Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning the war in Yemen, the war on the popular will in Michigan, and the war on elephants.

The Senate voted 63-37 vote to advance S.J.Res. 54, which aims to get us out of the war on Yemen, but they still must vote to pass the bill, and the sticking point for many Senators seems to be our Administration's apparent refusal to allow CIA chief Gina Haspel to brief them on the CIA's conclusion that Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman did in fact order the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But if our Administration does make her available (which it might, although our President has contradicted the CIA's findings!), those Senators may declare themselves sated and vote the bill down -- unless we remind them that we should get out of Yemen because Congress never authorized our involvement there and because we are helping create a human rights catastrophe there. So let's call our Senators and tell them to pass S.J.Res. 54; the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone) will help you do that.

Meanwhile, from the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: after passing minimum wage and paid sick leave initiatives so that voters wouldn't get to vote on them in a ballot initiative on Election Day, Michigan's reactionary state legislature has already started gutting the minimum wage and paid sick leave standards they passed! The state Senate has passed legislation accomplishing that aim, and the state House will follow suit very soon, before that pesky incoming Democratic Governor takes office, because, as in Wisconsin, evil sure doesn't have a hard time setting priorities. So, if you want to call Michigan state House leadership (you can find phone numbers for them here) and use the Big Stick of Bad PR on them, hey, I won't stop you. I also won't stop you from telling said state House leaders that the entire country is watching them try to subvert the will of the Michigan people, who are their real bosses. I mean, gosh, we're all about freedom here at Thieves in the Temple.

Finally, fewer than half a million African elephants still roam our planet -- but our Administration wants to make it easier for folks to go off and kill these elephants so they can bring "trophies" home. Why would any reasonable person think they're hot stuff because they killed an animal that hasn't developed firearms of its own? And why should our government encourage such behavior? OK, watch our President for 30 seconds and that question answers itself, but the "freedom" to kill an endangered species and beat your chest about it is not exactly the freedom we're all about here -- surely the elephant should have freedom, too, if it's not hurting anyone? Surely being a hunter and being a civilized person aren't mutually exclusive propositions? Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to curtail granting permits to kill elephants for "trophies." And then maybe we won't see as many elephants wailing over their dead.

Around the table: with more sad proof that bailouts and tax cuts don't create jobs.

It really is understatement to note that "GM Announcement Confirms Tax Cuts Don’t Prevent, May Encourage Layoffs." Not that this would surprise you if, for example, you didn't routinely give your children cookies before they did their homework. Seriously, how hard is this? Threaten to take away a corporation's profits through taxation, and they'll spend it on jobs and building stuff. (As an aside, I don't know that GM's problems come from their aversion to building SUVs, even though they're "wildly popular." When corporations decide to make mostly junk food, people learn to crave mostly junk food. And SUVs are the junk food of American cars.)

We are also reminded that GM has received "billions" in public subsidies over the years, and that didn't save those almost-15,000 jobs, either. That would include some $50 billion in American bailout money after the 2008 bankster Armageddon. Nice work if you can get it! Sadly, I expect most of our President's votaries will only remember the mean things he said to GM after the layoffs, and thus presume he actually did something about it. Hell, yelling about stuff is exactly the same as "doing something," right?

Michigan's still-reactionary state legislature might try to ram a bill through while they still have a Republican Governor that would allow corporations to create their own private police forces. No use dreaming libertarian dreams of ending the war on drugs and suchlike -- if you think police officers are bad now (and a few of them are), just wait until they don't have to account to their bosses, the taxpayers, at all! Seriously, when I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Though voters in Wisconsin turned Republican Scott Walker out of office in favor of Democrat Tony Evers, state Democrats fear that Republicans will try some lame-duck shenanigans that could cut the incoming Governor out of the redistricting process altogether. And Republicans are saying who, us? -- which should be of no comfort, since Republicans have spent the greater part of the decade springing their most nefarious works on the voters without warning. How much is enough for a party that got 46% of the votes for Assembly seats but still wound up with 63% of the seats? The answer is: nothing is ever enough for a desperate and intellectually bankrupt party.

Finally, apparently because he couldn't get away from CNN while traveling abroad, our President thinks we should create a "Worldwide Network" (caps in original) to counter the "unfair and false" coverage CNN is supposedly giving him. All together now: waaaaaaaah! I mean, if Barack Obama had mooted creating a giant propaganda network to promote his Administration, right-wingers would justifiably be giving him what-for, but our President's most devoted followers seem to live vicariously through our President's self-pity, while simultaneously imagining that only Those Other People do that. But whining is whining, no matter where it comes from. And our President is not America; we are.

Action: concerning taxes and conservation.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell the incoming Congress to repeal the Republican tax-cuts-for-the-rich and advance forward better tax proposals. Our duty is our duty, so it doesn't matter that the Republican-held Senate won't pass them! Or, perhaps, it does matter, in the sense that Republicans will have to explain why they won't close corporate tax loopholes, which are popular with approximately no one outside of corporate board rooms. They'd also have to explain why they don't want to raise income taxes on the super-rich, raise the corporate tax rate, or raise the Estate Tax on millionaires and billionaires, to name three actually-popular initiatives. And remember that Republicans passed a tax cut and still lost the House, which suggests that their tax cut propaganda doesn't sway Americans like it used to. Certainly not when Americans don't even notice a tax cut in their paychecks!

Meanwhile, speaking of taxes, People for the American Way helps you tell Congressional Democrats to investigate allegations of tax-dodging that have plagued our President. I didn't want to make this the new Democrat House majority's primary focus, since our President doesn't deserve to be our primary focus -- no, the Founders would instruct us similarly, and about any President! -- but the allegations against him require our attention as defenders of civilization and lovers of law and order. And this petition would also help you demand that future Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates be legally required to release their tax returns, since custom and tradition weren't enough to persuade this President into doing so. Like conservatives, liberals would prefer that custom and tradition work their will. But when they don't, our laws must step in.

Finally, you know that our Administration is working to loosen up the "Roadless Rule" so that more logging corporations can cut down thousand-year-old trees in places like the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, but S. 3333, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, would stop that effort in its tracks, so to speak. I've long said that a new desk for your office is less valuable to our civilization than a thousand-year-old tree, but I've neglected to mention other good reasons for keeping the Tongass wild -- like the 300 species of birds (including the bald eagle) that fly through the Tongass, or the species of moose, bears, and deer that walk the land or the salmon that swim its rivers. And we'd destroy all that for what? Not even for a new desk or chair, really, but for yet another opportunity for corporate bosses to get richer! So Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to support wild places by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act.

Around the table: how to convert conservatives into liberals, maybe! And other tales.

From the "I'm Not Sure I Should Share This" file: a Yale study suggests we can more easily convert conservatives into liberals merely by first making conservatives feel safe. But the Yale study appears to have converted conservatives into social liberals, which seems to be an easier lift than turning them into economic ones. And even though I've long believed that most folks' emotional attachment to racism and nativism is actually pretty soft, we also have to remember that their newfound sense of safety (and thus their newfound attachment to openness) can be pretty soft, too, if they and their communities don't tend to it properly.

This really should be said a lot more often: "Bake Sales Can’t Fix This: Corporate Tax Cuts Leave Public Schools Desperate." No, really: I've had people tell me the answer to public school funding problems is to get a corporation to donate sports uniforms. And too many of the folks who'd say that would read the tales of corporate donations and online funding platforms and foundational grants and say see? The free market provides! Except that, well, it doesn't, as anyone with more than a glancing relationship with arithmetic would tell you.

