Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: health care, big pharma, bad bosses, free speech, and a paranoid EPA head.

House schedules hearings on the Children's Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) three days after it expires. Most (but not all) states have not used up their CHIP funding, but it still should be grotesquely easy to run ads against Republicans -- they tried to take your health care away, and became so obsessed with taking your health care away that they they allowed your kids' health insurance to expire! Of course, the fact that it'll beat Republicans everywhere in America is, I suspect, the very reason Democrats won't do it.

Washington state files suit against Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin (a.k.a. "hillbilly heroin"), saying that Purdue essentially ran "an uncontrolled experiment on the American public" by marketing the opioid without being able to prove that it worked as a painkiller. Of course, this also marks a failure on the part of federal regulators, though the FDA's failure pales next to the sheer chutzpah of Purdue, which actually told the FDA not to approve generic versions of Oxy because it wasn't safe.

I questioned whether Hugh Hefner had a positive influence on American culture even when you set aside his objectification of women, but let the record show that Mr. Hefner was also an extraordinarily exploitative boss, and mainly of his female bunnies. He made them pay for their costumes even though drunk men were constantly going at them (particularly at their bunny tails), plus he gobbled up 50 percent of their tips and garnished more than that in a complicated "demerit" system wherein bunnies lost wages for "bad make-up" or eating on the job -- and that's before we get to the, ah, difficult work of pretending to be nice to drunk men.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech at Georgetown University Law School about freedom of speech, but someone -- maybe our Attorney General, maybe the school -- decided to disinvite a group of law school students planning to protest the event. It should be tough to convince large numbers of people that law school students were merely trying to be "disruptive," but the First Amendment doesn't protect you from other people disrupting your speech, and just imagine the whining from the right if something similar had happened at, say, an Eric Holder speech on the topic.

We've been learning about the kinds of things EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt likes to spend taxpayer money on, even as he's trying to cut the EPA budget, but I wasn't prepared to learn that, aside from private flights and a security detail that would make a movie star jealous, he wants to spend $25,000 on a soundproof phone booth in which he can make calls. That's right, Scott Pruitt doesn't even want his own co-workers to listen in on his phone calls to big corporate sugar daddies, so he wants a cone of silence. We can only hope it works exactly as well as this one.

Action: concerning monopolies, credit, clean water, and fair redistricting.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to reject the proposed AT&T/Time Warner merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. AT&T wouldn't be buying Time Warner's cable TV apparatus -- Charter bought that last year, after Comcast bid for it and then withdrew their bid under massive popular pressure. AT&T would be buying Time Warner's entertainment and news holdings, including CNN, HBO, and Warner Brothers, and while a pedant would tell us that AT&T's business is in delivering content and Time Warner's business is in producing content and therefore there's no monopoly possible, we of course know better, particularly if we recall that blocking such mergers if their "effect...may be substantially to lessen competition" has legal precedent in American law. We also know better, I'd hope, to think that an AT&T/Time Warner merger would "create jobs." Our opponents rarely say it anymore, which is an indication that most Americans do know better.

Meanwhile, CREDO also helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1816, the Freedom from Equifax Exploitation Act, which would give consumers more tools to fight data breaches. The FREE Act (hey, at least it's not a completely tortured acronym) would require credit reporting corporations to provide credit freezes for free, would block corporations from selling your personal information when you have a freeze on your account, and would mandate an additional free credit check for those folks who used their annual free credit check before the Equifax breach. The bill would also refund folks who wound up paying for a credit freeze after the Equifax breach became known; a lot of people, I suspect, panicked and paid for credit freezes, which smells of the kind of corporate exploitation that too many folks call "the free market in action." But conservatives who extolled the virtues of the "free market" in the Reagan years didn't approve of such exploitation, and neither should we.

In other news, the Bureau of Land Management, scarcely two years after enacting regulations that protect clean water from hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. "fracking") on public lands, now wants to repeal those rules, which, like, sigh. Fracking didn't suddenly become safe over the last two years; so what do you suppose happened? Oh, right -- we elected a President who literally doesn't care about anything but money. Oh, and we also elected a President who seeks to completely erase President Obama from American history by undoing all of his works, even those (like the BLM's fracking rules) that didn't go nearly as far as we wanted, but went further toward protecting us than before. But there's no reason for good Americans to be held hostage to President Trump's insatiable thirst for drama; hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect us from pollution by abandoning its effort to repeal the fracking regulations it passed in 2015.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislator to pass HB 722/SB 22, which would create an independent commission that would redraw legislative districts more fairly then self-interested legislators tend to do, then Fair Districts PA still helps you do that. HB 722/SB 22, as you recall, has actual bipartisan support in the state legislature, but the relevant committee heads are sitting on the bill and refusing to hold hearings on it, despite their popularity (and despite the feedback they're getting from their constituents). This is America, though, so they can be so ignorant of the popular will for only so long, and now wouldn't be a bad time to start pressuring our legislators again, if for no other reason than that the relevant committee heads can get pressured by their colleagues as well as their constituents. It's a shame it's come to that, but I'm not too proud to use the whatever levers of power are available to me as a citizen.

Around the table: in which we are reminded of who the real weaklings and losers are in America.

Former Republican reminds us that "There is No Free Speech Crisis on Campus" -- only opportunistic right-wingers who were uninterested in going to Berkeley a year ago, until they realized they might get unearned attention for attracting protestors. Meanwhile, Adam Serwer at The Atlantic reminds us that too many on the right "insist() those on the left are sensitive snowflakes who cannot sustain a dissenting view," but "simultaneously angrily demand() that the state and society sanction the left for the expression of political views it finds distasteful." In other words, right-wingers are weaklings. It really can't be said enough.

Adam Johnson reminds us that the "liberal" media has virtually ignored the matter of two journalists facing decades in prison on bogus felony rioting charges, merely because they covered the protests at the Trump inauguration. So reporters are failing to report on the reporters who face jail time for reporting on the same Administration that reporters have warned would stamp out unfavorable reporting? The hypocrisy here is just icing on the cake, really.

You already know the "tax cuts create jobs" argument is a total myth, but here comes Hedrick Smith to buttress your knowledge with some deep, deep support. When fewer than one in four multinational corporations say they'll invest their tax cut windfall in job creation, when corporations that buy tax cuts from Congress don't hire more workers as a result, and when corporations spend more and more money on stock manipulation and less and less on research and development, it's really no wonder that so many Americans look at corporations and say why do those assholes deserve a tax cut?

President Trump has been treated a bit unfairly, for once, after twittering that Puerto Rico was already having a tough time of it with debt and infrastructure issues -- but of course he contributed to that state of affairs by sticking Puerto Rico with tens of millions of dollars of that debt when his golf course failed there. And that tells you what kind of "infrastructure" plan he'd go for -- the kind that makes executives rich when the infrastructure doesn't get built. Always they say "make shareholders whole" when they ought to be saying make taxpayers whole.

After Sen. Luther Strange's completely unsurprising loss in the Alabama Republican Senate primary runoff, erstwhile Strange supporter Donald Trump deletes all his twitterings supporting Mr. Strange. He just can't be associated with a "loser," can he? You know what that means: it means he's deathly afraid everyone will find out that he is a loser. And at that moment -- perhaps when we finally get to see his tax returns and find out he's really dirt poor -- I suppose we'll have a massive terrorist attack so we can "rally around our President." Hey, if I thought of it, you know they have.

Finally, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has died at the age of 91. Even if we put aside his magazine's relentless objectification of women, the victory of libertarian values ("anti-censorship," "consumerist," "hedonistic") attributed in part to Mr. Hefner's work is not entirely a positive thing, even if it allows us to cuss more or talk politics at work. We don't need to live in a world where everyone needs to wear a gray flannel suit to their job, but worrying about the stultifying conformity of wearing gray flannel suits to your job was a luxury in a society where federal tax policy all but mandated full employment; now, in a society where federal tax policy lets CEOs do pretty much what they like, we worry about the next health care crisis breaking us financially or the long-term effects of our household debt, and in this we have not created a more perfect union.

Action: relief for Puerto Rico, CHIP reauthorization, forced arbitration, and media policy.

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico last week, leaving almost all of the island's over three million inhabitants without power and nearly half without running water, while the lack of fuel has not only made it nearly impossible to evacuate good Puerto Ricans, but leaves hospitals without the power to run generators and ventilators. So that means our government has mobilized like mad, just like after hurricanes hit Texas and Florida, right? Well, not exactly, so the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to help Puerto Rico rebuild, not just with emergency aid, but with the help they need to overcome decades of environmental and economic degradation. If you want, you can also rewrite the action tool to tell your Congressfolk that you don't want an emergency aid package to Puerto Rico laden down with all kinds of poison pills, whether "poison pills" means initiatives relating to American politics that'd never pass on their own, or initiatives that deliver taxpayer money to some politician's cronies.

Meanwhile, with the Obamacare repeal nightmare over-for-now, we can turn our attention to the other health care-related item that needs to get done before September 30: CHIP reauthorization. The Children's Health Insurance Program has been around for 20 years, and is immensely popular, even among Republican politicians -- and you can guess what that could mean! That could mean now is the time to attach something horrible to a CHIP reauth bill and dare other Congressfolk to vote against it! So you would do well to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass a clean reauthorization of the Children's Health Insurance Program, without irrelevant and/or harmful legislative riders. I haven't heard any scuttlebutt that Congress would take CHIP hostage to something truly awful, but if I can imagine it, I'm sure they have, too. So don't just hope they'd be afraid of the backlash they'd create -- communicate your will them, and thus give them something to fear.

In other news, both H.J.Res. 111 (which passed the House in July) and S.J.Res. 47 would repeal the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's rule prohibiting banks from forcing consumers into arbitration over disputes. Don't believe the hype that people win more money in arbitration than they do in our courts -- fewer than one in 10 folks who go to arbitration win at all, which means more than 9 out of 10 folks win precisely zero dollars. And banks can take you to arbitration, and when they do, they win more than 9 out of 10 times, meaning that 9 out of 10 times you'll owe them thousands of dollars. And when they say you that you have "the right" to use arbitration, remember that banks don't make it a "right," but a requirement of doing business with them; does that smell like freedom to you? The Senate could vote on either of these resolutions as early as today, so both Consumers Union and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to protect consumers by voting against H.J.Res. 111 or S.J.Res. 47.

Finally (cue cheers from the convention crowd), FCC Chair Ajit Pai's term on the FCC is up fairly shortly, and President Trump has nominated him to serve another five-year term on the FCC. Of course, if the Senate doesn't confirm him, then he can't be FCC Chair anymore, and can't advance the rigid pro-corporate, anti-consumer agenda he's advanced thus far. This agenda has included rejiggering media consolidation rules so that the Trump-loving corporation the Sinclair Broadcast Group can control even more UHF stations across the land, and it's also, of course, included his effort to kill off the FCC's excellent net neutrality rules, so that corporations can have more control over where you go on the internet than you do. All in all, not a sparkling record; no use telling me Mr. Pai is a smart guy or a nice guy, because you don't need a Snidely Whiplash mustache to do evil. In fact, it really helps if you don't have one. Hence Free Press helps you tell your Senator to reject the renomination of Ajit Pai to the FCC.

