Thieves in the Temple.

Action: Presidential tax transparency, and "right to work."

H.R. 305/S. 26, the Presidential Tax Transparency Act, would force Presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns, like virtually everyone else who goes to work in our government. Right-wingers who read the bill may tell you that the "Special Rule for Sitting Presidents" described in Sec. 2(a)(1) -- which would compel the person who's actually President right now (his initials are "Donald Trump") to submit his tax returns within 30 days of the bill's enactment -- is an unconstitutional bill of attainder. And you know what? They'd be right about that: the Constitution does specifically proscribe arresting and convicting folks for crimes (here, the refusal to disclose tax returns while a Presidential candidate) that weren't crimes when they committed them. But you know what else? Mr. Trump has already declared his candidacy for 2020, which makes him a Presidential candidate, which would put him under the scope of the bill, if it becomes law. You can see where a clever negotiator might have put that "Special Rule" in there only because giving it away would be worthless to the other side. Anyway, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Presidential Tax Transparency Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk and your President to reject "right-to-work" legislation, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. "Right to work" is a clever phrase, I'll give right-wingers that -- they're very good at coming up with clever phrases while their counterparts in the Democratic party are tripping over their five-syllable words and using words like "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" as if they were amulets. But so-called "right to work" laws don't actually confer upon you the right to work, or even the right to work the way you'd like -- they merely deprive unions of the ability to automatically collect dues from their members, who presumably had a say in whether or not they wanted a union and who certainly enjoy the benefits of being in one, which is why liberals often call it "right to work for less." Still we hear right-wingers say "why should anyone be compelled to pay for something they don't want," as if, you know, civilized people don't routinely pay for things they don't want, as the price of living in a civilized society. I mean, I opposed the war in Iraq, but I'm not asking for a refund of all that tax money I contributed toward it.

Around the table: describing matters about law and media.

Nearly two dozen young folk file suit against President Trump, alleging that his refusal to deal head-on with climate change's effects would "deny() young people and future generations their constitutional right to a healthy and stable atmosphere and environment." They also sued President Obama over this matter, and I'm not sure they'll win -- what the law commands our government to do about climate change may not be as clear-cut as they'd like. But I am sure that I'm-the-President-so-you-can't-sue-me won't kill the suit.

House votes to approve S.J.Res. 34, which would repeal FCC rules preventing internet service providers from selling your private information at will. It would be grotesquely easy for Democrats to run ads painting (most of) their Republican opponents as anti-privacy or even pro-hacking -- so easy, I suspect, that none of them will do it, since they're all a bunch of smartypants weaklings.

A California state legislator introduces, then thankfully withdraws, a bill that would ban "fake news." Naturally the bill's dragnet would have punished satire like The Onion or The Borowitz Report, which you should be able to tell are satire without anyone's help. How do you fight "fake news"? Same way you always have -- with good works. You just may need to do more good works than you think.

In a peripherally-related development, New York Times holds up past spreader of lies about Saddam/al-Qaeda links as a bastion of "basing...arguments on facts, logic and reason." Lessons: we can't let our horror at how bad media has become make us look upon past practitioners of bad media more generously -- and we really need to stop looking for right-wingers who "seem sane," since this year's "sane" right-winger is usually last year's insane one.

Bill Blum at TruthDig tells us how "Bill Clinton Laid the Groundwork for Trump's Ugly Immigration Policies." Almost tripling immigrant detentions, punishing "sanctuary cities," speeding up deportation hearings, expanding the list of crimes for which you can be deported, even building a big wall on the Southern border -- yep, that was all Bill Clinton, too. Strange how little credit he gets from the right for all of that. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

Finally, Chris Hayes at The Nation, in writing about "Policing the Colony from the American Revolution to Ferguson," gives us a couple of responses to "why didn't those protestors who got beat up just do what the cops said?" One: how do you know those protestors didn't? Two: how do you know the police didn't make an unreasonable or unconstitutional request? Three: don't you know the Founders were scofflaws? Seriously, though, this is a sprawling, enlightening article (adapted from a book, no less -- A Colony in a Nation, which I'll have to check out).

Action: the Supreme Court, and antibiotic abuse.

The Senate Judiciary Committee won't vote on the Gorsuch nomination until Monday, but hell, why not use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're using a cellphone) to call your Senators today and tell them to vote against him? You can probably skim recent news reports and think of reasons to vote against him -- the "frozen trucker" decision, the cancer patient decision -- but I had forgotten that Judge Gorsuch also authored a separate opinion in the 10th Circuit's Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores case ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court. Mr. Gorsuch all but said that any Hobby Lobby employees whose religious conscience did not forbid them from using birth control were "wrongdo(ers)." In other words, a corporation (or the rich folks who run it) not only seem to have more of a right to act on their "religious beliefs," it seems inconceivable to Mr. Gorsuch that employees have any such right. I'm tired of judges who think corporations have more rights than people.

Meanwhile, USPIRG helps you tell the FDA to ban the use of antibiotics in healthy animals to promote growth and/or prevent diseases. In doing so, you would not be asking the FDA to ban antibiotic use on sick animals; that sounds self-explanatory, and it is, but you just know some right-wing troll stands ready to say TEH LIBRULZ WANTZ TEH SICK ANIMULZ TO DIEZ!!!!! No, even telling the FDA to ban antibiotics for "disease prevention" isn't a death sentence for animals, since we don't use antibiotics to prevent diseases, but to kill bacteria. Nearly four out of every five antibiotics in America goes not to sick people or sick animals but to nominally healthy animals on factory farms, and this antibiotic abuse may well bring back a world where the next cut kills you. Don't be afraid of right-wingers telling you TEH FOOD PRICEZ WILL GOEZ UPZ!!!!, either. These factory farms are big corporations, with lots of money, and I would hate to deprive them of the character-building experience of raising affordable meat without destroying the planet.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, March 29, 2017: death spirals, cynics, and hapless futurists.

If you've been hearing from right-wingers that Obamacare is in a "death spiral," you should know that it's not really true. Paul Ryan's mistake, of course, was saying Obamacare was in "what the actuaries call a death spiral." I'm happy to tell you how badly the Democrats do trying to appear smarter than everyone else, but dropping in the ten-dollar word "actuaries" takes "death spiral" out of the realm of the colloquial (where Mr. Trump always leaves it, you notice) and into the realm where "death spiral" actually has a fairly precise meaning: it involves a health insurance market that suffers from "shrinking enrollment," "a deteriorating risk pool," and "rising premiums," and not only does Obamacare suffer from only one of those problems, that problem (rising premiums) has always been a feature of our health insurance market, and Obamacare subsidies are pretty much flattening its effect. Of course, if Mr. Trump runs Obamacare into the ground, folks won't remember the precise meaning of "death spiral" and they'll just conclude Paul Ryan was right. Which might make him clever, but wouldn't make him, you know, not evil.

I missed out on this piece about the career of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from early January, but it's worth reading. You may recognize the star of this piece, journalist Alec MacGillis, from numerous ProPublica articles, but he literally wrote the book on Mitch McConnell, a book aptly titled The Cynic, and here we follow Mr. McConnell from his early days targeting "lowerclassmen and unpopular kids" as a way of winning a high school election through his days as a center-left Republican fighting anti-abortion legislation and supporting collective bargaining to his reawakening as a Reaganite. The overarching theme is that Mr. McConnell "is obsessed with electoral self-preservation and improvement, with no clear larger purpose" -- hence his archives at the University of Louisville talk about his victories and not his accomplishments, and hence he crusades against campaign finance reform, because how can such a man win elections if not for larger piles of money? I hope and pray for a Damascus moment in his life, not because he's a potential bulwark against Mr. Trump, but for his own sake. From where I'm standing, it sure looks like he needs one.

Emily Dreyfuss at Wired describes how Silicon Valley "transhumanists" would like to "cure" death, but seem to be ignoring most of the ways it could actually help extend people's lives. An actual futurist lists some of the technologies that already "augment" our lives: "clean water; urban sanitation; smokeless cooking facilities; free access to healthcare; a guaranteed minimum income; a good, free education" -- and not "apps or toys for rich people," in the words of another observer. Of course, if you've been reading Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal! and have thus had your fill of watching contemporary Democrats natter on and on about the "innovation" coming out of Silicon Valley, you may have already decided that Silicon Valley's War on Death is more likely a war on your pocketbook. Also, not for nothing, but has anyone from Silicon Valley trumpeting the need to "add years to your life" actually talked to someone over 100? They lose not just their mobility but their eyesight and their hearing just by living long enough. They lose all their friends and outlive their children and even their grandchildren. It's far from an idyllic existence -- unless, I guess, you can buy friendship and love.

Action: the Trump budget, Keystone XL, and GMO labeling.

Today's as good a day as any to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're viewing on your cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject the Trump budget or anything close to it. You know the drill: the Trump budget slashes spending that actually helps people, while jacking up spending that helps corporations. We should really call it the corporate welfare budget, since that's what it is. Seriously, a $54 billion hike in military spending, when we already spend more money on the military than all the countries ranked second through eighth in military spending combined? When we could eliminate considerably more than that in waste and unnecessary weapons? I mean, the only reason anyone's spent 25 years trying to build the F-35 fighter jet is corporate welfare, and that's a far greater moral hazard than spending on food stamps, public broadcasting, rural arts funding, and scientific research, to name just four necessary things that would suffer under the Trump budget.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard by now that the State Department has approved the Keystone XL pipeline. And you may have responded to that news by saying that sure was fast! You would not be alone in that -- though the Obama Administration sure did seem to drag its feet on the whole process, the sheer speed with which the Trump Administration got this done makes it more likely that they didn't go through all the legal procedures in approving it. Of course, for Donald Trump, law and order is for losers. Despite the rapid approval, the Keystone XL pipeline still faces many hurdles -- the Nebraska Public Service Commission has yet to approve that part of the pipeline that runs through Nebraska, for example, and this has long been a sticking point with good Nebraskans, as they scramble to protect the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides clean water to nearly two million good Americans in eight midwestern states. Hence the Sierra Club helps you urge the Nebraska PSC to reject permits for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Finally, Just Label It helps you tell the Nestlé corporation to label its genetically-modified foods for-real for-real -- by which I mean "not with QR codes" that only a smartphone can read, because that's not a good way of telling people whether your foods contain genetically-modified organisms or not. Nestlé doesn't just make iced tea, Crunch bars, and bottled water from public water sources, you know -- they also own a bunch of popular brands, including Buitoni pasta, DiGiorno pizza, Gerber baby foods, and Lean Cuisine meals. (They make a lot of dog and cat foods, too.) Would it kill Nestlé to commit to labeling its GMO foods, as many other major corporations have done? No, it would not -- certainly monks with quill pens don't write all their food labels, and certainly not everyone would reject GMOs in their foods even if they knew their foods even had them. If good Americans want to buy GMO foods, they should be able to -- and if good Americans don't want to buy GMO foods, they should be able to know which foods have GMOs in them.

Action: Medicare-for-all, law and order, and consumer protection.

Congressional Republicans pulled the American Health Care Act from a vote last week, after it became obvious that it wouldn't get enough votes to pass. So how about we play offense, and use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing on a cellphone) to call our Reps and Senators and demand a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health care system? Rep. Conyers (D-MI) has introduced H.R. 676 again, and Sen. Sanders (I-VT) has pledged to introduce his own version of a Medicare-for-all bill in the Senate. If you think your Reps and Senators are just too far gone, you could remind them that Medicare runs extremely well, and you could also remind them that America spends twice the money per capita on health care that single-payer country Canada does -- and nearly three times the money that socialized-medicine country England does. My guess is that today's CEOs (whom too many of our Congressfolk imagine are their real constituency!) are not so devoted to "free" market economics that they'll pass up an opportunity to spend less money on health care than they do now.

