Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: “truly the most oppressed minority."

David Corn reminds us that Donald Trump badly mishandled the COVID pandemic while he was President. Well, he also talks to memory experts to explain how Americans might actually have forgotten that (long story short: the pandemic sucked, why would you want to remember it?), but the better public service is reminding good Americans that a President less interested in creating drama at every turn and more interested in leading us through and out of the pandemic might have saved many more lives. And putting this guy in charge again would just mean more drama, more hysteria, and more assholes threatening to kill people who actually know how to do things, which is all pretty much the opposite of the future I signed up for.

Ho hum, right-wing "journalist" discovers that libel is actually a thing and not just a weapon to brandish at anyone you don't like. Specifically, a Scranton Times reporter reminded everyone that said "patriot reporter," who makes a living claiming that "certain high-ranking elected and public officials are satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles sexually abusing children and drinking their blood to ingest the life-extending chemical adrenochrome," has, in his own past, a Corruption of Minors conviction. The "patriot reporter"'s libel lawsuit, predictably, failed. Nice to know Scranton, PA still has a local daily, though will they still have one after a few more frivolous libel suits?

Portage County, OH Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski advises his Facebook followers that, if Kamala Harris wins the Presidency in November, they should "write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards! Sooo...when the Illegal human 'Locust' (which she supports!) Need places to live...We'll already have the addresses of the their New families...who supported their arrival!" (Odd capitalization and use of ellipses in the original.) When he feels like responding to press inquiries, he'll no doubt say that of course he didn't mean to intimidate anyone, but was just "trying to make a point," but I'm pretty sure most folks just read "write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards" and reacted accordingly, and that's almost certainly just as he intended. In case you were wondering, I think folks so obsessed with "illegal immigration" that they'd upend law and order are racists.

With the news that the Florida ACLU has sued a state health care agency for using taxpayer money to spread lies about the abortion-related ballot initiative up before Florida voters in November, we will gain some insight into what right-wingers plan to do if they lose this fall. They'll do what they did with their book banning and masking-related attacks in 2021 – attack where liberals are strong, and with clear majorities supporting the liberal position on abortion, they'll dig in with their "abortion always hurts women's health" rubbish and their LIBRULZ AREZ TEH REALZ FEARMONGERURZ!!!!! rubbish. In the meantime, someone should go to jail for misuse of taxpayer funds. And whoever ordered police to interrogate petition-signers at their homes maybe should go to Hell – in addition to jail or in place of it, whichever.

I'm old enough to remember when saying you "create stories," as Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance did on CNN when confronted with the fact that he repeated lies about Haitian immigrants eating cats, would finish your campaign, but in the Donald Trump era, you can get away with saying pretty much anything anymore – if you're a Republican, anyway. Those who would respond "well, fiction writers create stories to get you to pay attention to other people suffering" should note that Vice Presidential candidates are not fiction writers. We should expect political candidates to tell the truth; if we don't hold them to that, we're not "superior" because we're more cynical, we're just not doing our job as citizens. (At the risk of piling on, Mr. Vance sure is one to claim that "the left needs to tone down the rhetoric," since his running mate is the one who says 99% of all the obnoxious shit we hear.)

New Hampshire Libertarian Party opines on X/Twitter that anyone who would "murder()" Kamala Harris would be "an American hero" – and then deletes the tweet, saying they only did so because the tweet violated X/Twitter's terms of service, laments that "(i)t's a shame that even on a 'free speech' website that libertarians cannot speak freely," and further adds – and you may want to sit down for this – that "Libertarians are truly the most oppressed minority." Yeah, I remember when our government enslaved Libertarians and marched them off to detention centers and gas chambers and threw them out of helicopters! I kid, of course. I fucking hate whiners.

Finally, an internal Department of Homeland Security report reveals that under former President Trump, DHS tried its damnedest to link Portland, OR protestors to an "imaginary terrorist plot." Just as anyone who had even one working brain cell could have predicted when Tha Bush Mobb created the Department of Homeland Security after 9.11! The good news? Some DHS rank-and-file pushed back, because no one could prove the antifa "terrorist organization" even existed. But don't worry, folks! If we put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office this November, he'll make damn sure this time that nobody who ever stood between him and his evil fantasies will ever work for our government again! I wish I were kidding, but Project 2025 has essentially said the same thing.

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.

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 the death penalty, monopolies, anti-union propaganda, and abortion.

Long story short: tell Alabama’s Governor to commute Rocky Myers’s death sentence, tell our FTC to block a proposed fertilizer merger, tell Delta to stop subjecting its employees to anti-union propaganda, and tell big corporate pharmacies to dispense abortion drugs. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell Alabama’s Governor to commute Rocky Myers’s death sentence. Because Alabama no longer has a death sentence (Mr. Myers received his in 1994), because his lawyer abandoned him without giving notice and thus prevented Mr. Myers from exercising his right to an appeal, and because the case against him has always suffered from recanted (and possibly coerced) testimony. These aren’t mere “technicalities” – any one of these things should prevent us from killing a man. Yes, even if he’s actually guilty of murder! Maintaining a civilization is hard, as is anything worth doing, and all the folks who claim they’re “tough on crime” ain’t the tiniest bit tough at all. They’re whiners, frankly.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to block the proposed merger of Koch Ag & Energy Solutions/Iowa Fertilizer Company merger. And yes, that’s “Koch” as in “brothers,” but that’s only icing on the cake – the merger would kill jobs and raise prices like all mergers do and would also reduce options for small farmers trying to grow the food we all eat. I know, I know, a foreign chemical corporation owns the Iowa Fertilizer Company now, but where is it written that our only choices are “a foreign corporation owns it” or “the Koch brothers own it”? I’d rather the employees owned it! That’s not outlandish – even Ronald Reagan supported employee-owned corporations.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell Delta Airlines to stop its union-busting tactics. These include (and you won’t find very many surprises on this list) “anti-union videos and leaflets in break rooms, meetings with new hires that discourage unionization, managers telling workers to remove their union pins, and taking union fliers from workers’ personal belongings” but hey, there’s an idea! Let’s stuff every single worker’s backpack with, like, 200 union fliers! You best believe the underpaid flier-confiscation technicians will complain to their bosses right quick, and then maybe join the union effort. In the meantime, why let Delta tilt the playing field even more in their favor?

Daily Kos helps you tell big corporate pharmacies (like Walmart, Costco, and Safeway) to dispense abortion medications. Almost a supermajority of abortions in America now occur via medication, meaning almost a supermajority of abortions in America now can occur, at least in theory, without some idiot screaming in your face that you’re going to hell. It might be better to have legislation mandating pharmacies to do this – particularly since the Comstock Act still sits out there like a bomb waiting for Sam Alito to set it off – but the Big Stick of Bad PR also works, particularly when most people agree with its use, as most Americans will do about abortion drugs.

Yes, I heard that the greatest President of my lifetime just dropped out of the race after being hounded by Democratic leaders and our “liberal” media for the last few weeks. The challenge for us now? Same as it was before: to demand what we deserve from our leaders, and since we Americans are basically a good lot, regardless of how politicians and corporate executives act, we still deserve what our civilization has always promised us, and which the New Deal era came closest to delivering: freedom from want and fear and bigotry, freedom to dream bigger and accomplish bigger, freedom to create and sustain communities, freedom to maintain and nourish a heritage that we can pass down to our children and our children’s children. I’ll fight for all of that to my last breath, and I bet you will, too.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: this week with maybe half good news? Or more?

I don’t know what fresh hell our Supreme Court plans to unleash upon us next week, but on Friday they ruled 8-1 that our government can keep domestic abusers from owning guns. I’ve never liked using law-breaking as a pretext to take rights away, but then I’m no longer sure having a gun should be a right per se, and when right-wingers throw a tantrum over our Court saying “the Second Amendment is not absolute” (that’s Justice Barrett, from her concurrent opinion), they’ll show us their ass yet again, and I guess that’s useful. Of course Justice Thomas dissented, saying that since governments have barely ever prosecuted domestic violence victims then of course there’s no “historical precedent” to follow! I bet he likes bitcoin, too.

Our Supreme Court, in Moore v. United States, also rejected (at least in this case’s context!) right-wing arguments that our government can only tax “realized” income. Had our Court sanctified that pile of dung, our government would never be able to tax the kind of wealth rich people accumulate these days – capital gains, accumulated interest, stock options, and the like. Rich folks pay themselves like this so they can avoid taxes! Let’s see you and I try that! And now for the bad news: four out of nine Justices on our Supreme Court explicitly blessed the “realized income” argument; two of these merely differed on whether these particular plaintiffs had a case regarding their income.

Clearview AI – a player in the facial recognition software game, a game that should shame for all eternity anyone who plays it – is now so broke after all the lawsuits against it that it’s actually offering promises of future earnings in its settlement. Like they’re ever going to make money again! I mean, they’re not a name your grandmother knows, like Home Depot or Microsoft or DuPont. Well, at least a lot of idiots lost a lot of money boosting an absurd corporation (Clearview) as well as an absurd notion (that facial recognition software doesn’t completely suck). And, you know, it scraped all those photos off the internet without the consent of the photographed; turns out you don’t surrender all your rights just because the cynical say so.

