Thieves in the Temple.

Action: internet privacy, runaway executive pay, and "right-to-work."

You know the FCC -- which, like most other federal government agencies, now resembles a sort of evil alternate universe version of itself -- hates those privacy protections the last FCC, but you may not know that Congress would like to kill them dead, too, and some Congressfolk have begun to make noise about creating yet another "resolution of disapproval" under the Congressional Review Act that would kill them dead. Anyone else think it wasn't such a hot idea for the Obama Administration to wait until the last six months (the only timeframe within which the Congressional Review Act can operate) to issue all these regulations? Anyone else wonder if maybe that was the point? Anyway, don't be like Sen. Toomey (R-PA), who fretted all those years ago that if we enacted strong consumer privacy protections we'd "break the internet." Why can't we have both consumer privacy and a great internet? Aren't we the can-do country? So you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to lay off the FCC's internet privacy rules.

Meanwhile, the SEC, under Acting Chair Michael Piwowar, has apparently begun the process of rolling back the executive pay-ratio rule, mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act of 2010. It took the SEC five frickin' years to write the rule and now they've started a 45-day "review," with a special invitation to banksters and CEOs to report to them on how the SEC's executive pay-ratio rule burdened them. Hear that sound? That's the World's Tiniest Violin playing. Complying with the rule isn't exactly ditch-digging; CEOs just don't want to reveal that they're engaging in a massive income-redistribution-upward scheme, where they take home millions and pay their workers in dung pellets. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the SEC to leave the executive pay-ratio rule alone. Recall the Harvard Business Review report that good Americans think the average ratio of executive to unskilled factory worker is around 31:1, and would actually prefer it at a little less than 7:1. The actual ratio, of course, is 354:1. Anger at runaway CEO pay cuts across the political spectrum -- but not in Washington.

Finally, if you've missed opportunities to tell state and federal legislators that "right-to-work" laws are bad for workers and bad for America, then both CREDO and Sign for Good help you do that. Right-wingers incongruously claim that "right-to-work" -- which makes paying union dues optional if you belong to a union, thus depriving that union of some of its ability to fight on your behalf, which is kinda the whole point of being in a union -- actually liberates workers, but ain't no liberation comes with pay cuts and worse working conditions, which is what workers in "right-to-work" states more typically face. And folks who whine WHY SHOULDZ TEH ANYONEZ BE MADEZ TO PAYZ FOR TEH ANYTHINGZ!!!! know that I could, using that logic, ask for a refund for all my tax dollars that went to fight Tha Bush Mobb's Little Iraq Adventure, right? I mean, I could, but I don't -- not just because I understand that I'm not the center of the damn universe, but also because I understand that the price of living in a democracy is paying taxes, just as the "price" of a better union job is paying monthly dues.

Around the table: attempted criminalization of free speech, the fake robot revolution, and lots more Trumpslam.

Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post now counts 18 American states trying to criminalize protest in some way (including, of course, Arizona). Why? Because fear of democracy! Here's how it should work: when our government tries to hurt us, we meet in public to shame them. They become ashamed and not only stop hurting us, but start doing our will, not just the will of their biggest donors. It's not so damn much to ask.

Two Economics Policy Institute researchers reminds us that the robots are not, in fact, coming to take our jobs away. Corporations have to invest in information technology and the like in order to make that work, and that gets in the way of playing the various bankster shell games that actually make CEOs rich. And the fact that ZOMG TEH ROBOTZ!!!! is their answer every time folks say workers should make more money is a good thing -- it means they know they can't win the argument on the merits.

Factcheck.org pimp-slaps Trump Administration claim that folks from the seven banned countries conduct terrorist activity in America. Being "implicated" in terrorist activity isn't the same as being convicted of terrorist activity, of course, and "72" is just a scare number, one that loses its scare-power when you put it next to "since 9.11" (that's over 13-plus years, meaning approximately six "implicated" "terrorists" per year when it took almost two dozen to pull off 9.11) and, of course, next to the one million folks who came from those countries during those years.

In a related matter, President Trump dismisses a report from the Department of Homeland (sic) Security finding fault with his insistence that folks from the seven Muslim-majority countries pose a heightened terroristic threat. Sadly, the DHS spokeshack throws her report, and her department, under the bus. Add this to your list of points (skips intelligence briefings, purges the State department, attacks folks from countries that don't attack us, struts around like his balls swing like church bells) when Dear Leader fails to prevent a major terrorist attack on American soil.

Mr. Trump tells "bipartisan group" in D.C. that "(n)obody knew that health care can be so complicated." Well, that was a blast of pure Bush Mobb! Remember all those sentences Tha Mobb started with nobody could have predicted, almost invariably before describing something that someone not only could have predicted, but did predict? For such a big-balls guy, he sure does make a lot of excuses. If he wants health care that's a lot less complicated, of course, he could embrace a single-payer, Medicare-for-All system. What "complicates" everything, of course, is mammon-worship.

Finally, Trump Administration memo describing the danger of leaks gets leaked. And there's that how-can-we-get-candid-advice-if-people-know-what-we're-trying-to-do rubbish! Why do they do it? Because fear of democracy! Here's how it should work: when our government tries to hide stuff from us, our media should try harder to find it out. They all work for us, after all, even though they want us to think they don't. This, again, is not so damn much to ask.

Action: free speech, clean air, whistleblower protections, and endangered species.

Hoo boy: the Arizona state Senate passes SB 1142, which would, get this, allow the state to seize the assets of anyone who plans or participates in a protest that could turn violent. Asset forfeiture is an unconstitutional blot on our nation's soul already, and it shouldn't be difficult to imagine how an agent provocateur, or a group of them, could make a peaceful protest go south right quick. But if you aren't being violent at a protest, why should we allow the state punish you? SB 1142's supporters want you to think that anyone who protests Mr. Trump is a paid provocateur -- a profound insult to our patriotism, and you're free to remind them of that! But folks who whine that we've-gotta-do-something-anything also expose themselves as weaklings. And if they don't like protests, maybe they should stop giving the people the back of their hand. SB 1142 goes to the state House now; state House Speaker J.D. Mesnard's phone number is 1.602.926-4481, and Majority Leader John M. Allen's number is 1.602.926.4916. You want more phone numbers? Here they are. Give 'em hell.

H.J.Res. 36, the "resolution of disapproval" that would roll back the Obama Administration's rules curbing methane emissions on public lands, passed the House, but still awaits Senate approval. If you're scratching your head wondering why anyone would think more methane emissions on public lands would be a goodthing, well, you're not alone. Methane emissions, as you know, pack a bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions do, and "flaring" them on public lands not only pollutes those lands, but it represents energy that could be captured and used, and it represents royalties from capturing that energy and using it that the public could be earning. Since it is, you know, our land. But that's our Republican party -- objectively pro-pollution, objectively pro-wasting natural resources, objectively pro-wasting taxpayer money, as long as these things distribute more of your money upward to their big donors. So, yeah, H.J.Res. 36 warrants a phone call to your Senators today.

Meanwhile, Republicans aren't content with just unleashing more pollution -- they're also aiming to gut the Securities and Exchange Commission's whistleblower program, which has, over the last few years, recovered billions of dollars -- taxpayer dollars, I might add -- from fraud artists. If you're scratching your head wondering why anyone would want to make it harder to catch corporate criminals -- well, actually, you've already figured out that it explains itself. Any big campaign donor -- especially in an age that not only doesn't reward work but seems to hold contempt for work -- might be a corporate criminal, and we can't have any sunlight shining on that, or else some of these Congressfolk might actually lose their jobs. Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell Congress and the President that to reject any attempt to gut SEC whistleblower protections. After all, Congress may pretend it didn't happen, but we all remember that banksters crashed our economy in 2008, and though they feel no shame over that, we're not about to let it happen again.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to gut the Endangered Species Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Now that we have a bill (H.R. 717, the so-called Listing Reform Act, always they burn down your house and call it "reform"!), we can guess at the specific aims of Endangered Species Act destruction: H.R. 717 would mandate that government agencies count the financial costs of protecting endangered species, and would even let more unscrupulous government agencies (uh, like the ones we have now!) put "lost" oil and gas profits or "lost" local tax revenue ahead of any other consideration! Because that's the civilization they want -- one that makes every decision not just based on money, but based on short-term gains. That all doesn't sound very conservative, does it? I mean, wouldn't an actual conservative would insist on taking the long view? Of course, our President and our Congress aren't conservatives -- they're reactionaries. But reactionaries don't get all the say. Not in my America.

Around the table: border taxes, private prisons, "states' rights," immigration, playing defense, and hearts and minds.

Citizens for Tax Justice also thinks the "border tax" is a bad idea. Claims that ZOMG TEH BORDER TAX WOULD RAISE TEH 1.2 TRILLYUNZ DOLLARZ!!!! (over 10 years) tend to ignore the fact that the Republican proposal would actually lose $4 trillion over 10 years (largely because it repeals the corporate tax). Of course we should never tolerate when corporations pass on their taxes to consumers, but we shouldn't be dumb enough to think that wouldn't happen, either, particularly given the Republicans' utter lack of a law-and-order bent when it comes to corporate behavior.

Ho hum, Attorney General Jeff Sessions continues his hot streak by withdrawing an Obama Administration memo aiming to reduce private prison involvement in detaining undocumented immigrants. Because how can our government do the job all by itself? Private prisons do a worse job just like private everything does a worse job of fulfilling government functions, and we shouldn't leave it to Bernie Sanders to remind us that private prisons gave a lot of money to the Trump campaign, though I'm still glad he did.

Zaid Jafani at The Intercept notes the irony, as it were, that the Trump Administration wants to leave transgendered-folks-in-bathrooms policy "up to the states" but won't leave marijuana enforcement up to the states that have legalized the drug. "States' rights" is one of the most intellectually-bankrupt concepts in American history, having long been little more than a synonym for a state's "right" to own black slaves. Everyone wants the smallest possible governmental unit to have the most direct power over people's welfare, but people have rights, and "states' rights" can't be an excuse to run roughshod over those rights. Plus, pot ain't an opioid, so using opioid problems to justify cracking down on pot doesn't make sense.

Issie Lapowsky at WIRED says President Trump's immigrant deportation plan isn't just cruel, but suffers from "bad math." Long story short: your plan has a smaller chance of success the bigger its ambitions -- and deciding that deporting every undocumented immigrant is a bad way to use finite resources. Plus that Skittles analogy is really, really stupid -- "three in a handful" itself vastly overstates how many refugees commit violent crimes.

Another day, another quite correct diagnosis that playing defense isn't enough and Democrats need to start taking a few more chances if they're ever going to come back. "We must fight to either disengage the Democratic Party from its corporate masters, or to develop a viable third party," Leonard C. Goodman writes -- though the latter might be the only way to achieve the former.

Finally, Colin Beavan tells us "What It Takes to Change Hearts and Minds." Basically, we shouldn't pound numbers and facts so much, but we should "align() communication about (our) cause with the most deeply-held values and aspirations of (our) friends, relatives, neighbors, and fellow citizens." I'll admit it takes a lot of practice to discern between doing that effectively and just telling other folks what you think they want to hear. Keep in mind, though, that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano crazy and can only be contained in their damage, and that's just as true now as it was under Tha Bush Mobb. So we work on the 75% who aren't crazy. And that's why I'm an optimist.

Around the table: the Big Pharma vs. Trump phony war, and other tales.

Jim Naureckas reminds us that President Trump didn't "revoke" transgendered student protections because, actually, he can't do that. Prior court decisions have made clear that Title IX protections extend to transgendered students; all Mr. Trump did was rescind the Obama Administration's guidance on certain issues surrounding those protections, many of which, I feel compelled to note, public schools all over the country will keep anyway, because why should Trump be the Boss of Us? We're the Boss of Us.

ProPublica and Consumer Reports tells us how big pharma is getting leading academic voices to publicly support their thousand-dollar-a-day drug prices. You'll hear the familiar rhetorical hostage crises, i.e., we have to charge a lot for these drugs in order to ensure future innovation, though Big Pharma sure does spend a lot of money on advertising, lobbying, and executive salaries, all while sucking at the Big Gummint teat. But why does the article think Big Pharma will be "fighting" Mr. Trump? They've already beaten him -- he now says Medicare, though forbidden by law to negotiate better drug prices, is the "real" price-fixer.

The Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt to the EPA Administrator post before we could see all those emails he wrote to fossil fuel corporations while serving, such as he was, as Oklahoma's Attorney General, but Mike Ludwig at TruthOut tells you what they're all about. Long story short: it's not pretty -- for people who bleed money, fossil fuel executives sure do whine constantly about having to follow clean air and clean water regulations. And I'm tired of the you-either-work-with-us-or-you-work-against-us dichotomy the fossil fuel industry peddles -- as if they have no obligation whatsoever to work with us, the owners of government.

18 state Attorneys General write to Education Secretary DeVos, asking her not to ease up on for-profit colleges that bilk students out of money and lie about their chances at getting jobs after graduating. I'm tempted to say good luck with that!. But duty is duty, particularly when folks like Rep. Foxx (R-VA) say we've got to ease up on those fly-by-night schools that used to be the laughingstock of the country, schools that the Obama Administration cracked down upon only after Republicans retook the Senate.

Aarian Marshall at WIRED says the Trump Administration's delay of a Caltrain grant (so Caltrain can move from diesel to electric power) presages an all-out Trump Administration attack on public transportation. Well, why wouldn't he? We're not necessarily prepared for it, and Mr. Trump knows that, and plenty of right-wingers think public transportation is TEH COMMUNISTZ!!!! and EVERYONEZ IN AMURIKAZ SHOULDZ DRIVEZ TEH CARZ!!!!!

Finally, we learn that Democrats in difficult races may face primaries from their left, if certain grassroots groups have their way. National Democrats, of course, have no standing to take Democrat voters hostage to the notion that you have to stick with the people who can win, because we all saw how that worked out in 2016. I sure hope these grassroots groups don't go the way of their Tea Party counterparts, most of which dissolved in puddles of corruption. But worse things could happen -- like the inevitable 20-point losses Sens. Donnelly, Heidtkamp, Manchin, McCaskill, and Tester will suffer in 2018 if they're not primaried out.

Action: church and state, transgendered students, and internet privacy.

You may have heard that President Trump told attendees at the National Prayer Breakfast that he wanted to "get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment." No truth to the rumor that he also said he wanted to annihilate it, rip it to shreds, and go back in time and kill Lyndon Johnson's grandfather so that it'd never even be born. The Johnson Amendment, as you know, prevents churches and similarly tax-exempt organizations from advocating on behalf of candidates, or to donate money to those candidates' campaigns. So Mr. Trump would prefer that churches be tax-exempt without doing the duty that tax-exempt organizations must do, but that may not be the worst part -- the worst part would be the prospect of large corporations using churches as money-laundering schemes, because they can never have too many ways of obscuring the source of their money. I mean, we don't just separate church and state for the state's benefit -- we also do it for the church's benefit. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk not to gut the Johnson Amendment.

