Thieves in the Temple.

Penny Rants for Sunday, June 30, 2019: concerning certain law and order matters, plus did you know David Brooks is a "moderate" now?

In yet another decision purporting to demonstrate "non-partisanship," our Supreme Court rules that federal courts can't strike down state redistricting efforts that demonstrate extreme partisanship. The best I can say about their ruling is that it cuts both ways, and already has -- Pennsylvania state Republicans twice tried to interest Justice Alito in the state Supreme Court's redrawing of state districts before the 2018 election, but Justice Alito didn't bite either time. I could add, I suppose, that the ruling affirms Congress's right to make the process fairer (i.e., in the For the People Act), but that's not some elephantine act of generosity. And, at the risk of beating a dead horse, this Court would turn over every rock in Arizona to find an "animus" against religious folks whenever someone enacts an anti-discrimination statute protecting gay and transgender folks from bigotry, but seems utterly incurious about the actual animus of Republican politicians stupid enough to put their explicit intent to use the redistricting process to expand their power in writing.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court's ruling striking down our Administration's attempt to add a citizenship question to the census form will do some good in the short run, and I can't help but dig Chief Justice Roberts's understatement in saying Secretary Ross's reasoning behind the question "seems to have been contrived." I'm not as disturbed as other folks that our Court seems to think a citizenship question on the census is A-OK as long as you follow the Administrative Procedure Act in getting it done, because I'm not sure any Administration could get that done if they get too many public comments against it, which they almost certainly will. I'm far more disturbed that four of nine Supreme Court justices seem to think the Administrative Procedure Act doesn't mean a damn thing. I'm also annoyed to hear our President wonder, out loud, if he can "delay" the census, for "no matter how long." He can't, because our Constitution says we have to conduct a census every 10 years, and does not add "or whenever our President stops throwing a tantrum about a citizenship question."

Another day, another "moderate" warning Democrats to reject the numerous populist and popular positions they're just now starting to take again after all these years. And I know what you're saying: when did David Brooks become a moderate? I won't tabulate my objections to his argument, since they number approximately one per point made, but I will point out that the math he presents doesn't work the way he wants you to think it does. I don't even mean all his cherry-picked polls about the economy and health care; I mean presenting Gallup's notoriously misleading polling about how conservative, moderate, or liberal Americans think they are -- as if every last one of them will vote, let alone vote as a bloc, let alone vote in precisely the way they describe themselves. If you know any conservatives who would rein in corporate campaign spending or any moderates who would raise taxes on the rich or any liberals who would regulate handguns and rifles pretty much as we do now -- hell, if you know anyone who's ever described "holding their nose" in the voting booth -- then you know what I mean.

Action: concerning voting rights, pollution, and taxes.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4/S. 561, the Voting Rights Advancement Act. I know, the For the People Act passed the House, but Mob Boss Mitch won't let the Senate vote on it, so it's time for Plan B, which is "squeeze the politicians on the specifics." The Voting Rights Advancement Act would plug the holes our Supreme Court blew out of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder -- and would do so in a way that doesn't "single out" Southern states (our Court's main problem with the Voting Rights Act) but would "single out" any state or locality with an established, demonstrable record of voting rights violations. Republicans have been opposing voting rights reforms for-freaking-ever; why, it's almost like they're afraid people won't vote them into office unless they have a few dozen ways to suppress the vote! And of course vote suppression makes it more difficult to punish politicians who suppress the vote -- but this is a democracy, and we can still speak out in force, so we can still make it right.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would keep ubiquitous PFAS chemicals out of our food and water. PFAS chemicals appear in just about everything, from firefighting foam to food wrappers; the Sierra Club calls them "forever chemicals," because they're just about indestructible. If you're thinking maybe you like "indestructible," recall that indestructible chemicals don't break down into more harmless chemicals, and that PFAS chemicals increase your risk of kidney damage, thyroid problems, and cancer. Also, the FDA's found them in foods ranging from sweet potato to chocolate cake, and over 100 cities have found them in their water supply. So, yeah, it's well past time we did something about all of that. Various Congressfolk have introduced over 20 bills that would address the problem, and now we've got to get Congress to move them, so they can become law and protect us from serious health care problems.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to impose a financial transaction tax on Wall Street banksters. A few bills in Congress would do that: H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, would impose a 0.1% tax (that's one-tenth of one percent, not "one percent" or "10 percent," "liberal" media!) on financial transactions including stock and derivative trades, and H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, would impose a range of taxes, from 0.005% to 0.5% -- none of which are "five percent" or "50 percent," though, again, our "liberal" media will report it as such by "mistake." Seriously, a financial transaction tax (which supporters often call a "Robin Hood Tax") is fairly popular across the board -- with everyone, it seems, except politicians. And politicians have betrayed us in the past -- remember when candidate Obama supported it, only to be "talked out of it" by Larry Summers once he became President? We can prevent that from happening again only by communicating our will to our Congressfolk until they do our will.

Action: concerning "limited strikes," gun violence research, and corporate welfare.

Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell Rep. Engel (D-NY) that it is unconstitutional for our President to conduct a "limited strike" on a foreign country without a Congressional declaration of war. Seeing the differing responses of Rep. Engel and Sen. Sanders (I-VT) on the matter is rather like reading a Goofus and Gallant strip, except that the guy with the unkempt hair is actually Gallant here. It should be fish-in-a-barrel easy to refute Mr. Engel's suggestions that military strikes without Congressional authorization are OK as long as someone, somewhere, can define them as "limited," but sadly our "liberal" media doesn't seem prepared to do it, as they parrot the lines Mr. Engel himself parrots. And I hate to be a hard-ass (OK, I don't), but "t(ying) the President's hands" isn't a bug in our Constitution, it's a feature. The Founders were fairly disgusted with untrammeled executive power exercised by a wannabe tyrant, as you may recall. You know, like the 46% President we've got now.

Meanwhile, our House slipped $50 million for gun violence research (to be conducted by the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control) into a must-pass budget bill, so CREDO helps you tell your Senators to ensure that this legislative rider makes it into their budget bill, too. I've laid out my boundaries on gun control -- I want semi-automatic weapons treated the same as automatic weapons (which means there'll be almost no semi-automatic weapons on the streets), but I don't want universal background checks or greater limits on gun or rifle ownership. That being said, I, at least, am confident enough in my beliefs that I see no harm in funding more federal research on the matter. Oh, and that absolutely is my way of saying the rabid pro-gun crowd is not secure enough in their beliefs to endure the trauma of research that might (or might not!) tell them what they don't want to hear. And any Congressfolk who are "afraid" the research will "automatically" (semi-automatically?) lead to gun bans can, you know, perform oversight duties.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Sierra Club helps you tell your state Senator to oppose SB 618, which would give corporate welfare handouts to big coal corporations to burn off their coal waste. These handouts would total over $750 million over the next 17 years, and if you're thinking maybe we should give corporations some incentive to deal with their waste, consider, first and foremost, that giving corporations "incentives" to do the right thing is always a bad idea -- almost certainly they'll take the "incentive" and do nothing. Consider, also, that burning off coal waste in this matter doesn't reduce the volume of the waste very much and adds to the pollutants already in our air. Consider, finally, that there are better ways to ameliorate this problem, like revegetating on top of the coal waste, which not only works better but costs less. You thought conservatism was about being fiscally responsible? If so, then the funnel-taxpayer-money-to-cronies-at-all-costs crows is not conservative.

Around the table: more lessons in the abject folly of bipartisanship-above-all.

House votes down Amash/Lofgren amendment that would have curtailed warrantless spying on Americans by a 175-253 vote. Which means, of course, that a crapload of Democrats opposed both law and order and your right to privacy. Yay bipartisanship! That's why "electing more Democrats," which you can do once a year, is nowhere near as effective as pressuring your Reps and Senators to do the right thing, which you can do every day.

It's not particularly surprising that a group of billionaires has written an open letter all but begging our government to tax them more for the good of all Americans. If anything, it's more surprising that our irony-addicted media hardly notices when these things occur. Why, it's almost like their jobs depend on them not noticing it!

Fox News talking head tries to get job with our Justice Department, is rebuffed by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then calls Mr. Sessions America's most "dangerous person" because of his recusal from the Russia probe. Gosh, corrupt much? And cable news is notorious for asserting that they don't need to do conflict-of-interest disclosures about their hosts and guests because how dare you imply we're dishonest! Trying to get informed by watching cable news is like trying to get healthy by eating M&Ms.

From the "It's Not Only Inhumane, It's Fiscally Irresponsible!" file: Department of Health and Human Services official says it'd cost less money to keep immigrant children with their parents than separate them and put the kids in tents. Now guess which one our Administration is so proud of itself for doing! Remember: this is also the guy who puts his golf trips on the public dime and then turns around and says we can't afford health care for transgender soldiers.

Finally, Cenk Uygur tells us that Joe Biden isn't the "most electable" candidate but, in fact, the least electable candidate. Long story short: a candidate who overtly promises no change -- which is worse than merely "not promising change"! -- is profoundly misreading an electorate which is fed to the up. Also, too, as Mr. Uygur says, there's nothing actually "likable" about the Iraq war, mass incarceration, bankster deregulation, or bankruptcy "reform," but that's almost all of Joe Biden's Senate career right there. Recall, of course, that he didn't just "deal" with segregationists when he got to the Senate in 1972, but collaborated with them.

