Thieves in the Temple.

Penny Rants for Saturday, December 28, 2019: lies, damned lies, and "winning" arguments with liberals.

Our President has put up a website called "Snowflake Victory" -- hope or fear, I can't tell! -- which purports to tell you how to win arguments with your liberal relatives over the holidays. But clearly he's not trying to win arguments with liberals, who will not be won over by all the childishness, cherry-picking, baiting-and-switching, scare numbers, and outright lies -- he's looking to convert less politically-aligned folks who might be overhearing. After all, everyone agrees that it's possible to "have a strong economy and a clean environment at the same time," but not everyone knows that it's more possible when a) your predecessor's clean air and clean water regulations are starting to have a positive effect right as you take office and b) federal courts strike down most of your attempts to roll back those very same regulations! And I do find it highly amusing to see these folks talk about "winning arguments with facts and reason," when they're the first ones who tell you facts and reason don't matter after you confront them with actual facts and reason. It's almost as amusing as hearing the "Fuck Your Feelings" crowd constantly whine about their own feelings.

From the "Wrong Headline" file: an Economist/YouGov poll finds, according to Newsweek, that "Almost 50% of Americans Say Donald Trump Will Go Down in History as (a) 'Poor' or 'Below Average' President,", but add up the 40% who said "poor" and the 9% who said "below average" and that still leaves a majority (51%) of Americans who don't agree. Eight percent said history would regard him as "average" (I bet that verdict would really stick in his craw!) and nine percent had no discernible opinion, leaving 12 percent who voted "above average" and 22 percent who voted "outstanding," that last figure mapping quite well onto my long-expressed suspicion that a quarter of our electorate is insane. These figures won't predict the 2020 election very well, of course -- people who think he's "average" or have no opinion of the man certainly don't seem likely to vote against him because he got impeached, do they? They're more likely to get "sick of all the partisan bickering" and stay home, especially after our President runs the most negative campaign in American history regardless of how "spotless" his do-nothing, please-everyone opponent supposedly is.

Light posting notice of death and doom and horror and terror and probably fury also.

So it looks like I won't post anything new until after the New Year, when we'll start (of course!) with the ever-longer list of good House-passed bills the Senate won't touch.

In the meantime, this blog does have a Facebook page (it's right here), and if I find any good memes over the next two weeks, I'll share them with you there.

We've done a lot of good work in 2019, but we've got a lot more to do in 2020, and I hope you will keep coming to this site and keep using the action alerts here to tell your Congressfolk (and state legislators, and corporate leaders, and maybe even our President) to do the right thing. Thank you for all your efforts -- even during the bleakest times, these efforts help us move forward, even if we don't see that right away.

Action: concerning payday lenders, pollution, and food safety.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to crack down on payday lenders. Part of the crackdown you would ask for would be a 15% cap on interest rates, and that would be a major reform -- and not even one that's "never been tried," either! After all, our soldiers already get this protection from the law, and they surely do deserve it (and are especially vulnerable to payday lenders), but so do we all. Of course, our Administration, flush in campaign contributions from payday lenders, has glommed on to this extremely unpopular sector of the economy just like they glommed on to the extremely small and entirely corporate anti-net neutrality crowd. Sometimes it's like they're trying to screw everything up, and sadly our "liberal" media won't ask our President a simple question: why does he think payday lenders need more welfare handouts from our government? Maybe they're afraid the answer will be rock stupid, but that's all the more reason we need to hear it. In the meantime, let's communicate our superior wisdom to our Congressfolk.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: despite the enduring unpopularity of pollution, and the enduring popularity of clean water, Pennsylvania legislators are actually trying to pass SB 790, even though it would let oil and gas corporations replace water they've ruined with unsafe water, even though it would let the state pre-empt local and municipal ordinances aimed at protecting clean water (now there's some small-government conservatism for you!), and even though it would let municipalities spray drilling wastewater on roads to keep dust down (that's a zombie that never seems to die no matter how many headshots it gets!). These corporate welfare proponents like to say it's a choice between creating jobs and creating no jobs, but you know what we call that, right? A manufactured hostage situation ("put up with corporate welfare handouts, or you'll all be out of work!"), and as Americans we should never tolerate that. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state assemblyfolk to protect us from pollution by rejecting SB 790.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation giving our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) the power to investigate food poisoning outbreaks -- you know, like the fifth E.coli outbreak in Romaine lettuce of the past two years -- then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. The bill in question would be S. 2958, the Expanded Food Safety Investigation Act, which would, in its own words, give our FDA the "authority to conduct microbial sampling on concentrated animal feeding operations as necessary to facilitate a foodborne illness outbreak investigation, determine the root cause of an outbreak of foodborne illness, or address other public health needs." You might better know the "concentrated animal feeding operation," or CAFO, as a factory farm, and you likely know that factory farms are justifiably prime suspects in food poisoning outbreaks. And small farmers don't run factory farms, so don't let anyone tell you this bill is "anti-small farmer" without asking them if they're pro-food poisoning.

Action: concerning impeachment, government spying, and discrimination.

The full House votes on impeaching our President today or tomorrow, so call your House Reps and tell them to vote yea to send formal impeachment charges to the Senate. The charges are abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and Senate Republicans are eager to receive these charges so they can carefully and thoroughly refute them! I kid, of course -- Messrs. McConnell and Graham have both said they want to get this over with as soon as possible, truth and duty be damned. But don't be swayed by them -- if Republicans ever had a case in defense of our President, we'd have heard it by now, instead of endless whining about "process" and "politics." Don't be swayed by the long odds of ever getting a conviction, either. And certainly don't be swayed by reports suggesting that our President is really sweating the indignity of getting impeached. How likely is it that he's ever sweated any indignity? No, the man loves drama, and he loves playing the victim, too, so a short Senate trial ending in "vindication" won't necessarily be a boon to him.

