Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning fair housing, racism, and our duty as civilized people to shame those who have wronged us.

Our Department of Housing and Urban Development (or HUD) has proposed using algorithms to evaluate housing applicants. Ask yourself: why does an algorithm need to handle a task humans have been handling for years? The answer: because algorithms don't have families and don't need to use the bathroom. In other words, because they're not people. Call me old-fashioned, but if something's important enough to do, a person should do it. And if you think people are fallible, well, algorithms are worse -- facial recognition algorithms think all black people look alike, job-recruiting algorithms can't hire women, and social media algorithms can't root out violent racists. And HUD's algorithm would track how often applicants go out clubbing, like people are never supposed to have fun or something. So CREDO helps you tell our HUD to do public housing the right way and reject its own proposal to hand over functions to computers.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Senators to block the nomination of racist Steven Menashi to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. In "Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy," which he wrote for the University of Pennsylvania's international law journal back in 2010 (so no use saying "youthful indiscretion," amirite?), Mr. Menashi concludes that the more ethnically diverse a state is, the more ineffectual it is. He sounds like a man after our President's own heart! And Mr. Menashi's elite pedigree (he graduated Stanford and clerked for Justice Alito) doesn't excuse him; rather, it points out (as if we needed more of this!) how irredeemably corrupt and decadent Our Glorious Elites have become. If a white supremacist can smile, speak softly, and write complete sentences, they're not better than the barely coherent guy at the end of the bar, they're worse. Is it too much to ask to have fewer of them in positions of power?

Finally, CREDO also helps you tell ABC to drop former Administration spokeshack Sean Spicer from its upcoming season of "Dancing With the Stars." I have long believed that if you work for evil, then we, as civilized people, should shun and shame you. That's why I didn't think Condoleeza Rice was "oppressed" by the public pressure that prompted her to withdraw from her Rutgers commencement speech gig in 2014: frankly, someone who worked for Tha Bush Mobb should never have received such an invitation in the first place. I can already hear the right-wingers, not usually known for public displays of compassion, demanding to know WHEN WILLZ TEH SHAMINGZ STOPZ!!!!! "When people stop acting shamefully" would be the answer. And I can hear them saying WHYZ DO YOU HAVEZ TO BRINGZ TEH POLITICZ INTO ITZ!!!!! But, really, folks, Sean Spicer brings the politics with him wherever he goes, and when you work for evil, civilized people shouldn't rush to put you on family TV programming.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and public lands.

It's a new week, so it's time once again to call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Why would your Senators be afraid of bills that support voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections? I mean, these are all popular things. Of course their leader, "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell, won't allow the bills to come to a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." But when we flood our Senators' phone lines with calls demanding votes on these bills, Mitch McConnell's opinion won't mean a damn thing, and his power will disappear. After all, his power isn't rooted in good works, and (despite appearances!) that's the only sustainable power there is.

Meanwhile, with the Amazon rainforest literally on fire as we speak, CREDO helps you tell big private equity corporation BlackRock to stop investing in the Amazon's destruction. How is BlackRock investing in the Amazon's destruction? By putting its money into the logging, mining, and big ag corporations that are deforesting the Amazon -- and thus, not incidentally, injuring the Amazon's ability to sequester the carbon dioxide that causes climate change. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen -- you'd think more big corporations and big investors would respect that simple truth, but the only "truth" they respect is the money that'll do them no good at the Pearly Gates. Still, with the burning Amazon all over the TV news, maybe we can make BlackRock feel the Big Stick of Bad PR. (Hate to pile on -- OK, I really don't -- but BlackRock also invests in the destruction of the indigenous folks who live in and protect the Amazon. How about that -- folks who live in a place are actually invested in protecting it! It's like an actual conservative value or something.)

Finally, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would delete that section of the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that authorizes oil and gas drilling leases in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve (or ANWR). The New York Times recently reported that our Administration said we'd get about 40 times more money out of drilling in ANWR than we're actually going to get over the next decade, but that's not news to those of us who've been following the issue since Tha Bush Mobb tried to drill the hell out of these public lands, and seriously, what kind of public servant would be persuaded by the promise of a mere one-half of one percent of our annual federal budget, and over 10 years? The kind who only listens to big donors, that's who, and that's who passed that damn tax "reform" in the first place. But we can at least rectify the injury done to our public lands by telling our House Reps to pass H.R. 1146, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps us do.

Around the table: in which we examine a lot of whining and bad arguments from right-wingers.

The National Review publishes a 13-article issue called "Against Socialism," and the incomparable Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs rips it apart. Seriously, read the whole thing, and witness how right-wingers consistently set up straw men because that's all you can do when you can't win the argument on the merits. (Former Bob Novak protege/antiwar.com contributor Timothy Carney survives Mr. Robinson's scrutiny much better than the others, which isn't surprising, since Mr. Carney's a good egg.)

Thinking maybe this particular Administration, having promised to do better on terror-related issues than its predecessors, might actually be living up to that promise? Well, Dave Lindorff at The Nation finds our government's terrorism watch lists have expanded -- apparently to include him, as he has been searched several times at airports. And surprise, surprise, our government has padded these watchlists mainly with journalists and activists. Recall that Paul Craig Roberts has more than once asked why, if a no-fly list has a million people on it, we don't have a lot more terrorist attacks.

Dahr Jamali at TruthOut examines the ongoing fires in the Amazon rainforest and finds, guess what, a right-wing asshole in charge of a government that's bending over backwards to hand over more and more of the Amazon to logging, mining, and big ag corporations. And of course Mr. Bolsanaro, as disgusting a human being as has ever walked the Earth, plans to target the indigenous populations who have done the most to protect the Amazon from corporate pollution. Which is a big deal, actually, as the region, popularly known as "the lungs of the world," produces about one-fifth of Earth's oxygen.

The New York Times begins a "1619 Project" that puts slavery more at the center of American history, and right-wingers whine about it. Rebecca Onion is absolutely correct to note that we liberals shouldn't waste our "good faith on old, dead-end conversations" with right-wingers who can't take criticism, so I'll that I think it's more patriotic to face your sins and correct them than to whine about the people who actually do it. Also, hasn't the right been telling us for years that whining isn't conservative? You do have to wonder why they do it so often.

Finally, you know our President said a lot of stupid crap on Twitter this week, and I can't even say any of it is worse than any of the other crap he's said in that forum; perhaps I'm just weary of the pile. Thus I'm going to make a simple rule for this blog: if our President said it on Twitter, I'm not covering it. Also, I have blocked our President's Twitter account, and I think all y'all ought to do the same. It'd be nice if our media would follow suit, too. We might even call it "starving the beast." (And if anyone tells you you're "violating his free speech rights," remind them that our First Amendment does not require us to sit passively while someone screams in our face.)

Action: concerning campaign finance, Social Security, and immigration.

