Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: Howard Schultz does not hear you either, America! And other tales.

Ho hum, our intelligence agencies tell Congress that our Administration is dead wrong on a litany of foreign policy-related issues -- North Korean nuclear aspirations, Iranian nuclear accomplishments, ISIS's "demise," the danger presented by climate change, and the border "crisis." Didn't any of these clowns do the reading for Dystopia 101? Spooks and strongmen disagreeing on the important stuff isn't the kind of chaos that helps an aspiring dictatorship along! Naturally it didn't even take our President a full calendar day to slam our intelligence agencies as "naive"; I thought he might at least have tried to call it "fake news" first.

The Great Independent Bipartisan Hope, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, says he can't run as a Democrat because their views "don't represent the majority of Americans," adding, as a for-example, "I don’t think we want a 70 percent income tax in America." You of course will recall that Americans have been polled on this very question, and a solid majority -- 59% -- approved of a 70 percent rate. Democrats supposedly worry that Mr. Schultz would steal votes from the eventual Democratic nominee, but I think he'd more likely steal votes from the Republican side, since he really represents no one but Our Glorious Elites, who normally prefer Republicans. If all else fails, Democrats can always call him the Pumpkin Spice candidate.

Infamous tech corporation Foxconn, which had promised to create 13,000 blue-collar manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin for a mere $4 billion in tax breaks, now says it'll hire mostly engineers and researchers to work there, and may or may not ever create 13,000 jobs. And there's yet another lesson in not throwing money at a problem! At least our President got a photo op and a fake reputation as a blue-collar job creator out of it. In fact, he made out better than Foxconn, which may not even get very much corporate welfare from Wisconsin anymore. Funny how that worked out.

Let's not make too much of our President making "jokes" about how climate change isn't really real because the Midwest and the Northeast is about to get slammed by a cold snap -- he's pretending not to know the difference between climate and weather, thus saying it's OK for his votaries to ignore the difference. Actually, it's worse than that: focusing on weather is short-term, while focusing on climate is long-term, and you know how our President thinks focusing on the long term is for "losers" like us.

Ian Millhiser at Think Progress thinks our Supreme Court could kill Roe v. Wade as early as today by letting an anti-abortion lower court ruling stand. I'd like to think Chief Justice Roberts is a little cleverer than that, since our Court has already struck down a law that's almost identical to this one, and if he doesn't join our Court's four liberals to strike the ruling down, he'll go down in history as a Chief Justice who disregarded precedent pretty blatantly. I'd have no worries about Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch being similarly clever, of course.

Finally, anonymous bankster says, of the upcoming Democratic primary race, that the nominee "can't be Warren and it can't be Sanders." I suspect that, for most Americans, that's virtually an endorsement of either one! I do hope they left Sherrod Brown off their hate list because they don't think he has a chance (the alternative -- that he's reassured them he won't be trouble -- would be much worse). And of course they'd be happy with Beto O'Rourke! Now you don't have to watch any of his videos.

Action: concerning corruption, pollution, and law and order.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass the most vigorous version possible of H.R. 1, the For the People Act, then Common Cause still helps you do that. H.R. 1 essentially incorporates (among other goo ideas) the Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Fair Elections Now Act, and the DISCLOSE Act, all worthwhile bills that have merited our support in the past. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would have plugged the giant hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act by establishing a new pre-clearance formula for states with a long history of voting rights violations. The Fair Elections Now Act would have established a public campaign finance system that wouldn't have outlawed massive bajillionaire campaigns but would make them more politically toxic. And the DISCLOSE Act would have forced big campaign donors to disclose their identities. H.R. 1 wouldn't just do these good works -- it would also set up nonpartisan redistricting commissions in the states and enable automatic voter registration at the federal level. These are all good things! So let's do them.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that scientists have linked PFAS chemicals (PFAS basically stands for "per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances") to cancer, liver damage, and asthma, which is very unfortunate, since you can find PFAS chemicals basically all over the place -- in non-stick saucepans, food packaging, and firefighting foam, to name three fairly common places, and now in our drinking water as well. Our EPA had apparently planned to release a draft action concerning PFAS, but then the shutdown happened, and seriously do you really expect our EPA, as it's currently constituted, to do the right thing about this matter? This is an EPA, after all, that seems to care only about "liberating" corporate executives from ever having to worry about their products harming people's health. But we don't have to wait for them: we can prod Congress to act, and so the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to help keep our water clean by acting against PFAS chemicals. Don't be the one to tell me about the far worse things PFAS chemicals replaced -- science always advances, and as civilized people we have a duty to keep up.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big tech corporations Amazon, Microsoft, and Google not to sell facial recognition software to any of our federal, state, or local governments, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. You would, I hope, be wary of using any fancypants technology until we're sure it won't hurt us -- I mean, that would be a conservative way to be! -- and of course we can't be sure of that with facial recognition technology, not when the technology seems to work much better with white men than any of the many other demographics in our melting pot, and certainly not when the vast majority of faces law enforcement will have on file are non-white. And law enforcement mostly has photos of suspects, not convicted criminals -- I mean, some 117 million faces appear in law enforcement files, and though we're the most incarcerated nation on Earth, we haven't put more than a third of Americans in jail. We really should take this innocent-until-proven-guilty thing as seriously as our Founders did.

Action: concerning war-making, shutdown worker pay, and pollution.

The Democrats' number two man in the Senate, Richard Durbin of Illinois, has acted like a real number-two man in recent days by expressing support for our President's reported machinations in Venezuela, where he would apparently like to see a military coup. Rep. Gabbard (D-HI) got a zinger off in response -- "(w)e don't want other countries to choose our leaders, so we have to stop trying to choose theirs" -- but Mr. Durbin is part of party leadership, and you know how our politicians and our "liberal" media get when they can sniff out a war coming: they bend to the will of the President, no matter how hated he or she might be, instead of bending to the people's will, as is their job. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell Mr. Durbin to resist our President's apparent desire to go to war with Venezuela. It's a shame we have to remind Mr. Durbin of his Constitutional duty (i.e., that Congress declares war, not the President), but we do it because we love our country.

Meanwhile, the agreement to end for-now the partial government shutdown guarantees that federal workers will get back pay, but not federal contract workers, who ostensibly work for a private corporation even though taxpayers pay their salaries. And don't be the one who says "well, the law says what it says," not when H.R. 678/S. 162, the Fair Compensation for Low-Wage Contractor Employees Act, would change the law to ensure that we don't leave federal contract workers out in the cold. Federal contract workers are some of the lowest-paid workers in our government, and if we must outsource federal government functions to private contractors, we should at least avoid the appearance of using these workers' employment status to avoid paying them whenever our President decides to have a month-long tantrum over his vanity border wall. Hence UNITE HERE helps you tell your Congressfolk to support all federal workers by passing the Fair Compensation for Low-Wage Contractor Employees Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to a full-time gig as EPA Administrator, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Mr. Wheeler is supposed to be a saner, more competent, less greedy version of Scott Pruitt, but I don't want any version of Scott Pruitt to lead the EPA, especially when I look at Mr. Wheeler's record so far and see nothing but rolling back of regulations that protect our clean air and clean water. His clean air and clean water, too -- I mean, he doesn't live in a domed city with its own aquifer, much as I'm sure he'd like to. I must say it continually amazes me that today's "conservatives" can look at the Pruitt/Wheeler record at the EPA and see "conservatism." What, exactly, is today's EPA "conserving" besides the "right" of corporate executives to make even more unearned money? How is "increasing executive pay at any cost" a bedrock principle of civilization?