Meanwhile, after Florida state Attorney Aramis Ayala declared that she would no longer seek the death penalty in any capital cases, Florida's ultra-right-wing Governor, Rick Scott, is trying to remove her from a high-profile murder case. You may well be wondering where state and federal law stands here, and happily Jordan Smith at The Intercept tells us -- the Florida law allowing a Governor to replace a prosecutor is rather broad and vague, while prosecutors typically have the discretion to seek sentences they deem appropriate (they'll have to defend their choices in court, after all). Also, the U.S. Supreme Court has not only found Florida's death penalty scheme unconstitutional, but has also ruled that state governments can't mandate the death penalty in laws. Yet Mr. Scott is, surprise, surprise, all hot to mandate the death penalty for someone, like he's afraid everyone will find out he's never gotten 50% in an election or something. So Color of Change helps you tell Mr. Scott to drop his crusade to replace Ms. Ayala.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell Congress and the President to stop their incessant attempts to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB has helped nearly 30 million Americans get their money back from scammers, and you'd think that would be popular, right? I mean, no one likes getting their pocket picked! But you'd be wrong -- American banksters, those utter parasites who do nothing for our country and who spend all their time figuring out how to redistribute your wealth upward to themselves, are hot to get rid of the CFPB, all the while yelling REGULASHUNZ BAD!!!! Of course, without the CFPB, we might never have known that Wells Fargo was opening up customer accounts (and charging the fees that come with those accounts) without their customers' knowledge, and I remember everyone, regardless of political ideology, being against that. It's enough to make you wonder if most politicians don't care about doing wrong, but only about getting caught doing wrong.

Oh, and the House plans to vote today on S.J.Res. 34, the anti-internet privacy bill; if you didn't call your Reps yesterday, you'll want to call them today.

Action: internet privacy, affordable prescription drugs, and paid sick leave.

You may know that S.J.Res. 34, which would nullify the FCC's recent internet privacy rules, passed the Senate last week. But that bill still has to clear the House, so now would be a very good time to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or at the bottom of your page, if you're viewing this on a smartphone) to call your Reps and tell them to reject S.J.Res. 34. After all, why should Congress make it harder for you to protect your privacy on the internet? Because that's what S.J.Res. 34 does -- it makes it easier for corporations to sell your private info to third-party data corporations, or to hijack your web searches and send you to some crony's page rather than the page you said you wanted to see, or insert ads into your web surfing based on that information. What part of that sounds like anything the American people would want? And personal to those corporate hacks claiming they want "parity" between FCC and FTC regulations: why not go after FTC rules, then?

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1249/S. 469, the the Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Importation Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. (Alternately, you could mention it to your Reps while you have them on the phone about H.J.Res. 34, and then call your Senators about it.) The Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Act would, as you may recall, let good Americans get cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. The reason they're cheaper, of course, is that Canadians get to bargain for cheaper drug prices as a unit, which we can't do. We have long been beset by bad news about skyrocketing drug prices -- even President Trump criticized Martin Shkreli for jacking up the price of life-saving medication Daraprim. Of course, Mr. Trump's since declared that Medicare, which literally can't negotiate drug prices, is the real "price-fixer"! But our job as citizens is to make the President irrelevant by expressing our will, so let's do that.

Finally, H.R. 1516/S. 636, the Healthy Families Act, would require employers to provide 56 hours of paid sick time to their employees (except for businesses with fewer than 15 employees, which would have to provide that amount of unpaid sick time). Of course, despite the parenthetical I just employed, right-wingers will use small businesses as a human shield when they attack the Healthy Families Act, and they'll wring their hands that some $20 million-a-year CEO at a corporation sitting on trillions of dollars in "trapped capital" will simply never be able to afford all that paid sick leave! Of course, more and more CEOs are coming around to the notion that giving out paid sick leave actually saves them money in the long run -- not just in reduced dependence on public assistance programs, but also in less turnover, less "presenteeism" (where you're at work but not really at work), and fewer workplace injuries. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Healthy Families Act.

Around the table: Trump's not down, Kansas gets back up, and Southern auto parts workers get ground down.

Roy Edroso at Alicublog is "not so sure" that "Trump's down" due to the failure of his health care bill to even clear the House. Good points abound: "this failure is the GOP's, not his," a Senate version could be "stuffed with dominionist lunacy," and "Trump's already fucking up Obamacare" as we speak. Verdict: "as some wiseguy on Twitter said, this lull could just be the false relief that comes after the horror movie villain looks like he's dead the first time." Which is why we do sentry duty over the body.

Baltimore City Council passes $15/hour minimum wage. This is a big deal because other cities that have passed the $15/hour wage are much better off than Baltimore, and though conventional "wisdom" holds that a higher minimum wage would KILL TEH JOBZ!!! and RAIZE TEH PRICEZ!!!!, most rational folks know by now that it doesn't really do that. In fact, a higher minimum wage will more likely stimulate economies and create jobs, since folks have more money in their pockets and are ready to spend it. Really, economic policy shouldn't be all about which big box stores you can lure to your town.

Kansas state legislators are trying to bring the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion to their state. It's not what Gov. Brownback wants, of course, because Obama, but Darth Brownback has been getting a little too much of what he wants over the years, to the extreme detriment of good Kansans. Republicans still dominate Kansas's legislature, but who cares as long as voters get good representation, which they might actually get for once?

Thom Hartmann at AlterNet describes "How Republicans Quietly Sabotaged Obamacare Long Before Trump Came into Office." Well, that's how you'd have to do it! If you're not actually going to run a government, you have to set fire to it and then point to it and say, see? Government doesn't work! The only solution is to give my cronies more of your tax money! Hey, it's worked for Scott Walker in Wisconsin.

Peter Waldman at Bloomberg BusinessWeek reminds us that Alabama's 20-years-and-counting "auto jobs boom" has come at a considerable price to auto parts supplier workers. No use complaining that they should be lucky to have jobs at all! when a) that'd be a rhetorical hostage situation and b) "(p)ay is low (for auto parts supplier workers), turnover is high, training is scant, and safety is an afterthought, usually after someone is badly hurt."

Finally, study finds more than half of men think they don't "personally benefit" from the Affordable Care Act's birth control mandate. Why anyone's asking what men think about this matter is beyond me, but I suppose it's good that men more likely to be having sex are more likely to appreciate the mandate, or that men generally seem to support it (and more so when facing the prospect of its repeal). And, yeah, if men could give birth, we wouldn't be trying to get rid of it. Also, I'd be anti-abortion.

Penny Rants for Sunday, March 26, 2017: follies concerning Russia, health care, and the Supreme Court.

Quite reasonable people have asked me why I don't think the Trump-Russia connection is really very much worth your time, and Masha Gessen at The New York Review of Books explains why better than I could. And with considerably more generosity than I would have done, too -- as I'm exhorting everyone to work-work-work, Ms. Gessen reminds us that the "Russian conspiracy" "is used to explain how Trump could have happened to us, and it is also called upon to give us hope. When the Russian conspiracy behind Trump is finally fully exposed, our national nightmare will be over." Still, "none of the information" coming from intelligence agencies "can be independently corroborated," which I'm sure doesn't surprise you, and a lot of the dot-connecting doesn't actually pan out (Russia's December execution of two cybersecurity experts had nothing to do with Mr. Trump, and a phantom Ukraine plank in the 2016 Republican platform wasn't even out of our foreign policy mainstream, to name two). And I still tell people Russia didn't create the Interstate Crosscheck database or "lose" all those non-votes in Detroit and Flint, and Russia didn't induce the Democratic party poobahs to get behind the "safe" candidate instead of the one who could actually inspire people to vote Democrat. If Democrats would work on matters like these, all the Russian interference in the world wouldn't matter.

One doesn't want to gloat over Mr. Trump's failure (at least in the short term!) to get his health care "reform" bill passed, but when he blamed Democrats for its failure, I laughed out loud. A more reasonable individual might have blamed his own attempts to make his bill even worse in order to attract votes from nihilists in the Republican "Freedom" Caucus -- the CBO re-evaluated the bill as it was revised mid-week and found it would not only deprive 24 million Americans of their health insurance but would actually cost more than Obamacare does, and it would take a special kind of stupid to pass that. Then Mr. Trump offered to make health insurance corporations cover many, many fewer essential health care services than the Affordable Care Act does now, which would have made useless the pre-existing condition ban Mr. Trump says he likes so much. So Mr. Trump blaming Democrats for the health care bill's failure is like the schoolyard bully whining that no one will play with him. Now, his statement that "(t)he best thing that could happen is exactly what happened"? He might be right about that -- we're still over 19 months away from midterms, which is plenty of time for Trumpcare to turn up in, say, a must-pass appropriations bill, or for something else entirely. So, think we might be getting a terrorist attack soon?

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) gets an earful at a townhall over his support for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. He goes so far as to tell his loudly-booing audience that "if you can’t understand that he is a qualified nominee, then you’re not listening" (so much for the power of persuasion!), and that "elections have consequences," which he must have imagined would sound better coming from the man who dutifully voted to confirm Justices Sotomayor and Kagan in 2009, but which only reminds folks that in this election, 54% of the electorate voted against the winner of the Electoral vote. He also plays the Straw Man card, by suggesting his attendees think "only liberals only can get their nominees and conservatives can't" -- this, though he's been in quite a few Congresses that simply refused to hold hearings on a Democratic President's judicial nominees. But that's not even the worst thing he said. Here's that: "I don't think that the Constitution was written so that you get everything you want and I get nothing." Actually, the Founders did write the Constitution so that an elected representative gets nothing -- elected representatives do the will of their constituents, not their own will. Why do we need to keep reminding our elected representatives of that, I wonder?

Action: forced labor, Neil Gorsuch, Pebble Mine, and genetic testing.

The International Forum for Labor Rights helps you tell the government of Uzbekistan to release labor activist Elena Urlaeva. Ms. Urlaeva has agitated against that nation's forced labor law -- you know, the one where the government makes its citizens, including children, work in the cotton fields every October for little or no money -- for many years now, and has thus been subjected to abuse by the state for many years now, abuse which has included beatings, forced cavity searches, and being thrown in psychiatric wards. The state's most recent detainment began on March 1, and has also ended up with her being put in a psych ward. Think Steve Bannon's been studying this? I mean, gosh, what if our government could just sedate people and put them in psych wards when they protest the monstrous policies of our monstrous President? Well, we don't have forced labor in America, at least not yet. But if someone like Donald Trump can get elected here, pretty much nothing's off the table for the future. And that's why we fight.

Meanwhile, Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Judge Neil Gorsuch have concluded, so you might as well call your Senators and demand that they oppose him. I've seen nothing from him over the months that has made me think he'll be a good Supreme Court justice. Perhaps his two most famous opinions -- his ruling that a woman immunocompromised by cancer shouldn't be allowed to work from home while her workplace was beseiged by a flu epidemic, and the infamous "frozen trucker" dissent in which he asserted that a corporation was right to fire a trucker for abandoning a truck with frozen brakes and no heat so that, you know, he wouldn't kill people or die himself -- pretty much tell you all you need to know: this is a man who hides behind pedantry and cruelty. And folks who retort that he's just "applying the law" should ask themselves why his "application of the law" always seems to hurt working families and never seems to hurt corporations. And no, I don't care that he seems nice. Everyone knows how to hide their monstrosity by now.

In other news, the Trump Administration wants to breathe new life into the Pebble Mine project in Bristol Bay, Alaska, even though two major investors (including the notorious Rio Tinto) pulled out due to citizen agitation against it. We fought it, of course, not just because it'd pollute the Bay, but also because it would destroy the sockeye salmon industry there, an industry that supports 14,000 jobs. Remember that next time someone tells you you're a "job-killer" if you oppose the will of some big corporation! And the mining corporation pushing the project saw its stocks plunge back in February after an investment firm reported that Pebble Mine wasn't commercially viable. Then again, some investors just love low stock prices -- and some investors also just love bidding up stock prices on a corporation and then selling before it blows up. Why, that all sounds like it's right up Donald Trump's alley! Sum of Us helps you tell your Congressfolk and your EPA to reject the Pebble Mine project.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 1313, which would make it a whole lot easier for your employer to demand that you submit to genetic testing, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. H.R. 1313 takes a quite tortuous path toward letting big corporations mandate genetic tests -- it allows corporations to jack up your health insurance rates if you don't submit to genetic testing as part of a corporate-wide wellness program. To think, there are people in business and politics who think this stuff up! You wish these folks would use all their brainpower toward some good end. And what's the punchline? Genetic tests that can actually tell you something about someone's health risks are like the robots they say are going to replace us at our jobs soon: they simply don't exist. That might actually sway your Reps and Senators, though, really, the Big Brother feel of H.R. 1313 should already do that.

Oh, and I know the Republicans canceled their vote on their health care "reform" bill yesterday, but Mr. Trump has issued an "ultimatum" and demanded a vote for today, so call your Reps about that, again. And that'll be it until Monday, I swear.

Around the table: the Trump budget hurts Trump voters, and other truths.