Action: concerning trademarks, national forests, and bad leadership.

Big construction equipment corporation Caterpillar has actually asked the U.S. Trademark Office to remove trademark registrations that have the word "cat" in them, particularly that of Cat and Cloud Coffee of Santa Cruz, CA! Where do we begin with this? With the implication that anyone would ever confuse the maker of asphalt pavers and backhoe loaders with a freaking coffeeshop? With the notion that any apparel sold by a coffee shop could possibly be confused with any apparel sold by Caterpillar? Folks, this is what happens when we, as a civilization, decide that corporations should police themselves because they know their businesses best -- instead of innovating new products and processes, as a heavily-regulated civilization would force them to do, they just look for ever-more convoluted ways to make money without working, like frivolous patent requests. Hence Change.org helps you tell Caterpillar to stop bullying small businesses and stop acting like the world's biggest trademark troll.

Meanwhile, our Administration is totally hot to open up Alaska's Tongass National Forest to logging corporations -- thousand year-old ecosystems apparently being a profound insult to our Administration's ongoing program of inculcating short-term thinking into every governmental decision process -- but H.R. 2491, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, would revoke the U.S. Department of Agriculture's power to grant exemptions to the famous "Roadless Rule," which, as you may know, keeps roads and the associated development out of national forests. Of course big corporations would like to have roads in national forests, because that would make it a lot easier to extract the natural resources from national forests -- and, ah, to ruin national forests with their pollution, though big corporations will never admit they've ruined a forest even after they cut the last tree down. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect national forests and (as Penn Environment says) "keep wild areas wild" by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our Administration's nomination of Barry Myers to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA), then a consortium of good government groups (including CREDO and People for the American Way) still helps you do that. Mr. Myers used to own AccuWeather (more on that in a minute!), and as its owner constantly banged his saucepan to privatize our National Weather Service, and now our President wants to put him in charge of the National Weather Service? Also, when Mr. Myers divested from AccuWeather, he sold his ownership stock at cut-rate prices to family members; does that seem on the up-and-up to you? And the numerous sexual harassment claims filed by AccuWeather employees during Mr. Myers's tenure there -- claims that resulted in a six-figure fine assessed by our government -- also call Mr. Myers's leadership abilities into question generally. NOAA administrator is a leadership position, after all.

Action: concerning war with Iran, the Equal Rights Amendment, and hidden ticket fees.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our Administration from starting a war with Iran, then Greyroots Action still helps you do that. We have good reasons for not going to war with Iran -- like, that we'll utterly fail at "regime change" like we always do, and that we'll help create more terrorists from the ranks of regular Iranians who watch what we do. Also, we already had the nuclear weapons problem under control until our Administration pulled out of it; why should we reward their stupidity and venality with the war they want? Don't believe the hype that our President is furious with Messrs. Bolton and Pompeo for wanting to "push us into a war." Nobody put a gun to his head and made him hire those guys, particularly when he already had people in those jobs! He put them in those jobs either because he really wants to go to war with Iran or because he wants to look like the guy who prevented with Iran; either way, it's drama, and it's not even good drama. So let's not reward drama anymore.

Meanwhile, a consortium of good government groups (including People for the American Way and Progress America) helps you tell Virginia state legislators to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (or ERA). What's that, you say? The expiration date for ERA ratification was 1982? Tell that to the Nevada and Illinois state legislatures, who ratified the ERA in 2017 and 2018, respectively, meaning that 37 of the required 38 states have ratified it. And tell that to the good citizens who have been petitioning their Congressfolk to repeal the 1982 expiration date, expiration dates not being particularly common in Constitutional amendments in the first place. While you're at it, tell that to the women who've been waiting for justice all their lives. If Virginia ratifies the ERA, only one more state has to do it, and then Congress has to repeal the expiration date, and voila! The ERA becomes the law of the land. But none of that will happen if we don't speak out.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell Ticketmaster to stop springing hidden fees upon ticketbuyers. You look at ticket prices and they're already too damn high because bands don't have to put the effort into touring that they used to -- not that very many older bands will tell you they really enjoyed being on the road! -- but then Ticketmaster heaps on an average of 27 percent of tickets' face value in stuff like service charges, processing charges, and convenience charges! And lately Ticketmaster has announced that it won't give its customers honest, up-front pricing, unless our government tells them to. Didn't they take Corporate Propaganda 101? You're supposed to promise to do better in order to forestall government action, and then when you utterly fail to deliver on that promise, you say "well what are you going to do? Not see Thom Yorke? Hahahahaha!" But, actually, they're not the only game in town anymore, so maybe they'd do well to get ahead of the curve here.

Action: concerning war on Iran and Senate intransigence.

You see how late last week our President prepared a military strike on Iran, only to call it off at the last minute because he suddenly decided it wasn't "proportionate" to take 150 lives over an unmanned spy drone shot down over the Strait of Hormuz? So Presidential, right? Ah, no -- I don't have documentary evidence that he concocted the whole scheme to make himself look better, but I'm also not a schmuck, and our Founders didn't create a Constitution expressly designed to reign in executive powers so we could give our President the benefit of the doubt. So our task is the same today as it was yesterday -- to stop yet another stupid war with another nation that's not just going to roll over while we try occupying it for the next 20 years. So now's the time to call your Congressfolk and tell them to use their power stop the march to war with Iran. Tools for finding your Congressfolk's phone numbers are, as always, in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

While you've got your Senators on the phone, you can also tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. Mob Boss Mitch says the Senate won't vote on these bills because and I quote "I get to decide what we vote on," but pressure your Senators enough and they'll cave, because the only thing they really fear is the voters turning them out of office. Yes, I wish we could turn bad politicians out of office more easily, but H.R. 1 would make that task easier by protecting our voting rights. The Equality Act would extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, the Paycheck Fairness Act would help folks get equal pay for equal work, and the Save the Internet Act would restore our internet freedom. Don't let folks say supporting the President against Iran is more important -- our opponents can't win arguments, so all they do is create drama. But, as free people, we don't let drama dictate what we do.

Around the table: concerning matters of law and order, taxation, and drama.

Our government continues to justify its "right" to detain folks -- even American citizens! -- indefinitely without charge. Our Supreme Court has lately refused to hear an appeal from one Moath al-Alwi, one of the first 20 men Tha Bush Mobb brought to Guantánamo Bay, meaning he's been there for 17 years, without being charged with a damn thing. Open-ended detainment is bad enough when it's folks who can't pay bail for public drunkenness, but 17 years! Without a charge! That disgraces us, and injures our democracy. If we're the greatest nation on Earth, we shouldn't pull the kind of tricks dictators pull.

Speaking of things that disgrace us and injure our democracy, our Administration tells our Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that our laws don't actually require them to provide detained immigrant children with such things as soap or toothbrushes, even though our laws actually do require them to keep detainees in "safe and sanitary" conditions. It may be true that our laws do not always spell out how you must act like a human being, but that's often because we should all know how to do that by now. May God have mercy on the immortal souls of those who serve, such as they do, in our government.

I'm glad to see others saying, as Steve Wamhoff from the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy does, that "Calling Progressive Tax Proposals 'Extreme' Are Taunts Meant to Distract." And what do they distract you from? Why, their popularity among good Americans, of course! Whenever folks like Mob Boss Mitch call Sen. Warren's wealth tax proposal "extreme," they're actually calling over 60 percent of Americans "extreme"! How are majorities "extreme" again?

Ho hum, a hedge fund manager and his wife have contributed more than $3 million to the anti-vaccine movement over the last few years. In particular, they enable yet another snake-oil salesman to tell reporters that kids "should be allowed to have the measles if they want the measles." After all, who doesn't want the measles? Hedge fund managers! They're so useful!

Upon hearing that our President's new pro-coal climate change plan could "hurt the same workers he claims to be helping" -- mainly by depriving them of the renewable energy jobs that will get them out of a dying industry -- you may be reminded that people like our President only need you for your pain, and they need it so badly they'll create more and more of it. And then they'll tell you your pain is all black people's fault! I'd call it clever, if I didn't insist that cleverness, you know, not be evil.

I'm pleased to see that more than half of Americans say our President has "changed the tone and nature of political discussion for the worse," but I'm annoyed that 54% of Americans find themselves "at least sometimes entertained" by his antics, which are considerably less entertaining than a boy belching loudly over and over again. If we can persuade those people to feel ashamed at being "entertained" by an obnoxious jerk who lives only to create drama, we'll have a chance at building a sane, moral, and reasonable society again.

Finally, speaking of drama, Fox and Friends created quite the drama for our President after he didn't bomb Iran last week, with one talking head repeatedly intoning that he-must-have-a-secret-plan and another saying the Middle East will look at his "non-action" as "weakness." And then Steve Doocy, the man who gives effeminacy a bad name, got to act like the adult in the room! The sad thing is that goading this President works -- recall that he'd all but conceded defeat over vanity border wall funding late last December, and then shut down part of our government for over a month after Ann Coulter gave him an earful -- which means, as usual, that drama only foments more drama. We should want more from our government, and from our civilization, than drama.

Action: concerning forced arbitration, children's privacy, and prisoner rehabilitation.