The Tampa Bay Times profiles Rich Logis, who used to be a Trumphole but now runs a group aiming to help other ex-Trumpholes escape. I don’t believe anyone as emotionally-invested in Republican electoral fortunes as Mr. Logis was in 2015 could be an “independent” – no, not even if they voted for Ralph Nader four times! – and I never said losing friends and communities was easy, either, but the work of being yourself is the most important work you can do, and I’m pleased he’s now doing it, even if he never wants to tax the rich like I do. I’m also pleased January 6 and Gov. DeSantis’s mishandling of the COVID Delta wave pushed him away, because these should have pushed away every reasonable person. And while I’ve long said the work of redeeming Trumpholes is God’s work, not ours, maybe Rich Logis is doing God’s work.

When I hear that our government has designated a Swedish neo-Nazi group as terrorists, I’m more than a bit conflicted: I’ve never been thrilled that our government designates anyone a terrorist, and this is also a pretty obscure, faraway group; why, it’s almost as if they don’t have the guts to designate some American hate group a “terrorist” organization! Or, our government thinks Americans will more readily accept a “terrorist” designation of a domestic American hate group one day if they get one of an obscure foreign one first, but that’s also quite the double-edged sword. Still and all, fuck neo-Nazis with a broomstick sideways.

When I hear that Democratic strategists have expressed alarm over Joe Biden’s re-election strategy, I’m very, very tempted to say: these are same people who consistently snatch defeat from the jaws of victory! Your strategy can get no better endorsement! Now I could criticize Mr. Biden’s strategy – he’s not telling us that America is fighting monopolies again, for example – but of course none of these strategists seem to have that complaint. Actually, it’s hard to tabulate the complaints they do have, what with all the behind-the-scenes who’s-in-who’s-out drama the article describes. Why, it’s almost like the whole article was a bait-and-switch!

Finally, a megachurch pastor’s “confession” of a “moral failure” involving an underage girl – a failure that, of course, went on for many years – is an amazing document mainly for the utter lack of confessing that goes on in it! “Young lady”? Uh, ladies aren’t 12! “It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong”? Try it was wrong – nobody likes confessions that tabulate the sins one could have committed but didn’t. But best of all? “In March of 1987, this situation was brought to light, and it was confessed and repented of.” Not “I confessed” and “I repented”? Why, that sounds like someone who’s done neither! Remember: the passive voice hides evil.

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.

Action: concerning banksters, corporate welfare, and judge-shopping.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect us from financial predators, reject new corporate tax cuts, and end the notorious practice of “judge-shopping.” Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to repeal the Biden Administration’s fiduciary responsibility rule. So what’s that about? The Biden Administration enacted a rule requiring financial advisors to look out for their clients’ well-being first. Seems common-sensical, right? But financial advisors are too often financial predators, so our government has to step in and make them do the right thing. Sad, but necessary. So naturally Republicans in Congress want to stop our government from making financial advisors do the right thing! They’ll call it evidence of a “nanny-state,” but it’s not our fault banksters too often act like they need a nanny. So let’s get to stepping.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject new corporate tax breaks Republicans want to enact, while Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to let a specific part of the Trump tax “reform” law expire, that being the “pass-through” loophole. All of the Trump tax cuts were far more for the rich than for you or I, but the “pass-through” loophole – which taxes entities like partnerships, sole proprietorships, S corporations at a rate much lower than income tax rates – also lets rich folks to take massive tax breaks, though of course they sold it as a “small business” tax cut. Like all corporate welfare, we should rocket it to oblivion.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform also helps you tell your Congressfolk to outlaw “judge-shopping,” or the practice of fishing around for a suitable district to file a lawsuit in so you can get the result you want. Now that’s picking winners and losers! We only need consider that stupid anti-mifepristone and misopropol lawsuit our Supreme Court recently struck down 9-0, because the plaintiffs totally went for the far-right Fifth Circuit because they knew they’d get a judge who’d tell them what they wanted to hear. File the lawsuit and get justice where you were actually hurt, that’s what I say. Of course, right-wingers hate that, because then they might lose. Right-wingers sure do need a diaper change if losing bothers them that much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Action: concerning health care, law and order, and homelessness.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act, outlaw judge-shopping, and enact housing policy that actually helps homeless folks. 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 pass the State-Based Universal Health Care Act, which would make it easier for states to start their own Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems. Canada’s Medicare-for-All-style system started in Saskatchewan, after all, and the enterprising American Governor would relish the possibility at attracting big corporate headquarters to their state, since even CEOs prefer cost certainty to insane premium hikes. Of course, it’d also be better because folks wouldn’t have to stay in a bad job or marriage just so they don’t die, and because banksters wouldn’t make money from hurting you like they do now.

Demand Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing judge-shopping. You should get the judge in the area where you were allegedly harmed, not in some district in Texas headed up by right-wing judges who love certain kinds of frivolous lawsuits! It ain’t that deep! Now you may have heard Trumpholes lamenting the “unfairness” of their Personal Lord and Savior having to go before a jury of (gasp!) New Yorkers. Psst: that’s where he committed the crimes. They have nothing to say about his classified documents case being heard in Florida since the alleged crime happened there. So let us have wisdom, not Trumphole hysteria, guide us.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that really addresses homelessness, instead of pretending that jail time and massive fines are the solution. Who thinks some kind of punishment is the answer to every problem? Someone who needs to be ejected from your life, that’s who. And who fines someone who doesn’t have any money? Someone who wants to bring back debt slavery, that’s who. I’m not exaggerating about that. But Congress could invest more in housing assistance and end discrimination against renters, which would speak much better of us as a civilization than putting spikes on public benches.

Around the table: today, with upwards of 29% good news!

The PRO Act may not be very close to passage nationally, but the PRO Act has passed in Vermont, and will not only outlaw those forced propaganda meetings corporations like to make folks attend like they don’t have enough work to do, but will let domestic workers organize and let public workers form a union via card-check. There’s a lesson here for all Americans – don’t strap yourself too closely to Democrats, and fight for what you actually want, and you might more easily get Democrats to go along with you. I mean, they can put their finger to the wind just like anyone else. Come to think of it, didn’t New Deal legislation pass pretty much because the politicians were following the people’s lead? Why, yes!

Study published in The Lancet predicts that worldwide life expectancy will increase by almost five years by the year 2050, from around 73 now to around 78. Why? Because we have more non-communicable disease these days than communicable. Say, remember that time we all had to wear a mask all the time so we didn’t accidentally kill each other? Turns out that’s a habit that helps people live longer! And think how much better we’d do if we adopted better ventilation practices in public buildings! But it’s also going up because, well, a lot of nations have a lot of room to grow their life expectancy. What will be a drag on life expectancy? The fact that a lot of us are too fat because we eat too much crap.

Team Trump sends a cease-and-desist letter to the makers of the movie The Apprentice. Can you say “diaper-loaded brat,” boys and girls? How about frivolous lawsuit? And why don’t Republicans defend the free speech rights of the filmmakers? Because the only lawsuits they find “frivolous” are lawsuits that make corporations pay for the harm they do to good Americans, that’s why. In a peripherally-related note, GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.

Tim Cushing at TechDirt tells the story of what happened to a couple of cops who literally tortured a Fontana, CA man into confessing to a murder that never occurred. The “suspect” actually called the cops for help because he thought his father had disappeared; turns out his father had taken public trans to visit a relative and a female friend, but the cops decided he was dead and decided the son was the killer, pretty much without thinking very hard about it, or at all. You’ll really love the part where they threaten to euthanize his dog if he doesn’t confess, and then bring the dog into the interrogation room. Sadly, these cops didn’t lose their jobs but the city paid almost a million bucks in damages to the tortured citizen (four years later!), which of course came out of his and everyone else’s taxes. Who bellows I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!! after hearing that story? Someone you should straight-up eject from your life, that’s who.

Donald Trump endorses primary challenger to Rep. Bob Good (E-VA), which is probably the death-knell for the otherwise noxious right-wing incumbent. And also an opportunity for Democrats, if they have the sense to recognize it: Virginia’s 5th Congressional district usually votes Republican in federal and state elections, but not by absurd margins, plus the 2020 election saw 400,000 out of 580,000 potential voters actually vote. So a lot of these 180,000 folks might be persuaded to turn out against the Republican – by an actual populist Democrat who won’t let the party’s consultant class dominate their messaging. I’m not sure I see that individual among the Democratic primary candidates, but I’d be happy to be wrong.

Despite all the bad PR they’ve received for their, ah, unique educational “reforms,” Florida’s government continues to leave a trail of slime wherever they go, now putting together training materials that lump “cancel culture” “victims” in with Josef Stalin murdering three-quarters of a million political dissenters. When they lecture us about “the dangers and evils of Communism,” and then equate the quite deserved shame of garden-variety racists with the imprisonment or murder of actual political dissenters, they’re telling you that shame is only for right-wingers to use against you, never for you to use against them. What has two thumbs and won’t eat Florida blueberries until they stop being fascist? This guy!