H.J.Res. 48, the "We the People" amendment, would at last allow we good Americans to pursue our dream of campaign finance reform. Section 1 would restrict Constitutional rights to "natural persons," i.e., you and I and everyone you know -- and not "artificial entities," like corporations. Section 2 would not only allow federal, state, and local governments to restrict campaign spending again like we used to in the days of McCain-Feingold, but would instruct judges not to interpret campaign spending as "free speech." Because how many times must I tell these pimps! Speech is speech, and money is property. Defenders of dark money rush forward to remind us that being heard takes money, but in doing so they show (among other things!) their apparent inability to grasp the word "restrict," which does not mean "stop entirely." Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support campaign finance reform by passing the "We the People" amendment.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to expand, not cut, Social Security benefits by passing H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act, then the Economic Policy Institute still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would expand benefits, index benefit hikes to an inflation index that actually reflects how seniors live, and fund its expansion by taxing pay above $400,000 into the system for the first time. And how will the opponents of the Social Security 2100 Act respond? By calling Social Security an "entitlement" -- how gracious of them, to give you the thing you've worked for and paid into all your life! -- and by saying we have to cut it to avoid exaggerated future budgeting shortfalls (remember when Social Security was supposed to "run out of money" in 2016?). But saying we have to cut a cherished program that benefits all of us sooner or later really isn't the can-do American spirit.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell furniture corporation Wayfair to stop making money off our government's notorious concentration camps for immigrants, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may recall that courageous Wayfair workers walked out in late June over their employer's habit of furnishing immigrant detention centers, including centers with children separated from their families. These workers also wrote an open letter to Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah demanding that Wayfair donate the proceeds from the furniture it's already sold to a non-profit legal service and end all future contracts that enable our Administration's nefarious immigrant detention policies. And what has Mr. Shah's response been? Approximately crickets. And it's been almost two months! That means we need to keep wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR until he feels it. And then any other big corporate CEO who might enable our Administration's policies will fear it.

Action: concerning trade, food stamps, and evil media.

Public Citizen helps you tell your House Reps not to vote on our President's USMCA trade agreement until he fixes its problems. Those problems include extended intellectual property protections for big pharmaceutical corporations -- which will keep drug prices higher, and drugs less accessible to the public, for longer -- and its relatively weak labor and clean air/clean water standards. If you're thinking big pharma deserves to make more money off what it makes, remember that most drugs don't get to market without a lot of government help, i.e., taxpayer help, i.e., your help. Remember, also, that no one should have monopoly power over life-saving drugs. The USMCA will drastically curtail the use of "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) systems which nullify our laws and outsource our jobs, and that's no small thing. But the other things aren't small things, either, and we deserve the best trade agreements we can get. So get on the horn to your House Reps and communicate your will.

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed taking away state options, under the federal food stamps program, to assist working families who have significant child care and shelter bills. Sounds wonky, I know, but the end result will be no more food stamps for three million good Americans who still need it, so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our USDA to reject its own proposal to take away food stamps from so many people. No, it's not absurd to tell them to reject their own proposal -- it was absurd for them to propose something that merely injures us. And when I say "us," I do mean us -- we all pay into the food stamps program with our taxes, and any one of us could need it at any time, and we're not "lazy" or "stupid" merely because we need to avail ourselves of it. Hate to pile on -- OK, I don't -- but depriving states of flexibility in administering federal programs sure doesn't sound very conservative.

Finally, Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson called white supremacy a "hoax" a few weeks back, and then promptly went on "vacation," but now he's back, albeit with fewer advertisers, so now's as good a time as any to remind you that Media Matters still helps you tell big corporate advertisers to "drop Fox." Big cable corporations won't let us buy cable channels a la carte, so the next best thing we can do is make Fox toxic to big corporate advertisers, since as long as Fox is making money, they'll never change. At least not for the better! Pressuring Fox advertisers is already working -- Mr. Carlson's program has been hemorrhaging advertisers for a while, and big fast food chain corporation Long John Silver's has lately pulled all its ads from Fox. Still, corporations like Expedia, Allstate, and Applebee's still seem to look at Fox News as just another avenue to hawk their wares. But big corporate CEOs ought to be ashamed of themselves for giving money to Fox News. It's a good thing the Big Stick of Bad PR still works.

Around the table: featuring the horrible truth about "free" trade.

Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the state of Colorado violated the U.S. Constitution when it replaced three electors who planned not to vote for Hillary Clinton, though she won the state's popular vote. I think they ruled correctly -- and that's why we need to get rid of the Electoral College! I'm a little surprised and ashamed that it hadn't occurred to me until today that our President could win re-election regardless of his share of the popular vote, if enough electors simply buck the will of their state's electorate. If Democrats were more street-smart, they'd make the Electoral College a big campaign issue. They're not, of course, so they won't.

The incomparable Dean Baker reminds us that, contra what our President says, "China Did Not Trick the U.S. -- Trade Negotiators Served Corporate Interests." "Both Republican and Democratic administrations signed trade deals that made it easy to manufacture goods in China and other countries, and then export them back to the United States," he writes, meaning corporations could take advantage of "low-cost labor there" and "low-cost supply chains" so they could destroy their competitors and make a mint. Thus "the trade deficit was the result of their efforts to increase their profits," and American working families "lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007." In other words, the trade deficit with China is a feature of American policy, not a bug. The fact that it gives our President opportunity to grandstand about foreigners "taking advantage" of America is just icing on the cake, and our corporate overlords are nowhere near as upset about such grandstanding as they'd like you to think.

Department of Energy study finds the price of building wind farms lower than the price of building a natural gas plant. And natural gas was the "cheap" fossil fuel! Some caveats apply -- renewable energy tax credits might disappear, for one -- but note well that if our President calls all of this TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!! that his own Department of Energy said it. He does appoint "the best people" to his government, right? (But as much as he rants about "piles of dead birds," I'm sure he'll also tout the fact that three states that now get 30% of their power from wind -- Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma -- all voted for him in 2016. Why? Because while you're trying to make sense of his chaos, he just makes more chaos. And yes, I could have written that sentence about George W. Bush in 2004, too.)

Rutgers University study finds that roughly one out of every thousand black men will die during an encounter with police. Sadly, right-wingers will twist this around to SEE YOU ARE TOO TEH SAFEZ 99.9% DON'T DIEZ!!!!!, without telling you that black men and boys are 2.5 times more likely to die during police contacts than white men and boys. They'll also probably twist this around to say black men and boys are five times more likely to kill themselves than get killed by police, without mentioning, that, hello, nobody should worry about whether the next time they talk to a cop will be their last.

Finally, our President claims that Jews who vote Democrat exhibit "either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty." Presumably he means "disloyalty" to Israel, but suggesting you're disloyal to a foreign country if you oppose our President or his party is no less offensive than suggesting you're disloyal to this one. And, ah, could it be that Jewish voters went harder for Democratic Congressional candidates in 2018 than they did for Hillary Clinton in 2016 at least in part because more of them fear they'll be killed by the very same white supremacists our President has emboldened? Anyway, no President should conflate himself with our country and call his opponents "disloyal." This is a grown man acting like this.

Action: concerning public lands, racism, and equal pay.

Our Administration is desperate to open the Tongass National Forest to road-building, which seems innocuous on its face -- except that logging and mining corporations have long angled to get roads built in the Tongass so they can get their logging and mining operations in there! Hence H.R. 2491/S. 1311, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, which states that our government "shall not allow road construction, road reconstruction, or logging in an inventoried roadless area where those activities are prohibited by the Roadless Rule," as adopted in early 2001. That's right, yet again we have to tell this Administration that they have to follow legally-enacted regulations, which we might otherwise describe as "the law." But duty is duty, no matter where it takes us, so Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect public lands by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act. Obeying the law, protecting pristine areas from development -- why, that all sounds conservative, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard by now that our FBI considers black protestors a more important security threat than white racists, even though, ah, recent events would seem to counter that assessment. I mean, when mass murderers repeatedly say out loud how much they hate non-white people, wouldn't you have to pay attention? And even though police commit most of the violence that purportedly "accompanies" black protestors, our FBI has cooked up a "black identity extremist" category, which is even more absurd when you consider that for hundreds of years we systematically denied black folks any sort of identity other than chattel. Hence CREDO helps you tell our FBI to get its priorities straight, and go after white supremacists more than black protestors. If you really think black protestors have nothing really to protest anymore, well, a) you're wrong and b) that would have literally nothing to do with a reasonable assessment of whether black protestors or white supremacists are more dangerous. We fought a World War against the latter, after all.

