Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: chronicling more unneeded worry about ruining Mr. Kavanaugh's life.

I've been struggling to put this satisfactorily in re the Kavanaugh nomination, but luckily Dave Lindorff at Counterpunch does it: we do not have to shackle ourselves to a "presumption of innocence" when evaluating an appointment to our nation's highest court, any more than employers shackle themselves to a "presumption of innocence" when considering job applications. I mean, gosh, if we were filling 827 Supreme Court slots, I suppose we might evaluate candidates a little more loosely, but we're hiring for one slot, and even our President could easily find someone else who's qualified, preferably someone who hasn't treated the world as his plaything, as Mr. Kavanaugh has.

Study finds that millennials are actually driving down the divorce rate in America. How? They marry later in life than their boomer parents and grandparents, they wait until they're financially ready -- and, well, a good number of them don't get married to begin with. The first two items are good news -- even though I suspect "not marrying until you're financially ready" wasn't as much a preoccupation with boomers, since they were more likely to be "financially ready" once they entered the workforce -- but the third item suggests we're about to make marriage a privilege of the well-educated and well-paid. A solution presents itself: give everyone opportunities to be well-educated and well-paid.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker generally runs good campaign ads, so I'm totally gobsmacked that his campaign decided to make, and run, this one. You need to see it to believe it, and even then you won't believe it. You can make strange campaign ads -- in Wisconsin alone, Russ Feingold and Ron Johnson are famous for it -- but the strangeness kinda has to make sense after a while, and also (and this is important!) the strangeness can't be unpleasant and off-putting. You can't cut just any ad and say "there is no such thing as bad publicity," not merely because there is such a thing as bad publicity, but also because you don't have infinite money and infinite time to run ads.

Ho hum, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) throws a tantrum near the end of Thursday's hearing on the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, calling the hearing "the most unethical sham since I've been in politics." Hearing him complain that Democrats want to "hold this seat open and hope (they) win in 2020" is especially rich, considering he had absolutely nothing bad to say about Republicans a) refusing to consider Merrick Garland in 2016 and b) threatening to hold that seat open until 2020 themselves!

Finally, good citizens in small-town Iowa are using a novel strategy to keep from getting swamped in ever-higher levels of factory farm hog manure: they're agreeing to a legal covenant whereby they all agree not to allow factory farms or factory farm waste on their land, a covenant 40 families have joined, and more may join in time. Actual conservatives would no doubt applaud such a move -- one that doesn't institute new regulations and depends on citizens more than the state to police each other -- but too many of today's "conservatives" argue that whatever delivers the most money to CEOs is what's best for America. And anyway Iowa does need better regulations of factory farms, since factory farms tend to pollute folks' drinking water.

Action: concerning cruel budgeting and our Supreme Court.

It may seem strange, but Republicans are talking an awful lot about cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and the protections of the Affordable Care Act -- Administration economic advisor Larry Kudlow told the Economic Club of New York that our Administration would be going after Medicare and Social Security after the midterms, and Republicans in Congress keep proposing budgets that would turn Medicare into a voucher program and cut trillions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid. You'd think with all the trouble Republicans had getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, they'd know better -- but then again, they're probably looking around the political landscape and seeing nothing but weakling Democrats who barely raise a peep in defense of popular and necessary programs. Thus it's up to us, as always, so Greyroots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court, then you can still 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) to call your Senators and give them what-for. The news is all about the sworn affidavit from a third woman accusing Mr. Kavanaugh of horrific sexual behavior toward girls while he was still a youth -- and, as other observers have pointed out, a sworn affidavit means perjury charges for the person who swears it if they're lying. But Justice Kavanaugh has already convinced us he'd do his damnedest to expand Presidential power, and I think we're all seeing how bad a proposition that would be right now. And these quite reasonable accusations over the last week also show us that Mr. Kavanaugh is too entitled to sit in judgement on anyone or anything.

Action: concerning corruption, corporate taxes, and the Muslim ban.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 3357, the Anti-Corruption and Public Accountability Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. S. 3357 would (among other things!) help keep lobbyists out of our government and keep our politicians out of lobbying after they leave office, prevent politicians from owning individual stocks while they're in office, and subject federal contractors to more public scrutiny. In addition, S. 3357 would reclassify federal administrative law judges as civil service jobs -- to reverse our President's efforts to pack those positions with his cronies -- and it would make the IRS release eight years of tax returns for all Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates (as well as two years' returns for Congressional candidates). All of that would help get rid of, as our President might say, a lingering stench in our government. So let's do it.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell big pharma corporations to stop stashing their profits in overseas tax shelters. We should, of course, continue to demand that our Congressfolk pass laws that make corporations pay their fair share of taxes -- so that good Americans and small businesses don't have to bear all the burden of paying for roads, bridges, firefighters, libraries, schools, and the like -- but we might as well go right to the corporations, too, particularly the ones who charge us an arm and a leg for drugs they tend to need a lot of taxpayer money to even make. The Big Stick of Bad PR makes a big crack and a big hurt -- even when corporations respond by saying we already pay all the taxes we're supposed to pay under the law! They hope you don't know that they spend millions of dollars every year getting our Congressfolk to write the laws that lower their taxes. The good news? I think that ship has sailed.

Finally, a group of good government organizations (including People for the American Way and Project South) helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal our Administration's notorious Muslim travel ban. No use arguing with me that TEH BAN IZ ALSO FOR TEH VENEZWAILYUNZ!!!!!, because we all know our Administration put them (and a few other nations) in there just so our Supreme Court would have an excuse to say "see, it's not a religious ban per se!" But if it looks like dung and smells like dung, you don't have to taste it just because some right-winger says "you can't prove it's not meatloaf." The Muslim ban is a stain on our national character, not just because it unfairly targets folks based on their religious beliefs, but because it is a policy that diddles the rage glands of America's most rage-addled folks. And, frankly, they shouldn't get all the say about everything in America.

Around the table: the further adventures of our intrepid President.

Remember when our Secretary of State "certified" that the Saudi/UAE coalition was doing its best to protect civilian human rights in its war on Yemen? Well, he may have done that after the State Department's legislative affairs team told him that ending the war in Yemen would cost corporations too much money in arms sales -- and a former lobbyist for a defense contractor just so happens to head up that team. Nice to know that the matter of right and wrong enters into our government's deliberations so frequently! Remember this when your Tea Party uncle says our President is conducting a "different" kind of foreign policy, or that you should put businesspeople in government because they're the best people and they know everything.

Our Administration lifts a penalty for a coal corporation that has repeatedly violated mine safety laws -- and may have broken the law in doing so. And the fellow who made this decision -- our Administration's Mine Safety and Health Administration chief -- is a former coal executive whose corporation repeatedly violated the safety of its workers because of course he is. Again, let your Tea Party uncle explain how businesspeople "know everything," or, better yet, how making coal mines less safe "helps out coal miners." (And yes, I noticed the Russian connection to Pocahontas Coal -- but which would be worse: the fact of a Russian connection, or more coal miners getting sick and dying because our Administration doesn't think it has to play by the rule of law?)

A U.S. District Judge blocks a North Carolina law aiming to slash farmworkers' rights. Confront the details of the bill the court struck down and you'll likely think of it as legislators throwing fecal matter against a wall to see what sticks. But you know, it sure would be better for all of us if farmworkers weren't exempt from the protections of the National Labor Relations Act, and recent pro-worker legislation at the federal level, while pretty commendable, hasn't gone as far as that.

North Carolina passes law mandating voting places stay open from 7am to 7pm on weekdays -- but this has the unintended consequence (or do I mean "unintended consequence"?) of forcing almost half of that state's counties to close early voting locations. If you're thinking more hours open means more access to the polls, consider how far some rural folks have to go to vote and how little it matters that polls might be open a little earlier or a little later, and then accept the wisdom of having more voting locations.

Ho hum, Facebook now relies on two government-created propaganda outlets to stem the spread of "fake news." Or do I mean "stem"? Too many folks are using the spectre of "fake news" to censor good liberal news outlets, and (as I've said to more than one troll!) crying "fake news" at everything is a way of saying you can't win arguments on the merits. I'll admit I've barely noticed Facebook's doings on my news feed, but that's because I don't use them as a news feed -- I use email, still the greatest social network ever created, as a news feed.

