Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: featuring upwards of three government officials acting badly.

Uh oh: Federal Aviation Administration inspectors say their bosses pressure them to overlook airline safety issues. Lest you think this corruption unique to our current Administration, attend testimony that our FAA started treating airlines with kid gloves in 2015, replacing the regulatory model you'd come to expect from a government agency with a "mutual cooperation" model. Don't believe the FAA's hype that one death in 10 years justifies their "mutual cooperation" model, not if a) said model is only five years old and b) we all know it takes time for serious rot to set in -- just as big telecoms aren't censoring all your favorite websites just because the FCC repealed net neutrality, airlines aren't going to discard all their safety standards right away, either.

George Goehl asks "Who Is Blocking Medicare for All?" And answers: centrist Democrats and big health care corporations, both of whom would be endangered if Medicare-for-All comes to pass. Upon hearing that a consortium of hospitals, health insurers, and big pharma corporations spent $143 million last year to fearmonger about Medicare-for-All, I thought maybe there'd be better uses for that money. You know, like providing health care to actual human beings. I mean, that would really be the best way for big private health care providers to keep customers around. Or is that a quaint philosophy?

Ho hum, drama-addicted, six-figure-making HUD official possibly violates Hatch Act by tweeting something political from her government account, then says she "honestly (doesn't) care" whether she broke the law or not. Not caring about breaking the law would mean a lot more if the law in question was obviously unjust and oppressive, rather than a minor inconvenience easily avoided with a laughably small amount of restraint. She doesn't seem like the kind of person who values restraint, though -- she just jeopardized her career with a not-funny taunt of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, for heaven's sake. In other words, she's the real snowflake, not those who'd criticize her. Funny how often it turns out like that.

In a peripherally-related note, minor-league baseball club apologizes for airing a purported Memorial Day tribute video that sandwiched a photo of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez between photos of Kim Jong Un and Fidel Castro while intoning about "enemies of freedom." I'll admit, though, that when I read "(w)e’re embarrassed we allowed this video to play without seeing it in its entirety first," I thought they meant to say "we're so sorry we did this thing we'd like you to think was a complete accident but was actually on purpose so we'd get free publicity." Anyway, skip the Fresno Grizzlies next time you're in town, and I say this as someone who has enjoyed plenty of minor league baseball games.

Finally, from the "Somehow Not 'The Onion'" file: our Department of Energy calls natural gas "freedom gas" and "molecules of U.S. freedom" in a press release. If you had been wondering exactly what kind of stamp Rick Perry would leave on the Department of Energy, now you know. (In a related note, a few weeks ago I dreamed that Rick Perry switched back to the Democratic Party for no particular reason. Of course Joe Biden promptly made him his running mate!)

Action: concerning government spying, electric cars, and pollution.

Even though our National Security Agency has (in what must be an unprecedented act!) declared that it doesn't need the power to spy on everyone's phone lines, our Congressfolk have shown an unwillingness to repeal the law that gives the NSA this power. Admittedly, that kind of cowardice is not unprecedented as far as our Congressfolk are concerned, but that's why we're here -- to lend the steel in their spines when they don't have it. They don't have it a lot, but we've got a lot! Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which gives the NSA its "authority" to hoover up all your phone data without so much as a warrant. Don't believe the hype that we "need" to spy on everyone's phone to be safe, particularly with even our NSA saying the opposite. Folks say you shouldn't give up liberty for security, but the truth is you can't even have security without liberty.

Meanwhile, apparently because Republicans cannot let our government do anything that benefits its owners, the American people, S. 343, the so-called Fairness for Every Driver Act, would not only repeal tax credits for electric cars, but would impose a fee on good folks who drive them! The "fairness" in the bill, apparently, refers to electric car-drivers paying less money in gas taxes (which help maintain highways) and thus gas-guzzling car drivers paying more, but S. 343 wouldn't bring about "fairness" but mere symmetry, and would penalize folks who have gone out of their way to pollute less. Boy, is that not a good look! And gosh, is there just no other way to fund highway maintenance and construction -- like, say, by raising taxes on corporations and the rich who don't pay their fair share of taxes in the first place? Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote clean energy by rejecting S. 343.

Finally, our EPA hasn't banned the pesticide chlorpyrifos, although scientists have linked chlorpyrifos to developmental difficulties in children, and although a federal court told our EPA just last year to ban chlorpyrifos as its own scientists recommended. Naturally our EPA is appealing that court's decision -- I wouldn't go counting on our Supreme Court to help them out if I were them -- and hence comes S. 921, the Protect Children, Farmers, and Farmworkers from Nerve Agent Pesticides Act, which would ban chlorpyrifos for good. Yes, chlorpyrifos is essentially a nerve gas, and though it does far more damage in the short run to bugs than it does to people (as you'd expect), what's the difference if you ingest many, many times more than a bug ever does over the course of your lifetime? Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight pollution and support families' health by passing S. 921 and banning chlorpyrifos forever.

Action: concerning disaster relief, abortion, and voting rights.

Our Senate finally passed a $19.1 billion disaster relief package for Puerto Rico, which is still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Maria -- but when our House tried to pass it on a voice vote, which must be unanimous, one House Rep, Charles "Chip" Roy of Texas's 21st district, said no, due to "concerns" about "securing the border," which is now apparently a reason to block any legislation. (Kentucky's incorrigible Thomas Massey thwarted a second attempt yesterday.) Anyway, all is not lost: small pro forma sessions will continue this week, and then all of Congress returns on Monday, at which point they can pass the bill with a simple majority. Hence you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Reps' phone numbers and call them to tell them to pass disaster relief legislation. You may want to call their home district office numbers, since that's where most of them are.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell six big corporations to stop donating to the politicians who've enacted all these abortion bans across America. These big corporations will likely tell you that they gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to these politicians because of their "pro-business" views, not because of their hatred of women, but if the end result is near-total abortion bans in six states, then they're merely enabling woman-haters. And too many of these corporations have been positioning themselves as "pro-woman" lately, so it's well past time for them to walk the walk. Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land, and clear majorities now support legal abortion and Roe v. Wade, and what's the best way to fight abortion anyway? Birth control -- which right-wing politicians now also believe to be an unconscionable evil. But though these politicians remain stubbornly immune to the Big Stick of Bad PR, corporations are. So let's wield it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end the nefarious practice of keeping felons from voting, then Common Cause still helps you do that. My beliefs are pretty straightforward: prisoners should have the right to vote, not just once they've paid their debt to society and earned back their freedom, but also while they're behind bars. Giving prisoners the vote would curtail another nefarious vote suppression practice: the practice of packing non-voting prisoners into a district so that they can't vote but still count as residents of that district! If that reminds you of the Constitution's nefarious three-fifths rule during the years slavery was legal, well, you're not alone. And if prisoners could vote, the state would have less incentive to imprison the people it wants to silence -- an urge that, sadly, usually expresses itself as racial profiling. So let's stand up to all of that.

Action: concerning "national emergencies," unconstitutional war, abortion, and taxes.

Dig this: our President has used the Arms Control Act of 1976 to declare yet another "national emergency" so he can sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE without Congress's approval. If you're wondering what possible "emergency" could exist to justify such a sale -- presumably we don't need Saudi Arabia to protect us from invasion! -- you're not alone. Of course the "emergency" is Iran, though it's more likely kids on Yemeni school buses will feel the blunt end of the weapons sales. But if everything's an emergency, then nothing is an emergency -- and if a President faces so many "emergencies," it kinds reflects badly on him. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators, so you can call them and tell them to stand in our President's way on this matter.

In a related matter, CREDO still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2354/S. 1039, the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act. So far, our Administration's efforts to go to war with Iran have included lousy intelligence and boasting from elected leaders that a war with Iran would be easy; remind you of anything? I suppose a war with Iran would have important differences -- per John Bolton, we'd be sending 120,000 troops there, which is even fewer than we sent to Iraq in order to subdue a nation with less than half the population of Iran. Also, evacuating non-essential personnel from the Baghdad embassy is a dramatic touch I don't recall Mr. Bush contemplating. You know what else is different, though? Americans have seen this play already and have more vivid memories of their disgust with how the Iraq war turned out than they do of 9.11, which is almost old enough to vote now. Our duty now is to remind America of that disgust.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act, would prevent states from enacting medically unnecessary abortion bans that block women's access to health care. We don't "leave it up to the states" here, because our Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision explicitly prohibits leaving this matter up to the states. And that makes sense -- if our Constitution protects a right to abort a pregnancy, why would women need to get an ultrasound in one state and not another? Why would abortion be legal only up to six weeks into a pregnancy in one state and 24 weeks in another? Politicians could make all of this moot by putting a Constitutional amendment before us; wonder why they don't. And by "wonder why they don't" I mean "because they'd rather keep voters enraged than actually do something." The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect women's health everywhere by passing the Women's Health Protection Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to let our IRS offer free online tax-filing, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. You know that our government has an, er, arrangement with certain tax-filing corporations in which our IRS doesn't offer free tax-filing services online as long as these tax-filing corporations do -- and you may also know that these corporations do their damnedest to hide these free tax-filing services online so that you can't actually take advantage of them. But you may not know that TurboTax also diverts our soldiers from the free tax-filing services they're entitled to receive by offering "military discounts" that force them to pay for tax filing! That's a damn dirty trick, so go ahead and refer your Senators to the ProPublica article to which we've linked in the previous sentence. If they don't know about it, they need to know about it.