Also, as you know, the Trump Justice Department (and I put those words together at considerable risk of opening up a hole in space-time!) has revoked the Obama Administration's Title IX guidance which mandated that schools ensure that transgender students can use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity, rather than the birth certificate listed on their gender. So the ACLU helps you tell Attorney General Sessions to reinstate the guidance, and thus protect transgendered students from bullying and discrimination. The DOJ no doubt thinks adding a statement saying it really, really hates bullying and discrimination does the job, but it doesn't -- all the caring words in the world don't do as much as one caring act. Hopefully no trolls are coming along to say that transgendered folk are all child molestors, because they're transgendered. I mean, usually they're a little cleverer than that, but that's how their argument boils down. Since men still commit the vast majority of pederasty (and mostly against girls), we might do better to ban men from public restrooms. Of course, that would be a terrible idea, but that only tells you how terrible the other idea is.

Meanwhile, the FCC, now headed by Ajit Pai, plans to do whatever it can to gut your net neutrality laws, but might also move against new privacy protections put into place by the previous FCC. The FCC would, like most good Americans, prefer that internet service corporations get permission from you before they go selling and mining your personal data, but big corporations, of course, don't want to do that -- they'd rather propagate the myths that privacy protection on the internet is just too hard, or you're a greedy fool for wanting privacy on the internet, or but you'll lose our on all our great deals! The truth is that they'll lose out on that golden opportunity to make money by doing even less work that the internet provides. And I guess I should point out that I don't begrudge them the ability to make money by directing their ads at the right eyeballs more easily -- I begrudge them the "right" to demand that we participate in that, whether we want to or not. So Consumers Union helps you tell the FCC to protect internet customers' privacy.

Around the table: banksters wilt under reporting requirements boo-hoo, and other tales.

Trump Administration rescinds Obama Administration's guidance on transgender folks using the bathroom of the gender they identify with. The Times reports that Education Secretary DeVos initially resisted, and while I'd love to believe that's true, I don't -- I believe, of course, that the report of her initial opposition exists to lull us into a false sense of security about how well the Trump Machine is running, when it's running exactly the way Our Glorious Elites want it to run.

The incomparable David Dayen informs us that banksters want to reduce federal reporting requirements on suspected money-laundering -- you know, the kind of thing that helps catch drug kingpins, tax evaders, and terrorists. Banksters' apparent inability to comply with federal law on this matter might suggest that the reporting requirements are onerous, but they're not, and with banksters, of course, you have to ask how their notorious incompetence in following the law might be intentional. Read the whole thing, though, because the banksters' bad arguments just get worse and worse. And if Mr. Trump wants to be a law and order President, he should be paying attention.

Sue Sturgis at Facing South explores another way to dilute minority voting power in a region: make all the representatives "at-large." She's talking specifically about the Board of Commissioners of Jones County in North Carolina, and I guess defenders of the "at-large" nature of the five Commissioners will happily explain how Commissioners aren't "representatives" per se. But I'm equally happy to call such an explanation pedantry, since federal courts have ruled against County Commissioners on Voting Rights Act grounds before.

Issie Lapowsky at Wired writes that "The Internet Gave Us Milo" Yiannopoulos, and "The Internet Can Take Him Away." But as Ms. Lapowsky acknowledges, he wouldn't have gotten anywhere without mainstream media coverage of his internet shenanigans, and he may find he made a major mistake taking his book to a major publisher, when, you know, he could have self-published the thing and made a lot of sales. Think maybe he didn't go full-indy because he wanted to be legit? And think maybe he's regretting that now?

Wellesley College's Davis Museum removes works created by immigrants -- in effort to highlight contributions made by immigrants to American culture. I can already hear right-wingers squealing that they can't imagine any immigrant Muslims making such contributions, oblivious to the fact that folks once said that about Germans, Irish, and Italians. And a lot of the right-wingers who squeal about such matters have German, Irish, and Italian blood, too.

Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court allows convicted murderer Duane Buck to ask for a new sentence, given that one of the reasons prosecutors gave in arguing for his death sentence in 1997 was that he'd be more likely to commit crimes in the future because he was black. This one was easy enough that Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion; one day I may regard his compulsive literalism as an idiosyncrasy rather than a flaw, but he's firmly anti-racist when the evidence is obvious enough or the forces of evil sloppy enough, and I guess that's not nothing.

Action: internet freedom, discrimination, clean water, and arts and humanities funding.

The FCC is holding an open commission meeting today, so let's all call them up 1.888.CALL.FCC to tell them not to junk net neutrality regulations that let us, and not some corporation, decide where we want to go on the internet. The FCC's new Chair, Ajit Pai, has said that net neutrality's "days are numbered," and when good Americans across the political spectrum would rather have their internet the way it is than have it be like cable TV, you have to wonder why he says that like it's a good thing. Nah, just kidding: he says it like that because he only talks to other corporatists, and not to regular Americans. That's why we're calling, because we're regular Americans, and we don't want an internet so full of pop-up ads we stop using the internet. Now that I think of it, that's probably a good way to put it to the FCC: the more they try to "monetize" the internet, by letting corporations determine where we go and what we do, the less we'll use the internet, and the less money they'll all make. And we'll all be less free, of course.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee state Senate has now postponed its vote on SB 127 -- called the "License to Discriminate" bill by the Tennessee Equality Project -- three times, and has also offered to amend the bill to answer some of our objections. However, SB 127 still allows corporations and non-profit organizations to receive public finds and discriminate against good Tennesseeans merely because of those organizations' "religious beliefs" -- corporations will still be allowed to deny birth control coverage to women, and will still be able to deny spousal coverage to gay employees even though gay marriage is the law of the land now. Really, it's simple: if you take public money, you follow public rules, including the ones you fear will give you the gay cooties. The state Senate has scheduled the vote for today; I wouldn't lay money that they'll actually go through with the vote, but you should still allow the Tennessee Equality Project to helps you tell the Tennessee state legislature to reject SB 127.

In other news, Florida Power and Light (or FPL) has come up with a plan to store radioactive nuclear waste underneath the Biscayne Aquifer, which provides clean water to millions of South Floridians. Why would FPL need to store nuclear waste? Because they're planning to build two new nuclear reactors at its rather controversial Turkey Point plant, which they hope will be operational by 2030. Given that taxpayers have historically gotten less bang for their buck by subsidizing nuclear power than just about any other power source, one has to figure the chances of getting those reactors running by then is actually very small. And leaking carcinogens into the drinking water in the meantime is a terrible idea. But big corporations and their lackeys in government apparently don't agree with us, so Urban Paradise of South Florida has begun a petition on Change.org with which you may tell nearly three dozen Florida state legislators to prevent FPL from putting nuclear waste underneath the Biscayne Aquifer.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to defund the National Endowment for the Arts (or NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (or NEH), then Sign Here Now helps you do that. The only negative response I've received about this effort (on this blog's Facebook page) to stop Mr. Trump from zeroing out funding for the NEA and the NEH proceeded thusly: "fuck the NEA." Sadly, that is about the level of discourse I've come to expect from the right about this matter, and it isn't lost on me that I was talking about the NEA and the NEH and the commenter had nothing at all to say about the NEH. Back when I found right-wingers who sounded more reasonable, they used to ask me why should the government pay for art? Of course, the more pertinent question is why it shouldn't, and the answer I usually get, unfortunately, is that government shouldn't pay for anything, unless, of course, it makes money for some rich donor or other. But civilized people know better than to make everything about money.

Around the table: Charles Grassley gets an earful at a townhall, and other tales.

Julie Chinitz at the OurFuture blog tells us the Republicans' real aim in pursuing Obamacare repeal is to gut Medicaid. We shouldn't think of Medicaid as being "for other people" the way we do, since we're all a few bad days at work away from needing it. And a lot of Trump voters, as you know, rather like Medicaid, and it works pretty well, which is undoubtedly why Republicans want to sacrifice it to (as Ms. Chinitz puts it) "a redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle-income to the rich."

President Trump plans to deport anyone who crosses the Mexican border back to Mexico, regardless of where they actually come from. Doesn't he know that those brown people he hates also sometimes hate each other? I kid, of course; the man doesn't care. Plus he plans to deport anyone who's committed a crime, but he's going to include "crossing the border" as a crime, meaning when he tells you he'll be discerning on this matter, that he's lying. I guess all I can say is good luck with that.

Surprise, surprise, ProPublica and USA Today find that the Orlando (FL) school district stashes low-performing students at charter schools -- and then doesn't count them as dropouts when they drop out of those charter schools. Remember, when you read about matters like this, that the hysteria over "Our Failing Schools" was largely manufactured by the right, and that "alternative" schools are largely a way of funneling taxpayer money to some politician's cronies.

Now this is funny: an Iowa pig farmer tells Sen. Charles Grassley at a townhall that repealing the Affordable Care Act would "create one big death panel." You may recall (as Mr. Peterson clearly does!) that Mr. Grassley was the Senator pushing those death panel claims back in 2009. I presume Mr. Grassley will ignore his constituents on Obamacare, since that's the price Republicans extract from him for actually doing decent oversight at other times.

Finally, Donald Trump's getting attention for finally denouncing anti-Semitism, but his statement that "I hope they catch the people" responsible for recent bombing threats against Jewish community centers. "I hope they catch the people"? Not we will catch those responsible and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law? I guess if Dear Leader isn't emotionally-invested in something, he doesn't swing his balls about it.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, February 22, 2017: the exception to the rule is not the rule.

I wouldn't give Donald Trump too much credit for understanding and exploiting how folks tend to "take an aberration...and conflate it with the norm." Right-wingers have long been masters of taking isolated counterexamples and pretending they obliterated actual trends -- why, they built a whole tort "reform" movement on isolated, hysterical anecdotes. And it's not just right-wingers, either: media outlets have never thought a headline like "white man walks streets of black neighborhood without incident for 53 years" worth running, but be the white man who gets mugged or shot there and the media will make you immortal. Even Mr. Trump's threat to publish a list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants has lately been outdone -- the Little Green Footballs blog used to tabulate stories of Muslim-perpetrated violence during Tha Bush Mobb years, even though finding 100 incidents of violence out of a population of one billion still does not mandate that we condemn an entire religion. Our brains may be wired to receive stories better than we receive rigorous arguments supported by solid data, but that doesn't make the stories right and the arguments and the data wrong.

I have lots of issues with this New York Times article that asks "Are Liberals Helping Trump?" For one, its thesis (that when liberal animosity drives Trump supporters further into the arms of Dear Leader) rests on conversations with exactly three Trump supporters and two historians. For another, that thesis also assumes -- and, worse, excuses -- an intolerable amount of intellectual laziness on the part of conservatives: I mean, isn't it dumb to make a decision based merely of the ferocity of your opposition? For a third, I never see the Times wring their hands about liberals clinging harder to Bernie Sanders when right-wingers employ their brand of "moral Bolshevism," which they do, like, all the time. For all of that, I agree that liberals should refrain from assuming that everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a racist. Yes, you can assume someone making a white power signal at you is a racist, and yes, I agree that a vote for Mr. Trump enables racism, but most folks learn about their own racism better when (for example) you point out similar racism in other folks. And some of them even appreciate your generosity when you do.

Around the table: tax havens, climate change, moving left, right-wing whining, and an internet bully finally gets his comeuppance.

Ecuador voters appear to pass referendum forbidding its civil servants and politicians from investing in tax havens. They'd have a year to bring their money back to Ecuador, and if they didn't, they'd have to quit their jobs serving the public. If you're about to argue that politicians should have the same rights to put their money where they like as everyone else, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) meditate on the last three words of the previous sentence. The mantle of public service requires you to make decisions in the public interest, not in your own personal portfolio's interest.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt wonders whether the EPA "has the tools" to address climate change under the Clean Air Act. Of course, the Supreme Court ruled, almost 10 years ago, in an opinion authored by the late Justice Scalia, that the EPA does, in fact, have those tools. 10 years ago! Two Presidents ago! But if you feel compelled to hide your toolbox from yourself, of course you'll "wonder" where all the tools are.

At long last, someone takes to one of the big newspapers and urges Democrats to move left. The math certainly doesn't appear to support the notion that Democrats should try to win back the white voters who defected from Mr. Obama to Mr. Trump, since many, many more of them defected to Libertarian and Green candidates in the three battleground states that Mr. Trump unexpectedly flipped on Election Day. I'd still like to have had some inkling of what the author means by "moving left," though -- social issues are far from unimportant, but Democrats won't really win voters back, and for the long haul, until they move left on economic issues.

Trump Administration Press Secretary Sean Spicer laments (and "laments" is the word) that the President doesn't get more credit for all his leadership in fighting anti-Semitism. You and I will remember that Mr. Trump went well out of his way to excise the word "Jewish" from his first Presidential Holocaust statement, but forget that for now. I want to know when right-wingers will finally hear statements like "no matter how many times he talks about this that it's never good enough" as whining.

Finally, right-wing hack Milo Yiannopoulos loses his book deal with Simon and Schuster (and, later, his Breitbart job) after previous utterances resurface in which he favored pederasty in certain circumstances. So, to sum: self-hating gay man who makes career out of bullying others finally gets comeuppance after saying maybe we ought to bend our society's rules on consent -- which state that no child can consent to have sex with an adult -- because a lot of gay kids are lonely. Is it too much to ask that we never hear from, or about, this clown again?

Action: consumer protection, undeclared wars, and pipeline investment.

Congress is, as you know, pushing legislation that would cripple or neuter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Why would they want to do that? Well, they always talk about TEH CRIPPLINGZ REGULASHUNZ!!! and TEH JOB CREATURZ MUST BE TEH FREEZ TO CREATEZ TEH JOBZ!!!, but regulations against bankster malfeasance don't cripple anyone but the criminally-minded, and the "job creators" are the American people with their pocketbooks, not the corporate executives who would rather be catheterized with barbed wire than actually create a job for someone. And really, the forces aligned against the CFPB really they just want their big donors to be able to make more money more easily without actually having to fulfill their responsibilities to the American people. I wish it were more complex than that, but it really isn't. The CFPB has, per Consumers Union, returned some $12 billion to swindled consumers over the last five years, and we'd likely never have caught Wells Fargo without them, but who cares about that when there are martini lunches to be had with banksters! Congress's hard-on to destroy the CFPB merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators.

