEC and FTC with drama hounds who would “look for ways to partner” with bad actors.

Right-wing Congressdolt tries to get a zinger off on Joe Biden’s immigration policy, but winds up tripping over his own genitalia twice. First he tried to illustrate said immigration policy with a photo of an immigration “caravan” from 2018 – remember who was President in 2018? -- and then tried to pass off a photo of an immigration “caravan” in Mexico as a “caravan” in America. Of course, Rep. Edwards doesn’t care that he got called out for being stupid twice; he only cares that he “got the message out,” no matter how stupid the message was. You may not win converts that way, but you might intimidate the tending-toward-cowardly into submission.

A special election took place in George Santos’s old House district – and despite all the hand-wringing and horserace polling showing the race close, the Democrat won by eight points. I remain tired of hearing how “moderates always win races against crazy people” because, hello, 2016! But look at all the things Republicans and our “liberal” media insisted might propel Ms. Pilip to victory – immigration, crime, Israel, Joe Biden – that didn’t. Eight points is not a close race, abortion still matters, and, perhaps most importantly, Republican politicians all appear to be rage-filled drama hounds. I say “appear to be” because I think they’re all playing. Imagine living a life in which you decide that pretending to be an asshole is the road to power and glory!

Finally, folks are making a big deal about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Joe Biden; she also said she’d vote for him in July, so I’m not sure why it’s big news again in February. I will say that her assessment of Joe Biden as “one of the most successful Presidents in modern American history” is entirely accurate, even though that’s not a high bar to clear. I just hope enough good Americans prefer Mr. Biden over an objectively bad human being who pretends to be a rage-addled drama hound because that’s how you get attention in America these days. Yes, I’m saying a vote for Joe Biden is, among other things, a vote against the drama and sensationalism we should all have had enough of by now.

Action: concerning natural resources, public lands, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell the DRC President to stop evicting people from their homes to appease cobalt mining corporations, tell our BLM to keep Alaska public lands in public hands, and tell President Biden to get rid of Postmaster General DeJoy already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (or DRC) to stop evicting people from their homes so corporations can mine cobalt for electric batteries. Yes, moving from fossil fuels to more renewable energy is a good thing, but no law of nature demands that we disrupt (or end!) the lives of good citizens toward that end. Has no one considered compensating people properly for the good fortune they had in living on top of a valuable resource? Apparently not, and it ain’t just the DRC that does that, of course. But the Big Stick of Bad PR is what we’ve got here, so we better not be shy about using it.

Pew helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep 28 million acres of Alaska public lands out of the hands of mining and development corporations. Their latest email missive says we should “keep public lands in public hands” – now that’s a winning argument! And it rhymes! A lot of folks like things that rhyme, as you know. But our BLM is mulling whether to sell or lease this land for development, even though it supports local habitats, supports the salmon industry, and helps fight climate change. I just named three things that mining and development corporations care about far less than executive pay! So we’ve got to get to steppin’ about this matter.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to nominate two more USPS Board of Governors members who’ll oust the notorious Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. He’s been dragging his feet on this for some reason, and even if that reason is “I’ve still shoveling a lot of the horsedoodle left by my predecessor,” getting our USPS right again should be a much higher priority. Not just because of Mr. DeJoy’s legacy of higher prices, worse service, fewer jobs, and fewer Post Offices, but because our USPS delivers life-saving meds all the time, and because it might also deliver a lot of votes this year.

Action: concerning government spying, voting rights, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act and the Youth Voting Rights Act, and also tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits. 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 Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would prevent law enforcement from buying our data from third-party data brokers and would make law enforcement get a warrant whenever they want to search data they’ve already collected from us. Because anything else would be a fishing expedition, conducted to harass and oppress good Americans, and would contravene both the spirit and the letter of our Constitution. Many right-wingers today don’t seem to understand that law enforcement can be used against Americans. But our Founders did, and they were right.

RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Youth Voting Rights Act, which would (among other reforms) require voting booths at colleges and universities and end the sort of residency requirement governments only pass to suppress votes. You hear from right-wingers all the time about how young people don’t know enough about anything to vote, but they always said that about Black folks, too; they were wrong then, and they’re wrong now, not just on the morals but also on the facts. I make fun of young people sometimes, but they do see things we olds don’t anymore, and that’s a good thing.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. But wait, right-wingers say: Social Security is becoming insolvent! You can’t expand it ha ha ha stupid liberal! If I had a dollar for all the times over the years they said Social Security was becoming insolvent, I could retire right now! It’s 2024, checks are still going out, and frankly we could make Social Security better if we start taxing income above $168,600 into the system and start calculating costs more realistically. It’s not actually hard to do these things – unless your salary depends on your stupidity.

Action: concerning endless war, drug prices, and vote suppression.

Long story short: tell our government to start making peace in the Middle East, tell the Biden Administration to fight for lower drug costs, and tell our Justice Department to investigate AI robocalls in New Hampshire. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Win Without War helps you demand a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war, while Civic Shout helps you tell our government not to go to war with Iran. I’m old enough to remember right-wing “war on terror” bloggers not wanting to attack Iran after we attacked Iraq; maybe they got enough jollies from Iraq, but maybe they also knew that occupying Iran would be even harder than occupying Iraq turned out to be! But if we let the Israel/Palestine war get any worse – and it will, since Mr. Netanyahu wants to keep Hamas a player so he can keep power – then we might have war with Iran, and that’ll go so, so much worse than war with Iraq did.