Around the table: more folly about "bipartisanship" and "independence."

Sam Knight at TruthOut reminds us that Joe Biden's vaunted "bipartisanship" is a sham that actually helps promote the Republican agenda. Read the whole thing, because it's a pretty devastating analysis -- he downplayed how much his $200,000 speaking gig helped out the Rep. Upton (R-MI), and then cast Mr. Upton as a health care fighter who "saved lives" without mentioning that Mr. Upton freaking voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Plus, you know, Mr. Biden supported "free" trade, mass incarceration, the Iraq war, and bankruptcy "reform" while in the Senate. Seriously, read it even if your first thought upon reading the headline was "well, how well did Mr. Biden's 'bipartisanship' work with Republicans in eight years as Vice President?"

Trevor Aaronson at The Intercept suggests that our courts might be a "better battlefield" to fight our President's lies -- specifically citing the 2001 Information Quality Act, which mandated the creation of standards for information our government agencies put out, and perhaps more importantly, let federal judges force our government to retract published info that doesn't meet those standards. Very few plaintiffs have tried suing under the Information Quality Act, and I wonder which federal judges (cough Roberts Kavanaugh Gorsuch cough) will throw out lawsuits because plaintiffs don't have "standing" to sue, though it seems to me pretty much any American who feels lied to by our government would have standing to sue.

Didn't know there was a "Conservative Case for Antitrust," did you? Well, don't blame conservatism for that -- blame contemporary "conservatives" who seem to think conservatism is all about militarism and religious bigotry and who gets the most money. Certainly a "conservative case for antitrust" wouldn't surprise you if you've long thought of a viable conservatism as one that would oppose concentrated power anywhere. I might quibble with some of Jonathan Tepper's rhetorical strategies ("number of antitrust lawsuits filed by TR and Taft" is a statistic begging for more context), but I wouldn't quibble with the overarching notion that truly free markets require market competition. It even warmed my heart to hear Friedrich Hayek prefer "inefficiency" to monopoly.

The flesh is willing with Elizabeth Goitein's quite reasonable and thorough assessment that the longer our President waits, the worse his case for declaring a "national emergency" over the Southern border becomes, but we all know that for this President, the past isn't just another country but an alternate universe. And worse, if terrorists inflict a 9.11-style attack during the next government shutdown, Our Glorious Elites will declare that we are all Americans now and that we must cleave to our President in These Difficult Times, never mind the multitudinous ways he would have failed to protect us, and our "liberal" media won't be very interested in recalling how our President could have declared his little emergency right away but dithered for months on end.

Finally, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz mulls an independent run for President, and Jonathan Chait explains why he's a fool to try. Mr. Chait's analysis is mostly pretty solid -- it warms my heart to hear a media pundit actually say the center isn't where conventional wisdom says it is, and it warms my hear further to hear Mr. Chait describe opposing the massive corporate tax cut of 2017 as a "layup," one that Mr. Schultz misses, no less -- but I don't think the problem with a Schultz candidacy is he thinks expertise in one field will translate to another, but that as a billionaire he's surrounded himself with people who'll never tell him when he's full of shit. That would explain his apparent belief that Americans yearn for a great nonpartisan independent hope even better than a general theory of how we misread the "center" would.

Action: concerning the next government shutdown drama.

Late last week, our Congress reached an agreement with our President to end the partial government shutdown, but that agreement only lasts until mid-February, at which point we will face either another government shutdown or the spectacle of our President declaring a "national emergency" so he can build his vanity border wall. Thus today I urge you to call your Reps and Senators, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a smartphone), and tell them, explicitly, to prevent either of these occurrences from happening next month.

Don't believe the hype that Congress is somehow powerless to prevent these things. Congress can vote in favor of their next appropriations bill in numbers that will override a Presidential veto, and they can repeal the National Emergencies Act which gives our President the power to declare a "national emergency" at the border. The first course of action does contain one significant peril: that House Democrats would cave to a Republican-flavored appropriations bill with all sorts of poison pills in it so that they can get the vote numbers past the two-thirds threshold that would override a veto. But this fact doesn't make hostages of us, for we have an absolute, inviolable right to give our honest counsel to our Reps and Senators, and they have an absolute, inviolable duty to do our will. Hence it's not a heavy lift for us to tell our Reps and Senators to stop playing games with appropriations bills and pass a bill that funds those parts of our government at appropriate levels, regardless of whether our Congressfolk act like it's a heavy lift for them.

Generally I encourage you to keep your messages to your Congressfolk short and sweet, but this is one time you may want to game it out for your Congressfolk at some length. I've said on numerous occasions that a government shutdown would be a perfect time for the kind of 9.11-style terrorist attack that "rallies America around our President." While it also seems that our President is too fixated on Venezuela to be hunting bigger game, or that he uses a government shutdown to demonstrate how "unnecessary" we should find our government, these could both be feints, and I certainly do not put it past this Administration to have already discussed the political "opportunities," such as war against Iran or a new wave of anti-free speech legislation, that a terrorist attack could bring. I think you'll want to tell your Congressfolk that if they're gaming it out this way, you're on to them. If enough of us say it, out loud, to our Congressfolk, I believe we'll make a difference. They can't function unless we're as naive as they need us to be, so let's show them we're not.

I suppose I should address the possibility that your Congressperson believes we should build a wall along the Southern border, by any means necessary. You'd be right to argue that a vanity wall would do nothing for border security and that there is no "national emergency" along the Southern border, but you won't win the argument merely by saying that. You will also have to remind your Congressfolk that our President couldn't get his wall out of a Republican-dominated Congress, either -- one that could easily have bypassed a Democratic filibuster by including border wall funding within a budget resolution passed via the reconciliation process -- and that, more to the point, our President is acting like a spoiled brat and that America is sick of all the drama he creates. When our Congressfolk finally get it into their heads that America is sick of the drama, they will bend to our will. But if we don't tell them that, in so many words, they'll pretend it's not happening. And you never give your Congressfolk that kind of opening.

So I guess a good script for your phone call would go something like this: "I'm calling to tell you to fund our government appropriately for the rest of the year, without poison pill amendments and without funding for our President's vanity border wall. I also urge you to repeal the National Emergencies Act which supposedly gives our President the power to build his wall. Like most Americans, I am sick and tired of all the drama our President creates, and it's your job, as a federal elected official, to demand more from our politics than just drama. His vanity border wall will do nothing to secure our borders, and frankly I'm afraid that another partial government shutdown will leave us vulnerable to a 9.11-style terrorist attack. And I'm further afraid that our Administration has already decided that a 9.11-style terrorist attack would be another big drama that would yield immense political benefits for them. So I think you would do well to be able to tell our posterity that you didn't let that happen." Tough toodles if they don't like what they hear; they're Congresspeople, and you're their bosses, so you have an inviolable right and duty to tell them what they don't want to hear.