Around the table: confronting the drama of our times, again.

In more ordinary times we'd be pleased as punch to find Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) producing a policy paper excoriating corporations for their short-term obsession with shareholder value at the expense of research, development, and "long-term corporate capabilities," but these are not more ordinary times, and this is Marco Rubio we're talking about here, so not only is he short on actual solutions that might ameliorate the problem, he of course won't admit that public investment has ameliorated the problem fairly decisively in the past. Should I give him credit for slamming "outsourcing investment decisions to financial markets" as any good anti-bankster would? Nah -- not when the only alternative he'll entertain is corporations making all the important decisions, when corporations making all the important decisions is how we got here in the first place.

It may be premature to announce, as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has done, that "the days of insulin price-gouging are over" in Colorado with the passage of a bill capping out-of-pocket insulin costs at $100 a month, but $100/month is a lot more manageable than $600 to $900 a month, which is the kind of thing that leads diabetics to ration their insulin, a strategy that might not be significantly safer than Russian roulette. So if insulin-producing corporations demand more money from health insurance corporations to make up the shortfall, will those health insurance corporations then pass that cost on to their customers? If they want to be even more popular, perhaps!

I don't think it's good news that our President might not really "mean it" when he calls the media "the enemy of the people," since his votaries, who live vicariously through their President's tantrums, do mean it. I also don't think that we should feel very sorry for media outlets like CNN, which has never really had an adversarial relationship with the Our Glorious Elites, no matter how much acting out they might do. If they really wanted to cultivate an adversarial relationship with our President, they'd go after, say, his attempts to gut clean air and clean water regulations, rather than the drama he creates to distract us.

Regarding that video manipulated to make Rep. Pelosi sound "drunk": I guess it's good that our "liberal" media did a better job debunking it than they did with all those more obviously-manipulated videos coming out of Project Veritas in 2009 and 2010, and I guess it's good that you might need someone to "interpret" the altered audio for you ("she sounds drunk, get it?"), but I fear it won't be long before more radical alterations of video become more common and less detectable. Still, if Ms. Pelosi were less of a corporatist and more of a populist, the release of an obviously-altered video aiming to make her look bad wouldn't have made a difference. I mean, this President is a fake populist, and that seems to insulate him from actual facts that actually make him look bad.

Finally, at the risk of seeming very late to the party, I enjoyed the Game of Thrones finale more than most folks seemed to do. And more than I expected to: the finale overcame, as well as could be done, the fatal flaw of the show's final season -- namely, that it frogmarched Dany into madness rather than (at least!) letting her go mad at her speed. We can all easily tabulate other wrong notes (Tyrion's nomination of Bran for King, for example, had at least one Hallmark card moment), but the thing I'll always remember about the finale is a group of survivors coming to grips with their complicity in creating the decadent society that almost destroyed them and everyone they knew and loved. I was even surprised to consider that all those pornographic scenes from the show's early years might have had an actual narrative purpose! Given Bronn's eagerness to spend state money rebuilding the brothels that made the show infamous, I don't know how it'll turn out for Westeros. But I hope we do at least as well when the most decadent human being ever to hold high office in Amerca -- a man whose continued presence in that office indicts us all -- goes before the voters next year.

Action: concerning endless war and endless corporate mergers.

With the war in Afghanistan now almost old enough to vote, Win Without War helps you tell your House Reps to co-sponsor H.R. 1274, which would repeal the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) which all future Presidents have misused to start military conflicts wherever they like. And unlike past bills purporting to repeal the AUMF -- you may recall last year's S.J.Res. 59, which would have repealed the 2001 AUMF but also expanded Presidential power to start war without Congressional authorization -- this bill would simply repeal the 2001 AUMF 240 days after its enactment, which surely would give our Executive branch enough time to wind down its "war on terror"-related activities, including the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Don't brook any foolishness about this bill "putting our troops in harm's way." You know what puts our troops in harm's way? Fighting stupid wars, that's what. So how about we maybe do less of that?

Meanwhile, in a related note, our Pentagon has requested $750 billion in this year's Administration budget, so a large coalition of good-government groups (including Roots Action, Public Citizen, and Social Security Works) helps you tell our government to cut at least $200 billion of defense spending annually. We already spend more on defense than the next seven nations combined; an actual conservative might say we must ask how much more money we must throw at a problem. In any case, you might want to comment (in the petition's comment box) on what you'd rather spend the money on. Plenty of options (i.e., better public education funding, higher Social Security benefits, actual infrastructure rebuilding) leap to mind, but you might also want to address the notion that "defense spending gives us innovative products," because more National Institute of Health and/or National Institute of Science spending would achieve the same end, for less money.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FTC to block the proposed Bristol-Myers Squibb/Celgene merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. I am pleased to be reminded that both Bristol-Myers Squibb and Celgene just so happen to produce cancer-fighting drugs; since cancer is probably going to be the biggest health care problem we face over the remainder of this century, how do we think this merger would out for good Americans? With prohibitively expensive cancer treatments, that's how. This merger would be the biggest of all big pharma mergers, and you know what mergers bring, generally: less competition, fewer jobs, higher prices -- and even more profits for an already gluttonous pharmaceutical industry, who then use those profits not so much to research better drugs (they get corporate welfare for that already!) as for advertising and buying even more favorable laws from Congress. So let's put a stop to that.

Action: concerning media monopolies, paid family leave, and health care.

Word on the street is that FCC Chair Ajit Pai will recommend approving the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, so today might be a good day to call our Justice Department at 1.202.804.1389 and urge them to reject the merger. In this era of right-wing dominance, our legal system tends to view the "harm" caused by corporate mergers very, very narrowly: they only seem to care whether or not a merger will dramatically raise prices for consumers. Mergers do tend to raise prices for consumers simply because they decrease competition, but our courts need to go back to viewing "harm" as broadly as they used to do. Ask one of the tens of thousands of people who are going to lose their jobs as a result of this merger whether it causes them harm. Ask the working families who get discounted service from T-Mobile and will almost certainly lose it in the merger whether it causes them harm. We know concentrated corporate power harms all of us, so let's get to fighting.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Moms Rising helps you tell your state legislators to pass paid family leave and medical leave legislation. (Legislators plan to introduce bills toward both ends shortly.) America is, as you know, the only country on Earth that doesn't provide paid family or medical leave for its citizens -- and it is also, as you know, the only country on Earth that has seriously proposed raiding Social Security pensions to pay for family and medical leave! -- but we could pay for family and medical leave insurance with a minuscule payroll tax hike, or, heaven forfend, by amending the state Constitution so that rich folks actually pay a higher rate of taxes than working folk! Why would it be a minuscule tax hike? Because not everyone uses insurance at once! Indeed, that's how insurance has always worked. Six American states, the District of Columbia, and the rest of the planet already do it, so let's do it in Pennsylvania as well.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Right-wingers love asking, where's the money for that?. Usually, the answer is "tax the rich so that gazillionaires don't have 22 vacation homes or start collecting mountains," but, truth be told, we're not going to tax the rich to the tune of $3.4 trillion annually, which is what the right-wing Mercatus Center tells us Medicare for All health insurance will cost. However, we also know that we're already planning to spend $49 trillion over the next 10 years on health insurance, which means that, yes, we already know where the money is; we just have to capture it. Capturing it will be harder to explain than to do, but we also know that this is America, the can-do country, and matters of accounting should never stop us from doing the right thing.

Action: concerning discrimination, aircraft safety, and internet freedom.

Last week the House passed H.R. 5, the Equality Act -- with eight Republican votes! Eight! It's a firestorm of moderation! I kid, of course -- I'm old enough to remember when the Republican Moderate Caucus in the Senate had two dozen members; now it doesn't even meet for lunch! Still, that might bode well for passage of the Equality Act in the Senate, since all 47 Democrats will vote for it and a handful of Republicans still style themselves as moderates. Perhaps a handful more will style themselves as independents who worry about more important things than continuing to discriminate against gays and transgender folk -- but only if we get in their grills! Hence you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers so you can call them and tell them to pass the Equality Act. Maybe our President will veto it (at Vice President Pence's urging, no doubt!), but let's at least make him do it.