James Trimarco, who writes extremely well on rural issues, discusses "The Cuts in Trump's Budget You Haven't Heard About" -- which include programs that create or support jobs in what Mr. Trump called the "forgotten" parts of the country. You know, I was actually heartened to see the "liberal" media wring their hands over how thoroughly it had forgotten the rural, blue-collar areas that went for Mr. Trump -- but now they've gone back to their blissful ignorance. That doesn't mean we have to, though.

Charles Ornstein at ProPublica reads a bunch of letters from lawmakers to their constituents on health care, and surprise! Those letters are full of lies. Lies range from TEH REGULASHUNZ HURTZ TEH HEALTH CAREZ!!!! (unproven and unlikely) and LOOK AT ALL TEH UNINSUREDZ UNDER TEH OBUMMERCAREZ!!! (which number has, of course, fallen under Obamacare) all the way to Obamacare creating a "Health Choices Commissioner" to deny you care (it didn't) or the talking point that three out of four state-run health care exchanges have failed (they haven't).

White supremacist kid kills elderly black man in New York City -- and the New York Daily News talks about the victim's arrest record! 11 arrests, over 66 years -- and if you noticed zero convictions, give yourself a prize. And then they remind everyone that a black guy drove up to NYC to kill some cops a few years ago, because balance. This Daily News report was so out there that an AOL News report based on it apparently figured the report must have meant the killer had the arrest record, and thus reported it as such!

Colorado right-wing radio shouter who claimed that only Democrats ever committed voter fraud gets charged with, guess what, voter fraud. For allegedly mailing in an absentee ballot for his ex-wife, no less, "vengeance is mine" not apparently being one of his favorite Biblical passages. OK, he hasn't been convicted yet, and may not be, but he sure did talk a lot of guff about how "there is something about being a Democrat" that just makes you want to commit ALL TEH CRIMEZ!!!!

Finally, because Republican politicians don't have a monopoly on stupidity, Sen. Schumer (D-NY) says the Senate shouldn't confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court until of all this FBI investigation of Mr. Trump's ties with the Russian government can get resolved. Jesus Mary and Joseph that is the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time, and that's saying something. Mr. Trump got elected, he now gets to pick the next Supreme Court Justice, and I hated all the Republicans' excuses for not voting on Mr. Garland, so why would I like this? Also, Democrats should have the cojones to reject Mr. Gorsuch's nomination on the merits.

Action: health care, war in Syria, public water, and fracking.

The House plans to vote on Obamacare repeal today, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're viewing this page on a smartphone) to call your Reps and tell them to reject the legislation. We have plenty of reasons to oppose it, chief among them that it repeals the Medicare-funding tax imposed by the Affordable Care Act on high incomes -- which means that, yes, Republicans are trying to steal money from Medicare in order to give handouts to their wealthy donors. It would not be "uncivil" to put it like that, since it is, in fact, true. Obamacare repeal would also deprive over 20 million Americans of their health insurance and replace the individual mandate with a 30 percent premium hike for people who've had gaps in their health insurance -- which means that instead of paying your government a fine for not having had health insurance, you'll be paying health insurance corporations that fine. All praise the "free" market!

Meanwhile, H.R. 1473, the Prohibit Expansion of U.S. Combat Troops into Syria Act, would, as its title suggests, prevent our President from "establishing or maintaining any presence of members of the United States Armed Forces or private security contractors on the ground of Syria, unless the purpose of such presence is limited solely to rescuing or protecting members of the United States Armed Forces from imminent danger," except in case of the need "to protect, rescue, or remove United States personnel." That's right, it's another succinct anti-war bill from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA)! And H.R. 1473 doesn't actually prevent the President from, you know, going old school and actually requesting a declaration of war from Congress like the Constitution demands. It does, however, prevent the President from using the 2001 AUMF as an excuse to send soldiers off to die wherever he likes, which is also a pressing matter. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help put a stop to endless warmongering by supporting H.R. 1473.

In other news, the Nestlé corporation is doing its damndest to execute "water grabs" all over America -- where they pay a municipality a piddling sum to siphon off its citizens' public water so they can bottle it and make a shamefully huge profit -- but we are fighting back against these water grabs wherever we can. Even in Michigan, where Republicans have a stranglehold on state government, we've managed to stall their efforts to steal water from the town of Evart. But the Premier of British Columbia, has backed away from promises to review that province's water rate schedule "for industrial users" (i.e., corporations like Nestlé) -- promises she made only last year, after heavy action from the citizenry, of course. She faces the good voters of British Columbia again in less than six months, so help her do the right thing, but letting Sum of Us help you tell Premier Clark to keep Nestlé from stealing British Columbia's water. Especially given all the drought that's afflicted that province over the last few years!

Finally, Philadelphia residents take note: SEPTA still plans to build a fracked natural gas plant in the northern part of the city; perhaps not coincidentally, North Philly is the area of the city most neglected by the municipal government over the years. So perhaps they don't care if "those people" have dirtier air, since they already have the dirtiest air in the city. Why does no one think of building a renewable energy plant in economically-distressed areas? I mean, the gas'll be gone one day -- and will do plenty of damage in the meantime! -- but the sun and the win will always return. Now, the SEPTA board voted to pass this proposal months ago, but got caught not giving the public the legally-required amount of notice (I wonder why not!) and thus have to redo the vote. And Philadelphia's Mayor, Jim Kenney, can still veto the plan. You can call him at 855.969.5216 to tell him to veto the SEPTA fracked gas plan, and thus protect good North Philly residents from (even more) air pollution.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, March 22, 2017: the battle to win hearts and minds in America.

New York Times house conservative David Brooks has won a lot of plaudits from the left for describing President Trump's budget thusly: "He wants to cut any part of government that may seem soft and nurturing, like poverty programs. He wants to cut any program that might seem emotional and airy-fairy, like the National Endowment for the Arts. He wants to cut any program that might seem smart and nerdy, like the National Institutes of Health. But he wants to increase funding for every program that seems manly, hard, muscular and ripped, like the military and armed antiterrorism programs. Indeed, the Trump budget looks less like a political philosophy and more like a sexual fantasy." That's entirely accurate, of course, but, ah, read the whole column in which this insight appears, which is called "Let Bannon Be Bannon!" It's bad enough that Mr. Brooks thinks that Mr. Bannon is a populist, that he has a coherent governing philosophy, that a coherent governing philosophy is automatically superior to governing by the seat of your pants, and that Mr. Trump is actually governing by the seat of his pants. But, really, would Steve Bannon have come up with something more nurturing than the "hard power" budget? I suspect the next houseplant that man grows will be his first. And I bet he tries to make it grow faster by yelling at it.

Cracked columnist Christina H. writes about "What Changed My Mind" about being a "Hardcore Conservative," by which she means she used to be a stereotypical far right-winger who'd call Democrats "Demoncrats" and assume that liberals were all oversexed. Her condemnation of Hollywood on that last notion (among so many others!) is entirely appropriate, but here's the sentence you really need to attend: "(w)e all know nobody likes to admit they are wrong, but did you know nobody likes to admit they were until very recently wrong?" And thus she reminds us that usually we change our worldview far enough out of sight that we can hide it, if only to save our own egos. She also reminds us that conversations we overhear are more likely to change us than conversations we've invested ourselves in, that the stories we tell while we're just shooting the breeze do a lot more to change us than well-constructed arguments do, and that the folks "on your side" can do more to change you than the folks "on the other side," which is true even though it's regrettable that we describe folks in terms of "sides" at all. This is all important information -- it may even be enough to make you feel comfortable with the idea that you do your best and God does the rest.

Matt Harbowy at Medium writes "On Transgendered Bathrooms -- Or, as Most People Call Them, 'Bathrooms.'" I think he's actually quite generous to say that the brouhaha over transgendered folks in bathrooms derives, at the legislative level, from "the fears and tortured psyches of legislators trying to 'imagine' (since they typically have no direct experience with homosexuals of either gender) what it means if you put either homosexual or transgendered individuals into...the single gendered bathroom of their own childhood" -- I say "generous" because I tend more toward thinking these legislators are merely manipulative and heartless. But it's true that gendered bathrooms at schools are little more than "an opportunity for male bullies to be out of the watchful eye of mostly female teachers and supervisors," and it's also true that converting multi-urinal and multi-stall gendered bathrooms into single-stall/single-urinal non-gendered water closets would pretty much end the controversy. I think this idea (which would only be marginally less "efficient" than gendered bathrooms are now, especially when these are hardly ever filled to capacity) is exactly the kind of thinking this country needs -- though our political class wouldn't want it, since the result would be less drama, not more.

Finally, I wasn't waiting for this, but Hillary Clinton says she's "ready to come out of the woods" after her Election Day loss to Donald Trump -- and of course she's preaching about Americans finding common ground. The Clintons virtually invented the sport of Democrats and Republicans coming together to give Republicans whatever they want, so one could be excused, I think, for feeling something less than enthusiasm at this prospect. Besides, we not only can "ignore, or turn a cold shoulder to someone because they disagree with us politically," we must -- shame and ostracization are the tools of civilized people, even if some folks wield them in an uncivilized manner. Still, as it happens, Americans do have a lot of common ground: we like privacy, we like our right to dissent, we like good pay for hard work, we like clean air and clean water, we like not dying from health care problems, we like good government programs that deliver what they promise for our taxes -- and we hate corporate crime, media consolidation, media sensationalism, and "free" trade deals that let corporations outsource our jobs and nullify our laws. Of course, none of this lends itself well to a "bipartisan" "consensus" among Our Glorious Elites who only want to redistribute more of our wealth upward to themselves.

Action: racial profiling, "natural marriage," lead bullets, and internet privacy.

H.R. 1498/S. 411, the End Racial and Religious Profiling Act of 2017, would do pretty much what its title suggests. I wouldn't blame you for flinching at Sec. 102(c), which says proof of law enforcement activities having "a disparate impact on individuals with a particular characteristic" is enough to "constitute prima facie evidence of a violation of this title." We do, for example, demand that prosecutors produce more than the fact of an unnatural death to convict a defendant of murder -- we also demand they prove the defendant intended to commit murder. But racism isn't murder -- you can commit racist acts without conscious hatred, and many folks hide their racism even from themselves. And racist practices can continue long after anyone feels strongly about them, and other institutional pressures can help perpetuate them. Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1498/S. 411.

Meanwhile, because the Tennessee state legislature never seems to let up, their House Civil Justice Subcommittee will consider HB 892, the so-called Tennessee Natural Marriage Defense Act, which would, guess what, aim to outlaw same-sex marriage there. Now you may well be saying to yourself, self, didn't the Supreme Court make gay marriage legal all over America? Well, yes, they did. But HB 892 would try to do it anyway, even though a state can't just nullify a Supreme Court decision in this manner, and would sound like a state full of whiners in trying to do so. And check out their big cojones in calling gay marriage "unnatural"! What, exactly, about love between two consenting adults is unnatural? Have they not considered that gay folks wanting to get married is a sign of gay folks wanting to strengthen the institutions that sustain us? The Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell the Tennessee state legislature to reject their so-called "Natural Marriage Defense Act.".

In other news, the very first thing new Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke did when he literally rode into office (because right-wingers aren't about drama at all!) was to roll back Obama-era rules phasing out the use of lead bullets on public lands. And thus Mr. Zinke did exactly the sort of thing that gives gun-rights advocates a bad name -- this whole "debate" is just more right-wing swordfighting, where one right-winger tells another he's "insufficiently conservative" because he never defended the "freedom" of gun manufacturing corporations to put as much lead into their bullets as they want! Trouble is that lead persists in public lands and waters, meaning more dead animals and more brain-damaged people, thus meaning less freedom for us. And hunters and fishers are fairly resourceful people, who can hunt and fish without enabling so much pollution. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell Secretary Zinke to restore this lead ban.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to protect your privacy by rejecting the "resolution of disapproval" that would overturn strong FCC privacy rules enacted late last year, then both the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you do that. Again I feel compelled to ask: who could possibly be against good Americans having the right to tell their internet service provider not to sell their private data if that's what they want? And again I feel compelled to answer: evil people, who only want what fills their campaign coffers, and for what? So that one day they might have enough seniority to finally do something good? That never happens: the time to do your duty to your constituents is always now, and not once you're "entrenched" or whatever. I'm aware that I'm being generous in assuming that Congressfolk do so much evil because they're trying to do good later. But it doesn't really matter -- all that matters is that they're doing evil, and we must stop them.