Good luck and God bless.

Around the table: how our government shutdown actually ended, and other truths.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media sure do seem awfully anxious to overthrow the government of Venezuela. You don't have to love the Maduro regime to see where further American interference will lead, because you've seen where it has led -- to bigger and bigger problems "requiring" more American intervention, almost like that's the whole idea. You also don't have to love the Maduro regime to acknowledge that American interference has already helped send Venezuela's economy into a tailspin. I'm a little surprised that our President seems so transfixed on war with Venezuela as his ticket to unearned prestige and perhaps an unearned re-election -- although I guess it's easier than waging war with Iran! -- but then I wonder if that, too, is a feint, to take our eye off the next terrorist attack happening after the next government shutdown in a few weeks.

Eric Levitz at New York magazine reminds us that our Founders also regarded excessive wealth as evil, and regarded controlling the unbridled expansion of private property as a moral duty. Go ahead and read the article in its entirety; just don't get too distracted by infamous multimillionaire Sean Hannity's counterarguments, since they suck -- saying that you "better guard your nice things" from the "excess police" is weak tea, which testifies not only to the paucity of his arguments but the goodness of the American people, which has boxed him in with regards to what he can reasonably argue about the societal benefits of unbridled wealth. (And seriously, if your "dream" is to have the most money ever, you need a new dream, one that'll maybe benefit others in addition to yourself.)

Another day, another reminder that our Social Security program is most emphatically not "going broke" and that eliminating the cap on earnings to be taxed into the system would go a long way toward solving the "modest fiscal challenge" Social Security faces. No one said more people weren't retiring or that the system wouldn't face some additional strain, but today's politicians pretend the only solution is to completely raid the fund on behalf of big donors, even as they're instituting massive tax cuts for the rich that make the problem they're purporting to address ("runaway deficits," naturally) much worse. Social Security, having its own funding stream, doesn't actually contribute to the deficit, except in right-wing fever dreams.

Heather Vogell at ProPublica informs us that federal regulators have been slow to stop the flow of laundered money (i.e., from drug lords, terrorists, and the like) into and out of hedge funds. The PATRIOT Act mandated that our government write regulations requiring hedge funds to install anti-money laundering (or AML) programs, but here we are, over 17 years later, with no regulations written. Naturally, hedge funds "want" AML programs and federal enforcement, but just so happen to have eighty bajillion objections that of course must take precedence over the public good. I'd object that if they've done nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear, but I also wonder why our government doesn't simply do the regulating itself, instead of telling the hedge funds to do it (which, of course, they haven't done, either).

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fines a man who spent eight years swindling veterans out of their hard-earned pensions a mere one dollar, after said man swears he just can't pay more. They call it the "Mulvaney Discount," after former acting CFPB administrator/current acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, because it's not the first one. While it is possible that the CFPB will pursue action against the corporations this man owned, and maybe then swindled veterans will get some justice, a one-dollar fine makes a mockery of law and order in America -- particularly in a nation where (as the article makes sure to point out!) cash bail puts folks in jail for months without even convicting them of a crime.

Finally, we are reminded that the politicians didn't end the partial government shutdown at the end of last week so much as the workers who, after exhibiting great patience in working for weeks on end without pay, took action last week. Air traffic controllers slowed flights in at least three major airports, flight attendants visited their Congressfolk en masse, and 14,000 IRS workers didn't come to work, and regardless of what you hear from right-wingers about how workers who serve the public are supposed to serve the public even when our President has a massive temper tantrum, these workers are all heroes. It gives me hope that the next shutdown might be even shorter, and our President humiliated for real this time. (No, I think his "emergency declaration" will ultimately die in court, just like most of his other "bold" acts have died in court.)

Action: concerning family separation at the border and facial recognition software.

You've no doubt heard, by now, that our Department of Health and Human Services's Inspector General has found that our Administration separated "thousands" more migrant children from their families than we had previously known, and that our Administration has done a bad job even keeping track of the families they've separated, likely because they don't care. OK, as far as I know, the Inspector General didn't speculate about whether or not our Administration cares, but obviously they don't. Still, duty is duty, so Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk and Department of Homeland Security Secretary-for-now Kirstjen Nielsen to reunite every last child they've separated with their families. Anything else would be cruel, and it takes rather little moral fiber to notice it's cruel -- which means our Administration has no moral fiber whatsoever. But they're not the boss of us, so we don't have to take it.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell big tech corporation CEOs not to sell facial recognition software to our local, state, and federal governments. Why? Well, for one thing, our governments don't regulate the use of such software to protect our privacy, and for another thing, facial recognition software does a pretty bad job recognizing faces -- which is, you know, its purpose, as evidenced by the moniker "facial recognition software" -- to the point where it confuses members of our Congressional Black Caucus with suspected criminals. Starting to think that racism might be a feature, not a bug? Hey, you'd be naive not to! And, seriously, too many people think machines are the answer to all our problems. Machines are the answer to only one "problem," that of paying human beings to do jobs that human beings do best, and that's a "problem" only CEOs have. And they don't get all the say around here!

Around the table: the real effect of video games upon our culture, and other notes.

Mark Provost at TruthOut describes another type of border-crossing "caravan" you may not have heard about: the thousands of Americans who cross the border into Mexico every day to get dental care. About a quarter of Americans have no dental insurance, and the rest of us very likely don't have good dental insurance, and the town of Los Algodones, for example, is chock-full of dentists who have low labor costs and no malpractice insurance, to be sure, but no student debt, either. It's a bit of a stretch to call them "people currently fleeing the US’s health care system," since they're all coming back once they get their care, but it's also shameful that the richest nation on Earth can't provide such care for all its citizens.

Adam Johnson at FAIR describes "The Media's Profitable -- and Indefensible -- Addiction to Mugshots." If you've never had your mugshot in the paper, you may not know that it can get you fired, publicly shamed, and unemployable, and if that still seems like it's not that big a deal, consider that mugshots literally always depict people who have been accused, not convicted of a crime. Things like public shaming and loss of livelihood should only happen to the guilty, right? Or do we still inhabit a world where we "just know" who's guilty? Because that would most certainly not be a law-and-order world.

David Wong at Cracked suggests that "Violent Video Games Might Be Screwing With Your Brain" -- but not exactly in the way you might think. Long story short: video games don't "teach violence," but rather they "teach us that obstacles should be easy to eliminate," and if you take that attitude into the real world, where obstacles are actually difficult to eliminate, you'll get frustrated and lash out a lot more. Worse, we've "gamified" our social lives, with likes and upvotes and downvotes and blocks and bad online reviews, such that we've become "so impatient with problems that instead of seeing them through to a resolution, we are satisfied with solutions that make them merely disappear from our screens." I don't know if I'd attribute very much of our current political anger to this phenomenon, but Mr. Wong is definitely onto something here.

Measles outbreak leads to public health emergency in "anti-vax hotspot" nearly Portland, Oregon. Folks who won't get their children vaccinated because of bogus fears of autism or contamination aren't just putting their own children at risk but everyone else's, too, but let's not forget that this all began with an unscrupulous scientific researcher trying to help win a lawsuit and an American celebrity who studied vaccines at the University of Google.