Around the table: another NBA coach dresses down our President, and other tales.

The CBO's preliminary score of the apparently-defunct Graham-Cassidy bill -- the CBO would need a few more weeks to consider the bill's effects fully -- predicts that "millions" would lose their health insurance if the bill had passed. Dig Sen. Cassidy's lame excuse that the CBO's score pertains to a bill that they've since revised! As if the latest revision has unicorns and puppies in it.

University of Wisconsin study finds that state's notorious Voter ID law probably deterred nearly 17,000 registered voters in Dane and Milwaukee counties alone from going to the polls on Election Day 2016. Mr. Trump won that state by a little over 22,000 votes, so that's significant, but not as significant (as the study's lead author says) as the fact that the Voter ID law sows confusion and thus disenfranchises good Wisconsin citizens, all to "stop voter fraud." The confusion is "a feature, not a bug," says Rick Hasen, and if you remember Gov. Walker closing down a crapload of DMVs after getting the law passed, you would likely agree.

I'm a bit stunned to see a "liberal" media news outlet trumpeting a poll finding that nearly two-thirds of Americans think corporations pay too little in taxes. And here we thought the push for a corporate tax cut would sell better than another tax cut for the rich would! Of course right-wingers will muddy the waters further by claiming theirs is a tax cut for small businesses, but we know that cutting the top income tax rate (which of course they'll try to do) doesn't really help small businesses, and we also know that big corporations can't seem to help using small businesses as a kind of human shield.

Former U.S. House Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) gets 21 months for sexting a minor. I guess Mr. Weiner gets to see how "rhinocerously" thick his skin is, once his fellow inmates realize who he is. I don't despise Mr. Weiner for possibly killing Hillary Clinton's chances of becoming President, but you must recall that Mr. Weiner was the first member of Congress to get famous supporting single-payer health insurance, and who knows how many years he might have set back our cause with his stupid dalliances. (Yes, I did decide to write a sentence with "Weiner" and "member" in it. C'mon, I'm getting old.)

Finally, from the "From the Mouths of NBA Coaches" file: Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, in writing about the controversy over his club not going to the White House to shake hands with President Trump, reminds us of a few critical facts. "In his tweet to Steph, Trump talked about honoring the White House but, really, isn’t it you who must honor the White House, Mr. President?" Yeah, ya think? Also, too, "the president works for us, not vice versa." Mr. Trump really does think we all work for him and that we are so, so lucky to have him around. We will need to remind him, repeatedly, that he's wrong about all of that.

(Oh, and even though the Senate cancelled the Graham-Cassidy vote yesterday, call your Senators anyway and tell them to stop trying to destroy Medicaid, take health insurance away from people, and create loopholes in the pre-existing conditions ban, and then tell them to start embracing single-payer health insurance. They need to hear our will as often as possible, and if hearing our will today hurts their feelings, well, tough toodles, because being a Senator is a big-boy game.)

Action: Burmese oppression of the Rohingya, and militarization of American police.

In light of Burma's ongoing repression of its Rohingya population, Sum of Us helps you tell world governments to stop selling weapons to Burma. Not having weapons, as you know, does hamper a government's ability to kill its minority Muslim population after burning down their villages. The British government has lately announced that it will end training and cooperation with the Burmese military until their repression of the Rohingya ends, and the European Union is still imposing an arms embargo upon Burma, but other big supporters of the Burmese military (which often does seem to be far too independent of the Burmese government) include China, India, Russia, the Ukraine, and Israel. Other nations have eased sanctions upon Burma as the military has begun to allow democratic elections there, but really, if you do evil, you shouldn't get goodies -- even if you control a nation, or a large part of it. So let's not reward evildoing.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1556, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. I can already hear the legion of right-wingers squealing BUT TEH POLIZEZ SHOULD HAVEZ ALL TEH TOOLZ THEY NEEDZ!!!!! The key word there is "need" (or "NEEDZ," if you like) -- police do not need bazookas and tanks and grenades to find and arrest criminals. They might need those things, of course, if they want to put down protests after they use excessive force on a person of color, but how about they walk beats and resolve conflicts before it ever gets to that? Most of them would rather do that than fire military-grade weapons at the people they're supposed to protect, but when all you've got is a grenade launcher, everyone starts looking like a casualty. No use telling me TEH CRIMEZ IS UPZ!!!!, either, not unless you can provide convincing data. Spoiler alert: you can't.

Around the table: health care, corruption, higher wages, campaign finance, and media folly.

We hear that a Brookings Institution study finds that the Graham-Cassidy health care "reform" bill will deprive 21 million Americans of their health insurance by 2026, but, because of the headline, we may not know that Brookings's findings are actually completely in line with the Commonwealth Fund's 32 million figure, because Brookings also finds that 32 million will lose their insurance in 2027 if Congress lets the Medicaid block grants expire, as Graham-Cassidy intends that they do. I note this in the perhaps vain hope that it'll stop some right-winger, somewhere, from pretending the difference in the two figures (which, as I've said, really isn't a difference) proves that all liberals are wrong about everything.

Republicans reconfigure Medicaid payouts in the Graham-Cassidy bill in a blatant attempt to bribe four holdout Senators. You know what's even more notable than the fact that Republican leaders are openly trying to bribe them? The fact that these are bad bribes! A 3 percent increase in Medicaid spending for Alaska over six years? Inflation will almost certainly rise four times faster in that time! (Maine gets the biggest hike, but nowhere near as big a hike as South Dakota gets. It must be coincidence that South Dakota gave all of its electoral votes to Mr. Trump, right?)

Good news, everyone: Target, the other big-box department store chain in America, plans to hike its entry wages for its workers to $11/hour next month and $15/hour by 2020. Perhaps not coincidentally, the most recent minimum wage hike legislation in Congress would get workers to $15/hour by 2020. Don't let right-wingers tell you BUT TEH HIGHER WAGEZ BITEZ INTO TEH PROFITZ!!!! without questioning why they take it as gospel that profits are the only important thing -- particularly when doing so would be, among other things, sacrilegious.

Connecticut state legislature gets rid of public financing program in its new budget, though Gov. Dannel Malloy has pledged to veto it. If I were a more (or less) spiritually elevated person, I might find it amusing that one state Senator, after professing relief that she never had to run for office under the pre-public financing regime, of course voted to gut it, because WE'RE BROKE!!!!! As usual, politicians have a difficult time discerning between being fiscally "broke" and spiritually broke -- even when the right spiritual path also happens to benefit them electorally.

Finally, Fox News punditoids whine about the massive expansion of NFL players (and owners!) protesting institutional racism and Trumpian assholery, claiming that "(t)his is the least sexist, least racist, most free, most equal, most prosperous country in the history of humankind." We could debate all of those contentions (are overly-spied-upon 21st century Americans freer than 19th century frontiersfolk, for example?), but, ah, how did America ever make gains in these areas? Because good Americans demanded them, and fought for them, and not because Our Glorious Elites permitted them out of their natural wisdom and generosity, as I'm sure Fox News clowns tell each other when they're not on camera.

Action: the Graham-Cassidy health care "reform" bill.

Today the Senate Finance Committee will hold a hearing on the Graham-Cassidy health care "reform" bill -- and that will be the only hearing the bill will get. That is a piddling improvement on the Senate's health care "reform" bill of July, which received, shall we say, fewer than one hearing in the Senate, but the relative lack of transparency remains a sign that Republicans know the Graham-Cassidy bill is trash and are trying to ram it through before everyone in the world knows it's trash. Problem with that plan is that everyone in the world already knows it's trash -- virtually every organization that has opined about the bill, from the AARP to the ACLU to the American Heart Association to the American Hospital Association to the American Nurses Association to the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association to the governor of Alaska -- and this is a very abridged list I've presented, mostly confined to the letter A! -- has come out against the bill.

And for good reason: the Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) won't have time to do a full score on the bill before the Senate's Wednesday vote (though they'll release a preliminary report early this week), but, again, virtually everyone who's studied Graham-Cassidy has found that it will do a significant amount of damage to a significant number of Americans. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that 35 states, plus the District of Columbia, would lose Medicaid funding, and our very own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid find that nearly half of America's states would lose at least 20% of their Medicaid funding under Graham-Cassidy, while a couple of very, very red states would actually see an increase in funding (which doesn't look at all like a reward to those states for electing Republicans or rejecting the Obamacare Medicaid expansion). And of course the Commonwealth Fund has found that Graham-Cassidy would toss 32 million good Americans off their health insurance in 10 years, with 15 to 18 million of that number losing their health insurance in the first year.

With great PR like that, it's no wonder Republicans like Sen. Grassley have such trouble defending the bill on the merits, telling us instead that it's important for Republicans to "keep their promise to repeal Obamacare." Of course, if you think politicians should keep their actual promise to represent the will of their constituents, you won't be very impressed by that reasoning. But at least a few other Republicans in the Senate aren't impressed by it, either -- Sen. McCain has already said he'll vote against it (even though his BFF Lindsey Graham is one of the co-sponsors!), citing mainly the shoddy process by which the Senate has moved the bill forward, and Sen. Collins of Maine, who voted against the last repeal effort, has said she's leaning against this one, too. That leaves the other Senator who scuttled the July effort, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Senate Republicans have reportedly been trying to get her support by essentially excluding Alaska and Hawaii from most of the bill's evils. If she's contemplating taking the bait, she should remember the saga of Ben Nelson, Nebraska Democrat, once literally the most popular Senator in America, but an utter pariah after his attempt to use the Obamacare bill to get some goodies for his home state. (She might also remember that the one time they primaried her out, she ran as a write-in and still won re-election.)

But all that is a hell of a thing to depend upon. You can ignore declarations of opposition from Sens. Paul and Cruz, because they're the kind of fellows who let the perfect evil murder the good evil, and Dean Heller's co-sponsored the damn thing for Frick's sake, and no one's even talking to Shelly Moore Capito after she made all that noise and then voted for the skinny repeal bill anyway. So you know what you have to do: use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a smartphone) and tell your Senators, in no uncertain terms, to reject the destructive Graham-Cassidy health care bill. They're on a deadline, of course -- since they're trying to pass this thing as a budget resolution, in order to avoid a Democratic filibuster, Senate rules demand that they pass it by Saturday, September 30; after Saturday, they'll have to start all over again, which I imagine they won't have the stomach to do right away, with President Trump breathing down their necks about tax "reform." That doesn't mean they won't succeed -- certainly they'll try. But we can't thwart their nefarious efforts unless we make our will known, in numbers they can't ignore. So let's get to it.