"The Science is Clear," declares Elizabeth Shogren and Susie Neilson at Wired, "Dirty Farm Water is Making Us Sick." You know, given how unpopular food poisoning is -- I mean, even our "liberal" media covers it pretty intensely! -- you'd think it'd be easier for enterprising Democrats to draw a direct line from the FDA's delay in implementing new irrigation water-testing rules to our present inability to get Romaine lettuce that doesn't make us violently ill. But Democrats are too afraid of big ag corporations to do that, even though there's a Mack truck-sized opening for the "reasonable," "moderate," "fiscally-sound" Democrat to point out that the FDA rule delay (by the FDA's own analysis!) will cost consumers nine times more money in health care costs than big ag corporations will save in rule-compliance costs. And though I expect the FDA's delay will get struck down in court one day, you won't get much comfort from that if you've died of kidney failure in the meantime.

Uh oh: a Sierra Club FOIA request turns up emails showing former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt actually getting interview questions in advance from Fox and Friends -- and, in at least one instance, he approved a part of the program's script. What will Fox News votaries say about this pattern of obvious collaboration between media and governmental officials, the kind of collaboration warned about in dystopian novels and anti-Communist screeds? They'll say oh, news programs ask pre-interview questions all the time, though they do that with folks hawking their new books, not public servants. I guess the more cynical among them will say you just know MSNBC did that with Obama, though a) "you just know" does not actually describe evidence of a thing and b) if that were true, would that make it right?

Finally, a Fox News personality exclaims on Twitter that seeing our military use tear gas on migrants attempting to cross the border was the "HIGHLIGHT" (caps in original) of her Thanksgiving weekend. I guess some people feel closest to the spirit of the holidays when they watch other people suffer. And did she call it a "HIGHLIGHT" on any of those days the Border Patrol used tear gas on migrants during the Obama Administration? Somehow, I doubt it -- you know liberals never get any love from right-wingers when they act like right-wingers. Anyway, you've heard of this Tomi Lahren, I trust? She's pretty notorious. I don't think we've covered her flatugasms before in this space. But I'm certain we won't be covering them again -- she is, like so many inexplicably well-paid monsters before her, dead to this blog.

Around the table: Republican criticisms of our President are meaningless, part 802.

I do admire a headline which says our President "demands action to reduce deficit, pushes new deficit spending." I don't oppose being demanding per se, nor do I oppose coming up with a plan to achieve apparently contradictory goals -- I've long said we can pay for Medicare-for-All by cutting corporate welfare and raising taxes on the rich. But folks who've actually, you know, done work ever have the cachet to tell people to reduce the deficit and add new spending at the same time; when a guy who's been a millionaire since he was 8 and has never had to work tells people to do that, we can safely assume he's just being a jerk. (Also, too, he just cut taxes on the rich and on corporations, and that's ballooned the deficit -- not, you know, excessive Department of Commerce spending.)

Our President's own National Climate Assessment instructs us that doing nothing about climate change (which is our President's stated course of action) will cost Americans over $500 billion every year, mainly in health care costs and in damages from hurricanes, rising sea levels, and the like. But I bet doing nothing about climate change delivers more money into the bank accounts of fossil fuel corporation bosses, and since bosses are the only people our President really cares about, I'm sure he thinks everything's going according to plan.

The incomparable Adam Johnson at FAIR catches NPR doing PR for Amazon's super-speedy delivery processes, ignoring the costs to our environment and our workers. And on Morning Edition, too -- usually NPR has the sense to bury its corporate flackery on its more business-oriented programming! I don't have to mention that shipping everything now-now-now results in worker abuse and higher greenhouse emissions, but I do feel compelled to point out that "a meticulous shaving off of minutes and seconds on the journey of the package" is not the kind of life achievement you bring to the Pearly Gates.

Proud Boys co-founder says he's quitting the Nazi wannabe group. Supposedly to help certain Proud Boys get better sentencing over that October gay-beating that was all over the internets, and possibly, even, because of the admittedly surprising news that our FBI now classifies Proud Boys as an "extremist group," but I bet he's really leaving so he can move on to bigger and better things, like maybe his own cable news show. I wish I were kidding. (As an aside, what grown man calls himself a "proud boy"? That's like bragging that you're immature!)

Finally, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker says that our President "tries to divide" our nation with "anger" and "hate." He's criticized our President in harsh terms before, but his criticisms, however trenchant or obvious, have not prevented him from voting in jackboot lockstep agreement with our President's nefarious agenda -- I mean, how else would he have been "effective at getting a lot of things done"? Of course, Mr. Corker will be leaving the Senate soon, to be replaced by another Senator who'll vote in jackboot lockstep agreement with our President's agenda -- one Mr. Corker pretended to dislike, no less! I really do wish their words meant more, but they don't.

Action: concerning refugees and the war on Yemen.

In the middle of that fecal storm of bratty behavior he served up last week -- seriously, he should be ashamed of himself! -- our President authorized our troops stationed at the southwest border to use lethal force against anyone who comes over. But just as a man who has to tell you how tough he is all the time is actually weak, and just as a man who has to tell you what a great job he's doing all the time is doing a bad job, a nation that has to shoot refugees without telling which of them have legitimate claims for refugee status and which don't is, frankly, not a great nation. But then our President doesn't care about America actually being a great nation -- he only cares about diddling the rage glands of his most devoted followers, a strategy which has now cost his party the House and (by my count) at least two Senate seats. So Win Without War helps you tell Defense Secretary Mattis to bring our troops home from the border.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that our Senate could vote as early as tomorrow on S.J.Res. 54, which would end American support for the Saudi/UAE war in Yemen. Our President has said he'll end plane refueling support for this war effort -- which has, as you know, left millions of good Yemeni on the brink of famine -- but he has pointedly not said he'll end other American logistical support for the war effort, and he has more pointedly said that we should just live with our alliance with Saudi Arabia because "(t)he world is a dangerous place!" (exclamation point in original because of course it is) and because Iran is worse, neither of which you would recognize as convincing explanations unless you were a professional cynic. Which you're not, if you read this blog. Anyway, Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to support S.J.Res. 54 and end our involvement in the war on Yemen. Mr. Khasshogi's murder may have moved the needle a bit, but that's all the more reason we must move it more.

Around the table: liars and what to do with them.

The Intercept and Documented get their hands on anti-Medicare-for-All lobbyist papers. So how do they plan to turn us against Medicare-for-All? With the same crap they've been flinging against the wall for years -- ZOMG BERNIE SANDERS SPENDZ TEH 32 TRILLYUNZ!!!! (which doesn't mention the $46 trillion we're already planning to spend over the next decade), ZOMG 156 MILLUYNZ PEEPULZ LOSEZ THEIR PRIVATE PLANZ!!!! (they really think we're all that emotionally-invested in our private health insurance?), ZOMG TEH GUBMINT RUNZ EVERYTHINGZ!!!!! (eh, that's our government, which can't possibly bollocks health care up worse than private health insurers have already done), and ZOMG ITZ TOO HARDZ POLITICALLYZ!!!! (well that's not the attitude that ended slavery!). I guess it's a good sign that we're past both the "first they ignore you" and "then they ridicule you" phases and we're now well into the "then they fight you" stage. The "then you win" stage follows that, as you know.