Finally, seven million Americans have lost their health insurance since our current President took office. It's been a few years since that number went up, and our President said you'd have great health care, the best! If you're tempted to blame Democrats for this, recall that Democrats had literally no way of stopping Republicans from enacting whatever health care "reform" they liked, and Republicans failed -- and that our Administration has succeeded in making both the Affordable Care Act exchanges and the Medicaid expansion more difficult for good Americans to access. (I'll confess I was a bit floored by polling suggesting that close to one out of three Americans either think the Republicans successfully repealed the Affordable Care Act or aren't sure if they did.)

Action: concerning H.R. 1, the minimum wage, and drug pricing.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, now has 225 co-sponsors, which means more than half the House has co-sponsored the bill, and I presume the House will begin deliberating the bill soon. I mean, yeah, the shutdown takes the oxygen out of the room, almost like that's the whole idea, but if we speak out enough, we can move the conversation in our direction, so Common Cause still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the most vigorous reforms in H.R. 1 possible. As you know, H.R. 1 aims to reform voting rights laws, campaign finance laws, and ethics laws, and many of its reforms originally appeared in bills such as the Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Fair Elections Now Act, both of which deserved our support. But of course Mob Boss Mitch calls the bill a "power grab," fearing it'll increase Democratic political power. Maybe if he and his kind weren't such elitists, he and his kind would benefit from the bill, too!

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Raise the Wage Act, then the Economic Policy Institute (among other good government groups) still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act (sorry, Congress.gov still doesn't have a bill number at this writing!) would gradually increase our minimum wage to $15/hour by 2024, which is five years from now, so don't believe the hype about the "shock to small businesses" the bill would cause. The bill would also index the wage to inflation, which means it won't be some politician or other's manufactured hostage crisis every year, and it would also phase out the far lower tipped worker minimum wage, and anyone who complains about that very likely has a heart of stone. Seriously, they should go to the doctor and get that checked out. The rest of us will welcome more good Americans being able to make ends meet -- and get ahead.

Finally, the big pharmaceutical corporation Teva has introduced its own generic version of the EpiPen drug -- and, at $300, it just so happens to cost the same as Mylan's generic EpiPen. You remember Mylan? The big pharma corporation that took massive PR hits for jacking up the price of its EpiPen to absurd heights? Achieving parity with Mylan isn't a good look for Teva, but we're here to help, as a Change.org petition helps you tell Teva to make its generic EpiPen more affordable to good Americans. After all, it's not like most folks just have $300 lying around for a life-saving drug. If you want to mention to them that the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act would let our government manufacture generic versions of life-saving drugs whenever big pharma corporations price them too high, well, I won't stop you. Corporations do generally try to avoid governmental involvement in their affairs.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, soldiers' health care, and paycheck fairness.

Remember when the Senate passed a bill aiming to end our participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen last month -- but then the House promptly added a rider to the Farm Bill (of all things!) preventing a House vote on that matter for the rest of the year? Well, the calendar has turned and the House has changed hands, so why not let Roots Action help you tell your House Reps to vote to end our participation in the war on Yemen? A new year should create new possibilities, after all. Note well that the Senate's anti-war resolution probably got 56 votes last year because the Senate already knew the House wasn't going to pass it, making it a show of courage for a lot of Senate cowards, but Mob Boss Mitch will no doubt come up with a litany of absurd excuses not to even hold a vote on the bill if it passes this House. But that presents us an opportunity to embarrass them for their hypocrisy, and of course as good citizens we should not pass up such opportunities. They're teachable moments, after all.

Meanwhile, H.R. 663/S. 191, the Burn Pits Accountability Act, is back in Congress, with over 100 Congressional co-sponsors, and if the bill resembles past iterations (Congress.gov has neither a summary nor text for either bill at this writing), it would help our soldiers get the health care they need from burn pit exposure. Our military used burn pits to dispose of waste in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those burn pits had all kinds of trash in them -- chemicals, paint, plastic, rubber, human and medical waste, even munitions! -- and burning them does what? Puts all kinds of toxic crap in the air our soldiers breathe, of course! The Burn Pits Accountability Act would require our Department of Defense to ask soldiers whether they've been exposed to burn pits during routine health exams and exit interviews so they can better assist our Veterans Administration maintain its Burn Pit Registry, and that, at least, is a start. Hence the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America help you tell our Congressfolk to help our soldiers by passing the Burn Pits Accountability Act.

Finally, the Paycheck Fairness Act is apparently back, too (Congress.gov doesn't even have a bill number for it at this writing), and if it's like past iterations, it would prevent corporations from prohibiting employees from discussing their pay with their co-workers -- since these are the very discussions that let women know they're being shorted by their employer! -- and would limit the factors employers can use to pay women differently to "bona fide factors" including education, training, and experience. The 79-cents-on-the-dollar figure is the one you're likely most familiar with, but even when you adjust the data for education, training, experience, you still don't get women making a dollar for every dollar a man makes. And that's only fair! If the bill passes the House, Mob Boss Mitch will just say "the bill only helps trial lawyers," though that does tend to be a side effect of injustice. You'd think he'd want to remedy that by fighting injustice or something. Anyway, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support fair pay by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Around the table: tabulating an unusually high number of setbacks to civilization, sorry.

Supreme Court stays various injunctions against our Administration's transgender military ban -- meaning the ban is in place until all the legal challenges thereto can be resolved. Seems to me the conservative thing to do would be to leave the injunctions in place and let the lower courts work it out, but apparently that's insufficiently conservative to this Court's "conservative" majority. Dig, also, our Administration Solicitor General whining about how many federal courts are now issuing used-to-be-rare injunctions against "major policy initiatives." That couldn't be because so many of your "major policy initiatives" break our laws, could it? What a snowflake.

Apparently because absurdity just isn't absurd enough, Vice President Pence compares our President to Martin Luther King, Jr., saying that both men have "inspired us to change." I guess he means to equate the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Open Housing Act with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which remains our President's only significant legislative "achievement." The only way our President has "inspired us to change" is that he's inspired so many more good Americans to confront corrupt bigoted assholes like him a lot more forcefully, but I don't praise or thank corrupt bigoted assholes for that, nor do I argue for their continuance in office because some good happens to come of their assholery.

Lo and behold, Senate Majority Leader/Obviously Great and Wonderful Real American Co-President Mitch McConnell, mere days after saying he won't allow a Senate vote on any shutdown-ending bill that wasn't obviously the result of spirited negotiations between Democrats, Republicans, and our President, now plans to bring a shutdown bill that meets precisely none of those criteria to a vote this week. No use lamenting that he has no principles, because folks like Mob Boss Mitch think principles are for us "little people," not their "betters," like him.

Buried in this article buying the Republican fiction that they can't get our President's nominees through quickly enough despite the fact that Democrats literally can't filibuster them anymore is Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) whining about how "(i)t's very difficult for a president to advance his or her agenda if you don’t have the right people in place." I also despise the holds and withdrawals of unanimous consent that comprise Senate Democrats' last tools to stall our President's nominees, but Sen. Young appears completely unconcerned about the people's right to advance their agenda through their representatives in Congress, or about our President's constitutionally-mandated duty to do the people's will. I don't give one rat's hind quarter about a President's "agenda," and that's how our Founders wanted us to be.