Finally, we now know of four women who are accusing Brett Kavanaugh of various kinds of sexual assault, and rather than attend Mr. Kavanaugh's unlikely denials or our President's expected hysteria, let us instead attend Sen. Lindsey Graham's declaration that he doesn't want to "ruin this guy's life based on an accusation." If Mr. Kavanaugh didn't get on our Supreme Court, would that really "ruin" his life? He'll still serve on the D.C. Circuit Court, he'll still be the beneficiary of (I suspect wholly unexamined) white privilege, he'll be able to get wingnut welfare forever if he chooses -- yeah, our lives should be so "ruined." And, as I've suggested, a lot of people not so afflicted by a sense of entitlement must have the skill and ability to fill this position. Maybe even our President could find one.

Action: concerning taxes and conservation.

As you likely know, House Republicans are trying to ram through yet another tax-cut-for-the-rich; the bill number is H.R. 6760, and the title is the innocuous-sounding "Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act of 2018." The cojones on these clowns, pretending that families and small businesses have anything to do with it! The idea that "pass-through businesses" are "small businesses" -- and not, you know, the kind of corporations rich people set up to avoid taxation -- is a laugh. The idea that making the 2.6% drop in the top income tax rate permanent is a way of "protecting families" is also a laugh. But when Republican Congresses come after our Social Security and our Medicare and our Medicaid because TEH DEFICITZ!!!!! -- when their own tax plan blew open a trillion-dollar-plus hole in the deficit! -- ain't none of us going to be laughing. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called "Tax Scam 2.0."

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund before it expires on September 30, then the Wilderness Society still helps you do that. The Wilderness Society's email action tool also allows you to tell your Congressfolk to permanently reauthorize the LWCF, which sure would be better than leaving it vulnerable to the hostage crises our legislators like to create -- I mean, if Congress really desperately wants to repeal it (or improve it!), it could simply pass a bill to do that later. Ha ha, I said "simply" like it would be easy for them to do! The LWCF is actually pretty popular, after all -- most of us have visited one of the 40,000-plus scenic places it's created at no cost to the taxpayer. Yes, it's much "easier" for Congress simply to sit on its hands and let popular programs expire, which is a damn good reason to make them reauthorize such programs forever.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court and a vicious e. coli strain.

If you haven't done so, already, today would be a good day to 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 cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject the nomination of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court. I've said that the entirely plausible accusation of sexual assault, regardless of how long ago it was, is reason enough to sink his nomination -- I mean, we're only trying to fill one spot; think we can't find a qualified judge who doesn't have the sense of entitlement you'd have to have to try to rape someone? But we must remember that Mr. Kavanaugh poses a far greater threat to law and order: he has demonstrated, through his multitudinous writings, that he would expand Presidential power and Presidential prerogatives far beyond what our Founders intended or what a free society would tolerate. And that should upset you no matter what our President's name is.

Meanwhile, researchers at George Washington University have found a particular strain of E. coli (ST131-H22, to be precise) found in chickens seems to be migrating to humans and causing (among other infections) up to 40,000 urinary tract infections annually -- a mere one half of one percent of all UTIs Americans get in a year, but that won't comfort you if that number becomes 100 percent of you. And, of course, it could get much worse -- ST131-H22 has apparently developed some resistance to tetracycline, which it encounters frequently enough because factory farms tend to pump it into their chickens. Anyway, Penn PIRG helps you tell our USDA to start testing poultry for this strain of E. coli. The USDA can do this without additional authorization from Congress, and yes the big poultry producers will very likely stamp their feet and try to drag this out in court, but really, this is an appropriate time to say if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear.

Around the table: the real main characters of the bankster meltdown drama, and other revelations.

Leave it to the incomparable David Dayen to remind us that coverage of the 10-year anniversary of the 2008 financial services armageddon has virtually ignored all those folks who lost their homes in the fallout. Why does our "liberal" media admires egomaniacs more than they admire regular folks? I mean, what reasonable person could possibly care how Timothy Geithner justifies the evil he did to help cause the crash and the evil he did in "fixing" it? You'd think the story of how Wells Fargo absolutely screwed over Terrie Crowley would at least appeal to the sentimentalists in our media. I guess when big corporations get exposed as the lawless bastards they are, sentimentality doesn't mean as much.

Uh oh: infamous "Tiger Mom," who has helped vet clerks for Brett Kavanaugh in her capacity as Yale law school professor, told law students last year that Mr. Kavanaugh's clerks all "looked like models" and, further, that this was "no accident." Ms. Chua went on to advise students on how to "dress to exude a 'model-like' femininity," which did seem to put more than a few law students off on pursuing a clerkship with Mr. Kavanaugh. I guess right-wingers would look at such self-weeding and say that's how it's supposed to work! I'd say they've watched too many movies and too much TV, where everyone has to be "attractive" or else they "won't attract the audience's sympathy."

Did you hear about a right-wing punditoid's hilarious attempt to spread the notion that it wasn't Brett Kavanaugh who sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford, but a guy who looked like him? Turns out he got help, such as it was, from the same right-wing PR firm that worked with the Swift Boat Veterans back in 2004. Really, though, when a guy spends two full days teasing a revelation without saying what it might be or how he got it, you'd think "serious journalists" would know better than to report on it -- even to report on it as hype, which is how they get good journalists to do bad things. Sadly, they're all more afraid of being left out of a scoop than they are of the long-term damage they're doing to our civilization.

Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), who might well be that state's next Senator in a few months, unfurls an avalanche of ignorance about the whole Kavanaugh imbroglio. This is how they do it, of course: like His Personal Lord and Savior Our President, they sling so much fecal matter against the wall you can't keep up with it, so I'll say only two things: 1) you don't have to be "perfect" not to try and rape girls in high school, only good, and 2) if Mr. Cramer had been sexually assaulted, would he say it "never went anywhere" due to the mere absence of someone else's ejaculate in or on his person?

Laurie Penny at Longreads explains why we shouldn't debate right-wingers. Long story short: right-wingers don't care about "winning arguments" or "being civil" or "protecting the spirit of debate" so much as smearing the house of our civilization with shit and then laughing at our efforts to scrub it off -- and they use unctuous pronouncements about "debate" and "civility" only as a wedge to introduce ideas that civilized people wouldn't otherwise consider. You should spend the 15 minutes or so it'll take to read Ms. Penny's piece, so I'll only add two observations: 1) in my experience, folks who say "I like to debate" are generally trying to justify being jerks to other people, and 2) I don't like debate -- I like being right and getting attention for being right, and the difference between me and most people is that I just admitted it to you.

Finally, from the "Surprise, Surprise!" file: our President accuses Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), now running for Governor, of betraying him in public. What did Mr. DeSantis do? He wouldn't support our President's assertion that Democrats have been inflating death toll numbers over Hurricane Maria's landfall in Puerto Rico. We could go on about our President's peculiar notions of "loyalty," but let's just ask: when are our leaders going to be loyal to the American people? Because that's how this thing's supposed to work.

Action: concerning Puerto Rico, self-driving cars, and endangered species.

Given the fact that Puerto Rico -- which ought to be a state, so Americans are less likely to think it's full of brown-skinned foreigners -- is still suffering from the ravages of Hurricane Maria over a year later, Amnesty International helps you tell local and federal authorities to investigate our government's response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The immediate news hook: a CBS News report (based on photos taken by a Puerto Rico police officer) that millions of bottles of water sat on a runway in Puerto Rico for more than a year. I guess our Administration will blame REGULASHUNZ!!!!! for that, though is that sort of excuse really worthy of a can-do country? Also, both the Union of Concerned Scientists and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to enact some real relief for the good citizens of Puerto Rico. And if that means building out a renewable power grid and/or ending the forced austerity policies so beloved by the banksters who hold Puerto Rican debt, well, those are sacrifices we should be willing to make.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to oppose S. 1885, the AV START Act, which would let corporations put self-driving cars on the road without ensuring their safety, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You heard about the two people self-driving cars have killed this year, but you may not have heard that road tests commonly find self-driving cars absolutely flummoxed by a little snow or a solitary seagull. One corporation wants to put sensors under cars so they'll "see" the road better. I have a few better ideas: properly fund public transportation, mandate that corporations with known safety problems start disclosing them, and shame people who only buy cars because they're flashy. We'll start getting safer driving after that! Why do we assume machines will do things better than people when machines can't check out my groceries better than a 16-year-old? Because bosses don't want to have to pay workers, that's why. Let's not enable that behavior.