Years ago, JP Morgan Chase decided to stop using forced arbitration clauses in its customer contracts, after a considerable amount of public agitation -- but now, thinking, perhaps, that no one's watching them anymore, they plan to put forced arbitration clauses back in for their credit card customers. But we are watching them, so Public Citizen helps you tell JP Morgan Chase to withdraw their attempt to force customers into arbitration. Those customers deserve a day in a real court, just like everyone else in America, not some fake "court" either paid for or selected by the corporation, one that in practice rarely rules in a customer's favor. If you've fallen prey to the propaganda that ZOMG YOU CAN MAKEZ TEH MORE MONEZ IN TEH ARBITRASHUNZ!!!!!, then please read the last 10 words of the previous sentence over again. You don't get some big-sounding "average" award if you lose! And then you won't have money or justice.

Meanwhile, Facebook is not widely-known for defending your private information very well, but they do even worse for the kids who use its service, because sex traffickers will use Facebook to get to them and lure them into a life of exploitation too horrible to contemplate. Hence the international human rights organization Love146 has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Facebook to change its default privacy settings for children so that sexual predators have a much tougher time getting to them. In signing, you'll advocate for two changes in Facebook's default settings -- that friend lists be private, and that children only receive direct messages from people they've marked as "close friends" -- and an "only my friends" setting for the question "who can see me on other people's friend lists?" Sexual predators often get to kids through their friends, so these proposals will help keep them safe. To, you know, be kids.

Finally, you know how big telecom corporations force prisoners and their families to pay onerous phone rates? Well, S. 1764, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, would empower our FCC to determine and regulate "just and reasonable rates" for "any audio or video communications service" a prison provides, "regardless of the technology used," and thus help more prisoners talk to their families, which the data tells us means fewer prisoners going back to jail. This FCC, chaired by Ajit Pai, may think all that's bunk -- Mr. Pai, as you may recall, justified FCC inaction by suggesting that prisoners could just use burner phones stuffed into dead cats thrown over prison walls. Lucky for him, he doesn't have to sell that to the late Ms. Wright-Reed, who campaigned against usurious prison phone rates after realizing she could either pay for medicine or pay to talk to her incarcerated grandson, but not both. Hence Free Press helps you tell your Senators to support prisoner rehabilitation by passing the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act.

Around the table: containing horrible truths about "demonization" and "socialism."

ThinkProgress describes how the "Moral Budget" proposed by the Poor People's Campaign could raise $9 trillion over the next decade. A 5.5% surtax on income over $1 million, a 70% top tax bracket on income over $10 million, treating capital gains like the income it most assuredly is, lowering the Estate Tax threshold and closing other inheritance-based loopholes, taxing wealth over $50 million -- I'd make a lot of these proposals harsher to wealth, but they're certainly on the right track. Mr. Pyke also reminds us that decades of stupid, venal leadership by Our Glorious Elites has led us to the point where far-right racists are gaining traction all over the planet, almost like that was the whole idea.

Sen. McConnell (E-KY) dismisses statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as "full-bore socialism" And then discoursed at length about the subtle difference between liberal socialism and libertarian socialism! I kid, of course: he says it's "socialism" because it'd supposedly result in four more Democrats for the Senate -- it's like the thought of persuading people to vote for you has never occurred to him! -- and, coupled with inchoate proposals to expand our Supreme Court, which certainly aren't on the table for Democrats as long as this President is in office, well, I guess that's supposed to be "socialism." Calling everything "socialism" is what you do when you can't win the argument on the merits! Also, too, if you've ever breathed the air, drank the water, used a library, driven a road, or called a cop, then guess what? You're a socialist.

From the "I Shouldn't Waste Any Time on This But" file: let us properly contextualize the news that Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson has advised our President against making war upon Iran -- as drama, and bad drama, at that. Right-wingers constantly pretend they have massive differences with each other, and they do it to confuse us, but they also do it to pretend there simply aren't any other policy choices other than the ones they're fighting about in public -- you know, like, say, staying in the nuclear treaty that was actually keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but which this President couldn't abide, because our last President put it together.

Joe Biden tells big donors he doesn't "want to demonize anybody who's made money." Well, given that they've redistributed most of the world's income upward to themselves, divorced the concept of wealth from the concept of hard work, ground most small- and medium-sized businesses under their shoe, bought themselves enough politicians and media outlets to cripple the people's ability to redress grievances as guaranteed by our First Amendment, set fire to laws and programs that actually help us little people, and are very likely going to make our planet uninhabitable in the near future, I'd say mere "demonization" is too good for them.

Finally, in a related note, I don't particularly want Mr. Biden to apologize for saying it is-so possible for us all to get along because, hey, he had to work with segregationists like James Eastland and Herman Talmadge when he got into the Senate, because it often seems to me that apologies prolong drama more than resolve it. But let's remember that Joe Biden's way of "getting along" with his opponents and "getting things done" with his opponents has always meant capitulation to his opponents. He was a fierce opponent of desegregation busing in the early '70s, after all -- he even wrote Mr. Eastland a nice letter thanking him for his support. Folks who support Mr. Biden because he "can win" aren't just misunderstanding the lessons of 2016, they're getting democracy wrong: you're not supposed to be "on the winning side," you're supposed to be the winning side.

Action: concerning corporate transparency, nuclear power, racist enabling, and big tech monopolies.

H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, would (as its title suggests) force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners" -- the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence. Believe it or not, we don't do this in America, so skewed toward corporate power have our laws always been. And forcing corporations to disclose their owners will have real benefits: we'll better be able to stop the banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors who use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing. Don't believe any don't-tread-on-me tantrums from the right -- corporations aren't people, and don't have the same rights as people, and corporation owners don't have a "right" to hide criminal behavior, either. Hence CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to crack down on corporate misbehavior by passing the Corporate Transparency Act.

Meanwhile, Environmental Action helps you tell the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems to scuttle its plan to build new and inadequately-tested nuclear reactors near the Grand Teton National Park and invest in renewable energy instead. I know, nuclear power plants, every one a potential Chernobyl or Fukushima, near public lands -- terrible idea, right? And you don't even need to see every nuclear power plant as a potential terrorist target, either, or as an almost-certain money-loser that the taxpayer will need to bail out, though both of these are true as well. Really, all you need know is that the price of solar and wind production has come down so far in the last 20 years that now homeowners can reasonably expect to be able to pay to solarize their houses with home equity loans. That has come about with very little corporate or utility help; think of what their help could do to push renewables across the finish line in America.

In other news, with the rise of white supremacist groups selling their disgusting wares online, Sum of Us helps you tell big payment-processing corporations like MasterCard, VISA, and PayPal to stop letting white supremacist groups use their services. What's that, you say? Isn't that denying white supremacists their right to have their views heard, as well as their right to make money as they see fit? Well, no, because neither of these rights actually exist -- white supremacists do have the right to believe whatever obnoxious and emotionally-cripped shit they want in the privacy of their heart, and they have the right not to be put in jail by our government for those beliefs, but they do not have a "right" to sell those beliefs on bumper stickers and T-shirts, nor do they have a "right" to make money however they like -- I mean, if that were true, we could never put a burglar or a bankster in jail. So trouble not your heart, if racists have to get real jobs. Work builds character, after all.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell investment management corporation Vanguard to support a shareholder resolution aimed at breaking up Google. You don't need to know about Google's inability to protect your privacy or their illegal tracking of your location or their complicity in Chinese government censorship or accusations of wage theft and sexual harassment against them to want Google broken up. All you need to know is that when we look for information online, we say we're going to "google" it, for Google has so much power over our lives that its name has become a verb. And any corporation that has that much power deserves to be broken up -- even if we can credibly say that Google has done a lot of good. You know what other corporation did a lot of good? Netscape. Seriously, they had the best browser/email application in the world in the late 1990s. But I don't mourn their oblivion -- and I would mourn if they'd wound up monopolizing the internet.

Action: concerning government spying, health care, and paycheck fairness.

You've heard that even our National Security Agency would rather not have the authority to Hoover up good Americans' phone data without a warrant, as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows? Well, Reps. Amash (R-MI) and Lofgren (D-CA) would at the very least restrict our government's use of Section 702, by prohibiting spying without an actual investigative target (i.e., an actual suspect!), by prohibiting spying on folks outside the U.S. just to collect data on someone inside the U.S., and by prohibiting spying that our government knows is entirely domestic in nature. And Reps. Amash and Lofgren will offer this legislation as an amendment to a must-pass appropriations bill, one that'll fund most of the government for the next fiscal year, so it's got a good shot at becoming law. Hence Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans' privacy by passing the Amash/Lofgren anti-spying amendment.

Meanwhile, our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) has proposed a rule rolling back yet more Obama-era health insurance protections preventing discrimination against gay/transgender/queer folk as well as women. Now, I think the 2018 elections proved that taking away people's health care so unpopular that it causes politicians to lose elections, so what's our Administration's game here? Same as it always is -- to suggest that protections for "those people" aren't as important as yours! And a lot of Americans, who fancy themselves to be hard hats and not hippies, still fall for that even though they're not particularly mean to folks who aren't like them in their daily lives! And once you go down this road, as a citizen, you find it harder and harder to admit you were wrong. So get it right the first time, and let the ACLU help you tell our HHS to scuttle its plan to deny protections against discrimination to vulnerable people in America.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools to find out they're making less than men for doing the same work, mainly by making it legal for workers to discuss their pay with their co-workers, which is usually how they find out they're getting shafted (and which, perhaps not coincidentally, their bosses try to prevent them from doing). Moms Rising also reminds us that this past June 10 was the 56th Anniversary of the Equal Pay Act's passage, and yet women still make less than a dollar for every dollar a man makes, even when you adjust the data for comparable skills and experience. Right-wingers will tell you that just proves that laws that try to help people just don't work! They're wrong, of course -- the battle for justice doesn't end with a single law, and we must re-earn justice every day of our lives.