Finally, Louisiana passes law reclassifying abortion drugs mifepristol and misopropol as “controlled dangerous substances.” People have been using these drugs safely for decades, and the fact that some asshole somewhere may have misused it – if the bill’s sponsor’s “personal story” isn’t some made-up sack of dung – doesn’t change that. Let it be known that having a Democratic Governor for two terms hasn’t changed Louisiana politics one little bit, so be wary of supporting weak “centrists” (or “the only people who can win”) in red states. The only liberal who can really win in a red state – which is to say, win an election and be of some utility to the people of that state – is a populist.

Around the table: yes, Donald Trump will take your birth control away! And other obvious truths.

Good news, everyone: Oregon Labcorp workers have overwhelmingly voted to unionize. You’ll recognize Labcorp as one of the two big biometric testing chains in America (along with Quest Diagnostics), and if you’re at all acquainted with the forces aligned against workers described in paragraph 5 (staffing shortages, absurd schedules, private equity parasites constantly demanding cost-cutting and “upcoding”), you’ll find it easy to imagine why Oregon Labcorp workers want more of a say in their work lives. Something I haven’t emphasized enough: these anti-union propaganda meetings take workers away from their work – which workers resent even more when they’re already overworked.

Karl Bode at Techdirt reminds us that thanks largely to local governments, Utahns in 21 cities now enjoy good, affordable community broadband service, upon which 18 internet service-providing corporations compete and actually offer fairly low prices. Of course the big telecom corporations tried to sue UTOPIA out of existence, but failed; they might have done better, you know, building the infrastructure themselves and providing the service at a low price, but then they’d have to stop being parasites. And this solution – governments build the network, private corporations provide services on it – is a moderate solution. I can’t help but note that Utah is one of the most Republican-dominated states in America, and yet UTOPIA has thrived here. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.

Our “liberal” media has spent way too much time trying to “figure out” why Donald Trump said he’d take our birth control away and wouldn’t take our birth control away on the same day, but Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us that we don’t have to “wonder” what he’d do – we can just look at the “giant pile of receipts from Trump's four years befouling the White House.” His Administration cut funding for family planning clinics that offered birth control at low or no cost, resulting in 1,000 clinics shutting down or cutting services – mostly for poor folks, because cruelty – and they also gutted the Affordable Care Act mandate that insurers offer birth control at low or no cost. Result: more abortions, more sexually-transmitted diseases, and no confusion about whether another Trump Administration would hurt people or not. Of course they would! What fuels them, other than your pain?

Matt Stoller discusses why the Biden Administration seems to “Hate Its Own Agenda.” “Millions of people saw news about the banning of non-compete agreements by the government, actions against banks via regulation of credit card fees, bans on junk fees, antitrust actions against Google, Apple, airlines, book publishers, and meatpackers,” he writes, yet good Americans “don’t connect it to the Biden Administration,” and the reason for that, apparently, is that the Biden Administration goes out of its way not to discuss it. And well beyond simply refusing to comment on ongoing lawsuits, which is reasonable – they praise big corporations, like, a lot, and won’t even criticize them when they’re laying people off, all of which makes Americans think the Biden Administration isn’t doing anything about their problems. If it were me, I’d be wearing a cap saying I KILL MONOPOLIES everywhere I went. And the consultant class would throw tantrums about it, but regular Americans would love it.

From the “Praise the Lord someone said it exactly this way!” file: Jon Stewart explains that “Trump is the real ‘cancel culture’ – emphasis on ‘cult.’” Long story short: right-wingers constantly complain they’re being “cancelled” every time someone criticizes them, which is whiny and weak, but the only thing that really gets a right-winger cancelled is standing up to Donald Trump. Choice bit: clips show Mitt Romney and Will Hurd getting booed for criticizing “the Boy King” and Mr. Stewart says “Yes, the woke mob shouts you down.” Hey, it’s not my fault it’s so easy to turn right-wingers’ folly back on them. But it is our “liberal” media’s fault that they don’t do it anywhere near enough. We can’t rely on Jon Stewart to save us forever.

Finally, L. Brent Bozell IV, who comes from a long line of L. Brent Bozells, gets almost four years in jail for his role in the January 6 attack on our democracy. Of course his father and grandfather – Joe McCarthy speechwriter/police officer attacker L. Brent Bozell Jr. and Media Research Center founder/constant whiner about violence on TV L. Brent Bozell III – were major players in the conservative movement, in the sense that they were constantly forcing it rightward, particularly on the sort of social issues that keep energizing the feedback loop of masturbatory rage in which right-wingers have trapped about a quarter of all Americans. So the conviction and sentencing of Bozell the Fourth constitutes a sort of full circle for the conservative movement in its autumn years.

Action: concerning stock buybacks, bad health care, and judicial corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act and the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, and tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed 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.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would quadruple the tax on stock buybacks. They used to be illegal! But then the Reagan Revolution said of course we can trust executives not to abuse their power! They’re people, after all! Except we all know how people get when they get that kind of power, and if we didn’t know, we have 40-plus years of evidence telling us that executives buy back stock (and thus concentrate shareholder power in fewer hands) whenever they can, to the point where Apple now plans a $110 billion stock buyback spree. No corporation should have that kind of power! And too many of them do.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject to so-called More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed Act. You know how right-wingers want you to think they’re not just against anything that would make your life better? Here they’re pretending they really want to do something to help mothers succeed, without abortion. Of course the bill doesn’t do that – instead it diverts more taxpayer money, which is your money, to “crisis pregnancy centers” that take advantage of pregnant women to tell them noxious lies about abortion’s “effects” on their health. And sorry, but sometimes abortion is the “opportunity for moms to succeed.” I wish it weren’t, too, but it is.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, which would force our Supreme Court to adhere to the same ethics standards to which every other federal judge must adhere. Justice Thomas has lately been saying that Washington is a “nasty” place; don’t you hate it when people do evil and then complain that no one likes them? Maybe he should maybe stop contributing to that nastiness by accepting millions of dollars in gifts from folks who might have business before the Court! I mean, don’t conservatives want everyone to look to themselves first before complaining about how the world’s against them? Or is that only a rule for us?

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?

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.

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 paid leave and “free” trade.

Long story short: tell Pennsylvania state legislators to enact real paid family/medical leave, and tell all state legislators to pressure the Biden Administration into getting investor-state dispute settlement systems out of trade deals. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Moms Rising helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass the Family Care Act, which would provide at least 12 weeks of paid time off every year, so we can take care of ourselves and our families. Sound like a recipe for entitled, lazy workers? Well, this is the post-COVID era; nobody’s killing themselves at their jobs anymore after 50 years of get-rich-quick schemers running (and ruining) everything. Sound too expensive? Well, Kirsten Gillibrand’s national plan would have cost a worker making $50,000 annually a mere $8/month. Most folks’ co-pays are more than that!

Global Trade Watch helps you tell your state legislators to call on the Biden Administration to get the notorious investor-state dispute settlement (or ISDS) systems out of all “free” trade deals. ISDS systems allow investors to claim that our clean air/clean water/worker safety laws “hurt” them financially, and thus allow them to essentially nullify those laws, and there ain’t no sincere law-and-order advocate in America who’d put up with that. After all, we don’t go through all the trouble of building a civilization so wealthy whiners can tear it down.

Around the table: a good week for evil, though not for junk fees.

Our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) passes rules preventing big telecom corporations from throwing a bunch of surprise junk fees in their “all-in” subscription plans. That the FCC’s two Republican Commissioners of course voted against it should remind us that Presidential elections matter – we may find the Biden Administration working a bit too slowly on junk fees for our taste, but there’s no way a second Trump Administration would have done a damn thing about them. And pay no mind to the corporate whining at article’s end – it’s “micromanagement” to make corporations stop lying to us about their prices? Pimps, please.

Hard to believe, Harry, but women are apparently ditching birth control pills after getting bad/wrong advice about them from social media. Even if birth control pills caused weight gain (they don’t) or infertility (ditto), we would do well to stack that up against the very real threat of far more easily getting pregnant and being forced by the state to give birth. Too many folks hear one thing that surprises or impresses them and think they know everything after that; if we weren’t all so susceptible to the sin of pride, we’d make better decisions and we’d suffer a whole lot less.

Ho hum, an educational nonprofit plans to expand its deployment of an AI “teaching assistant” to thousands of students next year. Why, that doesn’t sound at all like part of a plan to replace unionized public school teachers with unpaid robots that never get sick or go on vacation! And Thomas Jefferson is literally the father of American racism, so playing up his alleged hatred of slavery means even less than the on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand argument the AI tool makes. Machines are good at washing clothes and keeping food cold, not teaching kids. But their continued deployment will enable more Americans to congratulate themselves for knowing things when they don't.

Hedge fund corporations move into the autistic services field, and surprise, surprise! Autistic service centers start delivering worse service before closing down en masse. Banksters really do ruin everything – why, they even cause or enable abuse of autistic children, no doubt by breathing down everyone’s neck to CUTZ ALLZ TEH COSTZ!!!!! But let’s not let pass that chains of autistic service corporations shouldn’t exist, either, because the downward pressure to cut-costs-no-matter-who-gets-hurt comes from that direction, too. The solution to most problems in America is small businesses creating jobs, not big corporations creating “efficiency in markets.” I can barely type that phrase without throwing up.