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Administration not to pursue a bunch of regulatory changes that would seriously injure our ability to protect endangered species. Get to stepping, though, because the deadline for your comments is Monday. What does our Administration plan to do? Among other things, they plan to allow agencies to tabulate "economic costs" when deciding how to protect endangered and threatened species and also to ignore scientific data before giving out oil and gas drilling leases. They'd further mandate that every single threatened species in America get its own rule, even though one rule currently covers all of them; is that what right-wingers mean when they say REGULASHUNZ IZ TEH BURDENZ!!!!!? Apparently the right finds cumbersome regulations just fine when it makes the real work of civilization much harder. They'll answer to God for their nefarious works -- but let's maybe help them walk a more rewarding path by speaking out now.

Action: concerning ALEC, media consolidation, and public lands.

You may have heard that Verizon has lately left the American Legislative Exchange Council because of ALEC's newfound BBF, David Horowitz, a notorious right-wing Muslim-basher. Yeah, I wish more corporations had dumped ALEC over their support for Voter ID and opposition to municipal broadband, too, but I take an opening where I get it, so People for the American Way helps you tell other big corporations, like AT&T, Comcast, and UPS, to leave ALEC. I admit I was a bit surprised to learn that corporations were leaving ALEC over climate change, but I'd be a lot less surprised to find corporations leaving ALEC over David Horowitz. America's big corporations do seem to have wholeheartedly embraced liberal positions on social issues -- mainly, I suspect, to divert your attention from their reactionary positions on economic issues. But, like I said, I take an opening where I get it, and it's ALEC's economic work I hate the most.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, then Free Press still helps you do that. Sprint and T-Mobile keep telling us this merger will be good for them, like we're supposed to be emotionally invested in that -- I'm such a churl I want only the things that are good for all of us, and having three big phone corporations instead of four ain't good for us. If four turns to three, then three can more easily turn to two, and two to one, and one was the number of political parties in the Soviet Union, and you know how that turned out. I don't make this analogy lightly -- one corporation monopolizing all of America's phone services would mean (especially in this post-neutrality age) one corporation deciding what you can see and hear. What do conservatives teach us? That concentrated power anywhere is evil. It's why we passed the Sherman Antitrust Act almost 150 years ago.

Finally, our Bureau of Land Management has proposed opening up almost all of New Mexico's Greater Carlsbad Cavern area to oil and gas drilling, and would even sell off some 50,000 acres for that purpose. Meaning it's no longer public land! Which you can only sell one time, I feel compelled to repeat with the italics hammer. Hence Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell our BLM to reject its plan to open up this area to oil and gas drilling. Read through Wild Earth Guardians's seven-point plan in the email you'd send and you'll be impressed with the breadth of its reasoning -- you would argue for prioritizing "securing public access to currently inaccessible lands" over corporate access and for strong safeguards against emissions and oil and gas leaks, among other things. So let's work on getting our policymakers to make some actual good policy, versus policy that enriches some crony or other.

Around the table: our Administration writes another Democrat attack ad for them! And other tales.

Did you know that 49 states have the ability to bill prisoners for their stay when they get out? And 46 states can put you back in jail for failing to pay your five-digit "debt" to the state. I put "debt" in quotation marks for a reason: you pay your actual debt to society by serving your sentence. And if you get saddled with a $50,000 bill for the cost of incarcerating you, you'll almost certainly never make enough to pay it back (most criminals can't find work as banksters, after all). You can't work it off in prison, either, and certainly not at 50 cents an hour. But wait, there's more! The problem is even worse in states that have privatized their prisons. What a racket!

Ho hum, our President said that tax "reform" would bring $5 trillion back into America -- from corporations that stashed it overseas and pretended it was money made in foreign countries -- but a mere $147 billion has come back. Nobody could have predicted that, given the choice between paying a low percentage on their "foreign" profits and no percentage, corporations would choose the latter! Well, except anyone who thought about it. You like how our politicians act like there's just no way to make corporations pay the taxes they owe? Even though they routinely kill bills that would do that? (And, in a peripherally-related note, Administration economic advisor Larry Kudlow tells the Economic Club of New York that it'll be time to go after Medicare and Social Security after the midterms -- you know, since tax "reform" blew another hole in the budget, not that Mr. Kudlow will say that. His statement is, of course, a Democrat ad that writes itself, and thus a Democrat ad we're not terribly likely to see.)

Michigan's reactionary state legislature passes a paid sick leave law which also makes the minimum wage the same for tipped workers as for everyone else -- but labor activists aren't celebrating. Both of these initiatives were going to go before the voters in November, but now that the legislature has passed them, they're not -- and the legislature can now change the law with a simple majority, instead of the three-quarters supermajority they'd need to overturn laws passed via ballot initiatives. You know how politicians talk about "polishing this turd" when they support bills they know aren't perfect? Well, this is kinda the opposite of that. You might even call it "turding" a bill.

Lisa Song and Al Shaw at ProPublica inform us that Hurricane Florence is very likely to destroy homes that have already collected federally-funded flood insurance payments. And naturally climate change is going to make all that much, much worse. Remember that time John Stossel all but admitted he built a house on the beach so he could collect flood insurance payments? Good times! Seriously, you can't tell people where to live, but it seems to me you can tell developers where to build.

Verizon ends its membership in the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) because of its association with the notorious David Horowitz. You may well be asking, as I did, "Stand Your Ground didn't do it, Voter ID didn't do it, climate change denialism didn't do it, but David Horowitz did?" Mr. Horowitz has, after all, been a sort of ambulance chaser of right-wing causes for decades. But, yeah, he says profoundly ugly crap that's unworthy of a civilized people. And anyway I'll take a hit to ALEC's pocketbook however I can get it.

Finally, Fareed Zakaria takes to the Washington Post an alleged "Threat to Democracy -- From the Left." How has this threat manifested itself? Well, two colleges disinvited right-wing speakers three years apart, the New Yorker changed its mind about having Steve Bannon on a panel last month, Roy Innis never got to debate William Shockley about racism in 1974 though he really really wanted to, and John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes said things about freedom of speech. Really, that's the whole argument. Here's a better, shorter one: the First Amendment only protects you from your government; it does not guarantee a public audience for your views, nor does it guarantee a reputation as a public intellectual. Even if one of our papers of record routinely prints your ramblings.

Action: concerning banksters, free speech, and product safety.

With the 10-year anniversary of the 2008 financial services armageddon having lately passed, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to break up the big banks via a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, which would make banks smaller by preventing them from indulging in the hifalutin investments that crashed our economy and will crash it again. As the first sentence suggests, we've already seen what happens when we don't break up the big banks -- and we're continuing to see what happens when we let banksters determine what our economy is going to look like, and it includes a lot of income redistribution upward from people who work to people who don't. But limiting the size of any institution that threatens to run roughshod over our freedoms is not some "radical" proposal, but one with a long history and precedent in America. You might even say a fundamental opposition to concentrated power created America.

Meanwhile, our Education Department would like to adopt a definition of "anti-Semitism" that would equate criticism of Israel or support of Palestine with anti-Semitism! All so folks can win civil rights cases against folks who do either one in an academic setting! Hey, that could be any of us, if we work in a school! Of course, Israel is not Judaism even if their far-right-wing government acts like they are, and when even the progenitor of the legal theory equating anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel says it can't be used in academic settings due to free speech issues, you have to wonder what our Education Department is really afraid of. Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell our Education Department's Office of Civil Rights not to equate pro-Palestinian activism or criticism of Israel with "anti-Semitism." Yikes, this from the Administration whose President said some Nazi wannabes are "very fine people."

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to ban poisonous paint strippers. A lot of paint strippers contain N-Methylpyrrolidone (or NMP) and methylene chloride, which cause respiratory problems and could lead to death; our EPA did propose a rule banning these paint strippers during the second Obama term, but you know what happened after that: a President openly hostile to regulations that protect good Americans happened. Walmart, Lowe's, and Home Depot have all lately banned these toxic products, but that ain't the boon it seems to be, as our EPA might use that as an excuse to declare that "the market has taken care of the problem," even though these three big corporations could all reverse their decisions tomorrow. And, ah, don't be the fool who retorts WHAT YOU THINK PAINT STRIPPERS SHOULD ONLY HAVE NICE CHEMICALS HA HA HA SNORT. Nobody should worry about dying because they use a paint stripper.

Action: concerning taxes, unconstitutional war-making, and product safety.