Finally, H.R. 3804/S.2083, the Athletics Fair Pay Act, would mandate that our government pay U.S. Women's Team soccer players the same as U.S. Men's Team soccer players. Seems like a no-brainer to me, particularly since the U.S. Women's Team has won four out of the eight women's World Cup tournaments ever and the Men's Team has only been to one men's World Cup final and didn't even qualify for the tournament in 2018. And if your Tea Party uncle objects by saying oh, so now we're going to pay the WNBA the same as we pay the NBA?, well, you may be tempted to say why not?, particularly if you're not all that emotionally-invested in what your favorite athletes make (or if, like me, you're working toward that 91% tax bracket on millionaire income which would pretty much end the era of absurd pro athlete salaries). But comparing it to the NBA/WNBA is actually beside the point -- the NBA and the WNBA are private entities, but the U.S. Men's and Women's soccer team play for our country. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote equal pay by passing the Athletics Fair Pay Act.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and sane drug policy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass six good House-passed bills that "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell won't even allow them to vote on, well, you can still call them and demand both that they vote on it and that they pass it. We need to call them, because if we don't, these Senators can always say "well, I didn't hear about it from my constituents," and we should never let them use that excuse -- particularly during the month of August, when they're all in their home states meeting with constituents, at least nominally. You better believe their big donors are trying to get their attention this month! The six bills in question, as you may recall, are H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Anyone who opposes voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections doesn't deserve to be a Senator anyway.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1456/S. 597, the Marijuana Justice Act, would not only remove pot from federal scheduling (which would essentially legalize pot), but would withhold federal funding for prisons in states that haven't legalized it and have arrested a disproportionate number of folks of color for pot-related offenses. The bill would also expunge federal convictions for pot-related offenses and establish a Community Reinvestment Fund to help communities ravaged by the notorious "war on drugs." We spend too much time and money chasing after pot-smokers when they do about as much damage as drunkards do, and you no doubt recall how our effort at banning alcohol went. Of course, we also spend so much time and money chasing after pot-smokers because our government thought it was a great way to oppress civil rights protestors! Don't just take my word for it, though -- take the word of President Nixon's domestic policy guru/Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichmann! Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact saner drug policy by passing the Marijuana Justice Act.

Penny Rants for Monday, August 19, 2019: special "media coverage of Democratic Presidential candidates still sucks!" edition.

Julie Hollar at FAIR catches our "liberal" media reframing attacks on Joe Biden as attacks on Barack Obama. They take their cue from Mr. Biden on this one, of course, just as objective journalists would! Of course, in the real world, where we observe and tabulate behavior more scientifically, we find the Democrats running for President going very far out of their way not to attack the Obama legacy, such as it is, and when your right-wing pals start yelling ZOMG ALL THEY DOEZ IZ ATTACKZ TEH OBAMAZ!!!!!, the bank-shot response will be "you mean like you did for eight years?" Democrats shouldn't take every criticism of policy as an attack on a person, since that's what folks do when they regard politics as a spectator sport, rather than the participatory exercise it actually is. And if I were Mr. Biden, I wouldn't be so confident that "Democratic primary voters" will make the "judgment" he hopes they'll make. After all, if the Obama Administration were that great, we wouldn't have the President we have now.

Sen. Bernie Sanders told ralliers that the Washington Post doesn't exactly like him, and our media protested that couldn't be true because OUR BOSSEZ DO NOTZ TELLZ UZ PRECISELYZ WHATZ TO DOZ!!!!, and then we are reminded that "liberal" media bias against Sen. Sanders is actually a thing that exists and can be measured. You may remember the 16-negative-headlines-in-16-hours spasm in which the Washington Post indulged back in 2016, but you may not remember the litany of Sanders-is-factually-correct-but-understanding-the-world-is-hard-so-he-must-be-wrong "fact checks" the paper has performed on his assertions since then. Calling his policy prescriptions "unrealistic" is just icing on the cake (and, you know, plenty of can't-happen stuff has actually happened), but saying his attacks on our media "echo" our President's is just plain wrong. Sen. Sanders accuses our "media" of bias, while our President calls their accurate reporting on him "fake news"; I wonder why they would want to equate the two.

Naturally it ain't just Bernie Sanders our "liberal" media doesn't like -- the New York Times treats us to a story of Democrats "worrying" about whether Elizabeth Warren has what it takes to defeat the beast, full of the usual anecdotal evidence and "conventional" "wisdom." The article worries about her "professorial style" in paragraph six, but it had already demolished that worry in paragraph two in telling us that "(f)ew candidates inspire as much enthusiasm as she does among party voters" -- after all, folks with "professorial style" don't "inspire" "enthusiasm," do they? Naturally the article also worries about her "uncompromising liberalism," even though at least one candidate stands to her left, and uncompromising centrism is clearly overrated as a winning formula. (Aside to the Democratic voter who says "(i)f it were completely up to me, I’d vote for her": it is completely up to you. Your job is to express your will, not get caught up in the 13-dimensional chess games Our Glorious Elites would rather you play.)

Our New York paper of record went on to cover the Beto O'Rourke campaign "reboot" with horserace analysis over whether Mr. O'Rourke can "break through." And the analysis ain't even that deep: can Beto somehow stand out among all the other candidates "taking the fight" to our President? seems to be the beginning and end of it; we don't even hear from moderate Democratic voters or think-tank punditoids, as we often do with Messrs. Warren and Sanders, respectively. Certainly the Times offers no analysis of whether "taking the fight" to our President doesn't play directly into his hands -- he loves it when you say his name and treat him like he's the center of the universe, and I'm old enough to remember when "taking the fight" to George W. Bush wasn't enough to beat him, either. The more you talk about how you want to make America a more perfect union, the less you talk about our President, but our "liberal" media is content to imagine that by criticizing Messrs. Sanders and Warren over "electability" concerns and Mr. O'Rourke over "visibility" concerns, they're being fair and balanced!

Action: concerning lead poisoning and obnoxious racism.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 930 would protect Pennsylvania's children against lead in their schools' drinking water, by requiring testing, mandating testing result disclosure to parents, and keeping lead levels in school drinking water below five parts per billion. We're now five years after the Flint drinking water crisis, and residents across Pennsylvania are finding lead in their school drinking water, but we still don't have vigorous standards against lead, though any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, and they don't exactly grow out of that. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Reps to protect our children by cosponsoring and passing HB 930. What's the argument against testing our schools' water for lead, I wonder? That "we don't have the money"? If a civilization accepts that as a reason for failing to protect our children, then that civilization deserves to die -- particularly if it keeps handing out endless welfare to corporate cronies.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Twitter to do a much better job policing hate speech on its site, then Color of Change still helps you do that. And to those who squeal TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!!, recall that our First Amendment protects us from our government, not from commercial media -- just as your local newspaper is under no obligation to print your neighbor's rants about black folks merely because he wants to be heard, Twitter can ban any speech it likes, and its executives need only worry about whatever PR backlash might result. And if (as Dean Baker said not long ago) Facebook is a publisher and thus should be held to the same standards to which we hold other publishers, then so is Twitter. Twitter's CEO, unfortunately, seems to think obnoxious racism is difficult to define. Here's a clue: when they start putting up swastikas, it means they're obnoxious racists. I mean, you'd have to be, to take up the banner of a nation we defeated in war over 70 years ago.