More Perfect Union helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the most vigorous “march-in rights” rule possible. “March-in rights,” created by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980, would enable our government to “march in” and make cheaper drugs whenever big pharma corporations charge too much for drugs that taxpayer money helped create, which describes, like, almost all drugs all the time now. Big pharma corporations will want to open up loopholes so they can still charge an arm and a leg (so to speak?) for life-saving drugs, so now’s the time for us to stand up for our right not to get gouged over drugs we helped create with our hard-earned money.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to investigate AI-enabled vote suppression during the recent New Hampshire Presidential primary. You’ve no doubt heard that someone used AI to create a Joe Biden-sounding robocall urging people to stay home on primary day and “save” their vote for the November election? Well, that’s vote suppression simple and plain, and vote suppression is illegal simple and plain. Doesn’t matter the New Hampshire Democratic Presidential primary wasn’t “important”! This was surely a test run; next time it happens, it’ll really hurt America.

Around the table: of planes, rageheads, bad cops, and trillionaires.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Boeing airplane operators filed about one service difficulty report per day between 2020 and 2023, with Alaska Airlines filing the vast majority of them. Problems include not just windows blowing out in mid-air and denuding children but also fuel leaks and debris in fuel tanks and “malfunctioning stabilizing motors.” And while you may recall the Trump Administration shoving as much taxpayer money as it could Boeing’s way in 2020, the vast majority of these reports have come during Pete Buttigieg’s tenure as Transportation Secretary, and the FAA’s official response to The Lever’s report sure ain’t promising. “(S)ome airlines may file more reports than what is required”? Whoever wrote that needs to lose their job.

Oxfam International tells us that the world may have its first trillionaire within the next decade, and about the only consolation I can take from that is that, if history is any guide, that trillionaire will almost certainly not be Elon Musk, regardless of how good things look for him now. Of far less consolation: the person who does achieve trillionaire-hood will almost certainly be an even worse human being. In the meantime, more than half the world’s population has become poorer over the last three years, while the five richest men on Earth have more than doubled their worth over that same period, but please, right-wingers, keep whining about immigration and crime.

Pro-Palestinian protestors at Columbia University get hit with an Israeli chemical weapon – and college administrators chide them for holding an “unsanctioned” protest! After all, getting hit with skunk is something you ought to expect, since pretty much everyone can buy it at their local supermarket! Seriously, if only you had protested the way we wanted you to you’d have been OK goes well beyond scolding and into hostage-taking. Ask Rosa Parks how well the civil rights movement would’ve done if she’d just protested the way the state wanted her to. (And hey, wanna put some pressure on Columbia over this matter? Jewish Voice for Peace helps you do that.)

Families suing Koch Industries-owned Georgia-Pacific over the havoc asbestos has wrought in their lives condemn Koch for using a bankruptcy work-around called the “Texas two-step” to avoid paying out. Texas law allows corporations to divide into two corporations and then dump all their legal liabilities onto the second corporation – which then declares bankruptcy! I would never expect our Supreme Court to do its duty and assert that such bankruptcy arrangements hurt the rights of others to redress grievances, but that’s what they ought to do. In the meantime, boycott Dixie cups and Brawny paper towels. “Tear-a-square” paper towels are stupid anyway; I’ll always be a size-a-sheet man.

”21 Bodycam Videos Caught the NYPD Wrongly Arresting Black Kids on Halloween,” announces ProPublica, so “Why Can’t the Public See the Footage?” I’m going to go out on a limb and say the answer is “because it would embarrass the NYPD.” Look, if you do bad things, you should expect to be embarrassed, and you should expect your friends and neighbors and family to shame you; all that’s called civilization , and too many powerful people think they’re above it. And if the NYPD remains in control over who can see body cam footage, that doesn’t mean “body cameras don’t work” – it means we should have more control, and the police should have less control, over who gets to see body camera footage.

Finally, a Christofascist who shall remain nameless because history will forget him assures us that folks “involved in election fraud” will be “struck dead by God.” Well, I guess so, eventually, though it seems He’s working awfully slowly, particularly in that Georgia case where everyone heard Donald Trump say he just wanted to find 11,780 – oh, wait, he means us! Everyone thinks God’s on their side, long after it’s obvious He’s not. But then, rage is a hell of a drug.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning government spying, voting rights, and judicial ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to rein in government spying, strengthen voting rights, and issue a code of ethics with teeth for our Supreme Court Justices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would, at long last, force federal law enforcement officers to get a fucking warrant before looking at all the information our government collects (or buys from third-party private data-collecting corporations, which the GSRA would also stop). Seriously, get a fucking warrant! It’s all I’ve ever asked! Sorry to drop f-bombs there, but that’s what our government deserves for pretending that what worked for over 200 years suddenly stopped working because 9.11. You’ve noticed no one whines about the “war on terror” anymore, right? That’s because Tha Bush Mobb used it to grift America, and they succeeded, so now everyone can pretend they were never all that big a jerk about it. But I will never forget.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act with their Shelby County v. Holder ruling. Our Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act unlawfully discriminated against Southern states, but the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would address that objection by ensuring that any state or locality with a record of vote suppression, regardless of their location within the U.S., would come under additional Justice Department scrutiny. So don’t believe the hype that we don’t need to pass this bill because “the South has changed.” Why would they be afraid of additional scrutiny if they’re doing nothing wrong?

Finally, the National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would hold our Supreme Court Justices – who have been reported with their hands in all kinds of cookie jars lately – to the same ethics standards to which all other federal judges must adhere. What’s that, you say? You heard that our Supreme Court developed and released a code of ethics just recently, one that broadly resembles the code of ethics for all other federal judges? That is to laugh! Yeah, our Supreme Court put out a voluntary code of ethics a few weeks ago, but it ain’t hard to imagine each and every one of them (not just Sam Alito or Clarence Thomas!) imagining that whatever gift they’re about to receive is the “exception” to all rules. That’s why we have laws, good peoples!