As long expected, Congressional Republicans have introduced H.R. 6760, known as the "Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act of 2018," but perhaps better known as "Tax Scam 2.0," the bill that would make permanent certain tax cuts Republicans passed late last year, and though Republicans spend a lot of time telling you these are really for, well, "families and small businesses," that's utter rubbish -- sure, the cut in the 25 percent bracket to 22 percent will stay, but that's not a whole lot of real money, whereas the 2.6 percentage point cut in the former 39.6 percent bracket is real money, and so is the Estate tax cut (which working folks like us never pay), and so is the pass-through business tax cut which mostly rich folks get. We might as well get the jump on this, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your House Rep to reject the work-hating, deficit-busting, working families-hurting "Tax Scam 2.0."

Meanwhile, several Congressfolk from both parties are still pushing for a War Powers Resolution vote on our participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you demand that your Congressfolk vote on the war on Yemen, as our Constitution and the War Powers Act mandate they do. Earlier this week, our Administration "certified," in testimony to Congress, that Saudi Arabia and the UAE "are undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure." Like bombing school buses? Like leaving Yemen teetering on the brink of famine? Defense Secretary Mattis has also said that American influence on Saudi Arabia and the UAE has saved civilian lives, which sure sounds like a rhetorical hostage crisis to me. You know what would save more civilian lives? If our government didn't feel like it had to go along with whatever Saudi Arabia wants, that's what. It's hard to say you have leverage over someone if you never actually use it.

Finally, hot on the heels of the news that some Playskool crayons you find in dollar stores or at online sellers like Amazon or eBay might have asbestos in them, Penn PIRG (which conducted the study) helps you tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to recall these and other products that might injure our children off our shelves. (As an aside, I sure do find the misspelling of "playschool" less funny as I get older.) Penn PIRG's findings also included markers with benzene and three-ring binders with phthalates, and while a Johns Hopkins toxicologist said the amount of asbestos found in the Playskool crayons isn't dangerous to "most" people, you have to wonder if "most" people includes children, and one of the Penn PIRG study's authors points out that if you get trace amounts of asbestos from several products (and you might!), you're still at risk for getting sick. So, yes, it seems like recalling the crayons would help save lives.

Around the table: featuring more of our President's lies, and more of the right's misdirections.

In ten brutal paragraphs, Jeffrey St. Clair lays out the horrible devastation in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria, and (of course) slams our President's absurd claims about how great his Administration handled it. Close to 5,000 dead, not "16," and our President never says who issues those rave reviews of his "performance" Jesus Mary and Joseph why is everything a damn performance anymore? Anyway, it really is well past time for Puerto Rican statehood -- I mean, given the number of times we've all had to tell people Puerto Rico is part of America, you know, maybe we should drive the point home.

Reed Richardson at FAIR reminds us that the whole "anonymous" kerfluffle just so happened to occur right around the time our Administration committed to further military involvement in Syria, which supports the hypothesis that our Administration, which loves drama, perpetrated the "anonymous" op-ed in the New York Times as a false flag operation. How do the libertarian-inflected folk who voted for our President because he promised a new-different-better foreign policy feel now, I wonder? Well, I don't wonder that much, because that was always a slim reed to hold onto.

Nicholas Powers at TruthOut reminds us that "Nike Uses Liberal Multiculturalism to Hide Abuse" -- specifically, abuse of the workers, in low pay and unsafe working conditions, who make Nike shoes. I've been obsessing lately over Hillary Clinton's suggestion during her campaign that we shouldn't break up the big banks because that won't solve racism or sexism or homophobia (gosh, I wonder why she lost!), and Mr. Powers's observations map pretty well onto that. (I do think he's overstating the effect 3D printing has on "making fully automated factories possible." 3D printers make knickknacks now, and get zero scrutiny from product safety regulators.)

Here's little-reported dung nugget from our President's August 30 Indiana rally: he slammed wind power, hitting on every last "problem" wind power supposedly has. In order: no, turbines don't kill that many birds; no, it's not the end of the world when the wind doesn't below because every form of energy has the occasional supply issue, and no "wind turbine syndrome" is not a thing, which anyone who's spent time in an actually noisy place already knows. He's taken all the crap-with-crap-sauce arguments fossil fuel PR hacks put out over the years and dumped them all in one paragraph! Our President really is everything wrong with our civilization in one person.

Finally, from the "I'm Pointing This Out So You'll Ignore It in the Future" file: long-time Republican donor Sean Klarman urges everyone to vote Democrat in the upcoming midterms, because "democracy is at stake," but you no doubt remember how many right-wingers urged you to vote for Mrs. Clinton in 2016 because democracy was at stake, so I hope you can forgive me for thinking this is a) just another attempt at corralling you into their game, instead of making them play our game, or b) ratfuckery from a big right-wing donor.

Around the table: R.I.P., *Village Voice*.

Uh oh: woman accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault while both were in high school, and Sen. Feinstein (D-CA), after some apparent dithering, refers the matter to the FBI. In a sane, healthy, and normal society, this allegation would finish his nomination; in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, I'm not even sure if this allegation gives some Democratic Senators (Heitkamp, Manchin, Donnelly, Jones) cover to vote against him. Of course, the right would no doubt prefer the story be about how Democrats handled it, and I bet our "liberal" media enables that narrative, since it's got drama and a penis in it. I'd be happy to be wrong about all of this, but I fear I'm not.

Speaking of sickness, immorality, and decadence, big pharma CEO says he had a "moral requirement" to jack up the price of a urinary infection drug by 600%. He also falls back on the old MUST! REWARD! SHAREHOLDERS! saw, and pretends that the choice we face as a civilization is either price-gouging or oblivion, which is what, class? A hostage situation, that's what -- don't prevent me from taking advantage of sick people, or the American economic system gets it! Gosh, how did businesses ever succeed in the days when you'd be ashamed to call price-gouging "moral"?

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says he could, theoretically, mind you, take on our President in an election and win, because he's "smarter." Of course he quickly backtracks, optimistically assessing that anyone other than a beltway insider was crying out for a Dimon 2020 campaign! Seriously, though, would Mr. Dimon be the first to crucify himself on his own pride against our President? No, he would not. (Also, too, he should check his I-earned-my-money routine -- even when comparing himself to the billionaire President who started out with a "small loan" of a million bucks from "Daddy" -- because all Jamie Dimon does, for real, is redistribute other folks' hard-earned wealth upward to himself.)

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), who's now what passes for a moderate Republican in the House, falls all over himself suggesting that staying in an orphanage might be better for kids than getting adopted by gay parents. Politicians ought to remember that high school kids are a) smart and b) not compromised by their employers, because they don't have them. I'm not sure this puts the kibosh on his re-election, though -- yes, New Jersey is one of the few states where being anti-gay is an electoral anchor around your neck, but Mr. Smith hasn't been as obvious about it as former Rep. Scott Garrett, one of the Republicans' few House losses of 2016. As persistent? Perhaps. But not as obvious.

I find the tale of how our President supposedly demanded that his architect remove braille signs from his building's elevators (in contravention of federal law) because "no blind people (were) going to live" there far more instructive than whatever came out in a book this week. If he was just screwing around with the architect, whom he also apparently called "weak," then he's a mean bastard, and if he actually demanded that someone else break the law on his behalf, then he's a coward. And his animus toward regulations "telling him what to do" (cf. all those health code violations at the "second White House," Mar-a-Lago) makes him the emotional equivalent of a 12-year-old boy.

Finally, on the occasion of the demise of the Village Voice after 53 years of greatness -- at the hands of yet another vulture capitalist who swore he'd revive it -- Art Forum treats us to remembrances of the Voice from some of its greatest writers, including Gary Indiana, Robert Christgau, J. Hoberman, and Greg Tate. Mr. Hoberman (I still remember his skeptical Schindler's List review!) calls the Voice "everything I loved about New York" and its writers "an indescribable mix of brilliant, talented, impossible people," and while I stopped loving New York long ago, I still love the work of at least two dozen of these impossible people (I hoped someone would mention Alisa Solomon, who used to be my go-to on gay rights). R.I.P., Voice.

Action: concerning data protection, corruption, and mergers.