Action: concerning financial predation and the death penalty.

Because our Administration hates all regulations that actually help good Americans, our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) wants to gut its whistleblower protection program. You can understand why governments hate whistleblowers -- because they expose the wrongdoing of politicians and political appointees! -- but the sheer hatred of the last two Administrations is still a bit surprising. Our SEC's proposed rules would automatically disqualify any whistleblowers who take their concerns directly to SEC Commissioners, would disqualify whistleblowers merely because they filled out paperwork wrong, and would put an arbitrary cap on whistleblower rewards; I'm no great defender of filling out paperwork incorrectly, for example, but the SEC's proposal would be like taking a sledgehammer to an ant. Why, it's almost like they're coming up with ways to protect their cronies from scrutiny! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our SEC to abandon its plans to make whistleblowing on financial firms a lot harder.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell Missouri's Governor to grant clemency to Russell "Rusty" Bucklew, because lethal injection would be, in his case, cruel and unusual. Mr. Bucklew suffers from a rare disease that grows tumors full of blood in his head and neck, and if he gets lethal injection, chances are those tumors would rupture and cause Mr. Bucklew to choke to death on his own blood. If you're reading that and saying so what? He's gonna die anyway, then you're doing civilization wrong -- we're supposed to be leaving as good example for future generations to follow, not wallowing in considerations of expediency until we become corrupt and cynical. And if you're familiar with the crime for which Mr. Bucklew got convicted, you might well be tempted to ask he sure didn't treat his victims with very much mercy, so why should we? Answer: the whole point of civilization is to lift ourselves above the murderer's level, not bring ourselves down to it. Maybe setting a good example will come back into vogue one day, but only if we lead.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then Color of Change still helps you do that. S. 2155 would make it a lot less attractive for big private equity corporations to do the thing they've done with impunity the last decade -- buy up large retail corporations, run them into the ground, and suck their wealth out in bonuses and fees on their way out the door. To think they have the gall to say we shouldn't "punish success," and that our richest Americans are merely the ones who have worked the hardest! How does running corporations into the ground and extracting their wealth benefit our civilization? Hell, how does it even qualify as "work"? And these predators have wiped a million jobs from our economy over the last decade; funny how folks who squeal about an increased minimum wage "killing jobs" have nothing to say about that. A lot of these folks are just nihilists, of course, but civilized people don't admire wanton destruction, let alone predators getting rich off it.

Action: concerning racism, immigration, and debt.

Wondering how hate groups get such a foothold on the internet? It ain't because they're right or because they're popular -- it's because they get money to spread their hate, and big charity corporations enable this horror by allowing some $11 million to flow through their "donor-advised funds" (or DAFs) between 2014 and 2017. Don't get the idea that "helping racists donate money to racist groups" is some kind of free speech issue, because a) money ain't speech and b) our First Amendment doesn't exist to promote hate speech, but merely to prevent folks from being thrown in jail merely because their speech is noxious to civilized people. And, ah, what law compels big corporations to fund hate speech merely because some donor wants to? If a donor wants to donate that badly, they can just write a check and send it where it needs to go; our First Amendment does not require that funding hate speech be easier than that. Hence Color of Change helps you tell big corporations to stop enabling the funding of hate groups.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell nine big hotel chain corporations to refuse ICE in their apparent quest to turn American hotels into immigrant detention centers. It's hard for me to see exactly how ICE could compel hoteliers to do this on their behalf, except through intimidation, and indeed four big hotel chain corporations (Marriott, Choice, Hilton, and Hyatt) have refused to cooperate with ICE. You don't even need to find ICE particularly odious to demand that hoteliers stop enabling them! You only need wonder why our government can't provide proper housing for detained immigrants on its own. And you might well conclude that maybe our government spends too much taxpayer money on private prison corporations -- which apparently can't do the job, or else ICE wouldn't be turning to Motel 6. Remember when we all used to imagine that evil was administratively apt? Yeah, this Administration sure is full of "evil geniuses." Nobody ever said Lex Luthor couldn't work within a budget.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) not to make it easier for collection corporations to harass us, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Yes, that's right, our CFPB, which exists to keep us away from financial predators, would allow debt collectors to call you seven times weekly per debt -- meaning per loan, per credit card, per health care bill, and heaven forbid have more than one of any of these -- and would also let debt collectors call your friends and family! I still know right-wingers who would say well, then, don't take on any debt you can't afford! They say this as if people plan to get slammed by unscrupulous health insurance corporations! But you may, if you like, point out them that debt collectors too often call folks about debts they've already paid or never had to begin with. Surely your right-wing acquaintances will find that objectionable. They are very proud people, after all.

Around the table: of unearned mandates, law-and-order posturing, and rich folks acting stupid.

Our Administration finalizes rules putatively allowing them to enforce the Endangered Species Act far less vigorously than before. Among the changes: our government can how "take into account" the purported "economic costs" of saving a species; perhaps our alien overlords will do the same when mulling whether to save humanity! And where does Commerce Secretary Ross imagine our President has a "mandate" to "eas(e) the regulatory burden on the American public"? First off, they're not "easing" a "burden" on "the public"; they're just making it easier for big corporate cronies to make more unearned millions. Second, 54% of the electorate wanted someone else to be President in 2016, so he has no "mandate" other than the ones our Constitution gives -- you know, the ones he ignores at every opportunity. So I guess we'll see these pricks in court, then.

Acting CBP Chief will not confirm for CNN's Jake Tapper that CBP is investigating any of our President's corporations for their well-reported reliance on undocumented immigrant labor. While it is true that "there are investigations going on all the time that you’re unaware of," it is equally true that I am not a schmuck, and I do not expect ICE to show up in Bedminster anytime soon, not because our President is innocent, but because they knows better. Or, maybe, because he's their bastard. I'd prefer the former reason, but either one is alien to a nation where we pride ourselves that no one is above the law.

Speaking of which, Current Attorney General William Barr tells the Fraternal Order of Police that those newly-elected district attorneys who do not shove their testicles in your face to prove their toughness are, of course, "anti-law enforcement." Here's a clue: if you say someone is "anti-law enforcement," you're pretty much telegraphing that you can't win the argument on the merits. It's like saying something is "socialist." And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that his statement that suspects should always "comply first" with police instructions and then "if warranted, complain later" will not resonate very much with families of folks executed by police after, say, pulling out their cellphone or telling a police officer they have a registered firearm in their car.

Visa CEO says he won't block gun sales, saying, as a matter of comparison I suppose, that "(w)e shouldn’t tell people they can’t purchase a 32-ounce soda" and "(w)e shouldn’t tell people they can’t buy reproductive drugs." I guess he brings "reproductive drugs" in because he's trying to say he's Hip Like Us, but comparing guns to soda is rock-stupid, because no Big Gulp has ever killed 30 people in 60 seconds. People like Mr. Kelly love saying everything is a "slippery slope," but actually almost nothing is -- civilized people have been debating the boundaries of what we allow and what we outlaw for thousands of years, but I guess corporate CEOs are too bold to acknowledge history and heritage.

Finally, wealthy supporters of our President who live in the Hamptons whine that they have to keep their support of our President "in the closet" (way to insult the entire gay experience, whiners!) for fear of ostracization and lost business, and even "physical violence." America is going into a "dark place," they say, and given our President's overt racism I sure would have said that differently! If rich folks really fear physical violence they can call a cop, but they don't seem to understand that when folks injure our community, we ostracize them, because that's how civilization is supposed to work. Or, to put it in a way our President's supporters might better understand: fuck your feelings.