Meanwhile, H.R. 608, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act -- an actually bipartisan bill with three Democrat and five Republican co-sponsors! -- would prohibit our government from shoveling money toward al-Qaeda, ISIS, and related terror groups. If that seems like a no-brainer to you, something that maybe shouldn't even need a law covering it, consider that President Trump (no doubt as part of his "new foreign policy") has made noises about escalating U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabia's war against Houthi rebels in Yemen, a war which just so happens to have resulted in Saudi Arabian alignment with, you guessed it, al-Qaeda. I can already hear the flaming-dog-poop crowd crowing BUT TEH HOUTHIZ ATTACKEDZ TEH AMURIKAN SHIPZ!!!! Well, yes, when you join a war against them, one that our Congress did not authorize, what the hell do you expect? Support Congress's authority to declare war rather than the President's "authority" to bomb whomever he likes, and we'll lose less blood and treasure -- and in the meantime, how about less taxpayer money for terrorists? Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your House Reps to support the Stop Arming Terrorists Act.

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell Wells Fargo to divest from the Dakota Access pipeline project. (If you're a Wells Fargo customer, God bless you, use this contact tool instead.) Wells Fargo's new CEO has recently said that his "number one priority is rebuilding trust" -- you know, after Wells Fargo employees opened up new accounts for their customers without their customers' consent, so they could meet absurdly rigid sales quotas and run up fees for these unused and unwanted accounts -- and Wells Fargo has also made sympathetic noises about fighting climate change, which is de rigeur for big corporations these days. Yet Wells Fargo still funds the pipeline project that would befoul local clean water supplies, run roughshod over Native American religious rights, and exacerbate climate change, even going so far as to say they "will continue to support our customers on both sides of the issue." Well, when folks can't drink the water, maybe they'll see the folly of "supporting both sides"! Perhaps they need to be reminded that police fired rubber bullets and water cannons (among other things!) at protestors late last year; that seemed to put the scare in banks for a while. In the meantime, let's remind 'em we're watching 'em.

Around the table: Presidential tantrums and small business truths.

Ho hum, Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post finds over a dozen claims made by President Trump at his recent Florida rally to be utter crap. Mr. Trump takes credit for jobs corporations were already bringing back, he pretends refugees come here "unvetted" when their vetting actually takes years, he pretends statistical outliers in Arizona and Chicago are trends -- if Mr. Obama had done these things, the flaming-dog-poop crowd would be howling. (And note well that he misses an opportunity to praise his Vice President for an actual decline in Obamacare premiums in Indiana, where Mr. Pence was until lately Governor. Think that's an accident?)

Dean Baker at TruthOut views a Congressional plan to deny states the right to allow private-sector workers to join public pension funds as "More Republican Handouts to the Rich." Mr. Baker has had pretty incredible message discipline recently, and he's right that most Republican policy initiatives seek only to redistribute income upward to their rich cronies. Sadly, the Obama Administration Labor Department's ERISA ruling enables Republicans to look like they're protecting worker retirement security, which makes you question Democrat motives, if not Democrat common sense.

Two Huffington Post writers make a point after my own heart: that while the President "distracts the public with his angry tweets," Congressional Republicans are rolling back federal regulations with the Congressional Review Act. Funny how that works, eh? It has long seemed to me that the CRA might actually be unconstitutional -- agencies have to write regulations to fit specific legislative aims, after all, and what if Congress strikes a rule that actually does that? In the meantime, we should again question Democrat smarts/motives if they finalize so many regulations within the 60-day window within which Congress can pass a CRA resolution.

Upwards of three Seattle-area restaurants institute a "minimum wage surcharge," apparently a reaction to Seattle's new $15/hour minimum wage. Because, as we know, these are the only three restaurants in the entire area! Plus, if they're not collecting sales taxes on their little surcharges, they're also breaking state law. It's enough to make you think that accepting the people's will, which clearly supports a decent minimum wage, is much better than throwing a tantrum about it.

Finally, we learn that a veterinarian co-op can help small business vets overcome a great many obstacles. Larger, corporate veterinary chains can pay less for supplies and machinery in bulk, but co-ops can give independent vets a lot of that bargaining power, too. Co-ops can also provide educational opportunities and a sense of community (that last item helped along by social networking, which, again, suggests that social media have gotten a bad rap in the "fake news" era). I wish them the best of luck.

Action: "right to work," the Endangered Species Act, and FBI harassment of protestors.

Bad news, folks: H.R. 785, the National Right to Work (sic) Act, would amend the National Labor Relations Act and the Railway Labor Act to permit workers to refrain from paying dues to their union -- while still receiving the benefits of being in a union. H.R. 785 would thus hamper unions' ability to actually bargain for better pay and working conditions and redress grievances with employers. Folks love to say why should I be compelled to pay for something, apparently unaware that they pay for a lot of things with their taxes for which they'd otherwise choose not to pay -- like the Iraq War, for instance. And I have never argued for a check-off box with which I can simply "choose not to pay" for things I don't like, because I understand that I have representatives for that. But President Trump's spokeshack, Sean Spicer, has indicted that he'd like to see a "right-to-work" bill passed because it would be in "the best interest of job creators." Sadly, when he said "job creators," he didn't mean you, though you, with your buying power, are the greatest job creators in the history of the planet -- he meant the executives who bend over backwards to destroy jobs so they can redistribute worker income upward to themselves. I think H.R. 785 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators.

Meanwhile, the Senate has begun to hold hearings on how best to destroy the Endangered Species Act. Of course, they don't call it that, because if they said "we want to destroy the Endangered Species Act," they'd be very unpopular and might risk losing re-election even in heavily-gerrymandered districts, so they say they're "modernizing" the Act. But tell them you'd like to "modernize" the Constitution and see how they react! Too often we hear from ESA opponents that it just costs too much money to save species from oblivion; where do we begin describing what's wrong with that? By reminding folks that a whole lot of good works in America cost money? By comparing ESA enforcement with, oh, just to pull an example out of the air, the cost of the B-35 fighter jet that Lockheed has tried to get combat-ready for literally a quarter of a century? By asking "costs whom," and invariably coming up with the answer "corporate executives"? By reminding folks that America is the can-do country and whining about the cost of being civilized isn't very American? Really, there are so, so many places to begin. I think the Endangered Species Act also deserves a phone call to your Reps and Senators.

Finally, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force has apparently been questioning Standing Rock protestors, which of course was not at all intended to intimidate the Water Protectors, not at all! Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell your Senators to question FBI Somehow-Still-Director James Comey about the questioning of peaceful protestors. You'd think the JTTF would have more to do than find folks protesting our government and pretend like they're terrorists, but apparently they don't, for they've also apparently harassed Keystone pipeline protestors, Black Lives Matter protestors, School of the Americas Watch protestors, Occupy Wall Street protestors, and Tea Party protestors. OK, I made up that last one -- seriously, Tea Partiers? They're certainly no threat to the status quo! -- but they've messed around with the others. It's enough to make you think our government wants terrorists to strike, so they can use that as a pretext to harass all those good Americans who risk their lives and livelihoods in order to make us a more perfect union.

Around the table: from health care lies to dystopian imaginings.

Julie Chinitz at the OurFuture blog offers "Five GOP Health Care Buzz Phrases You Need to Inoculate Yourself Against." These are: "block grant for Medicaid" (better described as "destroying Medicaid"), "health savings accounts" (better described as "tax shelters for the rich") "high-risk pools" (a.k.a. "high-premium pools,") "per-capita caps for Medicaid" (i.e., "putting limits on your health care"), and "premium support" ("destroying Medicare" or "making seniors' health care cost more"). Seems Democrats could run about a thousand ads against this crap; guess how many they'll actually run.

In a related note, Margot Sanger-Katz at the New York Times comes up with at least two other ways to describe Republican health care proposals: they'd "redirect money from poor to rich," and they'd "chang(e) the winners and losers." I prefer "redistribute" to "redirect," but I'm glad to hear some version of it from our Paper of Record. And it wasn't that long ago that Republicans complained about government "picking winners and losers." What really upsets them is the prospect that government might prevent them from picking their cronies to be the winners.

Janine Jackson at FAIR finds some dirt on Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch: he not only ruled against a cancer survivor's request to work from home while her workplace was besieged by a flu epidemic, but he also said that laws and rules protecting the disabled shouldn't "turn employers into safety net providers for those who cannot work." That's pedantry at best and cruelty at worst, and it's not too much to ask that our next Supreme Court justice come to us without these faults.

Thea Riafrancos and Daniel Denvir write about "moving past" identity politics. To me, the sword that slices the Gourdian knot of identity politics is the fight for economic justice -- anyone can identify with it, no one needs to feel left out by it, and attaining it also makes fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia a lot easier. Of course I find the whole notion of "throwing blacks overboard so we can attract white voters again" to be quite stupid -- it's as if evil people want us to think that's the only choice. But we Americans can make our own choices. That's why we rock.

Cade Metz criticizes Mark Zuckerberg for offering "A World Divided By Facebook" "More Facebook." Always they blame the wrong people! Facebook hasn't divided our world -- Our Glorious Elites have divided our world, and they've divided it a lot harder as their moral and intellectual bankruptcy has become more and more obvious. If you think Facebook is unprecedented in its ability to spread lies, then you've never heard of a whisper campaign, and if you blame Facebook for "help(ing) Americans construct parallel factual universes," then you've never heard of Fox News.

Finally, David Frum describes how Donald Trump could "Build an Autocracy" in America. I don't see the "familiar expansive magic" of "big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits" as a sure thing -- surely he remembers the, ah, mixed economic record of his old boss, George W. Bush -- but Mr. Frum does a great job imagining the banality of an American autocratic state (and most dystopian thinkers shrink before that task!) as well as describing how incrementally this autocratic state could creep up on us. These are Interesting Times, so I guess I'll have to say it: David Frum's article is essential reading.

Penny Rants for Sunday, February 19, 2017: just say no to the border tax! And other stories.

Republicans purport to wring their hands over "who would pay" for a 20% "border tax" on imports. That question's easy to answer: who always pays, i.e., everyone except corporate CEOs. That explains why they like the idea so much! Well, that and the fact that the "border tax" would (along with a 20% "corporate income tax") replace the 35% corporate tax, finally delivering that big corporate tax cut that corporations don't need because they already get so many handouts tax-wise. Of course all that's heinous, but what folks may not realize is that the "border tax" is essentially a back-door national sales tax -- you think Congress will lift a finger preventing big corporations from passing that tax on to consumers? -- and, as you may know, I hate sales taxes, because they hit working people far harder than they hit the well-off. When are we going to get back to taxing high incomes in this country? Don't tell me those high-income folks have earned it unless you can explain to me exactly how these hifalutin financial instruments are exactly like the real, hard work our parents and grandparents did when they built a middle class in America.

The Philadelphia Daily News's John Baer frustrates me at times, like when he describes the apparent difficulty good Pennsylvanians have been having getting hold of their junior Senator, Republican Pat Toomey. (I haven't been able to reach him on the phone for days myself.) He quotes Mr. Toomey's spokeshack extensively to the effect that Mr. Toomey only has four staff per office, all of whom who have other duties, which begs the question why not hire more staff? That would be job creation, after all. And while Mr. Baer reassures us that reaching out to your elected officials is "fundamental to creating or maintaining a society that actually cares about how and by whom it is governed," he's still a bit too eager to point out that "some, if not most or all" folks who complain about not being able to reach Mr. Toomey "are tied to a national online effort called 'Indivisible' urging grassroots opposition to Trump’s agenda." "Are tied to" should beg the question by whom?, if not the question why would a journalist use passive verbs?, if not the question why does that matter? And, having taken the Parable of the Prodigal Son to heart over the years, I've stopped cutting people down by saying where were you before the election?

David Brooks at the New York Times wonders "What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like." The spirit is willing to believe Mr. Brooks's assertion that Mr. Trump can be "played" by anyone who flatters him enough, but I still think we're better off believing that Mr. Trump and Our Glorious Elites are playing us, and that this "war" between himself and the "establishment" is a phony war. And sure I laughed out loud at the final "saving thought" that "(t)he human imagination is vast, but it is not nearly vast enough to encompass the infinitely multitudinous ways Donald Trump can find to get himself disgraced" -- but he disgraced himself in fairly unprecedented ways before Election Day, and still won. My real problem here, though, is that Mr. Brooks seems to think everything was fine until Mr. Trump got elected, that "moral arbiters in Congress like Howard Baker and Sam Ervin" ever did very much moral arbitrating, that "a single media establishment that shapes how the country sees the president" is a good thing. And I bet quite a few black folks could tell him that we already weren't "experienc(ing) the same reality."

From the "So Smart, They're Dumb" file: Democratic Party poobahs have apparently asked for Bernie Sanders's help in ensuring that all of this populist anger gets directed at Republicans and not them. Why they think they deserve a shield against populist anger is beyond me -- sure, they're "unified" against Obamacare repeal, but that's yet another place where unity won't actually help them fight repeal! Worse, they seem to think they deserve a shield not just against populist anger but against the popular will -- they have no business suggesting that, say, Pat Toomey should get pointed questions at townhalls but Robert Casey shouldn't, because Mr. Casey should be just as accountable to the people as Mr. Toomey. The Post doesn't report what Mr. Sanders said in reply, which should concern you if (like me) you worry that he now has the Democratic leadership's ear not because he's earned it (though he has!), but because they want to neuter him and co-opt his supporters. If he needs to, he can always ask Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tspiras how well ingratiating oneself with elites has worked for him.

Finally, embedded in this interesting assessment, by U.S. News and World Reportcontributing editor John Stoehr, of Donald Trump's weakness in the face of reversal, is his claim that white working class folks are predisposed to "authoritarianism" rather than "socialism," and that they "eat and sleep being told what to do." I'm not entirely sure what that last part means, unless he's telling us the workplace isn't a democracy and a great deal about familial relationships isn't particularly optional, but I know plenty of white working class folks myself, and they regard themselves as fairly independent thinkers, and you can only create a real authoritarian state if you convince the majority they're doing it on their own. Also, I'd say the white working class isn't predisposed to "authoritarianism" so much as they're predisposed to impatience. And you can't really blame them, not just because politicians fail them so often, but also because, well, being impatient is really part of our heritage as Americans -- we get crap done because we refuse to be thwarted, and impatience doesn't need to end in authoritarianism any more than conservatism needs end in reactionary extremism.

Action: fighting for internet freedom, whistleblowers, and Medicaid.

You know the new Trump-drenched FCC is hot to kill the Open Internet order -- which prevents your internet service provider from prioritizing some web traffic over others, so that you, and not some corporation, get to dictate where you want to go on the internet. But Congress is hot to kill it, too: Sen. John Thune (R-SD), who made noises about killing net neutrality in the last Congress, is readying a bill that would, as they say, destroy net neutrality in order to save it. Mr. Thune sure talks a good game about internet freedom -- he says he wants to outlaw paid prioritization and active throttling or blocking of websites, but the FCC's already done that, and his net neutrality bill from 2015 had loopholes you could drive a Mack truck through. When you're trying to kill something as broadly popular across the political spectrum as net neutrality, that's how you have to do it. I recommend you call your Reps and Senators and tell them to leave the internet alone -- to reject any efforts to weaken or undo the FCC's Open Internet Order from 2015.