In the wake of numerous news reports about safety failings of the Boeing 737 Max plane, which caused two of them to crash in six months, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) to mandate the "optional" safety features that could have prevented those crashes, and Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase FAA funding and take decision-making power about safety standards away from airplane manufacturing corporations. When folks started telling us that "the private sector does everything better," and started privatizing government functions, they assured us that government would still hold corporations accountable when they failed -- and then they started privatizing the accountability itself! It's like telling burglars to decide the length of their own jail sentences because, hey, they know best! Truth be known, airline deregulation has been a problem as long as I've been alive; maybe now's the time to stop all that?

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to vote for H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. Americans across the ideological spectrum -- yes, actual conservatives and actual liberals -- support the Save Internet Act, because it would restore net neutrality, the principle that big telecom corporations should treat all network traffic the same, and thus you, and not some corporation, should get to decide where you want to go on the internet. But politicians don't support it, because politicians care more about big telecom money than about people. Harsh? Nah, just truth. How do we know? They can't concoct a good argument against net neutrality -- take their complaining that internet regulation needs a "light touch," when net neutrality is obviously "light touch"! When an internet regulation doesn't mandate content or price, that's light touch.

Around the table: in which the calculus of defeat reveals itself, again!

Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada, who has shepherded numerous anti-gay and anti-transgender bills through that state's House over the last few years, has announced he'll resign his leadership post in the coming weeks. A Tennessean report revealed that Mr. Casada had exchanged sexually explicit text messages about women with his Chief of Staff; that's despicable behavior, obviously, but would it be too much to ask that bad legislators resign in shame after trying to pass despicable bills? (Mr. Casada says he'll keep his House seat; other Republican legislators have objected, but I doubt that'll amount to much.)

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) becomes the first Republican House Rep to call for impeachment of our President, and Mehdi Hasan at The Intercept wonders why more Democrats aren't calling for it. They probably think it's "smart politics," but then they also think that running yet another center-right milquetoast who wants everyone to "get along" in the name of "bipartisanship" will beat our President in 2020, just like it didn't do in 2016. And they're also wrong, as Mr. Hasan says, to suggest that they don't want to do anything to rile up our President's base, because anything riles them up, and bases don't win elections without a lot of help. (And Jesus Mary and Joseph our President needs to shut up about "TREASON!" He's going to make the word meaningless, and that's one of those words we need to define accurately and precisely.)

I don't know that the Venezuelan media offer "far more diversity" than American media, but Lucas Koerner and Ricardo Vaz at FAIR make a fairly compelling case that the Venezuelan press is far more diverse than our "liberal" media would like us to think. No, I think imputing malice to our "liberal" media is entirely appropriate there -- weren't they just doing their damnedest to create the impression that a coup was about to take down the Maduro government any second now? Yes, they were. And the "facts" our "liberal" media often presents are easily refutable by folks who've actually spent any time in Venezuela. Maybe there's a solution in there, somewhere.

Fresh off his pardoning of a bankster who wrote a glowing book about him, our President is apparently thinking of pardoning a few actual American war criminals on Memorial Day. On Memorial Day! Could it be that our President really is a Democratic plant trying to make the very idea of ever voting for a flag-waving jingo again revolting? That's not the way to bet, of course, and (as Sen. Graham might say, if he weren't such a toady these days) the whole idea of being an American is most emphatically not to prove that you can act just as uncivilized as your enemy. (As an aside, I think the Times is rather optimistic to suppose that Attorney General Barr might be trying to prevent this from happening; Mr. Barr is, after all, the man who helped Bush the Better pardon all those Iran-Contra conspirators. I'd be happy to be wrong, of course!)

Finally, a warning about polls suggesting that folks feeling good about our economy won't help our President get re-elected: ask them again in late October of 2020. If the economy's still "good" then, and the Presidential candidates have spent six months tearing each other down, then I suspect a fatigued populace will be more likely to ascribe the drama to "both sides" and return our President to office, a tragedy continued Republican vote suppression will facilitate. But who knows? Maybe Democrats will nominate someone who changes the conversation away from our President and towards a just, sustainable, and hopeful future. I kid, of course.

Action: concerning trade, banksters, pollution, and voting rights.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to remove corporate welfare for big pharma from the recently-negotiated USMCA trade agreement. Folks call the USMCA "NAFTA 2.0," but it deserves better than that, since it vastly curtails the use of the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system that nullifies our laws and outsources our jobs. Unfortunately, the USMCA also extends monopoly patent protections for big pharma corporations (for drugs they couldn't have made without government funding, no less!), which keeps generic drugs off the market and thus keeps drug prices high. In an era where EpiPens cost as much as $600 a dose, where hedge fund managers drive up the price of drugs by 700% or more, where drugs sell for $1,700 a dose when they sell for $8 a dose in Australia, and where insulin costs so much that diabetics risk death by rationing it, our trade deals shouldn't make all that worse. So let's get Congress to fix it.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from financial predators by passing the Loan Shark Prevention Act. The bill would, as you may know, set a maximum interest rate of 15% on "any extension of credit" -- unless the state in which the borrower lives sets a lower maximum rate -- and would explicitly prevent concocting fees to evade the 15% cap. Now, a 15% cap would just so happen to kill the payday lending industry, but let its defenders on both sides of the aisle make fools of themselves justifying the 300% interest rates on short-term loans that wreck soldiers' lives. As I've said, I'd set much lower limits on car loans (2%), mortgages (3%), and personal loans (6%), but the 15% cap would make credit card debt more manageable. And caps such as these don't destroy industries, though they may prevent such industries from buying more corporate welfare through campaign donations. What a shame that would be!

In other news, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban PFAS chemicals from our products. I'm sure PFAS chemicals seemed like a wonder material once upon a time, but now they're everywhere, from Teflon pans to fast-food wrappers to fire-fighting foam to rain gear to popcorn bags to dental floss, and chances are you've got it in your bloodstream as we speak, because PFAS never breaks down. And scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, kidney damage, thyroid problems, and child developmental issues. This isn't a situation where you can just avoid bad stuff, because PFAS is, basically, everywhere and in everything. Some 20 bills currently under consideration in the House and Senate would address PFAS chemicals; now we just have to impress upon our Congressfolk the urgency of the problem. Don't be one of those who'd say "well, what are we going to make our dental floss out of now?" America is a can-do country, after all.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that, and if you want to call Sen. "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell and tell him directly to allow a vote on the bill, then his Senate website provides phone numbers if you scroll all the way down. Don't imagine that the House flipping back to Democrats this past November means "the people have overcome" all the voting rights issues. Democratic candidates got more votes than Republicans in Wisconsin state legislature races in 2018, yet Republican legislators still hold almost two-thirds of that state's seats, and that's because Republicans have aggressively gerrymandered the state. The For the People Act would fix that, by making states use independent commissions, and not self-interested legislators, to redraw Congressional districts. The For the People Act would enact reforms in voting rights and campaign finance, too. So let's keep on 'em.

Action: concerning immigration, war, pollution, and taxes.

Mark Morgan, our President's latest nominee to head Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, says he can look in the eyes of an unaccompanied minor at the border and decide right there whether or not he'll grow up to join the MS-13 gang. Where do we begin with that? That MS-13 isn't an existential threat, but something politicians throw around to justify racist immigration policies? That the science doesn't support the notion of unaccompanied minors (or, indeed, undocumented immigrants in general) committing more crimes than native-born Americans? That if you think you can tell someone's criminal future by "looking in their eyes," you're an arrogant drama hound who should be nowhere near any levers of power? Maybe that last one is the one you lead with, when you use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can tell them to reject this absurd nomination.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2354/S. 1039, the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act of 2019. The bill would prevent war with Iran without express authorization from Congress, which is how it should be, even if far too many allegedly smart people tell you that such bills "hamstring the President." Hamstringing the President is how our Constitution wants it! It's a feature, not a bug! I'd love to add "and this President exemplifies the kind of person who should not have any sort of unilateral power," but I'd be afraid of calling someone into existence who's far worse. Don't believe reports that our President has told his acting Defense Secretary he doesn't want war with Iran -- and "since when do you trust this guy?" is really the wrong answer. The right answer is: since when do you trust your President? Americans don't just "trust their President" -- Americans check their President.

In other news, our EPA has decided to ban methylene chloride -- used in paint strippers, linked by scientists to liver and nervous system problems, and declared by our EPA to be a likely carcinogen -- so yay EPA, right? Not so fast: our EPA has, incredibly, exempted commercially-used methylene chloride from its ban, meaning that folks who work with paint strippers for a living will still be exposed to the chemical. I'll say it again: this Administration hates doing anything for anyone other than bosses. And this isn't even an example of "streamlining regulations," since our EPA specifically calls for input on a new system of training and certifying workers, because, why not put all the burden to do right on workers, and none of it on bosses? Our EPA's public commenting process on this matter closes this week, so the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to enact a real ban on methylene chloride.