Finally, why does our "liberal" media suppose our President has ever been any kind of "deal-maker," like this shutdown mess should be some kind of surprise? It's not just that every "great deal" he's ever made only allowed him to suck out a bankrupt corporation's wealth like the vampire he is -- a good deal benefits everyone, not just the guy who makes it, but our "liberal" media haven't attended that aspect of deal-making in some time, so obsessed are they with "who wins" and "who loses" like everything's a damn horserace.

Action: concerning the government shutdown and law-and-order issues at the border.

A consortium of good government groups helps you tell our President and our Senate Majority Leader to end the government shutdown now. As I may have said, I don't oppose government shutdowns per se, but I oppose this shutdown, which our President has orchestrated not so he can protect America or end a humanitarian crisis, but so he can keep on diddling the rage glands of his votaries. And our House has passed several bills aiming at funding those areas of our government which are currently shutdown, but Mr. McConnell says no, because our President won't sign them, or because the bills aren't a result of negotiations between our President and the Democrats, or something. Of course, if a bill has 67 Senate votes, it doesn't matter if a President signs it or not. What's he afraid of? He should be afraid of losing re-election in 2020 as more good Kentuckians figure out he thinks he works for Our Glorious Elites and not them.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our President's deployment of military personnel at the southern border to "assist" with Border Patrol work. Turns out that using soldiers for domestic policing matters is just about always against the law per the famous Posse Comitatus Act, and never mind that Southern states pushed for such a law back in the day to get Reconstruction-era troops out of their hair, because keeping our law enforcement and our military separate is still a good idea, as anyone who thinks about it for a second will see. Our President, unfortunately, cuts the figure of someone who does not think about things even for one second -- he just says do it, and then one day the people who carry out his orders annoy him and he turns on them. You'd think more good Americans would know this by now. We'll just keep having to tell them.

Around the table: starring our snowflake FCC and Mob Boss Mitch.

You can almost feel the disgust emanating from the U.S. District Judge who struck down Wisconsin's recently-passed restrictions on early voting, saying these restrictions were virtually identical to the ones he struck down in 2016. Although my heart swells to hear the Judge say "(t)his is not a close question," I wish it were more of a consolation that Wisconsin Republicans seem to be this lazy, since they seem to suffer very little for it.

FCC unsuccessfully asks D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to delay hearings on a lawsuit against the FCC net neutrality repeal, citing, of course, the ongoing government shutdown. Well, that's not a good sign! Did they really think having another few weeks to brainstorm would deliver the magic legal argument that will win the case for them?

Rachel M. Cohen at The Intercept finds Democratic politicians generally unwilling to address one of the striking L.A. schoolteachers' biggest gripes -- that private charter schools are siphoning off money that should be going to public schools. Of course, you already know why -- because Democratic politicians want that charter school donor money to keep coming! (I know someone out there is already saying that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's criticisms of charter schools "cost her nothing politically," as if it's her fault she was only a child when Democrats started selling out public schools to charter schools.)

I was just going to ignore the story of how Vice President Pence's wife went back to work for a school that explicitly tells you that you have to oppose homosexuality to work there, but then Mr. Pence had to open his fat yap and say that media criticism of "Christian education" is "deeply offensive to us." So many of our political class seem to equate "religion" with "hating gays," and our Vice President is one of the worst of these. Also, "religious education" did kinda used to mean "schools without black kids in them." Also, I'm sick of people saying NO YOUR TEH OFFENSIVEZ!!!!! like they're the cleverest people who ever lived.

Finally, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) says that H.R. 1 -- which rolls up the Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Fair Elections Act, and the DISCLOSE Act (among others!) into one bill -- is a "power grab." Yes, the people are trying to grab power back from the politicians. And he acts like this is a bad thing? Of course he does: he believes power isn't for us "little people." Still, I guess it is a good thing to make Mob Boss Mitch talk in public as much as possible, particularly in advance of his 2020 re-election campaign.

Action: concerning the minimum wage, internet privacy, and the DREAM Act.

With a new Democratic House taking power, the Economic Policy Institute (among other groups) help you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Raise the Wage Act. (I have no bill numbers for its current iteration at this writing.) Raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would represent a vast change in working families' fortunes -- the current minimum wage of $7.25/hour actually represents a pay cut from the late 1960s, when the $2/hour minimum wage had over $10/hour in contemporary purchasing power -- and no, it wouldn't kill jobs, not just because minimum wage jobs are often the kind you can't kill, but because "the minimum wage vs. jobs" is the wrong focus. A better focus would be "absurd CEO salaries vs. jobs," since those salaries are the real job-killer in America. The Senate won't pass it, etc., but embarrassing them isn't exactly a vain pursuit, particularly if it instructs future Senates about the people's will.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the big telecom corporations have been selling your location data to other corporations -- some of which will sell that data to just anybody, including bounty hunters. Thing is, your contract with your cellphone provider may prohibit data sales to "disreputable" folks or corporations, and even the big telecoms admit that they sell too much data to too many unsavory actors! Well, they said that out of fear that our government would regulate them -- a vain fear, since our government repealed FCC privacy regulations last year! -- but since the abuse is still happening, Free Press helps you tell our FCC to stop corporate abuse of our private data. Please do not be the fool who says well just stop using a cellphone then! Everyone uses a cellphone now, and everyone deserves privacy -- I mean, Chief Justice Roberts understands this, and crafts excellent jurisprudence based on that understanding.

Finally, you no doubt recall that our President tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program last year, and though various federal courts have blocked his efforts, now's as good a time as any to let People for the American Way help you tell Congress to pass a DREAM Act, so that immigrants brought here as children can contribute to America's heritage and one day gain citizenship. Sending immigrants back to nations they don't recognize as home, when they literally had no say in emigrating to America, should strike you as the height of cruelty, but of course our Administration cares about nothing but diddling the rage glands of its votaries, and thus still struts around demanding a brand new border wall before our government starts inspecting food and airplanes again. So when I said "now's as good a time as any" just now, perhaps I was being a bit glib -- now's a damn good time to change the conversation about immigration, even if our President doesn't want to.

Action: concerning mercury poisoning, law and order, and William Barr.

Another day, another Administration effort to gut rules that protect good Americans, as now the EPA wants to let power plants put more mercury in our air and water. Because what's healthier than mercury, particularly for growing children? And what's more popular than poisoning our air and water? It wasn't that long ago that most states put out health warnings about eating local fish because of all the mercury in it, but I guess our Administration wants to bring those glory days back. And the 900,000-plus Americans who submitted comments demanding stronger mercury regulations a few years ago? They must just be "little people" to this Administration. You just remember that "little people" made America great, and that a lot of "great men" deserve scorn, shame, and hatred. Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to scuttle its plans to allow more mercury pollution in the air we breathe and the water we drink.