Ho hum, NBC News wonders why the public thinks the crime rate is going up when it’s going down, which is a little like Donald Trump wondering why people think he shouts so much. The public think it’s going up because our “liberal” media always cover it like it’s going up. They’ve done better reporting actual facts about crime lately, but they still cling to local crime stories like grim death, reporting on them repeatedly over days and weeks, showing the same clips over and over again until it’s like all you see on the news is crime. How bad is it? Last week one of my co-workers saw a story about an arrest for a recent SEPTA bus shooting and asked if another shooting had happened. I’m pretty sure that’s a feature, not a bug.

Finally, another day, another right-wing punditoid opining that New York seizing Donald Trump’s property so he can pay off $450 million-plus in civil fraud judgments would “create the greatest victimhood of 2024” and “elect Donald Trump.” My immediate response would have been: so, you’re saying we should not enforce the law? As for “let’s not talk about whether it’s justified or not” – Jesus Mary and Joseph that is literally the only thing we should talk about! Americans hate political “analysis” because they hate having their lives reduced to a horserace, but our “liberal” media punditoids have nothing else to offer.

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: with jewels of good news struggling to rise above the muck of bad news.

Big coffee corporation Starbucks and Starbucks Workers United announce a “foundational framework” for contract negotiations, with Starbucks finally extending credit card tipping to unionized stores (as it had for non-union stores, which I’m pretty sure is illegal). Could this framework be a PR ploy on Starbucks’ part? Perhaps. But it would never have happened without workers’ agitation for fair collective bargaining, and it also wouldn’t have happened without consumer boycotts and Starbucks’ losing almost 2% of its value on one December day alone. And unionized Starbucks stores might be the thing that breaks the dam for the rest of America’s working families.

Ho hum, Donald Trump keeps talking about a “migrant crime wave” that doesn’t actually exist, as actual data affirms what common sense already tells us – that immigrants without papers commit less crime, because they have an obvious incentive not to have a run-in with police! Naturally a Trump campaign spokeshack alleges that “Democrat cities purposefully do not document when crimes are committed by illegal immigrants,” and, well, that’s a defamation lawsuit waiting to happen! Of course, Mr. Trump has a lot of experience being sued for that.

Study confirms that reported COVID-19 vaccine side effects exist and are rare, but social media drama hounds tend to leave out the part that they’re rare. The vaccine that had more pronounced side effects – the J&J vaccine, associated with neurological problems and blood clotting disorders – you can’t even get in America anymore, and that sure does resemble how civilization is supposed to work. Anyway, I’ll take a one in 1.75 million chance of acute brain or spinal inflammation over the considerably higher possibility that COVID would kill me painfully. Also, ignore people who write entire phrases in capital letters.

Gallup poll finds that Americans think “immigration” is the top problem facing them right now, and I guess it’s good that it’s not inflation, but note well that Gallup didn’t offer extremism as one of the choices, and behold! A Reuters/Ipsos poll ranks extremism at the top, above immigration. Anyway, if 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane, the results of both polls on immigration (28% and 18%, respectively) suggest that all Republicans' yammering about the border isn’t working so well, even if our “liberal” media, which doesn’t talk to regular Americans, seems to think it is. Yet fools like Rep. Suozzi (D?-NY) say crap like this: “The best politician is the politician who says what the people are thinking already. If the number one thing on people’s minds is the border crisis, you’ve got to talk about the border crisis, and you’ve got to talk about how to solve it.” Sure, people just happen to be thinking about the “border crisis,” and Republican hysteria over it, and credulous “liberal” media coverage of it, have nothing to do with it.

Ho hum, Rep. Maria Salazar (E-FL) takes credit for children’s hospital funding in a bill she voted against. I doubt her explanation – she "made sure" the goodies got in the bill, but she voted against it because it was “fiscally irresponsible” – will resonate very broadly with the electorate in her toss-up district, and her real calculation (I got the funding and I also got the attention for voting against it! I’m such a player!) will only appeal to the cynical, who are not as numerous as our “liberal” media want us to think — I mean, cynicism requires deep commitment, and most of us are just trying to get through the day with a little bit of dignity. I’d run an ad depicting a voter falling asleep as someone describes Ms. Salazar's labyrinthine scheme, and then add a voice-over saying can you believe how politicians are these days?

Finally, “Mob Boss” Mitch McConnell (E-KY) will step down as Republican Senate leader at the end of 2024, and will leave the Senate when his term is up in 2026. I want to say don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya, but that doesn't take his evil seriously enough – all he ever did as Senate Republican leader was kill good ideas dead, and in so doing hurt good Americans, all so Republicans could have more power to do even more harm to good Americans; I doubt St. Peter smiles upon any of these works at the Pearly Gates. And while I hesitate to quarrel with folks when they say the nearness of death informs their decisions, I know why he’s really retiring: because January 6 showed him that the world had left him behind. Republicans are all about naked brutality from now on; they have no use for Mitch McConnell’s brand of evil anymore.

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.

Around the table: corporate sickness, immorality, and decadence, part 492.

Wondering how a Boeing plane’s window could blow out in mid-air seven minutes into a flight? The Lever tells us how. Long story short: Boeing gave so much money to Congress that Congressfolk let them do whatever they wanted. Better they spent that money building a plane with windows that didn’t fly off in mid-air! Long story somewhat longer comes via Matt Stoller, who reminds us of many important details, not least of which is that Boeing is already essentially a government-backed corporation, meaning that folks who’d cry SOSHULIZM!!!! if we nationalized Boeing and then broke it up (as Mr. Stoller recommends) are hypocrites, not that they really care about anything but brandishing scare words so we do the bidding of their corporate paymasters.

Sara Van Horn at In These Times writes about an “Emerging Green Technology” in New York state that “Could Decarbonize Buildings and Provide Good Union Jobs.” Basically it’s a “networked” geothermal system, which allows one to dig one hundred-foot hole to serve several buildings, and it relies on a steady source of ground heat. But of course you know what right-wingers will say: socialism ethanol dead batteries wind turbine syndrome electric car graveyards you can’t use solar in wintertime stupid.

Speaking of electric cars, I bet right-wingers are dancing a jig over Hertz’s decision to dump 20,000 electric cars from its fleet, but as usual they need to take their chill pills. In a few years we’ll have more charging stations all across America, and the parts for these cars won’t be as hard to come by and thus the repair costs will come down. Anyway, I think Hertz is right to dump Tesla cars, since as we’ve lately learned, Tesla, like George W. Bush, doesn’t know what it’s doing and is arrogant about it.

Ho hum, right-wing state legislator from Michigan announces that “(h)onestly, I work for God and not for man. And so at the end of the day, I answer to one person, and that’s Jesus Christ.” Hey, Mr. Schriver: you work for your constituents. And he should count yourself lucky that he represents a gerrymandered district where the Republican typically gets about two-thirds of the votes, but then again he’d probably call himself blessed instead. In which case I’d say I’m glad someone’s blessed by his service!

What’s the funniest thing about Chris Rufo, the “architect” of right-wing drama over critical race theory, misrepresenting his “degree from Harvard” at the same time he was nitpicking Claudia Gay’s research? That Harvard apparently created the Harvard Extension School (from which he received a Master’s degree, and even I know people who have the real thing!) to give more people access to Harvard – meaning that Mr. Rufo has benefited from affirmative action at least as much as anyone he criticizes. Remember: good people have a sense of shame, but evil people don’t.

Finally, here’s some good news: our FDA has approved a Florida program aiming to important cheaper Canadian drugs for certain Floridians with certain medical conditions. It’s a good start, and if it lets Ron DeSantis whine about how slow the wheels of our FDA turn – or oppose a Big Pharma PR machine no one likes – well, I guess I’ll put up with it. Of course, if he did the latter with any consistency, he wouldn’t be wondering what to do about his disastrous showing in yesterday’s Iowa caucus.

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 immigration, clean water, and social media.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate Gov. Abbott’s anti-immigrant dramas, tell our EPA to get rid of all lead pipes in America, and tell social media corporations to better protect their users from political campaign lies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for human rights abuses. Like what, you ask? Like busing asylum-seekers to liberal cities, which may be juicy drama to right-wingers but is cruel to folks fleeing oppression in other lands; why, he even bussed asylum-seekers to Los Angeles as a tropical storm approached. Oh, and he also put razor wire in the Rio Grande and then literally pushed asylum-seekers back into the river. Anyone who uses people as pawns to prove a “point” is evil, especially like this. So let’s do something about it.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to switch out all the lead pipes in America. Because lead pipes leach lead into our drinking water and cause brain damage in our children! Most reasonable people would agree with that; some less reasonable people would try to convince you that we should leave it to the “free” market, which ha ha ha what a crock. But after Donald Trump told Iowa ralliers that we have to “get over” school shootings, how long before some other prick says we have to “get over” pollution? Hey, if I thought of it, I know they have.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell big social media corporations to better protect their users from election lies, while Eko helps you helps you tell Meta, specifically, to stop allowing ads claiming that elections in the U.S., Brazil, and Italy were “stolen.” Literally none of this should be controversial! It’s only “controversial” to folks who want to lie to you because otherwise you won’t vote for knuckle-draggers! And for “stolen” election lies, I have literally zero patience. Some folks whine like diaper-loaded brats whenever they don’t get their way; right-wingers have had us convinced for years that we call those people “liberals.” But no: they’re right-wingers.