Around the table: featuring follies about health care and pollution.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) says he'll oppose the Graham-Cassidy attempt to repeal Obamacare, too. His objections are all completely reasonable, but you have to wonder why he announced his intentions a full five days before the Senate plans to vote on the bill -- he may be signaling that he wants changes, though it's hard to see what changes would answer his objections, since they're mostly process-based.

We were just talking about the two sides of Charles Grassley, were we not? Well, here's the other side: despite professing to be able to "give 10 reasons why (Graham-Cassidy) shouldn't be considered," Mr. Grassley still thinks Republicans should pass it, because they made a promise to repeal Obamacare. The lesson here, I would think, is that you shouldn't make stupid promises, let alone promises upon which you can't deliver.

It gets worse: a spokesperson for Minority Leader Schumer says Senate Democrats were all ready to give up major concessions to Republicans regarding health care reform -- but Republicans turned them down. As dispiriting as it is to see Democrats being weak, it's mind-blowing to see Republicans turn down the opportunity not only to look like they can govern, but look like they can push Democrats around at will, which latter item would have invigorated their base ahead of the midterms. I literally cannot imagine what Republicans were thinking.

EPA Inspector General finds that the EPA mismanages its Superfund staff, to the point where work is not proceeding swiftly enough on at least four Superfund sites where folks can reasonably expect to be exposed to toxic contamination. Lest you get a whiff of the Trumphole in all of this, the Inspector General's study stretches back to February of 2016, when the putatively more competent Barack Obama was in office. Also n.b. that the Inspector General cites mismanagement of staff, not "not enough staff," though surely the latter can remediate the former somewhat.

But we can blame the Trump Administration for this: EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt says President Obama left 40 percent of Americans with "unhealthy air" to breathe, but doesn't mention that before Mr. Obama took office, 58 percent of Americans were breathing unhealthy air. I don't know which is worse -- that Mr. Pruitt pretends to care about clean air and the good Americans who breathe it, or that he ignores the part of the story that actually makes the story meaningful.

Finally, a Twitter user named Gay Sassy Republican apparently had serious financial problems stemming from a car accident -- but had earlier opined, on numerous occasions, that "healthy" people shouldn't be "forced" to pay for sick people. Even though, you know, that's how health insurance works -- and anyone can be healthy or sick at any time. Why, sick people have even been known to get healthy! Why do I suspect this accident and its aftermath will not change Gay Sassy Republican?

Action: fighting "free" trade, discrimination, and pollution.

"Foreign corporations shouldn't have the power to change our laws," reads the first sentence of Food and Water Watch's latest email in my inbox, and there, in 10 words, you have the most compelling reason to tell your Congressfolk to demand trade agreements that protect us from untrammeled corporate power, as Sign for Good helps you do. We speak, of course, of the hated "investor-state tribunal," which allows corporations to sue America for "causing it to lose money" by passing laws that, for example, force them to spend their own money to clean up any mess they cause in our air or water -- which not only means they can nullify our laws, but they can demand tribute from the taxpayer as "compensation" for the "harm" we supposedly caused them. President Bigballs, of course, decided against demanding an end to the "investor-state tribunal" in NAFTA -- and his very own hand-picked Commerce Secretary said, out loud, that he'd like NAFTA to look more like the hated TPP. So you know what that means: it's up to us to stop it.

Meanwhile, President Trump's got a jones for getting transgendered soldiers out of the military, supposedly since their health care is "so costly," though not really, since, as you may recall, a year's worth of health care for transgendered soldiers costs less than flying the President to his Mar-a-Lago getaway every weekend for a month. But an actually-bipartisan group of Senators have introduced legislation that would prohibit our Department of Defense from discharging soldiers (or preventing them from re-enlisting) solely because they're transgendered. I won't lie, it sure is nice to see Sen. McCain (R-AZ) saying "we should welcome all those who are willing and able to serve our country," not seven years after mouthing stupid platitudes against letting gays serve in our military. Still, Congress needs to act -- which means we need to act. So Freedom for All Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to support defense and oppose discrimination by keeping transgendered troops in our military.

Finally, with all the horrible storms we've had, and will continue to have, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund the Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) fully, so we can properly deal with the damage from these "once in a lifetime" storms. There are plenty of other reasons to fund the EPA fully -- hey, you need boots on the ground if you're going to stop corporations from spewing filth into our air and water! -- but certainly the power of these elephantine hurricanes to (for example) flood toxic waste dumps carries with it the sort of urgency that should convince your Congressfolk. Hurricane Harvey itself flooded more than a dozen toxic waste sites in Texas alone, and the weather sure in hell ain't gonna be done with us anytime soon. (The email tool specifically asks you to oppose President Trump's proposed EPA budget cuts, but you can amend the wording, if you like, to tell them to increase EPA funding.)

Action: health care, immigration, and public lands.

The so-called "moderate" health care "reform" bill -- a.k.a. the Graham-Cassidy bill -- still stumbles through the hallways of the Senate like a zombie, threatening to take down the Affordable Care Act's pre-existing conditions ban through yet another clever loophole, kill the medical device tax that only bothers medical device corporations, zero out all of the Affordable Care Act's subsidies, and end Medicaid funding within a decade. That they're even calling this monstrosity a "moderate" bill shows you how thoroughly right-wingers have destroyed the word. And if it passes, it could get worse -- what's to stop this reactionary Congress from "reconciling" it with the hated House bill so that nearly all of the House bill becomes law? Look, if I thought of that, then they thought of it months ago. So give this zombie health care bill the headshot it deserves, by using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a smartphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject the Graham-Cassidy bill.

Meanwhile, President Trump has occasionally seemed to be of two minds about the DACA program that defers deportation for certain folks who were brought to America as children. Now, we don't need to pay too much attention to this apparent dichotomy -- oftentimes politicians seem to be "conflicted" about something about which they're not actually conflicted, and they do it to put people off their game -- but the problem of DACA's end in less than six months still remains, and helping these good folks out is our duty as Americans. I mean, seriously, we're going to blame them for something they literally had no say in doing? And send them back to countries they likely wouldn't even recognize? All so people can have swordfights over "who's more conservative"? So People for the American Way helps you tell your Reps and Senators to pass H.R. 3440/S. 1615, the DREAM Act, which would not only protect a lot of immigrants brought to America as children, but would actually help them contribute more to American society.

Finally, Brazil's government would like to sell off vast swaths of currently-protected Amazon rainforest for the benefit of, you guessed it, corrupt cronies, and Brazil's President plans to travel to the U.N. building in New York next week to drum up support (and possible buyers, I presume), so Avaaz helps you tell the government of Brazil to stop selling off Amazon rainforest. It's a pretty simple principle, really: hold on to public lands, use them for the public good, and care for them on the public's behalf, and they'll last forever, but you can only sell public lands off once, and the money you make from them won't last forever. Besides, governments typically sell off public lands for one of two reasons: to make up for budgetary shortfalls they could have avoided, or to funnel money to some crony or other. And contemplate a rainforest that's home to approximately one out of every ten species of animals on Earth and produces more than a fifth of the world's oxygen, and selling off chunks of it sure does seem small, doesn't it?

Around the table: more follies concerning health care, budgeting, propaganda, and infighting among white supremacists.

The CBO won't have a preliminary report on the Graham-Cassidy health care "reform" bill until early next week (and won't be able to do a proper score before September 30 at all!), but the Center for American Progress finds the Graham-Cassidy bill similar enough to the CBO-scored Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act (which the Senate couldn't pass in July) to say that Graham-Cassidy will probably deprive 32 million good Americans of health insurance by 2027 -- and maybe even more. Which you likely already knew, but it's good to have some numbers behind it.

Michael Corcoran at FAIR writes a truly breathtaking article about the "liberal" media's repeated suggestions that single-payer and the various Republican health care bills are somehow equally "extreme." I suppose it's good news that the "liberal" media is starting to call Graham-Cassidy something other than "moderate," but it's still a bit dispiriting to witness the sheer hypocrisy of even relatively reasonable punditoids -- they excoriated liberals for being too "militant" in supporting the public option (!) back in 2009 and 2010, but now put forth that very same public option as the "real" solution to our health insurance woes! Then again, even that hypocrisy is a step forward for the media -- and another lesson that our job, as citizens, is to fight for what we want, not play 13-dimensional chess.

Alex Emmons at The Intercept points out that the Senate's $80 billion boost to defense spending would have paid tuition for every student at a public college -- a proposal roundly decried as pie-in-the-sky when Sen. Sanders proposed it last year. Well, at least guns are forever, while better access to higher education has absolutely no long-term benefits for a civilized society! Seriously, this may not be the best way to make the point -- too many Americans are afraid of suggesting we should spend less on defense -- but it sure does demonstrate that the money's there if the will is there. It also illustrates that when your opponents say things like "your proposal is too idealistic," it means they can't actually win the argument on the merits.

If your right-wing uncle cites some piece of reportage from something called The Free Telegraph, feel free to remind him that The Free Telegraph is a propaganda arm of the Republican Governors Association -- "propaganda" is a word a Republican campaign consultant uses, not me! -- and didn't identify itself as such until the Associated Press questioned them about it. All of which exemplifies dishonesty, corruption, and cowardice. And some of the RGA's emailing about the site shows extravagant self-pity, too -- Republicans shouldn't whine about "decades of demonizing Republicans" when Republicans have been the dominant party in American politics for almost 40 years.

Finally, when I first read that Nazi wannabes were actually fighting amongst themselves about whether to include gay members in their club, I have to admit I found it pretty hilarious. But when I started to read about the gay men who have tried to join the Nazi wannabe movement -- like the one who's attracted to other men but says he's not gay per se, or the one who posits "white homosexual masculinity" "as the idealized opposite" of black "violence, hypersexuality and stupidity" -- I have to admit I found the whole thing even more hilarious, a stew of PC infighting undreamt of on the left. And no, it doesn't "mean something" that some Nazi wannabes have tried to find a place for gays in their club -- not every incongruity rises to the level of irony (or even interest!), and even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Action: forced labor, national monuments, and gerrymandering.