Action: health care, "bathroom bills," banksters, and Muslim Ban 2.0.

The People's Email Network helps you tell the Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) to score H.R. 676, the Medicare-for-All, single-payer health care bill (and also tell your Senators that you want the CBO to score the bill). The CBO's scoring of the Trumpcare bill has become quite famous, mainly for predicting that more than 20 million Americans could lose their health insurance over the next few years, but the CBO has never scored H.R. 676, though it's been introduced in each of the last eight Congresses and (more to the point!) it's the bill that most resembles the popular will on health care, since, as you know, polls repeatedly show majorities of Americans wanting a Medicare-for-All, single-payer health care system. Wait until they find out how much it costs! the haters will say, but health care already costs more in America than it does just about everywhere else. So let us have more options than the narrow, corporate ones politicians in both parties constantly offer, because we deserve more.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee state legislature is mulling another "bathroom bill," because apparently they have nothing better to do than to condemn transgender students to more bullying and more depression by making them use the public restroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate, rather than their actual gender at present. Bill numbers are HB 888 and SB 771, and the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to oppose them. I'm wary of telling these bozos that their state's economy will suffer, just as North Carolina's economy did after the notorious HB 2. Of course Tennessee's economy will suffer, and that's a shame -- why, Chattanooga has one hell of a community broadband service! -- but these bozos shouldn't even have to consider that; they should already know it's evil to manipulate your most rage-addled voters into keeping you in office. But since they don't know that, we'll just have to tell them, again -- and again and again and again if need be.

In other news, President Trump has nominated yet another Goldman Sachs product, Jay Clayton, to run the Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC). The SEC's mission is to protect investors from being screwed over, so if you're thinking maybe Donald Trump isn't the guy to find that great protector, or that finding that great protector at Goldman Sachs maybe isn't the best idea anyone ever had, chances are you're already lukewarm toward the nomination. But wait, there's more! Mr. Clayton has lobbied against the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, because it, gets this, "incentivizes other countries to take a 'lighter touch'" toward going after corruption! After all, when you do the right thing and someone else does the wrong thing, you're always supposed to give up and just do the wrong thing out of fear that some crony or other will lose money! So Demand Progress helps you tell the Senate to reject Jay Clayton's nomination as SEC head.

Finally, Mr. Trump's Muslim Ban 2.0 may be temporarily blocked by two federal courts, but that may not last forever, so Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 608, which would nullify the executive order. Over three-quarters of the Democratic caucus in the Senate has co-sponsored the bill; guess how many Republicans have joined them? Precisely zero -- not John McCain, who used to be the face of moderate immigration policy; not Dean Heller, whose state has a sizable immigrant population; and certainly not putative "moderate" Susan Collins. Naturally, the five most endangered Democrats up for re-election in 2018 (Donnelly, Heidtkamp, Manchin, McCaskill, Tester) are also not among those Senators who've co-sponsored the bill, but all five of them are (as Mario Cuomo might put it) walnuts in the batter of eternity, each of them likely to lose by 20 points no matter how much they suck up to the 46% President who struts around like he got 66%.

Around the table: Trumpcare raids Medicare, and other truths.

I'd resisted repeating the Trumpcare-raids-Medicare meme, because folks who deployed it tended not to explain it, but I was being thick: as Allegra Kirkland at Talking Points Memo reminded us a while back, the Trumpcare bill repeals most of the taxes that fund the Affordable Care Act -- and one of them is the payroll tax on high incomes that helps fund Medicare. As Atrios has reminded us, Republicans really won the House in 2010 because they ran ads claiming that the ACA "stole" $500 billion from Medicare, and now here comes a bill that will steal money from Medicare. Think Democrats will apply the good-for-the-goose lesson in 2018? I kid, of course.

Peter Maass at The Intercept reminds us that "For Donald Trump, A Terror Attack Will Be An Opportunity, Not a Curse." There's hope, of course, not least in the fact that we saw all this before with Tha Bush Mobb and that resistance to the fact of the Trump Presidency has already begun. We'd also do well to remember, of course, that he retreats to Florida to play golf every weekend, that he hardly attends Presidential intelligence briefings, that he's gutted the State Department and his budget would gut it further, and that he's generally acted like an arrogant prick, and so if a massive 9.11-sized attack comes, he will have failed America.

Dean Baker reminds us that "(o)ver the past two decades, the economics profession has compiled an impressive track record of getting almost all the big calls wrong." Paragraphs 17 through 21 explain scare numbers pretty well -- the ZOMG TEH WELFAREZ IZ $17 BILLYUNZ!!!! crowd never explain their numbers in any kind of context (in the context of a $4 trillion federal budget, for example), and of course they'd never suggest taxing the rich more, because when did that ever happen? Except back when most of the Tea Party were growing up, that is. Have I mentioned that I think psychology is a more rigorous science than economics?

The incomparable David Dayen reminds us that "Donald Trump Isn't Even Pretending to Oppose Goldman-Sachs Anymore," now that his brain trust, such as it is, includes no less than five Goldman-Sachs veterans. As Mr. Dayen suggests, there's no use protesting the Democrats hire Goldman-Sachs vets to run finance, too, since Mr. Trump said he'd be different and went out of his way to criticize banksters when he knew it would get him votes. The good news? Maybe some of his votaries will see this and be angry. The bad news? I thought a lot of those votaries were in it just for the Jew-hate anyway.

Finally, John Light at the Moyers and Company website shares "11 Ways the EPA Has Helped Americans." You don't hear much about the hole in the ozone layer anymore, nor the Cuyahoga River catching fire, nor acid rain nor DDT, and that's mainly because of the EPA's authority, derived from law, to regulate these matters. Nice also to know that right-wingers whined about blackouts and higher electricity prices when the EPA moved against acid rain. Seems like they're always whining about that, and they're never right. It'd be nice if the "liberal" media would give their whining the appropriate amount of oxygen, i.e., none.

Action: the Trump budget, health care, and prepaid card rules.

How bad is the Trump cruelty budget? So bad it cuts EPA funding and staffing even more than Scott Pruitt wanted. So bad it jerks itself off for zeroing out NEA, NIH, and PBS funding. So bad the Trump Administration, having apparently watched a few too many porn films, calls it the "hard power" budget. So bad that OMB Director Mick Mulvaney actually praised it for its everyone-for-themselves quality. So bad it not only slashes the agencies that could feasibly build out infrastructure, which he did run on, but also slashes programs that actually help laid-off coal miners in Appalachia -- both proving, once again, that they only need you for your pain, and they need your pain so badly they'll create more of it, again and again and again. And, of course, it's so bad that you oughta call your Reps and Senators, post haste, and tell them you won't stand for this budget or any budget that's close to it.

And while you've got your Reps and Senators on the phone, you can tell them to reject the Trump welfare handout to his rich friends, better known as the American Health Care Act. The House plans to vote on this bill this week, and of course they're planning to ignore our will and pass the damn thing -- especially now that they're only pretending to hear the part of the CBO report where the Trumpcare bill would cut the deficit and not the part where it'd deprive 22 million Americans of their health care -- but every time we make our will plain, we shame them further, and they need all the shame we can give them. Republicans have also, apparently, decided to make the Medicaid block grant an option for states, but they're still planning to phase out the expansion, so why praise them because they now support a pile of dung the flies haven't found yet, rather than a pile of dung the flies have long fled?

Finally, the CFPB has enacted rules to protect good Americans from hidden fees, theft, loss, and unauthorized charges when they use prepaid cards -- but of course Congress wants to roll those rules back, because they worship mammon, or kowtow to big donors who worship mammon, what's the difference? Seriously, whom do these rules hurt? Banksters who want to make even more money without doing one thing to make the world a better place? Sorry, folks -- banksters who shell out big campaign money to get legislation passed to enable them to charge absurd fees to folks who use their services are not workers, but parasites, and parasites should not get all the say in America. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to roll back the prepaid card rules that protect consumers from financial predators. After all, civilized people still do think our government should do that on our behalf.

Action: protecting fuel economy standards and miners' pensions.

And just like that -- either because everything good Mr. Obama did must be obliterated from history, or because some rich friend of President Trump's isn't making enough money -- Mr. Trump has announced he'll try to roll back the fuel economy standards that will make cars get an average of 54.5 mpg by 2025. Better gas mileage, less pollution, more money in working families' pockets -- clearly none of these matter to Mr. Trump, and all he can do is rampage around saying REGULASHUNZ KILL TEH JOBZ!!!!!! Of course, if (like me) you're of the mind that regulations actually create jobs for folks who have to figure out how to comply with them, then all his sound and fury won't persuade you. And to hear automakers say it's hard to get their cars up to these standards in eight more years? That is to laugh -- the Prius was capable of getting that mileage almost 15 years ago! Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA not to roll back fuel efficiency standards.

Meanwhile, H.R. 179, the Miners Protection Act of 2017, would (as its title suggests) shore up certain endangered coal miner pension plans, including the 1974 United Mine Worker Pension Plan. Why do these pension plans need saving? Because coal corporations are going bankrupt and coal mining jobs are disappearing, which means that we have one current coal miner for every 12 retirees. And that's neither sustainable or moral -- these folks worked their whole lives and paid into the plan, so they deserve a secure retirement. And if you're tempted to say, well, if you cared about coal miners so much, maybe you shouldn't pass job-killing regulations!, please do the following four things: 1) slap yourself, 2) recall from the above paragraph that regulations don't kill jobs, 3) consider whether greedy CEOs and bankster shell games might have done more to kill coal mining jobs, and 4) slap yourself again. Then let Keystone Progress help you tell your Congressfolk to support the Miners Protection Act.

Around the table: Donald Trump wants you to spend more on gas, and other truths.

Buried in this account of President Trump's intention to roll back fuel-efficiency standards is, of course, a scare number advanced by the auto industry: ZOMG TEH BETTUR CARZ WILLZ COSTZ TEH $200 BILLYUNZ!!!! But of course you have to divide that $200 billion over the eight years automakers have to reach the standards, and you also have to divide that by the 17 automakers that made the claim, and now you're down to a little less than $1.5 billion annually, per automaker. Toyota alone made over $19 billion in net income during the fiscal year ending in 2016.

Federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii block Mr. Trump's Muslim Ban 2.0 a day before it was to take effect. It's not like you have to dig real hard to find the religious animus when Mr. Trump exposes that animus all the time and when his supporters go on TV and say Mr. Trump asked them to help him create a Muslim ban "legally." Mr. Trump responded to the news by saying, "(t)his ruling makes us look weak, which by the way we no longer are," which should remind you that anyone who has to say he's not weak is weak.

OMB head Mick Mulvaney defends the Trump Cruelty Budget by saying he can't ask "a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit" to keep funding public TV with their taxes. We can set aside, for a moment, that one of the features of living in a civilization is that your taxes occasionally go to things that don't appear to have immediate value to you. But dig how he insults these hypothetical Trump supporters! Does he think coal miners didn't grow up watching Sesame Street?

Yes it's damn annoying that the "liberal" media seems to care only about right-wing objections to the Obamacare repeal bill, though substantially more than half of Americans in poll after poll support Medicare-for-All, single-payer insurance, the most liberal plan out there -- but it ain't just corporate bias at work here, but an addiction to irony, and you know that I, too, used to comb through the ranks of the right to find folks who hated Tha Bush Mobb. Irony's like a hammer, though -- quite useful, but not the right tool for every task.

Matthew Yglesias at Vox notes that the recent CBO report also says that Obamacare is not, in fact, "imploding" as Messrs. Trump and Ryan love to say it is. And lo and behold, the reason Obamacare isn't likely to implode is that it ties its subsidies to income level, which makes it very likely that the working poor will stay in the system. But, ah, "(t)he merits of paying for a tax cut for millionaires by cutting millions of poor families off from Medicaid coverage" is not "something reasonable people can disagree about."

Finally, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously dismisses a challenge to that state's popularly-enacted minimum wage hike. The challengers, including the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, have now had so little success fighting these things tooth-and-nail that they're going to go after the law that allows good Arizonans to vote on matters concerning them in the first place, which puts their utter intellectual bankruptcy on full display. Keep worshiping mammon, gentlemen, and you'll find your reward in hell.

Action: internet privacy, clean water, and pension fund advice.