Around the table: when oh when will we finally be sick of the drama?

We shouldn't be wasting any time on this, but it's so obvious that the 2001 AUMF does not give this Administration the power to wage war on Iran that virtually every Democrat running for President feels secure enough to say so. Our Administration argues, such as they do, that the AUMF authorizes an attack on Iran because a) Iran supposedly attacked two oil tankers in the Middle East like they've been doing for decades and b) according to Secretary of State Pompeo, Iran and al-Qaeda have "very real" ties. Like how he says "very real" like he's afraid you won't believe him if he just says "real"? Naturally, even our intelligence community has found zero evidence that al-Qaeda had any involvement in the oil tanker attacks. This Administration is just as much a foreign-policy clown car as Tha Bush Mobb was, and unlike Tha Bush Mobb, this Administration won't have 9.11 to help us feel sorry for them.

Our President's hour-long interview on ABC Sunday night comes in third in its timeslot, with fewer than four million viewers. Fun fact: Celebrity Family Feud, which held that timeslot the previous week, got over six million viewers. Of course our President will tell everyone he outdrew 60 Minutes, which also isn't true (he outdrew 60 Minutes in certain demographics, and not overall), but when has that ever stopped him? I sure hope this is a sign that the American people are sick of this guy. I even hope (though some would call me an optimist, or worse) that we're also sick of the bad drama he epitomizes.

Sen. "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) actually goes on Fox and Friends to wonder aloud why Jon Stewart was all "bent out of shape" about Congress's failure to extend the 9.11 Victim Compensation Fund. Again, mob bosses prefer someone else to do this kind of messaging, even though Mr. Stewart criticized Mr. McConnell by name. But "many things in Congress happen at the last minute" is not exactly confident messaging. And, ah, is Mr. McConnell sure he wants to pick a fight with Jon Stewart? Jon Stewart did as much as any of us to preserve this Republic during Tha Bush Mobb years, so that's a hornet's nest I wouldn't poke.

Our Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) agency did not tabulate deaths-in-custody for a full calendar year, and has been tabulating them differently for about a year since then. Plus, at least one internal memo says that "preventable harm and death to detainees has occurred," and an NBC News investigation found that two dozen folks died in ICE custody since our President's inauguration. If you're thinking 24 isn't very high a number, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) ask yourself why the greatest country on Earth should tolerate any deaths in custody, and 3) recall that everyone is someone's mother, father, sister, brother, partner, or friend.

Finally, while we're talking about ICE, our President announces that ICE will begin deporting "millions" of undocumented immigrants next week, though later on an Administration hack said the effort would mostly be about the one million or so immigrants who have already received final deportation orders. No matter -- our President said it, so his votaries consider it already done, and next time they get angry about TEH ILLEGULZ!!!!!, they'll just put this "great work" of our President out of their mind. I used to think it had to be hard to reconcile such contradictions, but it seems that about a quarter of the electorate does so merely by yelling slogans in your face.

Action: concerning Medicare drug prices, abortion, product safety, and defense spending.

We've spent a lot of time trying to get Mob Boss Mitch to hold Senate votes on good bills passed by the House, but sadly, it's also like pulling teeth to get Democratic House leadership to consider some good bills. Case in point: H.R. 1046, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act of 2019, which would, as its title suggests, finally let Medicare negotiate its drug prices on behalf of our seniors -- and would empower our government to manufacture its own generics if big pharma corporations refuse to negotiate in good faith. Why would Democratic leadership not want a vote on that? Could it be because Democratic leadership is far better at raising money from big corporations -- including big pharma corporations -- than they are at legislating? It's a question worth asking! Or, more precisely, it's a question worth making moot by demanding that Democratic House leaders allow a vote on the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, which Social Security Works helps you do.

CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 29975, the Women's Health Protection Act. The Women's Health Protection Act would prevent states from passing legislation outlawing (or putting onerous restrictions upon) abortion; you may have noticed that states have been doing a lot of these things lately. Would you respond that we should let the smallest government make the most decisions about the most people's health and welfare? I am, after all, neither immune to nor automatically disdainful of such arguments! But you're better off taking that argument up with our Constitution, because our Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision specifically says we cannot leave the legality of abortion up to the states. Given the current composition of our Court, that argument may not hold much longer. But I'll still oppose outlawing a procedure when only half of Americans (i.e., women) could ever serve time for it -- I mean, the only fair thing to do would be imprison men for the ill-considered sex that also contributed to the abortion, and I know no man in America would support that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would ban unsafe baby sleepers, like the Fisher-Price Rock 'n Play, and other unsafe baby products. An April Consumer Reports investigation revealed that sleepers like these have helped kill over three dozen babies, and you can't just pretend you're Brit Hume and say that's not so big a number, because every baby is the apple of someone's eye. And our Consumer Product Safety Commission knew, for several years, that the Rock 'n Play had helped kill babies, but took no action until the aforementioned investigation revealed more deaths than our CPSC had said. Consumer Reports will also help you call for a ban on crib bumper pads that help cause suffocation and strangulation, and tougher safety standards for dressers so they don't tip over on babies, since that also leads to over two dozen deaths annually. Again, if these numbers don't seem so impressive, just imagine it's your baby. That should do it.

In the wake of the news that our government is actually making a defense contractor pay for overcharging our government -- not a big-name defense contractor, nor a huge amount of money ($16 million) in the context of a $700 million-plus annual defense budget, but it's still a good work -- a consortium of good government groups (including Public Citizen, Roots Action, and Win Without War) helps you demand a $200 billion annual cut in defense spending. I often hesitate to put a number out there that looks arbitrary, but you don't even have to know that we already spend more on defense than the next seven countries combined to know that we can afford it -- you only need know that we routinely throw billions of dollars at weapons that clearly don't work. Which is to say they don't actually help defend us -- at "enriching corporate CEOs" and "funneling corporate welfare to big corporations," I guess these weapons do work. Call me old-fashioned, but I think defense spending ought to defend.

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making, discrimination, and working families.

After last week's alleged attack on oil tankers in the Middle East -- a drama where all the actors involved can't even agree upon what really happened -- our Administration is even hotter for war with Iran. Fortunately, it's not their call to make -- it's our call to make, through our representatives in Congress. Hence both CREDO and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to stop the march to war with Iran. Do not believe the hype from your elected officials about "tying the President's hands." How many times must I tell these pimps! Our Constitution demands that we "tie the President's hands" in war-making! It's a feature, not a bug! Our Constitution reserves war-declaration power for Congress, and reserves war-conducting power for our President, but having the power to conduct a war is not the same as having the power to start a war. That's the way our Founders wanted it, and that's the way it should be.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Holler has reported that Coffee County (TN) District Attorney Craig Northcott has declared that he doesn't prosecute gay or transgender domestic violence cases. His his reasoning? "The reason there’s extra punishment on domestic assaults is to recognize and protect the sanctity of marriage," he says (so I guess he doesn't prosecute domestic violence in unmarried hetero couples either!), and since "there’s no marriage to protect," (because of course he doesn't "recognize" our Supreme Court's ruling legalizing gay marriage) "I don’t prosecute them as domestics." He can believe whatever he likes -- I, too, often think our Supreme Court is wrong! -- but his job is to enforce the law, which says gay marriages are marriages. And no, "religious" "conscience" plus "prosecutorial discretion" does not equal "I can do whatever I want." Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Mr. Northcott to resign, now that he has professed his lack of devotion to law and order.

In a directly-related note, 18 Million Rising helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The Equality Act would ensure that federal law grants the same protections under the Civil Rights Act to gay and transgender folk that other long-oppressed minorities (like women and folks of color) can get. If it bothers you that women and folks of color would no longer get more protections than gay and transgender folk, you really need to reacquaint yourself with the whole concept of fighting the real enemy. And if you subscribe to the notion that, say, the Equality Act will enable men to join the WNBA -- I wish I were kidding about this! -- then contemplate more closely how well someone who tried that would be received in any of his social circles. You might also want to contemplate more closely whether the slight possibility of such an occurrence is really worth continuing to let landlords refuse to rent to gay folks or employers refuse to hire gay folks or knuckle-dragging state legislators continuing to torment transgender folks.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act would ensure that employers make "reasonable accommodations" for workers who become pregnant -- which would include giving them sit-down work wherever possible and being lenient on bathroom breaks since anyone who's ever been pregnant would tell you they always have to go to the bathroom. It would not, of course, include letting them spend their entire shift in the bathroom, since that would be an unreasonable accommodation; I put that there for those who have so little faith in our justice system that they fear "small businesses" getting swamped with "frivolous lawsuits." And the bill would also prevent employers from firing workers (or otherwise retaliating against them) just because they get pregnant. I mean, all that would be quite anti-family, don't you think?