Seems it wasn't just big fossil fuel money that sank a bunch of climate- and renewable energy-related initiatives this past Election Day: it was also "liberal" media indifference or hostility that killed them. Except in Nevada, where a 50%-renewable standard for utility corporations passed with 60% of the vote, largely because said utility corporations didn't fight it. It is well past time for pro-renewable energy advocates to start fighting the crappy arguments deployed against us -- no, energy prices won't rise sky-high, or even appreciably, if we shifted to renewables, and even if they did, your descendants sure as hell won't be sitting around the campfire saying the planet is almost completely uninhabitable now, but at least our forebears didn't pay as much for electricity!

Lost in the onslaught of fecal matter unleashed by our President this week is his Administration issued new restrictions on journalists at White House press conferences, including a proscription on follow-up questions, except, of course, at the White House's discretion. So when our President or our Press Secretary says (hypothetically, I hope!) that Iranian nationals are trying to get into America illegally for the exclusive purpose of molesting American children, our media won't be able to follow up with "what's your evidence for that assertion?" You know what I think our media should do? Boycott Presidential press conferences.

And maybe more: when our President says the CIA didn't conclude that Mr. bin Salman had anything to do with Mr. Khasshogi's murder though of course they concluded that he did, I think maybe the press should simply stop talking to our President entirely, since he's just going to lie anyway. The lack of attention will infuriate him, of course, but that's just icing on the cake. People who lie to you all the time don't deserve any of your time. And pursuing this program just might lead to good old-fashioned journalism, which would concentrate on what leaders do instead of what they say they do.

Finally, speaking of the Khasshogi murder, dig the arguments our President makes in justifying staying with Saudi Arabia, arguments that not only insult our intelligence but our sentience. "The world is a dangerous place!" doesn't justify excusing any evil, nor does saying IRAN DOES TEH WORSEZ!!!!! And making a fanciful list of all the hundreds of millions of dollars big corporations would lose if we ended our alliance with Saudi Arabia is what, class? A rhetorical hostage situation, of course -- our President's saying don't make the Saudis do the right thing, or the money gets it! (And, really, we all know what he means by "the money" -- he means his money. He's apparently forgotten having said how much he likes the Saudis because they buy things from him -- or, more precisely, he hopes you've forgotten it.)

Action: concerning prison slavery, fraudulent fees, and methane pollution.

Color of Change helps you tell the state of California to stop exploiting prison workers (who make as little as $1/day!) to fight wildfires. I have nothing to say to folks who think of prison workers as a giant pool of people they can use and abuse as they like, but to folks who wonder how California will ever make ends meet if they spend all more money paying prisoners to do the back-breaking work of fighting wildfires, I have this to say: your wonderment is a hostage situation -- don't pay prisoners what their work is actually worth, or we'll all burn up!. Too often we imagine that the world around us is the only world that can be, but we can bring back a world where states tax rich folks hard and stop funneling taxpayer money to crony corporations. At that point we'll actually find it a lot easier to do the right thing, but let's tell California to do the right thing anyway. Doing the right thing builds character, after all.

Meanwhile, Comcast has lately agreed to refund well over half a million dollars to Massachusetts customers who signed long-term cable contracts only to find themselves slammed with fancy-sounding fees that inflated their bills up to 40% above advertised prices. And when they realized they'd been had and tried to cancel their cable, Comcast slammed them again with a $200 "early termination" fee! Nice work if you can get it! And since it's absurd to think Comcast would only try this in Massachusetts, Consumer Reports helps you ask your state Attorney General to investigate whether cable corporations' add-on fees in your state amount to a fraudulent price hike. We imagine America as some kind of "free" market Wild West, but we must insist on laws (and law enforcement) that won't let corporations pull this kind of bait-and-switch on us. Indeed, things like this used to be a law-and-order issues for conservatives. I wonder what changed.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its proposed plan to weaken its own methane emissions standards, then both the Sierra Club and the Union of Concerned Scientists still help you do that. You probably know the drill by now: oil and gas drilling corporations leak methane the way some folks leak gossip, methane emissions pack a far larger climate change punch than even coal emissions do, and when corporations ventilate methane into our air willy-nilly from drilling projects on public lands, they're also cheating American taxpayers out of royalties (since methane is a usable energy source, and, you know, public lands belong to the public). Always it seems like our Administration's EPA cares more about protecting polluters than protecting good Americans from polluters. But luckily, we are always here to remind them whom they are really pledged to protect.

Around the table: how Tammy Baldwin won re-election, and other lessons.

David Rosen at TruthOut reminds us that "Regulations Protect Us All." He not only lists the various crises brought about or helped along by lax regulatory oversight (the bankster meltdown of 2008, the Spillageddon in the Gulf of 2010, the Flint lead poisoning crisis of 2014) but he reminds us that our "liberal" media too often buy what anti-regulatory groups are selling without being too critical of it. Regulations actually save money, after all -- they just don't deposit that money directly into CEO bank accounts, as anti-regulatory efforts tend to do. Also, too, "(i)t’s pretty rich for corporations to demand longer, more nuanced, more detailed rules full of loopholes and exceptions to boost their bottom lines, and then turn around and whine about how complicated the rules are."

Mary Bottari at the Center for Media and Democracy describes how Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin fought off $14 million in outside spending attacking her and defeated her far-right opponent by 11 points. How did she do it? She punched back hard against an early attack ad, she defined her opponent as a corporate shill, defended popular causes like fair trade and expanding access to health care, and made those causes personal for her (she lost her mother at an early age to opioid addiction and got seriously ill as a child) and for Wisconsin voters (explaining how "free" trade hurts Wisconsin's massive paper industry). It didn't hurt that her opponent ran truly awful attack ads unbecoming a civilized person, let alone a nurse, or a candidate for U.S. Senate.

Investment bank study finds that building a new utility-scale wind or solar farm costs about as much as running an existing coal power plant. And, you know, eventually we'll run out of coal, but the sun rises every day and the wind always returns (and, ah, there is such a thing as battery storage for relatively lean times). But please, right-wingers, let's hear more bogus stories about "wind turbine syndrome" and "piles of dead birds," and let's pretend that coal miners couldn't possibly adapt to a more renewable future.

And on cue: our "liberal" media stops covering the caravan coming up from Honduras, and now our President is pulling troops from our southwest border. Remember how much ebola was in the news before the 2014 elections and then wasn't in the news at all after that? Good times! But seriously, you can't pull out before an "invasion," can you? Our brave and bold President can. And of course his votaries will tell the story that their Personal Lord and Savior put troops on the border and scared the caravan away. I can't even dismiss the possibility that they'll say he did it with dust from his magic horn.

Finally, it's bad when my veteran co-workers are bringing up our President's statement that the retired Navy Admiral who got Mr. bin Laden -- and who's been very critical of our President lately -- maybe should have gotten to Mr. bin Laden sooner. I have three things to say about that. One, if you can't ever concede even a relatively unimportant point in an argument, you're not being tough so much as you're being weak. Two, a big reason we "didn't get bin Laden sooner" was that George W. Bush didn't "lose a lot of sleep" over it -- or, you know, preferred him alive so he could be a villain in future election campaigns. And three, our President isn't popular with our military so much as he's popular with folks who need everyone to watch them worship our military, and you remember what Jesus said about people who pray in public.