Meanwhile, whistleblowers won a big victory not so long ago when the U.S. Tax Court (that's where you go if you want to challenge an IRS finding that you owe our government money) ruled that folks blowing the whistle on tax fraud may receive an award based on all the money our government manages to get from folks guilty of tax evasion. Yet the Treasury Department is trying to get that decision overturned in an appeals court, arguing, dig this, that whistleblower awards should only be for civil cases, not criminal ones. But, as you might guess, the criminal cases get the biggest fines! Always they protect their own! I bet Donald Trump thinks whistleblowers are all gold-diggers, but the truth is they're very, very courageous people doing what they can to bring wrongdoers to justice -- and usually at a great price to themselves, as so many of them become unemployable in their former fields after pursuing this justice. So the National Whistleblowers Center helps you tell Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to stop his department's effort to hurt whistleblowers -- and also tell your Senators to pressure the Treasury Department.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to make benefit cuts and other harmful changes to Medicaid. Medicaid doesn't get a lot of love (well, it does from Trump supporters, apparently) because we look at it like it's just health care for poor people. Of course, we should give it a lot of love -- because it's health care for poor people, and could well help form part of the platform (along with programs like Medicare, which mostly bcovers seniors, and CHIP, which covers children too well-off for Medicaid, and, oh, hell, even the Obamacare exchanges) to Medicare-for-all, single-payer health insurance in America. But in the meantime Congress is all hot to turn Medicaid into a block grant program, as if states don't already have enough leeway in how they use federal money. If Medicaid were a block grant program, of course, states would have a lot more leeway in how to use it -- why, they might even use it for purposes other than helping poor folks get health care, which is not how civilized people do things. So let's remind Congress how civilized people do things.

Around the table: Greece's Barack Obama, and other tragedies.

Research deriving from "literally 'millions' of ocean measurements over time" shows oxygen levels already falling in our oceans -- which scientists have long predicted to be a result of climate change. That'll affect marine life in a big way, which may not impress you until you recall how many industries (like, you know, fisheries) rely on marine life. (In a related note, the Senate votes on Scott Pruitt for EPA Administrator today; you might want to call your Senators about that.)

In case you were wondering how it's going in Greece, well, people it's bad. If anyone needed to leave the EU it's Greece, but Alexis Tsipras is a lot like Barack Obama -- coming into office with a burst of hope and a clear mandate from the people (a mandate, I feel compelled to add, that the people gave Mr. Tsipras again in a national referendum on yet another lousy "bailout"), but he's completely bollocksed it up, and having seen this play before, I'm not willing to consider that he's playing a long game.

Betsy DeVos "fires back at protestors," saying their actions "demonstrate() just how hostile some people are to change and to new ideas." Uh, no: their actions demonstrate how the public at large reacts to bad ideas that have been failing our children for at least 20 years. And in case you were reminiscing about the Glory Days of the Republic During the Obama Administration, there was Mr. Obama's first Education Secretary criticizing the protestors, too.

David Dayen at The New Republic says Andrew Puzder didn't become Labor Secretary because "his beliefs included the one idea conservatives would not abide: support for immigration reform." Mr. Dayen, as astute an observer of American politics as one could imagine, believes the combination of Mr. Puzder's immigration politics, his undocumented housekeeper, and his domestic violence allegations finished him, not "fast-food workers protesting in the streets" or "his reign of terror" as a fast-food CEO. Perhaps he's right. But I also say our work is just beginning.

Finally, in a completely surprising development, the American Legislative Exchange Council, once "skeptical" about a Donald Trump Presidency, is now quite sanguine about the coming horror because of course they are! In other news, the Pope is Catholic, bears poop in the woods, and Democrat weaklings keep masturbating to dreams of a "Grand Bargain" with Republicans. Seriously, I keep saying that looking for fissures between right-wingers is a fool's game, and right-wingers keep proving me right.

Action: fighting to strengthen Social Security, avoid nuclear holocaust, and shame Breitbart.

The good folks at Social Security Works inform us that today is the day you stop paying into Social Security if you make a million dollars per year, since the payroll tax that funds Social Security only taxes income up to $127,200. (If you make more than that, of course, you stopped paying into Social Security even earlier.) Hence they've called for a national call-in day today, demanding that Congress "scrap the cap" on payroll taxes so higher income can be taxed into the system; you can find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers, as always, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page. If millionaires pay more money into the system, Social Security can not only be solvent into the foreseeable future, but can be expanded, so that good Americans who've worked all their lives can have a better retirement. And that sure would be a lot better than cutting Social Security benefits, which is the only policy Our Glorious Elites ever propose and the only policy the "liberal" media ever covers. As usual, we know better than they do.

Meanwhile, H.R. 903/S. 332 would zero out American funding for the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, as you may know, aims to stop nations from testing nuclear weapons, and our government currently funds about a quarter of the Commission's budget. The Senate never ratified the treaty after President Clinton submitted it, because TEH PREZIDUNTZ WUZ A DEMOCRATZ!!!!!, but the Commission still soldiers on. So why do Sen. Cotton (A-AR) and Rep. Wilson (R-SC) have such a hard-on for cutting their budget? I can't imagine it's over a philosophical question, i.e., "why do we fund a treaty we haven't even ratified and isn't even in full force?" And besides, that question has an answer: because monitoring for nuke tests makes us all safer. Once you're done telling your Senators to "scrap the cap" on Social Security payroll taxes, you can tell them to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty -- or, at the very least, reject H.R. 903/S. 332. They'll never see it coming.

Finally, over 900 corporations have ended arrangements with the far right-wing website Breitbart, but we still have a couple of holdouts, hence Sum of Us helps you Canadian corporation Shopify to end their associations with the racist tools at Breitbart. Shopify runs Breitbart's online store, so getting them to dump Breitbart would be a big deal -- and, as such, has also been quite difficult thus far, as Shopify's CEO has actually held a townhall with employees who are angry that Shopify continues to associate with Breitbart despite the blowback their employer has already received. And remember: there is no First Amendment right to make millions of dollars off your speech; there is only a First Amendment right not to be put in jail by your government for your speech. Besides, I'm sure Breitbart can figure out how to run their own online store if it comes to that. I mean, if you want to do that, you find out how to do that, don't you? You don't just get some corporation to do it for you all the time. You and I don't have that luxury.

Around the table: Labor nominee down, drug prices up.

Fast food CEO Andrew Puzder withdraws his nomination as Labor Secretary. I would not underestimate your agitation against his confirmation, though the "liberal" media does -- though I also wouldn't underestimate that decades-old Oprah video. Republican Senators are already doing too much complaining about "Democrat obstruction," though Democrats can't even filibuster these nominees! And, ah, "new thinking," "smear campaign," "the plight of businesses," "experience creating jobs"? We're gonna need a lot more shovels before all this is over.

Reed Richardson at FAIR notes that even as the "liberal" media has reported extensively on the Trump Muslim ban's faults, it still "parachutes into red-state diners, barbershops and grocery store parking lots to seek out Trump voters—and only Trump voters—to gauge their support for the ban." I would hate to think the "liberal" media panders to the most rage-addled Trump votaries out of fear these votaries will kill somebody if their fee-fees get hurt. And, as Mr. Richardson points out (it's a really exhaustive analysis), the "liberal" media has trouble finding Trump supporters who don't support the ban, though you don't need to be a quantum physicist to realize they must exist.

Kaléo Pharmaceuticals jacks up the price of an opioid OD-reversal drug by a little over 650 percent. Because what are you going to do if you need it, try something else? Folks who are tempted to say who cares, they're just drug addicts should more carefully consider the nature of addiction, which robs you not just of your ability to make good decisions, but also robs you of your God-given and Constitutional freedoms. And why should the "free market" dictate that some folks can afford live-saving medication and others can't?

In a related note, Marathon Pharmaceuticals -- which recently applied for, and received, approval to market an anti-muscular dystrophy drug -- has hiked the price of that drug, previously only available overseas and thus by import, over 7,000 percent. But don't worry: after you get all the rebates and discounts you can get for the drug, the price will drop from $89,000 annually to a mere $54,000! And since we were also just speaking of the "free" market, note well that Marathon didn't do any of the research or development on this life-preserving drug. So, other than being in the right place at the right time, what, exactly, did they do to "earn" all this money?

Finally, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, says the real story about Mr. Flynn's resignation is "you have an American citizen who had his phone calls recorded." Hoo boy. Of course Mr. Nunes voted for the FISA Amendments Act, and more recently excoriated Rep. Amash (R-MI) as "al-Qaeda's best friend in Congress" because of Mr. Amash's opposition government surveillance. I found both those data points in less than 30 seconds. Don't they know this is the future?

Action: another Trump nominee, another pro-discrimination bill, and another attempt to destroy the NEA and the NEH.

You might have noticed that Andrew Puzder's nomination as Secretary of Labor has been, well, somewhat delayed -- by his apparent inability to submit the necessary paperwork in a timely manner, that inability itself brought on by (stop me if you've heard this before!) a complex web of investments that would raise conflict of interest questions. And unlike President Trump, Mr. Puzder would be bound by law to resolve any such conflicts. Well, we the people can put this matter to rest by swarming our Senators' phone lines with requests that they reject the nomination of Mr. Puzder to head up the Labor Department. (Remember to call both their D.C. offices and their local offices, particularly if their D.C. offices still purport to have full mailboxes.) You could cite Mr. Puzder's numerous conflicts as a reason, or you could cite his virulent hostility to overtime pay and paid sick leave and even breaks. No, I'm serious -- this is a guy who looks at someone on a break and sees someone who could be doing something. You and I, being people who do actual work, might look at a worker on a break and see someone who needs to recharge and collect oneself, but then we're also not folks accustomed to making other people watch our balls swing. And I'm pretty sure that's not our failure.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee state Senate planned to vote on a nefarious "religious liberty" bill, SB 127, on Monday, but have delayed the vote until this morning after receiving a lot of feedback about it, and I can't imagine that feedback was positive. The Tennessee Equality Project (which does amazing work, by the way) has dubbed SB 127 the "License to Discriminate" bill, because it would let Tennessee businesses discriminate against whomever they like (but most likely gays, women, and transgendered folk) merely because of their "religious beliefs" -- and they'll be able to do that even if they get taxpayer money from the good citizens of Tennessee! I'm not sure how many times I can say this: the First Amendment protects your right to your religious beliefs, but it does not protect your "right" to deny other people their rights. And if you take taxpayer money, you have to follow the law, and since the law forbids discrimination, you can't discriminate, even if your Jesus is as mean a bastard as you. Thus the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to reject SB 127, and thus reject "religious" discrimination.

In other news, you may have heard that Mr. Trump's budget would zero out funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. You probably also know that zeroing out such funding would mean "saving" a few hundred million dollars annually out of a several trillion dollar budget, making claims that WE'RE BROKE!!!! or DEFICITZ ARE TEH EVILZ!!!! particularly absurd in this context. And I'm sure you also know by now that those few hundred million dollars annually get America a lot of bang for the buck -- unlike the F-35 fighter jet, one of which currently costs, on average, about $175 million, meaning you could currently fund the entirety of the NEA and the NEH with fewer than two of the planes that Lockheed still can't make work in combat after 25 years of trying. If you need reminding why we need an NEA and an NEH, you probably also need reminding why we need civilization, and I'm not reinventing that wheel for you. Suffice it to say that Donald Trump obviously believes that whatever doesn't make money is worthless, and civilized people should never accept that from anyone, let alone the President. Thus Sign Here Now helps you tell Congress to reject any Trump budget that eliminates the NEA and the NEH.

Around the table: documenting various absurdities and hypocrisies -- and offering hope for worker rights in hard times.

National Security Advisor Michael Flynn resigns over the revelation that he discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia with a Russian ambassador before being confirmed to his Cabinet job. These discussions may have violated the Logan Act, which prevents private citizens from conducting foreign policy on behalf of our nation, and I guess we should be glad that Mr. Flynn's "apology" to the Trump Administration didn't end like this. But, gosh, it sure is a good thing we've got a law and order Administration now!

We learn from the Bill of Rights Defense Committee that FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force members have been trying to question Standing Rock protestors. They've been using the notorious "knock and talk" method, whereby agents try to strike up a "voluntary" conversation, without a warrant (warrants: they're so quaint!) and without your lawyer present. The good news? Local citizen groups have been able to pressure local police (including San Francisco's!) into withdrawing from participation in the JTTF. But you're about as likely to find a "terrorist" at Standing Rock as you are to find a short quarterback in the NFL.

Surprise, surprise, civil rights groups that get a lot of money from big telecoms are against internet freedom as the FCC protects it. Groups who rightfully oppose discrimination also opposing the FCC net neutrality order which prevents big telecoms from...discriminating? You have no need to think about it -- just follow the money -- and you have no need to parse through their absurd arguments, not least because we've already smacked them down a hundred times, but also because their folly demands nothing from us but shame and shunning. They should really know better.

Also from the "surprise, surprise" file: Donald Trump seemed warm to banning lobbyists from his Administration when he was running for President, but now he's hiring them, because of course he is. Sadly, I think the worse hypocrisies are coming: his draft budgets cut Social Security and Medicare though he promised not to do that as a candidate. And while Mr. Trump hasn't been a hypocrite on "free" trade, and I'm quite pleased with that, I feel compelled to add the qualifier: yet.

Finally, given the very strong possibility that anti-labor "right-to-work" laws will be the standard nationwide within a few years, Leah Freed at Labor Notes describes how unions can "survive and even thrive" under such adversity. The first lesson, of course, is to fight the boss and win for your workers -- meaning not just winning grievances but winning better wages and working conditions at contract time. The final lesson (not that the ones inbetween aren't vital, too!) is to "involve members in bigger movements." Sounds like good advice for weak Democrats, too -- but I bet we have more success getting unions to take that advice.

Action: methane emissions, corporate taxes, and crackdowns on public protest.

H.J.Res. 36, a "resolution of disapproval" aimed at the Obama Administration's rule limiting methane emissions on public lands, passed the House last week and now goes to the Senate. Last week I bemoaned not just the damage methane emissions cause to clean air and climate, but also the sheer waste in venting methane into the atmosphere where it can't heat anyone's home. But I should also have added that this waste occurs on public lands, i.e., our lands -- and that methane could be earning us royalties if it weren't being vented away. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject H.J.Res. 36, and thus protect not just our air, and not just our climate, and not just our public lands, but also our right to royalties from the use of that land. (Alternately, you can also use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' websites, which will ultimately lead you to phone numbers for their local district offices. Both of my Senators' D.C. numbers had full mailboxes yesterday, so we have to call their local offices more and more.)