Action: concerning Social Security, methane emissions, and working families.

You know how we've been talking about expanding Social Security, so that we can get ahead of talk from Our Glorious Elites about cutting "entitlements"? Well, H.R. 860/S. 229, the Social Security 2100 Act, would do just that, by actually increasing benefit amounts, increasing the amount of Social Security benefits retirees can enjoy tax-free, and creating a Consumer Price Index that accurately reflects seniors' economic trials. You know, rather than using "Chained CPI," which assumes that if something becomes too expensive, folks just switch to something cheaper. Can you imagine seniors "just switching" to cheaper drugs? No, you can't. Social Security has helped hundreds of millions of Americans live a more dignified retirement, free of poverty and want, and this is despite 40 years of politicians and their corporate paymasters trying to wreck the program and advancing every problem they've created as a reason to cut the program. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our retirements by passing the Social Security 2100 Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2711, the Methane Waste Prevention Act, would require gas drilling corporations to capture 99 percent of the methane gas that escapes from their operations within five years. H.R. 2711 would also require gas drillers to flare (or burn) that minuscule amount of methane gas they fail to trap, and would require our government to set standards for gas drilling equipment so that it doesn't leak methane gas. Methane leakage is, as you know, a byproduct of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), and it tends to trap far more carbon emissions in our atmosphere than even coal does. And methane is also, you know, usable fuel which does us not one bit of good if it's floating around in our atmosphere. Don't abide any whining about how all this is so hard and will cost gas drilling corporations money; their money isn't more important than our air and our climate. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our clean air and help slow the advance of climate change by passing the Methane Waste Prevention Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our President's nomination of Eugene Scalia to be our next Secretary of Labor, then CREDO still helps you do that. We don't oppose him because he's the late Justice Scalia's son, but because, well, of his entire career helping big corporations run roughshod over working people; the Wall Street Journal called Mr. Scalia one of the banksters' "go-to guys for challenging financial regulations," which doens't exactly speak to his love of working people, as does his work helping WalMart overturn a Maryland law which would have mandated that WalMart contribute something-anything to their workers' health insurance. Mr. Scalia also seems to have a unique animus against ergonomic safety regulations, which you'd only find sympathetic if you haven't noticed that technology has created more desk jockeys than hard hats over the years. He even lamented that such regulations would force businesses to "hire more workers," to which the only reasonable response would be: we can only hope!

Action: concerning good House bills and a bad Senate bill.

It's Monday, so it's time once again to call our Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. The House passed all these bills, but the Senate won't even vote on them, because Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) won't even hold a vote on any of them. He even calls himself the "Grim Reaper" now! Who but an insane person would be proud of the fact that they refuse to pass legislation promoting voting rights, civil rights, equal pay for women, a higher minimum wage, freedom from corporate interference on the internet, and safe and secure elections? Seriously, let that be your meditation object as you call your Senators. You'd think a few of them would want to go on the record supporting the things I've listed above, but too many of them think of politics as nothing more than team sports -- a profound offense to those of us who call America our team.

In the wake of a mass murder apparently perpetrated by someone who really, really hated immigrants, Republicans have responded swiftly -- with legislation that would further injure immigrants! Yay priorities! S. 1494, the so-called Secure and Protect Act, would (among other nefarious works) impose an unnecessarily high screening standard on potential aslyees, essentially prevent Central American refugees from even getting asylum in the U.S., and deny immigrants due process by subjecting them to abnormally fast "rocket docket" hearings. Naturally, Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called a Committee vote on the bill without even letting Democratic members speak on it, which is what you do when you're really confident in your bill. And aslyees and refugees are actually the least likely people to commit terrorism, because, you know, they're fleeing terrorism in their home countries. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to resist this persistent posturing about immigration by rejecting the so-called Secure and Protect Act.

Around the table: Joe Biden revises his career yet again, and other dramas.

Jesus Mary and Joseph now Joe Biden is trying to convince us he opposed the Iraq war and "was as outspoken as much as anyone at all in Congress," including, I presume, Barbara Lee, Bob Graham, and Ron Paul. Sooner or later even deaf, dumb, and blind infants will tire of Mr. Biden's attempts to revise his 40 years of professional capitulation to the right. And this is why he'll lose in 2020.

Alan McLeod at FAIR catches cable news channels suggesting that if you can't afford that vacation, you could just put it on a credit card! Remember when our Administration was telling folks furloughed over our President's vanity border wall tantrum that they could just take out a loan to make ends meet? This is what we get when we enable a bankster class that does no work other than converting other people's debt into their wealth.

Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upholds North Dakota law insisting that voters all have a residential street address in order to have Voter ID (and therefore to vote) -- though around 20 percent of the Native American population actually don't have these street addresses. Which our own Supreme Court will be anxious to overturn citing the "undue burden" standard in Planned Parenthood v. Casey! I kid, of course -- these Justices are very, ah, selective about their precedents.

Former #1 overall NHL draft pick Joe Murphy, who carved out a solid 15-year career as a second-line winger, is now 51, homeless on the streets of Kenora, Ontario, and showing symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE). We know football is bad for the human brain, but I bet one day we find out that hockey is even worse -- the game's effects on its players' brains hidden by the anonymity that's more likely to be their lot once they stop playing and return to their Canadian hinterland hometowns, as they tend to do.

In case you were tempted to argue that recent mass shootings mean we should give our FBI "more tools" to stop them, Chip Gibbons at In These Times reminds us that not only is the FBI more obsessed with "black identity extremists" than white racist terrorists, but it already has "extraordinary tools" that it's just not using against white racists. In other words, our FBI would rather use its vast powers against good Americans than use those powers to protect us. And naturally Joe Biden would pass a "domestic terrorism" law to respond to mass shootings, which surely wouldn't have the same ill effects as all that anti-crime legislation he's enthusiastically pushed over the years.

Finally, why does our President give a thumbs-up for the camera as he's taking a picture with an infant orphaned by the El Paso shooting? To get us to talk about that, and to get embroiled in yet another one of his dramas, that's why -- and, unfortunately, fighting drama means calling attention to the fact that it is drama. Think of it as a periodic vaccination. Also, think of what our President might not want you to find out as you're obsessing over his latest drama -- like, just as a for-example, that he still uses undocumented immigrant labor while he rails against undocumented immigrants.

Action: concerning good science, bad science, and bad media.

You've heard, no doubt, about our Administration's multitudinous attempts to hide and purge scientific information that good Americans deserve to know. Hence S. 2220, the Open and Responsive Government Act, would amend the Freedom of Information Act so that folks couldn't hide "confidential" information from the public unless it would actually cause them substantial harm. S.2220 would also specify more precisely that you can't withhold a big slab of information from the public merely because a portion of it might meet the "substantial harm" standard. These are good ideas, of course, but why are they urgent now? Because our Administration's EPA has packed its scientific advisory boards with (you guessed it) industry figures who could claim all kinds of "substantial harm" if FOIA requests would require answers from them. Of course, I'd rather not have this revolving door between corporations and our government in the first place, but in the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Open and Responsive Government Act.