Meanwhile, the Democratic House, in a fit of year-end budgetary capitulation that you'd think they'd know how to prevent by now, extended the notorious Section 215 of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act through March, so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to curtail government spying by repealing Section 215. I've been promoting the "even our NSA says it doesn't need Section 215" line for a while now, and it is significant that even our big spying agency doesn't want that particular spying power, but we also must remember that a) we have a President who openly tries to use our government to spy on his political enemies, like we should care about his problems or something, and b) we also have a President who loves calling people traitors and encouraging his votaries to call for the deportation of some of his political enemies, and surely we don't think a man like that deserves the power to collect email and phone data without a warrant. And certainly not in the name of "national security"! I keep saying he is not America, and maybe he'll never hear it, but mainly I say it so you do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to scuttle its own proposal to allow "religious" organizations to take part in government grants and still discriminate against people in violation of the law, then the ACLU still helps you do that. The ACLU sure does give some good examples of what might happen if our Administration gets its way: "Meals on Wheels and other HHS-funded community meal programs designed to support older adults could refuse to deliver food to older Americans who are LGBTQ. Federally funded foster care agencies could refuse to place children with families because of the prospective families' sexual orientation or religion, regardless of the children's needs. Head Start grant recipients and other federally funded childcare facilities could refuse to serve children with same-sex parents. They could also refuse to provide services to transgender youth." Ain't none of that ish cool, so let's make sure our Administration knows that -- because even if they defy us, we might help them lose in court.

Action: concerning online privacy, flavored e-cigarettes, and shareholder power.

You recall that Congress went to great lengths in 2017 to repeal FCC regulations that would have protected your online privacy? Well, S. 2968, the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act, would help make up for that notorious act, and if you read it online, you'll be able to imagine right-wing heads exploding at some of the bill's subtitles. A "Right to Data Security"? A "Right to Delete"? A "Right to Controls"? Gosh, they'll say, don't rights come with responsibilities? It would be strange for them to say that, since the big telecom corporations actually act irresponsibly, by selling your data willy-nilly, failing to be transparent about it, losing your data to hackers, and not letting you just say no to their sale of your data. But the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act would help fix a lot of that -- yes, I'd make the big telecoms ask you to "opt in" to data sales, rather than force consumers to "opt out" of them, but this bill will do a lot of good. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect your private data by passing the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act.

Meanwhile, you recall that our President announced he was going to ban flavored e-cigarettes, so he could help prevent children from becoming addicted to them? Well, the tobacco lobby got to him, and he backed down. So courageous! So resolute! So masculine! Of course, his votaries probably figure he already did the deed just because he said so, but those of us in what Karl Rove once derisively called the "reality-based community" remember what really happened, and we're all about helping people do the right thing, so Penn PIRG helps you tell our President to restart his effort to ban flavored e-cigarettes. But wait! you might be saying, you also advocate for the legalization of marijuana? Isn't that hypocritical? Well, no -- the key word in all of the above is children. The law doesn't allow children to drink beer or smoke regular cigarettes, so why would we allow them to smoke highly-addictive e-cigarettes? And why would we allow the existence of cigarettes specially flavored to draw children into that habit? Civilized people wouldn't.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to reject its own proposal to take power away from shareholders, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. The SEC's proposal, as you may recall, would require you to own ten times more in shares before you could even introduce a shareholder resolution, and if you're the kind of person who flinches at the idea of buying into a democratic process, no doubt you also flinch at the SEC's proposal. But in an era where our government has largely abdicated its responsibility to govern on the people's behalf, shareholder resolutions are too often that one tool that might induce a corporation to change its behavior, whether that means getting a corporation to adopt more climate-friendly practices or stop discriminatory hiring practices. So naturally the Crony-in-Chief's SEC wants to put a stop to all of that! This Administration hates progress, of any kind, with a passion bordering on insanity. But they don't get all the say in America. We do.

Around the table: why our media ignores the Afghanistan papers, and other hard truths.

Alex Shephard at The New Republic wonders "Why the Media Is Ignoring the Afghanistan Papers." Short answer: "everyone is to blame, which means no one has much of an interest in keeping the story alive." Somewhat longer answer: our media's thirst for partisan conflict makes coverage of "bipartisan failure" harder. Also, too, our President spews forth so much drama that "more complex stories, like the situation in Afghanistan, are often buried in favor of the political equivalent of sports sideline reporting." Mr. Shephard may be too nice to spell it out, but I also think we've become so cynical, all of us, that when we hear evidence that our government knew it was bollocksing up Afghanistan, we're proud of saying "and you're surprised?" As Americans, we deserve a better government than that, meaning we deserve actual surprise at such things.

This is really good news: the ACLU of Kansas has managed to shut down that state's notorious Interstate Crosscheck program, meaning it won't operate in the 2020 elections. That doesn't mean the ACLU has killed it dead, since it used a rather arcane argument to do so (that Interstate Crosscheck didn't keep voter data secure, of all things), and a lot of states still have previous Interstate Crosscheck databases and might use them to purge more voters. And the notorious Kris Kobach might create new purge lists himself -- though he's also running for Senate in 2020, and running a vote suppression operation while running for Senate might actually make him lose. Yes, even to a Democrat! Hell, he did it a year ago.

Ho hum, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy studies corporate tax avoidance during the first year after the 2017 tax "reform" that dramatically cut the corporate tax rate, and finds over 350 Fortune 500 corporations paying, on average, a little over half the new 21% rate. That tax "reform" cut the tax rate (from 35% to 21%) without closing corporate tax loopholes, but that shouldn't surprise us when our nominally "liberal" politicians' position is "cut the tax rate, but close the loopholes." An actual liberal position would be "tax the corporations harder and stop giving them welfare handouts." And then you might have actual compromise in America again. Maybe even actual bipartisanship!

Scientists point to another driver of climate change: inefficient energy grids. These energy losses -- caused by (among other things) bad wiring, poor and/or corrupt management, or natural disasters -- emit almost as much carbon as heavy trucks do, which is saying something. Getting energy corporations to upgrade their infrastructure, of course, is like pulling teeth -- they always want a welfare handout or six just to do the thing they should already be doing, the thing we would simply make them do if our lawmakers didn't all have spines of jelly.