Meanwhile, Rep. Rokita (R-IN) has introduced H.J.Res. 54, another "resolution of disapproval," this one aimed at the Treasury Department's recent guidance that cracked down on corporations that change their legal address to avoid paying taxes in America. So that's where our Congress is these days -- hell-bent on making it easier for their corporate donors to shirk their responsibility to help us maintain the roads and bridges and sewers and police departments that we all use. And dig Mr. Rokita's reasoning behind the bill: "(a) multinational company looking to expand its American operations would face large tax burdens if it tried to use its money earned outside of the United States to fund the expansion." Well, it's not like he can say he's objectively pro-corporate tax loophole! Seriously, though, corporations would already count money "used to expand operations" as an expense, since that's what it is, and doing so would reduce their tax burden, so I call horsedoodle! Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your House Reps to reject H.J.Res. 54, and make corporations do more to contribute to our commonwealth.

Meanwhile, our works calling our Reps and Senators and protesting inside and outside their public appearances is clearly working. How do I know it's working? Because now no less than 10 states want to criminalize protest in some way or other! That's also how I know Our Glorious Elites are morally and intellectually bankrupt, by the way -- if they had a point, about anything at all, they wouldn't need to throw their critics in jail! But they fear their critics, so much so that (to cite just one example) North Dakota is still mulling whether to let people off the hook for "accidentally" running down protestors in the street! I mean, manslaughter is manslaughter, so I presume North Dakota legislators' real point is that protestors aren't real people with real rights. But we Americans shouldn't have to put up with that kind of guff from our leaders, hence Fight for the Future helps you tell state legislators to stop trying to criminalize First Amendment-protected freedom of speech, even when they really, really don't like what we're saying. And remember, right-wingers: if you really can't stand criticism so much you're willing to chuck the First Amendment for it, then you're the weakling. And the whiner. And the tantrum-thrower.

Around the table: arts funding, "free" trade, voter "fraud," Standing Rock, and triumphs for the residents of Richmond, CA.

What's "The Irony of Trump's Attack on the National Endowment for the Arts," according to Henry Godinez at TruthOut? Why, the fact that so much NEA funding goes to the very same distressed rural areas that support Mr. Trump, of course! Which I imagine is all part of the plan -- take from rural Americans, blame Democrats, enrage rural Americans further, rinse, repeat. If you are a rural American, of course, you might want to say something to your Reps and Senators about it.

Dean Baker reminds us Our Glorious Elites are having a very, very hard time coming to grips with the fact that the American people understand full well what "free" trade deals do to us. Hence the lies about automation, the booga-booga about China, and the bait-and-switch where Our Glorious Elites talk about American support for "trade" as a way of suggesting Americans support "free" trade, which is a bit like trying to prove Americans all love bestiality by saying Americans all love sex. Also, too, Americans hate "free" trade because it's the most obvious way politicians try to "redistribute income upward."

Ari Berman says the Trump Administration's utter lies about "voter fraud" "Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression." I know what you're saying: will lead to? But "voter fraud" hysteria leads to bills outlawing same-day registration and tightening Voter ID requirements, all while we're waiting for someone, anyone, to win a lawsuit against the Interstate Crosscheck database, which I presume is inevitable if someone will but file it. (Oh, and "(t)his morning, on this show, is not the venue to lay out all the evidence" should have ended Stephen Miller's political career, but it won't, because ours is a sick, immoral, and decadent society led by a sick, immoral, and decadent Administration.)

American military veterans join the fight against the Dakota Access pipeline, by literally standing between Native protestors and the governments that aim to remove them. Will right-wingers assault the patriotism of these brave veterans? I kid -- of course they will, because when you're morally and intellectually bankrupt, all you have left is to defend the "leader" of your "team," no matter whom you insult in the process.

Finally, because it can't all be bad news, a blue-collar California town stands up to Chevron and builds a better future for itself. The Richmond Progressive Alliance -- an actual populist coalition, versus the fake ones running our government at present -- has been around for a dozen years; its victories include getting a supermajority on the city's Council and leveraging a threat to use eminent domain to force banksters to renegotiate mortgages into solid rent controls for working families. I wish them luck in their future endeavors -- particularly against Chevron, which makes residents because of its own laziness.

Action: fighting banksters and bad bosses.

Word on the street is that Republicans are getting ready to reintroduce the so-called Financial Choice Act -- but they're planning to make it even worse, in part by defanging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by crippling its rule-making ability and stripping it of authority to go after big corporations that try to rip off consumers. No amount of hand-wringing over properly-executed mandates is going to put lipstick on that pig, especially since the CFPB's role in exposing the Wells Fargo scandal -- you remember that, it was all over the news! -- has become so well-known. I recommend you call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject the Financial Choice Act and any other attempt to keep our government from actually trying to protect us from financial predators. I have it on good authority that calling their D.C. and local offices is the best way to pressure them. That's six phone calls total, but it won't take as long as it sounds, and it'll work a lot better than hoping against hope.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration may reverse the series of Obama Executive Orders that granted fundamental protections to those who work for federal contractors. The Obama Administration made federal contractors grant paid sick leave, pay at least $10.10 an hour, and be more transparent about gender pay and rights violations, while also preventing federal contractors from forcing their workers into binding arbitration agreements that abrogate their right to a day in court. Because, apparently, Mr. Trump's 46% victory at the polls was nothing if not a mandate for lower pay and worse treatment by your employers! I sure don't want to hear any right-wingers argue that the 25% of workers who work for federal contractors shouldn't have "more rights than everyone else" -- because the best way to fix that would be to ensure that the other 75% gets the same better deal! Anyway, the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell President Trump not to reverse the gains federal workers won under Mr. Obama. He doesn't care what you think, but duty is duty.

Around the table: Stupid Presidenting Tricks, plus Democrats acting weak as usual.

Ho hum, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warns that the Trump Administration may be preparing Executive Orders on health care which will almost certainly make insurance coverage "more expensive" and "less accessible." At which point Dear Leader will say, see? I told you Obamacare wasn't working! The best part is the part where they plan to let health insurance corporations charge older Americans 3.49 times what they charge younger ones even though the law says they can only charge older folks three times as much -- because 3.49 rounds down to three! Just like 46% rounds up to everyone.

The Trump Administration's one-in-two-out rule has stalled Department of Energy regulations that would protect whistleblowers. Ah, whistleblowers are all money-grubbing crooks, I can almost hear Mr. Trump say, and is it refreshing that he'd put it less politely than Mr. Obama would? No, not really. And of course whistleblowers usually wind up sacrificing their careers to do the right thing, whether they get paid or not.

So there was Ted Cruz on CNN the other night, telling Bernie Sanders that "Obamacare is discouraging people from going to medical school and training to be doctors" -- when statistical data tells us more folks enroll in med school every year. The Cruz camp says the real story is the shortfall in physicians (though not why he didn't just say that), but that's been happening for a while, and mainly because of higher demand for health care, a demand partly driven by, well, more and more of us living into older and older age. Still, arguing using facts is hard. Fake news is easier.

Glenn Greenwald sees the race for DNC Chair demonstrating "the systemic, fundamental sickness of the Democratic Party." The third-to-last paragraph summarizes all the problems Democrats have, which include, of course, "an inability to speak plainly, without desperately clinging to focus-group, talking-points scripts." All we have to do, as Americans, is focus on changing the Reps and Senators we've got -- and I've been hearing they're "rattled" by all our speaking out -- without getting personally invested in advancing Democratic fortunes.

Finally, in a related note, the personification of everything wrong with Democrats, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, tells us how Democrats can "win" in the "long haul." Of course it's all about "winning," "because if you win you then have the power to go do what has to get done" -- but when his party won, they made weak policy that led directly to their losing Congress (and most state offices!) in 2010. And he shouldn't boast that "I've never lost an election" when he's only ever run against token-if-any Republican opposition. Hate to pile on, but if any Democrat "masterminded" 2006, it was Howard Dean.

Penny Rants for Sunday, February 12, 2017: special "free enterprise for the poor, socialism for the rich" edition!

Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang talks about some of the "myths of neoliberal capitalism." "(F)ree enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich" you've heard before, but it's still true, and when your relatives call CEOs "risk-takers," Mr. Chang reminds us that they make millions of dollars even if they crash and burn their company. When he says "austerity is a very good way of pushing through a regressive political agenda without appearing to do so," you may recall Gov. Walker going on Fox News in 2011 to claim he was trying to destroy public worker unions because "we're broke." Mr. Chang also fears that any infrastructure spending President Trump approves will be just another bubble -- probably a real-estate bubble, since that's what he understands best, and that doesn't even mean it'll be like last decade's housing bubble, but simply that infrastructure projects will (like New York City's Second Avenue Line, as Michael Hudson described last month) benefit landlords more than regular folks.

Mark Paul explains at Naked Capitalism "Why the Dakota Access Pipeline Doesn't Make Economic Sense." I mean, sure, the pipeline will create around 50 jobs (no, not 50,000, fifty total), and perhaps bring tens of millions annually to a handful of states, and of course will help make some CEO rich somewhere, but the pipeline would also impose (in Mr. Paul's estimation) at least a $4.6 billion cost annually, because the problems associated with pollution -- not just the health problems from burning all that fossil fuel, but the inevitable remediations once our leaders get serious about dealing with climate change -- all cost money to fix. Right-wingers constantly whine about "cost-benefit analysis" and never count, for example, the cost of providing more health care to people who breathe in or drink all that poison (a cost the Clean Air Act has reduced by at least $12 trillion as of 2012). In short, the pipeline would "socializ(e) costs associated with pollution — and not counting them — while privatizing profits from the pipelines."

Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us that, repugnant as Mr. Trump's Muslim ban is, "Corporate Media Paved the Way" for it over the last few decades. Two of Mr. Johnson's three factors relate fairly directly to each other -- the "liberal" media's drumbeat of ISIS coverage certainly feeds into said media's propensity to view terrorism as an "existential threat" perpetrated almost entirely by Muslims -- but, yes, it sure would help if the media would describe non-Muslim terrorism (Alexandre Bisonnette, Dylann Roof, Robert Dear, oh hell Timothy McVeigh) as terrorism (and not "domestic terrorism," either -- you'd have to ask why that would deserve its own category). I'm not sure the war on terror's atheist fellow-travelers (of whom Christopher Hitchens was also one) have had the effect Mr. Johnson supposes, since I don't presume even very many atheists listen much to Messrs. Maher, Harris, and Dawkins. But when the "liberal" media give wall-to-wall coverage of things ISIS might do, they're doing ISIS' work for them. And you'll find more fake news there than in a hundred "Russian propaganda sites."

Finally, Clive Thompson at WIRED calls coding "the new blue-collar job." I agree that we should demystify computer programming a lot more than we do, and not merely because it's so much more everywhere now, but if you've attended Democrat economic dogma over the past few decades, you'll find, sadly, that Mr. Thompson's point jibes too well with it: "New" Democrats have been proclaiming for-freaking-ever now that workers simply have to adjust to the times, rather than try to bend the times a little more to their own will (which is certainly their right!), and trying to make everyone into a programmer won't actually make things better, because traditional blue-collar work and programming utilize vastly different skill sets. I mean, I generally believe the best about people, and I believe they're plenty adaptable, but I try not to let my optimism lead me into having unrealistic expectations. Training, say, factory workers to do solar installations sounds a lot more realistic to me than training them to write code -- but since that wouldn't please the politicians' big donors, we don't hear about it as often.

Around the table: nevertheless, she persisted.

U.S. District Judge in Northern Texas rules that the Obama Administration did not exceed its authority in issuing its fiduciary responsibility rule last year. That doesn't affect President Trump's Executive Order requiring the Department of Labor to "review" the rule, but it deprives Mr. Trump of an arrow in his quiver. It may seem absurd to you that folks would really hate a rule requiring pension advisors to put their clients before their profits, but that's where we are -- trapped in a sick, immoral, and decadent society that gets worse by the minute.

Public Citizen, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Communications Workers of America file suit against Mr. Trump's "one-in, two-out" order regarding federal regulations. "Complying with the order would constitute violating statutes," a Public Citizen lawyer says, and that's fairly easy to see -- Presidents don't get to make (or break) regulations just because they feel like it; laws enable Presidents to issue regulations, and those same laws insist that regulations fulfill particular legislative aims.

The Washington, D.C. luxury hotel owned by Mr. Trump that's currently leasing space from a federally-owned building now lists his son as its President. There is no evidence, however, that he's transferred ownership, which is the main Constitutional issue here, and selling it to his son hardly removes him from the appearance of a conflict of interest, either. The solution? Divest and turn over to a blind trust. But of course he won't do that, because look at them balls swing!

Again I feel compelled to point you to a story about "discord" within the Trump camp -- this one about how Mr. Trump is supposedly very disappointed with Press Secretary Sean Spicer -- to remind you that "liberal" media reports about "fissures" within the Republican party exist to lull you into a false sense of security about the damage these monsters can do. I wouldn't put it past the Trump Administration to have planted this story, so the media would be less likely to cover something truly hurtful and awful, though if so, they give the "liberal" media more credit than I do.

The incomparable Matt Taibbi tells us that facts don't matter in the Trump era because "if you connect with America's anger and paranoia, you can get by quite easily without facts." If only some good liberal would tap into the quite legitimate anger of so many Trump voters and get them to fight the real enemy! Oh, wait, that was Bernie Sanders, and the Democratic party couldn't have that, or else they might have won -- and then they would have had to deliver for those folks!

Finally, in the wake of Sen. McConnell silencing Sen. Warren on the Senate floor because she was a Senator with a vagina about to read a letter written by a famous person also with a vagina, Mark Morford marvels at the way Democrats seem to be "unifying, rallying, finding a way through the nightmare" that is the Trump Presidency -- but he doesn't think they can go all the way. Why? Because "the party simply doesn’t have the sadistic, bloodthirsty, shamelessly illegal, lie-strewn cruel streak that has now so saturated and overtaken the GOP." Thing is, you don't need that -- Coretta Scott King herself prevailed over worse than this. You need to be strong, not cruel. That's where Democrats fail -- and where we must succeed.

Action: email privacy, Muslim bans, and methane emissions.