UPDATE. One Taylor Swift, of Nashville, TN -- perhaps you've heard of her! -- also has a petition (on Change.org) which helps you voice your support for H.R. 5, the Equality Act. It has close to 300,000 signers as of Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at noon EST, so leveraging some star power to help this thing get passed would be worth your effort even if you've already called and written your Senators. Taylor Swift's a good egg.

Around the table: tabulating weak arguments easily swatted down if we but have the will.

My initial reaction to the news that our government had blurry, heavily-edited video of Iranian patrol boats in the vicinity of two oil tankers several hours after they suffered attacks was to call it drama -- why would we suddenly go to war with Iran now over something they've been doing for decades? Because our President, or John Bolton, wants a notch on their belt? It was just icing on the cake to hear later that the owner of one of the attacked tankers disputed our government's account of events. I said years ago that President Obama's competence in the service of empire was nothing to celebrate, but this President's inability to run a convincing false flag operation might be.

Michael Corcoran at TruthOut describes the current state of health insurance industry propaganda against Medicare-for-All. ZOMG 150 MILLYUNZ WILL LOSEZ THEIR PRIVATE INSURANZ!!!!! is not a talking point only John Delaney had been using -- and though it's true support wavers for Medicare-for-All once the pollster says psst you'll lose your private health insurance, that's a damn slim reed to hold onto, since "you can keep your hospital and doctor" if they have to take Medicare-for-All health insurance, as they will. And private health insurance plans are only popular when folks don't have to use them. This is a big country, so not everyone's going to have a problem with their health insurance at once, hence polls suggesting private health insurance is "popular" are intensely misleading. Also, too, when Third Way-types say we shouldn't do it because it's "ripe for attack," you should recognize such argument as cowardly. And stupid -- after all, haven't Republicans demonstrated they'll attack anything Democrats propose, no matter how weak?

JP Morgan/Chase CEO Jamie Dimon tells a business roundtable that "(s)ocialism means that the government owns and controls companies" and that government would use them for "political purposes, for jobs and votes." After we remind everyone that some people cry "socialism" at whatever they don't like because they can't win the argument on the merits, we have to remind folks that government corruption is easier to fight than corporate corruption because you have a voice in your government, and we also need to remind folks that restraining the power of the rich to run roughshod over the rest of us (which is what Mr. Dimon's really afraid of losing here!) is the best way to promote freedom for everyone else. People like Mr. Dimon complain about government "own(ing) and control(ling) (corporations)" because they want to do all the owning and controlling. And corporate CEOs need to ask themselves if they really want banksters like Mr. Dimon controlling them.

Ho hum, one of the House architects of the 2017 tax "reform" now says it's "way too early to tell" whether deficits will be worse over the next decade, even though deficit-neutrality was one of Republicans' big selling points and even though deficits are significantly worse now. He adds, "I don’t think anything could have been worse for the deficit than to stick with the old economy and stick with the tax code that was so outdated," although, as I'm now going to say with the Italics Hammer, deficits are worse now. No truth to the rumor that he then added BUT WE ALREADYZ PASSEDZ TEH BILLZ ANDZ OURZ DONURZ GOTZ ALL TEH GOODIEZ SUCKERZ!!!!!

Finally, our President invokes "executive privilege" to keep our House from accessing documents concerning its rulemaking on the census citizenship question. First thought: case is being litigated by our Supreme Court as we speak, so maybe he can. Second thought: House has oversight duties, particularly if they're going to create law on the matter (and Congress has introduced legislation addressing the citizenship question), so maybe he can't. Third thought: our Supreme Court can take care of itself without Executive branch help. Fourth thought: "executive privilege" can't be the answer to everything any more than "national emergency" can be the answer to everything.

Action: concerning debt in Puerto Rico, cruel immigration policy, and drilling in ANWR.

You recall that Hurricane Maria slammed Puerto Rico so hard that Congress needed to pass more disaster relief legislation to help it out, right? And you also recall that Puerto Rico was deeply in debt to begin with, and Congressional legislation passed under President Obama basically enabled banksters to keep scavenging the Puerto Rico economy? Crap like this wouldn't happen if Puerto Rico were a state, let me tell you! But H.R. 2526/S. 1312, the U.S. Territorial Relief Act of 2019, would wipe out Puerto Rico's debt and compensate debt-holders up to $15 billion -- even the hedge funds that swooped in like vultures, though they'd have to waive manager's fees, and I bet some of them find that so offensive they won't take the compensation. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out struggling U.S. territories wipe out their debt. And if you think that's "rewarding bad behavior," just slap yourself. Why should I bang my head against a wall?

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Administration to stop abusing immigrant children. I know it's hard to keep up with this ongoing humanitarian crisis our Administration has forced upon us, but long story short, our Administration still separates families at the border, still sets up these families (including their children) for human rights abuses, and no longer even provides legal services or recreational activities for these children, which sure will stop right-wingers from going on the TV and telling us that forced detention is like summer camp, right? I kid, of course -- right-wingers don't let the truth stop them! And though I know this Administration does not give one rat's hind quarter what you and I think -- not just about their inhumanity, not just about the political calculation that's gone into it, but also their who-are-you-to-tell-us-what-to-do attitude -- our duty to tell them what we think remains.

Finally, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would prevent our government from handing out oil and gas drilling leases in the Coastal Plain of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) -- which sure is timely, since our Administration has apparently already told oil executives that leases in this area "will happen in 2019." Previous attempts to lease ANWR have failed, even in Republican-dominated governments, and H.R. 1146 currently has 180 co-sponsors, but let's not get complacent -- no, not even because we have the better argument (drilling in ANWR won't release all that much oil, but it will adversely affect caribou and Native American populations), because H.R. 1146 will only become law if we demand it, at every step of the legislative process. Hence the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge by passing the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act.

Action: concerning pollution, robocalls, pensions, and antibiotic abuse.

Word on the street is our House would pass spending bills that would dramatically increase our EPA's overall budget, increase National Park Service funding, increase clean energy research and clean water infrastructure investment, and double research on dangerous (and ubiquitous) PFAS chemicals, among other things. Who would oppose these things? Only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment, that's who, and it's well past time we painted the objectively pro-pollution crowd into a corner. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your House Reps to support strong anti-pollution provisions in upcoming spending bills. And there won't be any "I decide what we vote on" from Mob Boss Mitch in the Senate, either, because the Senate has to pass funding bills, too, and shutting down our government isn't actually very popular, even if punishing those responsible for shutdown dramas has proven difficult.

Meanwhile, our Senate has passed a bill that would help good Americans stop robocalls from coming to their houses and cellphones! S. 151, the TRACED Act, would (among other things) force big telecom corporations to use call authentication technologies and mandate the FCC to write rules allowing customers to challenge calls' authenticity. That's a hell of a lot better than what the FCC would do, which is suggest to corporations that they should authenticate calls voluntarily. As if corporations ever do the right thing without being dragged kicking and screaming into it! Now it's our House's turn to consider the bill, so Consumer Reports helps you demand that our House pass the most vigorous anti-robocall reforms possible. I mean, robocalls are so unpopular that our Senate took the initiative and actually churned out a decent bill, so there's no reason our House can't do even better.

In other news, H.R. 1994, the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (or SECURE) Act of 2019, almost unanimously passed the House last week -- but that doesn't mean it's a giant ball of happy! The SECURE Act would (among its provisions) protect corporations from being sued if they select certain annuities for their 401(k) plans and then the annuities go belly-up, taking all the money with them. Why Congress would give welfare handouts like this may puzzle you, until you learn that House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) has taken campaign contributions from at least nine insurance corporations or trade groups. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the SECURE Act's pro-retirement scam provisions and expand Social Security instead. See what we did there? We stopped talking about what they want us to talk about and started talking about what we want instead. We have to do that every day if we want to take America back from those who worship mammon.

Finally, fast food corporation McDonald's has lately committed to getting antibiotic abuse out of its beef supply chain, a far more important development than its previous commitment to getting it out of its chicken supply chain, and we have our pressure to thank for that development. Now Consumer Reports helps you tell another fast food corporation, Wendy's, to get the antibiotic abuse out of its beef. We use four out of every five antibiotics in feed animals, not sick people or sick animals, and we do it to fatten those animals up and help them survive the factory farm experience, neither of which is a particularly good reason to bring back the world where the next cut might kill you. (The Sierra Club also helps you tell our FDA to regulate antibiotic abuse on family farms more vigorously than they do now; we might do better with Wendy's than with our FDA, but duty is duty.)

Action: concerning campaign finance reform, violence against women, and evil media.

Our Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC ruling -- which used the ancient and nefarious doctrine of corporate "personhood" to expand big corporate campaign financing -- remains a blot on our culture. But H.J.Res. 2 would amend our Constitution to allow Congress to "regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections," which would include "prohibiting" "artificial entities created by law" "from spending money to influence elections." Big corporate campaign spending is popular with approximately no one -- except the big corporations who buy votes this way! Yes, that's an accurate way of putting it: money isn't speech, it's property, and everyone but a pedant sees that big corporate campaign spending results in corrupt corporate lackeys in office. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to slow the flow of big corporate money into political campaigns.