Finally, Republicans are jumping up and down about New Jersey House Rep. Jeff Van Drew's announcement that he'll switch to the Republican party shortly, but the part of America not responding to that news with "Jeff Van Who?" is probably responding "he was a Democrat?" And how precious he is, complaining that impeachment isn't "bipartisan" enough -- has he been awake the last couple of decades? I suspect he'll lose the 2020 Republican primary in New Jersey's 2nd -- he may not even come in second! -- and then a year or two later he'll imagine the Democrats are desperate enough to take him back, and he'll be wrong, all of which will make him (as Mario Cuomo might say) just another walnut in the batter of eternity.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and pollution (among other issues).

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And this week we add H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act -- a better bill now, thanks in large part to your pressure -- and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, which would shine a light on those big telecom fees and taxes you find in your cable and cellphone bills. These are all good bills, advancing (among other causes) voting rights, consumer protections, and better health care policy, and your Senators have no excuse for rejecting them. No, TEH CREEPINGZ SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! is not an excuse.

Color of Change helps you tell Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) to reject attempts by Formosa Plastics to build a giant petrochemical plant in an almost-50% black community. Why? Because Formosa's plants tend to pollute more than virtually every other plant in America. Because this particular Formosa plant would emit ethylene oxide, which a 2016 EPA study found causes cancer even with "limited" exposure. Because big corporations have this nasty habit of plopping down their dirtiest plants in neighborhoods of color. Because the area where they'd build is already well-known as "Cancer Alley." Because Formosa has already paid Texas residents $50 million for illegally dumping pollutants in their communities. And because Gov. Bel Edwards -- fresh off a re-election more improbable than his first election in 2015 -- has demonstrated a willingness in the past to reward big polluting corporations even whey they don't follow the law. Hey, he doesn't have to run again, so maybe he should try not enabling big polluting corporations, particularly when they practice environmental racism.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its own proposal to weaken coal ash storage regulations, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Our President's votaries like to think he's "gotten rid of burdensome regulations," though we know he really hasn't -- courts keep striking his regulatory changes down, because you can't just do whatever you feel like doing when you run a government! But the next time your War on Terror/Tea Party deficit hawk/Regulation Nation/Blue Lives Matter/anti-immigration-but-not-a-white-supremacist-I-swear uncle says our President has "gotten rid of burdensome regulations," feel free to ask if allowing big coal corporations to avoid closing their unlined coal-ash ponds that leak into our water tables is more "burdensome" to big coal corporations than water pollution is to, you know, the rest of us. I know the good citizens of Roane County, TN and Eden, NC -- to name the scenes of two infamous coal ash pond spills -- would tell you which is more of a burden.

Around the table: important lessons from the week, including yet another lesson from our President in How Not to Be.

Bad news: as we feared, and despite our best efforts, the House passed a defense authorization bill without any of the amendments limiting our involvement in the war on Yemen, preventing unilateral war with Iran, or stopping defense spending on our President's vanity border wall. The bill would grant federal employees parental leave, and it would curtail our military's use of PFAS chemicals, but the bill also doesn't go far enough in keeping them out of our drinking water, and doesn't even have an amendment (which had actual bipartisan support) helping military families on food stamps. In the words of one antiwar activist, Democrats got "completely rolled" on this bill. The good news is that we don't trust them to do the right thing; we trust ourselves to do the right thing, and if we don't get the results we deserve, we work harder.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY) tells Fox News (sic) that he and our President's counsel will be in "total coordination" during his impeachment trial. As Rep. Jeffries keenly points out, imagine a jury saying it will be in "total coordination" with a defendant during a criminal case and you'll understand how utterly corrupt that statement is. In past years, a politician would never have said this out loud, and yet the fact that Mr. McConnell said it on Fox News (which, ah, has a rather selective viewership) rather than, say, your local nightly newscast (which will more likely attract a broader cross-section of your community) hints at how corrupt our politicians might yet become.

I would caution against viewing the Conservative Party's resounding victory in this week's British elections as a 2020 harbinger, except that the Tories, at least, could convincingly identify themselves with one side or the other in the Brexit debate, while Labour seemed to be try to have it both ways -- and, how about that, our Republican incumbent will most assuredly campaign against "free" trade in 2020, while most of his possible Democratic challengers will most assuredly try to have it both ways. As for the sheer size of the loss, I suppose it's possible Labour just threw it, in the belief that the Tories will likely bollocks up Brexit again either by exiting wrong or just failing to exit, but we all know by now the dangers of assuming a nominally liberal party is playing 13-dimensional chess. (However, for those who think the elections are a resounding rebuke of "socialism": how well, exactly, did those center-right Labour leaders do in 2010 and 2015?)

Our "liberal" media is still trying to puff up the Pete Buttigieg candidacy, hastening, even, to (in Joshua Cho's words) "portray() a lack of voter support as an obstacle to their preferred centrists’ ascent, rather than evidence of a problem with the centrists for not supporting a progressive political agenda representative of most voters." In other words, Pete Buttigieg could be President, if not for those pesky voters! But I don't think Bernie Sanders would get "liberal" media plaudits for flip-flopping on Medicare for All, as Mr. Buttigieg has done, because the rules for moderates and right-wingers are always different for actual liberals. And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we'll fight the way we need to, and the sooner we'll win.

Hate to pile on the Buttigieg Boom -- OK, I don't -- but former health care executive Wendell Potter tells us that Mr. Buttigieg's work at McKinsey entailed, in part (and in Mr. Buttigieg's words), "performing analytical work...identifying savings in administration and overhead costs," which Mr. Potter suggests is code for "laying off workers, offshoring, and hiking rates." I guess Mr. Potter would know, and since I take the Parable of the Prodigal Son seriously, I also think he's courageous for saying so. You'll want to remember that if Mr. Buttigieg were the nominee, our President would never shut up about "why Pete Buttigieg wants to keep his work at McKinsey so secret," as if he himself hasn't spent the last couple of years trying to keep everyone away from his tax returns, but that hypocrisy won't elect Mr. Buttigieg, since he has nothing to offer voters except elite fever dreams about his "electability." I'd call all that ironic, but I demand more from irony than yet another stomach ache.