Action: concerning privacy, clean water, and worker rights.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real reforms defending consumer privacy from big tech corporations. Sadly, the reason we need legislation to accomplish this (and I really wish journalists would mention it a bit more!) is that Congress passed one of its notorious "resolutions of disapproval" repealing FCC privacy rules which would have (among other good works!) forced big corporations to allow consumers to opt in to letting corporations sell their data, rather than forcing consumers to opt out. But big tech corporations like Facebook have been earning themselves a lot of bad PR for their inability/unwillingness to protect their customers' private data (and for employing Nixonian tactics against their critics) -- and corporations like Facebook monopolize their fields, so our government has to step in and curb their power, whether they want to or not. Concentrated power: it's evil everywhere!

Meanwhile, as you may know, the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) proposed banning fracking in the basin of the Delaware River earlier this year, which is good, but also proposed letting corporations dump fracking wastewater in the Basin and draw Basin water out to frack with! Welcome to yet another King-Solomon-actually-splitting-the-baby-in-half "compromise"! I mean, the whole point of banning fracking is to keep pollution out of our water, so if you go ahead and allow fracking-based pollution in water nearly 15 million good Americans drink and wash with, you've kinda missed the point. Still, Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf has one of four votes on the DRBC, so Food and Water Watch helps you tell Gov. Wolf to support a fracking ban with considerably more teeth. Remember, folks: the money you make from polluting water quickly goes away, but clean water lasts forever -- if we maintain it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) not to repeal its "joint-employer standard," then the Economic Policy Institute still helps you do that. Big chain corporations have long claimed that their workers' "real" employer was the particular franchise where they worked; thus workers would have had to redress grievances over pay and scheduling and such with the franchise. Of course any fool can see that's absurd, since franchises obey (or cope with) orders from the top, so the NLRB created a joint-employer standard to help workers redress grievances with their real bosses. Now that Republicans dominate the board, they're trying to scuttle the standard. But don't believe the hype that TEH STANDURDZ HURTZ TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!! Your local McDonald's ain't a "small business." Obviously.

Around the table: a potentially-major Presidential miscalculation, and other items.

House Democrats propose requiring a three-fifths majority to raise tax rates on the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers. Maybe this proposal makes raising taxes on higher incomes easier and maybe it doesn't, but anyway I'd prefer not to change House rules concerning majority votes for certain legislative aims, even if I agree with those aims (and I surely agree that working folks shouldn't pay more taxes). I'd prefer they reductions in middle-class tax rates with top tax-bracket income hikes, and then (since most Americans would support that program) just keep explaining past the haters and their lies.

Our Administration is mulling actually delivering an enemy of Turkish President Erdogan into his hands. Well, I guess we now know why Mr. Erdogan threw the Saudis under the bus over Mr. Khashoggi's murder. The good news? "Career officials" at three federal agencies were "furious" over the idea. The bad news? There are fewer "career officials" in our government than there used to be. And our President fist-bumped Mr. Erdogan not too long ago -- over his authoritarian tendencies, no less! I wonder how he'll feel about that if Mr. Erdogan persists in his requests.

ProPublica finds our Administration doing its damnedest to funnel Veterans Administration money toward private care for our veterans. Private health care is, of course, more expensive than single-payer health care (which our Veterans' Administration is), and the VA's well-covered problems in recent years started with Congressional sequestration dramas. This is how they win: they squeal TEH GUVMINT DOESN'T WORKZ!!!!! and then run our government badly to prove their point. I'm really surprised more members of our "liberal" media aren't on to this oh no wait I'm actually not surprised.

Speaking of our "liberal" media, FAIR catches them pretending they have no responsibility in reflexively trumpeting our President's squealing about caravans of foreigners coming to destroy us. Actually, their editorial pages exposed our President's racist game while it was going on, but their news pages covered it like it was real news! And then after the midterms, their editorial pages covered the caravan controversy like "everyone knew" it was BS! If I were more generous, perhaps I'd posit this schizophrenia as an improvement in media coverage -- over, you know, merely treating racism as something that "deserves a hearing." But I yearn for truth from our media, not coverage that's merely marginally better than awful.

I suppose it makes sense that our President would find Sean Hannity a suck-up who asks "dumb" questions, since the kind of loyalty he demands from everyone else seems to sicken him. You might even suppose (as the article's author does) that he keeps calling on CNN's Jim Acosta because he loves drama. But you might also suppose that reports of "discord" within our President's inner circle are also drama, and thus worth very little of our time. Still, I have to point this out occasionally, just as vaccines have to have a little bit of the disease they're fighting in them so they can teach your body what to fight.

Finally, Heather Digby Parton at Salon may have hit on something big here: that our President may be undercutting his obvious "Discredit Everybody Until Nobody Believes Anything Anymore" strategy by being completely untrustworthy himself. Indeed, this isn't a new strategy -- candidates always fill the air with BS so that more independent-minded voters throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. But given the highest midterm turnout in 52 years earlier this month, we also have evidence that his strategy is not working. So when's that terrorist attack coming?

Action: concerning voting rights and food safety.

You've heard that House Democrats plan, as their first act next year, to pass a "magnum opus" bill covering voting rights, campaign finance reform, and ethics reform? And you've also heard me say they'd be much better off trying to pass something more digestible first? That means now is a good time to call Democrat House leadership (here's phone info for Rep. Pelosi, Rep. Hoyer, and Rep. Clyburn) and tell them to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act first. The VRAA would ensure that our Justice Department could act on voting rights violations coming from any state or municipality -- not just the Southern ones, which seems to be the problem the Supreme Court had with the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. We may be done with poll taxes and literacy tests, but you see what's going on in Georgia and Florida -- and you also see states passing Voter ID laws, getting rid of early voting periods, moving voting machines out of low-income neighborhoods into wealthier ones, and using the Interstate Crosscheck database to deregister good Americans on mere "suspicion" of "voter fraud." So let's try to get House Democrats to do something we can all understand and support.

Meanwhile, a drug-resistant Salmonella outbreak has plagued raw turkey for over a year now, so far linked to over 160 illnesses (and one death) in 35 states -- and yet we still don't know which turkey brands are making consumers sick, so Consumer Reports helps you tell our USDA to tell consumers which brands of turkey are part of the outbreak. You might be saying, you really want our government to sound an alarm about turkey a week before Thanksgiving? But which is more important: turkey-producing corporations' business or people's health? I mean, if they didn't want the bad PR and lower sales associated with a year-long food poisoning outbreak, then maybe turkey producers should have fixed it before it came to that! It's sad that we even have to say that out loud. (Oh, and not to pile on, but I did say "drug-resistant" Salmonella; with all the antibiotics we pump into our feed animals, we're going to be hearing that a lot more in the coming years.)

Around the table: more lessons about the folly of "bipartisanship."

Our President declares that the California wildfires are the result of bad "forest management," but scientists inform him, gently and not, that he's dead wrong about that, too. "These aren't forests," says one, "(t)his is supposed to be the rainy season," says another, and our government's own National Climate Assessment warned, just last year, of "the increase in wildfire risk resulting from the combined effects of high precipitation variability (wet seasons followed by dry), elevated temperature, and low humidity." Of course, when our President mentioned "forest management," I'm sure he intended to suggest we should sell all of our public forests to big logging corporations. They'll take care of those pesky trees!