Yet another Congressional "resolution of disapproval," H.J.Res. 86/S.J.Res. 34, would overturn the FCC's recently-enacted rules protecting your online privacy. because, apparently, that is exactly the sort of thing that really, really resonates with Americans. Please, Congress, they say with one voice, let our internet service providing corporations sell our online data to whomever they like, since their right to make money is more important than our right to privacy! Or, perhaps, that's what the good Americans in Congressional heads say. I haven't emphasized this enough, but all of these "resolutions of disapproval" don't just repeal regulations that actually serve the American people, but they forbid the agencies issuing the regulations from ever addressing the matter again. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject the anti-privacy H.J.Res. 86/S.J.Res. 34.

Meanwhile, a Public Herald investigation has turned up evidence of Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) misconduct in investigating at least 170 water safety complaints over the past decade-plus -- most of which seem to concentrate in areas where gas drilling corporations use fracking to get their natural gas out. The DEP kept these complaints secret for many years, supposedly because they didn't want to "cause alarm," though if your water smells like gas or lights on fire or makes you ill you're already pretty alarmed, amirite? Seriously, if you're a law-and-order type, you wouldn't want to think that your government, which you've charged with keeping polluters from befouling the water you drink, wash, and bathe with, is deliberately failing to protect you. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell PA state Attorney General Josh Shapiro to investigate this possible misconduct.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Department of Labor to keep the "fiduciary responsibility" rule that forces pension advisors to put retirees' well-being ahead of their own lust for mammon, then PennPIRG still helps you do that. Do it with a quickness, though, because the Department is only accepting comments until tomorrow; possibly they hope the short commenting period will yield a plethora of comments like yes, I would very much like my retirement money to be shoehorned into investments that don't necessarily work for me, but that make my advisors even richer, because they're so much better than I am! Seriously, the "need" to "evaluate" further the subject of whether pension advisors should, given the choice, do what's best for you or what's best for themselves is so absurd that you must conclude the Trump Administration cares more about its rich friends than it does about you. Still, give 'em hell, because hell is what they deserve.

Around the table: tales of media revisionism, dying industrial towns, health care lies, and pension victories.

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut is righteously appalled at the recent George W. Bush media tour. Ever the cunning "political animal," Mr. Bush waited until a man far less able to disguise his asshole-nature occupied the Oval Office, because, gosh, anyone looks good next to him. But Mr. Bush still peddles an art book of disfigured soldiers and the "liberal" media doesn't mention that he put them there. Also, they ignore his role in creating all those refugees Mr. Trump doesn't want to let in now.

In case you were wondering, Factcheck.org finds the CBO's predictions of the Affordable Care Act's effects have actually been pretty accurate. The myth that they're "wildly off" is largely the result of right-wing cherry-picking -- they love saying the CBO got the number of people insured through the exchanges wrong, as if the exchanges are the only possible way to get health insurance (i.e., as if the Medicaid expansions don't exist, and as if the individual and employer mandates aren't driving up insurance participation).

Brian Alexander at The Atlantic visits the decaying glass-manufacturing town of Lancaster, Ohio. But Lancaster hasn't gone south because its jobs have gone overseas (though that could be coming!), but because its main employer, the nationally-famous Anchor Hocking, has endured at least half a dozen ownership changes at the hands of private-sector "financial engineers." And its workforce has declined by about 80%, which is usually what happens when banksters play their shell games.

Hot on the heels of a bad CBO report, Mr. Trump's spokeshack, Sean Spicer, says that "insurance for everybody" was never the President's promise, but a "goal." Next week he'll be telling us it was more of a "wish"! Seriously, nothing about the phrases "insurance for everybody" or "everybody's got to be covered" is ambiguous, and the more excuses Mr. Trump makes when he doesn't deliver, the fewer fans he'll have. That is still how it works, right? Or is the persistence of rage all his votaries care about?

James Russell at Labor Notes describes how Connecticut state workers switched from a 401(k) to a "real retirement plan," i.e., a defined-benefit plan. A defined contribution plan, as you may know, only assures what you pay in; a defined benefit plan assure what you get out, and defined contribution plans like the 401(k) suffer at the hands of bubble markets and overcharging pension managers. We must remind each other that the best attribute of a pension plan is that it be there, not that it gets the blessing of Wall Street.

Action: health care, pollution, and gerrymandering.

So the Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) scored the Republicans' Obamacare repeal effort and found that it would add up to 24 million to the ranks of the uninsured over the next decade, and likely add 14 million to the uninsured just next year -- but also that it would cut nearly $34 billion from the national deficit annually. Media outlets act like the report makes Obamacare repeal harder, but House Republicans love posturing about reducing the deficit, so it should be easier, if anything. But if we want to insure more Americans and cut the deficit, we should expand Medicare to include everyone: a 300 million-plus pool would have serious bargaining power to keep prices down, and we could fund it (among other ways!) by having employers pay our government instead of private health insurance corporations -- and they'd pay our government less. So use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to support single-payer, Medicare-for-all health insurance in America.

Meanwhile, H.J.Res. 36/S.J.Res. 11, the "resolution of disapproval" that would repeal the Bureau of Land Management's rules slashing methane emissions from fossil fuel-drilling operations on public lands, still hasn't made it to President Trump's desk. Why not? Probably because it's hard to message trying to help gas and oil drillers pollute the air more. Of course, the resolution's supporters won't put it like that -- they'll say they're cutting job-killing regulations or they're standing up to big government or some such. Of course, regulations don't cut jobs, but create jobs for the people who help corporations comply with them, and when they say they're "standing up to big government," just remember that government is you, so ultimately they're saying they're standing up to you. And they're so courageous about it that they won't even put it like that! So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject the pro-pollution, anti-climate "resolution of disapproval" aimed at killing good methane regulations.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to support SB 22, the anti-gerrymandering, fair redistricting bill, then MoveOn helps you do that. Currently the state legislature draws the state and Congressional districts, but the very first sentence of the MoveOn petition puts the problem with that quite succinctly: "(w)hen a politician wins an election, he or she is allowed to draw their own districts as a tactic to ensure their own re-election." If that doesn't smell like corruption to you, then I'm pretty sure you're noseblind. SB 22 would take redistricting power out of the legislature and give it to a specially-created five-member commission, consisting of the Majority and Minority Leaders in the House and Senate, plus one non-office holding Chairperson selected by the first four members. At the very least, you'll have gridlock -- and if you do wind up with gridlock, the state Supreme Court will get to break it according to established law and precedent, which more resembles how a civilized society would operate than our current system does.

Action: a slew of anti-science and pro-pollution bills, plus an ivory trade ban.

The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee still mulls H.R. 1430, the so-called Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017, and H.R. 1431, the so-called EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act of 2017. These bills would force the EPA to ignore peer review of research and would demand that all the EPA's science be "reproducible," though science coming from environmental disasters isn't reproducible, and "reproducible" science isn't automatically good science (since you can, for example, "reproduce" a bad study). But Nick Stockton at Wired reminds us that H.R. 1430 would allot a mere $1 million to comply with its aims -- which surely won't be enough to defend against an onslaught of corporate challenges! -- while H.R. 1431 would put corporate types on the EPA's Science Advisory Board, which smells of like corruption and corporate welfare. So you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to oppose these bills.

Meanwhile, if you missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the unholy trinity of bills that would cripple anti-bankster and anti-pollution regulations in America -- the REINS Act, the Midnight Rules Relief Act, and the so-called Regulatory Accountability Act -- you can still call them, or you can use this petition provided by Sign for Good. We always fight uphill when we defend regulations, partly because the right has pummeled their rhetorical hostage crisis ("don't regulate corporate behavior, or these jobs get it!") so hard it seems mainstream -- this, though regulations actually create jobs for the people who help achieve compliance with them, as you know. But it's also an uphill fight because folks don't really miss regulations until something bad happens in their neck of the woods. So it'd be perfectly all right to remind your Senators that tainted food recalls, burst pipelines, chemical explosions, and gas drilling accidents always make the news.

Meanwhile, Avaaz alerts us that more and more elephants come into this world without tusks, or with substantially smaller ones, to avoid the pain and death that comes with ivory poaching. Admittedly this has actually been happening for decades, yet we're less likely to see a world without elephant tusks by the end of our lives than a world without elephants, which scarcely bears contemplating if you've ever observed them mourn their dead or turn tree branches into flyswatters. And we don't build bridges and planes and cars with ivory -- we mainly make religious carvings with it, and though many folks around the world think fake ivory is sacrilegious, I'm more of the mind that God cares less about whether your Blessed Virgin statue is real ivory than about, you know, doing good works. Speaking of which, the world's largest importer of ivory, China, has pledged to ban its trade, so Avaaz helps you tell European nations to follow suit and ban ivory trading.

Action: protecting privacy, health care, and public lands.

H.R. 1313, the so-called Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act, would actually allow corporations to force their employees to get genetic testing, assess thousands of dollars in penalties if they don't, and see that information if the tests are part of a "workplace wellness" program. If that sounds to you like something that should be against the law (because it's your private info and doesn't predict your job performance, among other reasons), well, it already is -- the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, among other things, forbids employers from using genetic information in major employee-related decisions, and the EEOC issued new rules on May 17 of last year (just ahead of the six-month window a "resolution of disapproval" requires, you may notice) requiring that all workplace wellness programs be voluntary and forbidding employers from taking any negative action against employees who don't participate in them. So this is how dystopian genetic engineering schemes will arrive -- through loopholes demanded by corporations. I think you might want to tell your Reps and Senators to oppose this bill.

Meanwhile, the House Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce committees both passed the Republicans' Obamacare repeal package late last week; now it goes to the House Budget Committee. If you're feeling ambitious, here's a list of House Budget Committee members, but you'll still need at least one more click per member to get to their phone numbers; certainly, while you've got your Rep on the phone about H.R. 1313 you can instruct them to oppose the American Health Care Act, too. Some folks have taken to calling the American Health Care Act "Trumpcare" -- which seems to annoy the Trump Administration, but hey, if they don't like it, maybe they should stop calling the bill they're trying to repeal "Obamacare"! The Coalition on Human Needs has a better name for it, though: "Wealthcare," as in, "this bill cares more about giving wealthy people more tax cuts than about ensuring all Americans have access to decent health care." People love rhymes, but I bet the "liberal" media ignores it, since it might hurt the fee-fees of some of their corporate owners. But feel free to call it "Wealthcare" to your friends and family. They matter more than the "liberal" media anyhow.

Finally, after over a decade of activism from locals, the U.S. Forest Service is mulling withdrawing the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota from its mining permits schedule for the next two decades; if they do, big copper mining corporations wouldn't be able to pollute the water there, and thus they wouldn't be able to threaten not only the multitudinous wildlife species that live there (lynx, bear, moose, like that) but also the camping, hunting, fishing, and canoeing industries that thrive there. And support almost 20,000 jobs, I feel compelled to add for the benefit of those who think only mining creates jobs. Possibly when Sean Spicer said the "deep state" was out to get Donald Trump -- which, as Mike Lofgren reminds us, is an absurd proposition -- he meant the various officials in the federal government still working hard to be a good steward of our public lands and waters, rather than the servants of mammon Mr. Trump would no doubt prefer. Hence American Rivers helps you tell the Forest Service to protect the Boundary Waters area from copper mining.

Around the table: Paul Ryan is a dumb guy, and other truths.

Robert Levering describes "How Anti-Vietnam War Activists Stopped Violent Protest from Hijacking Their Movement." "(T)he primary way to deal with those who advocate violent tactics is to isolate them," he writes, "(to) do everything possible to separate them from the peaceful demonstration," because violent protestors need the cover of nonviolent protestors the way fire needs oxygen. Also, nonviolent movements need to "train() marshals" to "essentially be our own force of nonviolent peacekeepers." You just know the "liberal" media would rather talk about violent protestors than the vast, vast majority of nonviolent ones.

Like Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post, I'm tired of the media pretending Paul Ryan is a smart guy, when (as someone once said) he's a dumb guy's idea of a smart guy. He says "(t)he people who are healthy paying for the people who are sick" like that's not how insurance usually works (except the people who are sick are also paying for the people who are sick). And you and I and everyone you know will belong to both groups at different times in life. I was surprised to learn that Mr. Ryan is so terrible he even makes Tucker Carlson look good for a minute, though I'm sure that's exactly how they both intended it.

You've perhaps heard Sean Spicer declare that "the deep state" has it in for President Trump, but Mike Lofgren, the man who coined the phrase "the deep state," reminds us that Mr. Trump's actions thus far suggest that he and the deep state actually have the very same aims. It's more tax cuts for the rich, more freedom for banksters, and more war against the Middle East all down the line, even if "free" trade is gone (for now!). It's enough to make you think (as Mr. Lofgren says) that Mr. Trump could save Our Glorious Elites' political agenda "by masking it in a façade of fake populism and reality-TV stage management." Unless we step up with real populism, that is.

Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) alleges that President Obama is staying in D.C. to create a "shadow government," and then his office walks his comments back. Say obnoxious crap and then say you didn't really mean it -- well, that was the formula for getting attention in America, at least before Mr. Trump cut out the second step. But Mr. Kelly says so much obnoxious crap that some enterprising Democrat in his district could put together a greatest hits ad -- though let's learn from 2016 and not run only that ad, OK? Because if you want to hold public office, you have to do something.

Finally, we learn how the "Kalamazoo Promise" -- where a Michigan town pays 65 to 100% of your college tuition if you graduate from a Kalamazoo public school and meet certain other criteria -- has improved lives there. Lower dropout rates, higher college-completion rates, alleviated student loan debt, a rebounding population -- and yet some of the folks who've benefited the most still fret that other folks will find out they got help to go to school, when everyone gets help to do everything. Why, some of our richest Americans are completely dependent on Big Gummint, though they prefer you to think otherwise.

Penny Rants for Sunday, March 12, 2017: health care, the "liberal" media, and taxes.

Rep. Chaffetz (R-UT) has taken a lot of well-deserved hits for saying folks who worry about the cost of health care should just avoid buying that new iPhone, and not just because health care costs are absurdly high (getting your appendix out, without any of the follow-up care you'd need, could run you about 20 iPhones), or even because Mr. Chaffetz implies you should just "grow up" if you want more from your government than the back of its hand. Mr. Chaffetz advances the notion that you should "invest" in health care, but you don't literally invest in health care -- if you could save $200 monthly in an index fund paying 7% annually and reinvest your dividends annually, it'd still take you close to six years to pay off that appendix removal, and hopefully nothing else happens to you in the meantime! Also, you need health care when you need it, not when you can draw off your investments, and that's why insurance works: a large number of people pool their resources together so that a few of them can endure a catastrophe at a particular time. Why would Mr. Chaffetz want you to think you're in this on your own, I wonder?

We discussed Josmar Trujillo's article about the New York Daily News's latest defense of "broken windows" policing last week, but I wanted to discuss one more aspect of his piece, since it slices the Gourdian knot of how we should approach the media during the Trump years. Mr. Trujillo opens with this statement: "When President Donald Trump rails against the mainstream media, it might not make much sense to come to their defense...the problems with media powerhouses like CNN and the New York Times are well-documented, and preceded any of Trump’s Twitter storms." I've been uneasy about the quickness to which so many liberals have jumped to the media's defense lately, and that's even though the media have been doing a better job. But the problems with the "liberal" media -- too corporate, too sensationalist, too hostile to non-whites -- still remain, and won't go away overnight. So you approach the media under a President who calls them "the opposition party" like you approach anything else -- honestly, without worrying whether we should consider the media to be on "our side" because our jerk of a President is on the other side. Your side is the truth, not "whatever side isn't Trump."

Finally, Michael Hudson also had so many good things to say about Trumponomics in his Counterpunch interview earlier this month that I just didn't have space to get into Mr. Trump's opposition to deducting certain kinds of loan interest from your taxes. Long story short: Mr. Trump says he supports ending the practice, and doing so would put the brakes on the corporate raiders and unscrupulous landlords (ahem!) who seem to benefit the most from it -- but Congress would never do it, since their biggest donors are these same corporate raiders and unscrupulous landlords. And of course Mr. Trump knows that his opposition will come to nothing -- nothing, that is, except a PR weapon to use against Democrats on Election Day. Yet I find I don't want to get rid of all of those deductions -- I'd let folks continue to exempt student loan debt interest, I'd limit the mortgage interest deduction to mortgages of less than $300,000, and I wouldn't let folks take the deduction on more than one house plus one home equity loan. All of that would make being a landlord unattractive, but what a shame that would be.

Around the table: from corporate tax avoidance to Scott Pruitt's forked tongue.

In a completely shocking development, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds that, from 2008 to 2015, over half of Fortune 500 corporations paid, on average, a mere 21.2% in corporate taxes, despite the corporate tax rate being 35%. 18 of these corporations paid zero dollars in taxes during these years, with 100 more having at least one zero year and 24 having at least four, and no it can't possibly be because they hemorrhaged money over that time, since they're still around and still doing well (General Electric, Priceline, PG&E, ad nauseam). So that's what you say to your Trump-loving uncle when he complains about the corporate tax rate not being "competitive" enough.

President Trump reassures Republicans that if Obamacare repeal doesn't work out, he'll just keep blaming Democrats for Obamacare's failures, real and perceived. And this could work! Republicans take over government and deliberately run it badly precisely so people will think think government is naturally incompetent, and most folks don't fully understand that. Sure, one could reason that Trump votaries could stay home in 2018 because he didn't get rid of Obamacare, but reason can't compete with their bottomless, unquenchable, easily-stoked rage, and do you think Democrat smartypants weaklings will fight back?

Elizabeth Dexheimer at Bloomberg suggests that Congressional finance committees have been focusing on almost anything but gutting the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. Though the President may have more success doing that by himself, I hope she's right. But I can't help but imagine how easy it would be to thwart such pro-bankster efforts if we turned out for them the way we're turning out for the Affordable Care Act! And people aren't anywhere near as ambivalent about banksters as they are about the ACA.

Chris Morran at The Consumerist describes how Republicans have actually defended their efforts to repeal a 10% tax on tanning salons as part of their effort to destroy Obamacare. Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) actually suggested it'd make as much sense to tax the sun. It should be grotesquely easy to run ads against Republicans when they say things like that -- (insert name of House Rep) caters to tanning salons instead of listening to your concerns, etc. -- but then you remember Democrats would have to run such ads, and that'll never happen, since it's hard to drop the words "innovative" and "entrepreneur" into them. (Please, don't anyone take that as a challenge.)

Marshall Allen at ProPublica finds one reason for skyrocketing health care expenses: "all the perfectly good stuff hospitals throw away." These include disposable instruments discarded unused because they entered a surgeon's sterile field; supplies dedicated to particular patients that get thrown out once patients leave; supplies that get thrown out when a hospital upgrades models or changes vendors; supplies that have outlasted their expiration dates but remain unopened and usable. It's not a large percentage of health care waste, but it's still pretty annoying -- and, sadly, it ain't just third-world hospitals that would be happy to have the stuff, but American rural hospitals, too.

Finally, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt says he doesn't think carbon dioxide is an "important" contributor to climate change. But the fact that he's dead wrong about that isn't as important as the fact that he said exactly the opposite to the Senate during his confirmation hearings -- meaning that he knew what Senators wanted to hear, said it, and then went back to saying whatever he wanted afterward. Folks who are capable of that should be nowhere near the levers of power in America.

Action: fighting banksters and bad law-and-order policy.

The Department of Labor has proposed delaying the implementation of the Obama-era "fiduciary responsibility" rule, which mandates that retirement fund advisors put their customers' interests before their own. You'd think those advisors would already have to do that, but the Obama Administration had to issue a rule telling them to do it -- and here comes the Trump Administration to get rid of it, because REGULASHUNZ BAD!!!!! Other haters claim that making pension fund advisors do their job according to the values of a civilized society will reduce the number of retirement investment advisors, but you'd think right-wingers would have faith in the ability of these advisors to adapt to having to think about what's best for someone other than themselves. Luckily, the Department of Labor must, by law, take public comments about the issue before moving forward with it, so Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell the Labor Department to implement the retirement fund rule without delay, as anyone with any Goddamn common sense would do.

Meanwhile, Josmar Trujillo at FAIR catches the New York Daily News editorial board declaring that "broken windows" policing absolutely positively works and if it leads to deportations of undocumented immigrants, then "too bad." You might well be thinking that "broken windows" policing -- which holds that if you aggressively go after"quality of life" crimes (like broken windows), you'll also hold down more serious crimes -- sounds about as scientific as the notion that tax cuts for the rich will trickle down to everyone else, and if you are thinking that, well, the data compiled over two decades doesn't exactly refute you. Mr. Trujillo argues his points extraordinarily well; even when he concedes that the Daily News hasn't been monolithically pro-"broken windows" policing over the years, of course that fact only makes their recent aggressive defense thereof more mind-boggling. The link above will help you contact the Daily News and ask that they provide some evidence that "broken windows" policing actually works.

Action: school vouchers nay, cheaper medicines yea, and birth control coverage yea.

H.R. 610 has been under consideration by the House Education and Workforce Committee since late January, and I hope it stays there indefinitely, since it's a truly vile piece of dung that would institute a national voucher program in public schools, condition receipt of federal money upon institution of these programs, and (because hey, we've still got some teeth left!) repeals USDA nutrition standards for public schoolkids. Naturally, President Trump and his Barely Education Secretary, Ms. DeVos, are also voucher proponents. But vouchers don't work -- they don't guarantee admission to private schools, they don't guarantee students can even afford private schools, and oversight of these private schools is typically so lax you might think school vouchers is literally a racket, an impression reinforced when you remember that the far right largely manufactured the whole "public schools are failing" narrative to begin with. I think it's perfectly OK to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject any attempt to funnel even more taxpayer money toward private schools.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1245/S. 469, the Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Importation Act, would, as the title suggests, allow Americans to get cheaper prescription drugs from abroad, first from Canada, and then from other nations if they meet certain standards. You get basically the same drugs in Canada you get here, but they're cheaper up there, because Canada negotiates drug prices on behalf of its citizens, unlike Medicare, which our law forbids from doing so; recall that Brian Schweitzer damn near pulled off an upset in the 2000 Montana Senate race by busing seniors north of the border to get medicine. You may notice that Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) has gotten on board with this bill, after infamously shooting down the last attempt at importing prescription drugs from Canada by claiming that they don't meet American drug safety standards (though, as I said, they're basically the same damn drugs!). And in case you were wondering, the bill would also impose stiff penalties for those who'd use online pharmacies to cheat consumers. So when you call your Reps and Senators to urge them to oppose school vouchers (see above paragraph), urge them to support the Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Act, too.

Finally, new HHS Secretary Tom Price is (among so many other things!) vehemently opposed to the no-cost birth control coverage mandated by the Affordable Care Act, so the National Women's Law Center helps you tell Secretary Price to preserve the birth control coverage mandate so it can benefit women of all economic means. That birth control has become such a political football is one of the more disgusting developments of the last five years, and I blame all of it on right-wing swordfighting, where one right-winger "I oppose abortion" and another right-winger tries to one-up him by saying "Yeah, well, suck on this -- I oppose birth control!" Why should such hysterics should get all the say about everything? Of course, hysterics often try to sound rational -- Mr. Price, for example, claims that birth control is already affordable for everyone, which is only true in the sense that most bills are affordable when you take them one by one, but not when you take them in toto, which is, after all, how people actually budget.

Around the table: the "liberal" media rehabilitates another villain, and other sad tales.

And it begins: major media outlets (even The Guardian, WTF?) are starting to remember George W. Bush a lot better than he deserves. I wouldn't blame you if you decided this is exactly the purpose of a President Donald Trump: to make an unregenerate opponent of civilization like George W. Bush look good. Presumably they'll be able to do the same for President Trump, once President Rabid Raccoon takes over.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions cites unnamed "expert" testimony that "there's violence around marijuana than one would think." It's not just that of course the Anti-Knowledge Administration listens to "experts" when they tell them what they want to hear, it's also that right-wingers have been pushing this tired trope ever since President Nixon decided that casting all hippies and civil rights protestors as drug addicts was the only way to fight them.

Please ignore all reports of "revolt" within the Republican camp over the Obamacare repeal bill. As always, this is not only theatre, but bad theatre. When it's time to do the deed, Republican leadership will excise the part defunding Planned Parenthood in order to appease Sens. Murkowski and Collins, and of course they'll allow folks like Justin Amash and Rand Paul to vote their "consciences," but the rest will do what they're told, likely without even being threatened. Of course, if we get all up in their grills again, that could change.

Here's some news you could use: an email phishing scam tricks you -- with a near-perfect replica of Google's login page -- into giving up your gmail password, and then ransacks your contacts for more addresses so it can steal more passwords. The clue, however, is in the address bar -- if it doesn't begin with "http://," it's a fake. The address bar in this particular scam begins "data:text/html." Always so much deflection and misdirection with scam artists! It's almost like there's a civics lesson in there somewhere.