It's "harvest time" in Uzbekistan again -- which means the Uzbek government conscripts its good citizens to work the cotton fields, regardless of whether they're already nurses, business owners, teachers, or college students. And of course folks who monitor and document "harvest time" risk detainment, deportation, and assault, almost as if Uzbekistan has something to hide. Now, if Uzbekistan's cotton-harvesting scheme sounds remotely like "everyone coming together for the common good" to you, please remember that you can't force people to work for the common good (though you can restrain people who work against the common good), and remember, also, that when good Uzbeks toil in cotton fields, they don't really work for "the common good" so much as the good of the government's crony cotton industry CEOs. So, at the very least, it's well past time to shame actors who pump money into Uzbekistan's cotton trade, hence the Action Network helps you tell the World Bank to support freedom in Uzbekistan by withdrawing its funding from Uzbekistan's forced labor scheme.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration's Department of the Interior has finally let slip which of our national monuments it would like to "modify," either by shrinking their size or by opening them up to commercial mining, drilling, logging, and fishing. Naturally Bears Ears in Utah is at the top of the list -- Mr. Trump's obsession with undoing specific Obama works has become quite annoying -- but the Trump Administration would also allow commercial fishing in the Pacific Remote Islands, designated by George W. Bush in one of his last acts in office in 2009 and expanded by Mr. Obama in 2014, and in another Bush-designated monument, the Rose Atoll. But opening up national monuments to activities like drilling and mining is not exactly a way of protecting those monuments. Fortunately for us, President Trump doesn't actually have the authority to alter national monuments -- only Congress can do that. So both the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club help you tell your Reps and Senators to stand against the Trump Administration's plan to hand over some of our public lands to corporate cronies.

Finally, Pennsylvania state legislative leaders still haven't considered anti-gerrymandering bills HB 722 and SB 22 despite actual bipartisan support. If I were less (or more?) spiritually-advanced, I'd find that comic -- a leadership structure protecting its power by refusing to hear bills that would challenge that power! HB 722 and SB 22 would take the redistricting power out of the legislature and put it in the hands of an independent commission, comprised of the Majority and Minority leaders of both parties in both houses plus a chairman selected by the other four. And that's going to be a damn sight better than letting legislators draw their own districts to their own interest -- or, perhaps more precisely, to the interest of their biggest donors. Passing HB 722/SB 22 would give you a fighting chance of getting legislators who might actually respond to your will. And all I ask for is a fighting chance! PA Common Cause helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislative leader to give the anti-gerrymandering bills BH 722 and SB 22 a fair hearing.

Around the table: includes follies about healthcare, law and order, transparency, and big telecom service.

Dean Baker describes the "massive shift of resources" that would accompany a move to a Medicare-for-All, single-payer health insurance system. He generally finds less savings from single-payer than you'd hope, but also finds more savings in the area of prescription drug costs than you'd think, and he also thinks it's "a good working assumption" that, under a single-payer system, wages would rise by about the amount employers are paying for health insurance now, and I hope he's right, because I suspect big corporations would try their damnedest to keep that money for themselves and push the cost onto their workers in the form of payroll taxes. (He's also skeptical of raising taxes significantly on the wealthy, figuring they'll try harder to avoid it -- but we largely prevented that in the 1950s, so why can't we do that now?)

The Obamacare repeal deadline is all in the news these days (and the CHIP reauthorization deadline, which is the same day, uh, isn't,) but yet another health care-related funding deadline is coming up, and that's for federal funding for community health centers. 61 Senators, from both parties, have gone on record supporting reauthorization of this funding, so if Congress fails at this, it should be grotesquely easy to run ads against incumbents next year. If Congress kills it with poison pill amendments, of course, they could avoid defeat more easily, since most folks don't like to peer inside the sausage-making factory. But they would deserve defeat. Evil works always deserve defeat.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) demands information about "wasteful and potentially unlawful spending by the U.S. Marshals Service" with assets seized from civil and criminal proceedings. I do like it when Mr. Grassley performs actual oversight the way an actual people's representative would do, though his moments of partisan hackery, unfortunately, seem to get more attention. And if you'd prefer he concentrate his efforts on ending asset forfeiture, keep in mind that a damning indictment of asset forfeiture abuse would help such an effort.

The AP reports on state government bodies actually suing folks who request public records. Can you say "frivolous lawsuit," boys and girls? If you're even entertaining the notion that state government agencies might have a point, look at their argument -- "it’s best to have courts determine whether records should be released when legal obligations are unclear" (as the AP summarizes it) cries out for a punch in the nose. It's so obviously an attempt to intimidate watchdogs and muckrakers that the reactionary Michigan state House unanimously banned the practice earlier this year. It's so awful maybe even Neil Gorsuch would rule against it.

Finally, Verizon disconnects over 8,000 rural customers, thus threatening the ability of these residents to deal with emergencies (among other things). By the time you figure out the labyrinthine reason Verizon is dropping these folks, you'll be thinking maybe the real problem is that Verizon wanted to look like it was serving rural customers without actually doing the hard work that comes with serving them. Either that, or that they're just not very good at anything but making money. You know what would solve this problem? Community broadband! You know what big telecom corporations like Verizon spend inordinate amounts of time and effort fighting? Community broadband!

Action: tax "reform," corporate welfare handouts, and bad mining projects.

It ain't just health care Republicans want to screw up this week -- it's also our tax code, and since they're not squabbling among themselves over the debt limit and a continuing budget resolution, they can devote more time to their one sole aim: delivering more unearned tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Right-wingers have foregrounded corporate tax cuts this time, knowing that some center-right Democrats also hold the mistaken belief that corporate tax cuts "help" corporations hire workers (though corporate tax cuts usually just go right to shareholders and executives). But make no mistake: though even Sen. Ron Johnson, the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name, knows that tax cuts for the rich is a "pretty impossible" sell, they will try to do it, preferably when they think no one is looking. So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a smartphone) and call your Reps and Senators and say no to more tax cuts for corporations and the rich.

Meanwhile, you know Congress has had its ear to the ground with this whole Equifax data breach, right? And they've come up with legislation that's really strong and has big sharp teeth so that 130 million Americans don't see their data out there again? Gosh, I almost got though that without laughing. Of course Congress plans to do the precise opposite of help -- H.R. 2359, the FCRA Liability Harmonization Act, which would cap damages from class-action lawsuits against credit reporting corporations to $500,000 or less, which means credit reporting corporations will be able to avoid getting sued when they do something wrong a whole lot easier than they can now! The threat of a big damage award isn't inherently unfair to corporations, but actually discourages corporate misbehavior. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to help good Americans hold credit reporting corporations accountable and reject H.R. 2359.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Trump Administration not to waive Clean Water Act restrictions just so the Pebble Mine project can pollute the water and salmon industry in Bristol Bay, Alaska, then the Alaska Wilderness League still helps you do that. It would not be untoward to call Pebble Mine a job-killing project, since it would almost certainly pollute the water in Bristol Bay enough to kill off the massive sockeye salmon population -- which, of course, supports the massive sockeye salmon fishing industry and the 14,000 jobs that go with it. The mining corporation pushing the project saw its stock plunge this past winter, but, as you know, some investors just love buying low and selling right before the next bust -- or getting bailed out after the next bust. Capitalism sure does involve risks, don't it? Risks for us, that is -- good people lose clean water and good jobs, and bad people suck all the money out of failed ventures like the vampires they are. So let's see if we can apply a bit of daylight.

You know what else? Tell your Senator to reject the Graham-Cassidy health care "reform" bill that's even worse than those other health care "reform" bills they couldn't get done. If you haven't already, that is. You could add it on to your phone call about tax cuts.

Action: three alerts about health care and child care costs.

The first two paragraphs today should comprise one phone call. First up: Sen. Sanders has released S. 1804, the Medicare for All Act of 2017, and while it leaves a lot of details up to the Executive branch the way most bills do, and doesn't specify how we're going to capture the trillions of dollars we already spend on health care and divert it into the Universal Medicare program, it would allow Universal Medicare to cover virtually all of our health care needs and rein in prescription drug costs, and it would prevent private health corporations from insuring health care needs covered by Universal Medicare. It would also complete our transition to Universal Medicare over four years (starting with children under 19 within a year after passage), and would allow individuals to contract with providers for health care services not covered by Universal Medicare. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to support real health care reform in America by supporting S. 1804. (Alternately, you can text M4A to 69866, per National Nurses United; this will send your Reps and Senators a text message of support on your behalf.)

But wait, there's more! Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) have released their own health care "reform" bill, widely and inaccurately considered to be a "moderate" reform bill though neither Senator is particularly moderate (no, you should not confuse Lindsey Graham's occasionally-welcome orneriness with being a "moderate"). Their bill would convert Medicaid funding into a block grant that states could use to remake their Medicaid programs any way they like -- and then completely cut off that funding in 2027. Graham-Cassidy would also eliminate Affordable Care Act's subsidies and give states even more room to evade pre-existing conditions than the Trumpcare bills. True, it would also keep most Obamacare taxes-on-the-rich in place, but BFD if they're trying to set fire to everything else -- and since we can urge our Senators to reject the Graham-Cassidy bill and keep both the taxes-on-the-rich and the parts of Obamacare that actually work for us. (Again, use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers.)

Finally, both the National Women's Law Center and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to support the Child Care for Working Families Act (which has no bill number as of this writing). What would the Child Care for Working Families Act do? It would, as the title suggests, expand federal coverage of child care so that families making less than 150% of their state's median income pay no more than 7% of their combined income on child care. We're looking at two fundamental realities here: one, that working families have mostly been two-income families since the early 1980s, and two, that child care costs a crapload of money -- I personally know families who have paid one entire partner's annual income on child care, and I bet you do, too. Working families already pay too much for too many necessities -- health insurance, of course, also among these. The bill would also ensure that child care workers get more pay and better training, and why shouldn't they? They're not just working for working families -- they belong to working families themselves.

Around the table: featuring health care scare numbers and tax code silliness.

The quite estimable Harold Meyerson likes Sen. Sanders's Medicare-for-All bill because it doesn't try to do everything at once. He makes a compelling argument for extending Medicare to children and workers 49 and over first -- for example, will right-wingers be very successful calling health care for kids "socialism"? Still, as you know, I prefer opening with what I want and then negotiating -- though of course this bill is way less of a pre-emptive compromise than the Affordable Care Act was.

Republicans respond to the release of the Medicare-for-All bill by pretending it would require $32 trillion in new spending. Over 10 years, of course, though nobody ever says that. Problem with that is that we spent $3.4 trillion on health care spending just last year, which projects to $34 trillion over 10 years -- or, if you account for premiums going up, $49 trillion. So the answer to the question WHERE DOEZ HE COMEZ UP WITH TEH MONEYZ!!!!! is "out of the much larger pile of money we're already going to spend."

The incomparable Bruce Schneier informs us that the only solution to big data breaches like the recent Equifax breach is (drumroll, please) government regulation. The "free market," after all, won't fix it: "The companies that collect and sell our data don't need to keep it secure in order to maintain their market share. They don't have to answer to us, their products. They know it's more profitable to save money on security and weather the occasional bout of bad press after a data loss. Yes, we are the ones who suffer when criminals get our data, or when our private information is exposed to the public, but ultimately why should Equifax care?" Particularly when Target, Yahoo!, et al, haven't suffered in the long term. Regulate and punish them and they'll learn through their suffering.