Joan Walsh writes that "Yes, There Was a Big Blue Wave Last Week," although I think she's a bit generous to suggest that the pund-idiots who got it wrong on Election Night "unwittingly" fueled our President's claims of "voter fraud." I think it was quite witting, actually! In any case, Democrats have picked up more than a few House seats since Wednesday morning, when I also looked over the results and wasn't particularly impressed, and I certainly should have remembered that it actually takes a long time to count a lot of votes, just like it did in 2016. Despite the apparent failure of high-profile candidates like Beto O'Rourke, Andrew Gillum, and Stacey Abrams, Democrats' popular vote margin also so far exceeds the Republicans' popular vote margins in their 1994 and 2010 wave elections.

But of course Democrats did much better in Republican-inflected suburbs than in rural areas, and though winning in the suburbs seems like an easier task, Matthew Hildreth at the Daily Yonder reminds us that rural voters already support what Our Glorious Elites call "far-left" or "liberal" policy initiatives. This is true even though over two-thirds of rural voters call themselves "conservative" or "moderate." The problem, of course, is that most rural voters think Democrats don't fight for them. There's a solution in there, somewhere -- and when rural support for Medicare-for-All (a healthy 63%) actually lags behind rural support for treating-not-imprisoning drug addicts (77%) and taxpayer-funded community colleges and trade schools (66%), the solution is most emphatically not "acting more like a Republican." (Also, too, Republican policies help big ag corporations crush small farmers. Democrats could actually stand up for small farmers, maybe?)

Sadly, some folks still just don't get it, as a center-right Democrat and a far-right Republican collaborate on an op-ed extolling the need for "more bipartisanship." Guess who that leaves out? I mean, if, say, Barbara Lee and Richard Hanna had written such an op-ed back in 2016, every winged monkey in America would squeal BIAS!!!!! at once. OK, the House should implement the two reforms Messrs. Kilmer and Buck propose in paragraph seven, but their focus on every House Rep getting heard is secondary to our purpose of every American getting heard, and every time I read about the "importance" of "bipartisanship" I'm reminded not only that one party spends all its time stamping its feet and the other party spends all its time appeasing it, but that Americans don't care about "bipartisan" government as much as they care about good government. And that's as it should be.

Finally, even Sen. McConnell (E-KY) is getting on the let's-have-more-bipartisanship train. Given his leadership in totally nullifying the will of the voters for at least the last 12 years, it is hard to listen to anything he says about bipartisanship without either giggling or throwing a shoe at him, but it might actually be a good sign that he's the one mouthing these ridiculous pablums -- I mean, a real mob boss lets his underlings say the truly ridiculous shit so he can pretend to disown it. (Also, too, I wouldn't brag about getting more appropriations bills done before the start of the fiscal year if I were him. That's like schoolkids boasting that they go to school most of the time.)

Action: concerning banksters and facial recognition software.

H.R. 7006/S. 3542, the Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act, would (as its title suggests) break up the biggest banksters in America, by requiring that none of them would be able to control assets representing more than three percent of America's gross domestic product (or GDP); currently a mere six banks control assets that equal half of America's GDP, and that is (as a conservative might say) too much power concentrated in too few hands. All those big name banksters who've been running roughshod over our economy this last decade-plus? Yeah, this bill would smite them all. The bill would also prevent banks from using FDIC-insured deposits to indulge in the kind of hifalutin speculation that crashed our economy in 2008, thus re-erecting a Glass-Steagall-style wall between traditional banking and securities speculation. So CREDO helps you tell your Reps and Senators to pass the Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell our Transportation and Safety Administration (or TSA) to shut down its facial recognition program. The TSA has come out and said it wants domestic travelers to get "mugshots" so they can put this program into action! It's like you're a criminal even before you've committed a crime! And, as you know from other corporate antics, facial recognition software ain't good, particularly at identifying women and folks of color -- surely you've heard about that time Google's facial recognition software mistook a pair of black folks for apes. It gets better: TSA doesn't want to tell us what they'll do with their little "mugshots" -- might they share them with other law enforcement agencies without those agencies getting warrants? So, to sum: the technology isn't good enough, and it's also ripe for abuse. Why, that all sounds like it would do the opposite of keeping us safe!

Around the table: Democrats plan another mistake, plus somewhat better news.

Democrats plan a "magnum opus" of legislative provisions for their first bill, one that would address voting rights, campaign finance reform, and ethics. They've got the right idea, but as usual, they've got the wrong size: these all-encompassing pieces of legislation give Republicans too much space for prevarication (remember "death panels"?), and we can get more done with (and get more public support for) smaller bills. I think making H.R. 1 the Voting Rights Advancement Act would be the better idea, not least because we could put Republicans on the spot with it. After all, why do you oppose expanding voting rights? is a much more difficult question to answer than why do you oppose this big bill with all kinds of stuff in it? (Oh, and I'm also pretty sure they can't just overturn Citizens United with a bill.)

60 Minutes runs a lengthy report showing how European nations are actually doing more for their citizens' internet privacy than we are -- but doesn't mention that the FCC actually enacted privacy regulations in 2016, only to see Congress repeal them with a "resolution of disapproval" the next year. It's not like that was beside the point of the report! Anyway, Max Schrems's point about "forced consent" -- that it's wrong for a corporation to sell you a product and then say give us all your data, or you can't use the product -- should be attended by American jurists, maybe? It's not like there's no precedent in American law.

We could make too much of a U.S. District Court judge blocking further construction on the Keystone XL pipeline until our Administration does the proper reviews (and not just environmentally-related ones) as required by law, since our Administration could just show its work and OK I couldn't get through that sentence without spitting tea all over my keyboard. Also, too, if, per our Supreme Court, an Administration agency "cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past," well, that doesn't bode well for the FCC's net neutrality repeal, does it?

In other good news, our Administration announces that it will stop refueling Saudi planes bombing the bejeesus out of Yemen, though it will still aid the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen with weapons sales and logistical support. This is a good thing, though we'll need to pressure our Administration to do more, and I bet Mr. Khashoggi, now sitting comfortably in the beyond, finds his role in this matter rather amusing. Rep. Royce (R-CA) could use some education, however, lumping the Houthis in with al-Qaeda when the Houthis are some of the world's best fighters against al-Qaeda.

Finally, Axios/SurveyMonkey poll finds that 61% of Democrats think Republicans are "racist/bigoted/sexist," while some 31% of Republicans think the same of Democrats. For the record, I don't believe Republicans are bigots merely due to party affiliation -- in fact, I believe all of us are susceptible to bigotry (calling racism a "virus" that could be "activated" really was the smartest thing Nate Silver ever said), and better public policy, public policy that doesn't merely redistribute worker income upward to executives, would better ensure that fewer folks drink from the cup of bigotry.

Action: concerning trade, clean water, and healthy food.

The governments of the United States, Canada, and Mexico plan to sign the new USMCA trade agreement -- the one that would replace NAFTA -- on November 30; after that, the pact will go to Congress for ratification, so now's a good time to tell our Congressfolk to ensure that we get the strongest USMCA possible, as Public Citizen helps us do. The USMCA would eliminate the "investor-state dispute settlement" system with Canada in three years, and drastically curtail ISDS use with Mexico; these are tremendously good things, because we deserve to know that investors won't be able to nullify our laws and exact tribute from us simply because they can convince some tribunal that our clean air and clean water laws "cost them money." But that doesn't mean we shouldn't demand more, such as the elimination of corporate welfare for big pharma and better enforcement of labor and clean air/clean water standards. So let's get cracking.