Meanwhile, Sky Gray, of Asheville, NC, has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell online retail corporation Amazon to stop selling "conversion therapy" books. "Conversion therapy" -- which aims to "convert" gay folks (including children!) into straight folks by, among other odious methods, making them re-enact their sexual abuse -- is now illegal in 14 states. Are you feeling a little anxious about whether you're "suppressing free speech" by telling Amazon to do this? Rest assured that you're not -- Amazon can always say "no," after all, if they think they can withstand the bad PR that'll result. But our First Amendment only guarantees writers of "conversion therapy" books the right not to be imprisoned by our government for their speech -- it does not guarantee an audience for your speech, and it does not guarantee you the right to make money off your speech. In a sane and moral society, such books would be available at the gay-hating version of Paladin or Loompanics -- but not necessarily on America's biggest bookseller.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell corporations to stop advertising on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle on the Fox News (sic) Channel, then Color of Change helps you do that. Why? Well, because of everything they've ever said and done, really, and why do such terrible people get so many TV shows? It's like our media only care about drama! But both talking heads have also spread around plenty of racist pablum over the last few years, and with so many white supremacists going around shooting people these days, well, it's not a good look. And I wish we lived in an America where simply "changing the channel" was enough, but it's not enough, because even if we're not watching it, we're still paying for it, and corporations are still advertising on it. In the absence of a good a la carte cable packaging law, we can at least wield the Big Stick of Bad PR on their advertisers.

Action: concerning social media and Arctic drilling.

CREDO helps you tell big tech corporations Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to ban white nationalist and other hate groups from their platforms. And again, it's not a matter of "free speech no matter how noxious": our First Amendment guarantees that folks can't be put in prison for the mere fact of their noxious speech, but it does not guarantee a platform for your noxious speech, let alone a living. And let's also bury the suggestion that we merely oppose speech "we don't like" -- nobody should like it when far-right assholes cheer another racist for carrying out a mass murder! Big tech corporations (Facebook especially) act like it's so hard to keep assholes from ruining their platforms, but it really isn't -- they could stop valuing executive salaries like they're the only thing worth preserving in civilization and break off some of that money to hire more people to monitor speech on their platforms. For such powerful people, our big tech CEOs sure do act helpless an awful lot. And we shouldn't tolerate such weakness.

Meanwhile, our Department of Interior plans to push ahead with oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) this year, but Environmental Action helps you tell our Secretary of the Interior not to allow drilling in the Refuge. We call it a "refuge," after all, because we'd like some part of the old world to keep going, uninterrupted by the churning of the new one. Of course, the folks in charge of our government now, though they call themselves "conservative," don't value the past except insofar as they can convert it into money for some crony or other. And that's all we'll get by drilling in ANWR, scientists having found that we're not going to extract very much oil from the area. There is something truly noxious about converting wild places into nothing more lasting than money, which always gets spent and always cries out for replacement. Of course, such noxiousness is our President's calling card. Might we at least convert his bad example into a warning for future generations?

Around the table: no, every problem is not a Gordian knot! And other insights.

Politico wonders: "How Do You Solve a Problem Like 8chan?" Simple: you do what Dean Baker suggested we do last week -- you hold corporations like Facebook and Twitter accountable for the public postings of their users, in much the same manner you hold book publishers accountable for what they put out. (People who post privately to their friends will have to rely on their friends to tell them when they're full of it.) But you certainly don't throw up your hands and say the First Amendment "protects" hateful speech without specifying exactly how it does that (i.e., that it protects you from your government, and not your publisher).

And now for the WHEREZ TEH DATAZ!!!!!! crowd: researchers using FBI data on 248 active shooter incidents over 17 years, find that semiautomatic weapons "roughly double" victims' chances of getting killed or wounded. My initial reaction: they only double your chances of getting killed or wounded? But the Brigham and Women's Hospital study didn't count incidents with the largest death tolls or with multiple shooters. Headline from the no-gun-control-ever lobby: SEE TEH SEMIZ DON'TZ KILLZ TEH PEEPULZ MORE EFFICIENTLYZ HAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Of course, the more pertinent finding (and the one that aligns with common sense) is that semis do hit more people and thus result in more deaths.

Ben Freeman, Nia Harris, and Cassandra Simpson at TomDispatch explode the myth that military spending creates jobs. You've likely started to suspect that military spending enriches big defense contractor CEOs more than anything else, but it's nice to have some facts behind it. Lockheed's share of taxpayer money went up about 37% between 2012 and 2018, but their total workforce went down almost 13% -- and their CEO's salary went up 32%. Two other big defense contractors also cut jobs over that time, and two more only "gained" jobs because they bought other corporations. Stick that in your Tea Party uncle's hat next time he talks about defense creating jobs -- and then pivot to things that actually create jobs, like infrastructure, renewable energy, and health care spending, and you'll likely find a sympathetic audience. If only Democrats would act on this insight!

Another day, another finding that the 2017 tax "reform" hasn't goosed up capital investment like its supporters said it would, and this finding comes from our Administration's Commerce Department, which you would think would have an interest in saying the exact opposite. Then again, maybe not, as long as our President is willing to say whatever. But cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% did not, in fact, "free" corporations to spend more money on capital projects. Historically, the only thing that does that is a higher tax rate, since corporations will spend more money on capital projects once they realize it's going to get taxed away if they don't. (That's also why corporations don't really need "incentives" to do research and development -- research and development are expenses, and corporate taxes only tax profits.)

Finally, our President voices his apparent belief that his "rhetoric" not only doesn't divide our nation but actually "brings people together." And it is possible that he may be right about that one day -- at that moment where we can all observe his rhetoric bringing people together against him. Sadly, that moment isn't now, because his votaries are still too eager to make excuses for him -- this, even though conservatives always told us conservatism wasn't about making excuses for people!

Action: concerning banksters, pollution, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may well be saying to yourself, self, I'd very much like to stop Wall Street looting, too, but would this bill really do that? The answer is yes, S. 2155 would basically take all the joy banksters feel when they suck all the assets out of a corporation -- it would impose a 100 percent tax on all the fees private equity firms impose on a corporation for two years after they buy it, it would make those firms actually take on more of the debt they've assumed rather than simply transfer it back to the corporation they've bought, it would give workers more of a chance to recover what they've lost after their employer goes bankrupt, and it would make private equity firms' doings more transparent. These firms don't just kill big chain stores like Sears and Payless -- they kill local newspapers all over America, too (the Denver Post being the most famous example). And S. 2155 will help us stop them.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 707, 708, and 709 would give the state Attorney General "concurrent jurisdiction" over certain clean air and clean water laws in the state, and thus give our AG the power to initiate investigations into these matters. Given that our Attorney General is supposed to, you know, enforce the law on behalf of the people of the Commonwealth, you would think our AG would be able to do that on his own, but no -- current law mandates that our AG must first get a referral from the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) or a local district attorney. I have to admit I'm at a loss to explain why the state of Pennsylvania does it that way -- it sounds a lot like a decades-old turf battle won in favor of someone who may not even be alive now, frankly. But we don't need to put up with inter-bureaucratic turf battles, because our Attorney General answers to us. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to help our state government protect us from pollution by passing SB 707, 708, and 709.

Finally, in the wake of yet another data breach exposing the private data of over 100 million good Americans, Fight for Privacy helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass strong legislation that protects the privacy of good Americans' online information. There's no use saying if you still want privacy, don't put your information online, because putting your information online is basically necessary now, unless you pay for everything with cash and never take out a loan. I will say I continue to be disappointed with our Congressfolk's apparent inability to process the fact that we should be able to opt in to corporate attempts to sell our data to third parties. It wouldn't "break the internet" (as Sen. Toomey infamously put it in 2011), and it wouldn't even be very hard to do -- and it would protect a lot more people from a big bank that somehow decides to put all of its sensitive information on a freaking Amazon cloud server. When will folks realize that "cloud computing" doesn't actually make our lives better? It only makes it easier for big corporations to make big money.