Another day, another analysis (this one from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy) showing us that the Trump tax cut plan would benefit the rich more than working folks. And no it doesn't deliver them bigger cuts because "they make more money"! Just look at the frickin' charts! And it certainly doesn't matter that President Trump himself says his plan won't deliver huge tax cuts to the rich -- it only matters to him that his votaries believe that, and that they scream it in your face when you try to argue with them. (You're not trying to argue with Trump votaries, though, are you? Don't argue with them; just outvote them.)

Finally, former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore -- who may soon be the Republican nominee for the Senate seat until recently held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions -- said back in February that the 9.11 terrorist attack was "divine punishment." For failing to restrain financial predators with tough laws and regulations, no doubt! I kid, of course. But can Mr. Moore be the next Senator from Alabama? Of course he can! He's a Trumphole even if Mr. Trump is officially pulling for his opponent. It'd be nice if the Democratic candidate, former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, runs on his successful prosecution of the last two perps of the 1963 Birmingham bombing that killed four black girls. The national party is no doubt giving him the exact opposite advice as we speak.

Around the table: racism as a virus, cowardice as a Democrat virus, and other high concepts.

U.S. House passes an actually-bipartisan amendment that would essentially roll back the Department of Justice's efforts to expand asset forfeiture. Allowing police to seize property from the accused, not the convicted, is obviously unconstitutional -- except to the politicians who prefer posturing about being "tough on crime" to actually solving problems. The Senate could still shoot it down -- as they just shot down a Rand Paul amendment that would have repealed the 2001 AUMF that three Presidents have now abused -- but it's still a step forward.

The incomparable Heather Digby Parton writes a long and thoughtful article (including excellent analysis of recent polls) wondering whether making a deal with President Trump on the debt limit was a "trap." Call me old-fashioned, but I think you can walk through a lot of traps if you stop playing 13-dimensional chess and just work for your constituents, though that seems to be a lot to ask of contemporary Democrats. Certainly one should cast a wary eye at Democrat efforts to "win back" Trump voters, the vast majority of whom were Romney voters, McCain voters, Bush voters, et cetera. The worst thing about the debt limit deal, as I've said, was that it cleared the board for Republicans this month, so they can exert more effort on odious tax "reform" and health care "reform" efforts.

Credit reporting corporation Equifax removes forced arbitration clause from the free credit monitoring service it set up in the wake of its now-notorious data breach, but not from its general Terms of Service. That means that Equifax could try to force you into an arbitration court if you have a dispute with them over this whole imbroglio (which means that even if you threw their own statement saying they wouldn't force arbitration on you back at them, you might be doing so before an arbitrator). So I'd be conservative and monitor your credit using an actually-free credit report via annualcreditreport.com. (Yes, that is a totally valid way of using the word "conservative," though I guess I can't blame you for doing a double-take.)

Adam Johnson at FAIR informs us that the six top US newspapers actually spent a little more time condemning anti-fascists than they did condemning fascists after Charlottesville. Even if I were generous, and assumed that the "liberal" media condemn anti-fascists because it doesn't actually take a lot of moral courage to condemn fascists, I still don't think the isolated incidents of violence from folks resisting fascists is more than half of this story. I think Nazi wannabes committing considerably more acts of violence against people they think should be wiped from the Earth is more than half the story, actually.

Ho hum, Martha Pskowski at TruthOut describes how Coca-Cola has been sucking the water out of the ground in an area of rural Southern Mexico. Conservatves ought to find a lot of these themes familiar -- like the city overtaking the farm and the extermination of local traditions -- but too many of today's "conservatives" simply repeat the words free market over and over again, possibly in an effort to position themselves for their next job as a corporate PR hack. Trouble is, Coca-Cola's water-draining arrangement probably violates Mexico's Constitution, which literally guarantees clean water to its citizens.

Finally, we've been hearing a lot lately about the "intra-Democratic divide," which is a vast improvement from our "liberal" media treating Barack Obama like he was Thee Most Liberal Liberal Imaginable, but too many folks treat "reaching out to working-class whites" or "keeping black and Latino voters" is an either-or. Mr. Marshall is right to suggest that racism is a "virus" that lies "dormant" but can be "activated" by the right set of conditions, but one of the conditions that helps activate that racism is a corporatist Democratic candidate who has nothing to offer other than not being a Republican. Give people the economic populism they crave and deserve, and racism won't be anywhere near as important.

Action: protecting the Rohingya, and promoting renewable energy.

Avaaz helps you tell our government to cut off support for the government of Burma until it stops the ongoing massacre of the Rohingya people by Burmese soldiers. Even with the 2015 electoral victory of the famous political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi, the military still holds far too much power in Burmese politics, and after a Rohingya raid on a police station, the military has killed several hundred Rohingya and displaced tens of thousands more, largely by burning their homes and villages. If you're inclined to argue that "the Rohingya started it," please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider whether killing hundreds and displacing thousands is a fitting punishment for a pre-dawn raid, and 3) recall that the Burmese have persecuted the Rohingya (whom they now routinely describe as terrorists) for a very long time, and it could have something to do with the fact that the Rohingya are mostly Muslim and the Burmese are mostly Buddhist. At least we, as good Americans, can exert some pressure on our government to use its leverage on Burma's government to rein in its military.

Meanwhile, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) has introduced H.R. 3671, the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, which would ban the use of fossil fuels in the production of electricity or automobiles by 2035. H.R. 3671 would also end fossil fuel subsidies, impose a moratorium on new fossil fuel projects (like pipelines), extend tax credits for wind and solar production, and ease the transition of fossil-fuel workers to the new power grid by extending unemployment benefits, health insurance, and job training to those workers for several years. You know, just in case your Trump-supporting uncle was about to say BUT TEH WORKERZ!!!!! It's a fairly ambitious plan (more ambitious than China's plans, which we discussed yesterday), but if you've attended the falling prices of solar and wind power over the years, you know it can be done -- and you also know fossil fuel corporations will do anything to hold on to their unearned power. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support renewable energy by supporting H.R. 3671.

Action: children's health insurance, and the militarization of police.

Congress might have the debt limit and the continuing resolution off their plate for the month, but they don't have Children's Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) reauthorization off their plate, because that expires September 30. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize CHIP for the next five years. Of course, a bill reauthorizing the enormously-popular CHIP -- which helps deliver health insurance to almost 9 million children and (along with Medicaid) keeps the uninsured rate among children down to 5% -- would be as close to a must-pass bill as you could get, this side of an appropriations bill. And you know what that means! It means Congressfolk attaching all manner of evil to it, in the hope they can get that evil passed when it would otherwise wither under sunlight. So feel free to use the "personal message" section of the Moms Rising tool to express your will on that matter as well, i.e., "no poison pills!" or "no irrelevant amendments!" (Though tempting, "no shenanigans!" would probably be too vague.)

Meanwhile, given that the Trump Administration has lifted Obama-era limits on the notorious 1033 program, which allows our Defense Department to give local police departments military weapons, Roots Action helps you tell Congress to enact legislation banning this practice. Crime being down generally since the early 1990s -- regardless of what unscrupulous politicians and the nightly news and 80 million cop shows might suggest -- you have to wonder why police officers would need things like tanks and grenade launchers. And I think you would conclude that they don't need them to fight crime, since they're not very good crime-fighting tools, but to control and intimidate protestors. Donald Trump must love protestors an awful lot, since he's made so many of them, and if he wants fewer protestors, maybe the solution isn't to arm police like they're soldiers. Maybe, just maybe, the solution is to stop doing things people hate -- and start serving the people's interests.

Around the table: from hackable voting machines to antitrust regulation.

Virginia state officials order the replacement of hackable and not-tremendously-verifiable touchscreen voting machines in at least 22 localities in advance of the 2017 elections. Touchscreen machines don't leave a paper trail, as you know, meaning (among other things!) that you can't do recounts properly and can't figure out if a hacker has changed a crapload of votes. That's good news -- and now perhaps Virginia can work on its absurdly strict Voter ID laws and use of Interstate Crosscheck to deregister voters with similar names to voters in other states.

China announces plans to end production of fossil fuel-powered cars within the next quarter-century. I wonder how significant it is that China plans to ban production, while England and France plan to ban sales -- I suppose China could still import gas-powered cars after banning their production domestically, though by 2040 or later not very many Chinese may want them. Meanwhile, in the U.S., car-making corporations are working with the Trump Administration to weaken fuel emissions standards, because in Trumpland, the greedy, like the racist, can live out in the open.

The incomparable Dean Baker reminds us that Wall Street fees on 401(k) and IRA retirement funds could strip $1,000 annually from those workers who invest in them. "It's important to realize that this 1 percent fee is not for actually managing the money," he says -- that fee is essentially for the very very hard work of sending you quarterly reports; the funds in which your 401(k) invests charge their own fees for managing your money, so this additional fee essentially amounts to a $1,000 annual welfare handout to folks who are already rather wealthy. But please, right-wingers, tell us again why we can never regulate the financial sector because jobs and bootstraps and Big Gummint.

Well well well, three Equifax executives just so happen to have disposed of hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock each just a few days after Equifax found the hack that exposed so many good Americans to identity theft. I'm sure it's true that the corporations hadn't notified the executives formally, but I'd be a schmuck to imagine the three fellows just had no way of hearing about it through the grapevine. Also, "(n)one of the filings lists the transactions as being part of 10b5-1 scheduled trading plans," which generally help executives avoid charges of trading on exactly this sort of information.

Finally, Ramsi Woodcock at The Conversation instructs us as to how, exactly, the Amazon-Whole Foods merger could still be reversed using antitrust law precedent. I suspected that allowing the merger simply because Amazon didn't have a presence in the grocery market was a pedantic and narrow interpretation of antitrust law, but it's good to have more concrete examples -- Proctor & Gamble had such a vast product line last century and a vast TV ad presence that the FTC nixed its purchase of Clorox in 1957, saying P&G could leverage its massive power to stamp out Clorox's competitors. Sadly for those competitors, P&G was able to hold onto Clorox for over a decade before the Supreme Court finally upheld the FTC's decision -- thus today when you think of bleach, you most likely think of Clorox. Still, the Court did help set a precedent we could use today.