Finally, I try to avoid discussing the Drama-King-in-Chief as often as possible, but him telling Time's new Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg, that she has "anger management" issues is beyond disgusting. The man who shouts at everyone all the time doesn't get to lecture anyone about "anger management" -- particularly not, you know, folks angry that the adults are going to make their planet uninhabitable. This may be a cue to our "liberal" media that it shouldn't assume that if the President says it, it must be news -- and that if this President says it, it's more likely a lesson for America in How Not to Be.

Action: concerning social media, corruption, and shareholder power.

In the wake of the news that Facebook has resisted pulling obviously untruthful political ads from our President, the news that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has met with far right-wingers (including our President!) on several occasions recently, and, of course, our collective memory of how much obnoxious and just-plain-wrong stuff has been spread around on Facebook over the years, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Facebook's role in the right-wing propaganda effort. Because what if it isn't mere incompetence and "unintended consequences"? What if it isn't jes' folks connecting with each other and "being the media"? What if it's malice? What if Mr. Zuckerberg is just another billionaire who thinks his perceived superiority preordained his success, and the rest of us are just trash who should've worked harder? Most of Our Glorious Elites feel that way, as you know, and the ones who ascend to that level may feel that way more acutely than those who were born there. But letting them have all the say about everything, well, that's not democracy, is it?

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell Republican Senators to return any campaign contributions arranged by our President, and reject any future contributions from him as well. Regardless of how you may feel about the "overuse" or the "process" or the "political nature" of impeachment, how can you fail to see our President suddenly arranging campaign contributions for Republican Senators up for re-election in 2020 as anything but bribery? Time was Republican Senators would have rejected such contributions for fear of merely appearing corrupt, but not now -- as too many of Our Glorious Elites still yammer on about the "damage to our values" allegedly caused by abortion and gay marriage and transgender folk in our public restrooms, they continue to inflict real and lasting damage to our values by supposing that "everyone does it" or "everyone would do it" whenever we shine a light on fairly obvious corruption. But "everyone does it" is not the same as saying "it's right," is it? The folks who decry situational ethics the most too often practice it the most. And they don't get all the say around here.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to reject its proposal to weaken shareholder power, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. As always, you have to ask: what are big corporations afraid of? That those who invest their hard-earned money will tell them to run things differently than they're inclined to do? That shareholders will make them treat gays better, treat workers better, prepare for climate change better? That shareholders will demonstrate further that money isn't the only reason to make a decision about how to run a corporation? Or are executives afraid of anyone other than themselves making those decisions? I mean, I like to think the best of people, I really do, but big corporate executives make that so, so difficult. It's like they only value shareholders for the money they bring in! Myself, I prefer democracies to set-ups you have to buy into, but our SEC exists pretty much to protect shareholders from corporate tyranny, so let's remind them not to enable the tyrants.

Action: concerning Social Security, public housing, and our Post Office.

S. 2733, the so-called TRUST Act, would of course create a fast-track process to cut Social Security "behind closed doors," as Sen. Ernst might put it. Because how else can you cut Social Security? The politicians pretend Social Security is going to go belly-up any minute -- I'm old enough to remember when they said it would go belly-up in 2016! -- when actually it'll pay out full benefits until 2037 and we could put it on sounder footing (with expanded benefits!) if we merely taxed income above $132,000 into the system. But that's just impossible, says the "bipartisan" "consensus" among our elected officials, which has little to do with reality as ordinary Americans experience it, and sadly the TRUST Act has four co-sponsors among the Democratic caucus. They keep using that word "bipartisan", but I do not think it means what they think it means. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject secret Social Security cuts by rejecting the TRUST Act. (Those four Senators are Messrs. Manchin, Sinema, Angus King, and Doug Jones, if you're looking to do more.)

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the infamous Faircloth Amendment, which has stymied the building of public housing for the last two decades. The Faircloth Amendment represents yet another capitulation by nominal Democrat Bill Clinton to the far right; we said Republican moderates were useless the other day, but that's no less true of Democratic ones. And guess what's happened in the meantime? A major housing bubble burst, throwing millions of good Americans out of their homes, and several major American cities (and minor ones -- hello, Berkeley, California, where the $400,000 listings are all empty lots) have become too expensive for folks to live in. Oh, and America has 50 million more people now, and they can't live in tents. Republicans used to say that when the "free" market failed us, government had to step in; now they say "oh, the free market failed you? Well, tough toodles for yoodles!" But we don't need to take that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to reject any Postmaster General appointee who aims to privatize the service, then Progress America still helps you do that. Too many right-wingers say PRIVATIZE TEH POST OFFICEZ!!!! as if it will cure all of America's ails; these folks seem unaware (do I mean "unaware"? Perhaps I do!) that our Post Office has taken exactly zero dollars in taxpayer money for operating expenses since 1982 -- or that our Constitution literally mandates the creation and Congressional oversight of a national post office. But, if anything, we should bring our Post Office more under the American people's control. If we did that, we could more easily reinstitute the postal banking service that was a regular feature of our Post Offices until the late 1960s, and that would better serve urban and rural folks banksters don't bother to serve -- certainly it would serve them better than check-cashing joints! But if we privatize our Post Office, that won't ever happen -- and good Americans won't get the services they pay for and deserve.

Action: concerning transparency, privatization, and robocalls.