The U.S. House of Representatives has again passed H.R. 387, the Email Privacy Act -- and has, again, passed the bill unanimously. H.R. 387 would, as you no doubt recall, require our government to get a warrant before searching any emails you've left on your email provider's server. Current communication law -- and "current," in this case, means "30 years old" -- regards emails left on your server as "abandoned," and thus doesn't require our government to get a warrant before Hoovering them up, but this is the cloud computing era, where documents you clearly use all the time get left on servers. Last time the Email Privacy Act sailed through the House, a few Senators tried to attach poison pills to it (like the amendment offered by Jeff Sessions that would have allowed our government to shout emergency! as a way around getting a warrant, a power that could never, ever be abused!). So you may want to call your Senators about passing the Email Privacy Act as is, without poison pills. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, both CREDO and Amnesty International help you tell your Congressfolk to support legislation that would end President Trump's Muslim ban. A federal judge (not a "so-called" federal judge, Mr. Trump) issued a stay against the Trump order last week, but this may wind up at the U.S. Supreme Court, and you never know which hat John Roberts will have on (either the "obsessive literalist" hat or the "right-wing judicial activist" hat; the first is, obviously, more palatable) when the Court hears a case. So Congress can, in the meantime, act against a stupid and racist ban that clearly targets immigrants of a certain religion (hey, Rudy Giuliani said so! In public!) and clearly targets refugees, i.e., the class of people least likely to inflict terrorism on others precisely because they've had terrorism inflicted upon them. (No, terrorists more frequently come from classes of people who don't suffer from terrorism, but who witness others folks' suffering.) Congress may well be afraid of Trumpeteers throwing bricks through their windows if they oppose him, but no one said the work of civilization was easy.

Finally, Congress has lately moved to block the Obama Administration's methane emissions standards -- because what's more freedom-loving than natural gas corporations wasting methane gas into the atmosphere, so that it can not only make climate change worse, but be completely unavailable to consumers as an energy source? -- and thus some in Pennsylvania's state legislature have introduced SB 175, which would prevent the state Department of Environmental Protection from enacting any methane emissions standards that are stronger than the federal one! Which, as we've just described, is about to become nonexistent! What clever folks these Pennsylvania state legislators are! And again, it's not just the pollution that bothers me about this, it's the waste -- Pennsylvania gas drillers waste enough methane to heat over 100,000 homes for an entire year. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your state legislators to reject SB 175, and take matters like clean air and climate change a bit more seriously than they take their big donors' pocketbooks.

Around the table: the good news behind the bad news.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers grants final permit allowing completion of Dakota Access pipeline. Of course, their reversal is so abrupt (occurring not even two months after declaring they needed to do more environmental impact study) that they probably didn't cross their t's and dot their i's, which will matter to a federal judge even if it doesn't matter to President Trump. Expect more media coverage of Mr. Trump's apparent investments in Phillips 66, one of the corporations behind Dakota Access.

Senate confirms Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary. Three things about that: one, I'm pleased that we could make Mike Pence come out and break a 50-50 tie in the Senate; two, I'm also pleased the Trump Administration had to delay Jeff Sessions's confirmation vote because they needed his vote in the Senate to get DeVos through, and three, she still has to follow the law as Education Secretary, and we have tools to make her do that.

Organization conceived as a "progressive answer to ALEC" sees hope for positive change at the state level in the coming years. You won't be surprised by much of what you read here -- the State Innovation Exchange (or SiX) gets "more requests and more enthusiasm" from folks in red states than in blue ones, the left has failed to organize for the long-term like the right did in the early 1970s (and for bad reasons, too!), and a lot of state legislators work part-time for little money, and are thus susceptible to organizations like ALEC (and SiX, we hope!).

Politico says Republicans are worrying about Donald Trump's budget blowing a hole in the budget. Oh, horsedoodle -- of course fiscal "hawks" will eventually back Mr. Trump's budget, because deficits only matter when a Democrat's President. And remember what I said last month: "liberal" media reports on Republican "fissures" are all feints, designed to keep you from doing your job as a citizen, which is to communicate your will to your Representatives.

Bush Mobb attorney/"torture memo" author John "the Ballcrusher" Yoo shares his "grave concerns about Mr. Trump’s uses of presidential power." But of course we shouldn't be so impressed that someone with a law degree sees trouble with Rudy Giuliani's utterance that Mr. Trump wanted a "Muslim ban." And let's not indulge in all that "miss Bush yet?" silliness, too -- if not for people like John Yoo, Mr. Trump wouldn't be getting away with what he's getting away with today.

Finally, we learn that the solar-energy sector now provides twice as many jobs in America as the coal sector. The oil industry still employs more folks than solar, but the gas industry doesn't, not quite. Still, you just know coal corporations will use this statistic to argue that the solar power industry just isn't that "efficient." And then they'll have the cojones to say environmental regulations kill jobs! Venal CEOs kill jobs more efficiently than any regulation ever could.

Action: Social Security and Medicare, clean air and clean water, and internet freedom.

Social Security Works helps you tell House Speaker Paul Ryan that you will not permit him to destroy Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. You didn't think I forgot, did you? I bet Mr. Ryan sure hopes you forget, particularly with all the drama coming out of the Trump White House -- why, all that sound and fury is a perfect cover for Congressional Republicans to privatize Medicare, cut Social Security benefits, and turn Medicaid into those useless block grants that make it easier for states to fail to deliver Medicaid services to its qualified residents. And Mr. Ryan couldn't do any of these things if the spotlight were on him, because the American people wouldn't stand for it. Seriously, cutting seniors a check so they can maybe buy more expensive privatized health care? Why, that doesn't even save our government money! Of course, Paul Ryan is also the kind of person who either thinks you're stupid enough to think "subsidies" and "tax credits" are two different things -- or the kind of person who hopes you think he's stupid enough. We're smarter than that, though. And if we act, we'll win.

Meanwhile, the government of Cameroon has now turned off internet services in that nation's English-speaking areas for three weeks. Why? Because they're throwing a hissy fit about all the protesting going on there, that's why! English-speaking citizens of Cameroon have been protesting their government's institution of French as the official language in courts and schools, though two of Cameroon's 10 administrative regions (which enjoy a lot of autonomy, apparently) speak mostly English. Hence, the shutoff. Like I said, hissy fit. Sadly, internet shutdowns are considerably more common than you'd think -- governments imposed more than 30 of them last year -- and before you get too comfortable thinking it can't happen here, remember whom our President is, and how quick to anger he is, and how both he and his racist advisor Steve Bannon have both said they'd like nothing more than to smash the state into bits. Access Now helps you tell the government of Cameroon to turn the internet back on, and stop using shutdowns as a political weapon.

Finally, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held hearings yesterday that they dubbed, without intending irony, the "Making the EPA Great Again" hearing, and they considered a bill that Chairdunce Lamar Smith (R-TX) has been pushing for years: the Secret Science Reform Act, a title that, sadly, does not appear to be inspired by Joseph Conrad. The bill would require the EPA to formulate policy using only "replicable" and "publicly available" data, but as Sharon Lerner at The Intercept explains, data about catastrophes like the Spillageddon in the Gulf can't be replicated, because they're unique disasters, and a lot of good data isn't "publicly available" because it contains "confidential personal information that is illegal to share." Thus this bill only pretends to care about using the best science to make important decisions about our clean air and clean water. I think you may want to call your Reps and Senators, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page, and tell them to reject the Secret Science Reform Act. They'll never see it coming.

Penny Rants for Tuesday, February 7, 2017: who's to blame for terrorist attacks? And other burning questions.

Quite a few observers have raised alarms about this New York Times report describing (among many other things!) President Trump apparently being quite angry that he'd put Steve Bannon on the NSC in an executive order without really knowing it. But I don't believe that's how it went down -- it's all drama, and, again, it's bad drama; there is no daylight between Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon, just as there's no daylight between Congressional Republicans and Mr. Trump. And the Times report is drama, too, pushing the notion that Mr. Trump is changing into the the kind of person who could actually be a President, without giving very much evidence for that notion. Maybe if his aides were to actually figure out how to turn on the lights in the cabinet room -- admittedly as bizarre a slice of White House life as I've ever read -- we could have some confidence that Mr. Trump is "adjusting." But his m.o. is to make the whole world adjust to him -- an m.o. that's not exactly conducive to wisdom, let alone competence -- and it's not our job, as citizens, to expect or to hope he'll change. Our job is to make him change.

Sarah Jaffe, at FAIR, explains how "crucial and increasingly difficult" it's going to be to "(m)aintain() some ability to discern reality" in These Interesting Times. Long story short: the main culprit in the rise of fake news isn't blogging or Facebook but "(t)he death of reliable, locally-based news outlets," though the False God of Objectivity (which invariably turns out to mean "never criticize people in power") and the use of button-pushing phraseology like "protests descended into violence" (which phrase obscures the important matters of "by whom" and "against whom") certainly don't help matters. There are things we could do, of course -- beyond defending net neutrality and media consolidation rules, we could force cable providers to sell cable channels a la carte, so we can starve cable news drama hounds of their money -- and Keith Olbermann also has a few good suggestions for the media, chief among them that media organizations shouldn't cover Mr. Trump's press conferences live and then fact-check them as they're reporting on them, which seems, I don't know, an awful lot like how sane people would do it. Be first with the truth, not with the scoop, what I say.

Finally, a U.S. District Judge (appointed by George W. Bush, no less!) blocked Mr. Trump's little Muslim ban late last week, and Mr. Trump hasn't been taking it well, saying that "if something happens," Judge Robart should get the blame. And they say liberals always blame the wrong people! If "something happens," i.e. a massive terrorist attack, we are first going to blame the attackers, whom we can be sure had other options besides blowing up craploads of innocent people (particularly since terrorists typically don't come from the poorer classes, like most folks suppose, but from the wealthier classes who watch the poor suffer). And then we're going to blame Mr. Trump, who struts around like he won 200% of the vote while also whining like he didn't win a single vote, who doesn't bother going to intelligence briefings, who purges ambassadors and State Department personnel, and who only tries to keep out the foreigners who don't attack Americans. He will, of course, blame everyone but himself when it does happen, as he has already blamed everyone but himself for the problems he's had thus far. Is it too much to ask that no one respects him by then?

Action: fighting discrimination and fracking.

Elections, as we know, have consequences, and here's one of them: the crowd who thinks they should have the "religious liberty" to discriminate against people they're scared of getting cooties from are now in charge of the Executive and Legislative branches of our government. President Trump reportedly readied yet another of his infamous Executive Orders, one that would permit federal contractors to discriminate in hiring, in benefits, and in public services on the basis of their supposed "religious beliefs"; supposedly Mr. Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband, both gay rights supporters, talked him out of it, but Americans United for the Separation of Church and State helps you tell Mr. Trump anyway to reject any plans to let Americans use "religious beliefs" as an excuse to discriminate against gays, women, and others. But Congressidiots are readying the so-called First Amendment Defense Act for reintroduction, which would let anyone discriminate against anyone else based on their "religious beliefs." And our opponents constantly claim we're oppressing them by not letting them do so! What whiners! Folks can have any religious belief they like, and can't be put in jail merely for having them -- but acting upon them in such a way that deprives other folks of their rights is evil. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the First Amendment Defense Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to permanently ban fracking in the area of the Delaware River Basin. The Delaware River Basin, as you might imagine, provides drinking water to some 15 million good Americans across four states (Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York), and fracking in the Basin would pretty much destroy that; there's a reason, after all, that the area's state Republican Senators made sure to slip a gas-drilling moratorium into the state budget back in 2012. The Commission doesn't derive its authority from the Pennsylvania legislature, of course, but from all four of the aforementioned states and our federal government; they've imposed a temporary moratorium on fracking in the Basin, but we need to make that permanent. And if you really want to indulge in some force message multiplication, find friends and neighbors who hunt and fish and get them to tell the DRBC to protect the Delaware River Basin forever. If they organize, right-wing politicians may shrink -- we just saw this happen with Rep. Chaffetz's sudden withdrawal of H.R. 621 (which would have enabled the selling of millions of acres of public land) after outdoor recreationalists joined the fight against it.

Around the table: from Trump Administration psyops to House Reps bailing on townhalls.

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone reminds us that Donald Trump wants "extreme vetting" for immigrants and refugees but not for banksters. Mr. Trump's economic advisors "represent a rogues gallery of the creeps most responsible for the 2008 crash," and that Mr. Trump "talks a big game when slamming the door on penniless refugees, but curls up like a beach weakling around guys who have more money than he does." That includes the people who caused the 2008 crash, now "back in charge of non-policing themselves."

The New York Times suggests Scott Pruitt will destroy the EPA "with a scalpel, not a cleaver." They're right to note that it would be difficult to get rid of the EPA, since the EPA enforces actual laws, and the process for reversing their regulations itself requires lengthy study and public comment periods -- but maybe Donald Trump eats some hot peppers and then just abolishes the EPA through Executive Order, daring the courts to step in. And then Mr. Pruitt actually looks like a good guy, almost like that was the whole idea.

Linda Pentz Gunter at TruthOut reminds us that the renewable energy sector provides a much, much fastest rate of job growth in America than fossil fuel corporations. Of course, it's a growing sector, which means more buildout, which means more jobs, but that's the whole point -- a smart government identifies sectors that are already growing and gives them the help they need to employ even more Americans. And do you think run-down coal towns would be picky about the precise kind of energy grid we could build in them?

MIT blackjack pro explains how the Falcons lost the Super Bowl by "ignoring the odds." Their utter failure to run the ball in the second half (why, even Andy Reid runs the ball when he's up three touchdowns!) was the story in my locker room at work yesterday morning, but the Falcons' failure to run down the clock on individual snaps may have been even more crucial -- and again, anyone who watched Tom Coughlin's Giants beat the Patriots in two Super Bowls knows the best way to beat them is to keep the ball from them.

Finally, House Reps are starting to avoid holding townhall meetings, due to the pushback they've been getting from their constituents. Our Reps are such weaklings! We're not even three weeks into the Trump Presidency! They have no sense complaining their opponents are "anarchists" (your neighbor with three kids is an "anarchist"?), but they have no right complaining about "coordination," as if Americans have no right to talk to each other or something. But it doesn't matter -- they'll have to go out in public sooner or later.

Action: banksters, terror, abortion, and paid family leave.

As you know, President Trump signed some more Executive Orders late last week pertaining specifically to financial reform, one mandating a "review" of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law passed in 2010, the other delaying the implementation of the Obama Administration order mandating that pension advisors put their clients' interests before their own. We'll have an opportunity to file public comments on just why that's such a terrible idea, unless Mr. Trump declares martial law or something by then, but in the meantime, you can call your Congressfolk (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page) and tell them to reject any attempts to gut Dodd-Frank or allow pension advisors to screw pensioners. (If you can't get through directly to their D.C. phones, call 1.202.225.3121, then their local offices, and if that doesn't work, Americans for Financial Reform will help you email them.) Remember: most of Mr. Trump's supporters hate banksters, too. Not many will call their Reps and Senators about it, because they still think their team is Trump and not America -- but still, you won't be alone.