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed expanding offshore drilling in almost all of our coastal waters -- except around Florida, of course, because they need Rick Scott in the Senate that badly. I would naturally have said hey, remember how well the Deepwater Horizon spill went?, but it turns out that the Taylor Energy oil spill of 2004 is about to overtake the Deepwater Horizon spill as the worst oil spill in American history. If you're wondering how a 14-year-old oil spill is still spewing hundreds of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day, well, Taylor didn't even tell anyone about the oil leaking for six years and still claims there's "no evidence" the spill is even happening. And this is the kind of thing our Administration apparently wants more of in our great nation! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to scuttle its plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your state Governor to follow the lead of Arkansas and ban dicamba usage on your state's farms. Arkansas banned dicamba usage during that state's main growing season after finding that dicamba doesn't stay put once it's sprayed on crops -- it drifts away for up to three full days, leaving a trail of destruction in its path, and if it drifts onto neighboring farms -- which, hello, happens all the time -- then it also damages other folks' crops, and therefore their livelihoods, and also therefore our food. Arkansas also found workers getting sick after working with dicamba, which couldn't possibly happen to consumers, could it? Naturally, Monsanto has a version of dicamba it uses with its proprietary soybean crop which it modified genetically to better withstand its dicamba. But our choice is simple here: we can either stand with farmers or stand with big corporations.

Action: concerning war, media, and immigration.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the war in Afghanistan. Their latest email missive informed me that some folks who were pre-teens when the war began in 2001 just got elected to Congress, which I found a bit sobering, but these new Congressfolk are considerably less emotionally-invested in this war than the folks who started it, and now (at last!) they get a bigger say in whether we keep that war going. Which we shouldn't, not least because we got Mr. bin Laden years ago. The forces of evil will try two tactics: 1) ZOMG TEH TERRURIZTZ WINZ!!!!!, and 2) let's privatize the Afghanistan War. Both arguments are moronic -- respectively, fearmongering is a way of announcing that you can't win the argument on the merits, and if we're going to fight wars, we should fight wars, rather than let mercenaries bleed the taxpayer. And taxpayers will be paying out the wazoo for bad results, if past privatization efforts are any indication.

Meanwhile, Media Matters's latest email missive opens with this blunt and completely accurate statement: "Fox News is a malevolent and destructive force." One almost (I said almost!) longs for the day when Fox's on-air "talent" went to some lengths to hide their racism, but now, with President Bigballs as their Personal Lord and Savior, they don't even have to do that anymore. And since we can't buy cable channels a la carte in America, we can't directly hit Fox News where it hurts (i.e., in their pocketbook). But we can tell Fox's corporate advertisers to stop sponsoring Fox News, which Media Matters helps you do. Do not tolerate any guff that boycott efforts like these "hurt free speech." Fox News punditoids have an inviolable right not to be imprisoned for their speech, but they have no "right" to six- and seven-figure TV jobs. Our First Amendment protects us from our government -- not from advertisers, not from activists, and certainly not from viewers.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) that their proposed expansion of the definition of "public charge" will unfairly punish immigrant families, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. As you may know, we've always kept immigrants out if we can establish that they'll become a "public charge," or someone completely reliant on the taxpayer, but HHS has proposed calling anyone who has ever availed themselves of Medicaid or food stamps a "public charge," which would make a lot of folks who work and contribute to society (not to mention pay taxes!) into "public charges." Our Administration is basically trying to deport as many immigrants as possible, which is a stupid way to make policy. And either "public charge" means something or it doesn't; our Administration obviously prefers meaninglessness and nihilism. But we don't have to put up with any of that.

Around the table: more good (and bad) election news, plus our President's latest public tantrum.

"The Needle and the Damage Done" is the article title of the year, describing the return of the New York Times's infamous election-predicting "needle" from 2016 and the damage this "predicting" generally does to our discourse. I'm old enough to remember when the Eastern media outlets called the 1980 Presidential election a few minutes after 8 pm on Election Night and demoralized Idaho Democrats enough (it was only 5 pm there, and they were just getting off work!) that Senator Frank Church lost re-election by a point. But it's so much more sophisticated now, and this year's punditoids took one 8 pm forecast from Five Thirty Eight (of course!) to declare NO BLUE WAVEZ!!!!! while polling places in more than half the country were still open. I'd prefer that our voters stop obsessing over whether it's "worth it" to vote if your "side" can't "win," but maybe our "liberal" media can do less prognosticating and more reporting? This insane zeal to be "first" with a story helps keep our society sick, immoral, and decadent.

Here's another good result from Election Day: Colorado voters outlaw slavery as a punishment for a crime in their state, meaning prison laborers can no longer labor for nothing. We can make a very simple law-and-order argument supporting the Colorado voters' will: once you get your sentence for a crime, you cannot have further punishments heaped upon you. We'd use the same argument to oppose taking away felons' voting rights after they're out of jail (and, really, while they're in jail, too). Of course, if "law and order" only means GET TEH BLACKZ!!!!! to you, you won't see the point. Or much of anything else, frankly.

And here's another good result from Election Day: Louisiana voters amend their state constitution so that all felony convictions will now require a unanimous verdict. Yes, until this week, the state has used the 10-of-12-jurors standard to fill their jails with black folks, which has helped contribute to Louisiana's long standing as (until recently) the state with the most prisoners in our Union, which sure ain't something to yell WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!!!! about. A big part of this victory: Louisiana felons getting back the right to vote after five years out of prison, though I'm certain they don't account for all of the measure's 64-36 margin.

And here's some bad news from Election Day: pro-renewable energy ballot initiatives failed in three states after big fossil fuel corporations dropped over $100 million fighting them. This should remind us who really benefits from the "climate change hoax": big corporations with this kind of money to burn on convincing people climate change isn't really happening, and not scientists reporting that climate change is, in fact, happening. Shame the FCC took away our net neutrality, too, because network neutrality is the greatest tool we've ever devised to cripple the power of campaign spending. I regret having not already figured out how to do that.

Finally, there's really very little to say about our President's insane press conference after the midterms. Except the usual: our President should be ashamed of himself for being a grown man acting like that in public. (And then his press secretary spread an obviously-altered video of a journalist's "outburst" that "caused" our President to revoke his press credentials, because when you can't win the argument on the merits, you lie. It's the only tool they've got left in their toolbox. Well, not the only one, I suppose -- would now be a good time for that terrorist attack?)

Horror and hope, 2018 edition.

First, the good news. Colorado and Michigan voters passed ballot initiatives creating redistricting commissions for their states; Utah voters also mulled the matter, and with 95% of the vote counted at this writing, the "yes" votes have a narrow lead. Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah voters passed ballot initiatives expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while Maryland and Nevada voters approved same-day voter registration. Florida voters restored voting rights for some ex-felons by a 25-point margin, while Massachusetts voters banned gender identity discrimination by a 40-point margin; Michigan voters legalized recreational marijuana, while Utah voters legalized medical marijuana. So a lot of so-called "purple state" and "red state" voters approved good policy on Election Day -- which they've done a lot in recent years, often over the wishes of their elected representatives -- and that's always a good thing. And the election results broadly instructed us that our President's support for avowed white supremacists remains an anvil around the Republican party's neck. In a nation where too many of us still have too many private racisms, we shouldn't over-congratulate ourselves for that, but at least those morons walking around in their Hitler T-shirts whining about how "oppressed" they are received no mandate whatsoever from the voters this week.