Around the table: the truth is obvious, part 987.

Good news, everyone: America now produces 40% of its electricity without pumping out more carbon emissions. I’m old enough to remember when Alaska paced the nation in renewable energy with a mere 25%, that figure goosed up by the 80 zillion miles of coastline Alaska could use to develop hydropower. If right-wingers want to call our decreased dependence on coal a “war on coal,” they might want to address why no one calls the antibiotic era a “war on bacteria,” but they’ll probably just settle for posting alleged pictures of electric car graveyards, when electric cars are no more the be-all-end-all of renewable energy than ethanol production ever was.

Ho hum, despite right-wingers’ incessant attempts to claim that the January 6 rioters were “antifa,” everyone they accuse of being antifa turns out to be just another garden-variety Trumphole. Because they all keep saying they’re Trumpholes on social media! Of course right-wingers never cared about proving their point, but only asserting it enough times that tired people will just accept it. And they certainly don’t care about their point being disproven, because they’ll just ignore it and try to enrage people about something else.

the Wisconsin state Supreme Court has found state legislative maps unconstitutional, and will redraw districts themselves if the state legislature won’t. If you’ve noticed Democrats getting more total votes statewide in state legislative races yet still winning only one-third of the seats, you have already anticipated this outcome. And if you’re still hearing right-wingers whine about the court’s “partisanship,” then you know they have no shame. (As an aside, I wince whenever someone calls a state a “purple” state, because bruises are purple, too.)

Surprise, surprise, very, very few British citizens now think Brexit has really benefited their nation, and while I was never particularly against Brexit regardless of how many assholes also supported it, I also thought Greece needed to leave the EU way, way more than England did. Why, the EU let England keep their own currency! Anyway, anyone who believed the $350-million-more-for-health-care per week lie was a fool, though I’m sure most of the folks who mouthed it didn’t really believe it. But though I’m sure Brexit delivered victory to the Tories in 2019, I still think inflation will mean more to British voters than Brexit does now. If only today’s Labour party wasn’t somehow even worse than Tony Blair’s.

Bruce Schneier is about the only person I’d ever listen to about the possible benefits of Artificial Intelligence (or AI), and though I’m sure he’s absolutely right that AI can, in fact, streamline a lot of processes for the better, there’s a reason we think inside a lot of boxes concerning AI: because we understand that Our Glorious Elites will never give up power without a fight, and they’ll leverage AI only to keep that power, which means, at this stage of what folks optimistically call Late Capitalism, preserving their nearly-unlimited power to skim money off all our doings while sitting on their asses. And then they’ll just tell us to work harder if we don’t want to spend all our money on rent.

Trumpholes are threatening the lives of the Colorado state Supreme Court justices who struck him from that state’s primary ballot because of course they are. The best people support Donald Trump! And they include the kind of person who’d threaten someone’s life in an online forum composed only of dittoheads but who would never have the guts to kill someone in real life. I just can’t wait until these fools whine that their threats are somehow “free speech,” when our First Amendment doesn’t protect terroristic threats.

Finally, you weren’t wondering what Joe Lieberman was up to, but I feel compelled to note that he’s now stumping for third parties, and he sounds as stupid as ever. It’s easy to say “I’ve never seen this much anger at the two major parties” when you a) are perfectly happy to pretend righteous anger against Republicans and masturbatory rage against Democrats are the exact same thing and b) never, ever look for anything else that might be happening around you. And can we not call him a “maverick” in headlines, please? He spent a quarter-century in the Senate sucking up to corporate power; “mavericks” don’t do that.

Around the table: and it's *bad* drama, part 989.

Biden Administration asserts that it does, in fact, have the lawful authority to seize patents for drugs developed at least partially with taxpayer money, if big pharma corporations are charging too much for said drugs. Of course asserting authority isn’t the same as using that authority, but this is a good first step. Now watch as the big pharma corporations threaten to sue the Biden Administration into oblivion, as if anyone’s rooting for them to keep demanding so much money for these drugs that folks can’t get healthy anymore. Watch, also, as right-wingers whine about how Mr. Biden is “abusing his power,” though they seem to prefer a President who’s already vowed to abuse his power if elected in 2024.

Surprise, surprise, CNN poll finds about half of Republican voters support Biden Administration policies aiming to halve carbon emissions by 2030, though given that pollution is actually quite unpopular, that number really ought to be much higher. Naturally, fewer than half of Americans approve of Mr. Biden’s handling of environmental issues, but even there you see good news – they may not approve because nearly three out of five Americans think the Administration isn’t doing enough, regardless of whether they approve of the things the Administration is doing. Also too, broad questions aren’t particularly useful. Remember when Mr. Obama’s approvals were low in 2012? How’d that work out for Mitt Romney?.

Texas Supreme Court blocks woman from getting an abortion at state Attorney General’s request, though her child would almost certainly be born dead and the birth would probably injure her badly enough that she wouldn’t be able to have children again. Next time someone tells you their health insurance shouldn’t have to pay for someone else’s abortion because of their “conscience,” ask them about this one, or about any ectopic pregnancies, or any other thing you can think of, and maybe also ask them if their conscience should get between an American and their doctor. Also too, Texas’s draconian anti-abortion law does allow women to get abortions if their lives are in danger or to “prevent substantial impairment of a major bodily function,” which begs the question: does Texas’s government really think childbirth isn’t a “major bodily function”?

Hoo boy Republicans think that pretending to be not such woman-haters about abortion will actually trick significant numbers of people into voting for them, but people won’t forget Republicans spending half a century making themselves into the woman-hating party just because individual Republicans claim “but I’m different.” And the masturbatory-rage crowd won’t be thrilled with their standard-bearers trying to nuance their positions, either. Republicans have to hope Democrats won’t hit them too hard on their “evolving” positions, and though they used to be able to count on Democrats to hit back soft or not at all, recent electoral returns suggest that day is done, particularly where abortion is concerned.

Finally, with Kevin McCarthy announcing his departure from our House of Representatives at the end of this year, Rachel Hadas at The Conversation looks over some classical dramas like Antigone, Ajax, and Julius Caesar and finds Mr. McCarthy a “slight unmeritable man” (in Mr. Shakespeare’s words) who was “not a hero.” “McCarthy does not qualify as a hero,” she writes. “To be humiliated, to fall, you have to have attained some height to begin with.” I keep saying that all Republicans do these days is drama and it’s never even good drama, and the “fall” of Kevin McCarthy seems to exemplify that trend.

Penny rants for November 29, 2023.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Social Security, saving our Postal Service, workers' rights, and school lunch debt.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, let our Postal Service offer more services, pass the PRO Act, and pass the School Lunch Debt Cancellation 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.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act. Currently, folks who get SSI benefits, who most assuredly do not get rich from their maximum monthly payments of $914 per month, can’t have more than $2,000 in savings (and just $3,000 for couples) or they’ll lose their benefits. Presumably, I don’t have to tell you how quickly you can go through $914, or how easily you can lose $2,000 (or $3,000) to the slightest mishap. The SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act would at least raise those limits to $10,000 per person (and $20,000 per couple, thus eliminating the “couple penalty”) and would also exclude retirement benefits from calculating those limits. Let right-wingers whine about fraud or “people getting free stuff.” Standing up to cruelty is a basic skill of civilized people.

Save the Post Office helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would permit our Postal Service to offer more services. The Postal Service Reform Act allows our Postal Service to offer limited fishing hunting licensing services, but they could do so much more, particularly for otherwise underserved rural communities – they could offer basic banking services, obviously, but they could also offer vehicle charging, parking lot wi-fi, grocery delivery, and checking on seniors. Now, about that last item, you just know right-wingers would love to squeal TEH BIG BROTHURZ CHECKINGZ ONZ TEH SENYURZ!!!!! Just remember that these are the same people who willingly bought Alexas and cellphones, and thus allowed private corporations to spy on them pretty much with impunity. I’m so sick of right-wingers yelling “big gummint” whenever we might get our government to do good things.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which would outlaw most corporate union-busting and give teeth to law enforcement when it goes after such corporate interference with worker organizing. You might even say that folks who oppose the PRO Act are objectively pro-defunding the police, or objectively anti-law and order. If folks come at you with unions make workplaces worse when you tell them they should support the PRO Act, come right back at them with so you think it’s OK for corporations to force their workers to sit through anti-union propaganda when they’ve got work to do? And if they respond it’s their money ha ha ha snort, ask them how shareholders should feel about them pissing it down the drain on anti-union propaganda, which is very expensive.