Meanwhile, the National Police Association is actually trying to get the Massachusetts Bar Association (or MBA) to disbar Suffolk County's incoming District Attorney, Rachael Rollins. Thinking she must have done something to deserve that? Well, no: they want her disbarred because she declared, while running for office, that she'd stop prosecuting all those petty crimes that seem to jail a disproportionate number of black folks. And yet every single DA in America prioritizes certain kinds of cases over certain others! It's called "prosecutorial discretion," and I presume the NPA has heard of it. And Suffolk County police aren't even complaining about Ms. Rollins, possibly because they feel the same way about the work they're being compelled to do, so I feel compelled to regard the NPA's complaint as an attempt at election nullification. So Color of Change helps you tell the MBA to dismiss the complaint against Ms. Rollins.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of William Barr as our new Attorney General. We have so, so many reasons to oppose Mr. Barr, including his support for the noxious notion of the "unitary executive" President who can do pretty much whatever he likes, the likelihood that he'll end or otherwise obstruct the Special Counsel's ongoing investigation into Russian meddling/Administration collusion, and his, ah, peculiar attitude toward the False Claims Act, but we must also recall that Mr. Barr, while he was George H.W. Bush's Attorney General, approved all those pardons Mr. Bush handed out to Iran-Contra figures who were about to go to trial (and possibly expose Mr. Bush's own complicity in those wrongdoings). Sense a pattern? Then tell your Senators to reject the Barr nomination with a quickness. Lawlessness is this President's only remaining defense, and he's better at lawlessness than we are.

Around the table: celebrating our third consecutive day with at least one item of good news!

A ProPublica/WBEZ Chicago report describes how the meteoric rise of video gambling in Illinois has been little more than a "botched money grab," as underregulated gambling corporations make off with the money while leaving towns and counties even more destitute. Why, it's almost like that was the whole idea! The video gambling troubles began in 2009, at the height of the Great Recession, when "something had to be done" to raise money. And the gambling bill, with the Orwellian title of the Illinois Jobs Now! (exclamation point in original), was a truly modern bipartisan mess, created by Democrats too afraid to raise taxes on big donors and Republicans who had clearly abdicated conservatism (and who now say they should have studied the matter more, which is just dandy now that the barn door's open).

Well, how about that -- poll finds almost 60% of Americans support a 70% tax on income above $10 million. How "radical" can an idea be if a decisive majority of Americans support it? "Not radical at all" is the correct answer. Americans generally support higher taxes on the rich, but it's good to see such support when someone puts a number to it. Yet I do wonder if Rep. Ocasio-Cortez means to forestall a drive to set the top tax rate even higher -- say, at 91%, and on millionaire income -- which would, in turn, suggest that the Democratic establishment's hand-wringing over her is, that's right, drama. I'd be happy to be wrong about all of that.

You think the government shutdown's bad now? Well, three Bloomberg writers remind us that it could get a whole lot worse -- not just no food stamps and no housing assistance, but no court hearings, no flights, no buses. Why, even Wall Street might shut down! And then, if our President is really lucky, we'll have a terrorist attack to rally the country around him, I'm sure they've mooted this possibility at the White House -- I mean, they've lost all the arguments, so how can they hope to keep winning elections without sowing chaos? Remember: if terrorists attack, immediately blame our President for holding up government funding over his precious wall for however many months it's been by then.

Here's some more good news: federal District Court Judge halts our Administration's efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire, saying our Commerce Secretary broke "a veritable smorgasbord" of rules and laws in adding the question. Per the judge, he also "cherry-picked facts to support his views, ignored or twisted contrary evidence and hid deliberations from Census Bureau experts." All that sure doesn't bode well for the FCC's net neutrality repeal of 2017, particularly since the judge found that our Administration's census question did, in fact, violate the Administrative Procedures Act.

Finally, I don't go looking around for Iconic Photos of Our Age, but the sight of our President inviting the national college football champion Clemson Tigers to eat mountains of junk food is actually a pretty good one. Junk food is really the perfect metaphor for everything this Administration offers -- it might taste good in the moment, but it'll ultimately leave you fat and malnourished at the same time. And there ain't nothing else on the menu.

Action: concerning the Arctic Refuge, kids' apps, media consolidation, and climate change.

Our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) has released its proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (also known as ANWR) to oil drilling -- and, naturally, because they don't want to hear what you think about it, they announced their proposal in late December when folks are immersed in the holidays and have given us only a month to leave a public comment about it! So let the Sierra Club help you tell our BLM to keep big oil drilling corporations out of ANWR. You know (better than our BLM does, apparently!) the threat oil drilling poses to caribou within the Reserve and the Gwich'in Native Americans who live there, but don't forget to remind our BLM that just about nobody who's studied the matter thinks there's a whole lot of oil in ANWR to begin with! Is this the lesson we want to teach our descendents -- that when some corporation or other wants to make money, it can destroy whatever's in its way? And that our government should help them do that? Not in my America, it's not. But only if we act.

Meanwhile, you might think the children's apps in the Google Play Store wouldn't illegally collect data or manipulate kids into buying stuff or model harmful behavior, but, sadly, they do, as a Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood complaint to our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) documents. Like the app depicting a kid crying after you don't buy something! That's disgusting! Kids take it seriously when other people cry! And when the big corporations providing these apps say hey, we're just collecting information so we can target ads better -- corporate spokeshacks are not as smart as you think, after all! -- contemplate the horror of a corporation that thinks of children as just another moneyjar. You know, the way they already think about their parents! But at least parents can defend themselves better against such manipulation -- children need their parents' protection for a reason. Hence the CCFC helps you tell Google to adopt more vigorous standards that protect kids from privacy invasion and rampant commercialism.

In other news, one Digital First Media plans to buy Gannett newspapers, the nation's biggest newspaper publisher -- no doubt you've read USA Today and a slew of local and regional newspapers that used to be independent. Yeah, might as well get that out of the way early: having a thing such as Gannett isn't a good thing for America, even if their reporting is competent enough, but having it bought by an even bigger corporation owned by a freaking hedge fund is an even worse thing. What do you think Digital First will do once it gets its grubby hands on Gannett? If the experience of previous Digital First-owned outlets (like, say, the Denver Post) has any predictive power, there'll be censorship of journalists, firing reporters who don't toe the bottom line, and sacrificing anything and everything to the altar of mammon. Hence Free Press helps you tell Gannett's board to protect their newsrooms by refusing to sell to Digital First Media. We've got here the Big Stick of Bad PR here, so let's use it.

Finally, our Supreme Court has lately rejected Exxon's latest attempt to stall or stop Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey's investigation into whether it lied to investors and consumers about fossil fuels' role in climate change, so now's as good a time as any to tell your state Attorney General to join the effort against Exxon, as Corporate Accountability helps you do. You probably know the story by now: several media organs reported in 2015 that Exxon's own scientists had warned executives of fossil fuels' role in climate change as early as 1977, but these executives basically pretended that research didn't exist and spent their time stoking doubt in everyone's minds instead. And there you have the real role of money in climate change policy -- scientists don't "make money" from telling everyone climate change is real so much as fossil fuel corporations make money from telling everyone climate change is a hoax. Remember that the next time our President weighs in on the matter.

Around the table: what's even worse than pretending not to understand how tax brackets work, and other lessons.