And now, the bad news: for the third consecutive even-year election cycle, Republicans outperformed the polls, such that Democrats took back the U.S. House, but flipped fewer seats than estimable organizations like the Cook Political Report and Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball predicted they'd flip, and Democrats lost seats in the U.S. Senate, which likely guarantees Justice Thomas's retirement in 2020 and makes taking back the chamber later that year a much longer shot. Democrats flipped seven Governor's offices, but flipped only six state legislative houses, gaining around 350 legislative seats, which actually isn't that impressive (America has almost 7,400 state legislators). These gains at the state level will make a right-wing Constitutional convention considerably more unlikely, but they don't assure better redistricting next decade, let alone better policy -- for example, while I'd love to savor Scott Walker's defeat in Wisconsin, and I will, Republicans still have huge majorities in both legislative chambers there.

How did Republicans outperform the polls? By running on their record of good works animated by good policy and skillful communication with voters? Ah, you know me better than that by now. Republicans won, to some extent, with the vote suppression tactics (gerrymandering, Voter ID, Interstate Crosscheck, and the like) that have characterized Republican stamp-out-the-vote efforts since 2012. Obviously we should fight vote suppression wherever we find it (and we have fought vote suppression tirelessly at this blog). But the main reason Republican politicians seem harder to kill than zombies? Democrats just don't seem to have a clue. Republicans all over America have run this vote suppression scheme three times now, and Democrats have been caught flat-footed each time; the higher turnout this midterm no doubt delivered them the House, but we deserve the credit for that, not them.

And this apparent cluelessness goes deeper than their inability to win races on the ground -- they don't seem to have a clue about what to do when they have power, either. When they have power, they piss it away trying not to offend corporatist donors and trying to "build bipartisan consensus" with a party that deserves oblivion. We used to get mad at Tha Bush Mobb for insisting that they "create reality," but the truth is the Democrats do the same thing -- they piddle away the mandates the voters give them, and when Republicans storm back into power, Democrats tell us the landscape is difficult and all they can do is play for time. Well, since we're talking about time, this state of affairs describes the last 38 years of American politics. And how did that era start again? With the 1980 Republican Presidential candidate who decided he was going to change the landscape! I know changing the landscape is an easier task, logistically, when you have big corporate power behind you, as Mr. Reagan did, but surely if this is the greatest democracy on Earth, it's not that big a lift for those enterprising Democrats who can get the American people behind them.

So change is absolutely possible -- if we demand it. Now, you will not find very many echoes of my theses in "liberal" media analyses. They'll proclaim that Democrats ran too many far-left candidates and should have run more "electable" candidates who could "win" (again, in this self-fulfilling prophecy of a "landscape"). Never mind that for every Kara Eastman the pundits can cite I can find an "electable," "mainstream" Democrat who also got the silver medal on Tuesday. Never mind that the Democrats' Senate losers on Tuesday were all "electable" "compromises" with the "harsh realities" of the political "landscape." The fact is this: when you do no good works with your power, people won't work that hard to keep you in power -- and this is as it should be! We beat up on our fellow Americans for not being more engaged with politics, but the sickness, immorality, and decadence of our political class is a far bigger and far more urgent problem. If you fix the latter, you will fix the former. I know it's a big task, but only the big solutions last. And this humble blog will continue to help you push the big solutions on your representatives -- until they have no choice but to follow the popular will, regardless of their party or ideology.

On Election Day.

Today is Election Day, which means you ought to go out and vote, if you haven't done so already. If you have any trouble voting, of course, you should call 1.866.OUR.VOTE (or if, like me, you hate mnemonic devices for remembering phone numbers, 1.866.687.8683). (You can also text "Our Vote" to 97779, or visit 1.866.OUR.VOTE's website here.)

What would be a good reason to call 1.866.OUR.VOTE? Being told you can't vote if you have unpaid parking tickets or child support, getting challenged by official-looking people (or people with guns, even!) who don't have any actual authority to challenge voters, getting a flyer telling you Election Day is on Wednesday for people like you wink-wink. But what if you show up at the polls and the election worker says they can't find your registration? Well, you might be a victim of lousy recordkeeping, or you might be a victim of the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database, which, as you know, helps nefarious state governments deregister voters with the same name as voters in other states, though most names are, as you know, quite common (and Interstate Crosscheck doesn't check middle names or Social Security numbers!) That'd be a damn good reason to call 1.866.OUR.VOTE.

Note well that if you find yourself deregistered when you know you've done nothing wrong, your disgust will be palpable and righteous, and you may just want to throw up your hands and say to hell with these clowns and then go home. But before you do that, remember that this is exactly what they want you to do. It's the same reason they saturate the airwaves with negative ads the days before Election Day: because they want you to stay home out of disgust, so you won't vote against their cronies. Don't let them manipulate you, and don't let them win. Make the call to 1.866.OUR.VOTE, describe your problem to them, and let them help you take the next step.

Do I have predictions about how today will go? Yes, I have a few: I predict that you, dear reader, are not the kind of person who has been investing their entire identity in a Democrat "blue wave" today. And I also predict that, if Democrats lose Senate seats and only pick up a dozen House seats, you will remember that this is where we were two years ago, and that if the corporatists and the racists and the woman-haters win again, they'll be just as unpopular tomorrow as they were today -- they will have no mandate, and again they will have us to deal with. But here's the most important thing I predict: that you, dear reader, have already spent the last two years calling and writing your Reps and Senators every day -- and perhaps you've even been challenging them at the few townhalls they've held, and bird-dogging them at public events -- and thus you already know that your duty to our country doesn't end today, but begins today. Voting happens one day out of the year, and then Our Glorious Elites want you to sit on your hands the rest of the time. You can confound their expectations, and their nefarious goals, by expressing your will to your representatives every day after today. And this blog will continue to help you do that, as it has done since 2005.

So good luck today, and God bless.

Action: concerning government spying, antibiotic abuse, and cruelty to immigrants.

You may have heard that our military is trying to figure out if they can predict mass protests (i.e., against our President) from social media activity beforehand. Before we get into figuring out exactly which Philip K. Dick short story our government is trying to make into public policy this time, let's step back: why would our government want to know about protests beforehand? I can think of only one reason: because they don't want any good Americans to protest! And I'm sure they felt exactly the same way when Tea Partiers were making asses of themselves in our streets and on our public lands! Hence Free Press helps you tell Congress to pimp-slap any Administration effort to obstruct lawful protest in America using surveillance. Seriously, if they want to figure out when the protests are coming, all they have to do is note when they're about to do something that's going to hurt good Americans. Seems easier to just stop hurting Americans than to do all this hifalutin spying.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell Darden Restaurants to get the antibiotics out of the meat it sells at its restaurants. Darden, as you may know, owns Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, LongHorn Steakhouse, and the Capital Grille, among others; in total, Darden runs over 1,700 restaurants serving 400 million guests in North America annually, so it's got reach. And its shareholders have, in each of the last three years, put forward a resolution demanding that Darden meats stop relying on animals pumped full of antibiotics; the most recent iteration of that resolution got 40 percent. Add the Big Stick of Bad PR to shareholder pressure Darden's already getting and we may yet get Darden to rid its supply chain of antibiotic-drenched meat, and thus Darden could help us avert a world where antibiotic abuse in feed animals renders antibiotics useless for medical use, which would also be a world in which the next cut could kill us. So let's get to wielding that Big Stick.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration not to distend the definition of "public charge" so it can deport more immigrants later, then the National Women's Law Center and the Union of Concerned Scientists still help you do that. We've always tried to prevent immigrants from coming to America if it seems likely they'll become a "public charge," or someone who'll depend entirely on taxpayer assistance, but our Administration would dramatically expand the definition of "public charge" to include anyone who's ever used food stamps or Medicaid, when a lot of good Americans fall on hard times and need to rely on those services sooner or later. I guess it's asking too much for a President who was literally a millionaire before he was eight years old -- and not through his own hard work, but through his father's sketchy inheritance schemes -- to understand that hard-working people face hard times every once in a while. But we're happy to teach him otherwise.