Finally, RISE helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act, which would pay off the over $250 million of school lunch debt “accumulated” by good Americans. I put “accumulated” in quotation marks for many good reasons: one, our taxes should pay for school lunches, so nobody goes hungry, and two, it’s bad enough we blame adults for their poverty before we ever blame their bosses for refusing to pay them enough, but how bad is it, then, that we blame children for their parents’ poverty? I mean, you’d have to be a special kind of cruel to do that. Sadly, quite a few educators are that cruel, going so far as to publicly shame kids who don’t get caught up on the school lunch debt they shouldn’t even have to begin with. If we did more for those kids, we’d certainly give those educators a chance to be better versions of themselves.

Penny rants for October 25, 2023.

When I hear that a New Jersey state Senator, aptly named Ed Durr, said on Facebook a few years ago that “(a) woman does have a choice. Keep her legs closed!” and that state Democrats are using his words to tar other state Republicans, I am reminded that Mr. Durr spent around $300 to unseat a putative titan of the state Senate (Stephen Sweeney) in 2021 and that nobody covered all the stupid and obnoxious crap he said on social media before that until after the election. When I then hear that Republicans promise to “support women and teens facing unexpected or unwanted pregnancies” and “lift them up and help them and their families with access to adoption services, health care, financial and food assistance, counseling and treatment, and family planning” (as Idaho Gov. Brad Little has said in justifying his state’s abortion ban), I am not surprised to hear that Idaho Republicans cut funding for all that stuff almost on cue – and I’d prefer to see Democrat ads about that kind of hypocrisy, instead of the more sensational stuff that should have simply ended Mr. Durr’s campaign two years ago, but instead made him into the Democrats’ Useful Idiot almost like that was the whole idea.

When you hear that Texas Republicans are stalling gerrymandering-related lawsuits – and thus preserving their otherwise-unearned legislative majorities – by claiming all sorts of “privileges,” including lawyer-client privilege and “legislative privilege,” you may well wonder why privileges, even Constitutionally-established ones, always seem to outweigh rights in America. And when you hear that “legislative privilege” aims to protect the privacy of legislative debates, you may reasonably wonder why legislators’ “privacy” is more important than our right to know what legislators are doing, putatively on our behalf. Because they’ll be more honest with each other if we don’t know what they’re saying? Ah, they know how that sounds, right? And if someone defends Texas Republicans because “citizens won’t understand how private deliberations work and will overreact,” you only need ask why leaders don’t prevent such overreaction from happening before it starts. That’s what leaders do, after all, even in a world where our “liberal” media know nothing about anything and sensationalize everything. Sadly, today’s leaders work harder at excusing their failure to lead than at, you know, leading.

The good people at Popular Information offer another reminder that hysterical media reports about “crime waves” and “America in chaos” stand in conflict with the facts. Property crime may be up this year, but violent crime and murders are down, and both property crime and violent crime are half (or less!) of what they were in 1991, even though whining about it from our political class seems to have doubled over that time. Meanwhile, wage theft (which politicians never talk about for some reason!) outpaces property crime, and don’t even get me started on polluters and banksters. Seriously, I’m beyond fed up with tough-on-crime posturing. Politicians swing their balls about crime because they have literally nothing else to offer voters, and the only consolation is that it doesn’t work as well as it used to, or else Pennsylvania wouldn’t have been a wave year for Democrats in 2022. Hate to pile on, but when Vivek Ramaswamy says we need to institutionalize more people – which, I hate to say, we probably do – just remember that if he’s elected President, there’s no way in hell he’d ever actually do it, because how can you keep people in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage if you actually help make their lives better? Whenever you think of tough-on-crime politicians, think of the hate monster from “Day of the Dove.” Then they’ll make perfect sense.

Around the table: don't let evil get you down, part 875.

Here’s an incredible story: the mainstream Israeli media is raking Binyamin Netanyahu over the coals for failing to anticipate the biggest terrorist attack on Israel Hamas had ever managed, and I say good for them, because, really, you shouldn’t get to say only I can protect you and then utterly fail to do that. Imagine if American media outlets had castigated George W. Bush for failing to anticipate 9.11 in advance; even 22 years later they’re too scared to do that! And now they’re also afraid to do that to Mr. Netanyahu, and he’s not even an American politician.

In a related note, Maariv poll shows Israeli public support for the Netanyahu axis absolutely cratering, and though voters’ apparent preference for the Benny Gantz axis ain’t much better, this finding is the precise opposite of what most of us who lived under otherwise improbable sky-high George W. Bush approval ratings would expect, and which only reinforces my conviction that Donald Trump threw Mr. Netanyahu under the bus the other day because he knows as well as I do that Mr. Netanyahu’s done. But it also reinforces my general optimism about the human race – genocide, it turns out, is not popular.

When I hear that our IRS has audited Microsoft to the tune of almost $30 billion, I feel compelled to say that this is why we passed the Inflation Reduction Act, for though this particular audit is a decade in the making, it began before Republicans in Congress started slashing our IRS’s budget due to bogus charges of bias. When you see how Microsoft did it – channeling profits through a Mexico warehouse it owned that merely burned software onto CDs – you probably won’t even be impressed with their chutzpah. Imagine being the guy who defends that sort of thing!

When confronted with the horror of the right wing’s “Project 2025” program – which would (if Mr. Trump wins the Presidency in 2024) replace virtually everyone in the Executive branch with Trumpholes so he doesn’t have to face any accountability for what he’s done anymore – I realize that one way to put their program is that they would defund the police. I mean the police who go after corrupt politicians, but I wouldn’t even put that descriptor in an ad; I’d just say defund the police over and over again, because these haters don’t deserve the gift of nuance.

Did late night “sensation” Greg Gutfeld really say we shouldn’t have elections anymore because the fact that January 6 protestors got longer sentences than Philadelphia looters “proves” that “elections don’t work”? Why, yes, he did. Pssst: they got longer sentences because trying to nullify the will of the American people with violence is actually a worse crime than looting. So let me guess how he deals with the backlash: I was just joking. HA HA HA NO MORE VOTING HA HA HA! Seriously, why can’t right-wingers STFU about the Philly looters? They sound like people who don’t have a leg to stand on. Worse, they sound like people who know they don't have a leg to stand on, and don't have the guts to admit it.

Finally, Amanda Marcotte reviews the trouble Republicans are having finding a new Speaker of the House after deposing the last one for whatever reason. I heartily approve of the layups she takes here – “So much for fascist order and discipline,” “Calling this a ‘clown show’...is unfair to the skill and training of actual clowns,” “Aren't far-right movements supposed to make the trains run on time?” – but hang on, also, for more trenchant observations like “authoritarian movements valorize assholes, mistaking cruelty for strength and showboating for passion.” By the end we will be reminded that the only thing fascists excel at is murder.

Action: concerning financial regulation, tax policy, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep our CFPB as independent as possible, reject any extension of the Trump tax “cuts,” and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would subject our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to the annual appropriations progress. Congress has long found this method of funding perfectly acceptable for other agencies, so why not now, with our CFPB? Probably because our CFPB has done a lot of good work for us. You’d think that’d mean something to our House Reps, given that they’re supposed to represent us (that’s why we call them “representatives”), but apparently the whining of big donors means more, hence why right-wingers want to defund our CFPB, which is an awful lot like defunding the police, since our CFPB catches financial predators. I’d hate for America to be a land where all you have to do to get what you want is have a lot of money and whine a lot.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to extend the notorious Trump tax “cuts.” I put “cuts” in quotation marks because most Americans didn’t get nearly as much benefit from them as the rich and corporations did. I’d happily make tax cuts for lower brackets permanent, but I would never be a hostage to letting rich folks pay hundreds of thousands of dollars less every year and corporations paying millions of dollars less every year. One percentage point is a lot more money at higher incomes, after all. Politicians pretend not to get that, but we do.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Big corporation (foreign or not, I really don’t care) wants to mine for copper on Native American sacred land that also happens to be public land? Why, no, thank you. And I’m not particularly anti-copper – the health care industry found out during the pandemic that getting rid of all those copper tables years ago was a big mistake – but I am anti-pollution and pro-clean water and pro-clean air and pro-respecting actual religious freedoms. I guess, for some people, religious freedom only counts if you’re white – or if you’re Black or Brown but also a Republican. That’s not the America we want to pass on to our children and our children’s children.

Action: concerning voting rights and government shutdowns.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and stop all the government shutdown drama. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

Around the table: the trials and tribulations of evil, part 989.

I hear that several airline corporations are finding fake parts in their planes, but Jesus Mary and Joseph it’s not a “supplier scandal,” regardless of how badly any particular supplier acts, but an executive pay scandal. I mean, why aren’t airline corporations making their own damn parts? Because that would require them to employ people who do that, and everyone knows slashing jobs is the way to goose up stock prices. Fly the friendly skies!

Ho hum, producer of putatively anti-child trafficking film gets nailed for fondling an underage girl’s breasts. He can say he was going undercover to expose evil and playing a part all he wants, but if he does that, he can’t also say anyway, I thought she was 18! That’s what they all say when they get caught, and saying so means he wasn't confident in your excuses, for some reason. Because they’re lies. That's the reason.