Remember a year ago, when Equifax announced they'd been hacked, leaving the personal information of almost 150 Americans exposed? What do you suppose Congress has done about the matter since then? Go find an empty sheet of paper and hold it up, and you'll have your answer. Why, they even tried to cap class-action lawsuit awards to protect corporations like Equifax when they expose your data! But S. 2289, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would help protect good Americans from these little Equifax moments, by regulating credit corporations' cybersecurity, mandating annual inspections thereof, and instituting fines for non-compliance. I'd prefer jail time for these clowns instead of fines, but S. 2289 represents a better impulse after data breaches than "let's ensure no corporations get hurt!" Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans' data by supporting S. 2289.

Meanwhile, S. 3357, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, would engineer a wide swatch of reforms to our political system; some of these include keeping politicians from going into lobbying after they leave office, keeping lobbyists out of our government, getting more transparency out of Congress and federal contractors, and ensuring that regulations prioritize benefits to the people over benefits to corporations. S. 3357 would also make administrative law judges competitive civil service jobs, just like they used to be before our President reclassified them so he could pack immigration courts with his cronies. These and other reforms in S. 3357 will go some way toward ensuring that our elected officials don't spend all day ignoring the popular will and collecting perks from their big corporate donors. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support public integrity by passing S. 3357.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FCC to reject the proposed Sprint/T-Mobile merger, then Common Cause still helps you do that. Sprint and T-Mobile would like you to believe that they need to merge in order to better compete with AT&T and Verizon, but Jesus Mary and Joseph get bigger is not the solution to every problem. And that's not even to say these corporations haven't tried other things! But we know for certain that a bigger Sprint/T-Mobile corporation will not bequeath upon our civilization lower prices, more jobs, or better service. Why, gosh, I'm old enough to remember when economists said more competition resulted in lower prices, more jobs, and better service! I'm sure our corporate kingpins find all that "quaint," but they the only thing they're really good at is (everybody now) redistributing income upward from working people to themselves. And we deserve better than that.

Action: concerning methane emissions, drones, and endangered species.

Another day, another EPA regulatory proposal that would allow big gas drilling corporations to pollute more, specifically more methane. Our Administration has had an absolute hard-on for dumping methane emissions restrictions since the get-go, and Republicans surprisingly failed to pass a resolution of disapproval that would have nullified the EPA's methane emissions rules last year, so they're trying to undo them from inside the EPA now. But methane packs an even bigger climate change punch than coal emissions do, and letting gas drillers vent methane without making them clean it up also deprives America of a) usable fuel and b) royalties if gas drillers are drilling on public lands. Yes, whenever methane floats away on public lands, money that belongs to the American people floats away with it. So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to keep methane restrictions strong.

Meanwhile, our Congress is working on a Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) authorization bill, and aims to use that bill to give our government the ability to shoot down drones it considers a "threat." And they don't mean the drones that we use in our unconstitutional war-making activities, but the drones journalists use to get documentation of detention center abuses. One might reasonably respond that if our government didn't do bad things to immigrants and refugees in the first place, they wouldn't need to shoot down any drones recording those things! But that'll fall on deaf ears with this Administration, which is, like Tha Bush Mobb, ignorant and arrogant about it. And while a quarter of the electorate worships them for that, the rest of us can let the Electronic Frontier Foundation help us tell our Congressfolk to reject any FAA authorization bill that allows our government to shoot down drones whenever it pleases.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Fish and Wildlife Service (or FWS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (or NMFS) to reject their proposals to base endangered species decisions more on economics and less on science and common sense, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. Don't be one of those folks who constantly says how's anyone supposed to make money? every time we try to protect endangered species, because that's actually evidence of weakness -- weakness of mind, in the inability to conceive of how business and nature could coexist, and weakness of spirit, in the unwillingness to make things work for anyone other than bosses. I mean, this is America, dammit, the can-do country of world history, and if we elevate mammon to primacy in all our decisions, we will destroy that can-do spirit, and we will deserve oblivion. But those of us with that can-do spirit will continue to fight.

Action: concerning conservation, marijuana, and self-driving cars.

Congress still hasn't reauthorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, though it'll expire at the end of this month, and though it has worked to reclaim American lands for decades now. And why not? Because they abhor hard work? Because dedicating oil and gas drilling fees toward buying up and reclaiming lands like the Appalachian Trail is TEH EXTREMIZTZ ENVIRONMENTALISTZ!!!!!? Because it's about conserving the past so the future can enjoy it and today's politicians only care about the present? Because a program that doesn't actually cost taxpayers anything must be a program that runs well and therefore must be destroyed? Whatever the reason, the Wilderness Society helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund with a quickness. And if they start talking about the LWCF needing "reform," you can remind them that when they say "reform" they usually mean "deform." There's no reason they shouldn't know we're on to them.

Meanwhile, our Administration has convened a Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee, with the apparent purpose of bamboozling the public not to support better marijuana policy, as most of us do. You'd think they'd have better things to do with their time, but let's one-up this "policy coordination committee" and let Drug Policy Alliance help us tell our Congressfolk to pass pending legislation which would improve our federal policy toward marijuana. The bills you'd support are the Marijuana Justice Act (H.R.4815/S.1689), which would remove marijuana from Schedule I and help communities ravaged by the "war on drugs," and the STATES Act (H.R.6043/S.3032), which would let states that have legalized the drug operate without federal interference. Why, even our President endorsed the STATES Act earlier this year! Of course, that was then, and for our President, tomorrow is always another country.

Finally, Congress is still itching to pass legislation that would actually allow corporations to put self-driving cars on the road without first determining if they're safe. This is, as you know, a matter of some debate, since self-driving cars have killed people on two occasions this year, and you and I still can't get one! But S. 1885, the AV START Act, would not only let self-driving car-manufacturing corporations glide past federal safety standards, it would prevent states from banning self-driving cars. I remember asking why folks are so excited about self-driving cars, but of course I know the real reason: putting these monstrosities out on the road will make someone a lot of unearned money. Indeed, it often seems like that's the only reason corporations do anything in America. Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from unsafe products by rejecting S. 1885.

Around the table: what we must do when the next financial crisis hits the fan, and other lessons.

Thomas Hanna at In These Times reminds us that the next time the banksters collapse the economy, we'll need to have a better response than "save the banks" -- like "require a public ownership stake, with full voting rights, in any financial institution that has to be bailed out due to its own fraudulent or speculative activities." I'd just say "nationalize the banks," and anyone who responds by calling that a BIG GUMMINT TAKEOVURZ!!!! ought to take a good look around and see what all that "freedom" for banksters has done for us. And public banks now make up about a fifth of the banks in Old Europe, while the Bank of North Dakota made sure that state didn't go in the tank after the oil and gas bubble burst there (oh, and North Dakota weathered the 2008 economic armageddon pretty well, too).

Chinese government bans one of its many non-state-sanctioned Protestant churches, for, you know, refusing to allow the government to install closed-circuit cameras within. The Zion church is one of China's many "black market" churches -- or, as we'd call them in America, churches. Memo to right-wingers still gnashing teeth over transgender folks in their bathrooms: this is what government oppression of religious freedom actually looks like. Then again, the lesson may be lost on them, since this tale also has actual Communists in it, rather than the "Communists" in America whose main crime is "not being a cruel and heartless Republican."

Surprise, surprise, North Korea still seems to be going to some trouble to conceal its nuclear weapons program. Also, North Korea doesn't appear to have gotten rid of any of its nukes, and appears to have made new ones. But what happened to we don't have to worry about it anymore? We must remember that all of our President's pronouncements have an expiration date, and that expiration date is generally "just after now."

Ho hum, Dept. of Treasury Inspector General finds that the outsourcing of IRS functions to private corporations is going very badly. Not just because they've only collected one percent of the money these deadbeats owe, but also because the IRS isn't holding these corporations accountable, and because private corporations are contacting taxpayers over the phone, just like pretty much every identity thief (and precisely unlike the IRS). This is the third time we've tried to privatize IRS debt collection; when will we learn? When we stop electing politicians whose one dream is to destroy everything about government that works, that's when.

Finally, Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis spoke to the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2017, which has, over the years, hosted a flotsam of racists and other unjustifiably aggrieved speakers. Naturally Mr. DeSantis calls the Freedom Center's apparent obsession with multiculturalism and diversity straight-shooting and truth-telling. But why would anyone expect any differently from a teabagger who has so obviously (and successfully) courted our President's support? And I wish I could say associating with this crowd would hurt him in Florida, as it would in, say, New Jersey.

Action: three alerts about pollution.