Finally, the House passed the Taxpayer First Act earlier this year, and though the bill accomplishes many useful ends, it also prevents our IRS from ever offering a decent online tax-filing portal. Not impressed? Then consider that our IRS has a sort of gentleman's agreement with private tax prep corporations like H&R Block and Intuit, in which our IRS avoids offering free online tax-filing so that these corporations can do it -- but consider also that H&R Block and Intuit haven't just been forgetting to remind low-income Americans that they offer this service, they've been actively hiding this service! Thus we have yet another reminder that private corporations don't have to answer to you, but your government does. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to ensure that our IRS can offer free online tax-filing services to all Americans. They don't have to scuttle the whole bill to do that -- they only need to amend it. It ain't that tough.

Around the table: concerning law and order, journalism, corruption, warmongering, and abortion.

Ho hum, Renee Dudley and Jeff Kao at ProPublica find that at least two data recovery corporations promised better security from ransomware but mainly just paid off ransomware hackers and then charged their customers more money. Both these firms guaranteed data recovery without paying hackers off, of course, and now some hackers routinely recommended at least one of these two firms to their victims; the article also describes a third corporation which could be paying off hackers while overcharging its clients, including our police departments. Nice work if you can get it! I do wonder how many "law-and-order" types will continue to squeal about immigrants while shrugging at cybercrime.

Julianne Couch at The Daily Yonder describes a local journalist in Iowa who's actually doing local news in Iowa. Local journalist Sheri Melvold's daily hour-long program doesn't give any PR to for-profit businesses, but does help local residents find out if schools are closed, or where the next church dinner is, or whether the arts center needs help -- and though she won't put opposing politicians on the air to talk past each other, she doesn't let them just say whatever, either. It sure helps that KMAQ AM/FM is one of the few radio stations in America that hasn't been gobbled up by a big corporation forcing cookie-cutter programming down our throats. Let's have more stations like that!

You've likely heard by now about the NRA's, ah, financial troubles, and now the New York Times finds the NRA has bled over $200 million from its charitable foundation since 2010. The only question is whether the NRA actually used money its donors intended for charity for lobbying purposes instead -- or, worse, all the fancy clothes long-time CEO Wayne LaPierre apparently billed to his expense account. I'd prefer to hear about the NRA's ties to gun manufacturers, of course, since gun sales seems more their obsession than gun rights. In the meantime, I guess we can always remember that time Oliver North seemed like the most ethically-upright person in a room.

In the wake of our Administration's desperate efforts to provoke Iran into doing something-anything to justify some sort of military action, British General says, contra American government sources, that "there's been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces" in the Middle East. Two predictions: 1) we'll be hearing numerous whispers about Gen. Ghika's supposed or actual character flaws, and 2) none of those whispers will prove he's wrong. Still, ain't nothing our "liberal" media loves more than a war, and I don't imagine they'll do a very good job being skeptical about our Administration's assertions. Just look at how happily they enabled our Administration's efforts to effect regime change in Venezuela (though, thankfully, the Venezuelans have thwarted their efforts thus far).

In a related note, I wouldn't put too much stock in reporting that our President "doesn't want a war with Iran," for at least three reasons: 1) it could be an abject lie, 2) it draws people into a drama over the "tension" between our President and the NSA he went out of his way to hire, John Bolton, and 3) it enables our President to say "I had no choice" if Iran does do something even mildly provocative. Nobody in America thinks of themselves as a hawk or a warmonger -- they think they have "no choice." Telling Americans they have "no choice" is really the only way to get us to sign on to evil anymore. Thus are the lessons of the "war on terror."

Finally, Dahlia Lithwick at Slate suggests that "Alabama’s Extremist Abortion Bill Ruins John Roberts’ Roe Plan." I agree that the Roberts Court would rather chip away at abortion rights a bit at a time, but I don't think the Alabama law "ruins" their effort -- reactionaries can't succeed unless they can point to someone even worse, and now the Roberts Court has their someone-even-worse, more than one of them, in fact. Even if the Alabama law dies at the hands of the Roberts Court, I think that aids their long game.

Action: concerning clean air, the Muslim ban, net neutrality, and prison privatization.

CREDO helps you tell our EPA to scuttle its own efforts to let corporations pump more soot into our air. When right-wingers tell you how our President has "freed" this economy by "unshackling" corporations from "burdensome" regulations, this is what they mean, whether they like it or not: dirtier air for all of us to breathe, and thus more sick and dead people. And at the risk of beating a dead horse: money goes away, but clean air can sustain a civilization forever. Right-wingers will probably pretend to agree with that statement, and them move on to asserting that "the science doesn't really conclude that breathing in soot is bad for people." No, really; they'll put it like that, because that's what they do: sow doubt about things we all actually agree about. That's what they have to do when they can't win the arguments on the merits.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, would rescind our President's Muslim travel ban and prevent future Presidents from enacting similar travel bans that obviously target folks based on their religious beliefs. Actually, I should say their parent nation's religious beliefs, since you can't identify an individual's religious beliefs merely by identifying their home country. Our Supreme Court gave the Muslim ban its blessing, and I'll always be sore about their willingness to use a proctoscope to divine lawmakers' "animus" against religious bigots in their gay-marriage cake-baking ruling but their absolute disinterest in our President's obvious, stated animus against Muslims -- which, again, doesn't bode well for Chief Justice Roberts's efforts to convince everyone the Court isn't "political." Anyway, Demand Progress (among other good government groups) helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight bigotry by passing the NO BAN Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. The Save the Internet Act would reinstate the net neutrality regulations the FCC enacted in 2015, before the 2017 FCC repealed them. Most folks would tell you they haven't really noticed a difference before and after net neutrality repeal, but big telecom corporations wouldn't block and censor and slow down websites right away, because freedoms best disappear a little at a time. You also have to consider that net neutrality repeal has a good chance of dying in court; big corporations won't want to do so much blocking, censoring, and throttling if the courts say they can't tomorrow. Indeed, that's why they largely obeyed net neutrality principles before the FCC codified them! But the courts could actually sanctify the FCC's repeal, so let's get our Congressfolk to pass the Save the Internet Act.

Finally, hot on the heels of announcements from Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase that they'll start to divest from private prison corporations, CREDO helps you tell Bank of America and SunTrust to divest from private prison corporations also. Getting two big banks to divest from corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic is a big deal, but why stop there? All the big banks should know the Big Stick of Bad PR if they continue to invest in the private prison corporations now best-known for helping our Administration separate families at the border. Of course, I think the evil of private prison corporations goes deeper: they take taxpayer money to do our government's job (of incarcerating those citizens who've broken our laws), and they generally cost more than public prisons and do a worse job of treating prisoners humanely. That's what you get when you bring public functions to the altar of mammon -- more waste, less accountability, and more evil.

Action: concerning budgeting, drug addiction, voting rights, and monopolies.

"One major reason" Congress never passes a budget on time anymore, according to Public Citizen's latest email missive, is "poison pill policy riders" slipped into must-pass appropriations bills; you can name a lot of poison pills that have found their way into budgets over the years, like our President's months-long partial government shutdown over his vanity border wall. A Republican Congress wouldn't fund that wall, you remember, so he induced a shutdown until he got his way (or, more precisely, could con his votaries into thinking he got his way). But this year (as in recent years!), "poison pills" include riders preventing our government from finishing various campaign finance disclosure regulations. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass clean budgets, without noxious "poison pill" policy riders. How popular is anonymous big money campaign spending, after all? So popular Congress has to take the budgeting process hostage to enable it!

Meanwhile, H.R. 2569/S. 1365, the Comprehensive Addiction Resources Emergency (or CARE) Act, would allot $100 billion over the next 10 years to address opioid addiction -- and not in a punitive way, because that clearly ain't working. The CARE Act would spend money on treatment, support services, and early intervention, among other things, and it would give states and localities considerable power over how they spend that money, not that right-wingers will notice actual conservatism happening under their noses. If you still think we "have" to put drug addicts in jail, just ask yourself? Have you ever gotten high on anything (not necessarily something illegal!) that could have hurt you in some way? And did the threat of incarceration ever stop you from getting high on that thing? The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to get folks affected by the opioid crisis real help by passing the CARE Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. And since Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) says he won't hold a vote on the For the People Act, because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on," you can go to his Senate website, scroll all the way down, and find a phone number so you can call his office and tell him to hold a vote on the bill already. Use whatever number gets you through; hell, I've had to do that with my Senators for a while. Nine phone numbers I have in my cellphone for each of my two Senators! And sometimes I have to call all nine! But if we had the ethics, voting rights, and campaign finance reforms contained in the For the People Act, maybe, just maybe, our Senators would be a bit more accessible to us. We are their damn bosses, after all! And if we get in their grills enough that they pass the For the People Act, maybe they'll start acting like it.