University of Toledo scientists develop method for keeping snow off solar panels, so now would be a good time to mention that when you hear that snow causes a 5 to 15% power loss, keep in mind that’s not a reason to abandon all renewable energy like right-wingers would have you do, but it is a reason to work to make solar panels more effective. We don’t let the perfect murder the good, as right-wingers would have us do, but we still strive for the best.

Judge orders loanshark freed by Donald Trump to repay millions to all the small businesses he bilked. Please don’t let Donald Trump’s follies sour you on the concept of mercy, since that’s almost certainly what he’s trying to do, by being so bad at doling out mercy. I am a little confused as to how going after financial predators could be “partisan.” “Because Letitia James’s doing it” is not a reason.

If I were more (or less) spiritually-advanced I might laugh at the news that several of Rudy Giuliani’s former lawyers are suing him for $14 million in unpaid legal bills, given that Donald Trump appears to have stiffed Mr. Giuliani for similar reasons. As they say, shit rolls downhill. But maybe these clowns can write them off as pro bono hours?

When I hear that Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) might be looking for a gig as a punditoid on CNN, I feel compelled to say that he’s a better Congressman than I ever thought he’d be after his awful Tea-Party-by-the-numbers 2010 Senate campaign, but I also feel compelled to say that all the things he’s been good on (tech monopolies, the Biden impeachment) haven’t yielded actual results. Why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea, again. I’d be happy to be wrong! But I’m probably not wrong.

Finally, when I hear that now-former Fox News Chair Rupert Murdoch hired Tucker Carlson because he thought he was a moderate who’d balance out Sean Hannity’s rabid Trumpism, all I can say is: pimp, stop lying. Rupert Murdoch knew perfectly well what he was doing, which was continuing to make money off keeping Americans in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage. After all, it beats working for a living!

Penny rants for September 19, 2023: special "right-wingers, stop whining!" edition.

In explaining the trouble Joe Biden's having convincing regular Americans that his programs are working for them, Matt Stoller also provides the only analysis I’ve yet read that makes me think Joe Biden might not get re-elected in 2024. Key finding: our government hasn’t counted inflation right for decades, because it doesn’t count hikes in interest rates as inflation even though common sense would tell us that it most assuredly is, plus folks don’t feel inflation’s fall from 9 to 3.7% if they’re writing monthly checks for cars and houses they bought when inflation was 9%, or if today's higher interest rates are ballooning their payments! Somewhat less key finding: Joe Biden may be the most anti-monopoly President since FDR, but the judges he’s appointing, well, aren’t, and they’re kinda arrogant about it – though maybe not as arrogant as antitrust lawyers who, I feel compelled to point out again, commit the heinous sin of asserting that the way things have been during their careers is the way they’ve always been.

Ho hum, Whole Foods goes to court to prove they can prevent workers from wearing Black Lives Matter masks – but not because, you know, our First Amendment protects folks from our government and not necessarily from their employer and because we’ve always assumed corporations can dictate worker uniforms more or less absolutely, but because our Supreme Court provides a “clear roadmap” to let Whole Foods do what it likes. I guess they just want to cement our Supreme Court’s insistence that you can actually discriminate on the basis of a “sincerely-held” “religious” “belief,” which isn’t very libertarian of them. But it sure would be a shame if the facts of the case shined even more light on the non-existent complaint that enabled the 303 Creative LLC ruling. It’d be an even bigger shame if Whole Foods, in attempting to argue the merits of their case, accidentally proved the original ruling was unconstitutional!

Finally, this Fatherly article from late 2022 provides awfully good advice on how to deal with a child’s tantrums -- but not just a child’s tantrums, good peoples! “If a child wants attention, the solution is — as long as it's safe — to literally give them no attention, not even negative attention,” “(i)f a child is demanding a tangible, then the best solution is not to give them what they want,” “(t)he appropriate response to an escape-from-demand tantrum where the child doesn't want to put on their pajamas is to force them to do it with you,” hand-over-hand if necessary – notice any parallels to our current political situation? Because these all sound like tactics we should deploy against Republicans just about all the time! Doesn’t matter if they got elected and thus “deserve respect.” Doesn’t matter if they “have power.” Doesn’t matter if any of their constituents threaten their life, or yours, or mine! If we treat Republicans like tantrum-addled kids even one time, America will be a different country.

Around the table: haters gonna hate, part 822.

Scientists give $7,500 to homeless folks, and find that they don’t blow it on alcohol, drugs, or other “temptation goods,” but do a lot more long-term planning, and not only hold onto jobs and housing better, but actually cost the taxpayer less. Caveats: the study didn’t hand money out to folks with substance abuse or mental health issues or to folks who’ve been homeless more than two years. Still, it suggests that a lot of notions we cling to – that folks just blow the money you hand out to them, that homeless folks can’t plan, that dealing with homelessness like it’s a constant emergency saves us money -- are really dumb. I presume I'll be making this point again, though, since I've made it before.

In a peripherally-related note, let us remember, as we contemplate the child poverty rate more than doubling in the year after the Child Tax Credit expansion expired, that this wasn’t just Joe Manchin’s doing, even though his utterance that those people are just using those $250 and $300 checks every month per child to buy drugs will justifiably live in infamy. No, we must remember, also, that 50 Republican Senators didn't lift a finger to prevent it from happening. Our “liberal” media always forgets the cruelty of Republicans, but we don’t.

These are the days we confront a headline like “School District Asks to Stop Being ‘Robbed’” and we leap to ask how exactly was this school district robbed this time. It’s the Riverhead Central School District in Long Island, NY, and the local Industrial Development Agency – which some center-right state legislature long ago gave the right to divert property tax money away from schools, how democratic of them! – has “robbed” the district of some $15 million over the last decade. On behalf of rich developers, I should add. So, you know, corporate welfare.

In a peripherally-related note, right-wingers in Florida get a book called Christian, the Hugging Lion banned because of the two male characters in it. First right-wingers said gay relationships were always entirely about sex even when the gay couple in question didn’t get sexual in front of anyone, and now they think any same-sex relationship, even a friendship, must be sexual. It’s like you can’t win with them! So don’t play their stupid games. Book banners are always losers! Even if they’re also the neighbors who lent you their leaf blower last year!

No a Republican House Rep is not “calling out” Sen. Tuberville for his several hundred holds on military promotions. I mean, if “I really wish he would reconsider this” is “calling out,” then the phrase “calling out” is virtually meaningless. But then I never liked that phrase anyway, so maybe Rep. McCaul is actually doing us a favor by hastening its journey to the dungheap of history! That’s a small favor, to be sure, and slamming Tommy Tuberville for being a bastard/moron would be a much bigger one.

Finally, Republican Presidential nominee-in-waiting Vivek Ramaswamy wants to “diversify” colleges by adding a physical fitness component to SAT tests, saying “it’s a fact” that people who do well on math/science tests can hardly run a mile, when it is actually not a fact. I guess he was trying to say Black and Brown people can all run faster without actually coming out and saying it! But remember: if someone says “it’s a fact,” they’ve already given you good reason to believe it’s not a fact. Facts speak for themselves, but lies all too frequently announce themselves as “facts.”

Action: concerning voting rights, government funding, and whistleblower protections.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restore voting rights to ex-felons, pass a clean funding bill, and expand whistleblower protections for federal workers. 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.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Democracy Restoration Act, which would restore the right to vote in federal elections to released prisoners. Because they never should have lost their right to vote in the first place! Because continuing to punish someone for a crime for which they’ve already served their sentence is cruel! And, not incidentally, because folks who try to deny voting rights to ex-felons mean to deny rights to Black and Brown folks, not because “they commit all the crime,” but because our justice system tends to target them. So, like, enough already.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk you expect them to pass a clean government funding bill, with no poison pills and no manufactured hostage crises. And no means no! Just because politicians want to do something doesn’t mean anyone else wants to do it! Rep. Greene (E-GA) says she won’t vote for any spending bill if our House doesn’t vote on impeaching President Biden over a whole lot of nothing, and we have to stop coddling people who do that. No means no! And no whining means no whining!

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Expanding Whistleblower Protections for Contractors Act, which would, as its title suggests, strengthen protections for whistleblowers and expand those protections to include federal contractors as well as federal employees. Because contractors can dime out some serious corruption, too! And they don’t do it for the money, because no amount of money can make up for lost jobs, livelihoods, families, or friends, so don’t believe big corporate lobbyists who tell you they do.

Around the table: judges pimp-slap Alabama again!

11th Circuit three-judge panel again rejects Alabama’s redrawn Congressional maps. Alabama state lawyers actually argued before the judges that they don’t have to follow their ruling (which our Supreme Court famously confirmed earlier this year), and if there’s anything a judge hates hearing, it’s that their rulings mean nothing. Hence a cartographer and a special master will redraw Alabama districts this time.