You know what's even worse than Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) explaining how tax brackets work pretty thoroughly and our "liberal" media refusing to understand it? Right-wing fools calling the "Green New Deal" a "leftist fantasy program." Folks actually do want less pollution and more renewable energy in their lives, so calling their sincere hopes and dreams a "fantasy" is pretty insulting. Oh, but it's even worse than that: in an era where solar and wind production costs have almost achieved parity with coal and oil costs, calling renewable energy a "fantasy program" is also pretty insulting.

Ari Paul catches a New York Times op-ed asserting that pot is actually extraordinarily harmful. The Times probably thinks it's doing its due diligence in presenting "opposing views," but I only want opposing views that actually make good arguments, not "arguments" that present anecdotes as evidence and cherry-pick the data so obviously it'd make the Cato Institute wince. And people have been known to do evil after drinking a lot of booze, and that hasn't lately spurred a whole lot of righteous anger against legal alcohol.

If you're wondering why it's taken so long for Rep. Steve King (R-IA) to finally suffer for the racist claptrap he's been saying on the national stage for 15 years, well, I can't really tell you, and not just because "tipping points" like these really seem to come and go without very much changing. It's not like Republicans have never condemned his remarks before, but it's also not like they've done very much about his mouth before now, either. And I don't think Republicans were trying to get ahead of Democratic-sponsored censure resolutions, because don't they normally just ignore Democrats when they talk about racism? (As an aside, I bet Mob Boss Mitch is hopping mad about having had to say something about this.)

Researchers develop a font (which they've called "Sans Forgetica") that supposedly helps you retain more of what you read. It probably does put more markers in your mind than you'd get from Georgia or Trajan Pro III (my two favorite fonts, if you haven't noticed), but the size and smell of a good book put those markers in your mind, too, and anyway you can't read a whole book in Sans Forgetica because it'd hurt your head. The best way to remember what you've read is to read it more than once, and don't task yourself reading things you don't enjoy. And better it be a real book than an e-book (see "size," "smell").

Finally, because you deserve some good news, two federal courts effectively block our Administration's attempt to allow just any old corporation to cite just any old "religious" belief to deny birth control to its employees. You'll recall that our Supreme Court's infamous Hobby Lobby decision wouldn't expand such "religious conscience" exceptions beyond closely-held corporations, and while I suppose it's possible the two relatively new far right-wingers on our Court might be looking to widen these exceptions, this could wind up being the second time our Administration has failed to roll back the mandate. Don't think our Administration is trying to do everything badly, though, not just because that's 13-dimensional chess and you should avoid it, but because incompetence might really just be the better explanation.

Action: concerning the government shutdown, high drug prices, and cash bail.

In re our President's stated desire to invoke "emergency powers" to build his stupid border wall, more than a few establishment Republicans have worried out loud that a future Democratic President could use these same emergency powers to do something about climate change or guns without consulting Congress, and several members of the far-right Freedom Caucus in the House have expressed similar misgivings. And they're right to do so! Big decisions like these should be made by the people via their elected representatives in Congress. But if our President pulls this stunt, you think any of these Republicans will put their money where their mouth is -- by, say, repealing the law that gives our Presidents powers to declare these "national emergencies"? No, they won't, at least not unless we tell them to, in numbers they can't ignore. So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Congressfolk and demand they repeal the National Emergencies Act.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, while Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Prescription Drug Price Relief Act. The Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act would allow our government to manufacture generic versions of drugs that big pharma corporations make too expensive for good Americans to afford, while the Prescription Drug Price Relief Act would mandate that these big pharma corporations price their drugs at or below the median price their drugs fetch in Canada, England, France, Germany, and Japan. Three of these nations have Medicare-for-All-style health insurance systems in place, as you know, so they don't spend a lot on their drugs. How would the big corporations make money? They'd make money because we all get sick sooner or later, despite our best efforts; they just wouldn't be able to take us hostage because we're sick anymore. And that's a thing worth fighting for.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell the Bexar County, Texas District Attorney-elect to end cash bail there. Said Bexar County District Attorney-elect, Joe Gonzales, has been an outspoken opponent of cash bail -- but you know plenty of politicians who've talked a good game (cough Barack Obama cough) only to disappoint you once they get into office, so Mr. Gonzalez may well need a bit more steel in his spine, and we can give that to him. The immediate news hook is the death of Janice Dotson-Stephens, 61, in custody after spending six months in a Bexar County jail because she couldn't pay a $300 bond (recall that nearly half of all Americans couldn't scare up $400 on a moment's notice if they had to!), but fact is you're not supposed to go to jail when you're accused of a crime; you're only supposed to go to jail when you're convicted of a crime. And it costs the taxpayer money to put folks up in jail while they're awaiting trial; don't we aim to use taxpayer money more judiciously than that? So let's end this bad system.

Action: concerning tax policy, voting rights, pollution, and the government shutdown.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has lately said a 70% income tax on income over $10 million could easily fund the sort of "Green New Deal" that would put us on the path toward a renewable energy grid while creating jobs, and while I of course support both those ends, I'd go rather harder on the tax end than she would. I'd enact a 91% on millionaire income, but since we also need to prevent folks from exploiting our current loophole-ridden system, I'd also bring back the 55% tax rate on corporate profits, stop treating dividends as separate from income for tax purposes, and outlaw stock options. That would make taxes fair again, revitalize our economy, and give us our best chance to kill climate change dead. I think all that merits a phone call to your House Reps, who need to know that calling Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's ideas "radical" is even stupider than our not-that-recent history (we did have a 91% tax bracket and a 55% corporate tax rate during the '50s, after all) would suggest.

I've been looking for the right contact tool to express support for the ideas that H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would codify into law, and Common Cause has it: they help you tell your House Reps to make H.R. 1 as vigorous as possible. You've no doubt heard that H.R. 1 would strengthen voting rights, expose big campaign donors, make Congressional redistricting fairer, and shut the "revolving door" between corporations and our government -- among other worthy aims -- but it's our job, as citizens, to make sure H.R. 1 actually does these things. And Democrats have no excuse to weaken H.R. 1 -- the Republican-held Senate won't pass it anyway, so playing 13-dimensional chess games with this bill in the vain hope that the Senate might pass it is a vain endeavor. You know what isn't a vain endeavor? Humiliating those politicians who refuse to pass legislation that holds our government accountable to its owners, the American people. That includes Republicans -- and it also includes Democrats who'd weaken the bill.

Meanwhile, our President has nominated acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to be his official choice for the job, and if you think Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt was bad, you're likely to find Mr. Wheeler to be significantly worse -- Mr. Wheeler worked most recently a coal corporation lobbyist, but before that he was Sen. Inhofe's Chief Counsel for over a decade, and before that he worked at the EPA, so he likely knows better than Mr. Pruitt how to destroy from within our EPA's ability to protect us from polluters. I mean, it could also be that Mr. Wheeler can't pass up wierd freebies any better than Mr. Pruitt could, since we've just learned that Mr. Wheeler has, shall we say, an expensive weakness for a certain kind of hamburger, but that's a hell of a thing to count on. Better to tell our Senators to confirm an EPA Administrator who'll actually protect our clean air and clean water more than he'll protect corporate paymaster profits, as the Environmental Defense Fund helps you do.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell our Congressfolk to end this ludicrous government shutdown. I actually have nothing against government shutdowns per se, but seriously, do we want to force Americans to choose between food inspections and a border wall that won't protect American but will diddle the rage glands of our President's votaries? How about between airline safety inspections and a border wall? Or between EPA clean air monitoring and a border wall? Or between health care for Native Americans and a border wall? Or, come the end of February, between food stamps for the working poor and a border wall? Of course, a lot of good Americans -- like air traffic controllers and TSA workers -- are already working without paychecks, so we're already forcing them to make dreadfully hard choices. But over the last quarter century, politicians have shut down our government for nothing but stupid reasons, and it doesn't matter that this border wall is "totemic" for our President. You know what's totemic for me? A government that does our will.