Finally, American Family Voices helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to block the proposed Bristol-Myers Squibb/Celgene merger. I'm old enough to remember when Bristol-Myers and Squibb were two separate corporations! And now they want to get bigger? Big pharma corporations are already too big, and have too much power -- witness how often their price-gouging schemes actually get a lot of coverage in newspapers and TV news programs, and how little they suffer for it! When you're big enough and powerful enough, after all, you can buy Congressional legislation that protects and expands your power -- generally they're not stupid enough to take a quid pro quo bribe, but they all know the game, and this proposed merger would be the largest one ever. If we want to hear less about 800% price hikes for life-saving drugs, we should prevent big pharma corporations from getting so big in the first place.

Action: concerning health care, student loan debt, and social media monopolies.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. The main obstacle to this bill's passage, for real, is that, unlike everywhere else on Earth, employers buy health insurance in America, and that hides the cost from you, because if you had to buy it, or pay taxes to your government in order to buy it, you'd know how much it costs. Here's how much it costs, between governmental and private spending: about $10,000 per person in America. The average income in America is a bit under $50,000; force corporations to add that $10,000 in as salary, and then tax the resulting salary at roughly 16%, and we'd spend the same money on health care we're spending now, but we could cover everyone and cover them better -- and folks wouldn't see one penny missing from their paycheck. Think it over, and you'll see it works.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Education Secretary to scrap plans to sell off federally-backed student loans to banksters. Whoa, you ask, is she really thinking of doing that? Of course she is -- for her, as for the rest of this disgusting Administration, everything is an opportunity to make Our Glorious Elites more money, and "everything" includes those fraudulent loans that weigh down students with nightmarish debt. An individual with morals would consider helping out students with their fraudulent debt -- or, hell, even canceling it! Predatory colleges did lie to those kids about their job prospects, and even about their own ability to stay in business! But this Administration considers financial predators and for-profit colleges their constituency. Which is fitting, I suppose -- our President himself had to settle three lawsuits for $25 million concerning his "university" right after getting elected. See? He knows corruption!

Finally, hot on the heels of Facebook's own co-founder writing a New York Times op-ed calling for our FTC to break up Facebook -- and you should read it, both for its defense of antitrust action and its sad history of how we've abandoned it over the last several decades -- Demand Progress helps you call our FTC and tell them to break up Facebook. "Breaking up Facebook" would require Facebook to sell Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, which might even enable you to enjoy those social media communities again, since they won't be under Facebook's thumb anymore (and will each have owners who might make them better applications). Our FTC is mulling a sizable fine for Facebook, as punishment for failing to protect customer private information, but even a $5 billion fine is peanuts to a powerful monopoly like Facebook -- a better punishment would be to take away their power to monopolize markets and do harm. Breaking up monopolies, after all, is fundamentally pro-freedom.

Around the table: starring weak Democrats, malicious Republicans, and actual hard-working Americans.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, now seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination for President, seems to aim for a "middle ground" on climate change policy. Never mind that this "middle ground" looks suspiciously like we'd just be clawing our way back to the Obama-era status quo, or that a "middle ground" is less likely to save our planet than an agenda corporatists will label "radical" and "extreme" -- dig this flatugasm from a Biden spokeshack: "What we learned from the Obama administration is unless we find middle ground on these issues, we risk not having any policies." Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph: "what we learned from the Obama Administration" is that once you signal to right-wingers that you won't fight, they'll just move further right, and you won't "hav(e) any policies" worth a damn.

In a related note, Mr. Biden thinks that, once our current President is out office, Republicans will have an "epiphany" and work with Democrats again. The evidence, of course, points to the opposite conclusion, especially when you remember that Republicans stonewalled the center-right Mr. Obama in 2009 and 2010 and were rewarded with 63 more House seats and six more Senate seats. The only thing that'll shake Republicans out of their stupor? Shame and humiliation in unmistakeable proportions in 2020. And Democrats will surely prevent that, by running out as many "electable" "non-ideological" "problem-solvers" as possible.

Rachel M. Cohen at In These Times visits Kentucky -- where high-paying coal miner jobs have left an indelible mark in residents' minds -- to describe some of the issues we'd have in shifting to renewable energy. A coal miner who has transitioned to renewable energy work warns that the transition costs money (he had to intern for six months) and might not persuade coal miners used to making high five figures who honestly believe that the coal jobs really are coming back. And a liberal activist also reminds us that even though Kentucky has moved right (especially in recent years), "FDR was just a peg or two under Jesus Christ here," which again suggests that maybe we need more actual liberals, and fewer "electable" centrists, running for office.

Greg Stohr at Bloomberg notices that "Mystery Delays Push Divisive Supreme Court Issues Into Election Year." Some analysts cite the contentiousness of the Kavanaugh hearings as a possible reason, but they may be misapprehending the lesson of those hearings a bit, i.e., that if those hearings had gone on into November, we'd probably have a larger Republican caucus in the Senate, and we might not even have a Democratic House! Delaying decisions on abortion, immigration, transgender issues, etc., into 2020 turns Republican voters out -- and regardless of the outcomes! If they rule the way Republicans would prefer, then "the President delivered," but if they don't, then "the President must be re-elected so he can get better judges on the Supreme Court." In the long run, though, this ain't gonna help John Roberts convince everyone that federal courts aren't political.

Finally, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) is the lone Republican to vote against one of our President's judicial nominees, specifically citing, as his reason, said nominee's 2011 characterization of former President Obama as an "un-American impostor." And Politico treats us to five paragraphs about how this is Mr. Romney's "latest break with the President," citing precisely two other "breaks." And note that the judicial nominee still got confirmed, because, like all the rest of them, Mitt Romney only stands on principle when it makes no difference.

Action: concerning debt, social media, climate change, and discrimination.

The Loan Shark Prevention Act (for which Congress.gov has no bill number at this writing) would cap interest on all consumer loans at 15 percent -- which would include credit cards and essentially eliminate the entire payday lending industry. Note well that the Loan Shark Prevention Act would prevent lenders from concocting fees to replace the money they'd lose. Myself, I'd add caps specifically on auto loans, mortgages and personal loans (I'd do 2%, 3%, and 6%, respectively), but a broad 15% cap would certainly save working people money on their credit cards. And banks wouldn't go broke -- they just wouldn't be able to buy Congressfolk as easily as they can now. And the folks who'd call the Loan Shark Prevention Act a "job-killing" bill? We could describe them as objectively pro-usury. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass the Loan Shark Prevention Act.

Meanwhile, you think Facebook's got it bad now, after being exposed as a corporation that's careless with our personal information? Then get a load of reports indicating that Facebook is aiding and abetting wildlife trafficking and looting of Middle Eastern archaeological sites, and has even enabled hate groups to hijack its software to auto-generate more video content. Facebook seems to think it's doing a great job at the last item, while admitting that it "could do better" about the other two, which we've totally never heard before! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to fully investigate these allegations and punish Facebook as their investigations demand. Why the National Whistleblower Center, you ask? Because without anonymous whistleblowers -- who risk years of unemployment and abuse whether their identities get exposed or not! -- we'd likely never have known about any of these things going on. And why the SEC? Because Facebook is a publicly-traded corporation which may be injuring its shareholders with its actions.

In other news, Corporate Accountability helps you urge your state Attorney General to investigate allegations that Exxon knew climate change was coming, but lied to shareholders and the American public about it in order to keep making money. You may know the story by now: Exxon knew enough about the relationship between fossil fuel pollution and climate change by the late '70s that it taught scientists about it, but didn't come clean about it with shareholders or customers, instead embarking on a long and very well-funded campaign of obfuscation and disinformation. Change being the only constant, you'd think a corporation that knew about climate change would maybe adapt by gradually switching over to renewables, but, alas, Exxon did not face a 55% corporate tax during the late '80s, nor did its executives face a 91% income tax on millionaire income, so Exxon moved to protect its money rather than the planet on which its employees live. And for that, we should at least investigate Exxon.

Finally, the House Judiciary Committee passed H.R. 5, the Equality Act, out of committee last week, and the full House may vote on it this week, so the National LGBTQ Task Force helps you tell your House Reps to support civil rights for gay and transgender folks by passing the Equality Act. The Equality Act would extend full protections under the Civil Rights Act to gay and transgender folks, which will no doubt prompt some right-wingers to squeal BUT TEH CIVUL RIGHTZ ACTZ WAS FOR TEH BLACKZ!!!!!, which would generally represent more enthusiasm for black civil rights than they had when Congress was debating the Civil Rights Act. What a wondrous thing, when folks suddenly discover their support for past civil rights legislation in their efforts to keep other folks from getting civil rights! But for the gay and transgender folks who get shut out of jobs, apartments, and freaking bathrooms because of other people's bigotry, we need to pass the Equality Act.