Our Treasury Department plans to change campaign finance rules so that big political organizations can keep their big-money donors secret! Specifically, Treasury wants to make such campaign finance disclosure mandatory only if the IRS is auditing that particular group. What one has to do with the other I'll never know -- the whole point of disclosure is to shine sunlight on who's trying to buy our democracy, and no it's not about privacy rights, because money isn't speech -- folks who exercise their free speech rights need protection from our government more than folks who exercise an imagined "right" to either bribe elected officials or ensure more bribable people get elected. (My app isn't flagging the word "bribable," and further investigation reveals that it is, in fact, a real word. The more you know!) Anyway, Public Citizen helps you tell our Treasury Department not to change the rules to protect the identity of big money campaign donors. They don't need our government's protection -- we need our government's protection, from them.

Meanwhile, are you using an .org domain for your website? You know, like virtually every good-government website helping you express your will to your Congressfolk? Well, the Internet Society (or ISOC) plans to sell the Public Interest Registry (or PIR) -- which contains the names of all .org domains -- to Ethos Capital, a damn venture capital firm. It's bad enough that they want to privatize the part of the internet where people get together to cooperate on positive change, but to sell it to a damn investment firm, which we have every right to expect will charge usurious rates for .org domains until they all go out of business? I said it a long time ago and it's still true: Our Glorious Elites know they're evil, and they know we know they're evil, so they're going to try to take everything from us, including, apparently, .org domains. After all, banksters won't manage them in our interest -- they'll manage it in theirs. This is why we don't privatize everything! So Save .ORG helps you tell ISOC to abandon its plans to sell off the .org domain name database to vulture capitalists.

Finally, S. 151, the TRACED Act, would enact strong protections against robocalls and call-spoofing; the bill passed the Senate in May, but an improved version passed the House last week, so now it goes back to the Senate for approval -- and since both versions of the bill passed their respective houses nearly unanimously, we might be optimistic about its final passage. Still, duty is duty and complacency is anathema, so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Senators to help protect good Americans from scam artists by passing the TRACED Act. If you're like most Americans, you've lately stopped answering calls from phone numbers you don't recognize because they might be trying to trick you into giving up your Social Security number or a big wad of cash (or both!). The TRACED Act would force big telecom corporations to authenticate phone calls and block scam phone calls, and would also prevent big telecoms from imposing additional fees on good Americans for providing such services. These would be good works, so we should encourage them -- and not just because Congress so rarely does good works.

Action: concerning good policy, the war on Yemen, and torture.

The list is back! It's time once again to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And this week we're proud to add H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed the full House on Friday afternoon. Why have all these good bills piled up? Because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY) won't bring them up for a vote; didn't know we elected Mitch McConnell Dictator-for-Life, did you? So let's tell our Senators to fight for voting rights, equal rights, public lands, internet freedom, and so much more -- and let's stay in their grills until they bend to our will.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that Democrats will abandon efforts to pass a defense spending bill amendment that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Sigh. And I bet Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, runs on proposing the amendment, even as he prevents its passage so it can actually do some damn good! And it would do a considerable amount of good -- it would get us out of yet another undeclared war, it would bring more good Yemeni back from the brink of starvation, and it would save more Houthi rebels for the fight against al-Qaeda that they're good at. Sometimes you think we get involved in these messes just so we can make everything worse. Ah, who am I kidding -- of course we're in Yemen to create chaos, just like Iraq! Rep. Smith's office number is 202.225.8901; his Armed Service Committee office number is 202.225.4151. These numbers are courtesy Just Foreign Policy; good luck finding phone numbers at his own House website, because they seem pretty well-hidden.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to release the full 7,000-page torture report to the American people, then Win Without War still helps you do that. There's no "looking forward, not backward" (in Mr. Obama's infamous phrase) when our CIA tortured at least 100 men in "black site" operations, and though Congress has released a 500-page summary of the report, they haven't released the whole enchilada, which hamstrings our effort to ensure this never happens again. The cynical will ask whom among our good Americans will read the full 7,000-page report -- and sadly, too many of our "liberal" media will ask the very same question, though the answer should be that they will read it, and report on its contents and its meaning. That is journalism, after all, and if too many contemporary "journalists" call it a day after they've trolled through Twitter for cruel and obnoxious crap uttered by fools who deserve their anonymity, that doesn't change their obligations to our Republic and our civilization.

Penny Rants for Sunday, December 8, 2019: concerning internet policy, tough-on-crime posturing, and impeachment.

Sen. Sanders releases his broadband plan, a plan big telecom executives won't like, according to Karl Bode at Vice. Sen. Sanders would restore net neutrality and break up big telecom monopolies, of course, but he'd also prevent big telecoms from imposing hidden and onerous fees -- which anyone who has ever paid a cable bill will like! -- plus he'd invest $150 billion (over how many years, his proposal doesn't say) in community broadband, which anyone who has ever paid a cable bill will also like. I'm not sure Mr. Sanders's plan is "Comcast's Worst Nightmare," though -- maybe Ben Tarnoff's "Socialist Plan to Fix the Internet" is. (No, I won't recoil from the word "socialist" just because idiots use the word to describe anything they don't like.) Mr. Tarnoff's plan is more a "sketch," containing a range of proposals including turning our internet into a free, publicly-owned utility and regulating corporations differently based on their size and function; you would think Comcast would rather deal with Mr. Sanders than Mr. Tarnoff.

Chris Calton at the Foundation for Economic Education writes about how asset forfeiture laws have mushroomed over the last half century -- with a vital assist from then-Senator/now Democratic Presidential contender Joe Biden. And also, sigh, with a vital assist from then-Assistant Attorney General/now Republican Presidential contender William Weld, which should (again) instruct us about the general uselessness of moderate Republicans. At first, RICO only went after the assets of convicted criminals, but within a decade Congress changed the law so they could go after indicted criminals -- and then Messrs. Biden and Weld stepped in, allowing law enforcement to take "substitute" property (like houses) without even demonstrating probable cause, let alone getting an indictment. Thus we now have a state of affairs that outrages liberals and conservatives alike -- not to mention good Americans who've lost their homes not because they broke the law, but because their local police department got hungry.

Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer reminds us that the Iran-Contra affair might predict what'll happen with the current impeachment effort better than the one against Richard Nixon. Mr. Reagan got away with that one, after all, and most Americans today look at the makeup of the Senate and conclude that our current President will, too. I recall that the Iran-Contra investigation essentially ended when NSA head John Poindexter told Congress that "the buck stops here with me," i.e., that he had decided to go ahead with the whole arms-for-hostages-plus-money-for-Contras deal and had actively kept President Reagan out of the loop. But that doesn't excuse our media's collective amnesia over that time a President committed an impeachable offense and Congress didn't impeach him. And while our current President ought to remember that he's a lot less popular than Mr. Reagan was back then, no matter what he says to screaming crowds at rallies, the rest of us should remember that he's not that unpopular -- at least not yet.

Around the table: concerning our economy, our public lands and water, and several far more trifling matters.

Your right-wing uncle telling you about wages going up under our President? Well, Dean Baker reminds us that state minimum wage hikes and our Federal Reserve's low interest rates are actually driving recent wage increases. You know that high minimum wages cause wage hikes at the low end, but you may not know that low interest rates have helped drive unemployment down -- and Mr. Baker says that "low rates of unemployment give workers the bargaining power necessary to secure real wage gains." Naturally our President says minimum wages should be lower, though, admittedly, he also thinks interest rates should be lower. But low interest rates have been Fed orthodoxy since 2008, so we can safety say he deserves very little (if any!) of the credit for what gains we're making in this economy.

If you've been following Nestlé's attempts to gobble up as much public water as it can and then sell it as bottled water at an absurdly high profit, you'll be interested to hear that the Michigan state court of appeals has ruled that Osceola Township can block Nestlé from expanding its bottled-water operation within town limits, because bottled water is most emphatically not an "essential public service" or a "public water supply." I was a little surprised that any legal eagles at Nestlé would make such ludicrous claims -- even as part of a see-what-sticks effort -- until I learned that a lower Michigan court had approved them, and I note that the court of appeals also said that a bottled water operation might be "essential" in a place with no water, which I'm pretty sure could be stretched by some judicial activist to mean any of the many areas of desert in America.

Big pharma executives tell OHSU researchers that prices for MS drugs go up so damn much go up purely for profit-making reasons. Also, you can only gouge patients in America, since (to quote one exec) "(i)n the rest of the world, prices decline with duration in the marketplace," and prices never go down because then people would think "we're less effective, (that) we think less of our product." You do hear the quiet part out loud more than you used to even 10 years ago, when it seemed (to me, at least!) we heard the quiet part out loud all the time. Maybe big pharma execs are tired of pretending they're anything but thieves, not that I expect their behavior to change.

From the "How Do They Always Find Someone Even Worse?" file: Interior Secretary David Bernhardt wants to reduce fees oil and gas drilling corporations pay to drill in shallow Gulf of Mexico waters. It's not just the stench of an Interior Secretary lowering fees on corporations for which he used to lobby, or the horror that we could have another Spillageddon in the Gulf like we had in 2010 -- it's the fact that these are our waters and we, the public, deserve to make more money if our government is going to be so foolish as to allow more drilling in the Gulf. It's like they have literally no idea that they're supposed to serve the American people.

U.S. House Rep. Steve Watkins (R-KS) apparently listed a UPS store as his official residence, which just so happens to have had the effect of allowing him to vote in a different Topeka City Council district than the one in which he otherwise would have voted. Has the Fox News Channel "accidentally" identified him as a Democrat yet? After all, ONLY TEH LIBRULZ COMMITZ TEH VOTER FRAUDZ!!!!!

Finally, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has suspended her campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, citing a lack of money to keep campaigning. I don't actually think it's correct to say that "she struggled to define a clear rationale for her candidacy" -- actually, I think she was completely successful in "defin(ing) a clear rationale for her candidacy," since that rationale was "I'm here to trick the liberals into thinking I'm going to run this country the way they'd want me to when I'm really going to run it however my big donors tell me to." If I'm right, then it's heartening that Democratic voters have rejected that rationale, at least as far it manifested in her -- and almost two months before the Iowa caucuses, no less!

UPDATE. An alert reader pointed out that I'd gotten our President's position on interest rate cuts entirely wrong; I've corrected the first paragraph above as a result.

Action: concerning voting rights, arbitration fairness, and our Post Office.

H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, may receive a vote in the House as early as today, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to call your House Reps and tell them to pass it. As you may recall, our Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated Sec. 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, saying that forcing Southern states to pre-clear changes in their voting laws with our federal government constituted an undue burden on those states given narrowly-perceived advancements in voting rights in the South. But the Voting Rights Advancement Act would institute a new pre-clearance formula into the Voting Rights Act that would subject any state or locality with a long record of voting rights violations to federal scrutiny. It would, essentially, revive the Voting Rights Act, so let's ensure our House Reps pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Meanwhile, Amtrak has recently inserted a forced arbitration agreement into its tickets, meaning that you wouldn't be able to take Amtrak to court if they crash your train, but you'd have to go before a private arbitrator, and you know how that tends to go. (Remember not to believe the right-wing BS about "average" awards from arbitration cases being higher than class action awards, because the average of all awards to people who lose in arbitration is zero.) Amtrak sure has some chutzpah pushing this on its riders, because its riders are also its owners -- our government still controls Amtrak, and gives Amtrak $2 billion in taxpayer money annually; given the public stake in Amtrak, I wonder if this clause could actually survive in court, particularly given that we can learn the results of a court case, but not a privately-arbitrated case. In the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell Amtrak to remove forced arbitration clauses from its customer agreements.