It's not just the American Dream and Promise Act, the For the People Act, the Equality Act, and the Save the Internet Act that aren't getting the proper attention from our Senate -- it's also H.R. 1585, the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act, passed by our House back in April but still sitting on the Senate's general calendar two months later. I suppose that's an improvement over the aforementioned bills, but your Senators could still use your counsel; hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to pass the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act. Are they refusing to pass it because it would give tribal courts more power to go after sexual violence, child abuse, sex trafficking, and the like? I sure hope not, because that would mark them as pedants -- and also as hostage-takers, since the bill would also help federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement entities communicate with each other about these issues.

CREDO helps you tell advertisers to drop the Fox News program The Ingraham Angle. CREDO cites Laura Ingraham's recent defense of evil white supremacist/anti-Semite Paul Nehlen as the immediate news hook (a simple graphic causes so much trouble these days!), but a better reason to tell advertisers to abandon her is everything she's ever done -- she's been an ambulance chaser for far-right causes for three decades now, and she doesn't obsess over nationalism and xenophobia these days because she's really given all that a lot of thought, but because she thinks that's where the money is. Let's prove her wrong. And while we're talking about it, Media Matters helps you tell advertisers to drop Fox News generally, since they're all pretty terrible. If you want to call your Congressfolk and demand that they pass a law letting you choose your cable channels a la carte so you don't have to pay for this rubbish, well, tools to find your Congressfolks' phone numbers are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Around the table: from the high cost of home ownership to corruption and censorship.

Sam Pizzigati at the Our Future blog foresees "A Nation Where Only The Rich Have Homes." Dystopia has landed in the Bay Area, where millionaires rant about homeless folks parked in RVs along the waterfront and GoFundMe campaigns have actually emerged to fund lawsuits fighting affordable housing. Why, it's like these folks have never heard of irony! If we taxed the rich a lot harder than we do, we wouldn't have any of these problems -- not homelessness, which is almost entirely a post-Kemp/Roth phenomenon in America, and not whining about homeless people getting a "better view" of the beach.

Barbara G. Ellis at TruthOut reports that well over half of rural voters also want Medicare-for-All health insurance -- and reminds us that rural folk "have horrifying mishaps the urban/suburban public are unlikely ever to experience," plus "the problem of long-distance travel to reach a medical facility." She also gives some good advice about how to talk to rural voters about Medicare-for-All -- or, to be more precise, how to listen to rural voters' health care stories. Strange that a "liberal" media that seems to love horror stories about health care doesn't typically run stories about folks getting mangled by tractors or crushed by jacks. Maybe they can't hear such stories because they have all that money in their ears.

Ho hum, YouTube doesn't abide by its own rules regarding harassment, mainly because of money from advertising. Using algorithms instead of human beings to "demonetize" websites that deserve it is undoubtedly part of the problem, though that doesn't fully explain why the history teacher making instructional videos about the fall of the Third Reich always seems to get shafted while the guy actually spouting racist rubbish gets off -- but who, exactly, would want to advertise with right-wing trolls who do little other than call their opponents foul names? It can't be all about the eyeballs, since anyone can get attention by merely being an asshole. Thus a Drop Fox-style campaign against YouTube seems long overdue.

Annoyed by all the drama our President has been fomenting about whatever agreement he has or doesn't have with Mexico over tariffs and immigration? Dean Baker comes to the rescue, as usual, by explaining how tariffs work. Long story short: consumers don't necessarily bear all the burden of tariffs, and tariffs can be an effective negotiating ploy, but in the hands of this President, tariffs will almost certainly become just another tool with which he enriches himself and his cronies. Also, too, assessing tariffs against Mexico makes no economic sense when you've been negotiating a trade deal with Mexico! Sadly, as I've said, it does make political sense.

I'm not sure this report about Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao greasing the skids for projects in the home state of her husband, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell will have the negative effect against Mr. McConnell's 2020 re-election effort that I'd like it to have. I mean, yes, it is textbook corruption, but will Kentucky voters feel that way about it, particularly after Mr. McConnell shows ads touting his role in "the revitalization of Owensboro"? Statistics showing Kentucky ranking only 25th in Department of Transportation money since the beginning of 2017 aren't convincing, of course, once you see that email from February of 2017 regarding "Ky-specific issue(s)." And by "Ky," they didn't mean the jelly.

Finally, China's "Great Firewall" of internet censorship now blocks both the Washington Post and The Guardian in addition to most other major English-language papers of record. Most news reports speculate that China is doing all this censoring because it doesn't want its citizens to read about the 30th anniversary of the Tianenmen Square massacre, in which the Chinese government literally ran over protestors with tanks; I guess that could explain the timing, but with tyrants you still have to wonder. It couldn't also be that the Post and the Guardian have been highly-critical of our President, could it? I mean, tyrants do seem to attract each other.

Action: concerning internet freedom, war in Yemen, immigration, and the minimum wage.

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. H.R. 1644/S. 682 would "save the internet" by reinstating the 2015 Open Internet order that forced big telecom corporations to deliver all network traffic to its destination at the same speed, without discrimination. The FCC repealed that order in 2017, and I told you then that you wouldn't necessarily notice any change to your internet right away, because the big telecoms aren't so stupid as to take away all your freedoms at once. But they most assuredly have been working to do that -- Verizon's throttling of Santa Clara County firefighters in the middle of a wildfire is perhaps the most famous example, but researchers have also found Sprint throttling Skype and several big telecoms throttling Netflix and YouTube. That's how it begins; let's make sure this is also where it ends.

Meanwhile, one of the architects of our Administration's "national emergency" declaration enabling it to bypass Congress and the will of the people and sell arms to the Saudi/UAE coalition currently waging war on Yemen -- a former defense contractor lobbyist named Charles Faulkner -- has lately left his State Department job in a black cloud, and now some Congressfolk want to have a hearing on the whole matter this week. As well they should -- the Saudi/UAE bombing of Yemen serves no purpose but to put Yemeni citizens on the brink of famine and bring shame upon anyone who helps it, and of course this latest "national emergency" drama testifies to the ineptitude and cowardice of our President, who got 46% of the popular vote and naturally acts like he has absolute power. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition. Doing whatever Saudi Arabia wants because TEH IRANZ!!!!! is no way to run a foreign policy.

In other news, American Dream and Promise Act has passed our House, meaning it goes to our Senate, where it may never get a vote. That would be a shame, because the American Dream and Promise Act would fix what our President broke when he issued an Executive order (one since stayed by our courts) ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program for those folks brought to America as children who now know no other home as adults. The American Dream and Promise Act would once again extend protection from deportation for these folks as long as they meet certain criteria, like continued settlement in our country, two years in our military, and continued enrollment in college. You might think, gosh, this is how a conservative would conduct immigration policy; pass judgment on the "conservatism" of today's Republicans as you like, but in the meantime, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass the American Dream and Promise Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. The bill would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour, and would ultimately bring the minimum wages for tipped and disabled workers into parity with everyone else's; anyone who says I JUST CAN'TZ RUNZ TEH BIZNIZZIZ!!! after that can first be pointed to the fact that the $15/hour minimum wage would be phased in over five years and second be told they just don't have very much of that can-do American spirit, do they? People in some parts of America already have a $15/hour minimum wage, and it hasn't exactly destroyed their economies -- when folks make more money, they have more money to spend, and thus pump more money into the economy. Of course, CEOs who think all economies should revolve around them find that intolerable, but they don't get all the say around here.

Action: concerning poverty, corruption, monopolies, and privatization.

Our Office of Management and Budget (or OMB) would like to calculate poverty using the "Chained CPI" measurement, which would essentially redefine inflation downward and thus redefine poverty upward. You may remember Chained CPI from the Social Security debates of the past decade -- Chained CPI portrays inflation as lower than it really is, by assuming that once an item's price rises a certain amount, consumers will simply switch to a cheaper item. Already sounds like a scam, doesn't it? And just as the last Administration mooted using Chained CPI to calculate Social Security benefits -- which doesn't work, because seniors have a lot of fixed costs and can't just "switch to what's cheaper" whenever they like -- this Administration wants to use it to claim that not so many folks are struggling, which means fewer of those who are actually struggling will get federal benefits like Medicaid. Hence the Coalition on Human Needs (among other good government groups) helps you tell our OMB to reject its plan to take health care away from more good Americans.

Meanwhile, S. 1393, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, would (as its title suggests) make it against the law for Congressfolk to trade stocks. If that sounds extreme to you, consider how often Congressfolk ever do the people's will versus how often they seem to do some big corporation's will, and then recall that corporations trade stock and people don't. Americans are getting a constant reminder from our President of how much they hate corruption, and they generally figure that Congressfolk will do what pleases them before they'll do what's right, but really, why should we put up with that? And folks who say we can "trust" Congressfolk to trade stock and do the right thing are ignoring the evidence of their own eyes -- and they're making about as bad an argument as saying cable news guests can take money from big corporations and still pontificate "objectively" about matters that concern their paymasters. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore some faith in our democracy by passing the Ban Conflicted Trading Act.