Action: concerning Iran and "usable" nukes.

The government of Iran has sentenced Nasrin Sotoudeh to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes, for (among other "charges") "being a member of a human rights organization" and "encouraging corruption and prostitution," which you no doubt recognize as BS charges concocted by a government that's insecure in its power. And what has Ms. Sotoudeh, a human rights lawyer, actually done? Advocate against Iranian law mandating that all women wear the hijab, or head covering, for one thing. What's wrong with wearing a hijab? Absolutely nothing! What's wrong with threatening to imprison women who don't wear it? Absolutely everything! But no doubt she's also in prison for spending most of her career representing minors facing death sentences, opponents of the Iranian government, and abused children threatened with going back to their abusive parents. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the Iranian government to free Ms. Sotoudeh.

Meanwhile, our government deployed a carrier "strike group" and a "bomber task force" to the Middle East last week, purportedly as a "warning" to Iran, but the Navy said the deployment was "regularly-scheduled," so our Administration's posturing about it sure smells like a false flag operation. But, as Zombie Lyndon Johnson would tell you, false flag operations work far better when Americans aren't so cynical about our President. A false flag op is about all our Administration has left, though -- pulling out of the nuclear deal which was working! may have induced Iran to demand more from the deal's European partners, thanks to the sanctions our government reinstituted after pulling out, but everyone remembers that our President only pulled out of that deal because he felt like it. Still, we might need to head off yet another stupid war, so Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation mandating no military action against Iran without Congressional approval.

Finally, our President's 2020 budget has so much to recommend it, and one of those things is, yes, the "low-yield" or "usable" nuclear weapon, which he'd like to put on our submarines. What an idea man! It's like he didn't grow up in a time when folks worried more about nuclear annihilation than anything else! It's like he has no idea that a "usable" nuclear weapon suggests that all the other nuclear weapons we have in our arsenal are completely useless! And it's like he thinks this is a bad thing! Happily, H.R. 1086/S. 401, the Hold the LYNE Act (thought of this, didn't you? I can't help it either), would prevent our government from researching, developing, or producing the Trident D5 low-yield nuke, so Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep "usable" nukes out of our President's hands by passing the Hold the LYNE Act. No, it really doesn't matter that this President is the very image of the person who should never have any weapons ever. He ain't the first, and he won't be the last.

Penny Rants for Saturday, May 11, 2019: concerning Democrat weakness, "liberal" media propagandizing, and more of President Manchild's shameful behavior.

From the "How Many Times Must I Tell These Pimps?" file: Joe Biden says our current Administration represents an "aberration" as far as the Republican Party is concerned. We could tabulate, with ease, all the ways in which that's so full of shit it's coming out its eyes, but let's instead remember that Hillary Clinton rode that trope all the way to 48% in the 2016 election. And then let us remind ourselves that trying to "appeal to Republican voters" is a vain cause: 25% of our current electorate is bat-guano insane, and another 25% will hold their noses in the voting booth because he's pro-life or appointed good judges or "slashed regulations." Better that our Democratic candidates consider why 100 million people don't vote in Presidential elections and maybe figure out how to turn some of them out. Hint: people who don't vote don't give one rat's hind quarter if Democrats think Republicans are good guys, because that's drama; these voters only care about their government doing right by them.

Dave Lindorff, writing at FAIR, catches our "liberal" media trying to fool large numbers of Venezuelans and Americans into thinking that attempted coup against President Maduro was actually succeeding. Seriously, the only other way to interpret some of these "news" "reports" is to assume incompetence on an unprecedented scale -- how does one invent an election the would-be coup leader Juan Guaido "won" (as CNN did) or fail to notice zero supporters in an airfield instead of "thousands" (also CNN) or run photos of Mr. Guaido addressing supporters on a completely different day (the New York Times)? Luckily, there are plenty of news organizations -- ones that aren't so insecure as to call themselves "The Most Trusted Name in News" -- doing good reporting on Venezuela right now; Mr. Lindorff lists a few, though you'll have to go to the internet to find them. And this, again, is why we need a la carte cable packaging. And net neutrality. And anti-trust enforcement.

The aforementioned New York Times does dig into our President's taxes, again, finding that he reported losses of over $1 billion on his federal tax forms between 1985 and 1994, and naturally our President responds by simultaneously calling the report a (sigh) "highly inaccurate Fake News hit job" and explaining the report's findings away: "(y)ou always wanted to show losses for tax purposes...almost all real estate developers did -- and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport." So he says "show losses for tax purposes" and I say "steal food out of the mouths of our children and our children's children," and folks who agree that defunding schools and libraries and police officers is "sport" are not the kind of folks I want in my foxhole. (Hey, speaking of Fox, the Fox and Friends crew think the losses the Times report depicts a life that's "pretty impressive" and "beyond what most of us could ever achieve," without mentioning that such a life is more within your grasp when your father gives you hundreds of millions of dollars.)

Finally, speaking of our President, I really thought that 2017 ad that both extolled his record and told his critics to get off his back within 30 seconds was the most appalling example of self-absorption I'd ever seen, but this twittergasm -- "(d)espite the tremendous success that I have had as President, including perhaps the greatest ECONOMY and most successful first two years of any President in history, they have stollen (sic) two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back" -- tops it. Or bottoms it, as the case may be. How can you be TEH GREATESTZ PREZNITZ EVAHZ!!!! and have your entire term as President "stollen" at the same time? For the man who won 46% of the popular vote, struts around like he won 66%, and whines like he won 26%, such mental gymnastics are child's play. And you know he misspelled "stolen" on purpose, in order to get everyone talking about that, and not about how shameful it is to see a grown man -- the nominal leader of the free world, no less! -- act like this in public.

Action: concerning health care, voting rights, and worker pay.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You may have read Paul Krugman's recent New York Times column stating (among other things!) that although it "(c)ould" be true that Medicare-for-All will result in better health care, and that we'd pay less in taxes to support it than we're currently paying in premiums, these would be hard to sell to the American people. And indeed, when folks confront the loss of their private insurance and how we're going to pay for that, support does fall off. But Medicare-for-All wouldn't poll well in the first place if folks were that emotionally-invested in their private health insurance; their support wavers not because they really think their insurer's doing a great job, but out of fear of the unknown. And we don't let that keep us from doing the right thing, do we?

Meanwhile, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow folks serving time in prison to be able to vote. No, letting prisoners vote won't turn prison into a "country club" (seriously, people say that to you whenever you argue that a civilization should treat prisoners better!), but it will prevent some fairly serious problems. One, our government won't be able to put people in jail just to prevent them from voting! I wouldn't argue they're doing that now -- I presume that putting folks in jail, particularly black and brown folks, is an end in itself, and our government looks at their inability to vote as icing on the cake -- but if I thought of it, you know they have. Two, denying prisoners the vote lets governments pack Congressional districts with large numbers of people who can't get proper representation! Sadly, state governments are already doing that. So let's put a stop to it.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell our government to give back pay to federal contractors during the government shutdown over our President's vanity border wall earlier this year. Federal employees got back pay, of course, but our government contracts a lot of work out to private corporations, and those workers didn't get back pay, though it wasn't their fault, or their employers' fault, that they didn't work. And a lot of these workers work low-paid jobs as cafeteria workers, security guards, and janitors. Which doesn't make their work any less important! And they have bills to pay just like the rest of us! Of course, our government shouldn't be contracting this work out to private corporations, and not just because these little government shutdowns leave them out in the cold. But we ought to do right by them while they're working for us, although our President is the kind of person who high-fives himself for sticking it to people who work for him.

Action: concerning voting rights, torture, pollution, and social media.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1/S. 949, the For the People Act, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. After all, if you've been watching this space, you've very likely already advocated for most of the things this bill would do, like redistricting reform, automatic voter registration, campaign finance disclosure for large donors, and public campaign financing. You've also very likely fought efforts to remove voters from voting rolls for no good reason other than that they might vote against the kind of politician who'd like less people to vote, and the For the People Act does something about that, too. Plus it'd make Election Day a national holiday and keeps House Reps from serving on for-profit boards. Who could oppose such things? The Republicans who parade their hatred of all that's good, that's who. And that's why we need the For the People Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2407's title, the Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, will set off some rageheads right off the bat -- you'll hear them say how dare you call it an occupation! as if that's the worst thing a human being could possibly do. Or as if it's anti-Semitic! But criticizing Israel's actions in Palestine is not in-and-of-itself "anti-Semitic," and nor are attempts to induce better behavior from Israel. And even if you think people criticize Israel too much, you should be put off by reports of Israeli soldiers separating Palestinian children from their families and torturing them while in detention. These things may not create terrorists, but they do create broken people, and we can't keep creating broken people and calling ourselves civilized. Hence Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose cruel treatment of Palestinian children by passing H.R. 2407.