Finally, President Trump cites fake terror plots in order to justify his Muslim Ban 2.0. No, he's not citing the "Bowling Green Massacre," but two-count-'em-two FBI sting operations resulting in convictions only after the FBI egged them on for months on end and gave them virtually everything they would have needed to carry out the attacks! Then he talks about hundreds of refugees being investigated, as if investigations equal convictions.

Action: free speech, health care, and the Muslim Ban 2.0.

It begins again: North Carolina state Reps. John Torbett and John Faircloth have introduced HB 249, which would, dig this, create a brand new class of "violent terrorists" called "economic terrorists." And what is an "economic terrorist," according to HB 249? Someone who "willfully and maliciously or with reckless disregard commits a criminal offense that impedes or disrupts the regular course of business, the disruption results in damages of more than one thousand dollars." They want you to think that just means violent protestors who break windows, but really it could describe anyone who stands in the street in front of a business with a sign! Think an unscrupulous person couldn't concoct $1,000 in damages from that? Republicans control the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and almost two out of every three state legislatures, and they're still so afraid of the people that they're constantly trying to criminalize our protests! They'd have fewer protestors if they didn't do so much evil. Really, that's all it would take. Mr. Torbett's phone number is 919.733.5868, and Mr. Fairlcloth's number is 919.733.5877.

Meanwhile, the House has released its Obamacare repeal bill, and now we know why they put it together in secret. As I suspected, the bill gets rid of the individual mandate and all the taxes levied against the well-off while keeping the pre-existing ban around, while also fooling around with Obamacare subsidies so poor people have less access to insurance, repealing the Medicaid expansion and then capping total federal spending on Medicaid, and in place of the mandate's tax, we'll have 30% premium hikes for folks who have a gap in health insurance coverage, which essentially means you'll be paying the mandate to the insurance industry rather than our government. Ultimately, the bill represents a whole bunch of tax cuts for the rich -- and just guess which funding mechanism from Obamacare the Republican plan keeps? That's right, the "Cadillac" tax, the only one that might actually hurt working people! The bill would delay its implementation five more years, but where is their zeal to protect working families from TEH TAXEZ!!! Republicans will (surprise!) rush these votes through House Committees, so use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators.

Finally, the Trump Administration has issued a new immigration-related executive order, i.e., "Muslim Ban 2.0," and while you'll find some cosmetic changes from the ill-fated first order struck down by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, you'll still sniff that faint animus against Muslims that seems to animate every foreign policy decision Mr. Trump makes, as the 120-day ban on refugee resettlement is back, even if the "indefinite" ban on Syrian refugees is not. And now, instead of seven majority-Muslim nations on his little Enemies List, he's got six, having excised Iraq. Maybe Mr. Trump's exemption of current visa holders and his excision of parts prioritizing "refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution" will get him past the courts this time, but the court of public opinion, well-shaped by the President's own multitudinous pronouncements against races and religions he does not like, may not be so easily-swayed. In any case, the ACLU helps you tell your Senators to condemn this latest Muslim ban.

Action: EPA funding, consumer protection, and yet another "bathroom bill."

You've no doubt heard that President Trump's budget proposal would slash funding for just about anything good our government does, and now you can add "EPA funding" to that list, as Mr. Trump apparently plans to cut EPA staffing by a fifth in his first year and cutting overall funding by about a quarter. And his cuts include Energy Efficiency programs, Environmental Education and Environmental Justice grants, and other grants that help states and regions enforce environmental standards. Those poor, poor fossil fuel corporations, constantly under siege by the big, bad old EPA! That's the picture Donald Trump paints, and it's a ludicrous one -- fossil fuel corporations aren't in any danger of going down as long as our government hands out public lands for them to plunder, and Big Gummint EPA helps keep our air and our water clean on our behalf. And they're already understaffed and underfunded, so cutting these further would only put more lead in our water and more cancer-causing chemicals in our air. It'd also make certain CEOs richer, which I'm pretty sure is all Mr. Trump really cares about. So use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Reps and Senators, and tell them you don't want EPA funding cut, but expanded.

Continuing along this theme, PennPIRG helps you tell your Senators to reject any attempt to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It's appalling that you tell right-wingers about the $12 billion the CFPB has won back for consumers from banksters so far, or their rules restricting payday lenders' ability to trap folks in a cycle of debt forever, or their work exposing the Wells Fargo fake account scandal that Congressfolk from both parties condemned, and the only answer you get is TEH REGULASHUNZ ARE KILLINGZ TEH JOBZ!!!!! Why "job creation" should ever depend on a financial predator's ability to rip off as many consumers is possible is something the right should try to explain. But, as PennPIRG's email missive reminds us, "(b)eing able to save, invest and manage your money without fear of being ripped off isn't some wildly controversial idea -- it's a hallmark of a civilized society." Which must by why eminently uncivilized Republicans -- including their standard-bearer, Donald Trump -- are so hot to destroy it. But they don't get all the say around here.

Finally, today a Tennessee state House subcommittee plans to consider HB 888, yet another "bathroom bill" that would force transgendered students to use the restroom of their birth gender rather than the gender they're actually living. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee legislators to reject HB 888, and thus protect the rights of transgendered students. Why bother with these "bathroom bills"? It can't really be out of a sense that transgendered students will molest children, because no right-winger has ever backed up such an argument with anything other than fear and emotional manipulation. So if "protecting children" isn't the point of "bathroom bills," what is? Ginning up rage from right-wingers so they'll vote against their interests, that's what. And I bet most right-wingers don't even hate transgendered folks, but they support these bills because they hate liberals and would do almost anything to piss liberals off. But that's not really better, because their hate won't make liberals suffer, but it sure will make transgendered kids suffer.

Around the table: more "liberal" media conflict-of-interest non-disclosure, plus at least two bad ideas from our Senate.

Ho hum, Comcast-owned media outlet runs positive article about app literally hours after Comcast sinks half a billion dollars into said app, without disclosing this fact. That's yet another good argument against corporations owning other corporations! Also, too, why are we covering corporate valuations like they're sporting events? Even if you're not actually invested in Snapchat (and your pension fund might be!), you might still be affected by its stock crashing, and more so than by your football team losing.

Sen. Shelby (R-AL) suggests Republicans might be able to get big chunks of Dodd-Frank reform repealed through budget reconciliation. And all the right-wingers who squealed like pigs when Democrats used reconciliation to pass Obamacare rose at once and shouted Sen. Shelby down! I kid, of course. And, ah, there might be a reason Congress hasn't foregrounded these pro-bankster efforts, while ensuring Obamacare repeal takes up all the oxygen in the room. (That reason would be "because the people would hate them.")

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) suggests Democrats might be willing to shut down our government if Republicans won't help them get to the bottom of President Trump's Russian ties. Jesus Mary and Joseph that is one of the stupidest things Democrats could possibly do. I can think of far, far better reasons to allow a government shutdown, and certainly I'd never allow it over something that would never have happened if Democrats were really the party of the people -- not to mention something that damages Mr. Trump more by the minute.

Here's something that almost escaped my notice: Sanderson Farms has begun to run ads suggesting that those corporations who are cutting out antibiotics from their chickens are merely indulging in a "marketing gimmick" that is "just a trick to get you to pay more money." And if antibiotic abuse really does bring about a world where the next cut you get can kill you again, there may not be many of us left to tell Sanderson Farms "I told you so." But I bet they'll still be around, feeling no shame over their enabling of civilization's destruction.

Finally, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wants to pass a law mandating that all Presidential candidates for 2020 release their tax returns. He says that would include Mr. Trump "if" he runs for re-election, but surely Mr. Graham knows that Mr. Trump has already filed re-election papers with the FEC, which I guess raises the possibility that his team would regard such a law as a sort of "bill of attainder" for Mr. Trump, which of course the Constitution prohibits. I'm sure Mr. Graham knows that, too, which makes all of this yet more bad theatre from the Republicans.

Action: pro-pollution bills, fairer redistricting, and Breitbart advertisers.

As you know, the House has passed three bills their supporters describe as "anti-smothering big government regulation" but which might more accurately be described as anti-safety, anti-science, pro-greed, and pro-pollution: the so-called Regulatory Accountability Act, the so-called Midnight Rules Relief Act, and the REINS Act, all of which would make it well-nigh impossible for Executive branch agencies to issue regulations to meet legislative ends, as many, many Congressional laws mandate that they do. Of course that's a legal hurdle not even a Justice Gorsuch could ignore, but why should we wait for that? You can use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Senators and tell them to oppose all three bills. Mention them by name, and remind them that these bills will make our air and water dirtier and let financial predators take more of our money. And remember: saying so is nothing like Tea Party whining about "death panels," because the "death panels" story was fiction, whereas dirtier air and water and more financial predation are real worries.

Meanwhile, closer to home, a group of Pennsylvania state Senators have introduced SB 22, which would make redistricting of state and Congressional districts a lot fairer in Pennsylvania, and Rep. Samuelson (D-135) is apparently readying a companion bill for the House's consideration, so Common Cause helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Rep to support the effort to get state districts drawn more fairly. SB 22 would, as you know, take responsibility for drawing districts out of the legislature's hands -- the temptation to redraw legislative districts to benefit particular legislators or groups of legislators being particularly strong, and having fairly dire consequences for the popular will -- and put it in the hands of a five-member commission, consisting of Senate and House Majority and Minority leaders and a fifth, non-partisan Chair selected by the other four. Putting one party or the other in charge of redistricting tends to subvert the popular will, and the public can certainly make their will more apparent on Election Day in more evenly-drawn districts.

Finally, Pastor Horace McMillon has begun a petition on Organizefor.org which helps you tell Renault-Nissan Alliance to stop running ads with Breitbart. Hundreds of entities have decided to stop advertising on Breitbart's "news" site, but Nissan hasn't; corporations typically say they want to reach potential customers, and to do that you have to go where the eyeballs are going. But I say corporations have a moral duty to shame those organizations that deserve it, and shame the eyeballs that seek out those organizations. I'm also skeptical that Breitbart is really Where All the Cool Kids Are Now. Their man in the White House only got 46% of the vote, after all, and though he gets to do a lot of damage over the next four years as if he got 66%, I think the "liberal" media has overplayed the "ascendance" of the racist right in this country. Of course the racist right would disagree (and if they could stop "disagreeing" by spraying swastikas everywhere, that'd be nice), but they always vote for the Republican Presidential candidate, whether he keeps his racism to himself or not.

Penny Rants for Sunday, March 5, 2017: losing Democrat strategies, and losing tax cut plans.

You may have heard that Democrats think they have a shot at picking up Tom Price's old House seat in an April special election, because voters there only went for Mr. Trump by a 48-47 margin. But apparently Republicans are running ads compiling social media videos the 30-year-old Democratic candidate has made, thinking they'll embarrass him. This may work, and then again it may not -- it's 30 seconds too long, it makes an obscure and probably inaccurate point, and why would Georgia 6th District's voters find Mr. Ossoff making fun of spoiled rich girls in our nation's capitol a bad thing? But this strategy's effectiveness will be short lived in any case, since even Republicans will run out of old-people candidates one day. I think the two more damaging pieces of news are a) that Mr. Ossoff has raised $2 million already (because money is everything, and ideas are nothing!) and b) that two Hollywood actresses (neither a superstar, but neither a has-been) have endorsed him (presumably Mr. Ossoff's opponent will run that ad closer to Election Day). So this still looks like the Democrat formula of raising boatloads of money and creating celebrity "buzz" for uninspiring candidates, the same formula that just brought us our present disaster.

Economist Michael Hudson explains how the Trump tax cut plan is based on myth. "The more you compress the tax rates" (that is, make them flatter so everyone pays more or less the same rate) "the more you un-tax where the income is really made," i.e., by the rich, whose share of income growth under the Obama Administration was approximately all of it. Also, income doesn't "trickle down" from the rich, precisely because they don't spend their extra money but lend it, which creates more debt for the rest of us -- and which makes complete sense once you consider that someone who makes 100 times what you make doesn't need 100 times the calories or 100 times the living space, nor do they spend 100 times what you spend on a cheeseburger. And it doesn't get said enough, but whatever working families get from tax cuts they'll lose in the social services that get cut or privatized -- and that doesn't necessarily mean food stamps or welfare, but education and health care. Plus, at the risk of piling on, most rich folks don't make their money working, but off of capital gains -- and this tax, of course, is the one all politicians, regardless of party, have the biggest hard-on for cutting. End result: "a vast sucking of income and wealth upward."