Action: clean water, and auto emissions.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Delaware River Basin Commission will vote Thursday on whether to move forward on banning fracking outright in the Delaware Valley, so Penn Environment helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to vote for a fracking ban. Currently the DRBC has enacted a moratorium on fracking in the area, which isn't bad, but the DRBC can, in theory, lift the moratorium at any time -- like, at a time when the gas drilling industry has bought enough politicians to get whatever it pleases whenever it pleases. A permanent ban in would be harder to reverse, particularly since the Delaware River provides drinking water to 15 million good folks, and because gas drilling corporations have polluted the water in other parts of the state -- to the degree that's been hard to establish, that's only because our federal government has allowed fracking corporations to keep their chemicals secret since 2005. Without clean water, we ain't got health. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA not to weaken auto emissions standards that not only cut pollution but lower gas prices, then Penn Environment also helps you do that. Anytime someone tries to whine about the hardships of automakers having to make their cars more fuel-efficient, just remind them that cleaner air and cheaper gas are things that help everyone, and maybe big corporations shouldn't get all the damn say about everything. We do live in interesting times, when corporations are more naked about their intentions than ever before -- during Tha Bush Mobb years, they at least tried to seem concerned about matters that affect everyone. Now you hear it from our government, and you hear it from big auto corporations -- the former doesn't want to make corporations do stuff, while the latter doesn't want to be made to do stuff, so no cleaner air and cheaper gas for you. Of course, Trumpholes don't get to ignore the popular will just because they run federal agencies. So let's make it impossible for the EPA to ignore us.

Action: health care, and data security.

With the debt limit and the continuing resolution off their backs for the next three months, Republicans can get back to doing the things they do best -- like destroying our health insurance protections while pretending to save them. President Trump has said he wants "one last push" on health care, and Congress would need to finish an Obamacare repeal-and-replace by September 30 under budget reconciliation rules (they could do it after September 30, but then it'd be subject to a filibuster in the Senate). So today would be a good day to call your Congressfolk (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to say no to the Republican wish list on health care. That means no to Medicaid cuts, no to tens of millions of Americans losing their health insurance, no to loopholes in the pre-existing conditions ban, no to letting insurers charge even more to seniors than they already do, and no to handing out more tax cuts for the rich (which repealing Obamacare taxes would do). That also means you'd say no to the Graham-Cassidy-Heller bill, widely (and incorrectly!) supposed to be a "moderate" "reform" bill.

Meanwhile, you've heard of the data breach at consumer credit reporting corporation Equifax, one which may have exposed names, birth dates, addresses, Social Security numbers, and even drivers' license numbers of close to half of all Americans. And naturally, Equifax offered credit monitoring services to those who might be affected -- services that force you to waive your right to take Equifax to court! Sigh. There is something to be said for seeing opportunity in failure, but mainly you should see the opportunity to correct your failure, not profit from it. Of course, this has been all over the news, so even Congress can't ignore it, and will in fact hold hearings on it soon, hence Consumers Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to hold Equifax accountable for what it's done, to enact stronger data security laws, and to preserve your Constitutional right to a day in court when you've been wronged by data breaches. They're going to act like it's too much to ask -- what more can we expect of a poor, beleaguered corporation? But Equifax has over $6.5 billion in assets and made nearly $500 million in profit last year, so I think they can weather a little accountability.

Around the table: tales of corruption both fiscal and spiritual (plus dogs are, like, self-aware).

USA Today finds that rich corporate-types now have access to our President as no rich corporate-type has ever had access before -- through membership at Mr. Trump's private golf clubs. Members who talked to USA Today said they didn't use their access to discuss matters before our government, but the Trump Administration doesn't disclose whom the President plays golf with, citing, of course, "privacy and national security concerns." What happened to the ethic that public servants should avoid the appearance of corruption, let alone the existence thereof? Hell, what happened to the notion that the First Amendment right to redress grievances should be for everyone and not just folks with money?

Even the notoriously moderate Factcheck.org finds wanting Administration claims that "most economists believe" that corporate tax cuts would help out workers. What happened during the New Deal years, when our government forced corporations to pay 35%, rather than let corporate welfare handouts drag that rate down to half that or less? We created the greatest middle class in the history of the world, that's what -- because corporations couldn't pay their executives outlandish salaries, and didn't want to hold on to too much money in profits, so they created jobs for people to make stuff, and let them pay taxes on it! Don't need an economics degree to see how that worked.

Now that the NFL season has started, Neal Gabler at Moyers and Company reminds us that "professional football gives vent to some of the country's worst impulses." Not just racism and tribalism, of course, but in this description of how the NFL, like most American corporations, treats its workers: "Damage your employees while they are in your service and earning you a fortune, underpay and then discard them." (As an aside, I think Colin Kaepernick is better than 12 starting QBs in the NFL right now, though maybe I shouldn't count the Jets' Josh McCown, since the Jets are tanking. But I just can't imagine why Mr. Kaepernick doesn't have a job.)

Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) has decided to retire rather than run for re-election in 2018. But while this "moderate," this self-described "member of "the governing wing" of the Republican Party, did in fact vote against the House's monstrosity of a health care "reform" bill back in May, you should remember that he voted for Paul Ryan's plan to destroy Medicare numerous times, and you don't get to call yourself a "moderate" if you voted for that. (Come to think of it, all of the three "moderate" House Reps who've recently announced their retirement recently voted for the Ryan plan -- and none of them ever voted against it.)

Finally, a Barnard College study finds that dogs do have the ability to recognize themselves. Dogs don't really recognize themselves in the mirror as far as we can tell, but if you've ever been around dogs, you might surmise that dogs find smell a more important way of understanding and organizing their world than sight -- so now we have at least two studies finding that dogs can recognize their own odor even when it's presented in a mix with other odors. This finding could lead us to presume that pretty much any animal is self-aware, and that we just have to find the way it relates to the rest of the world. Count me as one of the people who thinks only good can come from that.

Action: "free" trade, and immigration.

NAFTA renegotiation drags on, and so CREDO helps you tell our Trade Representative to negotiate NAFTA openly and transparently, to negotiate without using the nefarious Trans-Pacific "Partnership" as a starting point, and to get rid of NAFTA's "investor-state tribunals," among other things. Going over the rest of CREDO's list: I don't particularly want to use "free" trade deals to force other nations to adhere to our environmental and labor standards -- if I don't want them nullifying our laws, I certainly don't think it's fair to nullify theirs, and besides, a lot of countries have those standards already, but hardly enforce them, for a variety of reasons. But requiring imports to meet our product safety standards is not only fair but necessary, and I don't want "free" trade deals to run roughshod over Buy American and Buy Local policies, either. And I certainly don't want "free" trade deals to shovel more money toward big pharma monopolies; seriously, how much is enough for these clowns? As always, though, the "investor-state tribunal," or "investor-state dispute settlement mechanism," is my main target -- we go through a lot of trouble in America to get the laws we want, and why should we let a trade deal give corporations the right to nullify those laws and exact tribute from the taxpayer for their trouble?

Meanwhile, as you're no doubt aware, President Trump has announced his intention to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (or DACA) in six months' time, which would presumably give Congress six months to come up with a replacement (that Mr. Trump may or may not sign; people seem to forget that part!). If Congress doesn't come up with a replacement that could withstand a Trump veto, Mr. Trump says he'll "revisit" the issue, which sure doesn't have his trademark look-at-these-balls-swing swagger, does it? The DACA program, as you know, allows folks brought here by their undocumented immigrant parents as children to stay here, free of fear of deportation and free to work and contribute to society, as long as they reapply to the program every two years. We could argue that they're important to our economy, but we don't have to: even if you're of the mind, as I am, that we shouldn't enable big corporations replace us all with cheaper foreign workers, you would still, I'd think, regard deporting children to countries to which they have no emotional attachment -- indeed, countries of which they likely have no memory -- as a cruel act. Messrs. Trump and Sessions apparently don't see it as cruelty, but you'd have good reason to doubt their moral compasses point anywhere but to themselves. So CREDO, MoveOn, Color of Change, and Moms Rising all help you advocate for these immigrants, all brought here without their consent, who now call America home.

Around the table: how *not* to interrogate a Senator at a townhall, and other lessons.

President Trump comes to agreement with Democrats on a deal to increase the debt limit and finance our government's operations into mid-December. Congressional Republicans could still scuttle it, I suppose, but I feel compelled to note that this "deal" actually takes pressure off Republicans, who may now devote far more time to their tax "reform" scam. (Also, Sen. Heitkamp doesn't really imagine aligning herself with Mr. Trump will protect her seat come 2018, does she? Unless she magically transforms into an economic populist, she's toast no matter what.)

Tom Englehardt at TomDispatch, noting that Donald Trump's favorite generals have survived a lot of turnover in his Administration, reminds us that they're all veterans of a failed-and-still-failing policy, the "war on terror." Gen. McMaster, widely perceived as a voice of relative sanity in the Administration, has said the "war on terror" will go on forever because "(t)his enemy is dedicated to our destruction," though I wouldn't blame you for thinking there are other reasons this war would go on forever. Still, failing upward has been a pretty permanent condition in America if you're lucky enough to be a member of Our Glorious Elites -- recall the various banksters and bankster-enablers Barack Obama picked to get us out of the mess they made!

From the "Stupid Liberals Not Helping" file: apparent liberal activist asks Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) -- doing a rare townhall meeting with constituents and Democratic and Republican party poobahs -- if he can "confirm whether or not your daughter, Bridget, has been kidnapped," then gets ushered out by the TV studio broadcasting the townhall. Seems the interrogator was trying to make a point about DACA and family members suddenly getting deported, but Jesus Mary and Joseph there was just no other way to do that? He couldn't have made that point after saying something about DACA? All this moron did was get attention for himself and sympathy for a Senator who wouldn't otherwise get it, and I bet Mr. Toomey is a head-in-a-jar before he holds another townhall. Which leads me to wonder if his interrogator was actually a right-wing agent provocateur.

Kanawha County (WV) prosecutors drop charges against Dan Heyman, arrested for the horrible crime of asking HHS Secretary Tom Price questions at the state Capitol in May. If you advocated with County authorities for this result, go get yourself a Buffalo chicken cheese steak, or whatever else you like -- and then prepare yourself for future similar insults against our democracy and our civilization.

NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds well over half of Americans "comfortable with the nation becoming more diverse and tolerant of different lifestyles, gender roles, languages, cultures and experiences," but also finds some 24 percent of Americans, well, not comfortable. Some of the breakdowns are interesting (some 48% of seniors say they're "comfortable," which is a bit higher than I expected), but note well that this 24% figure maps pretty well onto my conviction that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano crazy. Note well, also, that they can only win elections with help from the not-crazy.

Action: fighting forced arbitration, the militarization of police, and corporate greed.

As you know, the House passed H.J.Res. 111 a mere five days after its introduction in July, which means H.J.Res. 111 must be a bad, bad bill. And H.J.Res. 111 would nullify the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's regulation keeping banks from forcing consumers into arbitration (and thus out of our courts) to settle disputes. Banksters love talking about how consumers win more money from arbitration than from class action lawsuits, but they, ah, leave out a few things. One, consumers rarely win in arbitration; if you don't win, you collect zero dollars, so it's no consolation that someone else, somewhere, won thousands of dollars. Two, banks can use arbitration against you, and they almost always win when they do, which means you lose thousands of dollars. And if you have a better chance of bringing a bankster to justice in a real court -- and this is the banksters' real issue! -- you should put aside your own lust for "winnings" and actually, like, win. I know that's a novel concept in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, but I advance it nonetheless. So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to protect consumers by rejecting H.J.Res. 111.