Flint isn't the only city in Michigan still suffering with poisoned water: now Detroit has lead and copper in its water at its public schools. And Detroit only began testing its public schools' water for lead this past year! Who knows how long its water has been tainted, or how many good Detroit kids got their brains permanently warped by lead? Hence Color of Change helps you tell Michigan's government to get the lead out of public school plumbing. Knowing Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a notorious right-winger who thinks corporations know everything and government knows nothing, he'll probably force Detroit to contract with Nestlé to get clean water or something, but the only way to really fix the problem is to replace the lead pipes out of public schools and then install filters to keep lead out. Why, that's the kind of infrastructure our President is supposedly all about! And it's about time our governments actually supported it, on their bosses, the people's, behalf.

Meanwhile, our Administration got its rocks off by shrinking the size of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, and now our Bureau of Land Management is opening up what used to be part of Bears Ears to uranium mining corporations, hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep uranium mining away from the Bears Ears area. Uranium mining not only pollutes nearby water tables, but leaves a lot of radioactive sludge everywhere it goes, and for what? So uranium mining CEOs can make even more money? So we can prop up a nuclear power industry that's never made money no matter how much corporate welfare we've thrown at it? So we can build nuclear weapons when we already have enough of those to destroy the world hundreds of times over? So we can stick it to the Obama Administration for letting Native American nations have some control over the Monument? None of this sounds very respectful of the traditions that sustain us as a civilization.

Finally, get your surprised face ready, as our Administration plans to delay implementation of the EPA's 2015 coal ash rule -- the one that would prevent coal ash, the waste from burning coal, from seeping into groundwater and thus putting good Americans at a higher risk of getting cancer -- so Environmental Action helps you tell the EPA to implement the damn rule already and start protecting people from this kind of pollution. Our Administration will be ready to respond that WE'RE PROTECTINGZ TEH COAL MINURZ!!!!!, but of course they're not -- not unless they're giving coal miners magic suits that protect them against carcinogens! No, they care only about other bosses, and not their real bosses, i.e., us. Our Administration has had several of its previous attempts to delay regulations struck down in court, but lawsuits take time to wind through courts, and in the meantime, people get hurt. If we act, we can stop that.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, war in Yemen, and drugs in our meat supply.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senator to reject the nomination of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court, you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' contact information and call them. I still think the best reason to deny his nomination is his zeal for expanding Executive power, but you may also want to note his opposition to net neutrality because it supposedly violates the First Amendment rights of ISP corporations to your Senator. Judge Kavanaugh would ensure that corporations have more rights than you, just as he'd insure that your President has more rights than you. And he's not a "nice guy," or jes' folks getting to the Supreme Court by dint of hard work and elbow grease -- he's a right-wing judicial activist, looking to ensure that we "little people" have as little say over our democracy as possible.

Meanwhile, Spain has cancelled a $10 million-plus arms sale to Saudi Arabia -- though not, apparently, a $2 billion warships deal -- which means that yet another nation has outclassed us in withholding weapons from the Saudi/UAE war against Yemen, a war which has left Yemen near famine. Hence, Win Without War helps you tell your U.S. Senators to help block our own planned arms sale to Saudi Arabia. After all, how can we guarantee it won't be used on kids coming back from summer camp? I know many folks will drink from the cup of cynicism and say war is just an evil game and there's no use demanding that war be "nicer." But that statement doesn't answer the question of why we're involved in it -- particularly when the Houthi rebels the Saudi/UAE coalition is targeting are actually some of the best al-Qaeda fighters on Earth. It also doesn't answer the question of why we're making war without a Constitutionally-mandated declaration of war from Congress. So folks: don't drink from the cup of cynicism. Cynicism doesn't nourish or sustain you.

Finally, Consumer Reports has found that trace amounts of very, very bad drugs have been making their way into our meat supply -- drugs like ketamine (used at raves and during animal surgeries), phenylbutazone (no longer approved for human use because, among other things, it suppresses white blood cell production), and chloramphenicol (a powerful antibiotic with powerful side effects). If your immediate answer to this news is well, meat has pretty much everything in it, well, you won't be so sanguine about it if it's your kid dying of aplastic anemia from chloramphenicol in his meat. And kudos to you if you recognized our agricultural system's addiction to using antibiotics in feed animals. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep these drugs out of our meat supply. They might have to hold our USDA accountable in order to do that. Again, don't drink from the cup of cynicism and assume that this Congress or this USDA will do nothing. Bad people want you to tie your hands behind your back; good people help you do the right thing.

Around the table: we need ourselves more than we need a "blue wave," part 234.

We start with a warning about treating politics like we treat team sports: Aaron Rupar at ThinkProgress calls our President "clueless" for demanding that Apple avoid Chinese tariffs and price hikes on its products by "mak(ing) (their) products here," but he winds up defending Apple for sending parts to China for assembly because "workers there are paid much less than they would be in the United States." A lot of professional liberals won't reckon with the destruction wrought by "free" trade because our President happens to be on the right side of the issue much of the time despite being a Republican, but those of us who fight for good ideas and good policy, instead of Democratic ideas or Democratic policy, don't have this problem. And Mr. Rupar also assumes that higher costs inexorably lead to higher prices, like corporations don't routinely use the specter of "higher prices" to resist any worker wage hike or any worker safety regulation.

Another day, another study demonstrating how the Republican tax "reform" actually fattens the wallets of CEOs, not workers. This study, from our Federal Reserve, concerned the tax amnesty in the recent tax "reform," where corporations got to pay a lower tax rate on income they "repatriated" from "overseas," and it finds that, much like the 2004 tax amnesty, corporations didn't use their unearned tax break to create jobs, but to (a man does get tired of writing this) buy back stock, which delivers unearned money to shareholders and concentrates corporate decision-making power in fewer hands. Also, too, more money for stock buybacks means less money for investment in making-stuff-selling-stuff-saving-money, though doing these three things (call me old-fashioned!) actually makes economies work. (By "work," I also kinda mean "not jumping from one bubble to the next.")

The incomparable Umair Haque reminds us that it's not the "prole" who becomes a fascist but the "frustrated bourgeoisie," "(t)he one whom capitalism promised to make a capitalist -- but only did it to sell him on capitalism." My first thought, honestly, was that this point maps quite well onto the notion that it ain't the poor Middle Easterners who commit terrorism, but the middle-class Middle Easterners who watch the poor suffer. A lot of Nazi wannabes would be upset to hear how much they're like the guys who flew planes into buildings on 9.11, but not all of them. That doesn't mean the folks who aren't upset at the comparison are somehow "not racist"; it just means they admire evil.

And now from the "Blue Wave Won't Change Nothing" file: Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in line to become Speaker again if Democrats retake the House, announces she'll reimpose the "pay-go" rule for House budgets. That would be the rule the Republicans constantly ignore when it doens't suit them. Again: Democrats never get any of benefit from playing the role of "the reasonable ones," because Republicans just act crazier, the rage-added eat it up, and the "liberal" media covers the rage-addled like they're the only people in America. And if a "pay as you go" rule seems like gospel to you, then honestly account for all the times you went into debt to get ahead. You know, like those times you bought a house or took on a car loan or a college loan.

The notorious Nestlé corporation has told the Australian government that its efforts to root various forms of slavery and sexual servitude out of corporate supply chains could raise prices for consumers. Which is what, class? A manufactured hostage crisis -- don't make my suppliers stop using child labor, or the low price of your Crunch bar gets it! Then again, perhaps they were emboldened by the Australian government's apparent refusal to impose financial penalties for modern slavery practices. Give big corporations an inch, and they'll take your past, present, and future.

Finally, Robert E Gutsche Jr at The Conversation reminds us that the latest Bob Woodward book about our Administration doesn't really tell us anything new. He's right to denounce our "liberal" media for caring about little other than salacious "scoops," but I wish his call for "journalism that joins the dots of bad language, misfires, and intentional wrongdoing to larger systems of power and to individuals who can be held accountable" was a bit more specific, criticism of salacious journalism being itself a species of salacious journalism if it doesn't offer more of a roadmap out.

Around the table: the moral of every story learned, at last!

Another day, another reminder that making a "blue wave" the be-all-end-all of your life is very shortsighted, to say the least: Matt Stoller at the Washington Post says "Democrats Can't Win Until They Recognize How Bad Obama's Financial Policies Were." No, really, as in Mr. Obama's response to the foreclosure crisis was nothing more and nothing less than "a wholesale attack on the American home (the main store of middle-class wealth) in favor of concentrated financial power." It goes on from there; by the time you get to the point where the Obama FTC goes after "such villains as music teachers and ice-skating instructors" rather than, you know, any of the dozen job-crushing monopolies you or I could name, you'll hopefully be reminded that you are the Great Person you've been waiting for, not some Democrat politician who'll sell you out in the name of "bipartisanship."