When I hear that big insurance corporations don’t want to cover damages from natural disasters anymore, I can only say we are not a sane and moral society if we allow this evil to happen. Ultimately our government will have to wind up covering such damages, at which point right-wingers will squeal SOSHULIZM!!!!! and then have a circle-jerk lasting several hours. It would have been nice if the Washington Post had reported profit information for the big insurance corporations its article mentioned.

Please remember that “Iran’s Street Art Shows Defiance, Resistance, and Resilience” even if it takes another 50 years for them to get rid of the mullahs. Too many Americans still think the Middle East has no engineers or doctors or poets, but only has angry people who kill each other, and some of the folks who think that are friends or family of yours.

We can make too much of Gov. DeSantis’s apparent refusal to meet with President Biden following Hurricane Idalia – how much do they have to talk about, really? – but the snub sure doesn’t help Mr. DeSantis, who looks like the diaper-loaded brat he usually is anyway and nobody’s going to remember that he whined about all the security arrangements Florida didn’t have any trouble making after the last hurricane. Maybe Joe Biden isn’t as dumb as right-wingers want you to think!

Finally, when I hear that Democratic voters “can’t get enough of” Chris Christie’s “new Trump-bashing persona,” all I can say is OMG what horseshit. And then when I read about all the “liberal” media personalities who are going along with it, I’m even more sure I’m right. Note well that Democratic voters don’t vote in very many Republican primaries, and Republican voters either want Trump or someone who gives them everything Trump gives them without the baggage.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning monopolies, death panels, and robocalls.

Long story short: tell our DOJ and FTC to make corporations account for their aims when they propose mergers, tell our HHS Department to investigate death panel claims against HCA Healthcare, and tell our FCC to crack down on robocalls and robotexts (and tell our Senate to confirm a full slate of FCC Commissioners). Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Our Department of Justice (or DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) have proposed making big corporations account for their actions more precisely when they propose to buy another corporation. Naturally the big corporatists are whining about how much paperwork they already have to do, which may be enough to tell you that you should support the proposed changes. But as Matt Stoller explains further: big corporations don’t even have to answer questions like why they’re merging or who’s on their board of directors or who their competitors are or how much market share they’re proposing to gobble up, even though the answers to most of these questions would reveal that they’re trying eat their competitors alive and make themselves richer at civilization’s expense. We should at least make them commit such answers to paper; you can read the new proposal here, and you can leave a public comment about it here. Don’t believe the hype that these are “radical” changes, because only whiners would tell you that. Certainly don’t believe anyone who says “but we’ve always done things the way I’d prefer we keep doing them,” because anyone who says that commits the unpardonable sin of mistaking their life experiences for the entirety of human history. And, since corporate lawyers aren’t stupid, I’d say they’re committing that sin on purpose, which makes it twice as bad. Don’t let sin rule America, good peoples!

Care2 helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to investigate allegations that HCA Healthcare has used, guess what, an algorithm to push hospice care on patients who actually stand a decent chance of recovering. Because those patients won’t make them enough money, basically! Right-wingers, that’s what a “death panel” actually looks like! And it’s far, far more likely to come from some private corporation than from our government! Note well that Wall Street banksters love HCA stock, which makes HCA suspicious pretty much automatically, and also that HCA once had to pay a $1.7 billion fine for defrauding Medicaid and Medicare (among other federal health care programs). As if to prove our decadence as a civilization, HCA’s CEO back then is now Florida’s junior Senator, Rick Scott. Let's fight the real evil, gang!

Finally, U.S. PIRG helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to crack down on illegal robocalls/robotexts. I’ve gotten no less than half a dozen of these irritants daily this past week, so I know they’re not doing enough, and so do you, I bet. Aren’t I on a damn do-not-call list? Why, yes, I am! But I guess these crooks just count on doing so much crime that law enforcement can’t catch them all. What a thing to bring to the Pearly Gates when you die! It’d help, of course if our Senate were to confirm a full slate of FCC Commissioners, which Free Press helps you do.

Action: concerning antibiotic abuse, printer ink, and climate change.

Long story short: tell WalMart to get antibiotic abuse out of its meats, tell our FTC to ensure we can get printer ink a lot more cheaply, and tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous carbon emissions rules possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

USPIRG helps you tell WalMart to get antibiotic abuse out of its meat supply chain. Why WalMart? Because it sells about half the groceries in America, that’s why! And getting it to root out the antibiotic abuse from the meat it sells would go a long way toward ending antibiotic abuse in America. Recall that seven out of every 10 antibiotics go, no, not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, partly to fatten them up and partly to help them endure their squalid living conditions, and if we abuse antibiotics like that, we might as well put a welcome mat out for the next generation of superbugs. So how about we make antibiotics effective again?

PennPIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break the big computer corporations’ iron grip on printer ink. You’d save big bucks using generic printer cartridges rather than the proprietary ones computer corporations bully you into buying, and while their scam certainly operates on a smaller scale than health insurance or cable TV, it’s the same awful principle. Our FTC has done good work, which is why Republicans call FTC Chair Lina Khan a “socialist,” but we should still treat all government agencies as though they’ll only act if we tell them to – because if they don’t, they’ll find (as they did during the Trump years) that it’s actually against the law to simply ignore public comments.

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon emissions rules possible. Our EPA has finally proposed limiting carbon emissions from existing plants as well as new ones, and that is, as a famous philosopher would say, a BFD. But of course the big fossil fuel corporations doing the polluting will get a lot of oxygen, so to speak, for their rubbish arguments. Waaaah it’ll kill jobs! Waaaah it’ll drive prices up! Actually these rules create jobs for folks who help implement them, and raising prices is to a large degree up to the corporation selling the service, but you know, when you can’t win arguments, just cry a river. Hey, right-wingers do it all the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning medical debt, price-gouging, and Senatorial whining.

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to fight medical debt and water corporation price-gouging, and tell your Senators to stop letting holds keep our government from doing their work. 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: HB 78, the Medical Debt Relief Act would help good Pennsylvanians get out from under their medical debt, by establishing a Medical Debt Relief Program that would buy up and discharge said debt – which is what organizations like RIP Medical Debt – and, before you ask, would expressly prohibit the Pennsylvania state government from collecting on that debt in Sec. 3 (c) (3) (vi). Imagine that, government doing something that actually improves our lives! The Medical Debt Relief Act merits a phone call to your PA House Reps; the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you find your PA Rep, as does the OpenStates tool in the upper right-hand corner of this page.

Staying with Pennsylvania politics for a moment, Food and Water Watch helps you tell your state Senators to repeal Act 12, which enables a lot of predatory water and sewer pricing in the Commonwealth. It’s like I keep going out of my way to say “Commonwealth” for a reason – and it’s almost like that reason is that our water belongs to all of us, and we shouldn’t let private corporations gouge us merely because they provide a service. Ideally our government should provide that service – privatizing water and sewer services doesn’t mean better service, but it does mean regular folks pay more for them. So let’s make sure our state Senators understand all of that.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our Senators to ensure they evaluate and confirm Justice Department nominees. Sen. Vance (E-OH) has put a hold on all Justice Department nominees because waaaaaaah, I mean because of the “weaponization” of our Justice Department against Donald Trump, and I have to say he’s not being very conservative here – I mean, a conservative would say if you don’t want to be hounded by law enforcement, don’t do so many crimes! Or do they only say that to Black folks? Anyway, we might want to call our Senators and tell them to get rid of holds entirely. That Tommy Tuberville is also making a mess of things with Defense-related holds.

Action: concerning health care, education, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to keep no-cost preventive health care, tell Ohio state legislators to reject an anti-education bill, and tell your Congressfolk to stop with the cutting of food stamps already. 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: the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you tell your PA state House Rep to pass the Health Insurance Preventive Coverage Act, which would ensure that good Pennsylvanians continue to get no-cost preventive health care. But doesn’t the Affordable Care Act already require that of everyone in America? Well, it did, but then that Texas judge, the one who’s had it in for Obamacare since forever, struck it down, in a ruling so terrible our Supreme Court should have an easy time gutting it, although you know how they are. All that's to say we must protect what we’ve won at the state level. And preventive health care helps everyone and saves money, so let’s get to it.

Ohio residents, take note: Civic Shout helps you tell your Ohio state legislators to reject the so-called Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act, which would prevent colleges from teaching anything that might give right-wingers a sad – like climate change, which the bill somehow declares a “controversial” subject. It’s “controversial” only because corporate executives want to keep polluting rather than embrace new technologies! Oh, and also because of the politicians who suck up to them. Frankly, I don’t find racism “controversial,” either – like climate change, it’s real, it’s happening, and it’s wrong, and folks who can’t handle these truths should move to a police state. In the meantime, let’s not let stupid people win.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut food stamps. But wait, you may well ask, didn’t the debt limit “deal” take care of that? We sure thought so, didn’t we? But Republicans upset about the “deal” continue to throw tantrums, such that the House couldn’t pass any legislation last week, and Congress also has to pass actual appropriations bills in a few months, so they’ve seized on “more food stamp cuts” as the way to, I don’t know, feel better about themselves? Someone who’d cut food stamps to feel better about themselves will have a tough meeting with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. We could help them avoid that fate by communicating our will that they not cut food stamps.