Around the table: our Constitution may not save us! And other sad truths.

Heritage Action executive director pens editorial explaining why we should all vote for Republicans this year. Your jaw will hit the floor when he says electing Democrats will increase partisan bitterness, as if Beltway partisans like him don't already look for any excuse to ratchet up the bitterness; most of the rest of it is better, I suppose, but it'll only move you if you already believe it, and three paragraphs of pablum about health care reform being better at the state level is no answer to the reality that Republicans tried to take away our health insurance. The worst thing about this op-ed, though? How the last paragraph suggests that the "noise" in American politics comes from anywhere other than our President and his votaries. That's some hardcore gaslighting there.

Green Party candidate for state auditor of Missouri writes damning piece about how "liberal" media reporting -- at least as far as his own race is concerned -- only covers "Issues That Don't Matter." Worse than the big media organs' refusal to cover issues brought up by him (and his Constitution and Libertarian cohorts), worse, even, than those organs' fascination with the Democrat and Republican candidates exchanging "jabs" and "harsh words," was the journalist telling him that there just "wasn't room" for discussion of issues in his article, and anyway "we need to write about what interests our readers, and they just want to know what the Democrats and Republicans say." Typical, how journalists think so little of us! They can rest assured that most readers (definitely including myself!) return their contempt in spades. There's a solution in there, somewhere.

Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs warns us to "be careful" about assuming our Constitution will save us from things like our President's efforts to end birthright citizenship for certain brown-skinned babies born on American soil. Long story short: "(c)onstitutions are very important documents," but "(t)heir words do not mean anything, though, if there is nobody in charge who is willing to uphold them," like, you know, the five right-wingers on the Court right now (not to mention the sixth or seventh, if Justices Breyer and Ginsburg pass). Thus even an abjectly stupid argument about what one of the original writers of the 14th Amendment "thought" it meant (an argument Antonin Scalia would have rejected!) could become "precedent" in the hands of unscrupulous folks like Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

How about some good news? a U.S. District Judge rules that Wyoming's ag-gag laws are unconstitutional. This means not only that folks working to expose animal abuse at factory farms can breathe a little more easily now, but folks testing water downstream from factory farms to expose pollution can also breathe a little more easily, since Wyoming's ag-gag law prevented that, too. One day we'll all take for granted that corporations shouldn't have more rights than people, and this ruling helps bring us one step closer to that day.

Finally, how about some more good news? Our FDA has banned the use of lead acetate in hair dyes. Responding to a petition filed by several groups including Consumers Union and the Environmental Defense Fund, our FDA found the 1980 study allowing lead acetate in hair dyes to be scientifically deficient, but note well that scientists have said for years there is no "safe level" of lead in just about anything. Hair dye may not sound like such a big deal, but a lot of people use it, and you probably don't even know how many! So this is a big deal, and kudos to our FDA for doing the right thing.

Around the table: containing some good news about liberals reaching rural America.

George Lakoff, the author of Don't Think of an Elephant, advises us that relentlessly fact-checking our President's numerous big lies plays right into his hands. If you ever suspected that he seems to do better when everyone's talking about him, you'll find that point sympathetic. I wouldn't say fact-checking itself is useless, but I do agree that reporters would do better to focus on what he's actually doing, rather than what he's saying. Good luck getting lazy reporters to do that, though.

Ryan Grim and Briahna Gray at The Intercept describe several "insurgent" Democrats who are making inroads into rural areas the party has long written off -- by being actual liberals, as opposed to the center-right DCCC-approved candidates who dominate other races. In these areas of the country, folks respond positively to candidates who support clean water, Medicare-for-All, and a higher minimum wage. You and I have been saying this for years, of course, but it's nice to get some solid reporting behind it.

Three men convicted of trying to murder Somali refugees cite our President's anti-Muslim rhetoric and Russian propaganda in an effort to avoid life sentences. Now, did our President set the bombs in those apartment buildings? No, he did not -- the three assholes who are about to get life sentences did that. Getting hung up on who might have influenced someone to do something horribly wrong hurts our fight against evil. And while it's true, and irritating, that "(t)he speaker with the best bully pulpit in the world is never sanctioned for spreading fear and advocating harm," that doesn't justify giving his votaries lighter sentences when they commit crimes.

Fascist ascends to power in Brazil, and naturally our financial papers are creaming their pants over how good he'll be for "the markets." Yes, I imagine Mr. Bolsonaro -- who has said out loud that his political opponents should be exterminated and (like all small men) clearly hopes other folks will do it for him -- will greatly aid the effort of Our Glorious Elites to redistribute all the people's wealth upward to themselves, but Jesus Mary and Joseph they can't seem to mute their giddiness even a little. But selling off public works projects to cronies and hello, being a murderous fascist do warrant a bit more scrutiny than that.

After being the target of an apparent Democratic campaign to paint him as the "true conservative" in this race (and thus deprive the Republican of conservative support), the Libertarian candidate in Montana's U.S. Senate race suddenly throws his support behind the Republican. I'm sure that will annoy those Libertarians who've already voted for him, but I wonder if it'll annoy the rest of them, too -- one of the reasons you become a Libertarian is you don't like people trying to manipulate you, and I bet Montana's Libertarians are even more ornery than that. I could be wrong, though. We'll see soon enough!

Finally, because I know you were waiting for this with bated breath, Kanye West now says he's "distancing myself from politics" because he's been "used to spread messages I don't believe in." Yeah sure -- that whole "slavery is a choice" thing didn't sound like a guy being "used." More likely, he used our President to get some attention for himself, though I can't say our President deserves much better than that.

Action: concerning Administration bullying and campaign finance.

Our Administration's plans to force transgender folks to undergo genetic testing to determine their "true" gender, which presumably will be, by our Administration's definition, the gender they're born with. How does this promote freedom, again? It doesn't -- it promotes the "freedom" of rage- and fear-addled religious bigots to make everyone conform to their vision of how Americans should be. And here you thought being an American was all about everyone's freedom! Luckily, our government contracts out so many of its functions that it'll just about have to depend on various genetic testing corporations, like 23andMe, Ancestry, and LabCorp, and Sum of Us helps you tell those corporations not to cooperate with our Administration's plan to gender-test transgender folks. Transgender folks face enough bulling already; they don't need any more from our Bully-in-Chief.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to ban politicians from using Leadership PACs as their personal slush funds, then Issue One still helps you do that. The FEC prevents candidates from using their own campaign funds on personal expenses -- an offense for which California Rep. Duncan Hunter got indicted in August -- but the FEC does not prevent candidates from using Leadership PACs for limo rides, expensive dinners, and trips to Disneyland, all things I wouldn't imagine even Chief Justice Roberts calling "free speech." Politicians who use Leadership PACs in this manner would likely argue that it's not a "necessity" for "survival" in the mean old political world, but sure ain't the attitude you need to have if you want to bring about a better world.