Meanwhile, what Sean Spicer called an attack by Iran's government against an American naval ship was actually an attack by Yemeni Houthi rebels against a Saudi ship, and that's as good a reason as any to remind you that the U.S. has been involved in the Saudi-Yemen war (on the Saudis' side, of course) for many years now, and that Congress has never authorized it. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power to declare war, yet President Obama never asked, and Congress never passed, any authorization to go into Yemen. And once Mr. Trump gets out of Remedial Presidenting class, I'm sure he'll use the same excuse Mr. Obama did: that the Authorization to Use Military Force, passed in 2001 after the 9.11 attacks, gives him all the authority he needs. But the AUMF only authorizes military action against "nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001" -- no, "he determines" isn't a loophole, since no reasonable person could "determine" that Houthi rebels attacked us on 9.11. And that's before we get to whether the AUMF itself is a proper exercise of Constitutional authority (it's not). Anyway, Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell Congress to debate, and vote on, American involvement in the war between Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

In other news, H.R. 490, the so-called Heartbeat Protection Act, would make abortions illegal if one can detect a fetal heartbeat. The problem, of course, is that one can detect a fetal heartbeat after a mere six weeks of pregnancy, and most women don't even know they're pregnant at that point. If we've decided, as a civilization, that women should have the right to decide on their own whether to terminate a pregnancy or not -- and we have, as a civilization -- then H.R. 490 would essentially take that right away, by making it illegal to act on their decision until after they have all the information they need to make a decision. Why don't politicians simply try to pass a Constitutional amendment to ban abortion? Nearly two-thirds of state legislatures are under Republican control now, and that's almost what you'd need on the back end; on the front end, if they've got the better case, they should be able to persuade the rest of Congress into going along. How do I know they don't have the better case? Because they resort to manipulative bill titles like the "Heartbeat Protection Act," when they sure don't care about your heartbeat unless you're not one of their big donors. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 490.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a vigorous paid family leave law. The Family Medical Leave Act guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave, as you know, but a little more than one in eight American workers have access to paid family leave -- about two in five American workers can get personal medical leave through their employers, and that ain't much better. Remember those two numbers the next time your Trump-loving uncle tells you the "free market" will guarantee that corporations that offer paid family leave will attract more workers, because they prove that the "free market" ain't guaranteeing it now, and corporations aren't hamstrung by our government no matter how much they whine about it. And no use arguing that if folks get it, they'll abuse it -- just remind those folks that they might need paid family leave one day, and they surely wouldn't abuse it, would they? (If you feel like piling on, you can always remind them that no law of physics prevents us from helping our countryfolk and battling fraud at the same time; it's a lie that the latter somehow precludes the former.)

Around the table: with glimpses into the innards of the Trump propaganda machine.

The economy created a hair over 225,000 jobs in January, and suddenly Donald Trump is all happy about the jobs reports he previously criticized as "phony." But of course he did all that on purpose, so that his votaries can squeal ZOMG HE CUT TEH UNEMPLOYMENT RATEZ FROM TEH 42 PERCENTZ TO TEH FIVE PERCENTZ DO TEH HEILZ!!!!!! And when they do, you probably won't be looking right at the Department of Labor's website -- though bookmarking it now might help!

Most spokeshacks who described a terrorist "massacre" that never occurred would find themselves out of a job posthaste, but not in Donald Trump's America, and certainly not in Donald Trump's Administration. Kellyanne Conway is doing exactly what Mr. Trump wants her to do -- help him create an alternate reality in voters' minds so he looks better in four years. There'll be no Bowling Green Massacres under President Trump, that's for sure! Until there are, at which point he'll blame everyone but himself for it.

Speaking of the big man, yes, President Trump literally said he wants to reverse financial services reform because his "friends" "with nice businesses" "can't borrow money." I know about 25% of the electorate, being bat-guano insane, lives vicariously through Dear Leader and would also make big decisions based on what their own "friends" told them, but surely the rest of us can make a bigger noise than they can. And look! Lately, we have been -- I guess the other side only spray-paints swastikas on synagogues when they're flush with victory.

Wired wonders whether -- times being, as I've said, interesting -- you might want to get yourself a burner phone. Thus follows a list of a few burner phones, which sure have improved -- some are getting to be like smartphones anymore! -- plus the Burner App which can disguise your phone number. I bet more than a few scam artists are using that app already, though. Seriously, if I thought of it, it must be happening now.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), in a completely unsurprising development, says he'll vote for Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary, thus virtually ensuring a 50-50 vote in the Senate that Ms. DeVos will win when Vice President Pence breaks the tie. Dig the ridiculous framing, though, both from Sen. Toomey -- who suggests that only his opinion of Ms. DeVos matters! -- and the article itself, which claims that he's upset "the left," and not, you know, the majority.

Finally, Christa Hillstrom at Yes! magazine describes the Northeast Investment Cooperative of Minneapolis, MN, "a first-of-its-kind co-op in the United States that pools members’ money to invest in commercial real estate." Some 200 local residents own property, share in the decision-making and the profits, and help keep local businesses thriving. They're hoping to export the model to other states, and I certainly would prefer a co-op to a bankster owning property they only bought so they can squeeze money out of it. I wish the NIC luck.

Penny Rants for Sunday, February 5, 2017: the further adventures of Our Man-Child President (and the real majority that opposes him).

Democrats boycott committee meetings so Trump Cabinet nominees can't get votes -- and then Republicans change the quorum rule (whereby the minority party must have at least two Senators in attendance for a committee vote to proceed) to ram nominees through committees anyway. I'm not ready to call this "unfair" -- Republicans have the majority, so they have wide latitude to change Senate rules. But I'm also not ready to call it a defeat. In changing the rules, Republicans also suffer the shame of having had to change the rules in order to get some really terrible people in office. And, you know, Democrats could have avoided all of this and taken the Senate back, merely by listening to the American people, and before the Trump ascension made doing so easier for them. And I think everyone knows by now that the only reason the Democrats have had any spine at all through this whole process is that we've given it to them. When these awful Trump nominees start destroying our government, we'll be waiting with our voices, and our will.

Laleh Khalili at TruthOut theorizes that the Trump Administration planned for "chaos" with its Muslim ban, but not "resistance." Of course, one of the reasons we reacted so quickly was because we've already lived through a President who wanted all-chaos-all-the-time, though he got off to a slower start (and that's probably how he lasted so damn long!). Do you remember when Steve Bannon said, "(w)e're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." No, of course you don't -- because that was Karl Rove, in 2004. (Personal to the folks still telling me to "let Trump do his job": his job is to execute our will, and I see no evidence that our will is to ban refugees -- the ones least likely to terrorize others precisely because they've been beaten down by terror themselves -- from nations that haven't even been sending us very many terrorists. That is pretty much exactly the opposite of how you'd handle thorny immigration issues.)

Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times describes "How Social Networks Empowered Mass Protests Against Trump." Today's "Resistance" uses Facebook and Instagram and the like not just to get in touch with each other, but to post photos of their works at rallies and protests, so when Mr. Trump says he has "the popular will," or that the Muslim ban is going swimmingly, photos of Women's March and airport protests refute him fairly decisively, and when he claims that "professional anarchists" do all the protesting, you can check your Facebook news feed and find it's actually people you know doing the protesting. One thing, though: I wouldn't call the anti-Trump resistance an "alt-majority," not just because the "alt-right" label (you know, the label that means "racist prick") has tarnished the "alt-" label forever, but because Mr. Trump's imaginary majority is the real alt-majority. No, I'd rather just call us the "the majority," since that's what we are, and calling yourself what you are is almost an act of courage in These Interesting Times.

Around the table: a town called Malice.

Donald Trump orders a Dodd-Frank "review," and halts Obama Administration fiduciary responsibility rule requiring pension fund financial advisors to put their customers ahead of their profits. They say bankers are "shackled," and I say if only they were! They also say the fiduciary rule doesn't have enough "consumer protections," when its obvious effect will be to protect consumers! Remember: there's no debating whether they're stupid or evil, because, as we learned from Tha Bush Mobb, stupid is evil.

Poor wittle Congressbabies complain about being "hammered" by constituent phone calls since the new Administration took office. Does someone need their wittle diaper changed? I couldn't care less when people whine about having to do the job for which they signed up, particularly when that job is "doing your constituents' will." Perhaps if these morons did less evil, they wouldn't have to hear so much from us.

A dozen folks file suit against three manufacturers of insulin for consorting to jack up the price of the drug -- a drug upon which many folks depend to keep on living, I feel compelled to add. From 2002 to 2013, the price of insulin almost tripled; did inflation almost triple during those years? No, it did not. President Trump, of course, is very upset about such matters, and has proposed to solve it by slashing the kind of regulations that might prevent it in the first place.

Ho hum, Politico advises us that "Businesses Grow Concerned About Trump After Early Excitement." Because of the immigration orders and the sense that Mr. Trump is "making policy on the fly," when he most assuredly is not. Again: it's all theatre! And it's bad theatre! Those corporations will be pleased as punch with what they get out of Donald Trump, no matter what they're telling you now. And more to the point, you won't be.

Congress passes bills reversing two Obama Administration anti-pollution rules. Are these the good works our Congressfolk want to take to the pearly gates? Yes, Lord, I made it easier for coal corporations to pollute good Americans' clean water, and I also made it harder for Americans to know whether fossil fuel corporations are paying foreign governments. I mean, gosh, that would give me pause. Do you need to get a lobotomy to serve in Congress?

Finally, and I really saved the worst for last this time, South Dakota lawmakers rushed to repeal the campaign finance disclosure law the state's voters approved on Election Day. And even if they're right that the law's aim was too broad, it hardly required "emergency" status; the real "emergency" for South Dakota legislators, it seems, is that good folks will find out what they're really up to. The bill goes to Gov. Dennis Daugaard; his phone number is 605.773.3212. In the meantime, the shame of South Dakota legislators is infinite.

Action: boycotting Breitbart, preserving civil rights, keeping public broadcasting, and defending ANWR.

If there's any good news these days, it's this: some 750 corporations and other organizations have ended their business relationships with the far-right "news" website Breitbart -- including, lately, Lufthansa Airlines and the University of British Columbia, and earlier, T-Mobile, Kelloggs, and BMW. That's some bad timing for Trump Administration advisor/racist Steve Bannon's former employer, because they're trying to expand their empire of hate and vitriol across the planet. But one corporation has thus far refused to end their relationship with the organization, and unfortunately, that corporation is Amazon, the WalMart of the internet, with about one out of every two dollars spent on the internet passing through its hands. With that kind of pull on people's eyeballs, we need them to join us in shaming, shunning, and ostracizing Breitbart, as Sum of Us helps you do. Do not be the fool who says that impinges on Breitbart's "freedom of speech"; the First Amendment guarantees your right not to put in jail for your speech, not the "right" to have your speech enabled by corporate money.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has made noises about basically the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division (largely through defunding it, if the many recent reports about the coming Trump budget are accurate). Why? I have to assume it's because the Civil Rights Decision does good works, and Donald Trump is an enemy of good works -- it's certainly not because "we've come so far as a nation that we don't need a Civil Rights Division in our Justice Department," not with the Supreme Court invalidating a big chunk of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, not with the "Interstate Crosscheck" database invalidating the voting registrations of so many black folks, not with the more intense scrutiny of police killings of so many black folks. I wouldn't get all cynical and say "what's Jeff Sessions going to do with a Civil Rights Division anyway?" A Civil Rights Division could well serve the next U.S. Attorney General, who might take America's Original Sin more seriously. Also, too, cynicism is evil. Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to defend the Civil Rights Division.

In other Trump budget-related news, you've no doubt heard that the Trump Administration would like to privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you no doubt feel a twinge of pain whenever you hear the word "privatization" -- for privatization not only means removing the people's control over public resources, but it also invariably means that private entities provide these formerly-public services at a higher cost and with much less satisfaction, so that you must conclude that "privatization" is merely a way of funneling what belongs to the public into the hands of some politician's cronies. Privatizing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has another layer of pain, though: public broadcasting's founders conceived of it as an alternative to commercial broadcasting; what "alternative" can it be once it becomes an actual commercial enterprise? Public broadcasting has also, historically, emphasized locally-produced programming, and we all know what big media corporations think of local programming. Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to privatize the CPB.

Finally, we have a bill number for the U.S. Senate bill that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling -- S. 49, the benignly-named Alaska Oil and Gas Production Act. Alaska already produces a lot of oil (and its citizens get a windfall from those oil profits every year!), and drilling in the ANWR doesn't promise that much more oil, so why the name? I kid, of course -- bill names are usually exercises in cynicism, particularly if they're tortured to spell out some acronym (which S. 49 has going for it, at least, since no one can say AOGPA). If ANWR ever experiences an oil spill -- and the chances are very good that it will, since oil corporations tend to treat safety precautions as a drag on profits -- it will likely not only spoil the clean water upon which so many good Alaskans depend, it'll kill a crapload of unique wildlife, which includes several endangered species. We do still regard it as civilized to ensure that entire species of animals don't disappear just so oil CEOs can make a few more bucks, do we not? I kid, of course -- we find that civilized, even if our government doesn't. But Penn Environment helps you tell your Reps and Senators to reject S. 49 and preserve ANWR from pollution.

Around the table: our politics is not merely theatre, but *bad* theatre! And other lessons.

Surprise, surprise, Trump Administration signals that it'll stop looking at white supremacist terror and concentrate exclusively on Muslim-related terror. After all, his people never terrorize good Americans! Except when they do. (Oh, and one more time: getting your shorts in a bunch over someone else's refusal to use the phrase "radical Islam" is what, class? Being politically correct. Seriously, right-wingers are far worse speech police than we'll ever be.)

Mr. Trump's first military raid (putatively on an al-Qaeda branch in Yemen) goes so badly that military officials claim that Mr. Trump approved it "without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations." Perhaps Sean Spicer will threaten to get rid of all those military officials who complained! We don't have to decide that this foretells all future Trump boots-on-the-ground operations, but if it turns out to be a pattern, add it to your list of things you'll bring up when Donald Trump fails to prevent terrorists from leveling an American city.

Also, the aforementioned Mr. Spicer incorrectly says, in giving "notice" to Iran, that Iran's government attacked a U.S. Navy vessel. It was a Saudi warship, attacked by a group of Yemeni rebels in a rather loose alliance with Iran, but look at them balls swing! After we've nuked Iran, I just can't wait to hear TEH IRANIANZ ATTACKEDZ OUR SHIPZ!!!! from people too full of testosterone to think clearly, or from people who only watch Fox News. But I repeat myself.

Two Republican Senators say they'll vote against Betsy DeVos's nomination as Education Secretary. But I'm inclined to think (as the article suggests) that both of them declared their intentions because they knew the vote would be 50-50, which (with Vice President Pence's help) is enough to get Ms. DeVos over. In these times, a "moderate" can only display "independence" when it does absolutely no good to anyone. Ask Zombie Arlen Specter about that stratagem.