In other news, S. 1187, the Safe School Meals for Kids Act, would phase out food tainted by the ubiquitous pesticide chlorpyrifos from our school lunch programs. Scientists have linked chlorpyrifos to numerous neurological and developmental disorders, and indeed our EPA banned chlorpyrifos from home use almost 20 years ago. Yet our Administration drags its feet on imposing a broader ban, even though our courts have mandated it, and even though kids who eat fruits and vegetables sprayed with chlorpyrifos -- which they likely are, since big ag corporations spray about 10 million pounds of it on crops every year -- may well be getting 140 times what our EPA has considered safe exposure. After all, cutting pollution doesn't make executives richer! Where our Administration won't act, perhaps our Congressfolk will -- but not unless we act. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep kids safe from pollution by passing the Safe School Meals for Kids Act.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell Facebook to stop with its bogus attempts at "fact-checking." You'd think we'd be happy that Facebook is actually checking facts, since so much BS gets spread around there, but they've partnered with decidedly-non-objective outlets like CheckYourFact.com -- a Koch brothers-funded project of the Tucker Carlson-created The Daily Caller -- and the right-wing Weekly Standard. That can't be an accident, could it? Nor could it be an accident that Facebook actually purged pages (including ZeroHedge) because the previously unknown website PropOrNot smeared them as pro-Russian propaganda hounds right after the 2016 election? It never occurred to them to seek out the decidedly non-liberal FactCheck.org? But all we need from Facebook, really, is an end to speech that our First Amendment doesn't protect, like terroristic threats. We certainly don't need "fact-checking" that's worse than the Wild West.

Action: concerning internet freedom, racism, and financial predation.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to promote real internet freedom by passing H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. Net neutrality -- the principle ensuring that you, and not some corporation, should get to determine where you go on the internet -- has actual bipartisan support across the political spectrum, with liberals and conservatives fighting for it, and nobody wants a corporate-controlled internet constantly herding you to junk news and junk culture websites but the big telecom corporations and their lackeys, but unfortunately their lackeys constitute a majority in the Senate! But as I always say: it doesn't matter what they want, it matters what we want. We the people have spoken numerous times over the past decade; we just have to keep speaking until they hear us. And castigating them for not hearing us would not be untoward of you.

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Department of Justice to require state and local police departments to report civilian deaths in custody, and to share that information with the public. Our Administration's first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, acted like doing such a thing was insufficiently supportive of our police! That's rich -- since when is it "support" to turn a blind eye to injustice? And if I took race out of it -- that is, if I didn't mention that victims of deaths-in-police-custody sure do seem to be disproportionately nonwhite -- most folks would recognize how absurd it is to equate "support" with "doing nothing about good Americans dying in police custody." I mean, getting good data about the problem is the first thing we ought to be doing. But this Administration won't do it, unless we get in their grills about it.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our FDIC to stop the proposed SunTrust/BB&T merger. Haven't heard much about these banks? Well, would you want to? Seriously, given our recent history, would we want a bank to be nationally-known? SunTrust and BB&T would become America's sixth-largest bank, with close to $450 billion in assets, if the merger were to proceed, and then you'd know their name like Bank of America and Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs; does that sound like something to which any corporation should be allowed to aspire? A merger this size will certainly result in jobs lost, jobs like bank teller and bank manager that regular Americans work, and nearly half a trillion in assets would mean more bankster power to influence legislation and condition corporations to play ever more hifalutin financial games that crash economies. And we've had enough of all that in America, even if our leaders pretend the 2008 financial crash happened in another universe.

Action: concerning war, financial predation, pollution, and racism.

With the Venezuelan non-president attempting, and utterly failing, to overthrow the democratically-elected President Nicolas Maduro, but our Administration still insisting it's considering a "full range of options" for military intervention there, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1004/S.J.Res. 11, which would block our Executive branch from indulging in any military action in Venezuela without express authorization from Congress. Which is how it's supposed to be, after all! Congress declares the war, and the President fights it. Too many folks today think "the President declares the war," but that's not what our Constitution says -- our Constitution makes Congress declare war precisely so that an Executive doesn't get too powerful. Congress has largely abrogated this duty over the decades, but they'll get back on track, if enough of us speak out. Ideally, they'll have no damn choice.

Meanwhile, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) put out decent payday lending rules in 2017 while Richard Corddray was still in charge, so naturally this Administration's now-defanged CFPB wants to put out new payday lending rules that roll back protections for good Americans against financial predators. Because freedom! I'm sure the same folks who reflexively say "if you can't do the time don't do the crime" about various worthwhile criminal justice reform initiatives will say "if you can't pay back the loan, don't get the loan" about payday lending rules, though they'd vastly overestimate the financial options available to the poorer working families whom payday lending corporations target with their 300 percent loans. Such folks always attack the victims of injustice rather than the perps, which isn't very "law and order" of them. Stop Payday Predators helps you tell our CFPB to reject its own efforts to expose more good Americans to payday loan predators.

In other news, our Administration is trying to roll back offshore drilling regulations our government put in place after the 2010 Spillageddon in the Gulf. You remember that, right? Almost five million barrels of oil spilled, almost $100 million lost by the Louisiana shrimp industry, all those animals coated in oil and dying of organ damage and hypothermia? This Administration, in its zeal to serve executives and only executives, would dramatically loosen testing requirements for the blowout preventers that would, as their name suggests, prevent another Deepwater Horizon blowout from happening. What is it about oil CEOs that makes them act like their mamas never taught them to clean up their own messes? Maybe it's the feeling that we might be able to power our nation without them! Anyway, Environmental Action helps you tell our Department of Interior to scuttle its own plans to roll back oil drilling safety protections.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to stop using the "Black Identity Extremist" as an excuse to spy on peaceful black protestors, then Free Press still helps you do that. You'd think our FBI would be more obsessed with unpeaceful white supremacists, since there seem to be more of them now than there were a few years ago and I wonder what changed? But, alas, our FBI still sees the actually-wronged trying to work within our democratic processes to make it right and calls that evil, as they've done virtually since their inception. But if they would take police brutality more seriously, they might find they have fewer black protestors to spy upon, and maybe they can get more important work done. Then again, spying on and harassing black protestors tends to create more of them, which means more money for spying and harassment, ad nauseam. After all, why solve problems when you can partake in endless dramas instead?

Action: concerning discrimination, pollution, health care, and our Grand Canyon.

The House Judiciary Committee held hearings last week on H.R. 5, the Equality Act, a bill which would extend the protections of the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to gay and transgender folks. Because yes, landlords can reject you just for being gay or transgender, and so can employers, schools, and banks, and they should only be able to reject you for good reasons -- like, you know, being a bad tenant, employee, student, or borrower. So don't get flummoxed by all the whining right-wingers do about people being "forced" to hire gays when they're bad workers, not just because the Equality Act won't compel anyone to do that, but because you don't have a "right" to a certain kind of neighbor or student or employee if your "right" is all about denying other people their rights. So People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support all Americans' rights by passing the Equality Act.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania state legislature is contemplating a swarm of pro-pollution bills -- namely, HB 430, HB 509, HB 762, HB 806, and HB 1055 -- and the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state legislator to protect our air and water by rejecting these bills. How would these bills make our air and water dirtier? Mainly by giving the legislature veto power over clean air and clean water regulations issued by the Executive branch-- but also by rubber-stamping drilling permits whenever the state Department of Environmental Protection has a backlog, which surely wouldn't prompt gas and oil drilling corporations to flood the DEP with bogus permits, would it? And also by mandating a "collaborative" approach to regulating, rather than a "punitive" one, an approach I guess they'd also have us adopt with burglars, rapists, and murderers. The polluters have lost the argument, but they won't concede defeat unless we make them.

In other news, H.R. 1948/S. 518, the Lymphedema Treatment Act, would mandate that Medicare cover certain items used in treating lymphedema, including compression garments and bandaging systems. Lymphedema, as you may know, occurs when a blocked lymph node traps lymphatic fluid somewhere in the body, causing swelling in soft tissues. It might not end there, though: after swelling, you might get discoloration of the skin, dermal thickening, or ulcers (among other things) and you'd also be at a higher risk for infections. Lymphedema is often a side effect of cancer treatments that compromise the lymphatic system; there's no cure as of yet, but folks with lymphedema can manage the condition somewhat. And an astounding 58 out of 100 Senators (including 18 Republicans) seem to agree that Medicare should cover some of the equipment used to treat lymphedema, so Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to help lymphedema sufferers get the treatment they need by passing the Lymphedema Treatment Act.