Action: concerning Social Security, renewable energy, and Presidential bad behavior.

2020 is coming, which means more fearmongering from the Koch brothers and their like-minded ilk about "runaway" "entitlements," and which likely also means that our President will go back on his promise not to touch Social Security because of TEH DEFICITZ!!!! he made worse with his tax cuts for the rich (probably not until after re-election, though). And it also means that the "liberal" media outlets that supposedly hate our President will be considerably more blunt then he about the "need" to cut "entitlements." So let's head them off, by telling our Congressfolk that we must expand Social Security, not cut it, as Social Security Works helps you do. The haters keep trying to sound "reasonable" and "serious" about cutting Social Security, and they keep failing -- but only because we stand up to them. We worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and when we retire, we deserve to enjoy it. So don't let the haters and their scare numbers take it from us.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend funding for clean energy programs. Would it be crass to mention to them that they take big campaign donations from the fossil fuel corporations they still subsidize even though they don't really need it? No, it would not be crass. Would it be crass to mention that we just had the hottest June in recorded history and massive heat waves devastating the country in July, and that using more renewable energy and less fossil fuel energy would help us suffer less of that? Would it be crass to mention the increased health care costs from dirty air and dirty water caused by pollution from fossil fuels (and, ah, not from renewables)? The answers are, in order, "no" and "no." And though renewable energy has grown tremendously across America over the years, it still only provides about 10% of our electricity, and it still needs support from our government -- which really means support from us, the taxpayers. We should get the livable future we pay for, right?

Elyse Marin has begun a petition on Color of Change which helps you tell the Anschutz Entertainment Group (or AEG) to stop hosting our President's rallies. That's right, it's time for the Big Stick of Bad PR again -- if you're a corporate sponsor giving stadium space to our President so he can have his little Nuremberg rallies where his votaries all squeal "lock her up" and "send her back" and other noxious crap, then you deserve to be pointed out and shamed until you change your behavior. I know there are still folks who are so proud of their cynicism that they'll say well how do you say no to the President, huh? Gosh, 54% of the electorate said no to him on Election Day 2016 (though, as you know, he's not a man who takes "no" very easily!), and anyway, saying no to our President is part of our birthright as Americans, a lesson I bet meant a lot more to the cynics when Barack Obama was President. Is it too much to ask that no big arena in America enable our President's obnoxious behavior?

Action: concerning good bills, soldier pensions, and mass shootings.

That stack of good House-passed bills keeps piling up on Mitch McConnell's desk, and he doesn't care what you think about that, but that's OK, because we don't care what he thinks! Go ahead and call your Senators and 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; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act. Mob Boss Mitch ain't the boss of your Senators, after all -- you are. People say I'm naive for thinking we can get Republican Senators to pass bills supporting voting rights, civil rights, internet freedom, better paychecks, and secure elections. But what would they hate even more than passing these bills? Being humiliated and jobless, that's what, and if enough of us speak up, they'll either bow to our will or be humiliated and jobless. Having the better arguments ain't enough -- we also have to deploy them, in force.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court gave our President the green light to appropriate some Defense Department funds for his vanity border wall, and then the Pentagon announced late last week that it would divert almost $225 million in military pension funds toward the wall. Taking from our troops' retirement to keep drama going -- how utterly despicable! I wonder how our President's votaries will explain it away. Perhaps they'll say it's only $224 million, which I'm sure will comfort our retired soldiers as they make ends meet. Or they'll say they're taking a lot more from real defense spending, so shutup or he's cutting money for weapons we don't even use, and that's a good thing -- but neither of these arguments can magically convert taking pension money into a good thing. Our President's phone number is 1.215.456.2011. He doesn't care what you and I think, but he's also sensitive to bad PR, so doing our duty might actually yield a result here.

Finally, on the heels of yet another mass shooting perpetrated by yet another white supremacist asshole, too many of our politicians are offering "thoughts and prayers" again, apparently having completely forgotten the backlash they got over their "thoughts and prayers" last year. Hence Greyroots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to get to work and pass some common-sense gun control legislation for once. Since I oppose very much control of handguns and hunting rifles, I'm going to use Greyroots' contact tool to specify the common-sense legislation I want -- legislation that would amend the National Firearms Act to make it just as hard for folks to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons. And all that bill did was get tommy guns off our streets. Our main job as civilized people is to fix problems without resorting to violence; if we don't commit to that, we'll never have enough weapons for the resulting apocalypse anyway.

Around the table: concerning the "liberal" media, Medicare-for-All, taxing the rich, job-killing pollution, and meatless meat.

Julie Hollar at FAIR notes that CNN approached its recent Democratic Presidential debates in a matter "more befitting a football game than an exercise in democracy," which "Shows the Need for Independent Debates." I'd have PBS do the debates, frankly, since they're more accountable to us than cable news networks, which are both the devil and the spawn of the devil. Which is worse, though: relying on far-right talking points for your questions, or turning every debate into a big drama? The answer: they're both wings of the same evil bird.

Marcia Angell at USA Today puts it better than anyone else I've heard: "Not only can we afford Medicare for All, we can’t afford anything else." The article makes other good points, but go ahead and use "not only can we afford Medicare for All, we can't afford anything else" as your meditation object. But since people are still going to ask how we'll pay for it, how about assessing employers a fee per employee? It'd have to be lower than what corporations are paying private insurers per employee now, but with Medicare's low overhead, that shouldn't be difficult. And no corporations won't "just fire people" in order to pay out less money -- though banksters are doing their best to change this, corporations still have to do things to make money, and doing things means having workers.

Steve Wamhoff at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy informs us that a "wealth tax," such as that proposed by Sen. Warren (D-MA), would be much easier to implement than you think. You can almost dismiss Mr. Delaney's "concerns" merely because he raises them, but I find it quite interesting that the wealth tax's opponents won't tell you it's immoral or counterproductive but "unworkable," when valuing unsold assets actually isn't a complete mystery -- as you'd know if you've ever shopped around for a house. Also, too, don't believe the hype that a wealth tax would be "too complex," and certainly don't believe it from rich folks who seem to spend all their time making our tax code actually too complex.

Surprise, surprise, our EPA fines Koch Industries subsidiary Georgia-Pacific $600,000 for violating the Clean Air Act at its Crosset, AK paper mill, and requires that the mill install $4.9 million in equipment that'll help it comply -- and then Georgia-Pacific partially closes said plant, firing over 500 workers. And now the Kochtopus will point to this occurrence and say SEE? TEH REGULASHUNZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!!! Given that the Crosset plant is polluting so much that a) it's been all over the news and b) even this EPA fined them, you might well conclude that pollution kills jobs, not efforts to stop pollution.

Finally, Rowan Jacobson at Outside explains how alt-meat (i.e., meat from plant-based sources that has both the taste and texture of meat) has risen so quickly that it might be "The Beginning of the End of the Meat Industry." Perhaps not surprisingly, some big meat corporations are suddenly anxious to get Big Gummint help in the form of labeling laws! But others, like Tyson and Perdue, are making noises about going along, and anyway I'd prefer a world where your choices are either alt-meat or meat from small producers. (Warning, though: Impossible burgers use at least one genetically-modified ingredient, and they're apparently the class of alt-meat burgers.)

Action: concerning campaign finance reform, data security, and working families.