Around the table: the newest email scandal! And other tales.

Uh oh: while Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence used his AOL account. to conduct state business, and that account got hacked at least once (to run that old we're-stranded-send-money scam, no less!). And right-wingers are coming down just as hard on him as they did on Mrs. Clinton! I kid, of course -- we're more likely to see squealing that Indiana laws are different, or that previous Indiana governors did the same thing, though neither is a standard you'd use to select a President or Vice President.

The incomparable David Dayen informs us that Trump crony "regulatory advisor" Carl Icahn gets President Trump to draft an executive order that would force gasoline wholesalers, not oil refiners, assure that gasoline meets the 15% renewable energy standard. Why is this important? Because Mr. Icahn just so happens to own an oil refinery that can't blend ethanol, meaning his refinery has to buy renewable fuel credits to the tune of over $200 million last year. In the words of one industry analyst, "this is no deal for anyone but Carl Icahn." Greed and selfishness: they're what the Trump Administration is all about.

Surprise, surprise, the Keystone XL pipeline will not have to build with American steel like other pipelines will per a Trump executive order, because the Keystone XL pipeline isn't a "new" project, having been first proposed over eight years ago. If Mr. Obama put out that excuse, right-wingers would call him an egghead, but Mr. Trump did it, so they'll laud his cleverness in "sticking it to the man." Right-wingers never realize that they're "the man" their heroes stick it to.

Lily Hay Newman at Wired explains how "Medical Devices are the Next Security Nightmare." More and more implantable medical devices can be tweaked over wi-fi, which is a big improvement over needing another surgery, unless a hacker gets ahold of it. The only slightly less awful news is that the outdated computer software hospitals use (a few hospitals still use Windows XP, for which Microsoft no longer even makes security patches) is the more likely target.

Samsung is sending out Dish network techs to fix washing machines. The corporation says it notifies customers they'll get a Dish tech, and assures us that their Dish techs know what they're doing, but, ah, they don't always, plus they occasionally try to sell you a Dish network subscription. What on Earth would be the harm in, you know, hiring washing machine technicians in an economy with a U6 unemployment rate still above 9%? Oh, I forgot -- doing that doesn't get the CEO his 19th vacation home.

Finally, the good people of Kansas achieve a victory, of sorts, when their state legislature votes to rescind all of Sam Brownback's tax-cuts-for-the-rich since 2010. Sadly, Mr. Brownback, who's somehow still Governor, vetoed the bill and only the legislature's lower house overrode the veto. Still, I hope they try again. But I also hope that when Mr. Brownback leaves office his name is synonymous with "failure" -- and that the whole concept of "trickle-down economics" soils the name of anyone who supports it.

Action: health care, junk food, and wasted food.

Republicans have apparently produced an Obamacare repeal bill, but seem a bit timid about actually showing it to anyone. First they showed the bill only to Republican House members in a room guarded by Capitol police, preventing any of them from leaving with a copy of it; then they turned Sen. Paul (R-KY) away when he showed up with a copy machine, then they told Rep. Tonko (D-NY) that the bill wasn't in the room, then Ways and Means Chair Kevin Brady (R-TX) exited the room professing no knowledge of the bill's whereabouts, and then a group of Democratic Reps showed up and searched the room, to no avail. Needless to say, this isn't a good look for Republicans, but as I've also suggested before, failure and incompetence are like fuel to these guys, so I wouldn't be surprised if they "find" their Obamacare repeal bill very shortly and have a vote on it very quickly. Nothing prevents you from calling your House Reps (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page) and demanding that the public get to see this bill before they vote upon it. Really, it's our government, so it's not so much to ask.

Moms Rising helps you tell Walgreen's to get the junk food out of its checkout lines. You know how that works: big supermarket and drugstore chains put items in the checkout line you're more likely to buy on impulse -- since, you know, you're already so close to getting out of there! -- and if you've got your children with you, they're likely to want whatever's there, too, and it almost certainly will be something like candy bars or soda that ain't good for them, and they'll almost certainly be less able to resist it than you will. And while supermarkets can afford to appear non-judgmental about such things, what does it say for a drug store that they're putting junk food in front of you as you're getting ready to go? Your inner Libertarian may well be asking what's the big deal? If enough people want it, the market will provide it! That's rubbish, of course -- markets thrive on giving you what they want and convincing you that you want it -- but certainly the market will never know what we want unless we speak out.

Meanwhile, Environmental Action helps you tell Target to cut down on the amount of food it throws away for cosmetic reasons. Not too many years ago, big food retailers routinely threw out produce that didn't "look perfect," to the point that they threw out 10 percent of all food produced in America -- and if you've ever picked through the tomatoes to find the "best" ones, you know why they do it! But food that doesn't "look perfect" is still nutritious, and the thrown-out food in our landfills produces about a quarter of all methane emissions in America -- and, as you know, methane emissions pack a big climate change punch. Thanks in part to agitation from consumers like you, the big grocery corporations are starting to rethink their policy toward less-than-perfect-looking produce, but Target isn't one of them, and though Target probably will never be as big a player as WalMart on the grocery scene, a lot of folks still go there -- which means Target's in a position to do a lot of good, if it chooses. So let's help them choose wisely.

Around the table: the Continued Amazing Adventures of the Citizen Legislator! And other absurdities.

Attorney General Sessions may have committed perjury when answering questions about any contacts with Russia that he might have had, but the "liberal" media spins the story to his benefit. I sure hope all those right-wingers who demanded Mr. Clinton's impeachment because he lied under oath will be just as outraged when they find that Mr. Sessions has done the same thing. I kid, of course -- the rationalizations should be quite irritating. In the meantime, note well Mr. Naureckas's point that the internet hasn't destroyed traditional media organs (at least the big ones!) but has broadened their reach.

Priorities USA gives advice -- some good, some bad -- to Democrats looking to stop President Trump's economic plans. Their assessment that calling tax-cuts-for-the-rich a wealth redistribution scheme doesn't work is quite irritating, but pounding the "border tax" as a middle-class tax hike is a particularly good idea, not least because it's true, and "highlighting companies...that are proceeding with plans to send jobs to Mexico" is an even better one, not so much because it's true but that it'll send Mr. Trump into a tantrum.

From the "Not All Clickbait is Bad" file: Nithin Coca at Shareable gives us "Five (More) Reasons to Delete Uber" and offers "Some Ethical Alternatives." You won't be surprised by the five reasons (Uber "breaks laws," "strong-arms cities," "competes unfairly," "doesn't take safety seriously," and "exploits drivers"), but you may need to be reminded of the alternatives, which encompass not only cab-hailing apps and public transportation, but also certain taxi co-ops (not that they're everywhere yet).

If you're still convinced that privatization of public services is the way to go, Dave Johnson at the OurFuture blog provides a handy primer about privatization's multitudinous harms. This is the phrase that snuck up on me: "the people would make a public investment and share gains from that investment." "Share" is a powerful word in this context, and not just because the "sharing" economy is such horsedoodle, but because privatization cripples our ability to "share" in the "gains." Oh, and Mr. Trump wants to privatize the VA; we'll stay on that.

Uh oh: the office of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the man who still gives the "Citizen Legislator" a bad name, sends a cease-and-desist letter to Milwaukee resident Earl Good after Mr. Good calls Sen. Johnson's Washington office hundreds of times to express his will. OK, I'd have called the local offices a lot more quickly than that, but what Mr. Good did hardly "cross(es) the bounds of decency," and the notion that "the well being of visitors to the office and staff" is their main concern in sending the letter, well, that is to laugh.

Finally, some good news: after a massive outcry from the citizenry, Arizona's House Speaker has decided not to move the nefarious SB 1142, the so-called "Plan a Protest, Lose Your House" bill, which would have used racketeering laws to attack protestors. I didn't emphasize this enough on Monday, so I'll do it now: calling us "paid protestors" is an attack not just on our ideas, but our patriotism. We do what we do because we love our country, and don't let anyone tell you any differently.

Around the table: everything old is new again, again.

So you've seen all those headlines about the "Confederate flag-waving couple" who got 33 years in prison? Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us -- as "liberal" media headlines somehow don't! -- that they were also waving a shotgun at black folks. Which might explain the longer sentence a little better! Personal to the folks who say ONLY READINGZ TEH HEADLINEZ IZ TEH STUPIDZ!!!!: you're telling me you read every single story for which you see a headline?

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) pushes natural gas as a climate change solution at townhall meetings. Methane emissions, as you know, are a fairly persistent side effect of fracking, and pack a climate change punch much larger than even coal emissions, and I just can't imagine how Mr. Cassidy will vote on H.J.Res. 36, the "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify BLM rules limiting methane emissions from gas drilling on public lands.

Ho hum, the IRS is hemorrhaging experienced criminal investigators, though tax cheats still work around the clock. One could reasonably ask whether the IRS investigates too many cases that aren't directly related to tax fraud, but the main culprit here, of course, is Republican budget-cutting and Republican-engineered dramas about IRS investigation of right-wing groups. If you want to get all "law and order," you should maybe start with the tax cheats that steal from all of us.

President Trump's new National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, apparently rather dislikes using the term "radical Islamic terrorism," unlike his boss and millions of whining right-wingers. Because, he says, being a terrorist is "un-Islamic," rather like it's also un-Christian and un-any other religion you can name. And how many times must I tell these pimps! Demanding that everyone use the term "radical Islamic terrorism" is the very soul of political correctness!

Finally, about the President's address to Congress Tuesday night: let's not give the man so much credit for deciding that pretending you care is a better stratagem than constantly acting like a prick -- and let's also consider whether this "Presidential" persona will merely enable his votaries to label his prick-nature "fake news." And, really, Donald Trump telling someone else to cut it out with the "trivial fights"? That's Bush Mobb-level chutzpah, right there.

Action: internet freedom, fair redistricting, and fuel economy.

The FCC's Open Internet order -- the one that finally enthroned net neutrality as a guiding principle of our internet, the principle that ensures that you, and not some corporation, get to decide where you want to go on the internet -- is a little over two years old now. But incoming FCC Chair Ajit Pai has not hid his jones for getting rid of it. He says he favors a free and open internet, but that's only because he knows better than to say "I want an internet where corporations get to feed you half a dozen items of junk news as pop-up ads so you'll have to wait five minutes to see the page you want to see!" And some folks still say any government intervention in anything equals tyranny and oppression, but of course, the government is our government, and is supposed to work for us, and government intervention has actually been known to increase freedom -- and for more people than just a Congressperson's big donors! The FCC's phone number is, of course, 1.888.CALL.FCC; I don't have a direct number for Mr. Pai, possibly because he really doesn't want to hear from you. Call anyway. We don't get anything from our "leaders" unless we demand it.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania state Senators Boscola (D-18) and Scavello (R-40) have introduced SB 22, which would amend the state constitution to abolish the practice of state legislatures redrawing districts every 10 years, and instead give that task to a five-member commission, four of whom would be the Majority and Minority party leaders in each house, while the fifth of whom would be a non-office holder and commission Chair selected by the other four (or by the state Supreme Court if the four can't agree on a suitable Chair). From here we have a fighting chance (and all I want is a fighting chance!) to get competitive legislative districts where politicians might actually have to serve their constituents to get re-elected, rather than a situation where incumbents can't be dethroned except in case of electoral catastrophe, and we don't want the kind of situation that causes an electoral catastrophe. And who likes the kind of gerrymandering that puts narcissists in power? No one -- except the narcissists who happen to have the power. Hence Common Cause helps you tell your PA state legislator to support SB 22, and thus support fair redistricting in Pennsylvania.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk and the EPA not to scuttle hard-won fuel economy standards enacted by the Obama Administration, then Consumers Union still helps you do that. Any right-winger who tells you that regulations mandating that cars get better gas mileage are "a burden on working families" really deserves a punch in the nose -- the Obama fuel economy standards ensure that working families pay less for gas than they did before, and no one thinks it's a "burden" to pay less for gas. I suppose right-wingers will also claim that TEH REGULASHUNZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!!!, but the next time they actually try to prove that claim will be the first. We know that regulations actually create jobs, not only for the people who have to (in this example) design more fuel-efficient cars, but also for the people who have to manufacture them. The only people who get "hurt" are the executives who can't redistribute worker wealth upward to themselves more easily. But they don't get all the say around here.