Finally, our Administration still has a jones to open up our Grand Canyon to uranium mining, even though such mining would pollute the Colorado River, and therefore also the drinking and irrigation water upon which close to 40 million good folks depend. But H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Protection Act, would permanently shield over a million acres of public land surrounding the Canyon from mining leases. The 20-year moratorium on uranium mining in the Canyon has certainly helped matters, but why not do better? Because our President believes that public lands exist only to make some boss, somewhere, some money? Because our Senate insists on inhabiting the wrong side of history, and our House might be too timid to oppose them? Because "free" markets and "socialism"? Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our Grand Canyon by passing the Grand Canyon Centennial Protection Act.

Penny Rants for Sunday, May 5, 2019: special "Our Glorious Elites still suck!" edition.

Ho hum, our President overcharges our government, and therefore you and I, for services rendered to our government at our President's Mar-a-Lago resort -- including an infamous $1,000 liquor tab. This means, essentially, that our White House "pays a bill" and our President "reaps the revenue." Nice work if you can get it! I was about to ask what insignificant or imaginary plaints beginning with "well what about" will fill the mouths of our President's votaries when they hear this news, and then I thought, "why bother? They're a minority, and we should ignore them -- according to their own feelings about minorities!" But that would all be a bit glib, really -- whenever our President "sticks it to the man," these folks imagine it could be them "sticking it to the man," even though they'd actually be sticking it to themselves. Could this disconnect have come about because our government has, for many years, given nothing to its owners but the back of its hand?

Speaking of Presidential corruption, apparently Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller wrote Attorney General William Barr twice about the latter's misleading summaries of the Special Prosecutor's report. And after the second letter, Mr. Barr called Mr. Mueller and said told him to call him if he had an issue. (Mr. Barr himself told this story, to Congress, so no use proclaiming TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!!!) Of course, the answer to "what's with the letter?" is obvious: a letter puts Mr. Mueller's frustrations in writing, and writing is, of course, harder to ignore than the he-said-he-said of a phone call. Mr. Barr went on to say that Mr. Mueller was really upset with (guess who?) the media, although, again -- and here we go back to "what's with the letter"! -- Mr. Mueller apparently didn't even mention the media in his correspondence Mr. Barr. And then Mr. Barr did what they all do when they're caught doing wrong -- acted "peeved" about the whole thing. Once again, we find that the kind of folks who accuse everyone else of whining do most of the whining themselves.

And speaking of that: I give Kyle Kondik at Sabato's Crystal Ball a lot of credit, not just for saying that assessing a candidate's "electability" is "like nailing Jell-O to a wall," but also for reminding us that the very fact of our current Administration "presents a great counter-argument to the idea that campaign professionals and pundits can confidently determine in advance who is electable to the presidency and who is not." I'd go further: Our Glorious Elites constantly tell us that actual liberals aren't "electable" because if they didn't, we might elect more of them, and get more good things done, rather than keep settling for the hostage's choice of weak tea from Democrats or poison from Republicans. I mean, we should take heart that they used to say Ronald Reagan was too extreme to win the Presidency! About 100 million Americans don't vote; if an actual liberal can capture even five percent of them, maybe the word "electable" will have a definition that better approximates reality.

Action: concerning Medicare-for-All, the For the People Act, and internet freedom.

The House of Representatives has begun to hold hearings on H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, and they've taken some well-deserved flack for inviting a mere one Medicare-for-All supporter to testify at these hearings, but that's something we can counteract, by letting Public Citizen help us tell our House Reps to get health care for all Americans by supporting the Medicare-for-All Act. We spend more money, on crappier health care, than any other highly-developed nation, and tens of millions of Americans still don't have health insurance -- but heaven forfend we pass a bill that even right-wing think tank Mercatus Center says will save us money, because SOSHULIZM!!!!! Seriously, if you talked only to politicians and their "liberal" media enablers, you'd think Americans don't like Medicare-for-All. But if you talk to real Americans who live outside the Beltway, you'd find a nation full of people who've had it up to here with how badly private health insurance corporations have bollocksed everything up.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. H.R. 1 would enact a suite of necessary reforms for which we've already agitated in our support for other bills; these reforms include automatic voter registration, national same-day voter registration, national early voting, prohibitions on various forms of vote suppression, state redistricting reform commissions, campaign finance disclosure for large donors, and public campaign financing -- among many others! Why would someone oppose these reforms? Perhaps because they worry that they'll start losing elections if we pass these reforms -- so it may be no coincidence that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said the bill won't come up for a vote in the Senate because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on." It's well past time to make him irrelevent, and H.R. 1 is one way to do that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to restore internet freedom by passing H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then the Electronic Frontier Foundation still helps you do that. The Save the Internet would restore your internet freedom by wiping out the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstating the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order that codified net neutrality protections into law, and thus allowed you, good citizen, to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than have your favorite websites blocked and throttled by big telecom corporations. But what's that, you say? The FCC called their 2017 net neutrality repeal the "Restoring Internet Freedom" order? Yeah, they meant the "freedom" of corporations to block, censor, and slow down websites, which means they get more freedom than you do, again. As Americans, we don't need to put up with that.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran.

Word on the street sayas the Senate will vote today (Thursday) on whether to override our President's veto of the Yemen war resolution, so you can call your Senators today, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone). We would need over a dozen more Republican Senators to vote our way this time, but we keep telling them, they'll know they're bucking the popular will if they keep standing with our President. Folks get this twisted by thinking of our President as "Commander-in-Chief," but our Constitution only charges him with the duty of prosecuting a war, not deciding when to go to war. And why should we be in Yemen? Because we like famine and bombing school buses? Because we like fighting people who fight al-Qaeda better than almost anyone on Earth? If the answers are "no," our duty is clear.

It's not just Yemen, though: Administration-supported opposition forces apparently failed to engineer a coup in Venezuela earlier this week, and if I may say so, this most recent coup attempt makes the folks who put Hugo Chavez out of office for a few days in 2002 look like super-geniuses. Our President sure knows how to pick a winner! He must think this is like the business world, where you pick losers and then make sure someone else pays you for your loss. Anyway, H.R. 1004/S.J.Res. 11, the Prohibiting Unauthorized Military Action in Venezuela Resolution of 2019, would do pretty much what its title says: prohibit our Administration from spending money to wage war in Venezuela unless it gets specific authorization to do so from our Congress -- again, as our Constitution mandates. So Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop any Administration efforts to wage unconstitutional war in Venezuela.

And it ain't just Venezuela, either: our Administration continues to rattle sabers with Iran, imposing tighter economic sanctions and designating Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, which sure will make a lot of other militaries jealous. President Obama actually had Iran handled with the multination nuclear deal, but of course our current President pulled us out of that deal, and our Secretary of State has lately asserted that the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) already gives our President authority to attack Iran. However, H.R. 2354/S. 1039, the (guess what) Prevention of Unconstitutional War With Iran Act of 2019, would keep our Administration from waging war on Iran without (guess what) explicit Congressional authorization, so the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our Administration from waging unconstitutional war on Iran.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, government spying, and our President's tax returns.

H.R. 1711/S. 780, the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, would do a great deal to stop the flow of corporate money into overseas tax havens. The bill would end the practice of "corporate inversion" -- by which American corporations merge with foreign corporations in order to "become" foreign corporations and avoid paying taxes here -- by treating all corporations that do most of their business here (or if most of the shareholders haven't changed) as American corporations. The bill would also subject "offshore" profits to the same corporate tax rate as domestic profits (although of course it would continue to exclude foreign taxes paid). Afraid to act on this bill because Republicans won't pass it? "Republicans won't pass it" is the very reason to act on this bill -- let them explain how pro-corporate, and anti-person, they are! CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight real tax evasion by passing the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop spying on journalists covering our Administration's ongoing humanitarian crisis at our Southern border, then Progress America (among other organizations) still helps you do that. Various immigration-related government agencies have been monitoring journalists and then handing over the data to our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic); anyone think maybe getting a warrant before spying on people would be a good idea? Or is that too quaint? To those who would say that we shouldn't bother getting warrants because the situation is "so dire," I would ask: why would we think journalists covering the humanitarian crisis is causing the crisis, or exacerbating it? And to those who exclaim OBUMMER GASSEDZ TEH CHILDRENZ!!!!!, I would merely say that changing the subject concedes the point.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell our Treasury Secretary to stop preventing our House of Representatives from getting our President's tax returns. People who call the House's attempt to get these tax returns a "WITCH HUNT!" should do three things: a) slap themselves, b) consider that calling something like this a "witch hunt" insults the memory of all the good women who died in real witch hunts, and c) recall that every Presidential nominee since Richard Nixon in 1968 has voluntarily released their tax returns. Frankly, what little we know of his tax returns suggests he's broken the law multiple times over the years, and the only folks who think he won't release them because he's under audit are the folks who want to believe it. And no, this doesn't set a "bad precedent" for the rest of America, because anyone might have to answer for their law-breaking at any time.