S.J.Res. 51 would amend our Constitution so that federal and state governments could regulate campaign finance, as they did before our Supreme Court's notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision, which cited "corporate personhood" in striking down many of our campaign finance laws. I bring up those halcyon days of campaign finance regulation because far too many right-wingers get far too much say in America, and they really get their shovels dirty trying to criticize the amendment. ZOMG TEH INCUMBENTZ WILLZ PREVENTS TEH OPPONENTZ FROM RAIZING TEH MONEYZ!!!! is just one of the many things that never happened back in the day when we regulated campaign finance a lot more stringently than we can now thanks to our Supreme Court. ZOMG TEH PREACHURZ WILL BE TEH SILENCEDZ!!!! is, of course, another. People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to do the people's will on campaign finance reform and pass S.J.Res. 51.

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of yet another reported data breach exposing the personal data of over 100 mullion customers, this one at Capital One, Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass vigorous reforms that would help good Americans protect their personal data from hackers and indifferent corporations. These reforms would include stricter enforcement of our laws and harsher penalties for breaking them, as well as a "credit freeze by default" for all Americans, which would automatically freeze your credit at all three credit reporting bureaus until you ask for a freeze to be lifted. A lot of good folks don't go through the trouble of a credit freeze because it can be tedious and confusing, and instead of complaining that folks are lazy and they should just go ahead and do it because it's important, we should ask why it can't be easier. This is the future, after all.

Finally, you may recall that former Administration Labor Secretary Alex Acosta resigned recently, due to the cush plea deal he appears to have negotiated (as a federal prosecutor in Florida in 2008) over the Jeffrey Epstein sex crime case ("the best people!"), but as you surely know by now, they always find someone worse, and so it goes with our President's new nominee to be Secretary of Labor, Eugene Scalia. Yes, he's the son of the late Supreme Court Justice, but more pertinent to his potential new position is his long career helping corporations screw over their workers and advocate against government regulations -- indeed, given that all of this is right up our President's alley, you have to wonder why he didn't pick Mr. Scalia first, instead of Mr. Acosta, who may not have been anti-worker enough for our President's liking, and who certainly wasn't dramatic enough. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the Scalia nomination.

Around the table: starring Saint Reagan, the racist! And Rand Paul, the bastard!

Jim Naureckas at FAIR reminds us that "Ronald Reagan's Racism" -- as recently exposed on previously-unscrutinized Nixon tapes -- "Should Come as No Surprise." Nor, I might add, should his cleverness about hiding his racism come as a surprise -- as Mr. Goldwater explained his opposition to the Civil Rights Act by saying "(y)ou can't pass a law that will make me like you or you like me," Mr. Reagan framed his opposition to a successful open housing referendum by saying "I have never believed that majority rule has the right to impose on an individual as to what he does with his property," all of which, of course, distracted us from these initiatives' true aim: to prevent people from taking away the rights of other people on the basis of skin color. It almost makes our current President's artless brutality refreshing. I said "almost."

The incomparable Dean Baker asks a question I haven't heard anyone else ask yet: "Why is Facebook, the World's Largest Publisher, Immune to Publishing Laws?" Long story short: people post a lot of false (and damaging in the legal sense) stuff on Facebook, but if our laws treated Facebook as a publisher, which it is, then Facebook would have to a) remove the false/damaging stuff and b) post prominent corrections so that everyone who saw the false/damaging stuff would see the correction. You know, like every other publisher has to do. That might sound like a lot of work, and might actually require Facebook to hire more workers and pay them well, but I've always believed that work builds character, and that adherence to the values of our civilization is the best job-creator.

Ho hum, more than half of our President's trade-aid-to-farmers went to only one-tenth of the farmers in the program. And our USDA claims that this is how the program is supposed to work! No, really, they said, and I quote, "the more acres they farm and bushels per acre they produce, the more assistance they receive." I guess they no longer believe that economies of scale "reduce costs." (As an aside, I'd be wary of suggesting that this is uniquely "a time when the number of mid-sized family farms is declining," because that's been happening for decades, and it's because our government no longer cares about consolidation or monopolies.)

Rand Paul offers to pay Ilhan Omar's way back to Somalia so she can "appreciate America more." Yeah, let's send people running from people trying to kill them back to the people who were trying to kill them, hardy har har. One more time: trying to improve America does not make you "ungrateful," nor does it mean you "don't love America enough." It's like these people think "a more perfect union" is some kind of magic spell, and not a phrase that actually means something.

Finally, let's address the ubiquitous center-right talking point that you shouldn't support an actual liberal for the Democratic Presidential nomination because Democrats wouldn't have the numbers in Congress to pass the legislation they propose. I was about to say this is something only cowards say -- don't support someone you believe in, it'll all end in tears! -- but it's actually worse than that: the No-We-Can't Caucus aren't cowards themselves, but folks who want you to be cowards. And why? Because they fear what we can do and will do when we stop obsessing about them! Our job as citizens, after all is to communicate our will to our representatives in such frequency and in such numbers that they do our will; our job is not to figure out which nominee is the most likely winner so we can be winners too, because that's playing their game. And history is, as usual, also instructive: the day before Election Day 1980, Democrats held 58 seats in the Senate, and you know what happened after that -- an "unelectable" extremist changed everything about politics for the next several decades.

Action: concerning debt collectors, food safety, and prison privatization.

Because our Administration only works for bosses and not for people, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) is as we speak planning to allow debt collectors to harass and abuse customers even more than they do, in part by allowing debt collectors to send an unlimited number of texts and emails without customer consent. If you're sitting back thinking well then they shouldn't have run up the debt in the first place!, please do two things: a) slap yourself, b) contemplate that not getting deathly ill or having massive student debt may be a matter of luck rather than superior intellect, and c) consider that debt collectors often have bad information and thus call people who do not actually owe them any money! Now imagine debt collectors calling every damn day to demand payment on an unowed debt. Empathy: it's not actually that hard! Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your CFPB to scrap its plans to let debt collectors harass and abuse good Ameicans even more than they do now.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to implement a new rule limiting the amount of pathogens like E.coli in the water they spray on our food. Sounds fairly commonsensical, doesn't it? Not to this Administration, where they seem to think that delay, delay, delay is the American way. And they're slow-walking these food safety rules a little over a year after an E.coli breakout among Romaine lettuce killed five folks and sickened another 210 across 36 American states. If "five deaths" doesn't sound that impressive to you, please do four things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider whether anyone should die from a damn salad, 3) imagine it happening to someone you love, and 4) slap yourself again, because even contemplating 2) and 3) isn't enough to expiate your sin. And if you're tempted to think the FDA's delay saves corporations money and regulatory headaches, think about how rising health care costs might mean more than that. And maybe slap yourself again.

Finally, we've managed to get six big banking corporations to stop giving new loans to private prison corporations, and the commitments from JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust Bank, BNP Paribas, and Fifth Third Bancorp represent almost three-quarters of the money private banks currently get -- but that still leaves over a quarter of the money! Hence Moms Rising helps you tell PNC, Barclays, and other banking corporations to stop profiting from our Administration's cruelty. And I don't think I have to tell you stories of kids being torn from their parents and sleeping on concrete floors in detention centers in order to persuade you to join this call. All I need to tell you is that imprisoning folks for whatever reason is something we should be doing, as a civilization and as owners of our government. We should not leave it up to some private corporation that cares first and foremost about their bottom line. And once we fully grasp that our own taxpayer money funds cruelty, we'll be better positioned to stop it, as is our right and our duty.