In other news, our FCC has given its blessing to the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger -- even though we all know this merger, like all other big corporate mergers, will reduce competition, raise prices, concentrate economic power in fewer hands, and cause a lot of people to lose their jobs -- but our Department of Justice can still step in and stop the merger, so Free Press reminds you that you can still call our DoJ, at 202.804.1389, and tell them to block the proposed merger. Our DoJ -- led, such as it is, by William Barr, who is, among so many other things, a man who believes corporations know best about everything -- probably won't want to block the merger, but again: it doesn't matter what they want, it matters what we want. One day, we will live in an America where all Americans really believe that, and communicate their will to their representatives in government until they cry uncle. Until then, we just have to keep reminding folks that we really do have the power -- if we use it.

Finally, our President, who has repeatedly assured us that he will pick the "best people" to work in our government, somehow thinks Barry Myers should lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA runs, among other things, the National Weather Service, which has done such a great job over the years that Jim Freaking DeMint defended it while in the Senate. And, ah, what did Mr. Myers do for a living until recently? Why, run AccuWeather, a private weather forecaster which has long salivated at the prospect of either crippling or buying out the National Weather Service! Putting Mr. Myers in charge of the NOAA is real fox-in-charge-of-the-henhouse territory; that's a cliché, I suppose, but this Administration is so terrible you can cut them down with little more than cliches. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject Mr. Myers's nomination to the NOAA. Don't believe the hype that since Mr. Myers has answered the conflict-of-interest charge by resigning from Accuweather, because he sold his stock to his own family at a very large discount; what does that look like to you?

Around the table: from centrist Democrats to empowered farmworkers.

Keith A. Spencer at Salon says "There Is Hard Data That Shows a Centrist Democrat Would Be a Losing Candidate." See? It's not just a feeling I have based on 100 million Americans sitting out the 2016 election! Seriously, Thomas Piketty (of Capital in the 21st Century fame) looked at 70 years of post-election data from America, France, and the U.K., and found guess what? That poorer working families used to always vote for liberal candidates, but now they don't, because generally there ain't one to vote for -- and while some of these voters now vote for faux-populist right-wingers like our President or Ms. LePen, many others simply don't vote at all. A solution presents itself! Anyway, it's nice to see Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Joe Biden portrayed as centrists.

West Virginia Supreme Court rules unanimously that gas drilling corporations can't drill on one person's property to reach reserves on adjoining properties without "express" permission from the owner. In a sane and moral society, conservatives would celebrate this ruling as a victory for private property, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, I suspect that any "conservatives" who weigh in on this matter will squeal about TEH JUDISHUL OVERREACHEZ!!!!!, since "conservatism," in these times, only ever seems to mean "whatever makes rich people more money."

Is it "news" that our "liberal" media always talks about American aggression as a "response" to vague or nonexistent "threats" from Iran? Perhaps not, but it's still good to be reminded -- as it is also good to be reminded that when someone says some nation or other is a "threat," you have every right to ask "based on what evidence?" "Because Iran humiliated us in 1979 and 1980" is not evidence, nor is a quotation taken out of context, nor is an attack on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure that even our own intelligence forces won't say came from Iran.

Ho hum, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposes gutting its own payday lending rule, and then payday lending bigwigs spend $1 million celebrating the proposal at one of our President's resorts. And that's why you don't put a "successful businessman" in office! As we learned, no doubt, when our President said he wasn't about to "hate" the Saudis because they spend so much money at his hotels. I expect we'll get further reminders of this kind of corruption as time goes on.

Finally, New York's farmworkers might get landmark labor legislation if the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act passes that state's legislature and gets the Governor's signature. A state Supreme Court decision extended collective bargaining rights to farmworkers -- who, as you know, do not enjoy the protections of federal law in this area, which leads me to wonder if our national Supreme Court will forget its putative aversion to meddling in state affairs -- but the FLPA would go further, giving them, among other things, one day off weekly (!) and overtime pay. That latter item is very important, as farms often make their workers put in 13-hour days. When farmworkers get to organize for better working conditions, a lot of our work as citizens will become a lot easier, and don't believe the farm corporations' whining that it'll be "too expensive." They should learn to count the cost of bad actions.

Action: concerning patents and pollution.

Remember a few years ago, when our Supreme Court ruled that you couldn't patent human genes because, well, you didn't make them? Congress may undo that good work with legislation that would nullify the ruling and allow big corporations to patent human genes again, so Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep big corporations from patenting our genes. Some Congressfolk will claim that this legislation doesn't do that, but all you need do to refute them is attend the discussion in paragraphs 8 through 11 of this article. Trigger warning: a lawyer claims the ruling has caused "a dead stop in research in the United States on isolated natural products." You'll recognize that as a hostage crisis -- give me monopoly power over human genes, or the science gets it! You'll also recognize it as absurd, since we're more likely to do good work about "isolated natural products" if many entities can research them, rather than one corporation valuing money more than science.

Meanwhile, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned our EPA's 2015 coal ash rule last year, ruling that it did not adequately protect good Americans from the water pollution caused by coal ash leaking into groundwater -- as mandated to do by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which grants our EPA rule-making power in this matter. Yes, I totally put that last clause in there to forestall complaints about BIG GUMMINT!!!! But even though the coal ash rule dates from the Obama Administration, now this Administration must fix it -- again, as mandated by our laws and our courts -- and you can probably guess their enthusiasm for that task. Still: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want -- if we speak out loudly enough. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to comply with our courts and write a strong coal ash rule. That would be the law and order thing to do, after all.

Finally, H.R. 2156, the RECLAIM Act, would help states clean up air and water polluted by abandoned coal mines Reclaiming abandoned coal mines -- which put a lot of filth into our air and water, particularly in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, from which (perhaps not coincidentally!) many of H.R. 2156's sponsors hail -- would not only make our air and water cleaner, but would create jobs for workers abandoned by a dying coal industry. And H.R. 2156 actually has almost a dozen Republican co-sponsors and just passed out of the House National Resources Committee by a 26-10 vote; with Senate Majority Leader Mitch "I decide what we vote on" McConnell also hailing from Kentucky, maybe H.R. 2156 can pass both houses of Congress! But we've still got to stay on our Congressfolk, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to cut pollution and help out depressed areas of our country by passing the RECLAIM Act.

Action: concerning pollution and racism.

Our Administration plans to open up public lands near wildlife refuges and wilderness areas in California to oil and gas drilling. One wonders if this is their revenge on California for being a liberal paradise, but there's a bigger issue here: California is still woefully short on water, even a year after a seven-year drought finally ended, and supports an agriculture sector that produces about two-thirds of America's fruits annually. And California farmers responded to the drought by irrigating their crops with fracking wastewater, which testifies to that water shortage and suggests that, well, maybe gas drilling isn't the best use of our water tables to begin with. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to reject its own plan to open up relatively untrammeled California lands to drilling. Remember: they'd rather ignore us, but if they do, we can stop them in court.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell our FBI to stop trying to hide the onslaught of white supremacist violence in its official data. How are they doing this? By lumping all sorts of phenomena into one category, called "racially-motivated violent extremism," which would allow our FBI to lump white supremacists who shoot people with black protestors who get shot at by police. And that also means that the new category would also allow inattentive evil media outlets to run rampant with bogus statistics "mistakenly" attributed to black protestors! Well, as they say, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on, but our government should not enable lies to get around so quickly. And the problem isn't black protestors getting loud with people who don't listen; the problem is white racists shooting black and brown people dead. And our FBI needs to confront that, just as we all do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end our President's Muslim ban by passing H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then People for the American Way (among others) still helps you do that. The NO BAN Act would repeal all three of our President's Muslim bans, would prevent future Presidents from issuing similar travel bans, and would strengthen the Immigration and Nationality Act by explicitly preventing discrimination on the basis of religious belief. Would it be too much to ask of our government to make decisions on who can travel to and from our country on a rational basis? Would it be too much to ask of our President not to stoke rage and hatred on our fellow citizens with his Executive Orders? I'm an eternal optimist, so my answer to both of these questions would be "no, it would not be too much to ask." But that's only true if we demand that it be true.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, June 5, 2019: Pete Buttigieg shows John Hickenlooper and John Delaney how it's done!

Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper gets booed at the California Democrats' state convention after declaring that "socialism is not the answer" to the problems of defeating our President in 2020 and "achiev(ing) big progressive goals." What does he mean by "socialism"? Well, he says that"(m)assive government expansions may not be strictly speaking socialism, but trust me: Republicans will make it seem like socialism." And he volunteers this strategy as a way of confounding Republican efforts to define Democrats! Enabling Republicans who call everything "socialism" is no way to fight them; hell, it's no way to fight. Still, it might be worse for him to offer "focusing on kitchen table programs that will actually improve people's quality of life" as an alternative -- as if "socialist" programs couldn't possibly do that! But here's what's worst: he insists we either take a center-right tack or the President gets re-elected, which is what, class? That's right, a manufactured hostage crisis -- don't communicate your will to your politicians, or your country gets it!

For all that, Mr. Hickenlooper fared better than former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, who got booed at the same event for a full minute after telling the assembled that Medicare-for-All "sounds good, but it’s actually not good policy, nor is it good politics." It routinely gets majority support in poll after poll and it's "not good politics"? His objection to Medicare-for-All as policy seems to be that it'll "kick() 115 million Americans off their health care" -- though it would give them cheaper, better health care, not "no health care." And naturally he took the criticism with the confidence and professionalism befitting a man who ought to be a frontrunner, right? Well, no -- first he said that "(i)ntolerance to alternative points of view is not what the Democratic Party should be about," which begs the retort that you cant 't President if you call criticism "intolerance." And then he said "(m)ost Republicans favor doing nothing and eliminating the ACA. What’s your choice?" Well, my choice is not to be part of your damn manufactured hostage crisis! You can't keep putting out a menu of wet oatmeal and a bowl of dung and expect people to say how great your restaurant is.