Finally, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo calls the Trump-CNN feud a "phony war." Which is most assuredly is, if you've witnessed CNN make a right turn these last few months. Best to treat all the posturing of Our Glorious Elites as theatre, and bad theatre as that -- and then demand a strong a la carte cable packaging law from our Reps and Senators, so we don't also have to pay for all this bad theatre. (Go ahead; tools are in the upper left-hand corner of this page.)

Action: public lands, assassination of activists, consumer protection, and Presidential divestment.

H.R. 621 would sell off over three million acres of public land in ten states; the bill's title (Congress.gov has neither text nor summary yet, wonder why) identifies this land as "previously identified as suitable for disposal," but what prevents our government from using this land to, say, build out a public, renewable energy grid? Welfare handouts for certain Congressfolk's big corporate donors (particularly those in the oil and gas industry), that's what. For his part, the bill's author, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, says these three million acres were "identified as suitable for disposal" by the Clinton Administration, but why should we care? The American people are not as thirsty for "bipartisanship" as Our Glorious Elites would have us believe -- we only want good government, and just because that center-right President we had two decades ago also thought we should sell them off shouldn't mean a thing to us now. Congress has been moving very, very quickly lately to try to sell of as much federal land as possible, but you can only sell land once; land the people own, the people can use, and repurpose, for generations. Use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Reps and tell them to reject this bill.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the indigenous activist Isidro Baldenegro López, who long fought with farmers against loggers in the Sierra Madre mountains, was assassinated on January 15, mere months after assassins linked to a certain dam project took out indigenous activist Berta Cáceres in Honduras. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Mexican law enforcement authorities to prosecute Mr. Baldenegro's murderer, or murderers. You may possess some skepticism that doing this will do any good, but the commitment we've made as Americans -- to fight for a nation, and a world, where justice wins out, and where good folks can live free from fear -- makes this, also, our duty. And we know he wasn't murdered because he had a spat with a neighbor -- we know he was murdered because he was doing good for his community, his nation, and his world. And anyway, how do we know it won't do any good? Plenty of countries bow before the Big Stick of Bad PR. And we want a world where governments fear informed public opinion.

In other news, PennPIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The news hook this time is the student loan corporation Navient, which manages some $300 billion in student loans (covering over 12 million borrowers, because college is pretty damn expensive nowadays). The CFPB found that Navient failed its customers "at every stage of repayment," which news presumably did not drive Navient's executives to exclaim WE GOT 100 PERCENT! Among Navient's crimes: incorrectly processing payments (which often leads to more late fees and I'm sure that's a complete coincidence!), failing to offer lower payment options to customers who had earned them (which, again, leads to more money for Navient), and slow-walking customer complaints (because what are they gonna do? Not go to college?). Don't take any guff from your Reps and Senators about "nanny states" and "burdensome regulations." A lot of financial corporations don't care about anything but money, and thus do a lot of people a lot of harm. Our government has a moral responsibility to stop that.

Finally, I know this seems a bit beside the point now that we're, what, almost two weeks in, but CREDO still helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 65, the Presidential Conflicts of Interest Act. Mr. Trump has brought an unprecedented number of conflicts of interest to the office -- which is to say, he is invested in so many businesses that he might have to make decisions about as President that we can have no faith that, given the choice, he'll serve the American people rather than serving himself. S. 65 would help him fix that, by requiring that the President and Vice President divest any and all interests that would create a conflict of interest in the course of doing their jobs as the people's servants, and placing all the proceeds from that divestment in a blind trust -- since any money they'd make from divestment is itself an asset, one that could be manipulated by the unscrupulous. Power is a temptation to anyone who takes high office, and bills like these restrain the powerful, so that they do not run roughshod over the rights of other people -- particularly when their job is to serve the people.

UPDATE. A reader points out to me that Mr. Chaffetz has withdrawn H.R. 621, to which the first paragraph above refers. Other assaults on public lands will come, but this is good news.

Around the table: Trump defends Medicare! I kid, of course. And other tales.

Remember when President Trump said he wanted Medicare to be able to negotiate its own drug prices, rather than be held hostage by big pharmaceutical corporations? I bet you already know what happened: Mr. Trump met with big pharma and then declared that Medicare itself is the "price-fixer" -- to review, federal law prevents Medicare from negotiating its own drug prices! -- and that he'll "fix" things by "lowering taxes" and "getting rid of regulations that are unnecessary." That's some negotiating, right there. Look at them balls swing!

From the "We Sure Dodged a Bullet There" file: President Trump's team originally told all federal Inspectors General to resign, before relenting under actual bipartisan Congressional pressure. Inspectors General, of course, serve terms of set length regardless of which party controls the levers of power, precisely so they hunt down corruption in our government independent of political pressure. I remember warning about something like this happening almost 10 years ago, but I wanted to be wrong.

Close to a thousand State Department employees all over the planet sign a cable expressing their opinion that Mr. Trump's Muslim ban won't make America safer. Clearly they're figuring that the Trump Administration can't purge everyone in the State Department! I bet Dear Leader tries, though -- and I wouldn't count on someone stopping him. (In case I haven't been clear, I think Republicans want things the way they are. As I suggested yesterday, they're like dung beetles.)

Andrew Cohen at The Marshall Project describes Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch as "Scalia Without the Scowl." I imagine Mr. Trump chose Mr. Gorsuch because he'll rubber-stamp whatever expansion of Executive branch power Donald Trump demands, and I also suspect Judges Hardiman and Pryor wouldn't kowtow to that. They might even have told Dear Leader that! If so, I sincerely hope both men eventually die in their sleep.

News you absolutely need: the Consumerist reports on a relatively new twist on an old phone scam, and thus instructs you to never say "yes" to a stranger on a phone. How it works: the caller asks "can you hear me?," and if you say "yes," they'll sign you up for all kinds of crap you didn't want and demand payment because you said "yes" (the recording of which they'll cut-and-paste into another conversation). Try as I might to avoid blasphemy, people who'd perpetrate such a scam deserve everlasting hellfire.

Finally, because it can't all be bad news, Lego has built a social network for children that seems like a nice place to be. Kids can be cruel just like adults can be, but Lego has built in some solid protections, not just by mandating parental permission and using actual human eyeballs to screen out adult content, but also by rejecting any user-generated image that might give away a child's identity, and by limiting comments to a variety of emojis. It's a lot harder to be cruel with smiley-faces -- especially from far across the internet. Great job, Lego!

Penny Rants for Wednesday, February 1, 2017: pipeline accidents, Obamacare repeal -- and the coming horror.

Yonatan Zunger goes into some excruciating detail about "What 'Things Going Wrong'" in America "Can Look Like." Increased pressure to fire Latinos (because they "might be undocumented"), mass surveillance-then-registration-then-internment-then-deportation of Muslims, mass crackdowns on black protestors -- yeah, people, it's gonna be bad. But I bring this article up mainly for paragraph 13, which really gets at how horrible people like Donald Trump can get broad support: "when people are already stretched to their absolute limit emotionally, with financial stresses, family stresses, medical stresses, lack of a clear future stresses, then hearing anyone else ask for something — even if that something is as simple as 'the right to walk down the street without being murdered' — feels like an added imposition. And that can lead to a backlash, not just from people who are inherently racist or the like, but also from people who aren’t and just don’t want yet another thing dropped on their plate." The solution, of course, would be to alleviate these stresses with good legislation -- Medicare-for-all, tax hikes on the rich, actual infrastructure funding for public projects. That's going to take a lot more work now, but the first step is pointing it out.

"Protestors Say Pipelines Are Dangerous. Are They?" asks this provocative article from Inside Energy. Paragraph 4 tells you all you need to know whenever some right-winger says BUT TEH PIPELINE ACCIDENTZ HARDLY EVER HAPPENZ!!!!: "According to data from federal regulators, there is actually a low probability of a pipeline accident. But when there is an accident, the impact can be huge." I mean, really, saying that only .0x percent of pipelines burst doesn't matter when one pipeline bursting can cause so much damage to a regional water table. But the article concerns itself mainly with pipeline safety to human beings, which is important, but is hardly the only indicator of a pipeline's safety. And if right-wingers tell you that you'd better support pipelines because they're safer than rail transportation (pipelines spilled three times the oil that railways did between 2004 and 2012, per the IEA, but pipelines also moved nine times the oil railways did), you can always demand to know why the discussion always has to be about the safety of oil and gas transport, and never about the safety of solar and wind power. (They'll squeal about dead birds and "wind turbine syndrome," but they have always overstated these dangers.)

I do get tired of hearing about how Republicans are wringing their hands over how they're really going to repeal Obamacare. I mean, it's all theatre. Here's how Obamacare repeal will go down: Republicans will repeal all the taxes (on the rich!) that fund the Affordable Care Act, then they'll repeal the mandate on citizens to buy insurance -- but they'll leave in the ban on pre-existing conditions, since that's very popular, and then watch premiums for everyone skyrocket when the uninsured don't bother to buy insurance until they're sick. Republicans might pass their stupid "health savings accounts" or "buying insurance across state lines" initiatives, or they might not. But it won't really matter; Republicans thrive on failure the way some insects thrive on dung. Republicans will deal with the mess by doing one (or more) of these three things: 1) hope people blame their employers when they get thrown off their now much-more-expensive health insurance, 2) blame the whole mess on Democrats, and 3) hope for a terrorist attack to take everyone's mind off their skyrocketing health care costs. Remember: I say these things out loud so they're less likely to happen.

Action: bad Trump nominees, bad Muslim bans, and bad attempts to kill good privacy and equal pay initiatives.

Senate Democrats have taken to skipping Committee meetings in an effort to stall President Trump's Cabinet nominees, which has led to some truly hysterical hand-wringing from the right -- Sen. Toomey (R-PA) called it "an unprecedented level of obstruction," which is to laugh! Surely you recall Senate Republicans refusing to confirm several of President Obama's nominees in 2013, which (unfortunately) led Democrats to get rid of the filibuster for Presidential nominees; Republicans seem anxious to point out that they didn't put up much of a fight on Mr. Obama's 2009 nominees, but his 2009 nominees were largely center-right nominees of whom even Pat Robertson seemed to approve, whereas Donald Trump's 2017 nominees are far right-wing extremists who do not speak for anyone but their biggest campaign donors. I was planning to urge you to use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Senators and tell them to oppose the nominations of Tom Price to Secretary of Health and Human Services and Mick Mulvaney to the Office of Budget Management -- Mr. Price for his obvious hostility to Medicare and Mr. Mulvaney for his stated desire to slash Social Security -- but hell, any of them is fair game right now.

Meanwhile, as you might expect, I've got action alerts concerning Mr. Trump's nefarious Executive Order which shut down refugee admissions for at least the next four months and banned legal immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations (though not the ones he's got business interests in or the ones who actually sent terrorists to kill us, amirite?). Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to denounce the Trump ban from the Senate floor, while the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Demand Progress, and MoveOn help you direct your will at all of Congress, and Sum of Us helps you contact Mr. Trump's CEO buddies, who (unlike some CEOs) have held their tongue about the Order. People who cheer on Mr. Trump's un-American ban should look into their own past and see if they were very well-received when they got here. Chances are they weren't! But did it kill this country to let such folks in? Of course it didn't. But the blind fear some folks have toward anyone who isn't like themselves is sure going to kill this country if we let it. And Donald Trump won't care, as long as he's making money. Let's try to make him irrelevant, as he most definitely deserves.

In other news, the FCC lately mandated that your internet service provider get your permission (which you can withhold!) before selling your data to third-parties -- and, of course, now that Mr. Trump is in office, his nominee for FCC Chair really, really wants to get rid of that mandate, because it's a good thing that helps people, rather than a bad thing that helps corporate CEOs make even more unearned money. Let me know if I'm not making my feeling absolutely clear, OK? Consumers Union helps you tell the FCC not to reverse the FCC's new privacy protections. Folks who would give you guff about this need to answer why on Earth we should expect privacy for our offline private information but not our online private information. The ease with which corporations can find and collect information is no excuse -- as your mama taught you, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. You wish our current ball-swinging man-child President's mama had learned this.

Finally, because like Ferdinand Foch I fight everywhere, Congress is mulling a backdoor attack on equal pay by rolling back pay reporting requirements that could reveal pay discrimination based on gender or ethnicity. What do our best and brightest corporate leaders have to hide? Some Congressfolk (no doubt egged on by these "best and brightest") act like any reporting requirement is onerous, like we're asking them to lift 16-ton weights with their pinkies or something. We only managed to get these reporting requirements last year, which means Congress might deep-six them before anyone has actually had to report any information! And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions (or EEOC) and the Labor Department (in theory, amirite?) need this information in order to investigate bad actors and enforce the many laws that would prevent corporations from discriminating against their employees. Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to gut equal pay reporting rules.

Around the table: the THREE MILLYUNS ILLEGALZ VOTEDZ!!!! guy is registered to vote in three states! And other tales.

President Trump fires acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates after she refused to enforce his Executive Order targeting Muslim immigrants. And like the drama hound he is, Mr. Trump said she'd "betrayed" the Administration, as if anyone should care -- or as if most of us Americans don't worry a whole lot more about our government officials betraying us. But, golly, look at them balls swing!

Dean Baker at TruthOut reminds us -- among so many other things! -- that when "free" traders talk about the "dangers" of "automation," they're full of soup. Key facts: "the most rapid period of technological change was in the quarter century from 1947 to 1973, not the last two decades," and most manufacturing job losses happened between 2000 and 2007. I also suspect that most of these smartypants who talk about "automation" all the time have never used the self-checkout line at the supermarket.

Ellen Brown says we can cut infrastructure costs in half by funding them through state-run banks like the mighty Bank of North Dakota, which almost singlehandedly keeps that state out of recession. North Dakota's a pretty red state, too, which only goes to show that colors ain't everything. The right will squeal COMMUNISM SOCIALISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!!!, but why should they get all the say about everything?

Quinnipiac poll finds more than six out of 10 Americans support federal funding of Planned Parenthood, and seven in 10 think the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade correctly. Also, too, when folks learn that federal funding can't support abortion services, by law, their support for Planned Parenthood goes up to 80%. None of which matters to Republicans, who are too busy stoking rage in the other 20% in order to make folks think the popular will is something other than what it actually is.

Ho hum, Right-wingers (including Mr. Trump's spokeshack) depict Quebec City mosque shooter as a "Moroccan Muslim" when he's actually, guess what, a white supremacist. Think Sean Spicer will admit he's wrong? Think Fox News will admit they're wrong? The Cleveland Browns will get their act together before either of these things happen.

Finally, and also ho hum, the gentleman who keeps claiming 3 million folks voted illegally in 2016 is himself registered to vote in no less than three states. I could very well do what Mr. Phillips has done, and assert that merely because he was registered in three states, he must have committed felony voter fraud in three states! But only an asshole would do that, and I'm not an asshole.