Around the table: time for another exciting installment of "when's that terrorist attack coming?"

As we count the cost of our ongoing government shutdown, I feel compelled to ask: when's that terrorist attack coming? I mean, our President could be hunting really big game here -- not just the right to strut around for years saying you should have given me that wall so I could have prevented that terrorist attack, but also expanded "emergency powers" legislation enabling him to do whatever he likes, whenever he likes. Hey, if I thought of it, you know he has. Just remember: if terrorists (or whomever!) do attack, the first thing out of our mouths should be our President failed -- the President who won't read intelligence briefings and won't staff a functioning State Department, and who also struts around like he alone knows everything.

Third Circuit Court of Appeals refuses to reinstate court order preventing the Republican National Committee from engaging in the kind of "ballot security" measures that just so happen to suppress minority voters, and Rick Hasen foresees "supercharge(d)" vote suppression in 2020 as a result. I do find it interesting that Mr. Hasen's Republican lawyer acquaintances would "bristle" at the kind of things the RNC used to do, but the RNC got in trouble (in part) for caging voters, and what's Interstate Crosscheck if not caging? Things like Interstate Crosscheck and Voter ID don't necessarily come at the end of a gun or a fist, but I'm not sure that's progress. It certainly ain't enough progress.

Ho hum, our President thinks he can unilaterally turn Medicaid into a block grant program though even many right-wing analysts disagree that he can do that. So I guess the Tea Party is right now taking to the streets to protest this AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!!!, right? I kid, of course. I'd be more confident that this latest attempt to subvert the rule of law will die in court, except that Tha Bush Mobb successfully imposed spending caps on two states back in the day, albeit spending caps so high those states had no chance of hitting them. And that's why I always say George W. Bush is worse than our current President.

I agree with Charles Eisenstein at Yes! magazine that "(p)eople are not going to be frightened into caring" and thus doing something about climate change, though I doubt most folks would find "deep and active care for the planet com(ing) through experiences of beauty and grief" to be useful advice. I do agree that the best climate change messaging is pro-clean water, pro-clean air, and anti-pollution messaging rather than TEH PLANETZ IZ GOINGZ TO DIEZ!!!! messaging; I even agree that local efforts to defeat the effects of climate change can do better than big centralized nationalized ones. But the main reason climate change messaging isn't working? Because we're not all saying "let's kick climate change's ass!"

Finally, because you deserve some good news, yet another ag-gag law goes down in federal court, and this time it's Iowa's. You may wince at the court's reasoning -- that our First Amendment protects lying, since someone who takes a job at a factory farm so they can do undercover reporting on animal treatment is lying -- since similar reasoning has also, at times, protected media outlets that lie. But of course our First Amendment not only protects lies, but efforts to expose those lies. (And dig the pork lobby's we-never-intended-to-infringe-on-your-rights-sucker act! As if corporations have literally no other way to "conduct our businesses and care for our animals" than to procure unconstitutional tools for dealing with undercover agents!)

Around the table: concerning the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-All, among other topics.

Ellen Brown instructs us that a nationwide network of public banks could fund the Green New Deal that's all the talk these days. I'd prefer bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income myself, but public banks are a good thing (as the good people of North Dakota can tell you!), and I'm sure they can help. Be sure to note America's Last Economist, Michael Hudson, instructing us that hyperinflation has just about never resulted from "governments just printing money," but rather from "foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate." The dollar is virtually a world currency, so I suspect that's even less likely to happen here.

I was ready for a big argument with Michael Corcoran at TruthOut about his statement that "Democrat Support for a Public Option" is the "Biggest Obstacle" to a Medicare-for-All health insurance system. I still regard all the ZOMG TEH 34 TRILLYUNZ OF DOLLARZ!!!!! scaremongering as the biggest obstacle, and if you slay that dragon, the others will fall more easily. But the litany of Democrat weakness he tabulates is still pretty depressing, and we all remember how President Obama put a wedge between us and single-payer with the "public option" he clearly had no intention of fighting for. And we also remember when Sen. Lieberman supported the Medicare buy-in until approximately the moment it had a chance of passing, which should serve as a warning to Sens. Harris and Booker as they try to "support" Medicare-for-All without actually helping us to get there.

Kelly Blanchard at TruthOut says "It's Time for an Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill," but if you remember Carly Fiorina supporting that during the last Presidential campaign, you do have a question: what will the cost of the over-the-counter birth control pill be? Prescriptions do tend to save money on your out-of-pocket drug costs, even on drugs commonly available over the counter, so making birth control more affordable will also require intervention from our federal government -- which is always less likely when Republican winged monkeys get too much of the say about everything. Hard to believe that, for Barry Goldwater, the uterus was one more thing our government had no business interfering with.

Adam Johnson at FAIR catches our "liberal" media getting its shorts in a bunch about some prisoners, somewhere, getting steak once a year during the holidays. Yes, it's not fair that prison guards work without pay because our President holds our government hostage over a wall, but our "liberal" media don't bust out best stock photos when prisoners find maggots in their food. And I think it may be a bit sanguine to call this story "(c)lickbait that'll soon be forgotten" -- in fact, I bet a lot of our President's votaries will bring up TEH PRIZNURZ EATINGZ TEH STEAKZ!!!!! every time someone corners them in an argument about inhumane prison treatment.

Finally, American carbon emissions jumped over 3 percent last year. You may recall that the IEA found carbon emissions dropping worldwide as late as 2015. But dig our EPA Chief's attempt to take credit for carbon emissions dropping from 2016 to 2017 -- you know, before he stopped doing the things that helped carbon emissions come down! The road to hell is paved with the skulls of men like Andrew Wheeler.

Light posting notice.

Posting will be light a bit longer, as I am thisclosereally to getting book number three to the printer.

I do have goals for the new year, though. I want 2019 to be the year we start kicking this President to the curb. The Special Counsel's report notwithstanding I don't particularly want him out of office, but I want good Americans to shun and shame him out of any serious discussion about America's traditions and America's future. I guess I really want him to become the proverbial Mayor of Deadwood, a man who aches to get in on the action only to get pushed out of the way. But I also want 2019 to be the year that America gets tired of drama. And by "drama" I don't just mean all of the right wing's manufactured outrages -- I mean a culture that can't stop showing folks acting obnoxious in public, a culture that follows celebrities around and calls it "news," a culture that winks with approval at corruption. Big dreams, I know, but America is the place for big dreams.