And these putatively "sane," "sensible" "moderates" could learn a lot from South Bend, IN Mayor Pete Buttigieg about how to hide your centrism from the masses -- he told the California delegates that "the riskiest thing we could do is try to play it safe" in 2020, which is a stroke of genius even if, like me, you don't believe he really means it. The flesh is willing with statements like "(our President) wins if we look too much like Washington" and "when (our President) inundates the imagination with a horror show of taunts and tweets, let’s change the channel," and certainly I'd be glad if someone with a megaphone actually took on the noble project of "breaking the Republican monopoly" on words like "freedom" and "security." But the flesh has also seen this game before -- "new thinking, bold action, and a focus on the future" will remind you of, well, virtually every Democratic Presidential candidate who's either lost or disappointed you, and he opened with that. And what is this "new thinking"? We don't learn, which leads me to think that eight years of a President Pete Buttigieg will be eight more years of we-tried-but-Republicans-wouldn't-let-us.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, discrimination, and pollution.

Our President, as you know, has declared yet another of his "national emergencies" so he can sell weapons to the Saudi/UAE coalition that's currently raining down bombs on impoverished Yemenis. What's the "emergency"? Saudi Arabia needs weapons to defend itself from Iran, or something. Iran is now the excuse for everything, apparently. "Where's my tax cut? Iran took it!" (Maybe I shouldn't give our President any ideas.) Since our President has declared an "emergency," Congress can't stop him from selling arms using the Arms Control Act -- but we can tell Congress to simply ban arms sales to the Saudi/UAE war effort with new legislation, which Win Without War helps you do. I've said it before and I'll say it again: a President who needs to declare "emergencies" so he can accomplish unpopular legislative aims isn't a guy who "gets things done;" he's a weak man and a bad leader.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1756, the Preventing Credit Score Discrimination in Auto Insurance Act, would, as its title implies, would prevent car insurance corporations from setting insurance rates based on your credit score, and would prevent credit reporting agencies from furnishing car insurance corporations with that information. And here you thought your auto insurance corporation might raise or lower your rates based on your driving history! But now car insurance corporations charge folks more if they have low credit scores, which sure does seem like a recipe for car insurance corporations not getting paid, but it does trap lower-income folks in a cycle of debt. Too much of our economy seems predicated on punching people in the face when they're down; if you hate that as much as I do, then let CREDO help you tell your Congressfolk to fight financial predators by passing the Preventing Credit Score Discrimination in Auto Insurance Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to ban glyphosate, Just Label It still helps you do that -- but do it quickly, as the EPA's public commenting period on the matter ends tomorrow. Glyphosate was in the news after several juries found Monsanto liable for billions of dollars in damages when folks who routinely used RoundUp (Monsanto's brand-name version of glyphosate) got cancer, and we dump around 250 million gallons of the stuff on our crops annually in America. Note well, also, that Monsanto's genetic engineering projects tend to center around making their crops more resistant to RoundUp, rather than, say, increasing crop yields so farmers can produce more food. Upon hearing that many farmers are already moving away from spraying glyphosate on their crops before harvest, you have to wonder what the EPA's hesitance to ban it would be. And by "you have to wonder," I mean "because corporate welfare."

Action: concerning good legislation, bad corporate behavior, and war with Iran.

Congress reconvenes today, so today's a good day to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers so you can call them and tell them to pass tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, H.R. 5, the Equality Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. And if you want to tell Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hold votes on all these bills, you can find his phone numbers at the bottom of this page. Why do we keep telling the Senate to pass bills they don't want to pass? Partly because they're all good bills that would (respectively) better secure our voting rights, expand civil rights protections to gays and transgender folk, and restore our internet freedom. But we also keep doing it because it gives us a way to hold our Senators to account, and because communicating your will over and over again is the only way to get things done.

Meanwhile, Peruvian indigenous farmer Máxima Acuña de Chaupe has, for several years now, fought the world's largest gold mining corporation, Newmont Mining, which wants to build an open-pit gold mine on land she owns, and has been sending thugs to her house to beat her up and bust up her house in an attempt to convince her to move. If you know someone who would respond "well she should just move somewhere else and farm there," remind them, gently or otherwise, that people farm everywhere, and a lot of folks farm because they wouldn't otherwise eat. Remind them, also, that no big corporation has a "right" to harass people off their land, and remind them that Newmont mines gold. Gold! Like we're all in Deadwood or something! Anyway, Sum of Us helps you tell Newmont to stop taking people's land by beating up its owners; Sum of Us will deliver your signature to Newmont's annual meeting tomorrow.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to pass H.R. 2354/S. 1039 and thus prevent our President from marching us off to war with Iran, then both CREDO and the Friends Committee on National Legislation still help you do that. Don't believe the hype that our President really doesn't want war with Iran, because warmongers always say "I don't want to fight a war" so that when they start a war, you're more likely to believe them when they say "I had no choice." Of course nobody put a gun to our President's head and made him replace his NSA chief with a man who's seemingly spent a lifetime trying to start a war with Iran, and nobody put a gun to his head and made him withdraw from an Iran nuclear deal that was accomplishing its goal, either. Certainly don't believe the hype that he hired John Bolton so he could "keep his enemies closer." You know a better way to neutralize your enemies? Don't put them in power in the first place.

Penny Rants for Sunday, June 2, 2019: confronting drama and the difficulties of vision.

I think my fellow liberals are reaching a bit in alleging that Robert Mueller's contention late last week that "if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that" is a "message to Congress" that they should, or must, impeach our President. Mr. Mueller also said that "(i)t would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of an actual charge" (referring to the Justice Department opinion that sitting Presidents can't be charged with crimes), saying that's why "we concluded that we would not reach a determination -- one way or the other -- about whether the President committed a crime." I'm tempted to say we need to spend less time trying to get our President out of office and more time proving he's unfit for that office, but even that isn't really the point -- we need to put our vision of a better America forward, and we need to keep putting that vision forward until it drowns out the drama upon which our President thrives. And it should go without saying that "we should work in a bipartisan manner with the people who are trying to destroy us" is not such a vision.

Sen. Sanders reiterates that taxes will go up to pay for Medicare-for-All, and naturally right-wingers respond with hysteria. The only flaw I'd find with this article is that it forgets to mention that the $32 trillion cost of Medicare-for-All over 10 years compares favorably with the $49 trillion projected cost over the next decade on the system we've got; possibly Mr. Corcoran figures it's piling on to spell that out, since he had already pointed out that TEH AVURAJ CANADIAN FAMILY SPENDS TEH $12,000 ANNYULLY IN TEH TAXEZ!!!! is not only flat-out wrong, but that the average American spends almost that much annually in taxes and premiums. And it's no use arguing that "the employer pays the premiums," because that could money could just as easily be part of your salary. Mr. Sanders might be thinking far ahead here: if he comes out and says he'll force corporations to count what they're spending on health insurance as worker salary and then extract that money as a payroll tax, the right will lie about it anyway, but if he calls it a tax at the beginning, and then explains how it'll result in lower health care costs without actually cutting into your paycheck, he might better fight those lies.

I try to avoid calling housing and health care "human rights" -- even though most of us, liberal and conservative, really have long assumed that they are -- but Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) makes the best case I've yet seen for calling housing a "human right" -- by saying that "our access and our guarantee to having a home comes before someone else’s privilege to earn a profit." If you're going to call something a "right," calling its main obstacle "privilege" is a damn good way to do it. Where it trips up a bit is "someone else's privilege to earn a profit" -- I might have said "some corporation's privilege to earn a profit," and not least because a corporation isn't a person and shouldn't have the rights of personhood that our Supreme Court has been granting it for close to 150 years. I would say you, as a person, have a right to earn a profit -- which is certainly not to say you have a "right" to gild the plumbing in your 19th vacation home, since your rights don't get to trample other people's rights, but you have a right to save money, both for future projects and as a bulwark against catastrophe. But I would not say a corporation has a "right" to make a profit. Hell, I wouldn't say it has a "right" to exist.

All the news programs seems to be talking about our President's announcement that he'll hit Mexico with tariffs until they fix the undocumented immigration problem, but all those folks who are cluck-clucking at his "stupidity" don't get what he's doing: he's linking the two issues that galvanize his base (trade and immigration) and using the one issue that attracts more independent-minded voters to him (trade) to bait them into aligning with him on the other (immigration). So when all the smartypantses on their TV say "tariffs don't work" and "you don't solve one problem by attacking the other," I can't be mad at anyone who gets mad at them -- TV is full of smartypantses, after all. And when my fellow liberals complain that "even the Republicans are against it," we'll have to remind them that that's part of the drama. This is why I say that, absent a complete collapse of the economy which I don't want to see and don't think tariffs against China and Mexico will bring about, that our President has a very good chance at winning re-election -- unless, of course, a courageous, straight-talking Democrat who changes the subject to the real causes of our problems wins the nomination, a phenomenon I haven't yet seen in my lifetime.