I don't know that Brett Kavanaugh committed perjury per se during all of his various confirmation hearings over the last decade-plus -- some of the arguments made at the link are stronger than others, and the strongest argument anyone will really care about (what, you think the average voter could give one rat's hind-quarter how much input he really had into William Pryor's nomination?) concerns his testimony about torture. But politicians never seem to be as offended by torture as the people are, so I doubt Democrats will make much of an effort there -- though it'd be easy for Democrats to paint Mr. Kavanaugh as a "coward" for trying to distance himself from unpopular policies when convenient.

And now, from Sam Levin at The Guardian, here's "The Dark Side of California's Ending Cash Bail." What is the downside to ending the unconstitutional practice of detaining folks in jail indefinitely before convicting them of a crime? Well, the law's writers decided they had to come up with some system to keep suspects in jail, purportedly out of concern for public safety, but they came up with "risk assessment" algorithms to predict who's a threat, and guess whom they're most likely to "predict" are a threat? Poor, black, and brown folks, that's whom, since they're the folks law enforcement will most likely arrest in the first place! Maybe in time we can polish this turd, but right now we've just given rageheads another tool to impose their biases on the rest of us.

Uh oh: Louisiana state police were apparently circulating a list of antifa members they got from a Nazi wannabe website. Oh, and it's not even a list of real antifa -- probably just folks Nazi wannabes don't like, which means you or I could be on it! That'd be a little ominous, of course, but it would also make me a little proud. Naturally the Louisiana police tried to block the list's release, saying that doing so could "compromise" an investigation and out a "Confidential Informant" (caps in original), because, as we know, there's just no way civilized people could protect actual confidential informants and pursue justice at the same time.

I know our President didn't really mean all protests should be illegal, just the ones that take place during hearings on his Supreme Court nominees hearings at our Capitol, but he said what he said, and anyway he's dead wrong: our government belongs to us, so we've got as much right to be at our Capitol as our Representatives do, and if they get all angry-dad on us, we have every right to say "are you effing kidding me?" and act like the bosses we are. Seriously, if protestors dog your every move, don't you wonder what you might have done wrong?

Finally, Michaela Haas at Yes! magazine shares with us "Seven Strategies to Turn Trauma Into Strength." You're always better off trying to turn the bad shit that happens to you into some sort of positive, and I can tell you from experience that meditation, self-compassion, gratitude, and you-need-a-mess-of-help-to-stand-alone (to name four of the seven strategies) are big helps in doing that. And yet I also feel compelled to caution you against using positivity against folks who seem to have more trouble overcoming their suffering than you'd expect. You know, the way right-wingers do to poor, black, and brown folks? It seems like "don't be like right-wingers" is the moral of every damn story I tell.

Action: concerning endangered species, mining pollution, and national forests.

The EDF Action says, in its latest email missive, that "(w)e are experiencing an unprecedented number of attacks on the Endangered Species Act," and they're right -- not only do we have Congressfolk proposing more bills that would hamstring the ESA, we have a President whose Administration seems determined to gut enforcement of the ESA from within. Luckily for us, the Endangered Species Act is actually very popular -- even three of four conservatives support the ESA, and the fervor of good Americans' support generally has increased over the years -- and our national emblem, the Bald Eagle, is one of the ESA's biggest success stories since its 1973 passage. Of course, we won't get to keep the ESA safe from "reforms" like mandating faster success or letting governors overrule the ESA unless we all speak out. Hence EDF Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempts to harm the Endangered Species Act.

Meanwhile, despite opposition from Alaska's Governor (the good Governor Walker!), a loss of investors, and the Pruitt EPA's own uncharacteristic refusal to allow production to proceed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is, as we speak, assessing Alaska's Bristol Bay for an open-pit copper and gold mine -- you know, like the Pebble Mine Project that's had so much trouble getting off the ground. It's had trouble getting off the ground for good reasons -- in addition to the reasons listed above, an open-pit mine would threaten wildlife, pour filth into the water, and just about destroy Alaska's vaunted sockeye salmon industry (and thus, you know, actually kill jobs). And some investors are sticking with the project, even though others have pulled out; you know what that means, right? It means we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against the Stirling Global Fund so that it pulls out of Pebble Mine, as Environmental Action helps you do.

Finally, sticking with our "Pristine Alaska" theme, Environmental Action also helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to keep Alaska's famous old-growth Tongass National Forest intact. Our Forest Service said last month it would evaluate whether the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which helps keep roads out of national forests, really applies to Tongass. Hmm, let's see: is the Tongass National Forest a national forest? I wanna be careful here; wouldn't want to get this wrong! (Looks at this paragraph four more times) Why, yes, the Tongass National Forest is, in fact, a national forest! Why do they need more roads in Tongass anyway? Because timber corporations want to cut more trees down, that's why -- even though some of these trees are a thousand years old. But which better helps us teach our children about what lasts and what fades away -- a thousand-year-old tree, or the office desk we make from it?

Action: concerning free speech and tax "reform."

H.R. 6054, the Unmasking Antifa Act, purports to be a bill preventing protestors from wearing disguises, but actually targets (as the bill's own title says!) the Antifa protestors who just so happen to oppose obnoxious racists who support our Administration. We could easily argue that bills targeting one set of protestors discriminate against those protestors -- just as we could have easily argued that bills "unmasking" Ku Klux Klan members do the same -- but you don't even need to go there to oppose this bill. If protestors want to disguise their identities, whether out of fear of being beaten up or out of simple cowardice, then the other good Americans watching them can decide for themselves how they feel about it; passing a bill attacking protestors who wear masks sure doesn't seem like trusting people, not government. Hence Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect free speech for everyone by rejecting H.R. 6054.

Meanwhile, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand answers from corporations over how they've spent their enormous tax cuts. You know, like how many of their employees got pay raises due to the tax "reform" bill (spoiler alert: very few), or how much money corporations are spending on stock buybacks versus wage hikes (spoiler alert: stock buyback money exceeds wage hike money by about a 37:1 ratio), or whether corporations gave their employees a pay raise anywhere near the $4,000 our President said would happen (spoiler alert: hahahahahaha). By asking them to account for this tax "reform," of course, you may well be inviting them to prevaricate about it, as Rep. Chauncey Gardiner Hultgren did last month, but at least make them make fools of themselves in public, that's what I say. I just wish they needed more prodding to do that.

Around the table: hard work and hard lessons about racism, betrayal, greed, activism, corruption, and weakness.

Here's some good advice from Briahna Gray at The Intercept: "Beware the Race Reductionist," i.e., the folks who say every policy proposal that doesn't directly attack racism first is either worthless or racist itself. Ms. Gray also devotes space to discussing "bad-faith" actors who can't reasonably attack programs like Medicare-for-All or "democratic socialism" (or fair trade, I'd add) unless they call them racist. The folks who actually think fighting racism is the be-all-end-all of activism (I was one once!) may hold us back, but they're still more our allies than the folks who claim that we shouldn't bother breaking up the big banks because that won't necessarily end racism.

Ho hum, even freaking Politico finds it easy to tabulate all the ways our President has injured worker safety regulations. Make no mistake, cutting mine safety inspections doesn't help the miners who have to go into less-safe mines keep their jobs -- it helps CEOs make more money. Counting on CEOs to hire more workers with whatever money they save from having to ensure their mines are safe, instead of keeping that money for themselves, is a fool's game. And counting on industry figures (let alone industry figures who have themselves been cited for safety violations!) to police their industries is also a fool's game. (Hate to pile on, but dig the National Pork Producers Council science and technology director who says that the effect of speeding up pork inspection lines on pork inspection workers is "really outside our area of expertise." And here you thought science and technology would have something to say about worker safety.)

I'm not sure it's good news that a Texas hospital slashed a patient's heart attack care bill from almost $109,000 down to a little over $330 after NPR ran stories about it. On one hand, I'm happy when our media shames corporations; on the other hand, I know our media doesn't cover everyone to whom this happens, and I'd certainly prefer our media do a little more shaming when health care bills go before legislatures, so we don't have this kind of BS in the first place. I mean, seriously, any politician trying to make it easier for hospitals to spring six-figure surprise bills for life-saving procedures deserves shame, right?