Finally, our U.S. Postmaster General will leave office next month, which means our President will get to appoint a new one, and he might decide to appoint someone who favors privatizing our Post Office -- but the USPS Board of Governors can reject such a nominee if they choose, so Progress America helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to reject any attempt to put a privatizer in charge of our Post Office. A lot of right-wingers have a jones for privatizing our Post Office, but we already know why that's a bad idea -- because any privatized Post Office won't operate for our benefit, but for the benefit of some Presidential crony or other. But our Post Office is supposed to serve us, and, not incidentally, our Constitution explicitly mandates that our government ensure mail delivery -- so let's help ensure a Post Office that belongs to us fulfills that mandate.

Action: concerning worker safety, food safety, and endangered species.

Many major clothing corporations have signed on to the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety so we don't have more Rana Plaza garment factory fires that kill thousands of garment factory workers -- but our work ain't done here, because Amazon hasn't signed on, and Amazon is close to being America's top clothing seller now, and sells plenty of clothing made in a few dozen Bangladeshi factories that the other big retailers won't touch. If you're still hung up on "free markets" always being right, consider the case of the woman who was trapped in the Rana Plaza rubble for three days and had to saw half her arm off just to get out. And then let Demand Progress help you tell Amazon to help ensure garment workers don't work in deathtraps by signing onto the Bangladesh Accord. Don't take any guff about how we should really talk to their "third-party" suppliers about that -- as if they don't use these suppliers to escape accountability in the first place.

Meanwhile, in the wake of yet another contaminated Romaine lettuce outbreak, Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to give our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) the power to investigate how these food poisoning outbreaks come about. Food poisoning is one of those things that still makes the evening news programs even despite these programs' ongoing effort to say nothing of importance to their viewers, so maybe we should empower our government to get to the bottom of E. coli outbreaks, maybe? Yes, even this government, which ain't gonna be with us forever. And if our FDA finds that irrigation water contaminated with feces was the cause, as most observers think, and if this finding shames the FDA that, you may recall, delayed implementing irrigation water-testing rules not that long ago, well, confronting the shame you cause yourself is a character-building opportunity, and I would never want to deprive government agencies of such opportunities.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to protect endangered and threatened species by passing H.R. 4348, the PAW and Fin Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. Our Administration has lately issued regulations that would make it considerably harder to protect endangered and threatened species from encroaching fossil fuel corporations, but the PAW and FIN Act would nullify these changes, and would also prevent our Administration from using "economic factors" in considering how to enforce the Endangered Species Act. By "economic factors," of course, our Administration means "money lost by bosses." No, that's all they mean -- bosses are all they care about. Oh, our President can go on TV and claim people fight him because he's "fighting for you," but his record shows he only fights for other bosses who think, as he does, that they're on top because they belong there. They don't. This is America. We do.

Action: concerning corporate spying, government-funded discrimination, and onerous research fees.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Amazon's relentless data-collection and stop it from extending its surveillance tentacles into all areas of our lives. That is the job of a Congressperson, after all -- not to "protect free markets" by letting monopolists do whatever they like but to protect freedom by restraining such monopolists. And Amazon doesn't just do streaming and same-day delivery -- it also listens in on your conversations through Alexa, tracks your every public move through Rekognition, and hands police another surveillance tool through Ring. Is streaming and same-day delivery really worth all that? I mean, I'm old enough to remember when I had to wait for TV shows to come on; the only aspects of our data-at-your-fingertips future we should accept are the ones we drive -- because free people control their destinies; this is, indeed, the promise of America, and we must work to keep that promise.

Our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) wants to let adoption and foster care programs receive government grants and discriminate against gay folks who want to be parents and foster parents. And this is why the religious right thinks of our selfish, adulterous, and thoroughly corrupt President as "the chosen one"! The rest of us, of course, care more for putting kids in good, safe homes than we do for ensuring they're in straight homes, and no one who's ever watched hetero parents yell at their kids at the mall thinks gay folks are automatically bad parents. I would imagine the distribution of good and bad parents is the same, actually, but that still means a lot more potential good parents out there would like to give kids good homes, if we remove the mote in our eyes. Hence both CREDO and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to block this Administration's attempt to discriminate against gay would-be parents.

Do you enjoy researching your family history? Then you'll be appalled to learn that our United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has proposed raising fees for getting copies of certain historical records more than ninefold. That's right, instead of a $65 fee (itself far too high, and I wish I'd known three years ago that the USCIS had tripled it!) to retrieve a copy of a visa file or a naturalization file, they'll now charge you $625! (Or "only" $385, if you happen to know the exact file number you want to retrieve, which nobody does.) A lot of bad immigration policy in this Administration is straight-up racist, and so is this -- by focusing on alien and naturalization files, they're making mostly non-WASP folks (ahem!) pay money they don't have just to learn about people they love. So Records Not Revenue helps you tell our USCIS to reject its ridiculous plan to charge absurdly high fees to folks for the unforgivable sin of wanting to find out about their history.

Action: concerning facial recognition, immigration, and shareholder power.

The more we fight facial recognition, the more our politicians try to protect it -- while pretending they're protecting us from it. Case in point: S. 2878, the so-called Facial Recognition Technology Warrant Act, which would allow police to use facial recognition tech to track people without a warrant. Our police would never abuse that power on, say, political protestors! And of course the bill would also exempt from its meager restrictions all the "foreign" surveillance that just-so-happens to catch good Americans in its web. Facial recognition is, as you know, crap technology that seems to think all black people look alike and also (in a recently-documented experiment) thinks it can spot Roy Orbison in a crowd. I mean, we wish! But, alas, Mr. Orbison passed over 30 years ago. Hence Ban Facial Recognition helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a real ban on facial recognition technology.