Meanwhile, given the Trump Administration's zeal for putting military weapons in the hands of local police officers, Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to put an end to the 1033 program that allows our Defense Department to give local police departments military-grade weapons. Why would the police need bazookas? Not to fight crime, surely, since a bazooka (or a grenade launcher, or a machine gun, or a tank) is actually a very imprecise tool toward the end of apprehending suspects and interrupting crimes. But bazookas, grenade launchers, machine guns, and tanks are very good for crowd control, of course, and what with the rise in anti-trump and anti-Nazi wannabe rallies over the past eight months, the Trump Administration is very concerned with controlling crowds, regardless of what they tell you. If the Trump Administration were actually concerned with doing the people's will, rather than holding onto power and wealth by any means necessary, they wouldn't have to worry so much about all these protestors. But Congress created the 1033 program, via a 1997 defense authorization bill, and Congress can take it away, too. So let's encourage them to do that.

Finally, the good people of Mina la India, Nicaragua, are trying to keep the British mining corporation Condor Gold from mining for, you guessed it, gold in their locality. Gold! It's like they live in the 19th century. Doesn't matter that a Canadian corporation mined gold here for close to 20 years in the middle of the last century -- it only matters what the good folks of Mina la India want, which, sadly, doesn't seem to matter to their government, which has handed over more than half of the mining concessions Condor Gold possesses in the area over the last decade. The Condor Gold project threatens to displace families from their homes, destroy livelihoods, and pollute the waters, and the corporation has even gone so far as to sue the citizenry there. So here's where the Big Stick of Bad PR comes in: the Condor Gold project's second-largest investor is the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank; if we can get the IFC to pull its money from this project, this project will have a much tougher time succeeding, and the good folks of Mina la India will be closer to securing their future. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell the IFC to divest from Condor Gold's efforts to build a gold mine in Mina la India.

Around the table: in which we are reminded that "free" trade deals are (at least!) a two-way street.

Margaret Flowers at TruthOut finds the upcoming Sanders "Medicare-for-All" bill to be noticeably weaker than Rep. Conyers's H.R. 676, long the "gold standard" of single-payer health insurance bills. Well, that would explain why Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-TX), the latter Sen. Ted Cruz's likely challenger in 2018, have embraced the cause! Mr. Sanders appears to have learned the wrong lesson from Mr. Reagan's similarly close loss in the 1976 primaries -- whereas many people then asked "wouldn't it be nice if Ronald Reagan could manage facts and figures?", no one is now asking "wouldn't it be nice if Bernie Sanders could 'play the game'?" When you've already changed the game, you don't play the old one.

Canada demands that the U.S. drop its state-level "right to work" laws and institute a generous paid family leave program, as part of NAFTA renegotiations. So that's what Barack Obama was talking about when he said "free" trade deals would force other nations to protect their workers better! But did he fail to consider it'd be used on us? I oppose any attempt to bargain away our laws in trade deals, even laws I don't like. But this sure is what's-good-for-the-goose territory for "free" traders. If we're very lucky, it might be the kind of thing that induces President Trump to throw up his hands and withdraw from NAFTA entirely.

"JPMorgan Software Does in Seconds What Took Lawyers 360,000 Hours," reads this breathless headline which, at any site other than Bloomberg, might be followed by an explanation point. I would advise my fellow liberals to avoid celebrating at the misfortune to be suffered by password-resetting techs and lawyers who used to read commercial loan agreements -- I mean, are any bosses suffering in this scenario? -- and attend to the very real possibility, unaddressed by this apparently slightly-rewritten PR release, that software is a way to avoid accountability for human mistakes and human wrongdoing. Also, JP Morgan Chase fucking cloud computes? Doesn't anyone care about security anymore?

Hillary Clinton alleges, in her upcoming election loss post-mortem, that Bernie Sanders caused "lasting damage" to her campaign, that he "made it harder to 'unify progressives'," and even paved the way for Mr. Trump's "Crooked Hillary" line of attack. These charges may be true in the strictest sense, but surely she remembers (for example) that George W. Bush's "flip-flopping" charges against John Kerry originated with Howard Dean (who used actual flip-flops!), and surely she knows that these things always happen in primaries. So I submit that as more evidence that she thought she had some kind of right to the nomination, if not also to the election, and we all know what that kind of hubris brings.

Finally, in a truly stunning display, the Trump Administration EPA goes to considerable lengths to attack one AP reporter over his work finding seven out of seven Superfund sites in Houston "inundated" by water. Tha Bush Mobb would simply have split hairs over whether "inundated" means "flooded," and I'm almost nostalgic for that kind of silliness, though the EPA's claim of having examined sites through "aerial imaging" does recall Bush Mobb reports that Mr. Bush had seen Katrina damage from on high. But the kicker, of course, is the personal attacks on the reporter for an unrelated story -- because when you can't win the case on the merits, personal attacks are all you have left.

Action: Social Security, and pollution.

Was I not just talking about how the only ideas Our Glorious Elites ever offer about Social Security involve cutting your benefits? Well, there was former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson -- whom I used to find profoundly irritating, not knowing how much more irritating future Republican Senators would be! -- on CNBC last week telling us we should raise the retirement age to 69 and calculate inflation to reduce benefits for seniors. Sigh. I'm old enough to remember when punditoids used to go on the TV and say Social Security would be broke by 2016! You might say wait until all the boomers retire, then you'll see! But I'd respond that Social Security will pay off full benefits until 2034 and then three-quarters after that, and we can address that shortfall by lifting the payroll cap on Social Security, since income over $117,000 doesn't get taxed into the system at all. Anyway, since Congress is back to work (or, perhaps more precisely, "work") and needs to pass a budget and lift the debt ceiling, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk not to use the budget and the debt ceiling to cut Social Security benefits. Because we're not hostages in America. We're free people.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state Assembly member to reject the bizarro pro-pollution bill HB 542 (printer #2259), then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. As you may recall, HB 542 started out life as a bill addressing internet sales taxes, and that bill passed the House by a wide margin. But then the Senate added all kinds of anti-regulation, pro-pollution riders, like the one letting gas and oil corporations do a lot of their own permitting, and the one letting the legislature veto clean air and clean water regulations coming from the state DEP. Because, after all, what says "we fight corruption" more than letting corporations regulate themselves? And what says "cut bureaucratic red tape" more than making clean air and clean water regulations jump through yet another hurdle before good Pennsylvanians can have clean air and clean water? Thus mutated, HB 542 passed by a narrow 26-24 vote, and now has to go back to the Assembly, because it's been so mutated. The good news? That gives us another chance to stop it. If we can't, it goes to the Governor -- and if he signs it, it very likely goes to the courts.

Action: tax "reform."

Every time Republicans hold both houses of Congress and the Presidency, we hear about the crying need for "tax reform," and when you hear that, you should be scared, because to Republicans tax reform generally means rewarding the rich and throwing crumbs (if that!) to working families. And indeed, the Tax Policy Center has already analyzed the Trump tax "reform" plan, such as it is, and found it would give the average family making less than $25,000 annually a $40 tax cut, while giving folks earning more than $3.4 million annually a $900,000-plus tax cut. That'd be two $20 bills standing next to a stack of $20 bills more than 16 feet high. I suppose we should count it as a victory that Republicans have largely avoided talking about income tax cuts this time around, as if they know we know it's a scam -- mainly, they've talked about corporate taxes, in terms of "competition" with foreign corporations (a cause close to Mr. Trump's heart, amirite?) and the "job creation" that would supposedly result from cutting the corporate tax rate.

And I suppose "hmm, our corporate tax rate is higher than Freedonia's" has some appeal if you don't think very much about it -- but if you think about it even a little, you'll see through it like you see through everything else. Of course corporations get so much welfare from our government that they don't pay anywhere near the 35% rate, and they don't create more jobs when they pay lower taxes, and a a "territorial" tax system would encourage corporations to pretend they make even more money overseas when they actually make it here. But arguments supporting corporate tax cuts also fail for one other reason: because people hate corporations. When the story of the last 10 years is the story of corporations crashing our economy, laying off millions of good Americans while sitting on trillions of dollars in reserves, and soaking up virtually all of the gains from this most recent economic "recovery" and using it not to create jobs, but mainly to buy back stock so as to concentrate their executives' power, then most folks would likely say why would we give these assholes a tax cut?

So I recommend that you call your Reps and Senators, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone) and tell them no to a cut in the corporate tax rate, no to a "territorial" tax system, and no to any tax cuts (including Estate tax repeal or capital gains cuts) that benefit the wealthy more than they benefit working families. You could also offer viable alternatives: pass legislation like S. 863, the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, and H.R. 1932, the Corporate EXIT Fairness Act, which would help prevent corporations from pretending they're "foreign" to avoid paying their share of taxes. You could tell them to cap (not eliminate!) the mortgage interest deduction so homeowners can take it but slumlords and vultures can't. Or you could tell them to simply end corporate welfare tax breaks and bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income. Now that's a job creation program, right there -- we've seen it work before, during the New Deal years, when CEOs couldn't pay themselves astronomical salaries because our government would tax most of it away, and didn't want to show a whole lot of profits, either, so they built more factories and paid more workers to make more stuff which more people bought, which helped create the greatest middle class this planet has ever seen.

And one more thing: you should prepare yourself for anything you can imagine this Congress would do, including pretend to have a discussion about corporate tax cuts that proves merely to be a smokescreen for getting massive income tax-cuts-for-the-rich done. You saw how far Congress was willing to go to pass their health care "reform" bill -- i.e., not even putting the bill through Senate committees or holding public hearings on it -- so why shouldn't we expect them to ram a tax "reform" bill down our throats before we can even catch our breath? Why shouldn't we imagine that they'll attach their tax "reform" effort to a debt limit increase or a budget resolution? You've been hearing enough about how "brutal" September's going to be (Congress has to deal with both the budget and the debt limit before month's end) that you'd be right to suspect it's a possum game, and that they're planning to take us hostage. So be sure to remind your Reps and Senators, as always, that this is America, and we're not hostages -- we're free people. Thank you, and God bless.

Around the table: meet the new boss, same as the old boss, part 873.

Jesus Mary and Joseph House Speaker wannabe Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) not only peddles the "corporations can't compete because of the tax rate" lie, but also says Democrats "can’t just be the party of redistribution of wealth." This gives right-wingers an opening to say LOOK EVEN TEH DEMOCRATZ!!!!, but American corporations are doing quite well, thank you very much, despite the 35% rate most of them can bribe their way out of paying. But doesn't Mr. Ryan know that Republicans are also "the party of redistribution of wealth"? Republicans just prefer to redistribute wealth upward.