James Kilgore at TruthOut explains why this prison strike is getting more mainstream media coverage than the 2016 strike did. One reason: activists have kept working on issues like cash bail and immigration detention/deportation specifically and liberal economic and social issues generally. Another reason: activists have worked more closely with the prisoners themselves and not necessarily just on activism, and the movement has made some leadership, messaging, and tactical changes (not least the focus on boycotting commissaries, which allows prisoners to exercise some economic power). Of course, things no activist would plan (the Lee riot, prisoners valiantly fighting wildfires in California) also helped put the issues out front, but that always happens.

Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL)'s blind trust has somehow made investments into at least two corporations that have business before the state, and between these investments and the somehow-similar investments his wife made, the Scotts have cleared at least half a billion dollars. Even before you get to the part where both the trust fund and Mrs. Scott have invested in two dozen Cayman Islands-registered hedge funds, this all sounds like a tailor-made Bill Nelson ad. You know, if Bill Nelson's even awake!

Finally, about that massive document Brett Kavanaugh document dump Republicans orchestrated mere hours before hearings about his Supreme Court nomination were to begin: I hate to be a hardass, but Democratic Senators wouldn't be in this mess if they'd actually stop being such pusillanimous weaklings. They could start by winning elections with bold-but-popular proposals and then using their power to work for their bosses, the people, instead of counting on the inherent ugliness of Republicans to slide them into office and then letting their big donors do all their work for them. If they had worked for us all these years, Republicans would be in no position to kick sand in their faces now.

Action: concerning labor, bailouts, and genocide.

H.R. 6080/S. 3064, the Workers' Freedom to Negotiate Act, would amend the National Labor Relations Act to strengthen worker protections. The bill would (among many other things!) strike down "right-to-work" laws at the state level, keep taxpayer dollars away from corporations that violate worker safety laws, narrow the definition of "independent contractor" so corporations can't just willy-nilly reclassify their employees as such, and prevent corporations from using class action waivers as a condition of employment. That last item is important, since more than half of all employers now subject their non-union employees to these class action waivers, thus depriving them of their right to a day in court when these employers screw them over. ("More than half" should clue folks in that "just go get another job" isn't a good objection.) So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Workers' Freedom to Negotiate Act.

Meanwhile, our Energy Department still thinks bailing out the coal and nuclear industries is a good idea, even though coal is dying out and nuclear has never made money. I can already hear the right-wingers squeal BUTZ WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH COAL MINURZ!!!!! How many times must I tell these pimps! This bailout ain't about coal miners; it's about CEOs, as it always is with this Administration. The Energy Department's plan to subsidize "reliable" industries has met with plenty of resistance already, so now they're claiming that we need to do it for national security reasons. Remember Dr. Johnson saying that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel? Well, squealing "national security" is the modern last refuge of politicians who can't win arguments on the merits. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to push back against our Administration's fossil fuel bailout plan.

Finally, Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to push the U.N. to bring the perpetrators of the massacre of Rohingya Muslims to justice. The Burmese military started ethnic-cleansing the Rohingya a little over a year ago, burning down villages and killing thousands, while spurring almost a million more Rohingya to flee to other countries, where they now live in (as you'd expect) wretched refugee camps. Hence we ask our Congressfolk to pressure our U.N. Ambassador, Nikki Haley, to bring the Burmese military to justice; she did call for a worldwide arms embargo of Burma last year, so she may be sympathetic. I do wonder how reasonable-sounding folks will argue that we should leave Burma's military alone. Because without their military, they'd collapse? That military is the very reason Burma can't succeed as a nation. And that military deserves no lenient treatment after committing genocide.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court and the war on Yemen.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has begun to hold hearings on our President's Supreme Court nominee, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and you can 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 cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject Mr. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. You need not go on a lengthy rant (that'll keep other good citizens off the phones, anyway): you need only mention that Judge Kavanaugh has demonstrated, through his writings and his decisions, that he would empower the Executive branch far beyond what the Founders wanted. Our Founders, sick of George III as they were, wanted a relatively weak President, not a President with so much power that he can make wars all by himself and shield himself from prosecution for his wrongdoings. A Justice Kavanaugh would make our President -- this President! -- that powerful.

Meanwhile, Congress wouldn't vote last month to curb our involvement in the Saudi coalition's war on Yemen -- this, even after an airstrike aiming at a summer camp bus purportedly harboring Houthi rebels killed 40 children and 11 adults. Naturally, that airstrike used an American-made weapon -- in case you thought we limited our culpability in this catastrophe to logistics! -- and the Saudi/UAE coalition later stated that that taking out the bus in a populated area was a mistake, meaning they would have preferred to kill all those summer school kids in a more open area. If we'd had all this out in Congress, as the Constitution demands, we'd have far less of this crap on our conscience -- and far fewer foreign entanglements that turn bad ideas into "matters of national security." So Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop giving weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE so they can kill defenseless Yemeni.

Around the table: in which our Administration starts yet another long game against the American people.

U.S. State Department starts denying passports to Americans born to certain midwives who practiced in Texas's Rio Grande Valley during the second half of the 20th century, declaring that they can't verify those Americans' citizenship after said midwives admitted forging a handful of birth certificates. Didn't know being born poor and Hispanic just inside our borders was a crime, did you? Didn't know a midwife forging one or two birth certificates made thousands more birth certificates suspect enough to provoke criminal investigation, detainment, and even deportation? It's exactly as simple as this: if you disagree with our Administration, they want you gone -- unable to criticize them, unable to shame them, and certainly unable to vote them out of office. And this is only the beginning: the mostly black, brown, poor, and old folks born outside of hospitals at any time over the last 80 years are next.

So what happens when our Federal Trade Commission installs a Bureau of Consumer Protection Chief who used to represent corporations being investigated by the FTC, and Public Citizen files a Freedom of Information Act request to discover his conflicts of interest? The FTC pumps out almost 500 pages of documents and redacts nearly all of it. Because the documents don't relate to specific lawsuits, and also because trade secrets. Should I praise them for resisting the urge to declare BECAUSEZ TEH NASHUNUL SECURITEEZ!!!! No, I should not. I doubt our laws allow this sort of chicanery, so I suppose the FTC is just following the example of our President and his Cabinet, by daring you to stop what they're doing.

Ho hum, our Administration creates a special "Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee" dedicated to persuading the public to abandon its will to legalize pot. And this Committee told other Administration departments to highlight "the most significant data demonstrating negative trends," while apparently avoiding finding anything out about how often folks consume pot or whether legalized pot reduces other drug use. Recalling that our Attorney General has a zeal for criminalizing pot should also remind you that criminalizing pot is mostly a way of putting more black people in jail. (No, John Ehrlichmann spelled that out for us years ago.)

I'm not sure that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals actually said you have a First Amendment right to feed the homeless. Their ruling actually says that Food Not Bombs has a First Amendment right to feed the homeless during their community organizing events in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, since feeding the homeless, in this context, comprises "an act of political solidarity meant to convey the organization’s message." So it doesn't appropriately shame governments that would issue thousand-dollar permits to individuals who give food to the homeless -- although I suppose we could all go out in well-named and well-promoted groups to feed the homeless. It'd be a whole lot simpler if we'd just stop pretending that our only obligation in America is to ourselves.

Kudos to Jake Johnson at Common Dreams for noting that our President has declared a pay freeze for 2 million of our federal employees while at the same time proposing a capital gains tax cut that would benefit the super-rich and virtually no one else. It is odd, isn't it, how they always say "we can't just keep spending money we don't have" when talking about paying workers, and never about, say, building nukes we don't need or giving the rich more tax cuts or handing out more "research and development" corporate welfare? OK, maybe it's not odd, per se, once we accept the fact that we are ruled by vampires.

Finally, maybe we shouldn't rush to celebrate Rep. Beto O'Rourke's challenge to incumbent Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as an "Obama-like" campaign. Mr. O'Rourke has a gift for speaking well, but so did Barack Obama, and we all know how his Presidency went: he coddled Our Glorious Elites instead of giving them the bitter medicine they earned, he extolled bipartisanship while half of the partisans tried to burn everything down, and he helped prepare the ground for a new President who seems to hate all the good and love all the evil in our world. So if Robert Rubin and Larry Summers have already gotten to Beto O'Rourke, we could be in for another turn of the vicious Republican/weak Democrat wheel, and as I've said, we've got to break that wheel.