Our Administration now wants to send park rangers and park police to do border patrol work, and even if you believe in "caravans," you have to wonder why we'd send people out to do a job they're plainly not trained to do. Of course, reasoning is not a strong suit with our Administration's votaries, who lap up every lousy idea about immigration as evidence that this President is "finally doing something" about immigration -- this, after President Obama earned his reputation as the "deporter-in-chief," and our current President wishes he were deporting as many immigrants as Mr. Obama! Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to stop misusing park rangers and park police as border control agents. Which also happens to leave our public parks understaffed, not that our Administration cares -- they would sell all our public parks to their cronies if they could! Of course, we care, and that's why we fight.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to stop trying to undermine shareholder activism, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Shareholders using resolutions to curb carbon emissions, stop discriminating against gays, or fight excessive executive pay -- all will be much harder to propose and enact if our SEC gets its way and makes you have to own 10 times more stock merely to propose such a resolution and make a resolution get more support before being reconsidered again. This is another occasion where you must ask: what are big corporations afraid of? Of course, we know what they're afraid of: they're afraid of anyone having a different opinion about how our world should be, and they're afraid of anyone getting their hands on their unearned moneypots. In other words, they're just like our President! But being like our President is something we must discourage.

Action: concerning abortion rights, the war on Yemen, and Presidential corruption.

First things first. Hot on the heels of a "heartbeat" bill designed to test whether our Supreme Court will continue to uphold Roe v. Wade, Ohio state legislators have introduced HB 413, which would force doctors to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy inside a woman's uterus or face "abortion murder" charges, even though scientists tell us that such reimplantation is medically impossible. I guess they'll call that an "unintended consequence" of the bill, but the hell it is -- today's "conservatives" care nothing about good policy, and they certainly don't care about reducing abortions; they only care about swordfighting over who's more "conservative." You can reach House Speaker Larry Householder (R-72) at 614.466.2500, and Senate Majority Leader Larry Obhof (R-22) at 614.466.7505, and Gov. Mike DeWine (R) at 614.644.4375, so you can tell them you want Ohio to stop playing politics with women's lives and reject HB 413.

Meanwhile, our government continues to enable the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, a continuing humanitarian disaster, and our government also talks of revoking Temporary Protected Status (or TPS) for every refugee it can, hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that Yemeni refugees can still get TPS status in America. I mean, if we're going to help create the conditions from which refugees try to flee, it would be hypocritical for us to shut our doors to those same refugees, would it not? And don't let anyone try to tell you that giving TPS to Yemeni refugees would "cause terrorism," not just because refugees flee terror, but because Jesus Mary and Joseph the war on Yemen causes more terrorism! Yes, by targeting the Houthi rebels in Yemen, we are helping decimate the ranks of some of the best al-Qaeda fighters on Earth. So no one gets to play the "terror" card when discussing TPS status for Yemeni refugees -- at least, not if they don't want to be the stupidest people on Earth.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to investigate the flow of our taxpayer money into our President's pockets, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. And if your Tea Party uncle tells you that all politicians do it, ask him: does that make it right? Seriously, this is the question we must always ask! Every day we must battle the cynicism of which far too many Americans are proud! And it is most pointedly not beside the point that a President (even one who got only 46% of the popular vote!) might use the power of his office to fill his coffers with taxpayer money. I'm old enough to remember when politicians avoided even strictly-speaking-legal diversions of taxpayer money into their properties, so worried were they about the appearance of corruption. And that's an America we ought to bring back, regardless of whether or not it hurts the feelings of our President's most devoted supporters.

Around the table: concerning health care, student loan debt, Astroturf protests, and bad leadership.

When I hear that our Administration spent $11 million to redesign a Medicare plan-finding tool that gives seniors inaccurate info, I'm gobsmacked that seniors can still support this President. I mean, of course I know the real reasons they still support him, but I do wonder how many more times the mustache-twirling villain can tie the girl to the train tracks before the girl stops voting for him. And, not for nothing, but a single Medicare-for-All program that covers everything would obviate the need to distinguish between plans in the first place.

Economists say that cancelling all student loan debt would boost the economy -- mainly by freeing people to spend money buying homes and starting families instead of paying debt installments. Economists may also overstate the effect that the resulting taxes would have on economic growth, forgetting, perhaps, that tax hikes on the rich don't hurt (and I'd say help) economic growth. In any case, I guess this is where the right "remembers" its "morals" and says we can't forgive debts just because it would be good for the economy. We could forgive the loans because they were extortionate to begin with, but no right-wing "moral" ever leads to criticism of big money.

Nathan Robinson warns that Sen. Warren talks a good game about slamming the rich, but "her campaign seems suspiciously designed to stave off revolution." I think he made the case better here back in September, but all I'll say is this: Sen. Warren did help build the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and it's not her fault this Administration has gutted it, but she's never really passed any legislation, and Sen. Sanders has passed a lot of it -- mostly amendments to other bills, but that's still legislation.

Hamilton Nolan warns that "Billionaire-Funded Protest is Rearing Its Head in America," although of course we all remember that billionaires funded the Tea Party "movement." Sadly, where billionaires may not be able to find a whole lot of pro-war, pro-pollution, or pro-racism protestors, they will find a sizable number of pro-charter school protestors, since charter schools purport to help poor folks, particularly from areas where public schools aren't funded well enough -- though that does suggest that funding our public schools properly would be a better solution.

Great Moderate/Billionaire Hope Michael Bloomberg said back in January that legalizing pot would be "perhaps the stupidest thing anybody has ever done." He actually had a sympathetic message buried in that dung nugget -- that addicting substances curtail freedom and thus shouldn't be legal, though I would argue that pot's a lot less addictive than heroin, and I wonder what he'd do about the legality of tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine -- but saying "stupidest thing anybody has ever done" just about insures that message will never get heard. I mean, George W. Bush did far, far stupider things nearly every day of his Presidency.

Finally, we learn from S.V. Date at the Huffington Post that our President has spent $115 million on security and travel expenses just on his weekend golf excursions. Yeah, $115 million ain't a whole lot in the context of a $4 trillion federal budget, but corruption is corruption, and the next time our President goes on about how the Mueller investigation cost TEH 35 MILLYUNZ OFZ TEH DOLLARZ!!!!!, you can mention that he's spent more than three times that in taxpayer money just playing golf. Oh, and that some of that money has gone into his own pocket. Oh, and he kicked transgender folks out of our military because their health care costs would have amounted to about one-fifth the cost of his golf trips.