President Trump plans to end President Obama's DACA program, which helps children of undocumented immigrants stay in America and contribute to society -- but will do so six months from now, ostensibly to give Congress time to "fix the problem." Or, perhaps, to give his CEO friends six months to get used to not having these folks around. Still, it's like King Solomon decided to just split the baby in half for real. And deporting folks who had absolutely no say in emigrating to the United States and wouldn't recognize their "home" countries at all remains cruel, but then "cruel" describes Donald Trump's main constituency.

In case you were wondering, no Donald Trump can't simply designate antifa a "terrorist" group. That'd be tough, in theory, because there's no actual hierarchy to the mulititudinous groups who call themselves antifa, but it's also impossible because the State Department can declare foreign organizations as "terrorist" groups, not domestic ones, and our government has no formal mechanism to designate a domestic group as a "terrorist" organization. And that's for the best! It'd too easy to dismiss the other side's arguments merely by brandishing scare words like "terrorist." It'd also be fair to ask exactly whom is "terrorized" by antifa -- from here, it sure looks like folks "terrorized" by antifa might really be terrorized by the quite reasonable fear that they can't actually win arguments on the merits.

Surprise, surprise, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt imposed a 20-month delay on implementation of EPA regulations concerning chemical plant safety not even three months before a plant damaged by Hurricane Harvey started blowing up. And these were the regulations the EPA put together after that big chemical plant explosion in West, TX that was all over the news in 2013! And you likely filed a public comment about those regulations! Why does it seem that the regulations President Trump hates the most are the ones that protect ordinary people the most?

Actual "fake news," er, satirical website runs story claiming a mosque also closed its doors to non-Muslim Hurricane Harvey victims, and gets gobs of attention, despite describing a mosque that doesn't exist and picturing an imam who was nowhere near Texas at the time. Too many fake news outlets are hiding behind "satire," and one day one of them is going to lose a lawsuit because a judge is going to point out that none of this "satire" is actually funny. And then they'll close up shop, and then they'll cast themselves as "free speech martyrs" or something, because self-pity does seem to be an endlessly renewable resource on the right.

Finally, Shaun Richman at In These Times presents "A New Bill of Rights for Workers: 10 Demands the Labor Movement Can Fight for and Win." I'll admit this list is a little mind-blowing -- I hadn't thought of "right-to-work" laws as a violation of the 5th Amendment's takings clause (i.e., its proscription against being "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"), nor had I thought of "scope of bargaining" restrictions as free speech restrictions. I also hadn't contemplated a national campaign against at-will firing, which would (as Mr. Richman says) actually make unions a lot more popular (just as the SEIU's assistance to fast food workers has done very well for their rep, though not increasing their membership).

Seven Things to Avoid Doing Now that Donald Trump is President.

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: With Congress coming back tomorrow, I thought I'd repost the early January epic "Seven Things Not to Do When Donald Trump Takes Office" -- slightly rewritten and retitled, of course, to reflect the passage of time since the New Year, and also to conform with my video, "Seven Things to Avoid Doing Now that Donald Trump is President." I thought it'd be a good way to assess how we're doing, and to remind us of our real relationship to our Congressfolk (i.e., that we're the boss of them, not the other way around). So take a few minutes to re-read it -- and have a happy Labor Day holiday, because you know what? You earned it.)

A great many of us fear the next four or eight years of a Donald Trump Presidency, and for good reason. But this moment in our history also offers a unique clarity: no longer can we fantasize about Democrats protecting us from the worst that Republicans do, not merely because, well, they've never been very good at that, but also because they can't now. Only we can protect ourselves from the worst they'll do, and the sooner we understand that, and practice that, and live that, the better. Hence I offer seven things we should avoid doing when Mr. Trump ascends to the Presidency.

1) Do not bother with media horserace coverage. The media treat everything like it's a big sporting event, and they treat you like a spectator. They routinely choose sensationalism over substance, and they're a big reason we're stuck with Donald Trump as our President right now. If they obsess about something (like, say, Russian hacking), you can pretty much assume it's not worth your time -- or that they want to distract you from something more important (like, say, vote suppression). And when they report on fissures within the Republican party, you should assume any such "fissures," or reports about them, are feints, designed to lull you into a false sense of security so that you don't do your duty to your country by communicating your will to your representatives. Certainly do not bother with media speculation on how much of the coming horror is Mr. Trump's fault and how much is Mr. Pence's, or that of Republicans, or Democrats. If we're all hurting, it doesn't matter -- it only matters what we do about it.

2) Do not accept the narrow choices Our Glorious Elites offer in policy debates. Whenever they talk about government deficits, the only choice they offer is spending cuts; about Social Security, benefit cuts; and about Medicare, privatization. But we know better: we can (for example) cut deficits by closing corporate tax loopholes and bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income. And we can improve Social Security by lifting the cap on payroll taxes so income over $117,000 can be taxed into the system. And we can improve Medicare by letting it negotiate its own drug prices and by hiring more investigators to stamp out fraud. There are always good alternatives to the moronic ideas Our Glorious Elites peddle -- after all, isn't America the can-do country that always finds a way?

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

4) Do not "give Donald Trump a chance." Of course we all want him to do well, despite the multitudinous indications that he won't, but "giving him a chance" is, again, beside the point of our democracy -- our job is to express our will, and his job is to execute that will. And there is no "waiting and seeing" in the country we love; there is only doing, and people who tell you to "give him a chance" (or "accept the results," or "get over it") really have a different aim in mind: they want you to be silent, because they're afraid if you're not silent, you'll make good things happen in America. And when good things happen in America, Our Glorious Elites don't get richer. And anyway, Donald Trump is going to be a pretty terrible President. You wouldn't look at a mound of dung in the middle of the sidewalk and "give it a chance" to magically transform itself into meatloaf, would you?

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

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

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

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

Action: "free" trade, torture, and immigration.

Sum of Us helps you tell our government that any renegotiated NAFTA absolutely can not have an "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanism. Why? Because the ISDS (a.k.a. the "investor-state tribunal") allows corporations to sue governments if the laws they pass cost those corporations money -- and then extract tribute from the taxpayer if it wins! That is exactly the sort of thing that should unify law-and-order conservatives and law-and-order liberals -- I can't think of anyone who would want a multinational trade agreement to interfere with how we legislate in America. This is true even though the laws corporations would most likely sue over are laws protecting our workers, our financial system, and our clean air and clean water -- real conservatives are no less concerned about these things than liberals are, though they may insist on achieving positive results differently. But the "conservative" or "liberal" who'd applaud a system that nullifies our laws, is no kind of conservative or liberal at all.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Bahrain to release human rights activist Ebtisam al-Saegh. Bahrain, as you know, detains and tortures activists, bans them from traveling, and even occasionally strips them of their citizenship -- plus they won't let independent human rights observers in, almost like they have something to hide! Bahrain has detained Ms. al-Saegh many times over the years, but most recently in early July, after she spoke out on Twitter about the horrible conditions (including torture and rape) faced by female detainees at the Isa Town detention center. And now they've apparently been inflicting these conditions upon her, though she's officially "under investigation" for, you guessed it, "terrorism," and will be detained until the "investigation" "concludes." Of course, any government so "terrorized" by free speech deserves to die a humiliating death, so let's fight for Ms. al-Saegh.

Finally, President Trump will decide by early next week whether to end DACA, the Obama-era program lessening the possibility of deportation of children who were brought to America by undocumented immigrant parents -- 10 state Attorneys General have threatened to sue him if he doesn't end it, though, you know, maybe he likes being held hostage as little as the rest of America does! Or maybe he'll be mindful of how much his CEO friends would hate it if he terminated DACA. Nah -- as I've said before, hoping Mr. Trump will do the right thing is fool's gold, and worse, it hampers us from telling Mr. Trump to do the right thing, which is our job as citizens. So the Friends Committee for National Legislation helps you tell Mr. Trump to keep deferring deportation for innocent young folks who contribute to American society. After all, punishing good people who had no say in whether or not they came to America is cruel, and we should never be cruel. And please understand that when I say "never," I mean never.

Around the table: corporate taxes, legislative hostage-taking, nursing home abuse, internet freedom, and military weapons for police.

"It's a Myth That Corporate Tax Cuts Mean More Jobs," says Sarah Anderson at The New York Times. So says most people who've given the matter a minute of thought, but Congressional Republicans want to lower the rate to 20 percent, and Ms. Anderson has effectively tested the effectiveness of that approach by conducting research on the 92 publicly-traded corporations already paying an effective tax rate of 20 percent or less. And surprise, surprise! As an aggregate, they're actually losing jobs -- though they're not exactly losing outlandish executive pay, or, we presume, stock buybacks. This sure seems like a head shot, to me, but I know this zombie lie will get back up.

Congressional Republicans plan to cut $1 billion from FEMA's budget, even though FEMA could be in Texas for years. And this cut is New Jersey Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen's idea, so add that to your Rodney Frelinghuysen hate book. In a peripherally-related note, Congress is also contemplating holding the Children's Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) reauthorization hostage to various stupid ideas, including a repeal of the medical device tax. Is it too much to ask that merely repeating these things out loud kills them, as daylight kills vampires? I insist that it is not too much to ask. But if I have to hold the damn wooden dagger myself, I'll do it.

HHS Inspector General reports that more than one out of every four nursing home abuse cases go completely unreported. And not all of the ones that do get reported actually get reported by nursing home staff, even though that's their job. But please, President Trump, make it harder for residents and their families to sue the nursing homes that abuse them! Forcing residents and families into arbitration they're probably going to lose really shows that great big heart of yours!

If the FCC guts our internet freedom, as we presume they're about to do, part III of Free Press's official comment to the FCC on the matter describes how such an anti-net neutrality action would be open to legal challenges. The gist of it is this: you can't do whatever the fuck you please just because you're FCC Chair -- you can, in fact, demonstrate enough pig-headedness that you run afoul of the law, in this case the Administrative Procedure Act. Also, too, maybe Mr. Pai shouldn't run his mouth on Twitter so much -- you know, like his boss.

Finally, in the wake of President Trump's resurrection of the program allowing local police departments to get discount military weapons, Mark Nevitt at Just Security wonders, quite reasonably, "Why Are We Giving U.S. Police Departments Bayonets?" He describes the folly of the 1033 program pretty well, and you may not be surprised by anything you read in it, but seriously, "(t)he bayonet is a bladed weapon designed as a weapon of last resort for close-quarter, hand-to-hand combat. In what circumstance would a police department need this?" Also worth highlighting: his suggestion that IKEA gives you more instruction on how to put together its furniture than the DOD does to police about how to use its weapons.